The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students is a 1987 book by the philosopher Allan Bloom, in which the author criticizes the openness of relativism, in academia and society in general, as leading paradoxically to the great closing referenced in the book's title. In Bloom's view, openness undermines critical thinking and eliminates the point of view that defines cultures. The book became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback.
Summary
Bloom critiques contemporary higher education in the United States and how he sees it is failing its students, criticizing modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Throughout the book, he attacks the moral relativism that he claims has taken over American universities for the barrier it constructs to the notions of truth, critical thinking, and genuine knowledge. Bloom claims that students in the 1980s have prioritized the immediate, blind relegation of prejudice as inferiority of thought, and therefore have closed their minds, as the title suggests, to asking the right questions, so that prejudice may be eradicated through logic and critical thinking, as opposed to empty, baseless instinct. Bloom writes, "Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. ... Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty."
"Students"
In part one, titled "Students", Bloom details how the young American mindset, the books, music, relationships, and other aspects of American popular culture contribute to the sanctimony of what he perceives to be dull, lazy minds in American universities today. Bloom contends that the "clean slate", with which students enter universities, at first made them more susceptible to genuinely embracing the studies of philosophy and logic. Soon enough, because of "[t]he improved education of the vastly expanded middle class [that] weakened the family's authority", there came a "gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes" in the students Bloom encountered later in his teaching career. He credits the narrowing and flattening of the American college experience to these phenomena.
Bloom then delves into what he believes is the great books dilemma. He believes that the great books of Western thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom—but more importantly, that "our students have lost the practice of and the taste of reading". Because of this, students are unable to derive their beliefs from evidence, from central texts, or any print source at all. Bloom contends that without an understanding of important older texts, such as Plato's Republic or Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, modern students lack any reference point with which they can critically think about or address current events. Students are instead left with vague and abstract ideas of "good" and "evil".
Bloom notes that the "addiction to music" he observes in modern students is unparalleled, and has been for centuries. But even this, he says, contributes to the closing of the young American mind. He notes that fewer and fewer students have a surface level, let alone nuanced, understanding of classical music, and that instead, "rock music is as unquestioned and un-problematic as the air the students breathe." Pop music, he believes, employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Mick Jagger quietly serve. He regards the ubiquity of overly sexual overtones in 1980s rock music, and what he perceives to be a subsequent corruption of young minds, as a signal of "parents' loss of control over the children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it."
Bloom's conclusion about the effects of music on education is that its oversexualization in the late 20th century makes it "very difficult for [students] to have a passionate relationship with the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education, [since] [i]t only artificially induces the exaltation attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors ... like discovery of the truth." Students no longer seek pleasure from the pursuit of learning.
Bloom concludes in "Students" that because of the relationships students have with popular culture, their family, and their peers, they no longer come to university asking questions, seeking instruction, or with imagination.
"Nihilism, American Style"
Bloom titles the second part of the book "Nihilism, American Style". He introduces in further detail the concept of "value relativism", mentioned previously only in the introduction. Value relativism, he says, plagues most elite institutions of higher learning. For Bloom, this dissolved into nihilism. He notices that students follow the path of least resistance when developing their values. For students, he writes, "values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life." Ironically, when traveling this path without reason, Bloom writes, students still "adopt strong poses and fanatic resolutions."
Bloom also criticizes his fellow philosophy professors, especially those involved in ordinary language analysis or logical positivism, for disregarding important "humanizing" ethical and political issues and failing to pique the interest of students. Literature professors involved in deconstructionism promote irrationalism and skepticism of standards of truth and thereby dissolve the moral imperatives which are communicated through genuine philosophy and which elevate and broaden the intellects of those who engage with these imperatives. To a great extent, Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to what he characterizes as a general crisis in American society. He draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis. Bloom cites Friedrich Nietzsche's actions of telling "modern man that he was free-falling in the abyss of nihilism", and continues to espouse Nietzsche's commentary that nihilism in our contemporary democracy stems from value relativism.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (Bloom made the comparison to the Brownshirts of the Nazi Party, who once similarly filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern American liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.
"The University"
Bloom contends that the failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits have become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory. In "The University", he discusses how the environment in elite institutions has cultivated mere ambition over the search for truth. He says that proclaiming an affinity for reason does not alone define a university's worth, as the statement alone does not constitute true commitment to scholastic pursuits in the name of a greater truth. He contends that "the mere announcement of the rule of reason does not create the conditions for the full exercise of rationality". Universities serve as a reflection of the public and democracy at large. Because of this, they are shaped by public opinion (per Alexis de Tocqueville). Public opinion serves as the final gatekeeper and the final headsman for any movements the university may actually try to implement to advance the pursuit of critical thinking.
Bloom also explains what he believes is the dichotomy between the "spirit of the university" and the university itself. "The philosophic life is not the university." He alludes to early philosophers, from Socrates (who he firmly believes to be "the essence of the university" concept) through the nineteenth century, who he claims never made use of such institutions at all. Bloom posits that maybe, after all, free thought and commitment to a greater truth need not exist within the metaphorical four walls of a university. What matters instead, he says, what is "uniquely human", is the "philosophic experience".
Bloom also notices a trend in which students notice the devaluing of free thought in universities. He writes about students at Cornell University, that "these students discerned that their teachers did not really believe that freedom of thought was necessarily a good and useful thing, that they suspected that all this was ideology protecting the injustices of our 'system'". Bloom asserts that American professors in the sixties "were not aware of what they no longer believed" and that this notion gravely endangered any capacity for progress towards free thought. Bloom insists that requiring from universities empty values like "greater openness", "less rigidity", and "freedom from authority" are only fashionable and do not have any substantive content. And in the face of growing civil rights conflicts, universities have a duty to instead actively pursue the task of "opening American minds". It is not enough, Bloom contends, for universities to "not want trouble". It is not enough for universities to only hold reputation paramount in the face of campus disruption, and only in name espouse free thought and truth. This "unfortunate mixture of cowardice and moralism" will unseat the spirit of the university. Bloom concludes by reminding readers that the love of wisdom and truth must be kept alive in universities, particularly in this moment of world history.
Publication
The Closing of the American Mind was published in March 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in the National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led" and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent" it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on The New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.
Reception
The Closing of the American Mind was met with mixed reviews from scholars and the general public alike.
Positive
The art critic Roger Kimball wrote in The New York Times that Bloom's work should not be diminished publicly simply because it is not optimistic. Instead, he writes, "'The Closing of the American Mind' is essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of liberal education in this society. Its pathos, erudition and penetrating insight make it an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate." He concludes that,