When it comes to the contemporary study of Western decline, there is hardly a tome that compares with Allan Bloom's tour de force, "The Closing of the American Mind." Writing in the mid 1980s, he skillfully unravels the knot of factors that have contributed to the current malaise. Nothing escapes his scalpel: feminism, narcissism, affirmative action, cultural relativism, and the collapse of academia are all sliced and diced, exposed in their entire historical and ideological depth.

Bloom (1930-1992) fought on the cultural front lines, teaching in the social sciences at some of the most prestigious American universities, including Cornell, Yale, and the University of Chicago. His testimony regarding the transformation of the student body is sobering:

"Today's select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture. The soil is ever thinner, and I doubt whether it can now sustain the taller growths."

The students he dealt with at those elite institutions were the opinion-makers of the future, who would later set the tone for the nation's cultural life. His "today's students" are, in 2008, entrenched in academia, the arts, industry, the media, etc. They justify Bloom's pessimism; it is now clear that the "taller growths" could not be sustained.

A theme that runs through the book is the evaporation of the critical spirit. Academics have distanced themselves from evaluation of ideas based on timeless, universal criteria derived from man's faculty of reason. In the past, Western thinkers were open to discussing diverse ideas and cultures, but with the intent of criticizing them. They sifted and compared and appraised, in order to separate the good from the bad.

Now, with the critical spirit in ruins, one is pressured to be open to all ideas and cultures equally. The evaluation stage is omitted. This has had a disastrous effect:

"Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless....Openness to closedness is what we teach."

Bloom observed that the students had become detached from the great works of literature. These works, based as they are on the critical spirit, have no relevant message in the new amorphous intellectual environment. The students are intelligent, they can read, they can analyze a text, but their upbringing and early education leave them without the experience of strong attachment to a great book.

A person who has had such an experience can re-experience it many times during a lifelong quest for cultural enrichment. But without it, the great books (as well as the great works of art) become virtually inaccessible. A generation earlier, writes Bloom, students were at least familiar with the Bible, which provided some ground on which an appreciation of literature could be constructed. When families ceased to transmit this basic heritage, not to speak of the great works in the arts and sciences, a cornerstone of the intellectual edifice crumbled.

"The cause of the decay of the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, "culture," i.e., boring. As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than information. With the 'information explosion,' tradition has become superfluous....In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and--as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible--provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing."

Bloom's deconstruction of feminism includes an interesting analysis of how it interacted with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The sexual revolution liberated nature, whereas feminism attempted to crush and manipulate nature for its own ends. It constituted a return (with a vengeance) to the old regime of repression and restrictions, but of course with a new twist:

"Male sexual passion has become sinful again because it culminates in sexism. Women are made into objects, they are raped by their husbands as well as by strangers, they are sexually harassed by professors and employers at school and at work, and their children, whom they leave in day-care centers in order to pursue their careers, are sexually abused by teachers. All these crimes must be legislated against and punished. What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions, the grip of which was so recently relaxed. The July 14 of the sexual revolution was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancien Régime and the onset of the Terror."

A good chunk of the book is a voyage through the history of Western thought, to determine the roots of the eventual collapse of the intellect in general, and the study of the humanities and social sciences in particular. Bloom does a masterful job of treating complex themes in a coherent and readable manner. This includes a discussion of the problems peculiar to liberal democracies, with their tendency to venerate equality and utility. This poses a terrible difficulty for the university, which must struggle to preserve detached pursuit of the truth, carried out by the scholar, or "theoretical type," as Bloom calls him. This is someone who can see across time and space, offering us insights that are not tainted by the ebb and flow of public opinion and political expediency.

Today, the theoretical type is on the brink of extinction, especially--irony of ironies--in the university, the one place established to protect and nurture it. There has been an "egalitarian resentment against the higher type...deforming and interpreting it out of existence." The man of reason, the true scholar, is under siege:

"Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us."

I conclude with a passage on the relationship between freedom of thought and tyranny, which rings true in our day, as the vise of politically-correct thought control tightens its grip:

"Freedom of mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside." ( )

This was probably the most difficult book to get through in 2007, thanks to Bloom’s combination of elitist language, difficult outline, and vast knowledge of philosophical history, an area in which I am lacking. Bloom starts the book with posing his criticism of the current culture’s devotion to “open-mindedness.” Bloom argues that there are two types of openness, the openness of indifference and the openness to knowledge and validation. The openness of indifference is what is plaguing the American mind, Bloom argues, and it is really a closing of the mind. This openness holds to the motto “be whatever you want to be” or “it depends” and according to Bloom:

results in American conformism – out there in the rest of the world there is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing.

The second openness is one that is open to critically learning from history and other cultures in their original form, and to be open to develop one’s own thoughts from them rather than accepting them at first glance. Bloom launches into a long, verbose, and difficult history of how the American “mind” came to be what it is, discussing German philosophy ad naseum. He closes with a discussion of the University and how it has lost its purpose of enriching students. It is merely a dull, lifeless garden for cultivating students for the workforce. The disappearance of the study of humanities is disturbing to Bloom, because they are the lifeblood of the University. While I agree with much of Bloom’s criticisms, it seems almost odd of his devotion to and near-worship of “the University.” ( )

I found this book off-puttingly pompous. I wanted to like it, since I agree with its premise, but it was tedious. ( )

Profound and well-put commentary about our modern American culture and mentality. ( )

This is an all time favourite and really did change my outlook. Nothing I didn't know implicitly, but it was great to be validated by such a great thinker. Not sure how to get out of this one though!!! I think time and ashes are the only way to heal. ( )