Steel Wheels of Excellence!, Part II (Notes on Allan Bloom)
I’d wanted to write a thoughtful word or two on higher education. If I had energy I could whip up something urbane and thoughtful on this. But here are some notes towards a real argument I haven’t got time to make. The _Chronicle_ will have to wait.
This last week I was feeling nostalgic for Allan Bloom, to the point that I picked up a used copy of his old _Closing of the American Mind_. Maybe thinking about Father Fitzgerald put me in mind of Bloom, who as college freshman I admired. I owned a copy of his book and brought the U Chicago course cataloge with me to UI, to replicate the U Chicago liberal arts education as much as possible at the big State U, where I decorated my dorm room with Matthew Arnold poems, before setting out to discern and defend the Truth. (Cute, yes? But also more than that, maybe.)
Around 1993 however, I was weened from Bloom. And looking back at COTAM now, he certainly seems an unpleasant and dangerous character. And a man of strong stupid prejudices, of many kinds. But I’ve been moving back to Bloom in some ways. I’m sure everyone read the NYT Suskind piece on GW Bush and the “Faith Based Presidency” (if you somehow haven’t, you should). I was struck by one part of the piece (discussed by Philosoraptor), that seems to have folks a-talkin:
Now, where does this kind of thing come from?
The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ‘’in what we call the reality-based community,’’ which he defined as people who ‘’believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’’ he continued. ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’
Where does this kind of thinking come from? Well, it seems like the kind of Nietzschian line conventionally attributed to Bloom’s mentor, Leo Strauss, who declaimed against such relativism, but sometimes uttered cryptic things about esoteric teachings. Strauss and Bloom were not only the intellectual leaders of the “Culture Wars” of the 80’s and 90’s, but as it turns out the teachers of many of the key figures in the Bush administration. Were Strauss and Bloom leaders of a cynical neo-gnostic cabal of authoritarian faux-foundationalists? I can’t tell you. But there at least a degree of influence here.
But the Straussian emphasis on *doing* rather than knowing, eerily echoed by the Bush aide who Sukind quoted may point to a significant failure on the part of cultural studies and text-based social criticism that on almost all accounts is now in a period of advanced crudesence.* While left-leaning intellectuals asked their students to interpret or deconstruct texts, or to show how texts work upon readers, traditionalist critics like Bloom consistently pressed the question of right action. For Bloom, like Strauss, Political Science was really the chief science–uniting the sciences and the humanities. And the end is action:
They [political scientists] therefore engage in policy studies who’s end, whether it is stated or not, is action. Defense of freedom, avoidance of war, the furthering of equality–various aspects of justice in action–are hot subjects of study. The good regime has to be the the theme of such political scientists, if only undercover, and they are informed by the question “What is to be done?”
Bloom may have been a racist and a sexist; but at least he was never one to foolishly insist on an Ivory Tower of intellectualism disassociated from politics, a la Stanley Fish. It should be clear now that the critical practices of Strauss and Bloom contained a radical potential that often went unappreciated by “Cultural Studies,” even thought the cultural transformation advocated by Bloom and Strauss was in most ways deeply reactionary (though Chris Hitchens types are fond of noting a liberal idealism in the expansive plans of Paul Wolfowitz and others).
Bloom’s advocacy of “What is to be done?” education is more than a little joke at the expense of Leninists. His nominally conservative educational program seems to offer real radical potential. Some of Bloom’s worthwhile principles:
1) Questions about the moral values of actions of literary characters should not be ignored, or dismissed on the grounds that asking such questions sentimentally asks readers to overlook the ways that texts work to construct character and plot.
2) The imperative to “always historicize” likewise cannot be an excuse to avoid dealing directly with the moral claims and arguments of texts we discuss.
3) Liberal arts faculty should push for an integrated curriculum that encourages political and ethical questions to be posed across classes.
4) Questions about “how the text works on us” cannot be allowed to eclipse questions that students (and teachers) need to face squarely as to the nature and justification of their own beliefs.
For most of my students here at UI, beliefs come from mom and dad and church. Bloom convincingly insists that that education should involve a reassessment of one’s own deeply held beliefs, and not merely asking students to deconstruct and historicize texts that are all merely exterior forms of entertainment. This was probably the reason for my attraction to him as a college freshman, and it remains attractive now. So, yes, back to Bloom, I think. Kind of.
The left, if it wants to combine “studies” with action would do well, I think, to appropriate some of the methods and language of Bloomian liberalism. We don’t need to adopt Bloom’s conservatism to appropriate the metods he advocates. We don’t especially need to say with Bloom that rock music is a bunch of “hymms to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents.” And if we do, we could always mean it as a compliment.