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 contends that the "clean slate", with which students enter universities,[5] 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",[6] there came a "gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes" in the students Bloom encountered later in his teaching career.
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.
"[8] 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.
"[12] 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.
[14][verification needed] To a great extent, Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to what he characterizes as a general crisis in American society.
[15] 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.
[citation needed] (Bloom made the comparison to the Brownshirts of the Nazi Party,[16][17] who once similarly filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.)
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.
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.
"[21] 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.
[23] Bloom asserts that American professors in the sixties "were not aware of what they no longer believed"[23] and that this notion gravely endangered any capacity for progress towards free thought.
[citation needed] 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.
Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews,[citation needed] including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times[27] and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent"[28] 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.
Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other The art critic Roger Kimball, writing in The New York Times, called The Closing of the American Mind "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate.
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.
Everything problematic that the term modernity implies, all the doubts about the meaning of tradition, the legitimacy of inherited values, the point of preserving high culture—all this Mr. Bloom is perfectly cognizant of.
He explains that by writing The Closing of the American Mind, "Bloom dangles the promise of an arousing and dangerous philosophical quest, which will take the student far from his (and his friends' and parents' and other professors') settled opinions about what is good and decent.
Feeney writes, Bloom's light, urgent prose makes it easy to forget how audacious this chapter is in its depth, breadth, and seriousness, and how defiant it is in its defense of liberal education.
It might be better, then, to reframe Bloom's project, from a secretly erotic quest for sublime knowledge to an existentially urgent battle for nonconformity; real weirdness in a world that wants to co-opt everything, make everything productive for and comprehensible to everyone.
[31]The neoconservative writer Norman Podhoretz embraced Bloom's argument, noting that the closed-mindedness in his title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments.
In 2005, Jim Sleeper wrote for The New York Times that "nothing prepared [conservatives'] movement, or the academic and publishing worlds, for the wildfire success of [the book]. ...
His multi-count indictment is a laundry list of cheap slanders made to sound vaguely authoritative, because, after all, Bloom is a teacher who supposedly hangs out with students.