In the current moment, we critique and demand, but from a negation; we know—or some think they know—what they don’t want, but it is quite unclear if they know what they do want. And since they have rejected moral norms it is impossible for them to give a rational justification for their wants and dislikes. Theirs is an exercise of will, for they have exorcised the logos, and mere will—willfulness—remains.
In order to win the undergraduates once more, the humanities have a clear course to follow. They must abandon identity politics, which only produce a tense and humorless classroom. More deeply, they must insist upon the old appeals to genius, greatness, masterpieces, beauty, and sublimity.
Accommodation and half measures—the stuff of everyday political life—will not do when we encounter the politics of mastery and subjugation. Aristotle’s “partnership of free persons” demands more.
The authors in this symposium have offered insightful analyses of Bloom’s book and the contemporary university it describes. Can what has been lost be recovered? If so, this will come through restoration of the imagination.
Allan Bloom would not have been surprised by recent developments in American higher education, from trigger warnings and safe spaces to micro-aggressions and physical violence.
What would have happened if literature professors had continued to love literature, admire Shakespeare, and teach others to do the same? Perhaps if they had emulated Allan Bloom’s attention to words—if they’d taught writing and written well themselves—our colleges would not now be so enraged.
Souls without longing are the price to be paid for a free, comfortable, and secure life. Yet the unnatural state of radical isolation and apathetic “niceness” can only last so long.
All is not well in America—or in the University. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind offers a profound and compelling diagnosis of the common illness infecting them both and of the intimate connection between liberal education and liberty.