Recent Reading: Allan Bloom

This week, I made it about halfway through Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind before deciding to set it aside. My response to the book was wildly uneven: I labored through the introduction, tore enthusiastically through the first hundred pages or so, and then ran aground in annoyance at the broad brush of sociological analysis in the next 65 pages or so.

I will return to it, but I’ve learned that the right book at the wrong time is a losing proposition. As a reminder to pick the book back up at some point, though, I want to note here a few excerpts from Bloom’s discussion of books as furnishings of the mind and soul, and of the powerful bond a culture’s literature can be:

In the U.S., 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 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. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise — as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost. (58)

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I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished. (60)

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The gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes in the souls of the young accounts for the difference between the students I knew at the beginning of my teaching career and those I face now. The loss of the books has made them narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. (61)

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I have begun to wonder whether the experience of the greatest texts from early childhood is not a prerequisite for a concern throughout life for them and for lesser but important literature. (62)

Bloom makes me think about the relationships between a number of things as they interact to create the fabric of culture — art, faith, intellectual life, books, music, history.

The section on music was pretty fascinating too. Here is a sample from Bloom’s scathing summary of rock music:

The result is nothing less than parents’ loss of control over their children’s moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance between the strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob’s emergent wishes — our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates’ rhetorical adversary — and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock. They discovered a few years back that children are one of the few groups in the country with considerable disposable income, in the form of allowances. Their parents spend all they have providing for the kids. Appealing to them over their parents’ heads, creating a world of delight for them, constitutes one of the richest markets in the postwar world. The rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to create it. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking, but it was so totally new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too late…

It was interesting to me to hear the accolades to Steve Jobs at his recent passing — godlike words like “amazing” and “magical.” Yet what did he achieve? Enormous wealth (something that garners criticism in other quarters) for providing people with 24-7 access to their music. It wasn’t a cure for cancer. It wasn’t something that noticeably bettered conditions of life for the poor. It wasn’t morally improving for humankind. It didn’t bring world peace. It was merely entertainment, accessible privately on any device, anywhere. If Bloom’s analysis (written in 1988) has any truth in it, this is by the kindest estimation a mixed blessing. It hardly seems worthy of the worshipful accolades we’ve heard. But they provide a good look at what our culture values.

All of this is meant to make the point that The Closing of the American Mind is a provocative, challenging read that made me think and wonder about many things. I want to save it for a time when I’m more ready to take it on.