Conference on the 25th Anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, On Students

I think we'll get started good morning everyone welcome to our conference sponsored by the program on constitutional government a conference marking the 25th anniversary of Allan blooms influential work the closing of the American mind my name is Arthur Melser I teach a political philosophy at Michigan State University also on this morning's panel in order of appearance we have Paul Kanter who teaches English at the University of Virginia then we have James Hankins a historian here at Harvard thirdly Katherine sense and a newly minted Harvard PhD in political philosophy and then I will bring up the rear our particular assignment is the first section of blooms book which is a discussion of the character of contemporary students under instructions from Professor Mansfield this conference is being conducted under Warhol rules that is each spec each speaker against 15 minutes now after that we will throw it open to discussion so without further ado professor Kanter and thank you it's a pleasure to be here I will rip off professor Mansfield opening remarks last night and say that I too was a friend of Allen bloom I knew Allen bloom and Allen Bloom was no Alan bloom that is for those of us who knew him it was quite amusing to see the image of him that emerged in the popular press he he was not moralistic he was not an old fuddy-duddy in fact a more or less had the personality of a Borscht Belt comedian and I may be the first to note he had the exact same voice as the comedian Shelley Berman and he was legendary for his jokes and so we maybe we can do some things today to correct some of the popular impressions of him now it was very interesting rereading the closing of the American mind I had not like many people had not reread it since it came out it holds up very well I was very impressed by a dead in some ways I'm more impressed by it now the the grasp of the history of philosophy is amazing there's a for example the few sentences about can't place them in the context of the history and philosophy and an incredibly illuminating way but we're not here to talk about that and indeed as you reread the pork and see stuff on high degrees rector's Rock Raider you really have to wonder how in the world that this thing become a best-seller I suspect that like many bestsellers and here to paraphrase Shakespeare this book was read more in the breach than the observance but our subject I think is the key to its success Blum II even even Sommers worst critics would admit he was a great teacher and this book is the fruit of his years of contact with students and he touched a nerve he talked openly about things that people knew were happening but no one was talking about and I think really that's the root of the success of the book and at the time and to this day it strikes me his characterization of students he's very perceptive above all when he calls them nice that is what characterizes students then and it characterizes them now students are very nice to each other maybe not so much to their professors but above all they are non judgmental they indeed very moralistic about being non-judgmental and bloom talks about challenging them with the practice of sati that Hindu we know burning I I do that but even further I often ask my students about cannibalism I teach cannibalism a lot now now I'm an English professor so I do things like Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe rider Haggard's she HP wells the island dr. Moreau cannibalism comes up a lot in literature and whenever I broach it challenged my cuz well how many of you think that cannibalism is wrong and a couple of hands shoot up and then a few hands gingerly come up and then it stops especially as I start to look around and then I say how many of you think cannibalism is evil and then they're really paralyzed and they don't say how many of you think that cannibalism is simply another ethical practice and a couple of hands go up for that then I asked them how many of you practicing cannibals and lots of hands go up students or at least have a sense of humor but I mean that does it was straight blooms point a few of them are cannibals but they really hesitate to pass judgment even on cannibalism so I think that aspect rings true to this day let me try to update bloom a little bit in my remarks though now I think there have been many developments since his book it would have been interesting to see his reaction to them and a little over a decade ago I began to notice a phenomenon at the University of Virginia we have something called pre-registration Harvard ought to try it by the way with the students over the summer picking out their courses and at some point I don't know exactly when I started to notice all these students on their cell phones talking to their parents about the courses that were going to take I'll get to the cell phones in a minute but that really shocked me in a way and it reflects to some extent a new development that recent generations of students really like their parents and actually consult them on matters of importance to them now in some ways they damn well order like their parents they have the most indulgent sets of parents in human history they are not demanding of their children certainly not in moral terms and they generally offer them all the encouragement and support they can this is in many ways I this is no startling revelation but the most pampered generation of children in history but I'm particularly struck that they would talk to their parents about what courses that are going to take I never dreamed of doing that as an undergraduate who began college in 1962 and I came from an educated family my grandfather had a PhD in English my mother had an MA in English and yet it never occurred to me and I would have been ashamed to seek their advice on such an important matter is what courses I was going to take nor did they think to even propose anything to me now the obvious problem with this wonderful situation of children liking their parents is it's really hurting the liberal arts now in it it's a continuation of the trend that Blum talks about it's parents that are pushing students increasingly into pre professional or vocational college study I'm the director of comparative literature program Virginia I've had students say okay I'll sign up for complet but if you hear from my parents tell them I'm double majoring in biology and that's you know obviously an anti philosophical trend in some ways as children students today are too comfortable with the lives of their parents and with their relation to their parents now the other aspect of my little anecdote is of course the cellphones and that's not irrelevant I mean one reason my parents didn't talk to me about my courses were long-distance rates we're really expensive at 1962 and maybe I said basically dropped me off in Cambridge went back to Brooklyn and said you know we'll call you for your birthday in October and maybe we'll see with thanksgifting but today's cell phones make instantaneous communication possible and very cheap and cell phones in general the social media now dominates students lives it would be fascinating to see how blue would have reacted against that in response to that quite typically probably would have invade against the social media and then plunged right into that I was talking about this last night a man I'm almost certain Allen would have had a blog he would have tweeted I mean he was so obsessed with the phone and talking to people on the phone all the time but these the domination of Facebook and all these other social media I must say it would have I think Alan would have seen it as a further extension of what he's talking about in this book it it's a kind of cyber herd mentality it I find it frightening because it reflects an unwillingness for students to stand alone they they need to be in constant communication with each other and they can't seem to put down their cell phones or their iPhones or whatever and it on the one hand it seems to be reaching out for communication and therefore this hurting and therefore another anti philosophical impulse the unwillingness to be alone for even a minute and it's only one year alone that you can think on the other hand it's so we narcissistic because what communication has become his self-expression and this business I mean I you know I'm I'm getting to the building I'm walking into the building I'm going up the stairs I mean my exes who cares but it's like everybody must know what I'm doing at any given moment and again I think Alan would have found that quite sinister and again it's I'm willingness to get out of yourself and this obsession with self which again can be an anti philosophical impulse now I so far I've been you know confirming what Alan said let me make some critical remarks in particular I would say this that if Alan were completely right things should just be unspeakably bad now among students because the the trans he talks about have continued and yet I don't think students are that bad the primary secondary schools are failing them they're they come to college with poor and poor education above all they don't know how to write and in some ways they barely know how to read anymore and yet I still find students who want to learn who have a philosophical impulse and I'll say in criticism of Alan that like many people he underestimates the resilience of the human spirit and then under the worst possible conditions which is to say American schools this spark of Curie in celestial curiosity is not stamped out and let's remind ourselves it was not stamped out in the Soviet Union it's not been stamped out under the greatest tyrannies in human history including that of political correctness in the United States today and so in that sense I'm somewhat optimistic and I also say this Alan has a limited view of what you would life consists of I'll read one passage of the book to suggest what I mean it's on page 336 what image does a first rank college or university present today to a teenager leaving home for the first time off to the adventure of a liberal education he is four years of freedom to discover himself a space between the intellectual wasteland is left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits a man for the baccalaureate that's a very dim view of human life and in some ways a narrow one and in this book there's the family and there's the University and there's nothing else and I would from my experience I'll just refer to two things jobs and athletics there are two things that I observe in my students lives that are very important to them and that they're not quite as dreary as Alan would suggest I am very struck by the entrepreneurial spirit of some of my students and the whole world of computers and software has opened that up in some way it's amazing how many students starve little businesses now no I I have a much greater respect for capitalism than Alan does and I also I think it builds character and I also feel the same way about athletics it's tough to say that at Harvard at the moment but but one aspect of university life that Alan omits is athletics and I realize all the problems with Big Time revenue sports athletics but I have noticed with a lot of my students that in the old traditional sense athletics builds character and it's the one area where excellence is still a criterion and quite a visible and enforced criterion and particularly in some of the more obscure sports I have to know a bunch of cyclists for example they really do learn something about life in a much more real sense than they do in the classroom and so I'll say that I think for Alan a book is the only philosophical experience it seems and it's the only gateway into philosophical experience I think he leaves out life and Socrates you know didn't go around teaching books he was dealing with lived experience and I think the lived experience of many of our students is is richer than then then Alan indicates and this is a book of someone who has spent all his life in an academic setting I have never left school since kindergarten and you know Here I am I'm on leave Virginia what I do I came to Harvard I feel like Coriolanus and shakes me explain there is a world elsewhere and it just goes to another city with rotten politicians and war and I say you know I so I understand how Alan thinks this way but I think there there's more to life than he suggests here and that are I'm impressed with the character of at least some of our students in the way that they've confronted real problems in life and in a thoughtful way and I found that opens them up to experience whenever I'm trying to teach the what seumas's spiritedness in my classes I appeal to athletes and they understand it instinctively and immediately so and just very quickly I'll say I do have problems as I think a couple of our panelists do with Alan's treatment of popular culture I think the chat from the pair when I first read the book the chapter on music did not ring true with me in retrospect I find it even more false he just has such contempt for popular music in retrospect the 60s was a great era of popular music bloom concentrates on Mick Jagger Hill mitts the Beatles The Beach Boys the who there were so many you laugh but Brian Wilson and Pete Townsend and Lennon McCartney were great songwriters one would be hard-pressed to find a decade in which more great songs were written than the 1960s you could pick a decade when Franz Schubert was alive and yes but otherwise it was an extraordinary year in popular music and I gather from talking to Arthur Allen just wouldn't let himself even be exposed to it and so I I i then was a fan of this music I had I was able to think and reflect on it certainly the music of the Beatles were even the lyrics were extraordinary Allen obits Bob Dylan from that section so I think on pop culture I'm afraid that he speaks of ignorance there and again this limited model that only a book encourages thoughtfulness to be much pop music does films TV I would argue that the most sophisticated writing in the world today is in television and I often i blundered into writing about pop culture because I found that it's actually a very good way to move my students in a philosophical direction and I will remind people that Socrates began with the pop culture of his day which happened to be Greek tragedy which is a good reminder that a lot of things we denigrate as pop culture a now may be the sort of thing it was pop culture in the past and gets elevated to high culture so I'm gonna leave that I think other panelists gonna speak on that so I will stop here thank you okay I feel slightly fraudulent at this symposium because probably very kindly asked me to speak at it I suddenly realized that I had written the paper on Alan bloom before in 1987 I tried to find it and I couldn't but I do remember was very critical in fact as I had been at Columbia at that point actually I was already at Harvard but I had been trained at Columbia in a very very rigorous anal-retentive German Phila logical school of intellectual history and history of philosophy which is my field and I didn't like this book at all his intellectual history and I think I remember tearing it apart so to me that the closing of the American mind at that period was some kind of Midwestern great books teacher loading up the machine gun of his mind with every possible book he'd ever read and going out in the street and spring bullets at every sacred cow he could find it wasn't really sort of wasn't philosophy it wasn't in scholarship I don't think it was very good however I read the book because everybody's reading it and I fought with great interest the this intense critical gunfight that broke out after it was published all the mandarins of American high culture are weighing in many people think this is the first real battle in the culture wars that consumed the 90s that might be true anyway blooms book remittent remained a point of reference for me and I rereading it I reminded myself that many of the positions of the adopt like I remember adopting myself so I must influenced by it even though I didn't like it very much as a work of scholarship I also felt a certain fellow-feeling with bloom because it was clear he was some kind of playtest not my kind of platanus but the kind of Platon is for whom the symposium the feeders in Republic are very holy texts and who sees the life of the mind through those texts myself I was a student at that time of the Plato's reception the West so I found blooms platonism fascinating for that reason much more importantly though bloom was a teacher of great folks and I had sympathy with what bloom was saying because I was a teacher of great books I started teaching great books at Columbia contemporary civilization course otherwise known as plain a tornado at the I did that for three years there and when I came to Harvard in 1985 I proceeded to teach contemporary civilization to clandestinely in various forms and I've been teaching it ever since I've been teaching great books for 30 years between Columbia and Harvard and I noticed when I started reading that bloomed himself that I just I've been reading great books for 30 years so I I feel I have some kind of fellow feeling with him on that basis that's oh it's been interesting to reread the book and to especially these pages devoted when atomizing the soul of the American student in the 1980s I assume the people in this room are roughly familiar with the list of charges in his indictment I just want to summarize them the main one is that American students had acquired almost subconsciously from the corrupt academic culture around them a kind of philosophical default setting that's destructive of the true life in mind they've been neutered by nihilistic forms of modernity and could no longer be impregnated by the great books these are all Socratic images the books that might have introduced them to the higher life of the mind so this kind of this kind of cheap relativism the unquestioning acceptance of egalitarianism the very openness to everything their unwillingness to discriminate morally among forms of life among philosophies among works of art to create hierarchies and literature all of us had paradoxically four bloom closed them off to the great minds of the past and made them unable to experience the beautiful and the good so American students in 1987 says bloom and tolerate all cultures equally but had no real culture of their own neither there's the state nor their families gave them spiritual sustenance or fundamental loyalties or unquestionable obligations they contained multitudes excluding nothing had no standards of taste and deed no warrants for standards of taste they no longer read to feed mental hunger their souls had no longing to transcend the temporal and the particular they had no heroes no conception and nobility no roots in the past they were addicted to worthless music that deadened their imaginative powers and appealed to their worst instincts and worst of all they had no capacity for real love they were suspicious of love they feared love and bloom blamed feminism and the divorce rate for the shallowness of student relationships as they were then called already for the absence of moral dedication to other persons he somewhat prophetically saw that liberating women from the domination of men would require the destruction of dumas of young men their maleness or spiritedness would have to be a putative or as it turned out drugged in order for women to prosper according to some people I don't believe that myself worst of all in this form it's the peroration of blooms anatomy of American youth the erotic impulses that Socrates and Plato had harnessed and made the basis of philosophical education had become impotent this is very important part of his argument the erotic electricity that drove the life of the mind the same eros that hurt held the world together in Plato's view that longing for American youth had been satisfied too early too easily by ignoble objects so this meant that Socrates and blooms blunt brand of psychic midwifery had become obsolete of course I'm summarizing this and it gives me a very false impression of bloom as Jeremiah and I take first speakers point that he was not Jeremiah and the book if you read it is is it was a very witty charming tolerant humane reasonable book it's it's it's still very passionate but but it's a humane book but I wanted to summarize the diagnosis so as to better pose the question what has changed in 25 years since the book was published are the souls of American students in any healthier State where have things gotten worse is a philosophical life of the mind as Plato understood it when as bloom understands plato which is dutiful things still possible to American universities 1987 bloom thought that was the case but just barely in the last page of the book he says the age is not utterly insalubrious for philosophy is that still true today now obviously a lot of things have changed since 1987 in the broader culture and in the wider world when I taught cc at Columbia contemporary civilization at Columbia in the 1980s you could always spark a discussion by pulling in the Cold War a cold war loomed at that time the communist threat the Merce of capitalism which system made better human being as which system gave you more happiness and they're always at Columbia a few red diaper socialists in the class who kept furious and attacked me and there would be Catholics and you know you could have a real real debate a very lively discussion there was a young guy I probably a during those years when I was teaching named Barry Sottero who I assume had a Columbia education released some part of a Columbia education since of course Obama but I'm calling around to some of my friends who taught CC that the agent nobody remembers him so too bad I was hoping to have a have a sort of have a broom a revelation but anyway the Cold War is gone now the political passions that aroused are gone now South African apartheid is also gone it was beautiful issued all these issues about divestiture and divestment as I prefer that were beautiful to illustrate the difference between utilitarianism and deontology that's all gone militant Islam and terrorism have only partially replaced it as a source of passionate debate I don't think Islamic terror is the quite the existential threat that communism was although I have a very vivid memory of giving my Western Civ class on on September 12 2001 and starting off with the Greeks as always I had this very electric atmosphere in the room and I started off by telling them that how the West became conscious of itself as a West when they saw the Persians driving their slave soldiers before them with whips and that's the point and they realized that they were free free men of the West so that was very exciting teaching but I don't think that that is lost of really I don't think that the people that's the kind of thing that teachers can latch on to today of course the international situation is still different today but much more important change is in the world and for tip nation technology one product paradoxical result of the easy availability of information technology I think is the deadening of curiosity the same may sound paradoxical but when I was young part of the reason you read books was to find out about the world about history about literature about other countries and there wasn't any way for most of us to do this than to go to books like Henry James we never thought we wanted never to be at a loss and books were our way of orienting ourselves in the world now any idle curiosity that a student might feel can be satisfied with a couple keystrokes in most cases there are still some things you have to go to books to find out but most most of the questions that are going to occur to an undergraduate are going to be solvable online so the urgency to learn doesn't quite exist the way it does and memories are less capacious than because they don't have to be Compassion's you just go to your iPhone and find out this makes blooms great books and even harder sell I think the old cliff notes that we used to deplore our students reading their will booklets 20 pages each have now been replaced by sparknotes which are one page each and you kind of kind of the students now you know look through them for ten minutes before they go to go to their section but the real point is that that in any information you might want is instantly available anywhere 24/7 online also with social media all of your classmates and relatives and anyone that you've ever met has become part of your your following and superficially at least available and you're constantly scheduling yourself to see people and do things which is not really possible in when I went to school and I don't think this is boated well for the kind of long tenacious intimate face-to-face utterly serious discussions that you need to have real philosophy and philosophy has antiquity understood it I don't know still students still do all night both sessions where they used to when I was in school maybe they still do but I somehow doubt it well we could discuss other background changes I don't to go on too long you'll give me the hook when I go on too long that have occurred a last quarter-century the disappearance of Europe as a cultural influence I think is a big one our students don't look to Europe for sophistication and the latest thing anymore there's the rise of Asia as the apparent successor civilization to America we can perhaps see looming the end of what Blum called the American moment in world history maybe environmentalism become a new religion for American college students too often based on faith rather than reason but I want to pass on to the changes that have occurred in the narrow environment in the university since 1987 and the most consequential for blooms project I think is the enforcement of the new left value system that began in the 1990s in earnest the movement that yet call it got called political correctness though that's not a really good name when bloom was writing I think the radical march to the institutions which began in the 60s had led the new left to take over the English department and they they created the Women's Studies department the Black Studies department but they hadn't yet taken over the Dean ships I think by the early 90s the radicals have taken over the Dean ships that intimidated traditional elements and university administration and started to establish their own value in language as the dominant ones and outlawed were silenced rivals at the same time they were weakening academic requirements and standards of all kinds in the interest of inclusiveness and multiculturalism so universities became less willing to provide to prescribe what students should learn but more willing to tell them what to think so not unconnected with this new PC cultures the vast hypertrophy and the size of university administration's the multiplications of rules and codes of conduct and speech Dean's and Dean let's have multiplied even in harbor we've I think double the number of Dean's since I've been here students are under much closer serve and surveillance and they were in the 1980s they have to navigate much more complex systems of behavior and language in order to avoid offense and possible punishment relations the opposite sexes are a bit more fraught than they used to be I keep running into undergraduates who tell me that they they don't want to take the risk of having a relationship with the harbour girl so they've got a B C or B U and find a girl there so they can't get outside the enforcement apparatus that's well this must really be frustrating for harbor girls I imagine so gates have come out of the closet conservatives have gone into the closet faculty members have seen the way the wind blows there are many fewer Oprah Koch conservatives and they used to be as obvious ly anecdotal but I remember when I came to Harvard we had seven or eight conservatives in the history department people who could you were pretty sure we're voting Republican of the next election and now it's just Neil Ferguson and me I think in the history department out of 50 50 professors it could be wrong it could be some closeted conservatives I haven't discovered but I don't think so so what of all these changes meant for the souls of students of their ability and willingness to live a philosophical life are they still ready at least some of them to search in old books for profound answers to their husbands about who they are what they should believe what things are good and beautiful here I think it would be well not to lump all the students together this is one of my objections to bloom spoke that he said there's the anatomy of students there was only one student for bloom and they all had the same characteristics and I think they're quite different in fact student body elite universities has in fact become more multicultural and international to start off with in line with the intentions of liberal policies it's much harder of course as we all know to to pronounce our students names than it used to be they're not all Betty and Sue Right girls so they're anywhere now from 30% to 50% Asians to start off with personally I think this is a good thing I like the new ethnic diversity taken by itself it keeps students from seeming from accepting their own backgrounds without question you don't find the same white bread social conformity of earlier time certainly I've been undergraduate at Duke in the 1970s and you would have to go very far before you found somebody who wasn't from from North America in that period and I think the social diversity does promote an awareness of our own cultural identity but when we come to intellectual diversity there we have a problem as students are well aware when they come to University nowadays that they're entering a community with strict orthodoxies political and cultural and most of them have already had contact with that orthodoxy in high school they know what they're coming in for they're introduced to it again during freshman orientation and for maybe the mature many students I don't really know number but perhaps the majority of students this is not much of a problem right they're already hold conventional left-of-centre views they they bask in the approval of their elders and their own consciousness most of them are going to sail through college never have a single one of their pre-existing beliefs challenged there are other students who don't fit in so easily a goodish number or misfits and non conformists many of them drawn into subcultures are already in part of subcultures like the Gothic subculture oddly enough creates a lot of these misfits and they don't respond an increasing number of them respond to the pressure from for orthodoxy in the thought police by embracing a very radical libertarian view which may not be political sometimes it is political this is I think an unintended consequence of the PC culture that you turned a lot of people into radical libertarians sort of John Stuart Mill on steroids this case sometimes it becomes political philosophy to the number of actual libertarians very small but there a lot of students with libertarian mentality which is I think a reaction against orthodoxies enforced or Salafi conservatives generally have the hardest time operating in the PC or the new left orthodoxy of elite universities they often have to conceal what they think from their classmates not necessarily because they're cowardly but because they can't afford the constant expense of spirit defending themselves so they adopt the motto of the 17th century heretics and free thinkers into acidly bet for tea so that most asked you know I believe what I like inwardly but I conform outwardly so these kind of students are very good at picking up and transmitting signals as to when it's okay to reveal their true views about this or that subject since open conservatives have almost disappeared from university faculties conservative students follow suit and keep their politics private they want to be liked they want to avoid offending their classmates they want to get on and get out and not get involved in damaging controversy and here the internet comes into play too because any public stats they might take will get on to the Internet it might hurt them with their future so all of this becomes a problem I think in the classroom conservatives especially but not only conservatives are extremely reluctant to discuss their real views in class this is quite different from the 1980s in my it's nice teenage you get passionate debates about capitalism abortion religion at least in the Columbia classroom maybe it's my shift from Columbia to Harvard rather than from the 80s for the 90s that's responsible here I don't know but I think really there is a difference in what people are willing to put out about themselves in class I can remember students veering wildly between socialism and Orthodox Catholicism and back in the space of the semester so students now want discussion questions to remain academic in the worst sense of that word they want their own views to remain offstage which means that whatever happens to students as a result of reading great works of literature and philosophy it's no longer happening in the classroom few minutes two minutes all right so not all is gloomy some readouts of the new left orthodoxy have crumbled or become obsolete the Holy Trinity of race gender and class that professional professorial radicals used to promote it's the key to history and literature and politics I think is now becoming passe and often secretly laughed at by students one effect of the huge percentage of Asians in elite colleges today is that the new love pretends to be concerned with race rings hollow in their ears particular most Asians know that they've only entered elite colleges in the teeth of secret quotas set by liberal university administrators state officials they don't see themselves as victims but they know racism and hypocrisy when they see it feminists are now like Alexander the Great weeping that they have only one world to conquer inventing ever more implausible reasons why they are still oppressed and victimized even though they're running the university and so the unchallengeable orthodoxies on campus today are quite different from blooms time I think they're really in challenge the ones now are kind of gay rights and environmental two of them you know the student attitudes I think are better the irony of the students 10 years ago was I think destructive of humility I need to to learn the kingdom of cool still reigns but the Empire of irony has lost a few provinces I think in the last decade so are any students still attracted to great works of literature and philosophies it's still possible to find a few and I think it's always been a few who are attracted to the life of philosophy as Blum understood it now the answer I think is certainly yes there's a core group of students not necessarily conservative ones who understand that something is missing from college curricula something that's no longer required but still necessary before they have the right to call themselves educated people they know they really shouldn't graduate from college without reading Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and Madame Bovary in such books students I think at Yale are better served the ones of Harvard Yale they've got directed studies if they've heard a thing you have to seek out your opportunities to learn about great writers and great philosophers but even of this select group of students who do seek out the great books of the Western tradition not all of them going to become philosophers but there still are I think a few seekers who want to orient their souls in nature and the human community and aren't fast satisfied but the facile answers our culture gives to eternal questions so all this I think augers very well for their survival however tenuous of the tradition of Socratic teaching of which Allen Bloom was so noble an example thank you well I'm too young to have been a student of Ellen blooms and I'm too old and out of the loop to have a very intimate knowledge of the character of students today so it's possible I'm not the person best qualified to speak about whether his book was accurate when written and still accurate today but at some point between the book's publication 25 years ago and today I was a freshman at Harvard and had the very good fortune to run across the closing of the American mind and to read it at age 18 and I was more deeply affected by that book than by anything else I read at that point in my life for one thing it inspired me as an undergraduate to undertake a quixotic attempt to help reform Harvard's core curriculum and to incorporate more study of the great books an attempt that was needless to say a complete failure but it also had a deeper and more lasting influence on my views of the world and of myself and on the path I've followed in life and over the years I run across quite a few other people who are likewise now wiling away their most vital years in the study of political philosophy who were led to do so in no small part by their encounter with blooms book so if I try to put my finger on what what made the closing of the American mind most appealing to me at 18 I might say its first of all the way bloom seems to write not primarily as a scholar or paedon tour expert of one sort or another but as a human being alive to the vital question of how to live one's life and I was struck by his argument that that that vital question still can and must be raised and if we don't give serious thought to it were merely living out the answer that happens to be most prevalent in our time in place and he makes an awfully convincing case I think that what is most prevalent in our time in place is in many ways shallow and thin compared to the alternatives for the most part I grew up as describes American students with little awareness of the alternatives beyond what he calls an insubstantial awareness that there are many cultures and we should all get along blue notes that people today become more alike for want of knowing that they can be otherwise and it's a pretty exciting and liberating thing just to learn to imagine that they can be otherwise in my case one instance of this liberating experience at reading the book is that I was struck by blooms criticisms of Americans narrow focus on careers and specialization the part that professor Kanter wasn't so fond of but um and struck by his observation that the notion of a serious life of leisure has been utterly lost today so thinking over a wider range of possibilities the life of leisure suddenly seemed to be the life for me and and in the many years of asking what I wanted to be when I grow up seemed to be at an end unfortunately though other people didn't stop asking about my career plans and I think the answer I gave them would would have produced fewer baffled reactions if I'd said my plan was to live on Mars actually when I first started teaching at Harvard I once mentioned to my students Mike I plan to live the life of leisure and that was certainly the most successful unintentional joke I've ever told so it's true that I've ended up modifying that plan but I confess confess I still haven't shaken a strange repugnance that the word career has long produced in me so perhaps that's one remaining side of blooms influence on me in any case I think it was probably this twofold character of the book that constituted the greatest charm for me perhaps for rung younger readers generally on the one hand vivid and biting an eye-opening depiction of the peculiar character and limits of our times especially if the impoverished souls of today's students and on the other hand and often eloquent town better richer alternatives encouraging young readers to hope for instance that studying the greatest books could lead one's mind toward unimaginative and more generally to hope that it may even be possible to find true happiness or human wholeness as one of blooms students said to me recently um bloom was the only professor he ever encountered who spoke to him about the soul and virtue and happiness in a completely unpaid antic and unembarrassed way and just was simple directness in sincerity and I think that that rare quality really comes through very much in the book in the book he also explains quite eloquently his reason for speaking to students in this way he notes that quote idealism as it is commonly conceived should have primacy over realism in education for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection utopianism is as Plato taught us at the outset the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are the blooms account of students is at times quite conservative and at some points curmudgeonly I think it's essentially different from the work of a conservative curmudgeon because he combines his criticisms of the conditions of students souls in the present with eloquent appeals to the erotic longing for perfection at least insofar as that that longing may still be present in reader's souls today and in fact the underlying concern of his whole description of students today is precisely the conviction that powerful erotic longings must be present in the soul and must be fostered if students are to be open to and fit for a real education meaning the kind of education that enables one to live a good life as a whole and not merely to be a competent specialist of one sort or another at the main point of his description of students as a whole is to explain how whole range of contemporary four forces in contemporary America serves to attenuate most intense and fruitful longings of the soul the longings that seemed to have animated the human soul until just about yesterday he criticizes the sexual revolution vigorously for instance not because it leads to immorality but because it leads to passionless nests in students instead of being filled with longing to meet their own Beatrice students arrive at the university Cote sated with easy and sterile satisfactions of body and soul he notes that his way of putting the educational question of our times is are we lovers anymore it's not students general ignorance or lack of studious Nisour abstract morals that troubles him but rather what he calls their lame eroticism they're too nice so the students section is the part of the book that I like best and the part that I gather made the biggest impression on people generally and in that section especially bloom did a quite unusual thing for a professor which is just to look around with his own eyes and attentively and with infectious interest described in his own lively and perceptive words what he saw and the bloom himself of course was American and he has deep knowledge and experience of America the specific and peculiar character of his students and of his times seems to strike him as forcefully as if he were a visitor from a faraway land somewhat like the latter de Tocqueville and actually in reading in rereading blooms account of students this time struck me as in many ways a continuation of Tok Phil's description of the Democratic soul in its contrast to the aristocratic soul but but blooms description of American students updates Tocqueville by taking into account even further applications of the Democratic principle of equality including what Blum calls the gradual stilling of the old political and religious echoes and the souls of the young as well as the accompanied decline of the family the emergence and ascendancy of rock music the feminist revolution and the sexual revolution and the spread of relativism among the many forces that he says have served to disperse the souls energy intention and to make it flat or flaccid probably the two biggest factors he emphasizes are what he sums up as relativism in theory and lack of relatedness in practice as for the effect of the first bloom says that American stumped I mean we've covered this already brought us Blum says that American students come to college convinced that there's no truth to be found about the most important matters I'm taking for granted that it's not even possible to investigate the question of what a good human life consists in there relativists meaning that they believe their mind is to be perfectly open and non-judgmental about all of the alternatives but in fact as Blum explains very nicely this very belief makes their minds peculiarly closed because they have no reason for taking any alternative seriously without believing in the possibility that some other view of the cosmos might be the true one some other way of life could be the best one the motive for serious investigation is extinguished so this is one aspect of the peculiar lack of longing with which most American students enter college lack of longing for knowledge of the most important matters because they don't believe such knowledge exists as he puts it nobody believes that the old books do or could contain the truth and he says this wasn't the case among American students when he first started teaching when knowledge of the Bible was pretty much universal and students were therefore more open to taking seriously the possibility of that books could contain the truth but as that fell away he says so did their motive for education as for by the relativism is still as universal and one of American students today as it was 25 years ago I was guessing that perhaps an increase in partisanship might have tempered that a little bit and also in the last 25 years I mean there have been some other developments like a big increase in home schooling which I think does not tend to produce relativists and just from judging from my students at Harvard I wouldn't have quite thought that they all necessarily subscribed to relativism but actually decided to ask my students about it explicitly in class this week and I took a survey which is my first the first field research I've ever done as a political scientist and in fact all the two of them turned out to be relativist and the two exceptions were actually both foreign students so my my sample size obviously limits any conclusions that can be drawn from that but I did I did check on some other surveys and they seem to fit with that and say that relativism has if anything only been increasing so Bloom's description does I guess still seem to hold in that respect and as for whether it's a serious problem it seems to me at least an easier one to correct than some of the other elements that Blum describes because it's so even if students pay lip service to relativism it's it's not that they really believe that their own beliefs are not true so I think it is possible to show them that but of course Blum doesn't merely focus on students theoretical beliefs but he gives a tremendous attention to all of those sub rational passionate elements of the soul that he says may need to be educated properly to prepare the use of reason and of course this is where his big emphasis on music among other things comes in including his famous or infamous account of the harmful effect of rock music on students souls music has always meant a lot to me and when I was 18 blooms forceful account of the harm caused by rock music helped to confirm my recent switch from pop music to classical but I do have to admit that like Professor Cantor when I read that part of the book recently I did find his portrayal of the completely corrupt an unromantic character of rock music a bit exaggerated I mean actually it seemed much his description seemed to me to fit much better with my distant impression of rap music than with my own experience of rock music I mean it's true that the the beat of rock music of course is more sexual than the beat of classical music but I don't think it's really true to say that rock music has one appeal only to sexual desire or that the three lyrical themes of rock are simply sex hate and a smarmy version of brotherly love I grew up listening to standard pop four top 40 fare and songs I listened to or mostly about love and desire and broken hearts and such I mean I'd say that they were some sort of attempt to articulate longings but a you know characteristically Democratic attempt often soft and mushy and sentimental and too self-absorbed and in bad taste occasionally poetic though admittedly lacking anything sublime or delicate or noble or profound as he charges so in that way I think rock songs do fail to elevate or refine the passions or foster the soul's highest longings but I don't see that it that rock music's effect is this thoroughly corrupting as he claims in any case I think that this is probably one area where the situation has changed somewhat over the last 25 years I mean with the other people have mentioned the rise the Internet and the spread of cell phones and texting at Facebook and Twitter and all of these things I think that music just can't have as central a role in students lives as it did without all of those constant competitors for their attention and of course they still listen to a lot of music but it's a question of the degree of its centrality for them I've read for instance that the average American teenager sends 2,500 text messages per month I'm having music on the background while you're curiously typing text messages I think is not the same as being gripped by music and my impression is also that there's not nearly as much of a common musical culture among students today that not everyone is listening to all the same songs at the same time which I think also tends to attenuate the power of rock music but still it seems doubtful that bloom would consider a more recent slight weakening in the power of rock music to be an improvement since he also says that precisely students love of music has the potential to provide a path to awareness in the rare case where as the students can be brought to reflect on a critique of music and incidentally I suspect that that's also why he goes a bit overboard in his critique of rock music because his his overriding concern was with trying to open up that path to awareness and um and you know he just he sort of went over the top because he wanted to make an impression and of course he did um okay well they'd better end there except to add that when I recently went looking around Cambridge for a used copy of the book the the manager of the Harvard bookstore and informed me somewhat snootily that they didn't have a copy because that book has fallen out of favor I don't know to what extent that's actually true and that certainly wasn't going to deter me but before rereading it I did have some slight fear that I would find my youthful enthusiasm for the book to be as embarrassing as most youthful enthusiasms turn out to be but somewhat to my surprise and rereading it um it seemed to me to have lost little of its power to charm and educate and and to encourage young people to swim against the prevailing tide and in fact if I had to recommend one book that would have the greatest chance of opening the minds of promising young people I think this would still be it thank you thank you thank you very much we're running a little late so I will give my remarks as quickly as I can looking back over the last twenty five years I have many reflections about this book by my teacher and friend Alan bloom but my primary reaction I'd have to say is one of frustration and chagrin the book had an extraordinary run one of a kind that we are not likely to see again it spent over four months on the New York Times bestseller list and yet when all the Magnificent dust finally settled it seems that in the decisive respect everything remained just the same as it was before and all the things that bloom warned against so powerfully in this book continued their onward and upward march pretty much undeterred that at any rate has been my impression although I would like to hear from others on this quest it's a question I'd like to put on the table for general discussion if anyone's interested did the book have any lasting effect other than to make Ostrowski ins feel a little bit better about themselves although I do think that the Katherine in her remarks just now has given a certainly a partial and very eloquent answer to that question and then you read let me elaborate my own view at greater length the closing of the American mind is an extremely dense book every page a bit thick with observations facts illustrations jokes anecdotes and insights and in this thicket of claims some of them have always seemed to me to be clearly false to say it one more time especially the more extreme claims in the music section other of the claims seem to me correct when Bloom wrote them but no longer true today but some of its claims and these I think the most important seemed to me not only true today but truer today than when he wrote the book and in particular I think that this is the character of what might be called the overall thesis of the book simply stated the thesis of the book I think is this the most characteristic moral ideal or moral demand of our times our virtue is openness or toleration but increasingly a shortcut to genuine openness is sought in relativism and the paradoxical effect of relativist openness has been the closing and narrowing of the mind now obviously this is a complex slippery issue but in the main it seems to me that blue thesis was correct in 1987 and despite the extraordinary success of his book still truer today clearly in our post modernist Age the embrace of relativism in the pursuit of openness has only intensified that's our that's what we do when we get up in the morning that's still our driving project it seems to me and as for the resulting narrowness and closing while perhaps the clearest manifestation of that can be seen in the issue of relativism itself that is to say it's much harder to do than it was 25 years ago to simply get people to take this issue seriously not so long ago the problem of relativism filled the universities and even the cafes with grave debates about nihilism meaninglessness and the abyss and today this kind of high Nietzsche and seriousness has somehow just evaporated into the air we don't get it we don't feel it we don't do it it strikes us as but now you didn't pass a the intellectual equivalent of those duck-and-cover atomic bomb drills that they made us do in grade school indeed the fear of relativism has now been I think fully replaced by hope and this hope is precisely the one that Blum spoke of we embrace relativism as a saving doctrine that can finally tame and pacify the world by causing people to become more accepting open and tolerant other writers have also made the same point Sveta on Todorov surveying the French post modernist scene speaks of quote relativism which is presented as a miraculous solution to our problems and within the anglo-american tradition Harvard's own Hilary Putnam speaks of quote the fashionable the fashionable panacea of relativism unquote so in the face of this disheartening spectacle I would like if only to vent my frustration to spend my remaining minutes attempting a brief blue mian Restatement a restatement of why the project used relativism as a means to toleration is all things considered a pretty bad idea so I begin with the arguments in favor of this project basically there are two relativism it is claimed decreases the inclination to intolerance and secondly it increases the appreciation of tolerance so to the first point relativism decreases the inclination to intolerance because by undermining the in truth with a capital T an objective Universal and permanent truth it attenuates people's beliefs and attenuates their sense of certainty and thus disinclined them to the zealous and intolerant effort to impose their views on others and secondly at the same time relativism strengthens the appreciation of tolerance as a virtue because by showing that there are no true and absolute values it demonstrates or at least it could be thought to did it to demonstrate that the only rational moral posture left is one of equal tolerance towards all value positions since all of them are equally fictitious now these two arguments are fairly sensible and there is no doubt that under the right circumstances relativism can lead to an increase in toleration and a decrease in sexism racism imperialism colonialism and the other forms of moralistic intolerance the only problem with this project is simply that relativism is a pretty complicated and internally even contradictory phenomenon and therefore it contains many other possibilities ironically the proponents of relativism so proudly anti universalistic in every other respect become naively universalistic when they describe the moral and sociological effects of relativism but in fact there are quite a number of ways in which relativism can lead to intolerance here very quickly is my top five list number one as we have seen relativism may at first point to toleration as the only value that seems consistent with the realization that there are no universal values but actually relativism does not merely point to the value of Toleration but it produces an unparalleled intensification of it tolerate because toleration becomes the sole value left standing everything else has been undercut it is the only remaining source to us humans of moral worth conversely intolerance and universalism now become the single root of all evil so there's a great simplification of the moral world here now as the proponents of relativism themselves will especially understand this kind of moral intensification and especially this unification of evil into one rolling all evil up into one one single ball that this can be dangerous inevitably it will lead some people to single out the Universalists absolutists the nonrelativistic lis wicked wicked and therefore not to be tolerated thus relativism easily comes around to its own unique strain of intolerance persecution in the name of toleration which is pretty much what is meant by political correctness and it's a phenomenon that we do indeed empirically see all around us so that's path number one number two intolerance can also sprout from relativism in an opposite way relativism may at first lead to toleration by attenuating the dogmatic confidence and zeal of people's value commitments but eventually this attenuation effect may extend to the value of toleration itself when that point is reached then things reverse course people become more open and more accepting of intolerance specifically this means that they become too morally laid-back to stand up to the entire of others and more importantly they become too morally laid-back to overcome within themselves the crude or intolerant impulses that form for most people an essential part of feeling good about themselves to be sure these mellow relativists will engage less in the crusading moralistic kind of intolerance but they will engage more in the visceral self-indulgent kind called it frat brother intolerance or if you prefer Jersey Shore intolerance that is to say a complacent easygoing Lao dishes and this too is something that it seems to me empirically we see on the rise all around us number three there is yet another obvious way in which relativism can undermine the commitment to toleration the value of toleration gets both its moral basis and its psychological force from a kind of empathy the belief that beneath our differences we are all the same we share a common humanity a single nature but of course the idea of human nature essentialist and Universalist is emphatically rejected by most forms of contemporary relativism which typically holds that we are socially constructed all the way down there are Germans there are Chinese there are Nigerians but there's no such thing as humans Todorov points to the possible consequences quote the consistent relativist writes off the unity of the human species now this is an even more dangerous position than the naive ethnocentrism of certain colonialists the absence of unity allows exclusion which can lead to extermination in short relativism undercuts all good explanation for why I should tolerate strange and annoying people who violate my values number four still another path perhaps the profoundest from relativism to intolerance works as follows relativism is anti foundationalist it holds that the true sources of human thought are to be found not in universal self-evident truths available to human reason everywhere and always but the sources of human thought rather derived from the unique traditions practices and conventions of one's particular cultural community now if true this implies that the deepest thinking is achieved precisely not by detaching oneself from one's community not by adopting a neutral objective cosmopolitan and thus tolerant posture towards others but rather by cleaving as closely as possible to one's own tradition to our shared commitments and seeking out what is genuinely authentically native and homegrown in this way relativism leads one to replace the ideal of objectivity with the ideal of authenticity and this shift not only subverts the the dignity of the tolerant posture but it can easily lead to a heightened fear of foreign intellectual pollution and intellectual nationalism a philosophically motivated xenophobia that has far more in common with intolerance and fascism than with tolerance and the open society fifth and finally if on the relativist view all meaning truth and value grow from the soil of local traditions and conventions then one needs to ask the further question well then where in turn do these conventions come from and what sustains them and in answering this question of people today like to use the passive and neutral term socially-constructed they're socially constructed but precisely how does that process work who does the constructing when something is socially constructed it's surely not all of us it's the hegemon 'he's a quick glance at history suffice us to show that cultures and conventions come primarily from conquests great founders ruling elites whether they are economically politically or socially dominant at bottom it come from force and will it's all political truth is subordinate to power power is what comes first and precedes all possibility of thinking that's the relativist view a non relativist would add that an important role in the origin of our of our practices and beliefs an important role is also played by the objective truth of things by something like a natural law which permanent and unmoved by human force and action makes itself known to humans over time and shapes their beliefs and values but for the relativist there is no natural law no truth of things that stands apart from the imposed creations of human beings everything is socially constructed by the hegemon and again there is no objective justice to help determine who the hegemon x' should be first there are hegemon x' then there is justice so all there is is an open struggle for domination at the end of which the victors not only write the history but create the values and the truths in this way relativism which at first may seem a moderating anti colonial influence can easily and perhaps more consistently become an incitement to conquest and a source of obviously unheard-of ambitions namely to be a creator of new values and new worlds and some that point up one could say there's a direct connection in other words between Nietzsche's two great themes relativism and the will to power and for this reason no one should be surprised to hear the following insightful words in praise of relativism famously spoken by Benito Mussolini in Italy relativism is simply a fact everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition if relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and for men who claimed to be the bearers of an objective immortal truth then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes and activity from the fact that all ideologies are of equal value that all ideologies are mere fictions the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable indeed end quote and he saw you on indeed given that the most profound sources of contemporary relativism are Nietzsche and Heidegger and that neither of them to say the least understood it as either an argument or a force for liberal toleration it is really hard to understand how intelligent people today can be so blithely confident of this connection so in some relativism is full of contradictory inner possibilities some of them quite horrific and no one can say which will triumph in the long run for this reason while many people regard the closing of the American mind as a strange and a radical work it is more accurately seen as a much needed call to sanity and moderation okay so we now in the let's say half hour 45 minutes remaining to us so in the 25 minutes remaining to us we throw up 300 throats using open throw open the out the floor dead to questions yes your remarks I think in being confused in this studying classic possible philosophy and give it to me that you should you should read these authors you know airing on the one side of caution and thinking that maybe they were basically right the idea being that prejudice you brings up other folks is that they're probably wrong especially and I guess in listening to the remarks about balloons book it seems like the prejudice goes the other way seeing all four panelists the assumption that he was essentially right and I mean I wonder if I can play devil's advocate how would we get how would we challenge the book it seems to me that the most important theoretical or the book is is the chapter initiative and I guess my question to panelist is just that do you think moons moons argument which is supposed to describe a specific number of mistakes and errors and unfortunate tragedies in life of the mind States which are supposedly according to all of your marks still true today they were supposed to subscribe to describe be specific you thought a specific time and a specific number of mistakes specifically about Nietzsche and how Nietzsche was brought to the United States investigated I just wonder whether whether it seems to really bring true its argument about me Chandni Chaz Asian at the last advice personally has a lot of the remarks that I just heard all that you made seem sort of general and to a million in other words that they seem to be general problems with democracy and such and the challenge of democratic morals to philosophical education as such and therefore a lot of Oakland said is incorrect and correct today but then it wouldn't really be a story defending champion to America it makes money so I just wonder you know whether or whether we might ask if bloom was was correct you know democracy in general but whether is specific tailored sort of genealogy of relativism it's true today whether that should make us wonder whether you know maybe taupe builds discussion of all Americans being artisans and entertain part is pretty much the same pieces that you don't really need this each wondered if there's something protect perhaps fundamentally wrong at least theoretically well our section was section 1 not the beach' section so no no typical undergraduate compound and and I think really I mean from my impression to rereading section 1 the Nietzsche stuff I don't really see that it plays such a big role in his in his description I mean it's these factors that he's describing they all seem like you know further democratization and it's a question of what what prompted that and whether it could have been for stalled but I'm not sure that I mean at least in section 1 I don't think he gets the impression of that that it could have gone completely differently it's these things happened and it's a kind of it affects the whole character of soul in a way that before democra for equality had spread this far things were fundamentally different but it's still I mean I to me at least it read as a continuation of the same trends and not heavily dependent on the particular intellectual history and chain of causes that he sketches out later but I mean other people might have other impressions yeah here's the issue that the top villian analysis holds and for Blum there is always a problem for the university in a democracy that the Democratic notions of equality work against the aristocratic intellectual position of the university where Nietzsche comes in is to explain why the universities no longer resist those democratizing trends which are intrinsic to the societies at all and there I think it's a legitimate argument what undermine let's say the prestige of Plato or Aristotle or other thinkers and there this whole complex of Nietzsche and Heidegger and there you know people like Max Weber and so on I mean they're it's a question what forces worked in the university to undermine it as a kind of bulwark against the leveling tenants of the surrounding democracy I would just add to those two points that yeah and it also the nature parts are adds to the payphones of the book because it shows that okay so there are all these problems you know it can be fight against this well you know I was sort of saying well you know we'll never see a force as powerful as you know the closing the American mind that it didn't seem to make a dent but you know you could more especially say you'll never see another thinker as powerful I mean an writer as powerful as Nietzsche who uses all that power you know against you know these democratizing and egalitarian izing attendance ease and the the wicked irony that that his thought should become fuel you know that that increases those those very those very forces there's a kind of real pay Foss is an added insult you know and pay Foss that comes from the Nietzsche part I'm so I don't think in the Nietzsche part does all the work I think but I think there's a it's a capstone because because not only as Paul says as it especially helped to undermine the universities and the intellectuals but it also just sort of it shows that there's such a power to this to this you know Democratic drift that the most powerfully stated you know Neil aristocratic sentiments get appropriate advice yeah there's a tendency in bloom to ignore the responsibility of French thinkers and to emphasize the responsibility of German thinkers that's his own personal love of France I think operating there in fact you know Nietzsche is not read directly by the radicals of the 60s they're reading there reading Foucault and the reading work who's and radical Marxist so I think this is not good intellectual history as I I continue to believe it's not good intellectual history I don't think that modern people who study intellection modern American intellectual history read this book for that reason but now I think that one has to look at the filters through which each comes into American a Kadeem mostly through the English department and not so much through history or philosophy departments philosophy departments have no interest in this stuff in the 1960s or 70s they're all doing they're all interesting interested in comes in he takes it for granted that high cultures already disappeared forever Matsuda kind of popping in yourself and you begin so the very first paragraph in that chapter prepares a song called the way you look tonight by Jerome Kern with answers luck elevates only the three different and caring without this one it's all misogynist so assuming the students have never heard dishonor don't know who drove a if I bring in a recording of the Ella Fitzgerald and they played it at me one student said I actually money for a Frank Sinatra they do different very controllers they do about showboat they know about all of it but even more remarkably once doing listening to the song said this isn't about love this is about sex and that student was absolutely like because the song was actually written for 1933 movie called swing time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire sinks into Ginger Rogers after he's picked up on the street and after they've had sex presumably as a way it's getting a little too the marriage but he has planned for in the rain and we so the song actually celebrates all the things work I think it was a very very sophisticated discussion chuckling students a lot more about it whatever with hierarchy with rank on the hierarchy women per minute as the Great American Songbook by the way I also think it's called the problem of evil and we're even Voltaire's Candide and also playing on a show and they never heard music or they they think we know the 13 West Side Story but the lyrics of Candide is very big questions get through venues that may not be a great book stock I'm really like simple if you mentioned career ism is one of the trans to increase in tourism particularly i was wondering how you think that be in fact interest in the grade books because on the one hand these are the places to go rhetoric the arguments whatever else's leadership all the time on the other hand that it leads to more perhaps instrumental treatment like I said first question is is it true that this training career ISM interesting no it's just the opposite it means that whatever value the great books may have they don't perceive that they don't think they're gonna learn anything from reading Plato that's going to help them in their lives that they are mistaken about that but there are so many there's so many things and colleges now that are labeled vocational that that make the connection to career so our pre-law pre-med previously that so that's not going to work and indeed as you then say it would be self-defeating to turn the great books into something instrumental anyway I can't tell you how many times I have students tell me I can't do X because my parents just won't let me now that used to be the reason for doing it in my day and that is that that is a significant change I noticed that their their parents have been permitting them to do all sorts of things they their parents have not seemed to be wrong about and so now when they finally say don't do this they actually listen to them and unfortunately it's a crazy topsy-turvy world war that what the parents are saying now is why do you want to study these great books when you could be taking accounting I think if students were approaching the great books with a view to learning leadership and so on that its public speaking that I don't think that would be a bad thing but I I don't see the least sign that that's actually the case that they're thinking of it in that way I mean that that would imply in a way that they're still looking at them as vital texts and have seen such a sign of that but I think there was a time perhaps when written the knowledge of great books as a status marker and you had that I've read them in order to consider yourself an educated person I think that's that's mostly gone which may paradoxically be good good for philosophy and that people read them for the right reasons and we're likely to read them for the right reasons now you know our activists Johnson they want so I'm wondering whether it might be possible but this sort of greatly and listen to her demonstrating the truth or positions well it is true that has been pointed out many times it that very few relativists choose to call themselves relativists although if you if you then so you know relativism is just a word that by large the railers against relativism like to use like myself but for one reason sits a kind of Pajar it's come to you got a pejorative term you don't find relativists calling themselves that but there are a host of other words and so if you just look substantively it what and what people are saying you know the you know it seems to me that the big idea of our time is a kind of let's say contextualism that that everything that somebody says and thinks and writes cannot really be understood unless you know their context because in the end it's an expression of their context now there are different versions of this depending on how you define the context that it's a marxist the send of context is your is your economic position and social class and Haigh alien will have a you know a very different understanding of the you know the progress of spirit of in the world and a feminist will you know understand context much more in terms of gender questions and you know and and and so on I mean Freudian will understand the context in terms of subconscious forces and toilet-training so you know you you can you can go down the list and you know there are other you know so vintaged I talks about language games and and Thomas coolin talks about paradigms of normal science but so in a way there's all this disagreement out there but then you sit back in your elves wait a minute in there's a one crucial overall agreement that and the overall agreement is the contextualism that you got a reduce thought to something unthought that's the truth of the world that really kind of opens our eyes that thought can't be taken just for itself because it's ultimately conditioned by something unthought some invisible background forces of some some kind of context that that makes it what it is and I just think that that is the dominant you know idea of our time so it doesn't call itself relativism but but it is relativism I think because it does lead to the view that there are no and cannot be a permanent truth because contexts change and with the change in context there must be a change of thought so there is no truth that is you know that stands alone on you know free of context and that is true in the old-fashioned sense that it's true now it was true a thousand years ago it'll be true a thousand years from now it's true here it's true in Germany it's true in Nigeria you know it's it's free of place and time and context that is the idea that's lost almost all plausibility it's look somewhat like there are there are serious philosophers out there who defend natural law and defend universal isms of art various kinds I think you're right say this is the general notion but you know there are people Charles Taylor and Ellis from McIntyre and Lonnegan and Alvin Plantinga modern philosophers are very sophisticated defenders of of a non contextualized philosophical point of view but they're not not they're not culturally dominant they exist and it's it's um they have they have detractors and defenders but they're not stupid they're not if but their cultural relic culturally relevant okay you got to stop I know

Channel: Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard

Views: 17,488

Rating: 4.949367 out of 5

Keywords: Allan Bloom, Students, Paul Canotr, Arthur Melzer, James Hankins, Kathryn Sensen

Id: VLGTSo-9JwA

Length: 99min 7sec (5947 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2013