Allan Bloom's defence of democracy

Abstract

It is a revealing indication of Allan Bloom's politics that his book's title chastises higher education for failing democracy. The Closing of the American Mind does not condemn democracy. This point seems to have been lost on many reviewers. Bloom has been attacked widely for being undemocratic. Most notable perhaps of the attacks was leviedby MarthaNussbaum, who, in herreview in TheNew YorkReview of Books (1987), charged Bloom with being an elitist, hostile to the openness and diversity of American society. It is a curious thing that while Bloom sees his project as curing the ills of universities so as to preserve democracy, his critics read him upside down-as wanting to abandon democracy in order to pmtect elite education. I propose one thing in this essay: to explain why Allan Bloom is a democrat, and to show what role he assigns to the university in helping to preserve his favoured regime. To the often made charge that Bloom is a conservative, or a traditionalist, his book testifies otherwise. It is certainly true that Bloom is worried about relativism, as almost all commentators agree. He complains that there is no single vision (or set of competing visions) of what an educated person is anymore (1987, p. 337). It has become impossible, he claims, to defend the content of the classic books. As an example, he turns to the Bible. "A teacher who treated the Bible naively, teaching it at its word, or Word, would be accused of scientific incompetence and lack of sophistication" (p. 374). One can only teach the Bible in the modem university as literature, not as revelation. Bloom also laments a time when students came to the University with strong convictions of faith or tradition. He recalls his own family the spiritual richness of his grandparents' home, and the links that were made between their "simple faith" and"areal respect for learning" (p. 60). By contrast, this generation is one supposedly better educated, yet spiritually impoverished. Strong even dogmatic belief in the household has now been supplanted by the more sophisticated "values education," a relativistic and non-judgmental mixture of supposedly enlightened thinking. The openness of the American middle class for Bloom, has "none of the genius that engenders moral instinct or second nature, the prerequisite not only of characterbut also of thought"(p. 61).