Looking back, it seems rather unlikely that in 1987, the year of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and Rick Astley@@Hahaha he looks hilarious: http://tinyurl.com/2s4x6q@@, a serious book with the serious subject of “how higher education has failed democracy” would make it to the top of the best-sellers list. Somehow, though, it happened.@@http://www.weeklystandard.com/keyword/Closing-of-the-American-Mind@@
“The Closing of the American Mind,” published 25 years ago this month@@http://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/1856482@@, sold half a million hardcover copies and was first on the New York Times best-sellers list through that summer. This success turned the book’s author Allan Bloom, previously a somewhat-obscure scholar of Plato and Rousseau at the University of Chicago@@http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/02/allan-bloom-or-figment-of-saul-bellows.html@@, into a household name that was both revered and reviled.
Bloom seemed wildly out of place in the cultural milieu he found himself in: He was an elitist, ebullient, haughty, gay curmudgeon, railing against things like feminism and rock music in the Morning in America ’80s@@http://www.billbennett.com/@@. According to his book, the United States had been slouching merrily toward a debauched oblivion since the 1960s.
It was then, Bloom said, that the universities of America, long ago infected by relativism and John Locke-style liberalism, failed society, leading to an “impoverish(ing) of the souls of today’s students.”
At times, “The Closing of the American Mind” can read like an overheated Jeremiad. I’m all for being a grumpy contrarian, but is Mick Jagger really to blame for the immorality of kids these days? Bloom, especially when he calls rock ‘n’ roll “prepackaged masturbational fantasy,” @@http://tinyurl.com/6u5wtum@@sounds awfully like that old guy in the neighborhood who hands out dried fruit on Halloween. Alas, if not Bloom and people like him, then who?
The triumph of “The Closing of the American Mind” in, of all times, the DayGlo, go-go 1980s is a triumph of curmudgeon culture, an important antidote to the syrupy, delusional “bright-side” thinking that’s encouraged in the mainstream. Of course, it’s unhealthy and depressing to think the glass is half-empty all the time, but it’s a whole lot better than fooling yourself into believing the glass is completely full when it isn’t. George Will@@http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/150@@, who championed Bloom’s book when it was first published, defended this realistic pessimism (or pessimistic realism) wonderfully: “The nice part … is that you’re constantly being proven right or pleasantly surprised.”
Unfortunately, Bloom died before either could happen in his case, succumbing to ulcer bleeding and liver failure at the age of 62, five years after “The Closing of the American Mind” was published and made him a celebrity. However, reading the book that made him famous 25 years later, one gets the feeling that he knew he was right.