Bloom and Doom: ‘The Closing of the American Mind’
This summer, Allan Bloom, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, published a pop polemic, a long and tendentious treatise on the decline of American youth. The book – gloomily entitled The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students – blames the waywardness of the young on, among other things, rock & roll and Mick Jagger, the lowlife satyr of dirty dancing. ”Rock music,” Bloom writes, ”has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire — not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”
Rock & roll, according to Bloom, has only three themes: ”sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” Bloom’s antirock diatribe hits full stride when he likens pop music to a ”pubescent child whose body throbs with orgiastic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercial prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”
As I read through the book, Professor Bloom actually made me feel young again. This is exactly what our parents and teachers warned us about in the Fifties when we first started listening to Elvis Presley and Bill Haley and tuning in black stations on the car radio. Rock & roll, they said, will rot your brain. Jungle music unleashes dangerous impulses that will lead to the Big Mistake.
I read on, and my nostalgia deepened. According to Bloom, American youth in the Eighties – even the best and the brightest at the leading universities, where he has taught for thirty years – are ”spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone.” That’s a fair summary of what was said about us – children who came of age in the Eisenhower era. We too were spiritless, ill educated, self-centered, timid and utterly without serious purpose. Our parents had given us everything they had lacked growing up in the Depression. In return, we frittered away our lives on sex, TV and cars. We did not read the great books that our parents claimed to have read Or listen to opera. Or study the Bible. Now Bloom comes along and enshrines my generation for poring over Plato and questing endlessly for the Good, the True and the Beautiful.
The professor is correct about one important distinction between kids of the Fifties and Eighties. In my youth we talked endlessly about sex. Today young people actually do it. And it seems to drive the fifty-six-year-old Bloom crazy, and no doubt rankles many others from his generation and mine. Underneath an ostensibly moral concern, many parents feel a strong current of jealousy as they observe their children exploring realms forbidden to them in their younger years. (Surprisingly this seems especially true of mothers and daughters.) Life is unfair. Even Bloom, an old bachelor himself, sounds a bit envious. He denounces Mick Jagger with such relish that one may wonder if the professor himself is turned on by Mick’s pouty lips and wagging butt.
Blooms other complaints – about television, movies, women and feminism, psychiatry, left-wing professors and Sixties political movements – seem silly and dated. It’s as though someone had dug up an old right-wing screed from the Nixon-Agnew era and published it twenty years late. Except for this: The Closing of the American Mind is probably the hottest best seller of 1987 and certainly the most surprising. With 350,000 copies in print, Bloom’s book has reigned atop the non-fiction-best-seller list of The New York Times more than four months, outselling all the fitness and diet books and the get-rich-quick manuals. Clearly the professor has touched a nerve, but of what sort?
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