
On December 10, 1982, a then-obscure academic from the American Midwest took to the pages of National Review magazine with a lengthy indictment of America’s intellectual class. Though this was the height of the Reagan Revolution — a heady time for the Review’s conservative editors and readers — the author had nothing to say about tax cuts or defence policy. Instead, he peppered his argument with references to Socrates and Nietzsche. A typical applause line was: “The Bible and Plutarch have ceased to be a part of the soul’s furniture.”
Yet the piece hit a nerve. And in time, it grew into a bestselling book that made the author — Indianapolis-born philosopher and classicist Allan David Bloom — an academic celebrity.
Much of Bloom’s success no doubt was owed to his book’s inspired title, The Closing of the American Mind. But the timing was perfect, too, arriving on shelves in the fall of 1987, when political correctness was just becoming an acute force for censorship. I was a college student at the time. And reading Bloom’s book helped convince me that, no, it wasn’t just me: something really was wrong with the way my generation was being educated and politically programmed.
Bloom was especially repelled by relativism, which he described as “the consciousness that one loves one’s own way because it is one’s own, not because it is good.” Though he was hardly the first postwar critic to abhor the fragmenting of cultural life and the marginalisation of the Western canon, Bloom went deeper with his analysis, showing how the emerging obsession with identity politics (as we now call it) left students glum and aimless — brimming with grievances, while lacking the sense of common purpose that once animated higher learning.
The author died in 1992, just before the advent of the world wide web exacerbated many of the problems he described. Social media, in particular, has reduced attention spans — making it difficult to teach students classic texts that are not immediately relevant to modern forms of self-identification. At the same time, these networks allow activists to shame heterodox ideas on a peer-to-peer basis.
If Bloom spent a single day on Facebook or Twitter today, he would instantly recognise the “mixture of egotism and high-mindedness” that he detected among his own undergraduates. But he also would be shocked by the rigid ideological conformity that now is demanded of students on matters relating to race, gender and sexuality. The speech codes Bloom saw metastasising in the late 1980s and early 1990s have become largely unnecessary: university administrators can now rely on students to police themselves.
Unlike Bloom, I have never taught at a university. But in my capacity as newspaper and magazine editor over the last two decades, I have scouted and recruited dozens of bright twenty-somethings fresh out of journalism school and leading liberal-arts courses in Canada and the United States. In many cases, I have watched these young people struggle for a few years in the profession, and then move on.
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