Closing of the American Mind (61 page)

¹⁸
It is to be noted that many students who come to the university intending to go into natural science change their intention while in college. It never, or almost never, happens that a student who was not interested in natural science before college discovers it there. This is an interesting reflection on the character of our high school education in general and science education in particular.

Andrew Ferguson

He had gone public with his ideas. He had written a book—difficult but popular—a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator. The thing had been done quickly but in real earnest: no cheap concessions, no popularizing, no mental monkey business, no apologetics, no patrician airs. . . . His intellect had made a millionaire of him. It's no small matter to become rich and famous by saying exactly what you think—to say it in your own words, without compromise.

—Ravelstein,
by Saul Bellow, 1996

Bellow's Ravelstein is a thinly fictionalized Allan Bloom, caught at the peak of life and rendered, so I'm told by Bloom's friends and students, with uncanny precision and ingenuity. We first see him dressed in a blue-and-white kimono, sashaying around the penthouse he's rented at the Hotel Crillon in the heart of Paris. His lover, a young man from Singapore named Nikki, lies asleep in bed. Bellow wants to impress upon the reader his subject's physicality. Abe Ravelstein's frame is long and angled and ungainly, but it's usually adorned in $5,000 suits. When he eats, you sense the pleasure with which he undertakes the task: “he was stoking his system,” Bellow says, “and nourishing his ideas”; at dinner parties, hostesses are advised to place newspapers under his chair to gather the debris from his enthusiastic feeding. His baldness is “geological.” He smokes constantly, twin spouts of tobacco smoke flowing dragonlike from his nostrils. Bellow stresses the physicality at the beginning of the novel because it lends poignancy to the wasting at the end, when Ravelstein endures a tortured death from AIDS, as did Bloom. He was carried off in 1992, only four years before Bellow immortalized him as Ravelstein and five after he published the book you hold in your hands.

Among much else, Bellow dramatizes the suddenness and unexpectedness of the wealth and fame that rained down on Bloom in the late 1980s. The course that Bloom's classic took on its way to boffo box office is singular even among the endless eruptions and craterings of the American book business. The proposal for the book was bought by one editor and midwived into print by another, with no more than modest expectations. The original title,
Souls Without Longing,
was lovely but uncommercial, so it was changed. The first print run, in February of 1987, was ten thousand copies. By spring it was selling twenty-five thousand copies a week. It hit the bestseller list in April, reached number one by summertime, and stayed there for two and a half months. It became beach reading! From the top of the list it beat back waves of challengers, including multiple celebrity memoirs, self-help books, and a particularly gloomy book-length warning about the “coming depression of the nineties.” In March of the following year,
The Closing of the American Mind
was still a bestseller. By then nearly a million copies had been sold in the United States. Foreign sales were just as prodigious. The best minds in American publishing were boggled. Never in their experience had a book about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger outsold books by Patty Duke, Shirley MacLaine, and Sam Donaldson.

Various attempts were made at the time to account for the runaway success. The nearest cause was a handful of spectacular early reviews. The book “hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like,” wrote the daily reviewer in the
New York Times,
rather awkwardly. “It commands one's attention and concentrates one's mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.” (Cut, print, and blurb.) The
Times
's Sunday reviewer, a college president, was similarly overwhelmed, calling the book “rich and absorbing.” Ditto the
Washington Post
's reviewer, likewise from the
Chronicle of Higher Education,
and still more from
Time
and
Newsweek
.

But good reviews, even ecstatic reviews, aren't sufficient to sell a book, as any number of highly praised authors you've never heard of would be happy to tell you. Something else was happening here, but we didn't know what it was. James Atlas, in the
New York Times Magazine,
conjectured that the book acted as a kind of adult continuing education class: “It appeals to the student in us all.” Bloom's editor at Simon & Schuster said the book tapped a large reservoir of underserved book buyers eager for intelligent discussion of profound issues. Louis Menand, a literature professor at Princeton and CUNY, was rather more sardonic in the
New Republic
: “It gratifies our wish to think ill of our culture (a wish that is a permanent feature of modernity) without thinking ill of ourselves.”

Menand's review was part of a second surge of notices, far more critical than the first. It was the Revenge of the Eggheads, and when at last it came you couldn't help but wonder what took them so long. The
Wall Street Journal
's rapturous review arrived late enough to note how odd the early praise had been, sociologically and politically, coming as it did from the “cultural establishment” that had been squarely in Bloom's crosshairs: “Many of the reviewers who have praised Mr. Bloom's book have not faced up to the consequences of Mr. Bloom's ideas.” The college president in the Sunday
Times
was singled out as an especially unlikely booster. His rave review for the book “shows no indication that the institution over which he presides stands fundamentally indicted by it.” And not only this or that institution: Bloom was accusing an entire generation of humanities professors of academic dereliction.

They took the book as a personal affront and reacted accordingly. “Bad reviews are one thing,” James Atlas wrote. “The responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers.” Tactics differed. There were attacks on Bloom's scholarship, his philosophical skill, and the empirical support for his broader claims. There were also sarcasm, invective, caricature, shaming, and, inevitably then as now, accusations of elitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Perhaps the most celebrated rebuttal to
Closing,
considered by many of Bloom's critics to be definitive, was one of the calmest and most measured. Written by the Harvard classicist Martha Nussbaum, it was a lengthy piece even by the standards of the magazine in which it appeared, the
New York Review of Books
. Her disputes with Bloom over the the ancient texts were too obscure for a layman to adjudicate, but to my mind her characterization of his general argument wasn't quite accurate and in places discredited itself. She tells us, for example, that in
Closing
“Bloom presents himself to us as a profoundly religious man.” You could have fooled me. His preeminent teacher, the philosopher Leo Strauss, liked to make the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem—a life of philosophy versus a life of faith. After a few approving nods toward the Bible,
The Closing of the American Mind
shows Bloom to have been an Athens man all the way (not to mention a Jew, a homosexual, and a Hoosier. Truly, they broke the mold . . .).

The most subtle of Nussbaum's arguments poked at a contradiction lying half-buried in the book. Bloom opens with a patriotic celebration of America's foundation in natural rights, the guarantee of equality; by the end of the book he seems to argue that the only way to save America from its present course is for universities to recommit to promoting the philosophical life, a life accessible, he frankly acknowledges, only to a chosen few. The contradiction, if that's what it is, doesn't cripple his other arguments, but Nussbaum and the other second-wave academics thought it exposed an elitist, antidemocratic agenda that could easily darken into something much spookier—autocracy or worse, a new (or very old) kind of authoritarian rule.

One observer estimated that more than two hundred reviews of
Closing
were eventually published, and scores of these, in obscure quarterlies and highbrow opinion magazines alike, elaborated the theme of Bloom as authoritarian menace. In
Harpers,
the political scientist Benjamin Barber called the book “a most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract.” Americans were too susceptible to a “Philosopher Despot” like Bloom, Barber wrote. “Anxious about the loss of fixed points, wishing for simpler, more orderly times,” they found in his work “a new Book of Truth for an era after God.” This was a common assertion but a weak one, even on its own terms. In accusing Bloom of authoritarian tendencies, Barber and the others exposed their own horror at the common folk and made you wonder about their own faith in democracy. Who knew Americans were so easily duped? Toss them a few quotes from Herodotus and bitch about their college kids and they'll think you've given them the Book of Truth. Even Franco had to work harder than that! Maybe this whole idea of “government by the people” needs to be rethought . . .

In time the academic establishment's horror of Bloom grew too vast for mere paper and ink to contain. Conferences were held to declare him anathema. At one of these, in Manhattan, the associate headmaster of the Dalton School called the book “Hitleresque.” Richard Bernstein, then a reporter for the
Times,
chronicled a gathering sponsored by Duke and the University of North Carolina, where Bloom, though not in attendance, was “derided, scorned and laughed at” by a large group of humanities professors. “In some respects,” Bernstein wrote, “the scene in North Carolina last weekend recalled the daily ‘minute of hatred' in George Orwell's
1984,
when citizens are required to rise and hurl invective at pictures of a man known only as Goldstein, the Great Enemy of the state.”

It's worth noting that Duke's conference was held nearly
a year and a half
after Bloom's book was published. Some hatreds need more than a minute to burn themselves out. And among the establishment—deans and department chairs, the grim-faced apparatchiks at the American Council on Education and the American Association of University Professors—Bloom remained a pariah for the rest of what was left of his life. But he was a jaunty and cheerful pariah, as Bellow shows, for there were compensations: appearing endlessly on TV, accepting invitations to Chequers from Mrs. Thatcher and to the White House from President Reagan, and laughing in his kimono all the way to
la banque
.

I wonder whether all this fuss will seem bizarre to new and younger readers of
The Closing of the American Mind
. It's useful to recall the world Bloom and his book broke into and riled so. In material ways, the United States of America of 1987 seems as remote as Republican Rome. Our national wealth has more than tripled in the last twenty-five years. The digital revolution, with its upending of the habits and patterns of everyday life, was just getting underway. Music lovers delighted in the portability and convenience of their brick-sized Walkmans, never imagining the tiny wonders they would be slipping into their shirtpockets a decade hence. Cars, on the other hand, seem to have been roughly half their present size. You couldn't carry around a telephone unless you yanked it off the wall. Nintendo was as sophisticated as gaming systems came. And nobody used the word “gaming system.”

Culturally, the country fretted. Culturally, of course, all countries, or some segments of them, are always fretting, and have been doing so since Cicero grieved over
O tempora, O mores,
up to and beyond Yeats's insistence that the center cannot hold. But by the end of the 1980s in the United States, there were numbers to underscore the worry. In the previous thirty years, violent crime had increased 500 percent, the divorce rate had doubled, the teen suicide rate had tripled, and the number of “illegitimate births” (this was the last era when you could use the term) had increased 400 percent.

Beyond the numbers, the worriers readily found signs of the culture's degradation, if not its imminent collapse. On TV, Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, and Sally Jesse Raphael had introduced a new kind of freak show that proved enormously popular, banishing modesty and discretion and making exhibitionism a virtue, qualifying adulterers and wifebeaters and cross dressers to strut their hour upon the stage set. (Eerie fact: exactly nine months after
Closing
's publication date, Snooki Polizzi was born.) Popular fiction chronicled a generation of pampered youth lost to anomie and cocaine. As the Iran-Contra scandal shook the executive branch, pundits discovered among the people a loss of faith in their institutions. A devastating crash on Wall Street was credited to greed unchecked by law or moral obligation.

And as if all that weren't sufficient cause for alarm, one final word: Madonna.

The skittish American public in 1987 was well-prepped soil for a message like Bloom's. It helped that his subject, colleges and universities, shared in the general unease and were in fact one cause of it. Test scores at all levels of schooling, but particularly college entrance exams, had been falling since the late 1960s. Two generations earlier the GI Bill had begun to democratize higher education by making it available to cohorts that in earlier times would have never thought it necessary for a fulfilling life. To accommodate the swells of new students, and to absorb the subsidies that followed them, schools vastly expanded their housing stock, increased the number of classrooms, and, crucially, widened the range of their fields of study.