Allan Bloom on Empty Heads in Higher Ed
In his book Democracy in America, the French historian Alexis De Tocqueville meticulously expounds his perspective on the American experience with democracy, stating the following: “In America, I saw more than America […] I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions. I wanted to know democracy if only to know at least what we must hope or fear from it.”
In his travels, Tocqueville admired much of what he saw coming from the American experiment, whether it was America’s strong individualistic character or its economic stability. What worried him was democracy’s ability to turn tyrannical. He remarked that while democracy does not always take a turn down the road to authoritarianism, there is nothing that can stop it from doing so. He worried that as democratic societies progressed, they could eventually become a tyranny of the majority, meaning that a majority of the nation’s population would become capable of “ganging up on” the minority view. He provides two examples of majority tyranny: one of which is the treatment of free Black Americans who were prevented from voting in northern states, and the other is the mob violence used against journalists who espoused antiwar views about the War of 1812.
Professor Allan Bloom, who studied under Leo Strauss and later taught philosophy Cornell University as well as Yale and the University of Chicago, wrote about his first-hand account of how public opinion has influenced America’s most important universities. In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom recounts his experience teaching at Cornell during the late 1960s. Bloom wrote that
when I first joined the faculty there was a core curriculum and there was a commitment to providing a liberal arts education. That is, there was recognition that there are skills and training (arts) needed by free (liberal) and responsible citizens to remain free. Faculty from different political views agreed that there was a tradition that had to be understood and there were thinking, reading and writing skills that had to be acquired. Of course, that common purpose has completely disappeared.
America during the sixties was fraught with change. It witnessed the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The country was not only engulfed in the Vietnam War but saw major changes when it came to the issue of civil rights, the women’s rights movement, and a slew of other political movements that took shape during the Cultural Revolution. Public opinion was changing rapidly under these new cultural shifts—and with these changes came negative effects for America’s elite universities, as well as the rest of higher education.
Later in his book, Bloom further emphasizes the full effect of public opinion on the institution of higher education, arguing that “although every man in a democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men.”
Bloom argues that when every man sees himself as the equal of every other man, this inevitably leads to falling into the trap of collective thinking. This was originally argued a century earlier by Tocqueville himself. The French aristocrat argues that in America the source of majority rule comes from this sense of equality among the people. This seems to be a rather distinct problem for Americans. Bloom points out that many of Tocqueville’s observations about the American people were that although they talked much about individuality and individual rights, there was always a real monotony of thought, and that real vigorous independence of the mind was quite rare. He notes, moreover, that Americans were creatures of public opinion just as much as the conformists.
Tocqueville, moreover, points out that in Europe the complex social hierarchies consisting of groups such as aristocrats, merchants, the clergy, and others, served as intermediary forces in society. These institutions acted as a bulwark against a more domineering political force and often served as a vital point of protection for liberty and human dignity. Bloom further explains this view when he writes, “unless there is some strong ground for opposition to majority opinion, it inevitably prevails.”
The institution that Bloom believes is best suited to “stand athwart” this form of tyranny is the institution that he feels is decaying from within—namely, the university. But how does one fix this problem? To truly understand the university’s role in a liberal society, we must look back to the period in which the “university” that we know today was established.
The Origins of the University
Bloom argues that the “university” as we know it today is a product of the Enlightenment. “To enlighten is to bring light where there is darkness,” and universities were meant to bring light (scientific knowledge) to the darkness (superstitions or mere opinions). While man has always held opinions, and will continue to hold them, the difference between pre-enlightenment governance and post-enlightenment governance is that in the former, men governed solely via opinion rather than reason. Bloom thinks the primary source of conflict the Enlightenment was meant to address was the conflict of truth versus belief. He argues that this tension had always existed long before the Enlightenment thinkers came to the forefront. A prime example of this would be the death of Socrates at the hands of the mob or Galileo’s later confrontation with the Catholic Church regarding his scientific discoveries.
One of the Enlightenment’s innovations was its attempt to reduce this very tension. The university was meant to serve as a place where scientists, philosophers, and others concerned with pursuing the “Truth” could be independent of the outside forces of opinion, establishing and following their own rules and dictates. The pursuit of protecting “free thought” and engaging in scientific inquiry were to be the goals that universities are to protect.
Bloom wrote that the university must be contemptuous of public opinion because it is the only institution where one can freely engage in the quest for truth in the world. It must, therefore, concentrate on and preserve the studies of philosophy, theology, and literature classics because these disciplines will most likely be neglected by a democracy. He said that the university “must resist the temptation to try to do everything for society […] it is only one interest among many and must always keep its eye on that interest for fear of compromising it to be more useful, more relevant, more popular.”
Have our institutions brought about such an atmosphere of free engagement? If the bulwark against majority tyranny is failing to act as such, then where does this source of failure come from? We must examine what virtue has been promulgated over the last several decades. What virtue then has higher education now brought us? Bloom writes that universities today have become far less interested in producing scholars, but instead aim “to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.”
Openness, Prejudices, and Nihilism
In his section about the university, Bloom examines the culture surrounding these institutions. He argues that in that schools had become too “open” and that this attempt to push openness has had contrary effects on higher education: it has closed our minds. This openness has created several issues for the university as an institution.
Openness of this kind seemed to discourage both students and faculty from holding prejudices. While the word prejudice has today taken on a far more sinister meaning, the kind Bloom is referring to is best described as preconceived notions, or one’s personal views about the world. During his time at Cornell, Bloom recalled a conversation he had with a psychology teacher. The teacher had told Bloom that as a teacher, “it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. He knocked them down like tenpins.” This comment prompted Bloom to ask himself if the professor had any idea if he replaced these prejudices with anything else, let alone understand what the opposite of prejudice might have been. He wrote, “I personally tried to teach my students prejudices, since nowadays—with the general success of his method—they had learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything. […] One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.”
Bloom believed that prejudices—strong prejudices—were and are visions about the way things are. They served as “divinations” of the order of the whole, and therefore they served as a road to lead us to the truth; by believing in and following these divinations, we go through a process of trial and error. Just as a coach or a parent may say “failure is a step in the right direction.” Bloom argues the same point. “Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.”
Plato expertly draws attention to this experience of coming from our prejudices and finding the light with his cave allegory. The shadows that dance on the wall serve as our prejudices. While these shadows may depict convincing images to us, they do not represent the full truth. It is the feeling of emerging from the cave that provides us with that liberating sense, but if we follow the line of thinking proposed by Bloom’s colleague the psychology professor, then we are not emerging from the cave but rather living below the cave. Below the cave is to not have prejudices; but it is also what it's like to replace those prejudices and leave them with nothing, to leave our mind empty. We not only remain in the dark, but we have blinded ourselves for the sake of losing our prejudices. The effort of teachers, and to many extents ourselves, to purge our minds of these preconceived notions instead of leaving us feeling liberated or more aware of our ignorance has left our minds empty.
The current style of openness is supposed to establish a sense of “go with the flow,” or it is meant to be an accommodation to the present, but this is wrong. This “go with the flow” feeling has developed into what Bloom called “easygoing American nihilism,” a line of thinking that “has descended upon us, a nihilism without terror of the abyss” and has left the students of our universities to believe in nothing. How often on college campuses, or in society as a whole, do we hear the phrases “live and let live” or “do your own thing”? While these statements seem harmless enough, these are the results of this kind of thinking that Bloom warns about. This idea that we can simply live our lives according to whatever floats our theoretical boat is extremely counterproductive to the role of the university and of a liberal education.
It is not just the students who are to blame for this mindset. Universities themselves can be their own worst enemy. Bloom says that when university administration capitulates to demands of “more openness” or “less rigidity” or “more freedom from authority,” while these may all sound progressive and fashionable to us citizens in a democracy, it instead can lead us to accept empty values without any substantive content or at worst extremely destructive ideas that can fundamentally change the university as an institution.
To be genuinely open we must allow for an atmosphere that brings out our inner philosopher. As Bloom writes, “it means being closed to the charms which would make us more susceptible to being content with our present state.” It is through these views that we determine what we find to be right and wrong. When attending college, students should not be so eager as to throw out their prejudices with yesterday’s trash, but instead allow them to be tested to determine which are true.
What then is the university’s role in democracy? The end goal for universities—and more importantly a liberal education—is to produce a virtuous citizenry.
Natural Rights and the Creation of a Virtuous Citizenry
To counteract this corruption of openness, and to halt the spread of American-styled nihilism, Bloom believes one of the root causes of this problem is that our universities have failed to instill in its students a substantial set of values, namely, the idea of natural right. Although there were also other areas to address (e.g., the removal of great books courses, the influence of student social habits, and other issues), the deafening lack of discussion or enforcement of natural rights seemed to Bloom the most egregious act.
Being a former student of Leo Strauss, Bloom understood the importance of having such values instilled in students and the need for these values in a democratic society. Natural right, as Strauss taught it, is the belief that man has a set of unalienable rights and that within reality is a foundation for the distinction between right and wrong in both ethics and politics. What openness and the tyrannical aims to conform to public opinion have done, is to “open” our minds so much that we now “pay no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime.” In fact, many have been taught to despise the very origins of our founding principles.
Bloom recalled a discussion he had with his history professor while in college. Bloom asked whether the picture that the teacher had given the students of George Washington would later make the students despise the very regime that Washington and the other founders had set out to establish. The professor replied, “not at all. It does not depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” Bloom then replied, “but you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” This is often the case with many mainstream teachings of the founders today. The belief that because many of the founders owned slaves, held disdainful views, or treated the native Americans poorly, has come to exemplify how corrupted the Founding itself was.
If the statement that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” was not fully practiced by those men who wrote it, then that means the statement itself is somehow void. While the inability of the founders to purge slavery from the newly founded United States will forever be a mark on them and the United States as a whole, it does not mean that the belief in natural rights or the liberal society that they had built was then corrupted at its roots. Bloom argues that the belief that these values were indeed both important and worthy was one of the core charges made by the Civil Rights movement. “The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right.”
The importance of teaching natural rights is that they allow universities to instill substantial values in their students. Openness, of the kind Bloom critiques, is almost artificial and therefore incompatible with our very souls and our nature. But openness of the sort that Bloom encourages, not only allows us to be inquisitive and seek to understand the world in which we live but allows us to test our prejudices and determine which are correct and which may be wrongheaded. The teaching of natural rights also seeks to counteract the dangers of American-style nihilism. Where this form of nihilism says that we cannot make any value judgments, because they would be non-relativistic, natural rights would say that not only can we indeed make value judgments, but we must make these judgments to determine both what is right and wrong. And they will either reshape, destroy, or confirm our prejudices.
Many will argue, “but it is not the university’s role, or anyone’s role to impose views or values upon students.” They will say that “every student must be allowed to develop freely.” Bloom replies to these arguments by asking one simple question: “Why have a university?” If the reply is “to provide an atmosphere of learning,” Bloom writes, “Which atmosphere? Choices and reflection on the reasons for those choices are unavoidable. The university has to stand for something.”
Later he states the following:
the university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines which are there either because they are autochthonous or because they wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university. The democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. […] Out of chaos emerges dispiritedness, because it is impossible to make a reasonable choice.
The importance of natural rights and the process of instilling values within students is vital for the survival of our democracy. Openness has left us feeling void and disillusioned, not only when it comes to grappling with the great questions of our lives but leaves us with either a bitter resentment towards our regime or soul-numbing nihilism. Irving Kristol wrote that “the only authentic criterion for judging any economic or political system, or any set of social institutions, is this: what kind of people emerge from them?”
This is the question we must reflect on when it comes to determining whether our universities are working properly. What kind of people are emerging from our great schools? What kind of questions are we asking our students? In his portrait of his friend Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow described how “he didn’t ask, ‘Where will you spend eternity?’ As religious the-end-is-near picketers did, but rather ‘With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?’”
These are the questions we should be posing to future generations. Like Bloom, I believe that, despite its current state, universities are where we can form lasting bonds, build communities, and foster friendship in our current times. Leo Strauss wrote that “liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.”
Despite its flaws and its failings, our universities and a liberal education can still offer much to our society and democracy. If we are to continue on the path we currently find ourselves on, however, the unpleasant tendencies that have taken hold in these institutions will wreak havoc on our politics and society. With no light to climb to, future generations of college students will not just simply remain in the cave but will have no reason why they should leave it. This, as Bloom wrote, “is the American moment in world history, the one we shall forever be judged.”
