An open letter to Allan Bloom

National Review, Oct 9, 1987 by John Podhoretz

AN OPEN LETTER TO ALLAN BLOOM

DEAR PROFESSOR BLOOM:

Who would have guessed that the single most important figure in my own college education would become one of the leaders in the battle to remake American education as a whole? And yet that is what you have become, as the author of the decade's most surprising best-seller (and, along with Paul Johnson's Modern Times, one of the two most important conservative works of the decade). This unlikely turn of events began with the publication of an article in this magazine five years ago and culminated in the publication of The Closing of the American Mind, the only book in this country's history to sell over 250,000 copies in hardcover with chapter titles like "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede' and "Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University.'

Who could have expected this? Certainly not you. The dedication of your book reads simply, "To My Students.' As you are deservedly considered one of this country's outstanding teachers, the dedication is not surprising. Your students, I remember, clustered about you like acolytes, seeking to glean the mysterious truths that you seemed to have in your possession but were not entirely willing to reveal.

Finally, you've chosen to come clean, to tell your students what you've really been getting at. And what you've been getting at is them--us. Yes, The Closing of the American Mind is about the corrosive effect of moral and philosophical relativism on our culture. But your real concern is your students, and how relativism has changed the face of the American college campus. It is your description of life on campus--and, implicitly, the life that is led by today's college graduates once they leave campus --that makes The Closing of the American Mind the first book about my generation that delivers a painful shock of recognition, and does not elicit a hoot of derision on every page. Reading The Closing of the American Mind is a little like eavesdropping on your parents while they are talking about you. Even though what they are saying is not very flattering, it's sort of nice to be paid attention to.

The portrait you paint is a saddening one. It is of the first generation of elite Americans who have grown up without what the sociologists call the "mediating institutions' --the first generation bereft of the multi-generational family, the first to be raised almost entirely without religious instruction, the first to be more the children of Freud than the children of God.

In other words, a generation reared without absolutes, without a coherent moral or political education. Instead, we have been taught "values,' and, as you make clear, "values' are the most relativistic things of all. For if "values' are nothing more than a word for any set of beliefs that someone holds valuable, then the only belief we are all obliged to respect is everyone's right to his or her own "values.' This kind of cultural relativism is destructive because it "teaches the need to believe while undermining belief.' So, while we live awash in moralism (see South African sanctions or the anti-smoking vendetta), we are constantly aware that our morals have no mooring.

In this world, the only immutable laws are those of science. That is why all political and social thought now must come armed to the teeth with statistics. All tangible conclusions must be proved scientifically, by actuarial, demographic, or Minnesota Multiphasic means. Otherwise any conclusion may be dismissed as merely indicative of its author's "values.' (It is, by the way, part of your triumph that you refuse to use a single statistic, or any other form of independent; corroborating evidence, anywhere in the book.)

How did a healthy, happy, fervently religious, and enormously purposeful and productive America sink into this mire of relativism? You argue that American relativism-- I'm-OK-you're-OK relativism--is a cheerful, mass-marketed, and thereby bizarre translation of Nietzschean nihilism as further developed in the thought of Freud, Weber, and Heidegger.

Your analysis of the sources of American relativism is breathtakingly original, an example of cultural criticism at its best. I was particularly struck by one brilliantly allusive and synthetic passage:

The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit "Mack the Knife.' As most American intellectuals know, it is a translation of the song "Mackie Messer' from The Threepenny Opera, a monument of Weimar Republic popular culture, written by two heroes of the artistic Left, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. There is a strange nostalgia among many of the American intelligentsia for this moment just prior to Hitler's coming to power, and Lotte Lenya's rendition of this song has long stood . . . as the symbol of a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present in the consciousness . . . Less known to our intelligentsia is an aphorism in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book well-known to Brecht, entitled "On the Pale Criminal,' which tells the story of a neurotic murderer, eerily resembling Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who does not know, cannot know, that he committed murder out of a motive as legitimate as any other and useful in many important situations, but delegitimized in these pacific times; he lusted after the "joy of the knife' . . . With Armstrong taking Lenya's place, . . . it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no less corrupt . . . Our stars are singing a song they do not understand, translated from a German original and having a huge popular success with unknown but wider-ranging consequences . . . Behind it all, the master lyricists are Nietzsche and Heidegger.