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Allan BloomThe Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Students”
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Clean Slate”
American students enter university virtually ignorant of the foundational texts of the Western intellectual and literary tradition. While their European counterparts learn about the major philosophical and literary movements of the West during secondary school, American youth are vastly inferior to their transatlantic peers in cultural knowledge and sophistication. For a brief period in the 1950s, during Bloom’s early years of teaching, he was impressed by the enthusiasm his best students showed for humanistic learning when they encountered European philosophy, art, and literature for the first time. This moment of intellectual enthusiasm was perverted, however, by the political activism galvanizing university campuses in the sixties, which exhausted the moral energy of students and faculties alike.
The succeeding generations of students are more ignorant and intellectually lax than ever before, Bloom claims. Nietzsche’s insight that the decay of culture entails the constriction of the human soul seems borne out by the state of American education and domestic life. Two major factors in the American character contribute to this decline; both are rooted in the devaluation of books as repositories of truth. First, American identity has never been based on a shared cultural or literary tradition. Tocqueville notes in Democracy in America (1835-40) that America was a nation without a book, unlike the French or Germans, rooted in rich cultural, historical, and linguistic traditions. Over the last half century, moreover, the democratic foundation of American political liberty has been criticized, demystified, and debunked, and students enter college cynical and ignorant of their country’s political heritage, unaware of its intellectual origins in the Enlightenment, and lacking an appreciation for the essential texts establishing the social, political, psychological, and moral horizons of the Western tradition.
Similarly, the decline of religion’s significance and the study of the Bible within the home has stripped the family of its role in providing moral instruction for children. Television has replaced the authority of parents with a constant flood of sensationalism and consumerism. The proliferation of higher education itself, increasingly focused on technical rather than liberal studies, has debased and commoditized knowledge. The result of these tendencies is that, without access to the great models of sacred and secular literature, students lack a vision of what is higher, are unable to make finer distinctions in manners, morals, and aesthetics, and are disillusioned and despairing of better alternatives. They are “narrower and flatter” (61); the loss of books has impoverished their intellectual universe, leaving them vulnerable to the cheap melodrama and sensationalism of mass media and consumerist culture. Truth seems an antiquated relic concealing underlying racist, sexist, and classist motives. The sheer quantity of information today replaces quality of insight and interpretation, Bloom laments.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Books”
American students no longer learn how to read books or expect reading to provide pleasure or insight. Their indifference to books results in a debilitating cultural illiteracy, Bloom notes. Without a grasp of religious and philosophical concepts and symbols, the works of Shakespeare and other great artists are incomprehensible. Not only do the rich traditions of artistic and intellectual achievement disappear when one lacks the requisite knowledge to understand what one is seeing; the complex nature of our humanity evaporates, impoverishing our spiritual condition. The fictional characters of the great novelists reveal human psychology in all its diversity; without such literature, discerning observations and the nuanced art of comparison are impossible. Works of literary genius awaken and form the reader’s power of awareness, yet the serious study of classic literature is under attack from many quarters.
In the university, feminism has had a pernicious effect: Classic texts are now considered sexist and thus unable to provide models of enduring value for the student. Taught to see traditional literary heroes as inevitably racist and sexist, students lack alternatives to the celebrity role models of contemporary media. Good education is based upon idealism as well as realism; it requires models of ideal behavior and character to instill the idea of a perfect soul. In the absence of literature’s rich and nuanced delineations of human character, students lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil in a meaningful way. The depths and heights of the human condition are oblivious to them as they lack the models of comparison offered by literature.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Music”
Bloom criticizes rock music as a narcotic that weakens the mind’s receptivity to education and damages the imagination. Today’s youth have no interest in classical music, preferring the Dionysian ecstasies of rock, which saturates the contemporary spiritual void with erotic, narcissistic illusions and enticements to drug use. Plato and Nietzsche emphasized the importance of music for the development of the soul, recognizing its role in regulating the passions and affecting psychological well-being. On this basis, music retains a privileged place in humanist education. The raw sexuality of rock, however, gives free reign to the anarchic, infantile desires of the unconscious and incites rebellion against any authority that represses libidinal desire. The sexual revolution masquerades as social reform, but the liberty it offers is merely crude sensuality. The sensational images of early MTV videos—lewd and often flirting with fascist chic—exemplify what Tocqueville characterized as democratic art: crude and debased, without any hint of profundity, delicacy, or taste.
The recording industry rivals illegal drug trafficking in contributing to the corruption of youth, Bloom claims. Modern leisure culture passively indulges in the lowbrow entertainments of mass media, no longer possessing the energy and intelligence necessary for higher intellectual and artistic pursuits. In the absence of real values, rock advertises infantile sexuality as a social good. Rock seems to fulfill Nietzsche’s prophecy of nihilism: In the search for a new source of vitality to replace outworn values, rock liberates the unconscious only to offer a premature ecstasy, short-circuiting the labor needed to attain meaningful personal and cultural goals and thus dulling the sensibility of young minds, which are therefore unable to move beyond superficial charms and pleasurable stimulants to grasp the beauty of noble sentiments and virtues.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Relationships”
In this chapter, Bloom analyzes how individualism has transformed domestic relationships and affected sexual and racial relations on university campuses and in American society. The weakening of traditional affiliations that once gave the individual a sense of belonging to a network of larger communities has yielded a culture of isolation and rootlessness.
For generations, the institutions of family, religion, nation, and education inculcated the idea of America as a common project. As the power of those influences has waned, the vision of America as a communal effort has been replaced by the idea that everyone should be free to pursue his or her own self-interest without interference. Two traits characterize students today: an easy-going self-centeredness and a commitment to equality. After the Vietnam War, students became less politically engaged and more self-absorbed. Lacking a sense of civic obligation, they adopted an ironic attitude toward life and dedicated themselves to self-fulfillment. The decline of the nuclear family reinforces the tendency to individualism and indifference to the past. Bloom likens the spiritual condition of American university students to Rousseau’s natural savage; unhampered by the normative constraints of tradition or social institutions, they are free to choose any destiny or identity. The primary concern of youth today is the pursuit of bliss and gratifying the whims of the moment.
At the same time, today’s students loathe bigotry and endorse egalitarianism and meritocracy. College students mix freely without regard to race, the notable exception being self-segregating Black students, who cling to a separatist identity. Bloom blames affirmative action policies of the 1970s and 1980s for institutionalizing racial separatism on campus rather than achieving fuller integration. Affirmative action disadvantages students by reinforcing the shame and defensiveness felt by those who have been its beneficiaries. Moreover, the influential Black Power movement resisted the ideology of integration and encouraged the social segregation of Black students while forcing concessions from university administrations that established Black studies programs and legitimated the use of Black English in the classroom. Bloom doubts the value of these measures, arguing that most Black studies programs have been an intellectual failure, serving as a political cudgel rather than a means of introducing students to the methods of critical thinking.
Sexual liberation and feminism have profoundly transformed American culture since the 1960s. By proclaiming the healthiness of satisfying male and female desire, providing inexpensive birth control, and refashioning sex as a casual, consequence-free act, sexual liberation upset the delicate relationship between the sexes. No longer pressured to feign modesty, women became free to pursue erotic as well as economic freedom.
While sexual liberation championed human nature and freedom, feminism’s goal of equality for women denies nature, Bloom claims. Feminism has chilled the exuberance of sexual liberation in its struggle against male dominance. Bloom laments the castrating effects of feminist denunciations of sexism and toxic masculinity upon the male libido. By demystifying the power relations embodied in male desire, feminism has de-eroticized and trivialized sex. It has suppressed women’s natural modesty while at the same time criminalizing male sexuality. Bloom suggests that the goal of feminism is to separate rather than unite: Socrates holds that sexual equality leads to a disruption of the delicate balance of relations within the family that ultimately results in the individual’s isolation. In demanding a more equitable division of labor in the home, feminism denies the natural proclivities of each sex toward child-rearing and domestic responsibilities. Condemning machismo as misogynist and patriarchal, feminists refuse to see male protectiveness and masculine pride as a positive form of relatedness. Similarly, by insisting that biology is not destiny, feminism discredits motherhood and assumes that male instincts can be reformed by social pressure.
Feminist literary criticism has been particularly injurious to students, Bloom claims, by restricting the meaning of literary texts to the monotonous theme of men’s oppression of women. At the same time, the sexual freedom of students has blinded them to the significances of works like Romeo and Juliet and Madame Bovary, in which the rigid sexual economy of earlier historical eras provides the material for dilemmas and tragedies arising from the social conflicts of the erotic situation. The moral ambiguity and potentially serious consequences that complicated sexual relations up to a few decades ago are incomprehensible amid casual hook-up culture today.
The result of these and related movements has been a refashioning of personal identity, which has become defined by its rootlessness. American youth, free from the traditional attachments to church, family, and country of earlier generations, are living in a “state of nature.” The student has unprecedented freedom of choice in religious, sexual, and other matters, without compelling motives for choice other than whim. This freedom has led to feelings of groundlessness and isolation from larger organic entities, such as the body politic or the family. Children of divorced parents epitomize the solitariness of American youth, preoccupied with themselves in a world marked by the fracturing of families and bonds of devotion. Such conditions subtly deform their spirit and dim their horizons of possibility. Classic literature, which is often concerned with the individual’s liberation from powerful social, familial, or religious bonds, seems alien to today’s students since they, by contrast, are ambivalently looking for commitment in the absence of traditional ties. Our education has proven incapable of illuminating the spiritual malaise that such students dimly feel within themselves.
The combination of self-indulgence, sexual freedom, feminism, and egalitarianism among youth has undermined the traditional idea of romantic love. With casual sex readily available, students no longer feel the spiritual passion of erotic longing, which for Plato was the royal road of the soul’s education. Our modern notions of the soul and nature have changed to such a degree that we are no longer able to experience the classical ideas of love and friendship, with the result that we are sophisticated and complacent but spiritually flaccid. Freudian psychology has reduced love to the animal, stripping away its transcendent spiritual dimension praised by Plato as the avenue to knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Bloom’s thesis is that the intellectual obtuseness of American youth—their debilitating ignorance of history, literature, and the Western tradition—stunts their full humanity. Unlike their European counterparts, whose cultural education begins at an early age, American students enter university as blank slates. Disadvantaged by education in school and at home, indifferent to reading and the value of books, they are incapable of making informed moral and aesthetic discriminations, experiencing beauty, or appreciating the meaning of art and serious literature, and, as a result, they are unable to comprehend the true dimensions of the human condition. This flattening and narrowing of their intellectual and spiritual horizons are the consequence of the cultural decay of America and represent a negation of the potential of human being itself. The obscuring of the rich possibilities of human existence that students’ ignorance and self-absorption prevent them from imagining is the most tragic aspect of the crisis of education in Bloom’s view.
Bloom focuses on the upper tier of American students attending elite liberal arts universities, but the implications of his argument extend to the nation’s culture and society at large. In these chapters, he details the spiritual, moral, and pedagogic crises afflicting American society, identifying the social pressures and trends that have combined to create the climate of entropy, isolation, and narcissism characterizing life today. Many interrelated factors contribute to this malaise: anti-intellectualism and the decline of the humanities in education and culture; the naivete, ignorance, and complacency of students entering universities; the failure of parents to provide adequate moral instruction and a stable loving environment for children; the prevalence of divorce and the decline of the nuclear family; the waning of the traditional role of religion in the home; the destabilizing effects of sexual liberation, feminism, and other empowerment movements; and the rise of multiculturalism and relativism. Bloom’s methodical critique of America’s unraveling moral fabric is explicitly contemptuous of the popular music industry and the feminist agenda, the former of which he sees as cynically catering to the sexual fantasies of coddled American children and the latter as a systemic attack on the value of traditional Western literature and art on the basis of its supposed sexism.
Many of Bloom’s salvos in the culture wars of the 1980s seemed racist, elitist, and misogynist to progressives at the time and prompted sharp criticism. His incendiary attacks on feminism, rock, and Black studies were especially notorious; critics decried his contemptuous characterizations of these social movements as falsely if not maliciously caricaturing his targets. To many readers today, his invective seems petulant and outmoded, yet his critique of feminist literary criticism, for instance, reflects the denunciatory rhetoric and radical attacks on the canon that characterized some of the feminist-inspired scholarship of the day. Similarly, in light of the increasing recognition of systemic racism in America today, Bloom’s criticism of the intellectual integrity of early Black studies programs appears offensive to some, but the politicized agenda surrounding multiculturalist efforts to reform the canon generated intense debate about scholarly method, academic integrity, and the use (or abuse) of evidence. The more fundamental charge against Bloom’s argument is that it idealizes the goals of Enlightenment rationalism and comfortably relies on the presupposition of a supposedly “universal” human nature to support his point about cultural decay.
Bloom’s psychological analysis of the contemporary generation of youth is more qualified. While he deplores their indifference to books, he concedes that many students possess an “authenticity” that, though untutored, ill-informed, and poorly served by the educational establishment, embodies a yearning for enlightenment and an instinctive sensitivity to certain aesthetic experiences. The passion for popular music among adolescents reaffirms Plato’s and Nietzsche’s arguments concerning the fundamental importance of music in the soul’s education, and Bloom takes heart in his students’ engagement with Plato’s theory of music in The Republic.
Bloom’s formidable erudition lends depth and dimension to his sociological analysis, as in the contrast he draws between Plato’s vision of erotic love and the hook-up culture of today’s youth. At times his appeal to classical models is anachronistic and ill-suited to his purpose, however. Against the feminist call for an equal division of labor in the household and paternal support in childrearing, Bloom, citing Aristotle, asserts that biology militates against this “unnatural” idea. Throughout, Bloom casually reiterates outmoded and simplistic patriarchal notions of the relation between the sexes and between parents and children. He takes classical constructions of masculinity as given truths and defends the supposedly universal qualities of male aggression and possessiveness that feminism “unnaturally” attempts to reform through reeducation.
