Socrates Plato and Jackass?

Bloom breaks down his book into primary three sections the first being about his individual experience with students in his classes. Then he moves to american social commentary which he calls "Nihilism: American Style", and he then sums up with a large-scale evaluation of the universities as whole institutions. They all have great sub-chapters with headings like

~"The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa"
~"Rousseau's Radicalization and the German University"
~"The Decomposition of the University"

I have only made it through about half-way of the first part mostly due to the material being incredibly dense. So here goes...

He begins by comparing the run of the mill European university attending student with his/her american counterpart. He felt though the European students came steeped in the classics (Plato, Socrates, Rousseau, Kant, etc) it was equally as abstract as the formalized Lord's Prayer that used to be recited mechanically in American schools. So in some ways American students were open to the Classics and felt there was something to learn from them up until the 60's. He felt when the Russians beat us into space amidst some other cultural pressures students began to be thrown into specialization-specific "disciplines" namely physics and mathematics. Necessity and ego prevailed and we were left with an intense spiritual vacuum devoid of any substantial moral component. He states that we were "capable of calculating but not of any passionate insight leaving the soul itself flaccid"

He then re-enters the euro-american comparison with a conversation about our lack of a collective "American" spirit any more. Still today wrapped up in the languages themselves of other countries are certain world-views or dispositions to worldviews. In France people are divided between Descartes-Psacal (reason and revelation) and you can get classified as one or the other if you visit there today. Similarly in Germany you have Goethe, Italy w/ Dante and Machiavelli. The only thing we had going for us, which speaks incredibly profoundly against those European thinkers, was a thourough understanding of the Scriptures and the Constitution in that order. Those were documents that interpreted Reality for us and the liveable Rights/Wrongs that they espoused. No one ever questioned whether freedom, equality, or justice were right or wrong they merely argued about their implications. However when the revisionst history and historicism began to re-write reality and debunk the Founding Fathers while throwing out anything sacred we have lost any sense of national/social consciousness we ever had. This is what seems to drive Bloom most crazy about the state of the students that come in as products of this brand of "absolute liberalism".

So he concludes:
"Thus openness has driven out the local deities, leaving only the speechless, meaningless country. There is no immediate, sensual experience of the nation's meaning or its project, which would provide the basis for adult reflection on regimes and statesmanship. Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political hertiage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it"

When he deals with what i see to be even a grosser shortcoming (the loss of anything Sacred) he really hangs the blame on the family. The fundamental element of any democracy. Most of the How and Why questions in life were answered through individuals living lives grounded in the Scriptures. Something transcendental. There was no "abstract teaching" that was divorced from reality. Now however we teach "Ethics" for a grade in a university and the aim is to perform well in the classroom while not believing that there is any accountability in the real world for what you might potentially learn in the classroom outside of some loose scratch my back ill scratch yours. This is really a subtle insubstantial form of propaganda that somehow is now on the shoulders of schools and governments. He says families inability to translate any meaningful purpose to the next generation is one of the sharpest daggers currently in the American mind. Most of parents advice these days, save those amazing exceptions, can be summed up as "be happy"/"make money"/"be civil" which can be interpreted in any way you would like.

It seems to come back to the temptation birthed in the 60's to value the present, be snobbish about the past, have a blind acceptance in progress and teach our children to do likewise. It doesn't even have to correlate with Reality!!! We have zero appreciation for the books of ole that they might be able to teach us something important about how things really are. Check this..

"Instead of being overwhelmed by Cyrus, Theseus, Moses, Romulus (or the Transcendental personal Triune Creator God), they [students] unconciously act out the roles of the doctors, lawyers, businessmen, or TV personalities around them. One can only pity young people without admirations they can respect or avow, who are restrained from the enthusiasm for great virtue" (I added the bit about Triune Personal God bc i dont think Bloom goes far enough).

So ultimately we end up with what i watched last night : Jackass 2. We are entertained now in the present with no ability to critique the past. As Neil Postman states in his book "Americans are probably the best entertained and least informed people on the planet". I will leave you with a quote of Bloom's when talking about the Bible.

"I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American Way, all of whom are M.d's or P.H.D's, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliches, superficialities, the material of Satire...I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the general revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there and eventually little left inside. "

Intro - E Pluribus Unum

Intro - E Pluiribus Unum (Out of many--One)

In the opening portion of his book professor Allan Bloom relays much of his frustration as a teacher first and then tries his hand at dissecting how we have gotten ourselves into this mess. What strikes me is that this book was written in the late 80's and cuts deeper and more painfully than most modern critiques.

Much of the American Experiment and a modern day education is grounded in the idea of E Pluribus Unum. Which can be roughly translated as getting unity out of diversity. The Greeks thought there was an essence which summed up all the other four main essences, a quintessence (where we get our modern word).

Bloom laughs at that groundless idealism now as he states that every university student comes dogmatically assured that all truth is relative and that this knowledge is the only modern virtue (it carries a moral tone in its unequivocality).He prescribes two differing types of "openness" you could even substitute "unity out of diversity" and these serve as really the theme and basis for his work. I will try to expound on these and then hopefully get to his historical critique of how we ended up here.

Type #1- A hollow type of cultural relativism which explicitly denies the content of the information itself but stresses only a diversification of information for the sake of itself. There is no talk of fundamental principles, virtue. etc only a blind trust in progressivism (an accommodation to the present) and "toleration" clothed with apathy about our souls. It stifles our potential as knowers because the things worth knowing are all of equal value since everything is relative.

"Thus what is advertised as a great opening is actually a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal truth about life-- except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru" (p.34)

Type #2- An openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination. It believes there is a knowable good that exists outside of the self and acknowledges error is possible (instead of stifling potential error like Type #1) but the reward is worth the risk of failing or being perceived as "intolerant"

How we got ourselves into this lovely predicament: Bloom spends much of his time here laying out how he thinks some major shifts have led us here. He starts with our founding Fathers and the type of men that were assumed and produced during that time period. He states

"We began with the model of rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected thee laws, and was dedicated to his family. Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; The Constitution, which embodied it; and American history which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" (p.27)

So starting with a beautiful blend of Reason and Pragmatism America was birthed and while I think Bloom might be a bit historically optimistic about the state of our citizens i think our ancestors had a much clearer understanding of what he calls "natural" reality. But as a major influx of immigrants and ensuing pluralism came ashore we swung the pendulum from protecting the natural rights of human American citizens to protect practically everyone and everything. Bloom states rather interestingly that the Founders were scared of minorities because they were selfish and sought their interests above the whole of the public good (more like factions), so they instituted a system that would keep them in check rather than ensuring that they had a fair amount of power. Think about it even as I use the words majority and minority we have been so conditioned to think that the worst of all possible evils is to not allow any one's rights to be trampled on. It seems that the Founders would trample on some toes if only to allow the majority to have rights and then institute a system where they could not overturn those rights.

3 Big Places We see the Change
1) Civil War- Bloom claims that the South actually needs to point the finger at itself for devaluing the Constitution and being the first majority of citizens that felt their needs and way of life over-rided the moral livable demands laid out in the Constitution (barring the 3/5ths Compromise the heart of the Const. is that ALL men should have been equal).

2) 60's Sexual Revolution - every type of authority is viewed as a chain needing to be loosed so we turned to the go to the bazaar of cultures and find reinforcement for inclinations that are repressed by puritanical guilt feelings. That's what we were told and we bought it hook line and sinker. Sick.

3) Civil Rights Movement - Here we see the peak of this divide. One one side you have some using the Dec of Ind and Const. to justify their natural rights and others like the Black Panthers saying that inherently they (Const. and Dec of Ind) were set up to keep some subjugated into slavery. Humanness is no longer enough they wanted literally "black power". We are now utterly confused as to what our natural rights are, whether they are derived or given. It's chaos.

Now that is a lot of information and I'm trying my best to synthesize it in a digestible form but i think he has some formidable conclusions in this intro. Where the line between what he thinks and my critique is no longer solid.

1) We now have a shift from principle to the pragmatic. We have had to debunk the past in order to put trust in the future. We serve a brand of liberalism w/o natural rights. And hence we have shifted from content study to diversification of information. We are left with a hollow cultural relativism that tells students their preferences are only an accident of time and location (the new openness Type 1)

2) I think this most appropriately could be called the era of cowardice and laziness. I believe we have a "tolerance" or "indiscriminate attitude" that has been told no such things as the Good exists, so don't waste time pursuing the True, the Real, the Transcendental because everyone is right. Even the bloke who doesn't believe in any of those. I think our Founders would laugh at what we call "tolerance"

I will end with this: Bloom states that even though Catholics and Protestants have had a rough storied history at least they took their beliefs seriously. There was no lax waning apathy about the state of their souls. May we take all of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True deadly seriously. It seems the only place to ground Unity and Diversity is in the Triune God not other cultures and not other gods.

Inspiration comes in Many Forms

Well it has been months since my last post but much has transpired since then and i figure its time to start blogging again before the Information Highway leaves me out to dry in some obscure rest area metaphorically around Lubbock.

I am going to be changing some things around and i am going to be doing a review of a book i just bought at goodwill for 2 bucks called the Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. One of the most fascinating aspects of being outside of our culture (particularly in the UK) is the room allowed to diagnose the current state of our own American Culture in all its supposed grandeur.

It is in that process of discovery that i have found gaping holes in what we tend to call "education" today so i hope to process some of these thoughts in the Context particularly of what Christ calls us to. I will use Os Guinness' Fit Bodies Fat Minds and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death as secondary sources but most of the work will come from Bloom's book.

May we never stop fighting for all the fullness that Christ has for us in this life and beyond,