Ferguson describes the crisis in education as Bloom saw it:
The crisis was—is—a crisis of confidence in the principle that serves as the premise of liberal education: that reason, informed by learning and experience, can arrive at truth, and that one truth may be truer than another. This loss of faith had consequences and causes far beyond higher ed. Bloom was a believer in intellectual trickle-down theory, and it is the comprehensiveness of his thesis that may have attracted readers to him and his book. The coarsening of public manners, the decline in academic achievement, the general dumbing down of America—even Jerry Springer—had a long pedigree that Bloom was at pains to describe for a general reader.
And how Bloom's surprise success made him the subject of withering attacks from those in the ivory towers of academia:
In time the academic establishment’s horror of Bloom grew too vast for mere paper and ink to contain. Drastic action had to be taken: Conferences had to be held. They were convened to declare Bloom anathema. At one, in Manhattan, an administrator at the (elite!) Dalton School called him a “Hitlerite.” For left-wing academics in 1987, Hitler was almost as bad as Oliver North. Richard Bernstein, then a reporter for the New York 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.
Ferguson though really gets at something in this interesting aside:
There is no element of moral uplift in Bloom’s brief against modern life. Discussing the collapse of the traditional family, which has of course only accelerated since his time, he writes: “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them.”
It was this slight crack in the armor that lead some to see that all Bloom was really offering was "humanizing doubts" and "impoverishing certitudes" in the face of modern rationalism as brought on by Nietzsche and Heidegger--to at least be aware of the abyss of nihilism which we are hurtling towards. Instead of basing his critiques of the relativism and, ultimately, nihilism, that he witnessed at Cornell and later the University of Toronto on reason and natural law, Bloom instead seemed to want to make sure that our relativism was a thoughtful relativism, not the easy-going kind that pervaded (and still pervades) the university. The university as originally understood was the only place that could supply the tools needed to emerge from the cave, the road to Socratic wisdom. Bloom himself implicitly and explicitly makes this case by referencing his bleak childhood in the barren lands of the Midwest only to finally discover the life of meaning while at the University of Chicago. Bloom could then not look at the things done by people in everyday life and glean any sort of higher meaning out of it: that could only be done by reading what philosophers wrote in books.
For so much talk about Americans, Bloom never takes time to see Americans as they understand themselves. It was because Bloom did not want to rely on the natural right and natural rights principles of the Declaration of Independence as the antidote to the problems affecting America (and the rest of the world). As he saw it, the Founders allegedly built the American republic on the very low ground. The principles of the Founders were supplied by the atheistic and materialist Hobbes and Locke, which they themselves discovered while foraging on the continent first discovered by Machiavelli. Far be it a saving grace, the principles of the Founders actually contained the poison which has so thoroughly infected the country today.
But in a critique (it begins on page 113) of Bloom, Harry Jaffa has written that contra to Bloom,
The teaching of the Founding, expressed in the Declaration and the Federalist, takes nature as the ground of political life in the teleological sense, not in the nonmoral purposeless sense of modern science. Bloom has completely misread not only the American Founding, but all political life, since he does not read political speeches to discover the form of the consciousness of political men. He assumes that political men are mere epigones of philosophers whether they know it or not. The political nature of man is however understood by the Founders if one reads what they say, and not only what Hobbes or Locke or Kant say in the light of the inequality of man and beast, as well as in the light of the inequality of man and God. This understanding corresponds very closely with the first book of the Politics, and as it does with the first chapter of Genesis. But such inequalities imply that morality and the principles of political right are grounded in a purposeful reality accessible to reason, one that corresponds as well to the teachings of biblical faith. When Madison speaks of the sacrifice of all institutions to the safety and happiness of society, he implies a fortiori that the safety and happiness of individuals may or must be sacrificed too. For the Founders, the safety or happiness of society that is to say, of a society constructed according to the principles of legitimacy and right set forth in the Declaration of Independence always takes precedence over the mere interests or subjective judgments of individuals. That is why Lincoln in 1861, while conceding that the citizens of the seceding States possessed the same right of revolution as their Revolutionary ancestors, denied that they ought to exercise that right for any purpose inconsistent with the purposes for which their ancestors had exercised that right. To extend slavery was inconsistent with the purposes of the Revolution.
Fortunately in spite of Bloom, Americans have begun to return back to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration. They have wanted to return to a politics based universal, unchanging principles that are not affected by history and are just as true now as they were when they were first articulated. More and more Americans have, without any help from Bloom, found the antidote that Bloom never supplied.
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