My Ambivalence About Allan Bloom
Much of today's conservative critique of higher education comes from him
The occupation of Cornell University’s Willard Straight Hall by black militants in 1969 was a pivotal moment in the life of the author of The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, the most famous member of the East Coast Straussian school. He shortly thereafter left the university, spent almost two decades stewing, perhaps developing new innovations in the Straussian pedagogical method of guru pederasty, then the book came out indicting higher education.
It’s maybe the most important work of l’esprit de l’escalier in American letters, published at the tail end of the Reagan administration, long after the reaction against the excesses of the counterculture had happened on a political level. A big part of the centrality of Allan Bloom has to do with the neocon co-optation of the Olin and Bradley funds, a subject that has been well covered elsewhere.
Much of the conservative case against the universities comes from the groundwork he laid in that book. It’s a feature of conservative lore too, Allan Bloom’s students write about it, Thomas Sowell, who resigned before the incident but amidst the climate of rising tumult, has written about it.
The campus upheavals of 1968-1969 are getting dredged up in all kinds of publications at the moment, from The Free Press to The Atlantic, with copious references to Allan Bloom’s book, by way of comparison to what’s going on at Columbia and elsewhere. The major difference is that this time there’s a considerable amount of evidence to suggest a majority of Americans also believe the Israeli government has gone much too far.
Whenever these upheavals, and the conservative case against them, gets brought up I think about my grandfather. During the Cornell incident there was another Bloom on campus, a young geology professor who—so the family lore goes—patrolled it, armed, during the crisis. The militants were armed too, and nobody was quite sure what they were going to do. After it subsided, he put down the rifle and continued to teach for decades thereafter. Shots were fired—not by him as far as I know—but nobody was killed.
What to make of this? There’s a very funny joke in here about how, if there is an American mind, there is also a Norwegian and a Straussian mind, and they appear to respond somewhat differently to crisis. The Straussian demands the administration crack down, leaves when they don’t, then spends years coming up with an intricate and persuasive argument at a high level of abstraction about What It All Means for the Life of the Mind. The Norwegian picks up a gun until the danger subsides, then goes back to naming rocks and tracking ancient sea levels.
I think there’s a lot to be said for that, though I can’t tell you which method of responding to a crisis is better. It seems pretty clear that there’s no making either side exactly happy in these sorts of moments. The left would probably consider him a freikorps type for this, but he was the furthest thing from that. He was pretty non-political, but a well-traveled Scandinavian Congregationalist from Wisconsin is not really the type you would expect to be regressive about civil rights, provided they were secured in an orderly way. The Straussian right would probably consider this sort of steadiness a capitulation to a long, slow decline. That’s one reason I don’t have much time for it.
Of all the conservative disciples of Allan Bloom, who without exception are resolutely Zionist, it’s more or less only Yoram Hazony who thought this through enough to publicly embrace the idea that sometimes, you may have to pick up a gun yourself—an issue of growing salience in Israeli politics. The rest of the neoconservative intellectuals are more interested in having other people pick up guns on their behalf to defend their life of the mind. I think we’ve had enough of this.
Moreover, given the convergence between this sort of perspective and hawkish national security views, one would hope the various financiers who adhere to, or at least support it have kept their nests clean, so to speak, when it comes to various problematic business relationships, foreign supply-chain issues and so forth, so as to put them in a position to actually follow through on it. Of course they haven’t done that, either. We’ll continue to go into it.
It really is true that neoconservatism is the universalism of nowhere at all, and their national security views are the seriousness of the deeply compromised. It’s not just that their perspective is wrong, though it is, or that they are corrupt, though they are, it’s that this whole complex of ideas and people—rooted in the assertion that they are the serious ones—has led to a situation of profound incompetence. There’s a vast and unexamined gulf between the possible and what these intellectuals stand behind. The liberal arts are great, and worth teaching, but a philosophical perspective is not really sufficient when it comes to matters of statecraft, military technology, and foreign policy.
Even that’s probably too kind. We have here an intellectual tendency that has burned out the American state through reckless wars abroad, eaten its seed corn, and now is turning inward hoping to strike a blow at core American institutions. These people are dangerous, and any country with a healthy instinct for self-preservation would have demanded accountability for it long ago.