The Closing of the American Mind; J. Chamberlain

437 A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK The Closing of the Anterican Mind by John Chamberlain A stoundingly, a very learned and diffi cult book about the state of higher edu cation in the United States has been holding Number One place on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list. And just as as tonishing, a book detailing what should be done to repair our deficiencies in general knowledge has been running Number Two or Number Three. The first book is The Closing of the Amer ican Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students by Allan Bloom, with a fore word by Saul Bellow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., $18.95). The second book is Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know by E. D. Hirsch, Jf. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 251 pp., $16.95). If people are really digesting and approving what Allan Bloom, a University of Chicago professor, has to say, it signals a remarkable change in our mental climate. It also tells something about reader persistence. Bloom de velops his subject in a most roundabout way, and it is not apparent until he reaches page 336 of his book that we really know what he is after. He begins with a charge that, in the mid-1960s, our universities were offering stu dents every concession other than education.

There was a "great spiritual bleeding." When Bloom talked to his students about books, he got an impression that there was no printed word to which they looked for counsel, inspiration, or joy. There was always the girl who mentioned Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, or the boy who had read The Catcher in the Rye. But the students had "nothing like the Dickens who gave so many of us the unforgettable Pecksniffs, Micawbers, Pips, with which we sharpened our vision." If the students lacked both books and heroes, however, they did have music. At this point Bloom takes off on a most wrathful denunciation of rock music. "Rock," he says, "has one appeal only, a barbaric ap peal, to sexual desire-not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored." The real issue here with Bloom is that rock "ruins the imagination of young people and makes it difficult for them to have a passionate relation ship to the art and thought that are the sub stance of liberal education."

Bloom's long chapter on "Relationships" laments a number of things that have a bearing on the failure of the universities to provide a unified education. Our discriminatory laws are now ancient history, and there are plenty of blacks now in college. But they don't share any positive intellectual or moral experience with white students. Generalizing from his days as a teacher at Cornell, Bloom notes that blacks in sist in eating by themselves. "Integration," he says, "was just an ideology for whites and Uncle Toms." Black militants "had to threaten-and to do-bodily harm to black students with independent inclinations" to 438 THE FREEMAN. NOVEMBER 1987 found a separatist system. Affirmative action in the colleges, says Bloom, "is the source of ... a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in America. ' , In this chapter on "Relationships" Bloom talks about love. "When I see a young couple who have lived together throughout their col lege years leave each other with a handshake and move out into life," he says, "I am struck dumb." But Bloom is not too dumb to perceive that such a couple could have little comprehen sion of Shakespeare's Othello, who killed for love. And Tolstoy's Anna Karenina would have little meaning.

Before getting down to the subject of course content in education Bloom has first to settle a lot of things about "value relativism." He as sumes that his readers must know all about Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Max Weber as well as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith. He also assumes that his readers must have an appreciation of Woody Allen. There are long sections on what Rousseau and Kant did to improve upon the theories of the Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment. Locke and the French philosophes had established the domain of natural science. But they left out of account such things as "community, virtue, compassion, feeling, enthusiasm, the beautiful and the sublime." After some 300 pages of general philosophy, which is always interesting, Bloom returns to what he has touched upon at the beginning, which is failure of the universities in the Sixties to stand up against the "pick and choose"

fragmentation of the curriculum. ' 'About the Sixties," he says, "it is now fashionable to say that although there were indeed excesses, many good things resulted. But, so far as universities are concerned, I know of nothing positive coming from that period; it was an unmitigated disaster for them. . . . The old core curriculum -according to which every student in the col lege had to take a smattering of courses in the major divisions of knowledge-was aban doned." Bloom is not very hopeful that the old-time curriculum can be restored. The trouble is not with the natural scientists or with the cham pions of the humanities at the two extremes. "The moral education that is today supposed to be the great responsibility of the family cannot exist if it cannot present to the imagination of the young a vision of a moral cosmos and of the rewards and punishments for good and evil, sublime speeches that accompany and interpret deeds, protagonists and antagonists in the drama of moral choice, a sense of the stakes involved in such choice, and the despair that results when the world is 'disenchanted.' "

-Allan Bloom They could agree on the issue of sharing core time. It is the social scientists in the middle that make a good compromise impossible. Social science, says Bloom, "is a series of discrete disciplines. . . . There is no social science as an architectonic science. It is parts without a whole." That is where Bloom more or less leaves us. E. D. Hirsch, in his Cultural Literacy, is just as critical of "cafeteria-style education" as Bloom, but he is rather more hopeful that strong disciplines in math, science, the human ities, history, and literature can be re-estab lished. There can be a return to core teaching without sacrificing flexibility. "A common ex tensive curriculum," says Hirsch, "would en sure that students have some information about Romeo and Juliet, but in their intensive curric ulum they might study The Tempest or Twelfth Night in detaiL" Hirsch concludes his book with a 63-page list of dates, names, phrases, titles, and snatches of song and poetry that literate Amer icans know or should know. Rousseau is there along with Rube Goldberg, and Immanuel Kant is not too far away from King Kong. Woody Allen, however, seems to be missing, which could make Alan Bloom feel that he is one up on Hirsch.

The two books admirably complement each other, and it is a tribute to American readers that they have recognized this in putting them high for many weeks on the best-seller lists. D CRISIS AND LEVIATHAN: CRITICAL EPISODES IN THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN GOVERNMENT by Robert Higgs Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 • 1987 •416 pages •$24.95 cloth Reviewed by John K. Williams T his is a first-class volume, which in sub stance exceeds its title. It will prove in valuable not only to people with exper tise, or wishing to acquire expertise, in Amer ican history, but to men and women anxious to understand the reversion in our age to the large, intrusive governments against which classical liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries fought with considerable success. This is not to say that the volume is misper ceived if its subtitle--Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government-is taken at face value. In such chapters as The Progressive Era: A Bridge to Modem Times, The Political Economy of War: 1916-1918, and The Great Depression: "An Emergency More Serious Than War," the author provides a detailed his torical analysis of significant turning points in the history of the United States.