When two "academic" books stunned the blase' New York publishing industry this summer by hovering on top during the dog days of Stephen King and Danielle Steele, I decided--as an ex-academic with a special interest in getting thoughtful messages onto the more massive media--I'd better take a look.
Alas, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Illiteracy: What Every American Needs to Know both seem to me unwittingly to exacerbate the growing gaps in income and consciousness between the underclasses and what, for lack of a better term, I'm calling the overclasses.
Bloom's is the bigger disappointment, with two subtexts that you don't need to be a psychiatrist to perceive.
The first is a question of academic turf. For two generations the social sciences have been steadily eroding the enrollment (and clout) of the humanities. This book is a blatant (and sometimes contemptible) counterpunch at the regnant misbehavioral scientist.
The other subtext is a meretriciously ad hominem swipe at affirmative action that apparently grew out of Bloom's bitterness at the black militants' ugly behavior in the 1960s at Cornell.
Parents who are going into hock putting their children through Ivy (or lower) institutions are mightily stroked by such a debater's tactics. For every black who is shoehorned into an undergraduate berth (or worse, a professional slot), one set of white parents fumes. Those are the real messages: Academic life is unfair when "trivializing" social science displaces the classics. And parental life is unfair when your qualified child is bumped down a notch to compensate for generations of black denial.
The academic infighting demeans the great tradition it presumes to defend. What do you think of a thinker who casually characterizes Margaret Mead (in a preposterously unconvincing putdown of cultural relativism) as a "sexual adventurer"? Or a man whose academic reputation rests (for what it's worth) on translations and editions of classical texts taking cheap potshots at Mortimer Alder for being a businessman who is more interested in profits in his Great Books enterprises than in commissioning fresh translations?
This is Faculty Club bitchiness at it's most squalid. Bloom's book is disgraced with such ad hoc hip shots. If that is what studying the classics leads to, please renew my subscription to the National Enquirer.
A major thesis of Bloom's argument is that cultural relativism has closed the minds of American youth. I couldn't believe that a philosophy professor from a major university could unload such Sunday supplement oversimplification on his anxious public.
Anthropology, for God's sake, has never contended that one culture is as good as another. Far from it. It argues, to my complete conviction, that the traits of a particular culture exist in symbiosis to each other. Influence one trait and the entire culture reverberates.
If American foreign policy had been guided by such sophisticated understanding, we'd be in a lot less trouble than we are around the world. We need more--not less--cultural relativism to keep opening the American mind.
Take the case of English as literature. Since World War II, there have emerged across the globe regional and national literatures in English of great intrinsic value and exceedingly important tactical importance. Students who read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart are in much better shape, intellectually and imaginatively, for understanding Africa's diverse turmoils than students who have been run through what Bloom knows of Plato. If I had to choose between assigning a second novel of Mark Twain or one by Nadine Gordimer, I'd opt for the South African.
I don't think we stand a Chinaman's chance of sorting out the contradictions of Latin America without the tutoring of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. R.K. Narayan provides indispensable insight into his subcontinent. Without Derek Walcott's poetry, our comprehension of Caribbean culture remains juvenile.
But academics like Bloom who have a career invested in Plato and Rousseau falsely urge us to go back to our roots, pro forma. Our roots are best understood by all but the specialist professor in the tendrils of meaning that contemporary writers are sprouting out of their creative absorption of tradition.
Oddly, Bloom's diatribe against rock music (with which you would have expected me to huzzah) helped me understand for the first time the "cultural" meaning of the music.
Rock music is the exploitation by cynical commercial forces of the structural problems of the advanced democracies. If Prince makes you froth in the mind (as he does me), address yourself to concrete proposals for the renovation of the ghetto. If punk rock makes you sick (as it does me), take a walk through Brixton in South London or in the slums of Liverpool to see where and why it breeds.
Our own children's captivation by rock is more function of the disintegration of the family and nuclear jitters than of some musicological conspiracy.
Bloom appears as a kind of pathetic Mr. Chips who can't get his best students to share his passion for Mozart. I would guess that's an occupational hazard of consorting too much with that genius of sentimentality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
May I suggest that rather than getting colleague Saul Bellow to write an admiring introduction (which only proves to me that great essayistic novelists can write lousy prefatory essays for friends), he read Bellow's The Dean's December, which convinces me that just as America's superpower foe is a prisoner of pain, so has our hedonistic consumer culture made almost all of us prisoners of pleasure.
Bloom's students' minds are not closing for lack of Plato or a surfeit of anthropology; they are closing because they are encased in cocoons of instant gratification from their very first Pamper to their latest fern bar. In short, Bloom rode the best seller lists because he took the weight of bad parenting off his readers' backs.
Hirsch's confusions are of a different order. If someone set our to parody our SAT culture, he couldn't do better than Hirsch has. There is a kind of higher trivia solitaire involved here. How would I do with the 1,600 items Hirsch says we need to cohere as a community? (Whew! I'm relieved, after 30 years of teaching, to find myself in his 99.99th percentile.)
But let's play the game my way for a few minutes. "Pro forma" follows "prognosis" in Hirsch's hit list. Have you ever found yourself in a teaching situation (or otherwise) when control of those two terms was crucial?
Then there's a nice run: "Jane Addams/ad hoc/ad hominem/adieu/Adirondack Mountains." Is it more important to know who Jane was than to help community settlements in your city?
Following some of Bloom's ad hoc and ad hominem arguments makes me wish I could bid him adieu for a retreat in the Adirondack Mountains to reconsider his mean-spirited, small-minded flattering of parents who are worried that even the best SATs may not guarantee their children a run on the narrowing ladder of upward mobility.
If Margaret Mead's minions are the heavies of Bloom's apocalypse, John Dewey is Hirsch's devil. I wish I had a nickel for every English professor who put Dewey down just before confessing he had never read a word of that philosopher's work.
Let me remind English professor Hirsch of a crucial bit of our intellectual history. Seventy-five years ago the Ivymen who ran the Modern Language Association decided not to concern themselves with the common schools, in spite of Jefferson's warning that a democracy could be no better than the quality of its elementary education. The National Council of Teachers of English was formed--in an eventually devastating act of cultural apartheid--to train teachers and monitor curriculum.
MLA realized what a catastrophic decision it had made to confine its attentions to elite universities. But the damage had been done. It wasn't John Dewey who brainwashed two generations of teachers. It was mediocrities who were cut off from the Great Tradition and from original American philosophers like John Dewey and Williams James.
We need more--not less--John Dewey in our schools. We put our money and our best teachers into preparing an overclass for better SATs, and we created a divisive mess. Until the estrangement of our academic intellectuals from the common schools is ended, we will get two cultures--underclass and overclass--more and more divided, more and more incapable of working together to resolve the huge debts that have been piling up since World War I. They make our current fiscal budget crisis a piker by comparison.
It is silly, nominalism to argue, as Hirsch does, that 4,600 terms in common will create a common culture. Our problem is a cultural economy that overproduces Ph.D.s and underproduces first-rate elementary and high school teachers.
On Hirsch's list, by the way, John Dewey rests between "devil can cite Scripture, The" and "dialectic." Ha. Just so.
from Welcomat, Vol XVII, No. 20, Philadelphia, December 9, 1987
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