THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
Allan Bloom
New York: Simon & Shuster, 1987
382 pp., $18.95
Unlike Soviet glasnost, American openness is indigenous to its system because the free inquiry into the truth was deemed the most important attribute of a free people by American founders. But in recent decades, this same openness has led to a steady, but deadly, erosion of that truth's certainty, which in turn has led to a kind of cultural nihilism, albeit a trendy one. Briefly, the beliefs underlying contemporary American nihilism run as follows: Granting all opinions equal status, the true one counts no more than the false one. Indeed, the belief only in opinions admits of no truth at all. And the fear of being wrong is replaced by the fear of being right and appearing to be an ideologue.
Today, while well-educated and well-to-do parents would never dream of leaving their children untutored in the necessities of basic hygiene and good budgetary habits they archly refuse to meddle in questions of religion, God, and ethics, preferring their children to discover answers on their own. How do they expect their inexperienced and naïve children to accomplish what profound men over the centuries have only reluctantly achieved? They do not expect such a miracle. But to do anything else is to be charged with brainwashing, indoctrinating, or educationally oppressing their children. Yet the overriding reason in most cases for parents leaving such awesome tasks to their offspring is that these questions no longer matter. What difference does it make if the child believes in God, in souls or in truth? It has not mattered to the parent; it cannot matter to the child.
The doctrine that a government shall not force any one religion or ideology on its people, that various faiths, creeds, beliefs, and worldviews can coexist under civil law, is one of the great contributions of the American system. It is a good principle, and sacred to any freedom-loving people. It is the ground for the openness so peculiar to American society. The single justification for such openness is the search for the truth. As a nation, we have tolerated various and conflicting opinions about even the greatest questions because we mistrust absolute opinions; we believe that tolerance and openness allow the truth to shine through the mists of false opinions.
Yet our modern universities have interpreted this principle of tolerance and openness to mean that the great questions do not matter. They have adopted a policy of indifference toward religion, culture, and tradition and, with it, a policy of social disdain and contempt for those who defend them. These policies forfeit interest in achieving or even looking for the truth, for they mistrust reason, interpreting its use as self-interested sophistry. It is a far cry from saying we ought to allow free inquiry into truth to saying that everyone's opinions are by nature equally true. This kind of pluralism is nothing less than relativism, which easily becomes nihilism.
Nihilism is an ugly idea that brings horrendous consequences. As a doctrine, it denies meaning to everything. Although a psychological or everyday kind of nihilism is embedded in the utterances of the contemporary jargon - "Who cares?" "Big deal!" "So what?" - a more serious and fundamental nihilism comes from
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