Allan Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind

In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom makes the case for what he describes as higher education failing democracy through an emphasis on historicism and relativism. This academic emphasis, for Bloom, creates a paradoxical restrictive freedom in the minds and hearts of students, leaving them without a moral compass, and creating a void that can easily be filled with demagoguery. Along the way, Bloom staunchly defends elitism and ethnocentrism, attacks feminism, and lays out a critic of pop music that attacks not the just the immorality of the music itself, but also the industry that pushes the drug of rock. Each of these points is crafted largely through what Bloom considers a close reading of the western canon, the classical texts of the ancients which Bloom thinks contemporary universities have abandoned. It would be wrong to critique this book simply on the grounds …show more content…
Bloom frames his defense of ethnocentrism by stating that it should be the one actual take away of analyzing other cultures because “only in Western nations… is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way” (Bloom, 36). This serves as a cornerstone for a critic of the modern university’s “western prejudice” that forces cultural history on students in such away that they learn nothing from other cultures and nothing of their own superiority. Remarkably, one of the key arguments Bloom makes in his tear down of academic historicism is built off of an ignorance seemingly born out of a strict adherence to the classical canon. To say that western cultures are the only ones to question their innate good is false. It would have been easy to correct if Bloom examined any number of non-western cultures, but paradoxically, the only thing he would have learned from his examination is apparently a blind reinforcement of his own