Afficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counter Life, Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognized literary gifts is an unsuspected bent for daring satire. What Bellow has done, quite simply, is to write an entire corruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades. The "author" of this tirade, one of Bellow's most fully realized literary creations, is a mid- fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name, "Bloom." Bellow appears in the book only as the author of an eight-page "Foreword," in which he introduces us to his principal and only character. The book is published under the name "Allan Bloom," and, as part of the fun, is even copyrighted in "Bloom's" name. Nevertheless, Bellow is unwilling entirely to risk the possibility that readers will misconstrue his novel as a serious
piece of nonfiction by a real professor, and so, in the midst of his preface, he devotes more than a page to a flat- footed explanation of his earlier novel, Herzog, in which, he tells us straight out, he was deliberately trying to satirize pedantry. This bit of hand waving and flag raising by Bellow detracts from the ironic consistency of the novel, but he may perhaps be forgiven, for so compellingly believable is this new academic pedant, "Bloom," that without Bellow's warnings, The Closing of the American Mind might have been taken as a genuine piece of academic prose.
The novel is, for all its surface accessibility, a subtly constructed palimpsest concealing what old Hyde Park hands will recognize as a devastating in-house attack by Bellow on his own stamping ground, the Committee on Social Thought. ("Bloom" is described on the jacket as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought.) The real target, indeed, is a former member of that committee, the late Leo Strauss, a brilliant, learned, utterly mad historian of political thought who spawned, nurtured, reared, and sent out into the world several generations of disciples dedicated to his paranoid theories of textual interpretation. (Strauss, whose hermeneutics placed special emphasis on concealment, absence, and misdirection, appears only once in the book, in an aside. Bellow leaves it to the cognoscenti to recognize the true significance of the allusion.)
As conceived by Bellow, "Bloom" is the quintessential product of the distinctive educational theories that flourished at the college of the University of Chicago during and after the heyday of Robert Maynard Hutchins. The key to those theories was the particular mid-western, upwardly mobile first-generation version of the Great Conversation that came to be known, in its promotional publishing version, as The Great Books.
According to this pedagogical conception, Western civilization is a two-millennia-old conversation among a brilliant galaxy of great minds, permanently encapsulated in a recognized sequence of great texts, with Aristotle's plan for the organization of human knowledge as the architectonic armature. Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, al Farabi, Maimonides, Erasmus, Cervantes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, on and on they come, reflecting on the relationship between man and the universe, chatting with one another, kibitzing their predecessors, a rich, endless, moveable feast of ideas and intellectual passions. The list, by now, has grown enormously long, but- and this is the secret of its mesmerizing attraction to the eager young students who were drawn to Chicago- it is finite. However much work it may be to plow through the great books, once one has completed the task, one is educated! One can now join the Great Conversation, perhaps not as an active participant, but certainly as a thoughtful listener. And this is true, regardless of one's family back- ground, upbringing, lack of private schooling, or inappropriate dress. Unlike the Ivy League, where the wrong social class marked one permanently as inferior, Chicago offered a "career open to talents."
The virtue of a Chicago education was a certain intoxication with ideas, especially philosophical ideas, that sets off graduates of the Hutchins era from everyone else in the American intellectual scene. When I taught there briefly, in the early 1960s, I was enchanted to find professors of music reading books on Kant, and biologists seriously debating the undergraduate curriculum in Aristotelian terms. The vice of that same system is a mad, hermetic conviction that larger world events are actually caused or shaped by the obscurest sub-quibbles of the Great Conversation. By a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, of the sort that the young Marx so brilliantly burlesqued in The Holy Family, Chicago types are prone to suppose that it is the ideas that are real, and the people in this world who are mere epiphenomena. Bellow captures this distorted mentality perfectly in "Bloom," who, as we shall see, traces the cultural ills of the past twenty years implausibly, but with a wacky interior logic, to the twisted theories of two German philosophers.
The novel (which is to say, Bellow's "Foreword") begins with what turns out to be a bitingly ironic observation. "Professor Blo om has his own way of doing things." And indeed he does! Once "Bloom" has begun his interminable complaint against modernity- for which, read everything that has taken place since "Bloom" was a young student in the 1940s at the University of Chicago- we are treated to a hilarious discourse of the sort that only a throwback to the Hutchins era could produce.
"Bloom's" diatribe opens with some animadversions upon the culture of the young. After a few glancing blows at feminism, he quite unpredictably launches upon an extended complaint about the music that the young so favor. Bellow's image of a middle-aged professor trying to sound knowledgeable about hard rock is a miniature comic masterpiece.
Now "Bloom" arrives at his real message. The deeper cause of the desperate inadequacies of our contemporary culture, it seems, is the baleful effect upon us of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger! Inasmuch as only a handful of American intellectuals can spell these gentlemen's names, let alone summarize their doctrines, "Bloom's" thesis has a certain manifest implausibility. But, as Bellow well knows, true Straussians spurn the obvious, looking always in silences, ellipses, and guarded allusions for the true filiations that connect one thinker with another, or a philosophical tradition with the cultural and political world.
"Bloom's" expository style, so skillfully manipulated by Bellow, makes it extraordinarily difficult to tell what he is actually saying. Its most striking surface characteristic is an obsessive name- dropping that turns every page into a roll call of the Great Conversation. Consult the book at random (my copy falls open to pages 292-93), and one finds, within a brief compass, mention of Christopher Marlowe, Machiavelli (a Straussian buzzword, this), Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, Rousseau, Newton, Socrates, Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus, Swift, and Aristophanes.
But despite the talismanic invocation of these and many other great names, there is precious little real argumentation in "Bloom's" "book." Indeed, despite his academic style of exposition, "Bloom" rarely enunciates a thesis that he is prepared to stand behind. All is irony, allusion, exposition, and under- cutting reserve. Eventually, one realizes that Bellow is deliberately, and with great skill, conjuring for us a portrait of a man of Ideas, if not of ideas, whose endless ruminations on moral and intellectual virtue conceal a fundamental absence of either.
The turning-point in "Bloom's" monologue comes late in the novel, in a chapter entitled "The Sixties." Suddenly, the mist disperses, the allusions evaporate, and we discover what is really eating away at "Bloom's" innards. It seems that, in the course of his distinguished academic career, "Bloom" taught at Cornell University during the late sixties. Two decades later, "Bloom" is so dyspeptic about the events there that he can scarcely contain himself. "Servility, vanity and lack of conviction," "pompous," "a mixture of cowardice and moralism" are among the phrases with which he characterizes his colleagues of that time. For "Bloom," at Cornell, Columbia, and elsewhere, the rebellious students were blood brothers to the Brown Shirts who supported nazism. "Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same."
Stepping back a bit from the fretwork of the novel, we may ask ourselves what Bellow's purpose is in committing an entire book to the exhibition of "Allan Bloom." Clearly, simple good- hearted fun must have played some motivating role, as well, we may sup- pose, as a desire to set the record right concerning the Committee on Social Thought. But as the final portion of the book makes manifest, Bellow has a deeper aim, one that is intensely earnest and, in the fullest and most ancient sense, moral. The central message of the Greek philosophers whom "Bloom" so likes to cite is that ultimately morality is a matter of character. Plato's brilliantly rendered portraits not only of Socrates but also of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and the others is intended to show us how virtue is grounded in character, and right action in virtue. Merely to know what can be found in books, or indeed on clay tablets, is no guarantee of virtue. As Aristotle remarks in a celebrated ironic aside, one cannot teach ethics to young men who are not well brought up. "Bloom," as Bellow shows us across three hundred tedious pages, is as intimate with the Great Conversation as any Chicago undergraduate could ever hope to become. And yet, at the one critical moment in his life, when he confronts inescapably the intersection between political reality and his beloved Great Books, "Bloom's" vision clouds, his capacity for intellectual sympathy deserts him, and he cries "the Nazis are coming" as he shrinks from America's most authentically democratic moment of recent times.
In the end, Bellow is telling us, the Great Conversation is not enough. One needs compassion, a sense of justice, and moral vision. Without these, the Great Books are merely dead words in dead languages. I strongly recommend The Closing of the American Mind to anyone who desires a fiction of the mind that takes seriously the old question of the role of reason in the formation of virtuous character.
原文:There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every students entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4.
譯文:大學教授絕對有把握的一件事是:幾乎每一個進入大學的學生都相信,或自稱他們相信,真理是相對的。倘若測試一下這個信念的真?zhèn)?,你不難預期學生的反應:他們并不理解它的含義。如果你說,任何人都不應把它視為一個不證自明的命題,這會讓他大為驚訝,就像要求他對 2+2=4提出質(zhì)疑一樣。
評論:不是“測試測試一下這個信念的真?zhèn)?,你不難預期學生的反應:他們并不理解它的含義?!弊髡呤钦f,這條信念在學生看來是顛撲不滅、理所當然的,完全沒有質(zhì)疑的必要,如果"is put to the test"“受到質(zhì)疑”,"they will be uncomprehending"“他們會感到不可思議(也就是困惑、難以理解為何要質(zhì)疑這條信念)”"That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4."這句的意思是”如果有人不認為這條信念是理所當然的,學生會對此感到驚訝,就像有人居然懷疑二加二不等于四?!?
讀這本書的時候,我想到的是我接觸過的身邊無數(shù)的美國人。我有一個朋友,從一個世俗標準來講,一個受過良好教育和知識訓練(well-educated and well-read)的人。他擁有博士學位,父母都是教師,從小學習鋼琴和繪畫。然而在和他的交談中,我發(fā)現(xiàn)這種傳統(tǒng)對他的影響,微乎其微。他承認這些書和音樂是偉大的,然而吸引他、能夠作為一個話題引起他交談欲望的,是科幻小說、電子游戲和哈利波特。我發(fā)現(xiàn)一個有趣的現(xiàn)象,是在學校、在網(wǎng)上遇到他,問候的時候,他總會說,Nothing interesting going on here; I guess I am just getting bored.
被無聊支配的心靈,也難以在音樂和藝術中尋找到情感的表達。Bloom在書中提到一個很重要的觀點,就是這個時代愛(love)的匱乏。Bloom說,當他看到一對大學時期同居了三年的男女畢業(yè)時輕松分開,沒有傷痛,甚至幾乎沒有記憶,他對這樣的男女關系感到完全啞口無言(struck dumb)。這是我們時代盛行的關系(relationship),而不是愛情。羅密歐與茱莉亞式(羅密歐與茱莉亞實際上已經(jīng)是被用來嘲諷戀人的名字)的、古典式的、建立在雙方獨特人格基礎上的愛情和表達已經(jīng)完全不復存在,因為男女關系已經(jīng)和靈魂無涉,而只是兩個人的一種可以任意置換對象的相處。這個朋友在談到他的上一段失敗的關系的時候說,我和她在一起的兩年,我投入了很多精力(I invested a lot),因此我在分手時感到難過。我當然不是懷疑他的情感,但就像Bloom啞口無言一樣,這個表達也讓我陷入沉默。投入是一種計算,雖然他在計算的并不是金錢,這種對情感的表達,卻無比準確地反應了一種情感的疏離。愛情不是柏拉圖筆下的因為自身不完整而產(chǎn)生的渴望和尋求,也不是圣經(jīng)中“骨中的骨,肉中的肉”,而是鉆石、禮品店賀卡、修剪整齊的鮮花束點綴的工業(yè)流水線產(chǎn)品。Bloom更是一針見血地指出,這個時代的高離婚率體現(xiàn)的不是人們得到了自由,而是愛之無能,和家庭作為一個重要社會組織對真理和價值傳承的無力。
This is no ordinary matter we are discussing, Glaucon, but the right conduct of life.
—Socrates, in Plato’s Republic
When we talk about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, it is useful to begin by distinguishing between the book, on the one hand, and the phenomenon, on the other. They are different, if related, things.
Let me start with the book. What is it? In the simplest sense, it is a pedagogical autobiography, written by a fiftyish academic philosopher who was also a dedicated teacher and whose experience of university life from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s had left him disabused, mournful, and alarmed.
The book is also—let me acknowledge this at once—a curious literary artifact. It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. It sometimes grabs readers by the lapels and gives them a shake; at other times it assumes a dry, professorial tone as it delineates the genealogy of freedom, discriminates among diverse meanings of equality, or parses a choice passage from Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, or Nietzsche.
Nevertheless, if parts of the book are reminiscent of the academic lecture hall, the overall effect is nothing short of electric. For all its loose-bagginess, The Closing of the American Mind is a book written with commanding passion, urgency, and conviction. Bloom himself described the book as a “meditation on the state of our souls.”
Now, the audacity of a paid-up secular academic talking without irony about “souls” in 1987 was perhaps the first thing that made people nervous about the book. “How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”—what a subtitle! It was one thing for Bloom to write that “No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.” We’re all good liberals here, we’ve read John Stuart Mill, and we naturally give a decent shudder whenever words like “convention” and “prejudice” are uttered in polite company. But then Bloom went on to spoil our smug tranquility by pointing out that “strong prejudices are visions about the way things are” and asserting that “there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.”
Soul? Prejudice? Magic? Whatever could he mean?
It is heady stuff. Bloom confronted the future of liberal education as if he were addressing an issue of—well, not life and death, exactly, but the question of what counts as the good life, on one side, and the multitudinous counterfeits and impostures that threaten it, on the other. I confess that I found the book no less thrilling, and no less pertinent, now, twenty years on, than when I first read it in 1987.
I realize, of course, that my enthusiasm is not universally shared. The anathema brought down upon Bloom was a veritable thesaurus of politically correct epithets, partly alarming but also partly comic. Bloom was racist; he was sexist; he was elitist; he was authoritarian and—get out the crucifix and garlic—he was “Eurocentric.” Bloom was accused, moreover, of stupidity, ignorance, malevolence, bad scholarship, insensitivity, and political manipulation. And that was all before breakfast. One critic compared him to Colonel Oliver North—a comparison, I hasten to explain for those who, like me, admire Colonel North, that was meant to be unflattering. Several reviewers summoned up the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy; one even discerned similarities between Bloom and Adolf Hitler. The cataract of calumny and vituperation continues to this day.
At the same time, the book was an astonishing success. That was another part of the phenomenon of The Closing of the American Mind. Indeed, I suspect that its success was a large part of what infuriated Bloom’s critics. Perched at the top of The New York Times bestseller list week after week, the book is said to have sold more than a million copies. How could that be, when Professor X, chairwoman of the department of anti-American studies, cross-dressing, and victimology at YaleHarvard, never published a book that sold more than 5367 copies? The time is out of joint, Comrade, and we have to close ranks to set it right.
But even the success of The Closing of the American Mind had its oddities. One side of the oddity was summed up by a cartoon in The New Yorker. It shows a bemused-looking chap in a bookstore. He is standing in front of a table piled high with the book. As he leafs through a copy, a bookseller stands by beaming and confides, “I haven’t read it, but it’s terrific.”
I have often wondered how many of those million copies sold actually found readers. Five percent? Seven? Not more, I’d wager. But the interesting thing is that it didn’t matter. Poetry, T. S. Eliot said, communicates before it is understood. Similarly, books like The Closing of the American Mind do not have to be widely read to touch a nerve and communicate their essential message.
It is worth stressing that Bloom was not the doctrinaire conservative caricatured by his enemies. He regarded liberal education, properly conceived, less as a preparation for than as an alternative to commercial bourgeois culture. Libertarianism he disparaged as “the right-wing form of the Left, in favor of everybody’s living as he pleases.” His chief concern in this book was actually quite narrow. His topic was not higher education tout court, but only a sliver of it—the “best liberal arts students” at the “twenty or thirty” best colleges in the country. They were the students Bloom cared about, and they were the ones most imperiled by the changes that had beset the academy.
Nevertheless, conservatives were right to champion Bloom, just as left-wingers were right to regard him with fear and loathing. Not only was The Closing of the American Mind a powerful indictment of intellectual and moral corruption in the academy, it was also, if incidentally, an indictment that might make the public sit up and take notice. Jobs, tenure, academic institutes, and college curricula might finally be subject to open scrutiny. Alumni might wonder why they should subsidize institutions devoted to repudiating the founding intellectual and political values of the United States. Legislators might wonder if all was well in the ivory towers that taxpayers had so munificently endowed and accoutered. Parents might wonder why their children were battened on nihilistic word games and taught to regard traditional morality as a contemptible expression of narrow-mindedness and bigotry. In September, they send John or Joan and a large check off to a prestigious college or university and by June the money is spent and John or Joan—so eager and pleasant a few months ago—return having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians?
Indeed, those with a stake in politicizing intellectual life in the academy had much to fear from the publicity accorded to Bloom’s book. If, alas, their fears proved largely groundless—if it’s still politically correct business as usual in most of our colleges and universities—Bloom’s book at least helped remind us that there were alternatives and that forceful criticism could make reform possible, if not certain.
In the preface to a collection of essays called Giants and Dwarfs, Bloom insisted that “the essence of education is the experience of greatness.” Almost everything that he wrote about the university flowed from this fundamental conviction. And it was this, of course, that branded him an “elitist.” In fact, Bloom’s commitment to greatness was profoundly democratic. But this is not to say that it was egalitarian. The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.
As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, etc. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.
The other side of Bloom’s commitment to greatness was his criticism of popular culture—more precisely, his criticism of the deliberate confusion of popular culture and high art. Among the many things that incensed Bloom’s enemies, perhaps none so enraged them as his condemnation of rock music. “Rock music,” he wrote, “provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied. It artificially produces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors—victory in a just war, consummated love, artistic creation, religious devotion and discovery of the truth.”
Bloom’s point was difficult to credit even for some people who were otherwise sympathetic to his argument. How could rock be such a bad thing? Hasn’t it become just one more middle-class entertainment, enjoyed by kids everywhere? To be sure it has. But the fact that rock has been domesticated and commercialized, that it is now big business and mass entertainment, does not change its essential character. Its appeal is the appeal of the Dionysian: rock is anti-order, anti-verbal, anti-intellect. It is about unconstrained sexuality and polymorphous gratification. That is why its main enthusiasts are adolescents, old as well as young. They are right that rock music is a liberation: it is a liberation or vacation from civilization. In the deepest sense it is a liberation from music, whose essence is order.
Bloom came down hard on rock because, like Plato, he understood the power of music to educate our emotions at the most basic level. Rock is an education for chaos and narcissism. There are, of course, many competing claims for a child’s emotional allegiance; rock music is only one of a host of attractions besieging young people for attention. But because “the first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life,” Bloom was right to call attention to the dark, seductive side of rock music. “Nihilism,” he observed, is often “revealed not so much in the firm lack of beliefs, but in the chaos of the instincts or passions.”
Bloom’s criticism of rock music was part of a larger attack on the 1960s, the decade that epitomized the radically egalitarian, liberationist ethos that wreaked such havoc on the university and on society at large. While he acknowledged and paid homage to the triumph of the civil rights movement, he regarded the 1960s as “an unmitigated disaster” for intellectual and moral life in academia. This, too, won him the vitriol of the cultural Left, for whom the 1960s was a political Golden Age. Having lived through the student demonstrations at Cornell in 1969, when black activists brandished guns and held university administrators hostage, Bloom knew otherwise. The Siege of Cornell was a defining experience for Bloom. American society did not quite come apart at the seams, but Bloom was correct in seeing parallels between the American university in the 1960s and the German university in the 1930s. “The fact that in Germany the politics were of the Right and in the United States of the Left should not mislead us,” he noted.
In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements, and did so in large measure because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide. Commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old… . The unthinking hatred of “bourgeois society” was exactly the same in both places. A distinguished professor of political science proved this when he read to his radical students some speeches about what was to be done. They were enthusiastic until he informed them that the speeches were by Mussolini.
Looking back on this episode from the relatively quiescent time of the 1980s, Bloom pointed out that in many ways the student revolutionaries had won the battle. Buildings were no longer in flames, guns were no longer brandished, but that was because on the central intellectual and moral issues the universities had capitulated. It was no longer a case of activists holding teachers and administrators hostage: now teachers and administrators held their students hostage—hostage to the emancipationist pabulum of their cherished 1960s ideology. Radical feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness: some of the names were new, but the phenomena were born and bred in the Sixties. “When the dust had settled,” Bloom wrote near the end of The Closing of the American Mind, “it could be seen that the very distinction between educated and uneducated in America had been leveled… . Freedom had been restricted in the most effective way—by the impoverishment of alternatives.”
The word “alternatives,” in fact, is one of the master words of The Closing of the American Mind. It crops up again and again at strategic points, signalling that amplitude of spiritual possibility that Bloom sought to cultivate. “A serious life,” he wrote in one typical passage, “means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.”
Consider, for example, alternative political regimes. While Bloom believes that “the United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature,” he also, like many commentators, underscores the extent to which the United States has been “a great stage” upon which various ideas about freedom and equality have played out, often in demotic form. (“All significant political disputes,” he notes, “have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness.”) Bloom challenges us to look beyond our taken-for-granted notions about political rectitude and ask, “for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.”
Bloom regarded liberal education in its highest form as a conversation across the centuries that revolved around the perennially fresh question “What is the good life?” He championed what he called “the good old great books” because they are the prime repositories of thoughtful alternative answers to that question. A liberal arts education for Bloom centrally involved a meditation on those books and the “permanent questions” they posed in themselves and, above all, in relation to one another. As such a liberal arts education was “a resource against the ephemeral” and prophylactic against nihilism and spuriousness.
I want to stress the interrogatory aspect of Bloom’s teaching. In his view, a liberal education did not aim to equip students with answers. On the contrary, it endeavored to develop in them a thoughtful, indeed a passionate, disposition to entertain those deep questions, questions that are fulfilled not in “results” or declarative formulae—not in better test scores or technical know-how—but only by being continually renewed in conversation with the past. This aspect of Bloom’s teaching has not pleased everyone. Even some conservative commentators, though sympathetic to Bloom’s criticisms of the academy, are impatient with what they regard as his indefiniteness and lack of a positive doctrine. Wilfred M. McClay, for example, in a thoughtful article for the Intercollegiate Review (Spring 2007), wonders whether Bloom really has “anything solid to offer in place of the follies he describes.” In the end, McClay suggests, Bloom’s position is not much different from “the languid pragmatism of Richard Rorty.”
McClay is right that Bloom does not offer anything “solid” in place of the follies he describes. But his model is not the chummy nihilism of Richard Rorty but the probing inquisitiveness of Socrates. There is a big difference. Rorty denies that anything like the truth exists; Socrates wonders whether he has managed to grasp the truth but is unwavering in his acknowledgment of its claims. “Man,” as G. K. Chesterton put it, “was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth.” For Bloom, liberal education in its highest vocation consists primarily in stoking the fires of this interrogatory attitude. It is an invitation to serious questioning, not a form of catechism. Who are we, not in relation to our low and common needs, but in relation to our highest aspirations? That, for Bloom, is the permanent, ever recurring question that fires liberal education. There are answers to this question, but they do not necessarily emerge in definite precepts and prescriptions. “A liberal education,” he writes, “means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern.” The diminishment, as Bloom puts it in the subtitle to his book, affects not only students but also democracy itself, which requires models of excellence if its commitment to equality is not to degenerate into a squalid egalitarianism.
Does it matter? Should we really care about preserving institutions where the liberal arts in this high sense are nurtured? It is part of Bloom’s brief inThe Closing of the American Mind to argue that the health of the liberal arts betokens not only the health of the university but also the spiritual vibrancy and purpose of society at large. But it fulfills this purpose in a curious way. After all, conceived as Bloom conceives it, liberal education is ostentatiously impractical. One may learn certain skills incidentally, but the basic impetus is contemplative, not utilitarian. It is also unabashedly elitist, by nature appealing to a small subset of students.
Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called civilized.
I described The Closing of the American Mind as a kind of “pedagogical autobiography.” It is above all a teacher’s book: for and about the pedagogical vocation, which, as Bloom put it, is ultimately about the care and nurturing of souls. Behind all his criticism is a horror of encroaching homogenization and moral impoverishment. Liberal education as Bloom conceived it is a spiritual quest. It requires passion, yearning, and tenacious intellectual engagement.
When he looked around him, Bloom saw a faculty that had abdicated its responsibility to cultivate that yearning and, correspondingly, students who were “nice,” “spiritually detumescent,” and intellectually unambitious. One sign of this was the common indifference to the great monuments of culture, especially great books, among college students. Competing with television, rock music, and movies, high culture no longer cast its enchanting spell. At a deeper level, what students lacked was the invigorating passion that links sexual longing to intellectual aspiration and ultimately brings liberal education itself under the aegis of eros. More and more, Bloom thought, they resembled the timid, narcissistic creature described by Nietzsche in his devastating portrait of The Last Man:
“‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and he blinks… .
“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.
“Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully… . A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death… .
“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse… .”
Having absorbed the multiculturalist doctrine espoused by their teachers and the larger society, such students were reflexively “non-judgmental” about everything but their own intellectual poverty and sense of moral superiority. Thus it is that the great liberal virtue of openness degenerated into flaccid indifference and anchorless relativism. And hence the melancholy irony of the situation Bloom dissected: “Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.” So here’s the rub: What had been proclaimed a magnificent opening turned out to be a great closing.
I suspect that Bloom’s discussion of the perversions of openness was one of the chief things that made The Closing of the American Mind a bestseller. As a liberal, democratic society, we are committed to that constellation of virtues named by openness, tolerance, diversity, and the like. But we are also a society that has witnessed what happens when those virtues are absolutized.
As Bloom saw, the “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. Multiculturalism is a paralyzing intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of ignorance and blighted “good intentions.” The crucial thing to understand is that, notwithstanding the emancipationist rhetoric that accompanies the term, “multiculturalism” is not about recognizing genuine cultural diversity or encouraging pluralism. It is about undermining the priority of Western liberal values in our educational system and in society at large. In essence, as the political scientist Samuel Huntington has pointed out, multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization… . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.” The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable.
Our colleges and universities have been preaching the creed of openness and multiculturalism for the last few decades. Politicians, pundits, and the so-called cultural elite have assiduously absorbed that dogma, which they accept less as an argument about the way the world should be than as an affirmation of the essential virtue of their own feelings. We are now beginning to reap the fruit of that liberal experiment with multiculturalism. The chief existential symptom is moral paralysis, expressed, for example, in the inability to discriminate effectively between good and evil.
As the philosopher David Stove pointed out, the large issue here is one that has bedeviled liberal societies ever since there were liberal societies: namely, that in attempting to create the maximally tolerant society, we also give scope to those who would prefer to create the maximally intolerant society. It is a curious phenomenon. Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even (it would seem) those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. Extending tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. But intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, namely, openness. As Robert Frost once put it, a liberal is someone who refuses to take his own part in an argument.
The escape from this disease of liberalism lies in understanding that “tolerance” and “openness” must be limited by positive values if they are not to be vacuous. American democracy, for example, affords its citizens great latitude, but great latitude is not synonymous with the proposition that “anything goes.” “The fact,” as Bloom notes, “that there have been different opinions about good and bad in different times and places in no way proves that none is true or superior to others.” Our society, like every society, is founded on particular positive values—the rule of law, for example, respect for the individual, religious freedom, the separation of church and state. Or think of the robust liberalism expressed by Sir Charles Napier, the British commander in India in the early nineteenth century. Told that immolating widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands was a cherished local custom, Napier said “Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” The next time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to speak at Columbia University, President Lee Bollinger might ask himself what Sir Charles would have done in his shoes.
The point is that the “openness” that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not “value neutral.” It need not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers, to the Islamofascist who after all has his point of view, just as much as the soccer mom has hers. Western democratic society is rooted in a particular vision of what Bloom, following Aristotle, called “the good for man.” The question is: Do we, as a society, still have confidence in the animating values of the vision? Do we possess the requisite will to defend them? Or was the French philosopher Jean-Fran?ois Revel right when he said that “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it”? The jury is still out on those questions. How they are answered will determine the future not only of Western universities but also of that astonishing spiritual-political experiment that is Western democratic liberalism.
這幾天慢慢在讀的,是1987年的全美暢銷書,亞倫?布魯姆(Allan Bloom)的《美國精神的封閉(The Closing of American Mind)》。索爾?貝婁(Saul Bellow)當年作為布魯姆的好友,給老友寫序不忘聲辯自己的《赫索格(Herzog)》不是故作艱深,而是與老友理趣相投。布魯姆死后,貝婁卻在2000年拋出小說《拉維爾斯坦(Ravelstein)》,大肆影射老友的勁爆私生活——喜好八卦,同性戀,艾滋病,驚掉了半個美國的下巴。(這個故事的寓意是不該交作家做朋友^-^)
uncomprehending的意思確實值得斟酌,但是最后一句明顯應當斷作(That (anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident)) astonishes (them),“that”引導了主語從句。中文翻譯加上“如果你說”應當是為了是這句話更易讀,畢竟中文很少有這么長的主語。