Who Closed the American Mind?

This retrospective review, written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's unexpected bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, appeared in the October 2012 issue of "The American Conservative."  As it's now been liberated from its paywall, I'm posting it here as well.

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One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus of the University of Chicago, where I had just enrolled as a first-year Ph.D. candidate in the renowned Committee on Social Thought. While I had not yet met him, I had heard much about Allan Bloom, a legendary professor, teacher, and lecturer. I had read his translation of Plato’s Republic as an undergraduate and had some notion that I would write my eventual dissertation under his direction.

As I crossed one of the campus quads, I saw a man sitting on a bench, swaddled under a heavy overcoat and his head topped by a fedora. A photographer was arranging his equipment across from him, while he bemusedly awaited some kind of publicity shoot. While I realized only a short time later that the man I had seen was Allan Bloom, it was a year later—a quarter-century ago—that I realized that I had witnessed the photo session that led to the headshot inside the hardcover jacket of Bloom’s blockbuster book The Closing of the American Mind. By that time, I had left the University of Chicago, disillusioned by the program and put off by Bloom’s circle of students. But I loved the book and credit it, at least in part, for my eventual return to the academy and a career as a professor of political philosophy.

I still assign the book with some regularity, especially in a freshman seminar on education that I’ve taught over the last half-decade. As the years have passed, I’ve noticed how the book has aged—many of its cultural references are long dated, while contemporary hot-button issues like gay marriage and religious liberty are altogether absent from Bloom’s confident pronouncements on our likely future. Still, the book continues to excite new readers—today’s students find it engaging, even if, unlike their elders, they don’t get especially upset by it and almost unanimously have never heard of it before. And with every re-reading I invariably find something new that I hadn’t noticed before, a testimony to the expansiveness of Bloom’s fertile mind.

While I continue to learn much from Bloom, over the years I have arrived at three main judgments about the book’s relevance, its prescience, and its failings. First, Bloom was right to be concerned about the specter of relativism—though perhaps even he didn’t realize how bad it would get, particularly when one considers the reaction to his book compared to its likely reception were it published today. Second, his alarm over the threat of “multiculturalism” was misplaced and constituted a bad misreading of thezeitgeist, in which he mistook the left’s tactical use of identity politics for the rise of a new kind of communalist and even traditionalist tribalism. And, lastly, most of his readers—even today—remain incorrect in considering him to be a representative of “conservatism,” a label that he eschewed and a worldview he rejected. Indeed, Bloom’s argument was one of the early articulations of “neoconservatism”—a puzzling locution used to describe a position that is, in fact, today more correctly captured by its critics on the left as “neo-liberalism.”

What should most astonish any reader of Bloom’s Closing after 25 years is the fact that this erudite treatise about the crisis of higher education not only sat atop the bestseller list for many weeks but was at the center of an intense, lengthy, and ferocious debate during the late 1980s over education, youth, culture, and politics. In many ways, it became the most visible and weightiest salvo in what came to be known as “the culture wars,” and people of a certain generation still hold strong opinions about Bloom and his remarkable, unlikely bestseller.

Today there are many books about the crisis of higher education—while the nature of the crisis may change, higher education never seems to be out of the woods—but none before or since Bloom’s book achieved its prominence or made its author as rich and famous as a rock star. It was a book that many people bought but few read, at least not beyond a few titillating passages condemning rock-and-roll and feminism. Yet it was a book about which almost everyone with some engagement in higher education held an opinion—indeed, it was obligatory to have considered views on Bloom’s book, whether one had read it or not.

Bloom’s book was at the center of a debate—one that had been percolating well before its publication in 1987—over the nature and content of a university education. That debate intensified with the growing numbers of “diverse” populations seeking recognition on college campuses—concomitant with the rise of departments of Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, and a host of other “Studies” studies—leading to demands that the curriculum increasingly reflect contributions by non-male, non-white, non-European and even non-dead authors.

The Closing of the American Mind spawned hundreds, perhaps even thousands of responses—most of them critiques—including an article entitled “The Philosopher Despot” in Harper’s by political theorist Benjamin Barber, and the inevitably titled The Opening of the American Mind by Lawrence Levine. Partly spurred by the firestorm initiated by Bloom’s book, perennial presidential candidate Jesse Jackson led a march through the campus of Stanford University shouting through a bullhorn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Passions for campus reform ran high, and an avalanche of words, articles, denunciations, and ad hominem attacks greeted Bloom’s defense of the Western canon.

Yet the nuances of Bloom’s qualified defense of the Western canon were rarely appreciated by critics or supporters alike. While Bloom was often lumped together with E.D. Hirsch—whose Cultural Literacy was published the same year and rose to number two on the New York Times bestseller list, just behind Closing—Bloom’s argument was fundamentally different and far more philosophically challenging than Hirsch’s more mundane, if nevertheless accurate, point that educated people increasingly did not have knowledge about their own culture. Hirsch’s book spoke to anxiety about the loss of a shared literary and cultural inheritance, which today has been largely supplanted by references to a few popular television shows and sports televised on ESPN.

Bloom made an altogether different argument: American youth were increasingly raised to believe that nothing was True, that every belief was merely the expression of an opinion or preference. Americans were raised to be “cultural relativists,” with a default attitude of non-judgmentalism. Not only all other traditions but even one’s own (whatever that might be) were simply views that happened to be held by some people and could not be judged inferior or superior to any other. He bemoaned particularly the decline of household and community religious upbringing in which the worldviews of children were shaped by a comprehensive vision of the good and the true. In one arresting passage, he waxed nostalgic for the days when people cared: “It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholic and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously…”

He lamented the decline of such true belief not because he personally held any religious or cultural tradition to be true—while Bloom was raised as a Jew, he was at least a skeptic, if not a committed atheist—but because he believed that such inherited belief was the source from which a deeper and more profound philosophic longing arose. It wasn’t “cultural literacy” he wanted, but rather the possibility of that liberating excitement among college-age youth that can come from realizing that one’s own inherited tradition might not be true. From that harrowing of belief can come the ultimate philosophic quest—the effort to replace mere prejudice with the quest for knowledge of the True.

Near the beginning of Closing, Bloom relates one telling story of a debate with a psychology professor during his time teaching at Cornell. Bloom’s adversary claimed, “it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students.” Bloom compared that function to the activity of an older sibling who informs the kids that there is no Santa Claus—disillusionment and disappointment. Rather than inspiring students to replace “prejudice” with a curiosity for Truth, the mere shattering of illusion would simply leave students “passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself.”

Bloom relates that “I found myself responding to the professor of psychology that I personally tried to teach my students prejudices, since nowadays—with the general success of his method—they had learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything … One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.” Bloom’s preferred original title—before being overruled by Simon and Schuster—was Souls Without Longing. He was above all concerned that students, in being deprived of the experience of living in their own version of Plato’s cave, would never know or experience the opportunity of philosophic ascent.

This core of Bloom’s analysis seems to be not only correct, but, if possible, he may have underestimated its extent. Consider the intense response to Bloom’s book as evidence against his thesis. The overwhelming response by academia and the intelligentsia to his work suggested anything but “indifference” among many who might describe themselves as cultural relativists. Extraordinary debates took place over what books and authors should and should not appear in the “canon,” and extensive efforts were undertaken to shape new curricula in light of new demands of “multiculturalism.” The opponents of Bloom’s book evinced a deep concern for the formation of students, if their concern for what and whom they read was any indication.

In retrospect, however, we can discern that opponents to Bloom’s book were not the first generation of “souls without longing,” but the last generation raised within households, traditions, and communities of the sort that Bloom described, and the last who were educated in the older belief that a curriculum guided the course of a human life. The ferocity of their reaction to Bloom was not simply born of a defense of “multiculturalism” (though they thought that to be the case) but a belief that only a curriculum of the right authors and books properly shapes the lives of their students. Even in their disagreement with Bloom, they shared a key premise: the books we ask our students to read will shape their souls.

Today we live in a different age, one that so worried Bloom—an age of indifference. Institutions of higher learning have almost completely abandoned even a residual belief that there are some books and authors that an educated person should encounter. A rousing defense of a curriculum in which female, African-American, Latino, and other authors should be represented has given way to a nearly thoroughgoing indifference to the content of our students’ curricula. Academia is committed to teaching “critical thinking” and willing to allow nearly any avenue in the training of that amorphous activity, but eschews any belief that the content of what is taught will or ought to influence how a person lives.

Thus, not only is academia indifferent to whether our students become virtuous human beings (to use a word seldom to be found on today’s campuses), but it holds itself to be unconnected to their vices—thus there remains no self-examination over higher education’s role in producing the kinds of graduates who helped turn Wall Street into a high-stakes casino and our nation’s budget into a giant credit card. Today, in the name of choice, non-judgmentalism, and toleration, institutions prefer to offer the greatest possible expanse of options, in the implicit belief that every 18- to 22-year-old can responsibly fashion his or her own character unaided.

Bloom was so correct about the predictable rise of a society defined by indifference that one is entitled to conclude that were Closing published today, it would barely cause a ripple. This is not because most of academia would be inclined to agree with his arguments any more than they did in 1987. Rather, it is simply the case that hardly anyone in academe any longer thinks that curricula are worth fighting over. Jesse Jackson once thought it at least important to oppose Western Civilization in the name of an alternative; today, it would be thought untoward and unworkable to propose anyshared curriculum.

Those who run institutions of higher learning tell themselves that this is because they respect the choices of their young adult charges; however, their silence is born precisely of the indifference predicted by Bloom. Today’s academic leaders don’t believe the content of those choices has any fundamental influence on the souls of our students, most likely because it would be unfashionable to believe that they have souls. As long as everyone is tolerant of everyone else’s choices, no one can get hurt. What is today called “tolerance,” Bloom rightly understood to be more deeply a form of indifference, the extreme absence of care, leading to a society composed not only of “souls without longing” but humans treated as utilitarian bodies that are increasingly incapable of love.

If this core argument of Bloom’s seems prescient, a second major argument not only seems to me incorrect but in fact is contradicted by this first argument. It was because of his criticisms about the rise of “multiculturalism” that Bloom came to be readily identified with the right-leaning culture-warriors like William Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza and was so vilified on the academic left. Yet Bloom’s first argument implicitly makes a qualified praise of “multiculturalism,” at least as the necessary launching pad for the philosophic quest. In his praise of the belief structures that once inspired some students to disillusionment, he was singing the praises of a society composed of various cultural traditions that exercised a strong influence over the beliefs and worldviews of that culture’s youth.

Such qualified praise led him to wax nostalgic about an age when Catholics and Protestants cared enough to hate one another. But at his most alarmist—and, frankly, either least perceptive or most pandering—Bloom portrays then-regnant calls for “multiculturalism” as a betrayal of the norms of liberal democracy and as the introduction of dangerous tribalism into the university, as well as the body politic. At times, Bloom painted a portrait in which the once-ascendant claims of American individual rights, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, were about to be displaced by the incipient warfare of identity tribalism and groupthink.

At his best, Bloom sees through the sham of yesterday’s “multiculturalism” and today’s push for “diversity”—little of which had to do with enthusiasm for real cultural diversity, but which was then and remains today a way for individuals in under-represented groups to advance entitlement programs within America’s elite institutions. Those individuals, while claiming special benefits that should accrue to members in a particular group, had no great devotion to any particular “culture” outside the broader American anti-culture of liberalism itself. Indeed, the “cultures” in question were never really cultures at all, if by a culture we mean an identifiable group of people who share a generational, geographical, and distinctive set of customs aimed at shaping the worldview and practices of successive generations.

By this measure, women, blacks, Hispanics, and so on were people who might once have belonged to a variety of particular cultures, albeit not specifically as women or blacks or Hispanics. These new categorical groupings came to be based on claims of victimhood rather than any actual shared culture; many cultures have been persecuted, but it does not follow that everyone who has been mistreated constitutes a culture. While in passing Bloom acknowledged the paucity of such claims to cultural status, too often he was willing to take seriously professions of “multiculturalism” and to lament the decline of the American project of universalist natural rights.

The stronger case would have been to expose the claims of multiculturalism as cynical expressions from members of groups that did not, in fact, share a culture, while showing that such self-righteous claims, more often than not, were merely a thin veneer masking a lust for status, wealth and power. If the past quarter century has revealed anything, it has consistently shown that those who initially participated in calls for multiculturalism have turned out to be among the voices most hostile to actual cultures, particularly ones seeking to maintain coherent religious and moral traditions.

Bloom was prone to obtuseness about this fact because, at base, Bloom himself was not an admirer or supporter of the multiplicity of cultures. Indeed, he was suspicious and even hostile to the claims of culture upon the shaping of human character and belief—including religious belief. He was not a conservative in the Burkean sense; that is, someone apt to respect the inheritances of tradition and custom as a repository of past wisdom and experience. Rather, he was at his core a liberal: someone who believes that the only benefit of our cultural formation was that it constituted a “cave” from which ambitious and rebellious youth could be encouraged to pursue a life of philosophy.

Reflection about Bloom’s distaste for particular cultures suggests that the differences between Bloom and his apparent nemesis, the Cornell professor of psychology, are rather minimal. Both wanted to disabuse the youth of their “prejudices” in the name of openness: the psychology professor in the name of nihilisitic openness, and Bloom for the encouragement of philosophical inquiry, open to the possibility of Truth as well as the possibility of nihilism.

In fact, Bloom’s critique of the “multicultural” left is identical to and drawn from the critique of the “multicultural” right advanced by his teacher, Leo Strauss. In his seminal work Natural Right and History, Strauss identified Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution as one of the lamentable responses to the “Crisis of Modern Natural Right,” a crisis that arose as a reaction against the social contractarianism of “modern natural right.” Burke’s argument against the revolutionary impulses of social contractarianism constituted a form of conservative “historicism”—that is, in Strauss’s view, the rejection of claims of natural right in favor of a preference for the vagaries of History. While today’s Straussians concentrate their criticisms largely on left historicism (i.e., progressivism), Strauss was just as willing to focus his criticisms on right historicism, that is, the traditionalism of Burke and his progeny.

Ironically, because the left in the 1980s adopted the language (if not the substance) of multiculturalism, Bloom was able to turn those Straussian critiques of Burke against those on the left—though of course they were no Burkeans, even if they used some Burkean language. For this reason, Bloom was assumed by almost everyone to be a “conservative,” a label that he not only explicitly rejected, but a worldview that he philosophically and personally abhorred.

Bloom’s argument became a major touchstone in the development of “neoconservatism,” a label that became associated with many fellow students of Strauss but which, ironically, explicitly rested on rejection of the claims of culture, tradition, and custom—the main impulses of Burkean conservatism. Bloom continuously invoked the natural-rights teachings of the Declaration and Constitution as necessary correctives to the purported dangers of left multiculturalism: rather than endorsing the supposed inheritance of various cultures, he commended the universalistic claims of liberal democracy, which ought to trump any identification with particular culture and creed. The citizen who emerged from the State of Nature, shorn of any specific cultural, religious, or ancestral limitation, was the political analogue for the philosopher who emerged from the Cave. Not everyone could become a philosopher, Bloom insisted, but everyone could be a liberal citizen, and ought rightly to be liberated from the limitations of place and culture—if for no other reason, to make them more tolerant of the radical philosophers in their midst.

Bloom’s was thus not only an early salvo in the culture wars, but an incipient articulation of the neoconservative impulse toward universalistic expansion. Burke’s willingness to acknowledge the basic legitimacy of most cultures—his “multiculturalism”—led him, in the main, to oppose most forms of imperialism. The rejection of multiculturalism, and the valorization of a monolithic liberal project, has inclined historically to a tendency toward expansionism and even imperialism, and neoconservatism is only the latest iteration of this tendency. While many of the claims about Strauss’s influence on the Iraq invasion and the neoconservative insistence upon spreading democracy throughout the world were confused, there was in fact a direct lineage from Bloom’s arguments against the multicultural left and rise of the neo-liberal or neoconservative imperialistic impulse. Bloom explicitly rejected the cautiousness and prudence endorsed by conservatism as a hindrance to philosophy, and thus rejected it as a political matter as a hindrance to the possibility of perfectibility:

Conservatives want young people to know that this tawdry old world cannot respond to their demands for perfection. … But … man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. …. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are.

Bloom here witheringly rejected “realism” as “the easy way out” of real inquiry; yet, in the wake of the Iraq invasion, one of Bloom’s longstanding allies and admirers, John Agresto, lamented the overconfidence of the neoconservatives, and especially their neglect of the reality of culture, in a post-invasion book entitled Mugged by Reality.

Bloom’s book remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it was, ultimately, more reckless than many of its readers realized at the time—not because it was conservative, but precisely because it rejected the conservative impulses to modesty, prudence, the genius of place, and tradition. It opened an era of “culture wars” in which the only combatant who seemed absent from the field was a true conservatism. Perhaps it is finally time for an opening of the American mind.

Leaving Washington

It was on the virtual “pages” of the Front Porch Republic that I announced last February that I was leaving Georgetown University, in Washington D.C., to accept a position at the University of Notre Dame, in nearby South Bend, IN. That posting was on track to becoming the most visited page in three year history of FPR – it had accumulated over 12,000 hits during the week it was online, at least until I thought better of the overweening self-indulgence of such a personal pronouncement and decided to take it down.

There were doubtless many reasons for the virtual traffic that this post received – at least in significant part because of my decision to leave one Catholic university for another one, and my expressed dissatisfaction with the place from which I was departing – but my sense from a fair number of reactions that I received was a widespread incredulity that I would leave Washington D.C. for the flyover region of Michiana and the run-down, economically depressed city of South Bend. Academics in general are attracted to major cosmopolitan cities like flies to bright lights (or, I could point to a more earthy substance to which flies are also attracted), and so there was general disbelief from a number of quarters about the sanity of my decision. But what was most striking to me was the general disapproval from those who have spent much of their adult lives decrying the influence and reach and growth of Washington D.C. – meaning, of course, its main industry, the Government. Many, if not most of my “conservative” friends urged me not to leave my previous position because of the influence that I could exert over students at such a strategically-located institution like Georgetown, ones who were drawn to the preeminent university in DC so that they could embark on political careers in that city. Stay in Washington, they urged, so that you might educate students to make Washington less important.

 After seven years in Washington, witnessing the ongoing growth of the conservative industry in the city that conservatives claim to hate ranks high among the absurdities amid the countless absurdities of modern American life. D.C. has been the longstanding home of a number of the nation’s top conservative think-tanks, from AEI to Cato to Heritage Foundation. It is a magnet for recent college graduates who intern and work for countless conservative organizations, from conservative journals like the Weekly Standard and the National Review to major conservative journalists of opinion such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks. The location of the Porch's President, Mark Mitchell’s college, Patrick Henry College, was selected in significant part due to its proximity to D.C., where it was hoped its graduates would find ready foothold for conservative internships and jobs. Recently I was among a set of speakers at a newly founded satellite “campus” of nearby Hillsdale College – the Kirby Center, located close to Union Station in Washington D.C. – noteworthy for the fact that Hillsdale is among the only institutions of higher-education in America that accepts no federal funding, yet has established a Center in the heart of the Capital.

Of course, the explicit grounds for this growing presence of conservative people and institutions in Washington is that the slowing or reduction of Washington’s influence can only be achieved by achieving control of national political office and influencing its policy. This is at least a plausible reason, even if evidence for its efficacy is scanty. One might note in passing that since 1980, the Presidency has been under control of Republicans during 20 of the last 32 years, and in control of at least one house of Congress for sixteen of those years, including four – from 2003-2007 – when it controlled both Houses and the Presidency, and during which discretionary outlays of the Federal budget increased by 48.6% and the national debt grew from $6.7 billion to nearly $9 billion. Conservatives, when in power, generally increase the budget and activities of the federal government no less quickly than their liberal counterparts, and in the case of the years when they controlled the Presidency and both Houses, increased it more than many previous liberal administrations.

But my point is not to castigate the "conservative" party for hypocrisy in an age when budget outlays and increases are built into the fabric of democratic electoral politics and are a fundamental demand of its citizenry, regardless of party label; it is rather to suggest that the attraction to Washington D.C. is not perhaps best explained solely by any credible evidence of likely influence of its residents over policy – much as that might be the form of self-explanation that attracts many, whatever their political persuasion. Experience of the last 30 years of politics should indicate that the efforts of even those most dedicated to reducing the size and scope of Washington’s influence have shown very poor results. Yet, rather than showing discouragement with the entire project and decamping in the face of obvious defeat, attraction to Washington of every political stripe has only accelerated in recent years, with the city showing population growth over the last decade that has exceeded the growth rate of any State in the nation. Indeed, the entire region including and around the nation’s capital has seen remarkable growth, with the population of the area around Washington DC – DMV – doubling since 1960, expanding from 2.3 million to to 4.8 million in 2000 and to 5.6 million in 2010. The area is projected to grow by another 7% by 2014. The DC region now holds the dubious distinction of having displaced Los Angeles as the most traffic-congested area of the nation.

The growth of Washington has not been broadly representative of the overall demographics of the U.S. population. As analyzed in Charles Murray’s recently published and widely-discussed book Coming Apart, the DC area has been a particular draw to a narrow subset of the U.S. population, which he describes as “overeducated elitist snobs.” These are the graduates of America’s top institutions of higher education – represented by his analysis of the settlement patterns of recent graduates of HPY (Harvard/Princeton/Yale), who settle with extraordinary consistency in a number of “super-zips,” (“super-zip codes,”) designated by Murray as “Elite Bubbles.” Thirteen of these zip-codes are to be found in or near the city of Washington DC – including Georgetown, NW DC, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, McLean, Arlington, Alexandria, as well as the more “middle-class” zip codes that include the likes of Springfield and Reston. In these zip codes, people enjoy an average education and income higher than that enjoyed by all but 5 percent of other Americans.

 Murray emphasizes that these “super-zips” (along with others that are to be found in places like New York, Boston and Chicago, San Francisco, among the few cities where HPY’s congregate after graduation) are not “islands,” but shape and influence a large geographic area that, in the case of Washington D.C., constitutes the wealthiest and most desirable areas of the nation in which its elite prefers to live. Murray also notes that these denizens of “super-zips” are overwhelmingly politically liberal, leading him to decry a kind of monolithic political worldview of such places (according to Murray’s findings, 67% in “superzips” are liberal or doctrinaire liberal, while 19% are conservative or doctrinaire conservative). But it should be pointed out that people of widely different political views live in the same neighborhoods, shop at the same stores, dine at the same restaurants and live the same basic lifestyle. No matter how we describe them politically – and the policies that they support, whether or not they are likely to be enacted or not – a defining feature of these denizens is a pervasive urbanity and cosmopolitanism. They are generally well-travelled; comfortable in the larger, generally anonymous urban setting; happy purveyors of high culture and fine dining; occupants of similar housing stock, which is generally upscale single-family that does not include residents of different and especially lower economic strata; they tend to be well-informed about current events from similar sources, such as NPR or the WSJ; comparatively among the wealthiest people in the entire world, and largely expectant that their children will travel life paths that will put them on a similar trajectory to occupy similar positions and locate in comparable super-zips as they become adults. For all of the significant political differences that might divide them, they in fact have far more in common in their “lifestyle” and general worldviews and outlook on how life should be lived.

 I don’t blame them for liking to live in these settings, and will admit that moving to South Bend has not been without moments of second-guessing about leaving all the cultural, culinary, and aesthetic bounties of a place like Washington, DC. These are beautiful and wealthy places, filled with interesting people leading interesting lives, places overbrimming with so much prosperity that one inevitably benefits even if one is not among the super-wealthy. Living in such places, one actually does experience a kind of “trickle-down” wealth, if not literally in direct increases (though money flows more freely), then in the ancillary benefits of good schools, a constantly upgraded infrastructure, well-maintained private homes, well-stocked libraries and manicured public parks, interesting intellectual discourse, an atmosphere where personal health, personal growth, and well-being are stressed and therefore contagious.

 People educated at the leading institutions today – whatever their political stripe – are essentially trained to be concerned about the affairs of the world, to seek to change the world, at least at the scale of the nation-state, if not the international scale. They are groomed to be “leaders.” Hope College - location of FPR's second conference - proclaims its aim in its mission statement “to educate students for lives of leadership and service in a global society" in such off-campus centers as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and - naturally - Washington DC. The topics of the discussions and debates of today’s highly educated are almost exclusively cultivated to be focused on the issues and concerns emanating from national and international venues. It was always the source of sad bemusement that so many of the articles of Georgetown's campus newspaper, "The Hoya," were directed to topics of national and international political concern. It was not that students believed that anyone who might influence such matters was consulting "The Hoya" (well, maybe a few students were so deluted); it is that they were practicing and auditioning for future positions.

 While the airwaves are filled with debates between our best educated leaders who have congregated together in one of four or five cities in the country, they are in fact more commonly and deeply bound by a shared perspective that what matters is the big and the expansive. While these are places of specific geographic locations, with particular and often interesting histories, the people who are now attracted to these places go there not with a commitment to any particular local culture, but rather because they are places attractive to people who seek to transcend any particular locality and become citizens of the world. As thought and opinion leaders, they help to foster a national and international consensus that the things that really matter are the things that are being debated and discussed in Washington.

 This outcome was, of course, part of the original design of our system – to encourage the vacating of “local cultures” in favor of the cultivation of an elite class that would transcend concern for, or identification with, any particular locality. Addressing the concerns of the original localists – the so-called “Anti-federalists”, who decried the proposed Constitution’s tendency toward “consolidation” – Alexander Hamilton tipped his hand to the kind of nation that the Constitution would help foster:

I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of mere domestic police of a state appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion: and all the powers necessary to those objects ought in the first instance to be lodged in the national depository.... It is therefore improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the [local] powers.... The possession of them ... would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, and to the splendor of the national government.

For all the stated political differences of our leadership class, cultivated in this similar worldview, they share a deeper commitment to maintaining our attention upon, and concern for, national and international concerns. Hamilton acknowledged that people tend to have a preliminary and dominant concern for what is nearest to them – their families, their neighborhoods, their communities, their States – but believed that if the best and the brightest could be attracted to national office, our gaze and concerns could be diverted to places and debates far from us, that we would come to think that what happens in Washington DC or in Brussels to be more important than what happens in our own neighborhoods.

 There is another element to this longstanding effort, to lower our sights and concerns from the divine to the earthly – to foster, in the recent words of biblical scholar Peter Enns, a “rival eschatology.” While we are drawn into the weighty battles between liberals and conservatives, sides pitted against each other, we cease to notice that they are part of a common effort to secure our allegiance to the belief that the fate of our world and our lives hangs in the balance with the outcome of the next election, or the election after that, or the election after that. As our attention focuses with greater exclusivity upon the concerns of Washington DC, the scale of our vista actually shrinks. Indeed, with our gaze fixed on the bright lights of Washington D.C., we invite its light pollution to dim out the light from the City that ought to matter more - the Eternal City to which we ought rather to aspire. We are more apt to see the lights of that better city from locations less bright, less distracting, less self-important.

 We forget that Augustine went to Rome – his biographer Peter Brown tells us, because in Rome he could find the stage where he might pursue his ambitions as a political actor, a teacher of rhetoric. Unlike our current leaders, however, Augustine was quickly disillusioned by what he found there – an assortment of people drawn by common vices in the pursuit of earthly power. He left Rome, and eventually settled in the provinces of his homeland in Africa, in Thagaste, where he was drawn by life in a monastery where, Brown relates, “monks seemed to him to have succeeded in living in permanent communities, where all the relationships were moulded by the dictates of Christian Charity.” It would be from this setting that he would write his great work, The City of God, in which he sought to remind Christians – after the sack of Rome – that even the most important and majestic human societies must die, are destined to die, and will die all the more quickly when they think themselves to be the sole end and purpose of human life.

 I have left Washington, but I am still learning to leave Washington. I am trying to learn that what takes place in my city, in my neighborhood, my region, deserves more attention and concern, deserves my energy and devotion and passion, far more than whatever the debate I’m told to care about by my betters who seek to focus my attention on the national and international stage, to distract me from the “slender allurements” of mere “domestic” life. Rather than “win” Washington, I am trying to learn to ignore Washington, to live in and care about where I am. And to remind myself to have a proper vista, not to share in the self-delusion in the eternity of our earthly city – that self-delusion that led our best-and-brightest into the belief that our economy would always grow as long as there was more to borrow, or today that our power will always increase. I am learning to leave Washington in part in preparation for the day when it will no longer be, or be what it is – a day that I think is not as distant as those now living there, a time when we will live in local culture because it will be the only place to live, the only place we should live.

 [This post is cross-posted at "Front Porch Republic." The remarks were delivered at the Second Annual FPR Conference in September]

Quigley on Georgetown, 1967

The Hebrews and the Greeks, who are our cultural parents, and our own western civilization descended from these two, have always agreed that the only sin, or at least the greatest sin, is pride, a particularly aggressive type of self-deception. And anyone who is concerned with the health of individuals knows well that neuroses and psychoses are basically simply forms of self-deception, combined with an obstinate refusal to face the facts of the situation.

This kind of illness is prevalent in all American higher education and in all the sub-divisions of it, existing, indeed, in a more obsessive and virulent form in the aspirant "Great Universities" than in the so-called "Great Universities" themselves. It is to be found in its acute form in Catholic education, in Jesuit education, and at Georgetown.

Of course, that is not what we are being told. Today, in education, as in government and in everything else, the propagandists flood us daily with rosy reports on how well things are going. Larger and larger expenditures of manpower, money and facilities (such as floor-space) are devoted to telling the world about the wonderful job being done in every organization worthy of the name from the Johnson Administration down (or up) to Georgetown University. Fewer and fewer people are convinced, or even listening, but in the process the money and facilities (if not the manpower) which could have been used on the goals of the organization are wasted on propaganda about what a wonderful job is being done, when any sensible person with half an eye can see that, every year, a poorer job is being done in the midst of self-deceptive clouds of expensive propaganda.

But beneath these clouds, ominous cracklings can be heard, even at Georgetown. If they come from within the University, they are drowned out with another flood of words, denials, excited pointings to a more hopeful, if remote, future, or by the creation of some new organizational gimmick, a committee or a new "Assistant Something-or-Other," to deal with the problem.

If, on the other hand, these criticisms come from outside the University, they are ignored or attributed to jealousy, sour grapes, or to some other unflattering personal motivation of the critic. When these criticisms come, as they often do, from some departing member of the faculty, they are greeted by reflections on his personal competence or emotional stability, both of which had been highly esteemed as long as he remained here. As a result, most departing faculty, to avoid such personal denigration, depart quietly, but they depart. Their reasons for leaving are then attributed to the higher pay to be obtained elsewhere, an explanation which fits in well with the Big Lie at GU, that all its problems would be solved if the University only had more money. Anyone who knows anything about the situation knows perfectly well three things: that Georgetown's problems would not be solved by more money and have not been, but, on the contrary, have grown steadily worse as the supply of money has increased; that resigning faculty have been leaving because they were discontented; and that the chief cause of that discontent has not been inadequate pay, but the generally chaotic and misguided Administration of the University....

Professor Carroll Quigley
"Is Georgetown University Committing Suicide?"
The Hoya
April 28, 1967

Against Great Books

At the request of "First Things," which has asked to publish this essay in the January, 2013 issue, I have removed from my site the text of the lecture of this title that I delivered in November, 2011, at University of Texas at Austin.  Anyone wishing to access the lecture may contact me at pdeneen AT gmail.com, or await its revised and forthcoming publication in "First Things."


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Seven Years

Seven years ago today, my teacher and friend, Wilson Carey McWilliams, passed away. I miss his gentle wisdom and bear hugs; his gravelly voice and uproarious stories; his invitations to sip bourbon as the sun descends toward ground.

We need his voice more than ever. Here is an excerpt from an essay entitled "Religion, Morality, and Public Life," re-published in the recent collection of Carey's essays The Democratic Soul. The essay was written in 1999, but still rings as true today as when it was written over a decade ago.

.....

In contemporary practice, the moral picture is not entirely bleak. Despite much uneasiness and more posturing, there have been gains in the relations between the races and the genders, and many old abuses are now subject to sanction. And religion, if it needs saying, provides support for the decencies and for some sense of obligation. But the temple, if standing, is in need of repair, especially since so many of the institutional pillars of the Framers' moral design have been unsettled or pulled down.

That states and local governments are now held to the essentially secular standards of national law would inspire some sympathy among the Framers, although the Supreme Court's insistence on the "wall of separation"—rendered almost go labyrinthine by the Court's opinions--goes far beyond the understanding and practice of the founding generation.

It is a matter for greater concern that the institutions of civil society have been so thoroughly penetrated and reshaped—and often shattered—by economics, technology, and the "hidden curriculum" of the media. In the new order of things, indignity is commonplace: the media confront us with superstars, just as the market disproportionately rewards elites; by comparison, the intermediate dignities offered by local communities seem tawdry. This perception is strengthened by the fact that localities--and with them, a good many personal relationships--increasingly are exposed to mobility and change, transient connections to which we are apt to limit our liability.

Despite general prosperity, economics adds desperations, weakening our already slender resources of trust and moral community. Inequality is escalating, with the middle class recently losing ground to both rich and poor. The vogue of "outsourcing" and "downsizing" makes jobs feel insecure, even in good times. Responding in kind, Kristin Downey Grimsley reports, employees are becoming less loyal to the firm or to their fellows, resulting in a workplace that may be "leaner," but is surely "meaner."

It is hardly surprising, consequently, that so many Americans are hesitant or half-hearted about commitments, or that they seek solace in immediate or short-term gratifications, inclinations evident even in the seats of power. It is also understandable that we are tempted to treat market forces as if they were autonomous and irresistible, partly because doing so saves us from the burden of responsibility, allowing us a more or less guiltless pursuit of interests and enjoyments. But conceding sovereignty to the market leaves us only the consumer's passive freedom to make choices, rather than having a say in defining what is choice-worthy. All of these retreats from society, politics, and faith diminish us, so that more and more Americans seem to be looking, sometimes furiously and sometimes wistfully, for what is missing.

......

Recquiscat in pace, my friend.

In the National Cathedral

On Sunday I was the invited speaker at the magnificent National Cathedral in a series devoted to the exploration of political themes. The subject was "The State of Political Language." The event was recorded, and is available here.

Our Libertarian Future

I was invited by the good people at "Minding the Campus" to write a response to the recently released 2011 American Freshman Survey. My brief essay is now available on their website. My main point:

What the data also demonstrates is [not only an increase in libertarian toleration, but] a keen and intense emphasis on the self. Today's students simultaneously urge toleration toward others, but also expect to be left alone. Their overarching emphasis upon individual achievement--particularly in the area of career advancement--suggests that the message of "toleration" and "diversity" seamlessly co-exists with a self-centered focus on material success and personal lifestyle autonomy. At risk is a cultivated belief in civic membership, a sense of shared fate and even forms of self-sacrifice.

One telling aspect of the survey has, to my knowledge, received no attention: while 72.3% state that the "chief benefit of college is to increase one's earning power," only 2% of current college graduates are enrolled in an ROTC or other military program. While likely career choices are fragmented among many possible choices (with the largest numbers of responses clustering around the choices of engineer, physician and business, together totaling 28%), only 1.5% responded that they foresaw a military career; 0.9% intended to enter government or public policy; and .1% stated an intention to become a member of the clergy. As many respondents indicated a likely future of unemployment (1.5%) as those willing to serve in the military!

...

Several disquieting questions should come to mind: what kinds of citizens will these people grow up to be? What kinds of parents and what kinds of neighbors? They will likely be willing to leave other people alone--but will they care about others? Will they love? Will they serve? Will they sacrifice? According Charles Murray in his recent book Coming Apart, it is the upper classes (which will be composed by the students in this survey) that have largely abandoned any idea of trusteeship and moral and civic responsibility toward those who have not won the meritocratic sweepstakes. The survey suggests that this divide will only deepen in coming years.

I fear that we are not ushering in a utopia of toleration and sensitivity, but one of indifference and self-absorption. Today's young people have deeply absorbed the lessons that have been taught them by their elders. Do we truly think a civilization can persist when it teaches its young that the most important thing in life is indifference toward others and that the means to happiness is earning the most money?