Redstate

By ikslawoK Posted in Culture — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

After all of these years, finally, the New York Times is giving perhaps the greatest popular book on philosophy and the state of higher education of the last half century its due on the front page of their website -- of course, in their timelessly patented, backhanded way.

I'm talking about The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, which I read (and didn't really understand except for a few sections, because I was so scatterbrained and full of hormones and rage, and otherwise-inclined) in my senior year of high school, after picking up a copy off the curb at a sidewalk sale in Greenwich Village, of all places.

I used to drive into the Village on the weekends after acquiring my driver's license to escape from the existential ennui of the New Jersey suburb I lived in. I hung out at some coffee shops and restaurants, walked around and people-watched, and generally tried to satisfy my internally roiling angst by hanging out in the hippest places I could find that wouldn't kick me out or steal my car.

One night I happened to walk down Bleecker street and a guy who had been tossed out of his apartment was hawking his stuff on the curb in the humid, stickysweet-smelling New York City night air. One of the books that caught my eye scattered amongst his huge collection of (mostly leftist) castoffs was The Closing of the American Mind. I bought a copy of it for $1.00 (because I thought it was a book that would appeal to my budding leftist sensibilities!!) along with a copy of "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley ("Be careful with that one", he admonished me inexplicably...) and brought it home in my Dad's beat-up Audi and started reading it. I guess I thought at the time that I had picked up a contemporary version of Rules for Radicals.

Whhhhhoooooooooooooooooo. Wrong. Full stop.

To say that The Closing of the American Mind made an impression on me is the understatement of the millenium. It frightened me deeply, because when I first tried to read it, it exposed just how *little* I knew and how dumb I actually was. Reading Bloom at that moment in my life was like drinking from a firehose, and it took me more than a month to get through it, making notes in the margins and highlighting key passages while trying to piece together the history of philosophy from the Ancients through the Moderns and Postmoderns, the Sixties, the role of the University (which I had never experienced) and everything else contained in those dense pages.

The New York Times is talking about it again, in a begrudgingly respectful sort of way. The book was widely panned among certain intellectual cliques at the time, and Bloom published a follow-up ("Giants and Dwarfs") that everyone should also read as an accompaniment. Even without the later volume of essays, it's a testament to Bloom's original work that it is still a topic of current conversation and debate.

It's the best book I've ever read. It frankly makes Candide seem like a pamphlet written by someone with an adult case of diaper rash.

I invite everyone here to reread it and discuss it. It's one of my favorites, and even though I was completely unprepared to read it in high school, enough parts of the book that I did comprehend stuck with me to help lead me back out of the Wood of Error even well after I had gone past the age when I shouldn't be able to retrace my steps.

In my opinion it's one of the 10 most significant books of the last century. You cannot begin to understand yourself as a Conservative unless you take the time to read it and come to grips with it and ascertain where you stand in relation to it.

And far from what the current view of Literature might say, I didn't read this book because I was looking for identification. I was profoundly and painfully shocked when I read it precisely because I couldn't find any of myself in it, except with great diffiulty and a lot of anecdotal storytelling. I love this book because it was the first one that really ever humiliated me the first time I read it, and because it signalled to me just how little I actually knew -- but not because I identified with it. I remember reading it and thinking how little I really knew about anything important discussed in the book. All I had to counter Bloom with was a collection of pop-culture platitudes.

And the truth is that I didn't know anything, and that was a good lesson to learn: because there are times in this life that you might have to "press the reset button" for yourself and return to Square One. If you ever have to do that, I can think of a lot of people much worse than Allan Bloom to help you out.

I'm looking forward to ordering a new copy and rereading it with the benefit of almost two decades' life experience. With a little luck I'll have more to say about it this time around than I did the first time it hit me like a ton of bricks.