The Closing of the American Mind, Part Two

Seeking truth in the coming post-post-truth era

Aug 30, 2023

In my last commentary, I maintained that public intellectuals of the Left and the Right have failed to adequately address the critique of American higher education contained in Alan Bloom’s best-selling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. I suggested that Bloom was essentially correct in grasping the importance of liberal higher education in a democracy, but that he makes a not very useful distinction between the function of the great or elite university and that of the state university. And I further suggested that Bloom was on target in seeing liberal education as providing an opportunity for students to know alternative answers to important questions, but (1) questions concerning the historical and structural sources of world poverty and war are among the important questions; and (2) the speeches and writings of the exceptional leaders of the people’s revolutions of the world, and the intellectuals organically tied to them, are among the sources of the alternative answers that should be studied.

Today I reflect on Bloom’s considerations with respect to the widely held view that truth is relative. Bloom and I both seek to avoid the dark implications for humanity of the cynical belief in the relativity of truth. However, Bloom does no more than place his hopes in an imagined and unidentified community that seeks truth.

Bloom believed that the Enlightenment had formulated a solid scientific and moral foundation for modern democratic societies. The Enlightenment emphasized the human faculty for reasoning. It envisioned human freedom as the searching for truth through human reasoning, liberated from the force of tyrants and myths; and in the quest for truth, science and the discovery of truth through scientific investigation play an important role. And the Enlightenment stressed the notion that humans possess inalienable natural rights; it understood the role of government to be the protecting of the inalienable natural rights of citizens.

The American Revolution is rooted in the Enlightenment. The founding documents of the American Republic, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, affirm the principle of the natural rights of citizens, who at their best use their capacity for reasoning to liberate themselves from tyranny and myth. For this reason, Bloom maintains, the American educational system historically was oriented to producing citizens committed to the principle of the natural rights of all citizens and the free exchange of ideas rooted in reason.

However, Bloom maintained, there had occurred a fundamental change in the American educational system, beginning with Charles Beard’s 1913 critique of the economic interests of the Founders. Over the next decades, there emerged the widely accepted view that the Founding Fathers were flawed by racism, sexism, and class bias.

With the delegitimation of the Founders and the founding documents, there was no foundation for discerning the true and the right. As a result, almost every student, Bloom maintained, believes that truth is relative. This was not, for Bloom, a belief that students could defend; rather, it was a belief in which they had been indoctrinated in the American educational system. There thus emerged a fundamental unifying belief in the relativity of truth, tied to a belief that everyone has the equal right to express his or her version of the truth. This epistemological approach cultivates openness to all thinking and all lifestyle choices; intolerance is to be avoided as the primary social sin.

For Bloom, openness to all points of view, without any basis for judgment or evaluation with respect to the different opinions, is an inadequate foundation for building a democratic society. There must be a shared vision of the public good and shared values, beyond the notion that everyone is free to do whatever they please. Attention must be paid to the definition and cultivation of fundamental principles and moral virtues.

Bloom maintains that the debunking of the American founding and the casting aside of the philosophy of natural rights was done in the name of an apparent progressivism that provided more space for the life-style choices of minorities. There emerged the idea of a nation of minorities and groups, each following its own beliefs and inclinations. But, Bloom maintains, the casting aside of the philosophy of natural rights was unnecessary for the attainment of greater space for minorities. The practice of full equality for all, regardless of gender, race, or ethnic group, can be accomplished on a foundation of the philosophy of natural rights. Indeed, this was the approach taken by blacks, women, immigrant ethnic groups, and workers’ organizations prior to the 1960s, which struggled to develop in practice the full implications of the principle of the natural rights of all.

Bloom did not study the modern revolutions of the Third World, and he thus did not appreciate that the approach he advocates against relativism and for the step-by-step protection of natural rights has been the road taken by the people’s revolutions of the Third World. These revolutions confront a situation of democratic proclamations not followed in practice, and they thus have undertaken struggles for structural changes designed to eliminate the contradiction between the proclamation and the practice, with the recognition that the proclamation itself is an important step forward, even when not yet fully implemented in practice.

Bloom blames the fall of American culture into the darkness of relativism on the naïve acceptance by American professors of concepts of German philosophy in the late 1940s. At that time, American professors were optimistic that a scientific approach to understanding society would lead to historic breakthroughs in social scientific knowledge, equivalent to the advances forged by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton in the natural sciences. To this end, they believed in bracketing values and value judgements, in accordance with the formulations of the German scholar Max Weber. They did not see, Bloom maintains, the dark side of the separation of facts from values and the separation of politics from morality, weakening the capacity of moral sentiments to guide the political outcome. They did not see that value relativism takes us to the dark regions of the soul, where not even dangerous political experiments could be condemned.

I do not find tenable Bloom’s claim of German philosophy as the source of the American fall into relativism. The most influential German thinker on American sociology was Max Weber, whose concept of value relevance—by which he meant the unavoidable influence of cultural values on social scientific investigation—was buried in his epistemological writings and was almost never discussed among social scientists. His concept of ethical neutrality—the obligation of the social scientist to bracket value judgements in scientific investigations—was much more widely disseminated in the social sciences, but this concept is different from a belief in the relativity of values and the relativity of truth.

In my view, American professors and students arrived at the notion of the relativity of values on the basis of their experiences. There had been a workable political consensus in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century, forged on the basis of the founding principles of the nation. Even the divisive issues of race and class were debated within the prevailing consensus with respect to the philosophy of natural rights. But beginning in the late 1960s, a diversity of viewpoints suddenly emerged to dominate public debate: black nationalism, feminism, environmentalism, and homosexual rights, which themselves provoked ideological division in the society; and this phenomenon was accompanied by public awareness of national liberation movements in the Third World as well as anthropological writings with respect to human cultures. The diversity of viewpoints, and the divisiveness of different viewpoints, overwhelmed the American experience. And what is more, the epistemological assumptions of the social and human sciences left the academic community powerless to arrive to any conclusion other than that of the acceptance of diversity as an inescapable human fact, with truth being relative to culture and ideology.

It is true that Weber’s concept of ethical neutrality, the notion that scientific objectivity requires the setting aside of value judgments in social scientific inquiry, had pervasive influence in the social sciences. But its consequences were different from what Bloom believed. The doctrine of value freedom, along with the fragmentation of the social sciences and the humanities, were epistemological assumptions that had profoundly negative consequences for the study of some social problems and issues, poverty and war among them.

Let me elaborate the point with a personal reference. As a teacher in a church-related, non-elite college in the 1990s, I took students to Honduras for educational experiences designed to complement academic study. Upon seeing the living conditions and the phenomenon of children begging in the street, the nearly universal reaction of students was, “this is wrong, and somebody ought to do something about it.” And a follow-up question, “Why does this occur?”

Addressing the question of the sources of poverty in the world requires an investigation that takes you to questions that pertain to the disciplines of history, political science, economics, the nearly defunct discipline of political-economy, sociology, anthropology, and even philosophy and theology. But the situation of the fragmentation of the disciplines did not allow a young academic to pursue such an investigation. You had to confine yourself to the scope of one of the disciplines, and you were sanctioned for ignoring this norm. You were judged by senior professors in your discipline as not being as scholar of that discipline. You likely would be denied tenure on these grounds, and there was a good possibility that the denial of tenure would have the consequence of forcing you out of the profession of college teaching.

If in your desire to know and in your desire to understand the sources of poverty in the world, you were to begin listening to and studying the speeches of social movement leaders in the world; and if you were to observe that the leaders were full of insight, that is, they were capable of explaining the structural sources of the problems of inequality and poverty, and they were putting forth well-reasoned remedies; you could not as a young academic write of this finding. To do so would violate the norm of value neutrality. You were not allowed to say that social movement leaders are morally and factually right and that the powers that be were not, because that would involve taking sides, in violation of the norm of ethical neutrality.

There was in the U.S. academy in the period 1970 to 2010 (perhaps there still is) a subdiscipline of sociology known as “social movements.” The paradigm of social movements literature was “resource mobilization theory,” which maintained that social movements are successful in attaining their goals to the extent that they are able to mobilize resources (hardly a profound insight). A sociologist could indirectly support a particular movement by describing its successful resource mobilization strategies, including its use of an ideology consistent with widely accepted societal values. But if a young academic were to go so far as to say that the leaders of a particular social movement possessed insight and were seeking to teach humanity with respect to the true and the right, our unfortunate young academic would be branded an ideologue, not a social scientist, and would be dismissed from employment and possibly from the profession. These dynamics had a chilling effect on debate on social issues in the academy, independent of the consequences of young scholars being driven from the academic world for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of their scholarship or their commitment to the life of the scholar.

Some academics learned the art of supporting particular social movements in an indirect form, through the presentation of apparently factual analyses, combined with playing upon widely accepted societal values pertaining to equality with respect to race, class, and gender. The effect of this was to distort debate in the academy, inasmuch as many people were not quite saying what they understood and believed. Moreover, this approach left in place without questioning the marginalization of the exceptional contributors to the heritage of human knowledge, condemned to marginalization because their insights were articulated in a context of political practice.

Allan Bloom did not confront such challenges, because he did not attempt to study practical problems like inequality and poverty, considering such lines of investigation to be beneath the dignity of a professor in an elite university. Therefore, he was not able to discern the nefarious consequences of the doctrine of value freedom and the fragmentation of the disciplines of the social and human sciences. His critique of higher education entirely overlooks this fundamental limitation.

The inadequate epistemological premises of American higher education had other nefarious consequences. They prevented academics from working through to resolution of the question of the relativity of values and the relativity of truth. They led to unawareness of a gradually evolving and increasingly evident fact; namely, that the seeds to the resolution of the question of relativity were being sown in the people’s social movements of the world. The exceptional leaders of the people’s revolutions in the various regions and cultures of the world were meeting with and listening to one another. On this basis, they were learning to formulate common principles and conclusions with respect to necessary social changes, in spite of their diversity. Indeed, unity amidst diversity would eventually become their rallying call.

The exceptional leaders, therefore, were implicitly showing that the road to truth was not value freedom but dialogue across civilizations, in which mutual learning occurs in the realms of both fact and value. In recent decades, they have demonstrated that human consensus can be attained, in spite of cultural, political, and ideological diversity, with respect to moral principles and fundamental historical facts. The exceptional leaders of the world are showing the road to the true and the right.

I sympathize with the late Professor Bloom. It must have saddened him to experience the indifference to the profound insights of the classic philosophers, in institutions that should have been dedicated to discovery and rediscovery of their insights. However, in the final analysis, Bloom completely missed the point. He did not see, in the first place, that the issues that agitate the human mind must necessarily include questions related to human material conditions, the so-called practical problems; and secondly, that it is exceptional leaders, moving for the most part outside the structures of the university, who are educating in theory and in practice concerning the true and the right. As Cubans say, the discourses of Fidel are pedagogical.

We are beginning to see signs of the demise of the post-truth era, driven by its evident nefarious consequences, such that some commentators today are speaking of an era of “post-post-truth.” In my view, in order to put behind us the era of post-truth, we need to appreciate that the human heritage of knowledge includes the formulations of the exceptional leaders who are seeking to construct a more just and sustainable world, and we need to develop a practice of liberal education based in such appreciation. Fidel is a contributor to the heritage of knowledge of humanity, as Cubans today know and appreciate, because they have seen and experienced this previously unexpected fact.

Knowledge, ideology, and real socialism in our times

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