14
PARTISAN REVIEW
Given his narrow focus, which is almost excessively intellec–
tual, it is not surprising that Bloom does not indicate how we are to
extricate ourselves from what he considers to be an educational
morass. Clearly, history cannot be reversed, nor can it be redirected
by the exercise of moral or political will. Bloom talks endlessly about
the necessity of getting out of our cultural relativism. But he stops
short of saying how we are to accomplish this. He exhorts us con–
stantly to teach genuine values to the young, and he extols such
hoary abstractions as "the true, the good, the beautiful," which
presumably are to be taught to American youth . Indeed, Bloom
talks about
the truth,
as though everyone knew what it was but failed
to teach it. Who, in Bloom's educational utopia, is going to decide
which truth, which theory, which ideas are going to unify college
curricula and methods of teaching?
The fact is that relativism - both philosophical and cultural–
has been accepted by modern thinkers not simply because they
spurn absolute values, but because the argument for absolute values
does not hold up. The dispute over philosophical truth and moral
values has been won, so to speak, by the relativists, and a plea for
the return of absolutes - such as those advocated by some re–
ligions - is bound to be seen as a longing for an irretrievable past.
To be sure, the relativist position has been carried too far, to the
point where discriminations and distinctions have been almost to–
tally blurred. But absolutes are not the answer to a relativism run
wild.
Bloom insists he is not motivated by nostalgia for an
aristocratic society ruled by a political and intellectual elite. But his
educational prescriptions are modeled on the highly differentiated
class systems of the past. Essentially, Bloom's idea of the university
is an aristocratic one. It presupposes an artistocracy of taste and
knowledge, that existed in the past only in societies with a more or
less homogeneous ruling class - and then only partially. In addition,
his understanding of literature - and therefore how it should be
taught-is antiquated: he thinks that poetry exudes beauty and that
literature in general imparts truth and knowledge and is a guide to
proper living. And, for someone who is impatient with cultural
cliches, Bloom is shockingly banal in his repetition of current cliches
about the destructive influence of Freud and psychoanalysis on our
culture. Bloom also makes an ignorant gaffe when he says
Partisan
Review
was hostile to the great modernists-Proust, Joyce, Mann,
Kafka. The opposite was of course true.
