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world. He is no friend of the MBA degree. Yet Bloom nowhere attri–
butes to modern capitalism as important a causal role in the sorry
state of higher education as I would, even though from time to time
he is critical of the market. And he would never call himself anti–
bourgeois. To be anti-bourgeois is to wind up in Nietzsche's camp,
and "when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietz–
sche, it is hard to set limits."
Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of
The Closing
of
the American
Mind,
therefore, is its respect for Nietzsche. The title of the introduc–
tion, "Our Virtue," is taken directly from
Beyond Good and Evil.
Nietz–
sche's words on the "last man" from
Thus Spake Zarathustra
constitute
Bloom's own
leitmotif
for this Germanic book. Nietzsche "opened up
the great terrain explored by modern artists, psychologists, and an–
thropologists . ... " The charm of his writings "is undeniable." He
was a friend of artists, the very reactionary men of genius so uncom–
fortable with modernity. His ideas "constitute the profoundest state–
ments about creativity, by a man who had a burning need to under–
stand it."
Thus Bloom is both furious and jealous that his hero was stolen
by the left. When the left had only Marx, Allan Bloom was much
happier, for Marx, in his view, is anything but a profound thinker,
even though Bloom cannot help relying on his skills as a phrase
maker. Yet, his belief that the left took over Nietzsche's ideas seems
to confirm his view that "what happened to the universities in Ger–
many in the thirties is what happened and is happening everywhere."
The Closing of the American Mind,
then, is a quirky book, along
the lines of Henry or Brooks Adams. But there is a difference. The
Adams family really was part of an aristocracy in decline. It would
make sense for either of them to say that "Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton are not what they used to be - the last resorts of aristo–
cratic sentiment within the democracy." But for Bloom to utter those
words is most peculiar. What, exactly, does he want-to restore
anti-Semitism in the elite universities? It may be true that, in his
words, "there is hardly a Harvard man or a Yale man anymore," but
for most of us, that is a good thing, indicating that our prestigious in–
stitutions are more open to merit than connections .
I find little to quarrel with over Allan Bloom's characterization
of today's university students. They are, as he rightly points out,
moral relativists and generally ignorant of the culture of which they
are a part. But like Charles Reich, whose
The Greening ofAmerica
is so
much like
The Closing of the American Mind,
not only in the gerundial
