Allan Bloom again, on the genesis of what’s happening now
[NOTE: The following is a revised and updated version of a post I wrote over seven years ago, based on Allan Bloom’s book published in 1987.]
I’ve written before about Allan Bloom’s masterful The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, here and here.
And I probably will again. It is so richly loaded with thought that almost every sentence might cause the reader to pause and reflect. Plus, it’s extremely readable. Bloom has done something extraordinarily difficult, which is to write a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a very lively style.
Apparently, that’s the kind of guy he was.
On reading the book, I was blown away at the outset by the first few paragraphs of his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue.” And so I’m going to reproduce some of it verbatim, just for you, to whet your appetite for the book itself. Remember as you read this that it was written no later than 1987, and probably a bit earlier [emphasis mine]:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. Those are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—-a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.
Let’s pause here for a moment to digest that. Bloom is saying in 1987 that openness is the only virtue primary education has been dedicated to inculcating for more than fifty years. That would put the beginning in the Thirties. And Bloom isn’t talking just about colleges; he specifically mentions “primary school.”
I have to say that it’s not what I was taught, or certainly not solely what I was taught. I went to primary school in the Fifties, and my teachers were old, really old for the most part. I think most of them were close to retirement age, which would place their births close to the turn of the century or even in the 1800s. That might explain a lot about my education, which was fairly old-fashioned.
Bloom continues [emphasis mine]:
Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
There’s a lot in that paragraph, too. But the situation has changed since he wrote it, and even since I wrote my earlier post on the subject. The idea that the beliefs of the past were “mad” has now given way to the idea that all those beliefs are evil, and we can’t even learn about the people who believed that and their other accomplishments. We must obliterate them and their symbols, and ignore or belittle their accomplishments. And the last sentence, about not thinking you’re right at all, has very much given way to the idea of the left that the only right thing is what the left says it is. They can change that from day to day, as the left is wont to do, but they’re still always right (including in the moral sense).
Bloom again [emphasis mine], with an important and telling anecdote from his own past:
The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated…
Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection,; but even the neutral subject, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person…Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime…A powerful attachment to the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man…
But openness…eventually won out over natural rights, partly through a theoretical critique, partly because of a political rebellion against nature’s last constraints. Civic education turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new. What began in Charles Beard’s Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders being charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests. I asked my first history professor in the university, a very famous scholar, whether the picture he gave us of George Washington did not have the effect of making us despise our regime. “Not at all,” he said, “it doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” To which I rejoined, “But you just showed us that Washington was only using those values to further the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy.” He got angry, and that was the end of it. He was comforted by a gentle assurance that the values of democracy are part of the movement of history and did not require his elucidation or defense. He could carry on his historical studies with the moral certitude that they would lead to greater openness and hence more democracy. The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.
I find that passage about the obtuseness of Bloom’s history professor astounding as well as very descriptive of how we got here. The complete dominance of the radical professors as far as numbers go are a more recent manifestation, although there have long been some. But Bloom was a student of that history professor back in the mid-1940s, having been born in 1930 but having also been precocious enough to get his undergraduate degree at the age of eighteen from the University of Chicago after having entered at fifteen. The unnamed history professor Bloom describes in that passage was almost certainly not a radical. At most he was probably only mildly liberal. Perhaps he even passed for what was then known as conservative. If so, he was also unaware of the lessons to which Bloom refers to in that last sentence I quoted, even though – as Bloom notes – they had just experienced those lessons in WWII. The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.
But Bloom, his student, saw it, even back then, even at so young an age.
Note also the tone of barely-restrained sarcasm; Bloom seems to have had a certain amount of contemptuous anger at those academics who could have been so stupid as to not have realized the effects of their throwing out the precious baby and leaving the dirty bathwater (it seems his first history professor was none too happy with his challenges, either). As the book goes on, some of the best passages involve Bloom’s description of the faculty’s craven abdication during the student uprisings of the 1960s, when he was one of those who tried (in vain, as it turned out) to hold his finger in the dike of the best traditions of Western Civilization. If you read the book, pay particular attention to those uprisings, which were the template for what’s happening today.
[NOTE II: Here’s a very good article about the mess at Cornell in 1969, when Bloom was there. It’s by the great Thomas Sowell, who was also a professor at Cornell at the time the crisis began, although he quit before it reached its fever pitch.]
The always-interesting Thomas Sowell was on Mark Levin’s program last night (Fox) and denounced the use of the meaningless phrase “systemic racism” in a fascinating discussion of his new book about charter schools which are, of course, opposed by the powerful unions and by the party to which the unions contribute so mightily.
“Relativism is necessary to openness, and this is the virtue, the only virtue,” [Bloom]
“And the last sentence, about not thinking you’re right at all, has very much given way to the idea of the left that the only right thing is what the left says it is.” [Neo]
So we have the leftist contradiction that the great absolute truth is that all truth is not absolute; a pseudo-philosophy based upon non-sense.
I never got the grand Bloom equivalency: “Openness = Closedness.” Sounded 1984-ish to me.
Although I’m more conservative than I was in my youth, “truth is relative” still makes sense. Past “2+2=4” and the boiling point of H20 at sea-level, what humans call “truth” gets pretty relative pretty fast.
For instance, I can only understand “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” as truth relative to the Founders themselves and their concept of a Creator.
I mean, I agree they are pretty good truths, but as a rational person I can’t parse that paragraph as anything other than a declaration of axioms for the republic, but no more true than Euclid’s 5th Postulate concerning parallel lines.
“almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”
I have the book and when I read that statement I concluded that Professor Bloom had written a book about morons.
Neo: That would be a Dike you’re referring to. Unless you’re a Polderclast.
*looks innocent after having planted this very double-entendre in a comment thread several days ago*
“I have to see that it’s not what I was taught, or certainly not solely what I was taught. I went to primary school the Fifties”
_______
Well, I was born in 1953, on Long Island, and relativism was absolutely dominant in my HS. It came through very loud and strong, and was based on tolerance. I rejected it, partly because I’m a natural reactionary naysayer, but also because I saw through the illogic of the way it was presented.
It was always based on the notion that what you said was wrong, wasn’t really so. But if that’s true, if you really approve of it (or at least think it indifferent), in what sense are you tolerating it? Yankee fans didn’t have to tolerate other Yankee fans, or Mets fans other Mets fans. It could be a chore to tolerate each other. (Note that, in NY, in my day, you were one or the other. Not both. But everyone hated the Dodgers, Brooklynites most of all.)
So I ended up cutting my teeth on conservatism early. I think I bought my first NR in 1967. And was immensely influenced by T S Eliot, and later GKC and Lewis. When I encountered Bloom, it wasn’t new to me. (Actually, I first encountered him in his translation of The Republic. And Plato, too, was an overwhelming influence.)
I read the book decades ago, and recall nothing specific, but in general was disappointed by Bloom’s fuzzy thinking and imprecise writing. Now in the anecdote about the eminent history professor, it seems obvious that Bloom got the prof’s meaning exactly backwards. The eminent prof was saying that whether or not George Washington was a ratbag didn’t matter, nor did it matter that he was a booster of the Virginia squireocracy; what George was working for had virtues unconnected to and unlimited by his personal failings. But Bloom seems to have cheerfully assumed he meant just the opposite. No wonder the eminent professor was peeved. It’s possible I didn’t finish the book; usually when I encounter bilge of such magnitude I soon realize that I have better things to do than diagnose the author’s delusions.
Bloom’s great fault is that he seems to be devoted to declaring just how smart Allan Bloom is, and everybody else is a clod. Sorry, I’m not enough of a clod to be impressed. The problems he talks about are obviously real. That doesn’t mean he understood them in any useful way.
In passing, It’s over my pay grade, but still cannot help feeling that the problems with Western Thought ***go back a very long way*** and what we’re dealing with is some kind of cultural autoimmune disease or just the universal Human Condition: it’s our innate nature to @$#% things up.
Believe me it’s very tempting to look for the roots in C19/20 developments, but trying to fit that model to the data is (shall we say) not optimal for The Usual Mimetic Scapegoat Suspects.
I’m personally not a huge fan of the irruption of 2 millennia worth of culturally alien textual study and legalistic needle-threading into Western Civ and am not shy about saying so. However, despite some distaste for these, am 100% certain that this is not the Big Picture and that the fault lies in our stars. Rooting *that* out of ourselves instead of taking it out on each other is one hell of a project though.
Black lives matter = good. All lives matter = bad. Males in female locker rooms, bathrooms = good. Males don’t belong in female private spaces = bad. Yeah, of course relativism is obviously the truth and reality is just facts, until TSHTF.
Bottomline, relativism = nihilism. Arm yourselves.
huxley:
‘Although I’m more conservative than I was in my youth, “truth is relative” still makes sense. Past “2+2=4” and the boiling point of H20 at sea-level, what humans call “truth” gets pretty relative pretty fast.
For instance, I can only understand “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” as truth relative to the Founders themselves and their concept of a Creator.’
_______
Well, there are two things going on here. So far as the Declaration goes, I have to agree. The use of “self evident” doesn’t comport with it’s usual meaning. This got me in lots of hot water in college, as I went to UVa, back when Mr Jefferson was still a deity.
But that’s not the whole picture. There is a fundamental problem, if a moral or ethical statement is relative, then you have a fundamental contradiction. In what sense is it moral at all? It cannot just be strong feelings. In my preceding comment I cited sports teams; I could have used food or music. These all bring up strong feelings, but no sane person REALLY thinks they are moral questions. (Red Sox fans are, ipso facto, insane.)
There are 3 ways to defend a statement as self evident.
1. The weakest is common consent. Of the ones in the Declaration, life is strong here. I do not believe you can find a society where it is simply OK to kill someone. Yes, they do differ over where you can draw the line. And that can lead to interesting arguments. But even in the most narrowly defined (caste, race, nation, etc) you will still get in trouble for killing a fellow boyar. And the large number of cases where you can, are always defended, as we defend soldiers in combat or self defense. It is ALWAYS problematic.
2. You can use a reductio (aka “retorsion”). This means assuming it false, and then demonstrating that an absurdity – meaning a self-contradiction – results. This is the most common way.
1. The very strongest, when you can manage it, really is just an explanation of the meaning. This works because that is the real meaning of “self evident”: the predicate in question is contained in the definition of the subject. (These are Aquinas’s words – well the English translation – which Kant used to define “analytic”.)
Now, going on beyond that, would take a long time, and I’ve already gone on too long. But it is what philosophy is all about, back to Socrates. It is in fact the whole point of the Socratic dialogues. And that takes us back to Bloom’s day job. And his point: the kids don’t even know there are arguments against their point. And that does shut their minds really quickly.
A final example. Hadley Arkes wrote of his classes, in which he started with the Lincoln – Douglas debates. On thing that took his students by surprise is that, on this point, they all started agreeing with Douglas. That is, like him, they thought truth was relative.
Eeyore: I appreciate your effort and graciousness, but I’m not getting your point.
Some of the Bloom problem IMO is that what most people mean or intuit by “truth is relative” isn’t that sometimes “2+2=5” or sometimes I might rise to the ceiling like a soap bubble if the Party wills it, but the commonsense notion that human beings are limited by their biology and experiences and so come to different understandings of truth.
Which I believe is Nietzsche’s perspectivism. I don’t see how one honestly gets around that, however unfortunate it may be that the left has used it as a battering ram against the West and the Enlightenment.
“here is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them”
Years ago, I sat in on part of a college philosophy class. The professor, clearly not a typical professorial example, developed a critique of moral relativism. Students were shocked, practically disoriented by this radical idea.
To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the intelligentsia imagine so many thing in the trance of navel gazing.
If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them
I see this partly as a developmental issue. Teenagers are realizing that the comfortable, secure child’s world in which they grew isn’t the only world and other people have other worlds.
IMO that’s a big, important step in maturing. That students might be shocked when a professor with a Ph.D challenges them does not impress me at all.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
–The Declaration of Independence
_________________________________________________
Are these truths absolute and self-evident? How do you know?
huxley,
Keep on keep on trucking towards that dead end street/abyss. “How do you know?” When the screen door hits your ass. 🙂 Timing is everything.
Maybe I’m just muddle headed today, but why isn’t the behavior of the Founding Fathers sort of “excused” by a truly relativist viewpoint?
“And the last sentence, about not thinking you’re right at all, has very much given way to the idea of the left that the only right thing is what the left says it is. They can change that from day to day, as the left is wont to do, but they’re still always right (including in the moral sense).” – Neo
One example among many, but I just read it a few minutes ago.
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2020/07/13/ya-dont-say-drew-holden-takes-cnn-and-the-rest-of-the-media-to-the-shed-in-timeline-thread-of-their-own-anti-mask-tweets/
It would be nice if some of these journalists had a basic grasp of English grammar, but I’ve given up on that finally.
However, having a grasp of Truth and Impartiality might be nice features.
Keep on keep on trucking towards that dead end street/abyss. “How do you know?” When the screen door hits your ass. ? Timing is everything.
parker: Sounds like you’ve got an anti-reason dead-end you’re comfortable with. It’s OK with me.
Maybe I’m just muddle headed today, but why isn’t the behavior of the Founding Fathers sort of “excused” by a truly relativist viewpoint?
BravoRomeoDelta: I never got that either.
The Postmodernists seem to have arranged a loophole so that every point of view must be deconstructed except itself.
huxley:
Obviously, they are not self-evident to an atheist, who has no belief in a Creator. Nor are they self–evident to tyrants. The Founders were not dumb; they knew that.
I believe that what they were saying was that they HOLD the truths to be “self-evident” – that they are the starting point of good government and of a good life itself, and without them all is chaos and misery, and that they do not have to be proven because they are “self-evident.”
You also write:
No, that’s not what it means, although you probably are correct that it’s what some people think it means. Of course different human beings come to different understandings of truth – that in and of itself is “self-evident.” Very few if any people disagree with that. Moral relativists believe that there really is no truth – or that the only truth is that there really is no truth, which of course contains a contradiction. There is no overarching Truth, in other words. Plus, we cannot even say that one truth is any better than any other truth.
That, of course, doesn’t stop them from declaring all sorts of truths, some of them quite absurd.
I’ve previously written posts on the subject of cultural and moral relativism: this and this.
huxley:
And Bloom wasn’t challenging some comfortable, secure child’s world. He wasn’t saying “parents aren’t perfect” or “the world can be a scary place” to a bunch of teddy-bear-clutching kids. He was talking to students of 18 and up, old enough to be drafted and get sent to war, for example, who should not have been the least bit shocked by the rather simple and relatively conventional thing he was saying. And yet they were, because no teacher prior to him had challenged their previous beliefs in this way. Their teachers had taught them just one thing as a sort of gospel. He is not really criticizing the students, he’s criticizing the lack of challenge in their entire high school education.
Sowell makes a point that leftists (and most of the elite rightists as well) have been dodging for years, in the context of black militant activists coming to Cornell and doing what all militant activists do.
https://www.hoover.org/research/day-cornell-died
I wasn’t surprised to learn that most (or all?) of the “hate crimes” at Cornell were hoaxes, but this actually was something of a shock to me.
That Cornell would have gone after the lower-ranking black applicants because of their ghetto image, rather than admitting black students who might actually be able to do the academic work, is unfathomable to me.
Sowell has been of almost prophetic stature in many ways, but he missed reading the tea leaves here:
On a side note: my primary through high school education (1960s) did not feature any of the philosophical relativism or moral ambiguity Bloom noted, but that may be the difference between his urban environment on the East Coast (??) and mine in rural West Texas.
To offer my $0.02 here, I think that one problem with this relativism of truth is that we confuse (or at least fail to discriminate) between the truism and the symbol for it. Take the classic 2+2=4. Hold up two fingers; now hold up two more. One might argue that he represents those fingers by the symbol “5”. After all, “4” or “5” are just synthetic symbols of the number of exposed fingers. The choice of the symbol does not change the reality of the number of fingers being displayed.
The same thing with gender. Gender is a linguistic/literary construction. Even in English, in which we tend not to identify the gender of nouns, we sometimes project sex characteristics onto inanimate objects, e.g., a ship referred to as “she” or male and female electrical outlets. Now calling a ship “she” doesn’t give the vessel a sex, and likewise one’s choice of pronouns doesn’t change what each of us carries between our thighs; that is the real determinant of sex just as the number of exposed fingers is the real determinant of a given quantity. All the rest are just symbols which, over time, have become traditionally accepted to represent those realities (“4”, “male”, “female, etc.).
AHA! There’s the real target, that pesky “tradition.” Let’s eradicate that so that we can build new symbols on different principles; in other words, our principles, not the faulty, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic (fill in the blank)-ophobic principles of those founding fathers or those ancient Romans and Greeks.
The problem, however, is that if Humpty Dumpty choses words which only mean what HE deems them to mean, then communication (and thus civilization) completely breaks down because if you get to define the meaning of your symbols without common structure, then, first, I get to define my symbols based upon my own structure, and second, I have no obligation to accept either your structure or your meaning.
So, you can call me “racist.” It’s just gibberish to me.
Wiki says Bloom was born & raised in Indianapolis, and educated in Chicago.
tom swift:
Well, call me a clod, because I’m very impressed by Bloom’s “bilge.”
You write:
That not at all how I read what Bloom wrote. It seems quite clear to me that Bloom well understood that the professor meant his students to understand that Washington “had virtues unconnected to and unlimited by his personal failings.” What Bloom was saying was that because the professor was harping and harping on those personal failings, it could bleed into and taint their understanding of these virtues in a way that would make them ultimately throw out the baby with the bathwater.
And that is indeed one of the many processes by which we have come to the point we’re at today. Bloom seems to have seen that back in the 1940s, when he was a student at the U of Chicago, which he entered at the age of fifteen.
(Just saw that Neo addressed this, but I am going to add my $.02 anyway; does that give us 4 cents now, or a nickel?)
“The eminent prof was saying that whether or not George Washington was a ratbag didn’t matter, nor did it matter that he was a booster of the Virginia squireocracy; what George was working for had virtues unconnected to and unlimited by his personal failings. But Bloom seems to have cheerfully assumed he meant just the opposite.” – tom swift
Bloom said:
Granted, Bloom may have been mind-reading about the professor’s obtuseness, with the benefit of foresight then and hindsight when he was writing, but the point is that we have reached our abysmal situation today because so many of the professors concentrated on the ratbaggery (How can they make that judgement anyway, since all truth and morals are relative? Wasn’t Washington just living his own truths?) and failed to support the maintenance of the good democratic values, somehow or other expecting the students to intuit those values, even under the onslaught of the debunking of the Founders, and remember that “what George was working for had virtues unconnected to and unlimited by his personal failings” rather than what the professor was emphasizing, which was exactly those failings, and not the virtues.
The professor seems to me to be a choice exemplar of the “useful idiots” of the left, who never seem to connect their actions with the flow of events.
They are akin to the residents of decaying Democrat states and cities who are fleeing to the Republican (or at least more conservative states), where they have been promptly voting for the same cohort of politicians as the ones they left behind, and imposing on their new neighbors the same failed policies that they fled, without making any connection between those policies and the decay.
“The lessons of fascism and the vulnerability of democracy, which we had all just experienced, had no effect on him.” – Bloom
If all truth is relative, then there is no cause and effect.
I believe that what they were saying was that they HOLD the truths to be “self-evident” – that they are the starting point of good government and of a good life itself, and without them all is chaos and misery, and that they do not have to be proven because they are “self-evident.”
neo: Pretty much what I said in my first comment:
I mean, I agree they are pretty good truths, but as a rational person I can’t parse that paragraph as anything other than a declaration of axioms for the republic, but no more true than Euclid’s 5th Postulate concerning parallel lines.
No, that’s not what it means, although you probably are correct that it’s what some people think it means.
neo: It was very much what I believed as a college freshman and all of my friends, so far as I could tell.
And Bloom wasn’t challenging some comfortable, secure child’s world. He wasn’t saying “parents aren’t perfect” or “the world can be a scary place” to a bunch of teddy-bear-clutching kids. He was talking to students of 18 and up, old enough to be drafted and get sent to war, for example, who should not have been the least bit shocked by the rather simple and relatively conventional thing he was saying. And yet they were, because no teacher prior to him had challenged their previous beliefs in this way. Their teachers had taught them just one thing as a sort of gospel. He is not really criticizing the students, he’s criticizing the lack of challenge in their entire high school education.
neo: My point was that Bloom challenged teenagers who had grown past the child’s comfortable secure world and had reached the point of maturation where they realized other people came out of other worlds.
That’s the Big Truth an 18 year-old has and it’s not a bad one.
If those kids weren’t impressed by the Allan Blooms life graced them with, maybe it’s because the Blooms weren’t quite as smart as they considered themselves to be.
It’s a pity that Piaget, so far as I know, didn’t deal with development issues of late teens.
huxley:
Reading Bloom’s work, I come to very different conclusions from you.
Bloom really was very smart; he wasn’t just pretending to be. But I don’t see his book as being about trumpeting what a smart smart guy he was. I see it as being about a crisis in the making that he saw and wanted to prevent from getting much worse. The book was a warning, and he was Cassandra. Yes, he’s smart, but it’s not all about him. It’s about his message, and the mess we’re in.
I was seventeen years old when I went to college, and I was nowhere near as naive and protected as his students, although I was naive and protected to a certain extent. I understood even at that age that college was a place to encounter challenging ideas, and I’d already been challenged with many in high school.
I seem to recall that you and I have argued over Bloom many times before. He really rubbed you the wrong way, if I recall, when he discussed rock music, which he was utterly against. It’s not my favorite part of his book; I think he way overstated the case. But I also think that rap music has proven that his argument there had at least a kernel of truth.
neo: And I come to different conclusions than you. Yes, we have argued over Bloom before.
tom swift laid it on a bit thick, but as far as I’m concerned, Bloom is a thoroughly second-rate mind, in love with his own opinions, and with an ax to grind. None of which I find recommending. Furthermore, he was ignorant and bigoted about rock music, since you bring it up.
Bloom was prescient with with his insights about the Cornell protests and maybe in the long run that’s more important than my cavils with him.
However, I note that no one here so far has defended their horror about “truth is relative” by arguing for “truth is absolute.”
We just have parker saying, he knows, “When the screen door hits your ass.”
parker would have made a good hippie (“You just know, man”) if he had gotten to LSD before he got to guns.
Well, Eeyore seemed to argue against “truth is relative” and, I guess, for “truth is absolute” or could be absolute but I couldn’t follow the argument.
As a follow up to my post above @7:37 pm, Thomas Sowell as quoted over at LegalInsurrection:
I was born in 1945 while my father was overseas. Later we moved to and I grew up in one of those subdivisions for young guys with families getting started, which meant it was sort of like growing up in a giant VFW encampment.
Relative truths were thin on the ground. Some things, some things not explained to children, were just….wrong. Or right. Or true. There was no room for argument.
I never saw a relativist argument that didn’t seem like digging a tunnel through actual truth for the convenience of the digger. IOW, first came the goal and then the search for a tunnel, which may have to be manufactured.
Current and not so current condemnation of the Founders isn’t based on morality. It’s designed to discredit the Founding and all that followed; politically, culturally, and especially the Constitution. First came the goal, then the relativism.
Several years ago, making an analogy and referring to something which actually happened and which could be documented, one guy generously offered to consider my “lived truth”. The follow-on is likely to be that his lived truth does not include that which actually happened and which threatens his point. Therefore, he doesn’t have to deal with it.
“The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism.
The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”
“Son you have to believe in something or you’ll fall for anything” lyric of unknown attribution
“If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Fyodor Dostoevsky paraphrased.
Result; inescapable societal dissolution.
(shifting the order just a bit, for pedagogical purposes)
“Are these truths absolute and self-evident? How do you know?” – huxley
“I believe that what they were saying was that they HOLD the truths to be “self-evident” – that they are the starting point of good government and of a good life itself, and without them all is chaos and misery, and that they do not have to be proven because they are “self-evident.” – Neo
“I mean, I agree they are pretty good truths, but as a rational person I can’t parse that paragraph as anything other than a declaration of axioms for the republic, but no more true than Euclid’s 5th Postulate concerning parallel lines.” – huxley
Euclid’s postulates, or axioms, have never been “proven” to be true, but, if they aren’t accepted, all of geometry falls apart, and it becomes very difficult to explain the world, and make buildings that don’t fall down.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EuclidsPostulates.html
Altering the fifth postulate led to the rise of alternative geometries. They are logically consistent, and are useful for some applications.
When we don’t accept as axioms that all (people) are created equal (under the law and in respect to other people), that they have certain rights (from some source superior to the government and public opinion) that cannot be alienated (taken from them), and that everyone is entitled to pursue whatever that person calls happiness (barring psychopaths and serial murderers), then society falls down.
Altering any of those three axioms leads to governmental systems that are NOT logically consistent, or so it seems to me; those systems certainly have been practiced throughout history, sometimes for long periods, but if you drop one axiom, you eventually drop them all.
I would rather keep them.
huxley:
I assume you read this link?
“Truth is absolute” is not the only opposite of moral relativism. It is, however, the most extreme opposite.
Another stance that is opposed to moral relativism is that truth does exist, and that it is our duty to come as close to it as we humanly can, knowing that we only see truth through a glass darkly. But we can still see it and strive to know it.
AesopFan,
Well said.
huxley,
Whether certain rights are actually granted by a creator is not nearly as important as the fact that non-revocable rights can ONLY exist if the great majority in a society accept the premise that they have been granted by a creator. As ‘rights’ that extend from a then popular consensus of opinion can be easily rescinded by a later consensus of opinion, which makes such human rights mere privileges. And privileges are always subject to the whim of those who hold power.
Lately I’ve been coming back to Evan Sayet’s “grand unified theory of liberalism.” I still find it very thought-provoking.
https://youtu.be/eDb3sTwD_vA
“The real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found in the attempt to be right.”
I don’t think people have stopped believing truth is relative. I’ve definitely seen people attacking reason and objectivity lately. Are they really convinced of their moral rightness because they actually now think there’s a such thing as the true, the good, and the beautiful? Or is this just about winning, about power? Or as Sayet believed, a foolish but genuine desire to make the world a better place by destroying all standards until no one’s better than anyone else?
Bloom is a solid reason why scientists dismiss philosophy in particular and the humanities in general.
I find that to be sad, but true.
Weirdly enough, my math prof buddy (really, ex-university roommate) assures me that most mathematicians, even today, are Platonists. The Timeaus lives!
Now that the hysterics of the Left are commandeering the obeisance of the scientists, it seems that leaving the relativists cabined off, as a strategy, has
failed — again. Quelle surprise.
“is this just about winning, about power? Or as Sayet believed, a foolish but genuine desire to make the world a better place by destroying all standards until no one’s better than anyone else?”
Trotskyites believe that, with the right people in charge, mankind can be made better. Stalinists are solely about power.
The ‘equality’ of misery is a powerful attraction for the intellectual egotist, who arrogantly assumes that reality can be controlled.
The Postmodernists seem to have arranged a loophole so that every point of view must be deconstructed except itself.
I’ve always wondered about that. The claim is always “all narratives are deliberately built in order to privilege some people and oppress others.” And yet somehow that claim isn’t built in order to privilege its proponents and oppress its opponents, I guess.
Maybe this is why I got a C in Philosophy in college.
Tangential but germane to this discussion, see the essay by Scott McKay in American Spectator in which he highlights an interview with Yuri Bezmenov. Bezemenov cites the four stages of Marxist takeover as: Demoralization; destabilization; crisis; and finally (new) normalization.
The parallels to what is happening today and this thread’s discussion of the “relativity” truth are certainly worth noting (H/T Instapundit):
https://spectator.org/four-stages-of-marxist-takeover-the-accuracy-of-yuri-bezmenov/
I never saw a relativist argument that didn’t seem like digging a tunnel through actual truth for the convenience of the digger. IOW, first came the goal and then the search for a tunnel, which may have to be manufactured.
Bingo.
I can’t resist asking. Is it absolutely true that truth is relative or is it only relatively true that truth is relatively?
The “fifty years” comment on education is interesting. I observed that there was an inflection in education in the US in the 1920s or so. Prior to that, there was a lot of research and trials on teaching students how to study.
‘How to Study and Teaching How to Study’ (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University was highly cited but seemed to have been tossed aside by American educators circa 1920s. When I found this book a few years ago, I was angry as I could have used this knowledge and skill back in the ’70s when I was in school. Even today, it seems ignored with many “researchers” wondering how to improve children’s study habits. But no university or even elite private prep school lists anything near what McMurry wrote of on their “Studying” advice webpages.
Of course, a student who can independently process a book or lecture is likely to develop independent thought. But it did take until the retirement of the old professors in the 1970s who had been trained in how to study in the old methods to really get the decline going.
Consider this from ‘Teaching Boys and Girls How to Study’ (1919) by Peter Jeremiah Zimmers, Superintendent of City Schools, Manitowoc, Wisconsin
“One of the most important functions of the class period is the development of initiative and self-reliance in pupils. These qualities are fundamental, not only in proper study, but they lie at the very basis of a democracy such as ours, and it is important that the school make provision for their development. In these days of hysteria it is essential that the future citizen be trained to stand on his own feet and to think for himself.
“The ordinary man never trains himself to make a move unless some one tells him to do so. The advancement of successful men from position to position is due largely to this faculty of doing things without being told. Successful men have the nerve and decision to act quickly and assume the initiative in times of emergency. Men who are most in demand are the ones who can stand up under responsibility and can be counted on to do the right thing without depending on somebody else.
“How is initiative developed? Certainly not by having the teacher take all the initiative and responsibility in the conduct of the class period. To develop initiative, the pupils must exercise initiative, and the class period must provide this opportunity. To secure this initiative, there must be a change in the conduct of the class period.”
Further, from the letter of resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times (again, H/T Instapundit:
https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter
or, as previously noted in this thread by Richard Aubrey,: “I never saw a relativist argument that didn’t seem like digging a tunnel through actual truth for the convenience of the digger. IOW, first came the goal and then the search for a tunnel, which may have to be manufactured.” [above @ 10:33 pm].
“The professor did not see any relation between what he was saying about the Founders and what would ultimately undermine our republic and all the values he probably held dear.”
And such blindness continues up to the present. Bari Weiss just resigned from the New York Times and excoriated the woke cancel culture that has taken over the paper, describing it in blunt and threatening terms. And then what does she do?
She writes that, OF COURSE, she’ll continue to read the New York Times. So the very people Weiss describes as dangerous to journalism, democracy, and independent thought can rest assured they’ll continue to receive both Weiss’ money and respect.
It’s nice for Weiss to put the NYT on blast like this but I’d be a lot happier if she understood that SHE is part of the problem as well.
Mike
What is philosophy? What? ti esti?
What at its birth or discovery — a time when we might think philosophy would be quite well articulated (supposing any truthful articulation of a human pursuit to be possible) due to the intensity with which this peculiar motion gripped an early dedicant — what in the life of a man?
Speaking simply, philosophy appears as a love of wisdom (from the Greek phile + sophos).
[In aside, do we know what wisdom is?]
Is love of a thing or person the possession of that thing or person?; or is that love an abiding desire to possess that thing or person, even perhaps a desire never to be fulfilled as such? Is that love a choice? One to be picked up at will, possibly to be discarded also at will thereafter? Or, alternatively, might that love be an involuntary sort of motion; one not chosen, although fully embraced nevertheless?
Ah well. We don’t so much care about this, as we are not moved in this way, or we think we know so much better, since we have come along after so grand a passage of progress?
Allan Bloom, however, did care about these questions . . . and he cared for these to the exclusion of any care what any of you, or we, think of him. This care, in turn, went hand in hand with Bloom’s studies of the enigma of Socrates, whether through studying Aristophanes, Plato or Xenophon, for somewhere in there is the origin of political philosophy, and with it the origin Bloom’s life’s pursuit or work.
Seems like this post might be a useful adjunct to Bari Weiss’s letter.
From Power Line on banning.
https://quillette.com/2020/07/09/it-wasnt-my-cancelation-that-bothered-me-it-was-the-cowardice-of-those-who-let-it-happen/
In a perfect world Dr. Thomas Sowell would have been the first Black President of the United States rather than the poseur Barack Obama.
Universities deliberately avoid teaching of “critical thinking” skills opting instead for indoctrination.
I read, and very much liked, Bloom’s book when it came out in 1987. I thought (and still think) he was badly wrong about Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is widely misunderstood, and I think Bloom was right about the Nietzsche of popular understanding…..
Sadly, I think our great universities signed their own death warrants when they did not deal with the rot brought over by the Frankfurt School radicals.
In a perfect world Dr. Thomas Sowell would have been the first Black President of the United States rather than the poseur Barack Obama.
Sowell is an impressive man of letters, but he’s never had anyone working under him but a few research assistants and he’s never had any interest in public office of any kind.
The most accomplished black pols of the last generation have been Anthony Williams and Robert Bowser. The most appealing black presidential candidate in the last 50 years was Herman Cain, but you can tell listening to him that he’s a marketer at heart. Our first black president should be an experienced executive who accomplished something. (Not an exemplar of hype like Bory Cooker).
“…adjunct…”
(reminds one of “…adjacent”….?)
Anyway, here’s a “horse’s mouth” version:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/tyler-o-neil/2020/07/14/centrist-resigns-from-nyt-exposes-the-new-mccarthyism-at-americas-newspaper-of-record-n640716
(Actually, I’ve been wondering over the past while why she was still working there. Ditto for Bret Stephens.)
Ditto for Bret Stephens
Stephens and Douthat are employed to provide emotional validation for liberals. If they ever wrote anything not designed to attack, bore, or demoralize the rest of us, they’d be fired.
MBunge:
Weiss didn’t say she’d continue to read the Times, not exactly. What she said was this:
She will read a few people who still write for the Times. Only them; not anything else. And whether she’ll read their work at the Times site or elsewhere – on Twitter, or in their books, or in pieces at other sites – she doesn’t say.
I bought Mind as soon as the paperback edition came out, and it remains on my bookshelf. It helped me better understand and provide part of the foundation for my political beliefs. It stands right next to my copy of The Road to Serfdom. Time to read these fine books once again.
I have written a post on Weiss here.
Well, there’s no need to get around it, unless you are dedicated to the proposition that there exists a common humanity that extends beyond the merely taxonomic to the moral and psychic. And that as a result for example, it is really … objectively wrong somehow to, say, sight in a howitzer on a distant group of foraging aborigines, and test the power of explosive shells on them.
This of course is the great problem for the left: How to abolish objective categories, yet stake moral sounding claims and establish prescriptive injunctions on the basis of them. Inclusion is after all so important. For some reason having to do with something.
As was so nicely encapsulated earlier, the secular liberal tradition has been to place those questions off to the side; which can of course be done if we are all nice people and no one makes demands on anyone else to do or to yield up anything.
Sure. Sounds good. If there are no costs to living in such a world it’s no problem. If however, a fat mentally unbalanced lunatic starts camping on your doorstep and screaming for you to render up your children to his/her kind attentions and sexual initiation, then the problems with such an intellectual stance become more obvious. Well, to many, that is.
And, of course that “epistemic humility” implicit in and promised by the preachers of this relativistic take on reality, is never actually lived by them.
Somehow they know that their version of untruth is superior to your untruth; and theirs, if validated by at least a majority of one (itself acknowledged as a convention not to be rooted in some metaphysical truth), has all the life and death moral force of what used to be called truth; and that you are obligated (by some additional untruth or another) to respect it even at the cost of your advantage, and possibly even, life.
Or maybe they are cynics and are just huckstering (the crowd) instead of pestering (reality).*** In that case you might at first think that as cynics they would not plead too much if you had them on the grown and were about to stomp on their windpipe. But a moment’s more reflection reveals that huckstering shells of appetite need no justification, respect no consistency, and laugh at logic: so, they undoubtedly would.
*** a formulation taken from the author of a book on deconstruction.
Damn auto correct, and disruptive phone calls. LOL
“On the ground” not on the grown.
“Weiss didn’t say she’d continue to read the Times, not exactly.”
Yeah, I think you’re straining too hard to deny the obvious. She refers to journalists in the context of them working at the Times and then says she’ll continue to read them. Suggesting she might read them BUT ONLY when they write for someone other than the Times seems a bit silly.
The fact that she beat the Times about the head and shoulders but pointedly declined to add “I won’t continue to be a reader” kind of says it all. She’s going to keep reading. She’s going to keep giving them her money and her attention and, most importantly, her respect.
Some psychologist somewhere has got to do a paper on how the people who are so proud of themselves for demistifying and demythologizing traditional authorities like the Church and the military and the police and government leaders are still naive and trusting little children when it comes to one stinkin’ newspaper.
Mike
Some psychologist somewhere has got to do a paper on how the people who are so proud of themselves for demistifying and demythologizing traditional authorities like the Church and the military and the police and government leaders are still naive and trusting little children when it comes to one stinkin’ newspaper.
Childhood indoctrination works.
Bloom is a thoroughly second-rate mind, in love with his own opinions, and with an ax to grind. None of which I find recommending. Furthermore, he was ignorant and bigoted about rock music, since you bring it up.
Perhaps, and Huxley identifies with hippies that have an ax to grind against the Establishment Blooms over counter or mini cultures like the hippies.
All of your identities are wrong and gets in the way of Divine aspirations.
T J:
‘Bloom is a solid reason why scientists dismiss philosophy in particular and the humanities in general.
I find that to be sad, but true.
Weirdly enough, my math prof buddy (really, ex-university roommate) assures me that most mathematicians, even today, are Platonists. The Timeaus lives!’
_______
Mathematicians were Platonists in my day, too. And logicians. It goes with the territory. 2 is NECESSARILY an even number. If you don’t see that, you really are misunderstanding.
That is, of course, where the arguments for objective truth start, as in many Platonic dialogues. See the tour de force at the core of the Meno.
But scientists have largely used a pragmatist view (even if they don’t know that’s what it is), “if it works, that’s all I mean by ‘true'”. Of course, this fails because there is no way to get “works” to mean any more than “produces results I like.” The fact that you have a formal description defining what you like, doesn’t change that.
I wasn’t so much arguing for absolute truth, as simply laying out the basis for saying what one can do to say that a proposition is self evident. Note that, one of the premises – that there is a Creator – was explicitly denied by Aquinas as being self evident. That doesn’t mean he didn’t think it couldn’t be demonstrated – he gave Five Ways (actually, 6). But there is a difference between objectively demonstrable and self evident.
Note also that huxley’s 2nd example of objective truth “the boiling point of H20 at sea-level” is also not self evident. We have to check. That is a key difference between experimental science and deduction. Both aim at truth, but truths of different kinds, and therefore by different methods.
Perspectivism cannot work, because while it claims not to be full on relativism, it ends up saying that what is true for A is false for B. And that takes you right back to pure relativist skepticism. As Roger Scruton put it, when someone argues for that, he’s telling you not to believe him. So don’t.
It would entail believing – at a minimum – that there was really no truth of the matter studied by science, as well of course as believing that Washington wasn’t President, or really, anything. (Pure logic possibly excepted.)
Note that this does NOT entail a claim that we have got that much of the truth. Nor does it deny that we often err in reasoning. But dismissing reason because we don’t do it well is like blaming math when you messed up your budget. Even to try to make such an argument relies on such things as the law of non contradiction. But it’s a huge area.
I will say that, while I like Bloom OK, he’s not one of my guides. I’m not a Strassian, but I like a lot that they do. For that matter, the great conversion in my thought – c 1980 – was from Plato to Aristotle, and then Aquinas. But I still read Plato by preference. What other philosopher gave us a character as well presented as any novelist could?
Oh yes, when I deny that Mr Jefferson’s words are self evident, I am not denying their truth. Any more than Aquinas was denying God exists. They just need to be argued for. And except for life, that’s a tough one*. Remember that the Founders’ interest in philosophy was very heavily concentrated on the political side. Metaphysics wasn’t that big a concern. Jefferson himself dismissed Plato.
*Well, there is a sense in which, in identifying someone as a man, you have put him in a specific group, all of whose members are, by definition, equally in that group. So, simply considered as “man”, they are equal, as that’s all we know about them, at that level. Hence the difference between those who defended slavery by saying the slaves weren’t really men, and those who regarded it as an unfortunate necessity. (BTW, it had almost died out in the Latin West, but returned with the Renaissance. The big exceptions were those cheek by jowl with Islam. And they, in principle, were enslaving captives of war.)
re eyeore on the meaning of self-evident in the Declaration. Benjamin Franklin inserted that word in place of Jefferson’s “sacred and eternal” (or something like that). It was a term borrowed from plane geometry and Euclid, but in the context of the scientific revolution of the 18th century, of which Franklin was very much a part of, it simply means axiomatic. In other words it is an axiom, not to be disputed, upon which our republic is founded. It is a moral not an empirical axiom however, the ultimate meaning of which is that every person’s happiness is or should be equally important in so far as the design of good public policy is concerned. That’s why our current trade and immigration policies, which discriminate against the low-skilled (especially Blacks), are un-American. They benefit the few,those who have capital including human capital, who were already better off, at the expense of the many.
Another translation of self-evident would be that, other things being equal, a dollar is always worth more to a poor man than a rich one. This is a proposition that contemporary academic economist refuse to countenance, which makes them un-American.
This is a proposition that contemporary academic economist refuse to countenance,
Any class in microeconomics will include discussions in the income elasticity of demand and the trade elasticity of demand, as well as the distinction between normal goods, inferior goods, and luxury goods.
I assume you read this link?
“Truth is absolute” is not the only opposite of moral relativism. It is, however, the most extreme opposite.
Another stance that is opposed to moral relativism is that truth does exist, and that it is our duty to come as close to it as we humanly can, knowing that we only see truth through a glass darkly. But we can still see it and strive to know it.
neo: No, I didn’t read your 2008 post as I recall. I like your blog and your writing but not so much I read everything and remember it, especially not 12 years ago. I hope you don’t expect me to.
But until your comment in this topic, no one has offered any alternative to bagging on “truth is relative” as though only foolish kids could argue for it.
Your “truth does exist but we only see it through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:11 BTW — I love St. Paul) doesn’t contradict “truth is relative” on the level at which I and my friends meant it.
huxley:
Of course I didn’t think you read it all those years ago and remembered it. However, I had already linked it again in a comment on this thread, which I had addressed to you. Here is the comment where I linked it in this thread.