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Sept. 18, 2007
‘The Closing of the American Mind,’ 20 Years Later
“HITS WITH THE APPROXIMATE FORCE AND EFFECT OF ELECTROSHOCK THERAPY” raved Roger Kimball’s review in The New York Times, as quoted on the paperback jacket of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a surprise best-seller in 1987 and the opening salvo in a ceaseless conservative war against the academic and cultural left. On the 20th anniversary of The Closing, and 15 years after Bloom’s death, the most salient issues concerning Bloom are his role in neoconservative Republican circles and his semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating — as in Saul Bellow’s thinly fictionalized account in Ravelstein — in death from AIDS.
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In Bloom’s introductory chapter to his 1990 collection of essays Giants and Dwarfs, titled “Western Civ,” previously published in Commentary, he responded to the reception of The Closing as a conservative tract by claiming that he was neither a conservative ("my teachers—Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche — could hardly be called conservatives") nor a liberal, “although the preservation of liberal society is of central concern to me.” He saw himself, rather, as an impartial Socratic philosopher, above political engagement or “attachment to a party” and denying, against leftist theory, that “the mind itself must be dominated by the spirit of party.”
A close re-reading of his books, however, confirms that they are lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.
Bloom rages against the movements of the 60s — campus protest, black power, feminism, affirmative action, and the counterculture — while glossing over every injustice in American society and foreign policy (he scarcely mentions the Vietnam War).
Bloom’s personal affiliations further belied his boast of being above “attachment to a party” and captivity to “the spirit of party.” Today these statements appear to go beyond coyness into the kind of hypocrisy that has become boilerplate for conservative scholars, journalists, and organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni or National Association of Scholars, whose leaders vaunt their dedication to intellectual disinterestedness while acting as propagandists for the Republican Party and its satellite political foundations. The magazine in which Bloom made these boasts, Commentary, and its then-editor Norman Podhoretz, were prime examples of this hypocrisy. Podhoretz proclaimed in his 1979 book Breaking Ranks about Commentary, “I could say that the reason for our effectiveness [against the New Left’s alleged subordination of intellectual integrity to political partisanship] was a high literary standard.” But in the 80s he turned Commentary into a fan mag for President Reagan and in 1991 commissioned David Brock, in his self-confessed “right-wing hit man” days, to write an encomium to the intellectual gravitas of Vice President Dan Quayle.
For years, Bloom was co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, which received millions from the John M. Olin Foundation. That foundation, whose president was William J. Simon, multimillionaire savings and loan tycoon and Secretary of the Treasury under President Ford, at its peak spent some $55 million a year on grants “intended to strengthen the economic, political, and cultural institutions upon which ... private enterprise is based.
William Kristol wrote a rave review of The Closing in The Wall Street Journal (where his father was on the editorial board), which is also quoted on the paperback jacket; he was at the time Vice President Quayle’s chief of staff, and is now editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard. Kimball, the Times reviewer, was an editor of The New Criterion, and yet another Olin beneficiary. (So much for the Times’ fabled vetting of reviewers for conflicts of interest.) The supposedly liberal mainstream media have been complicit at worst, silent at best, in these conflicts of interest concerning Bloom and other conservative culture warriors, as in failing to consider how much the success of The Closing was attributable to Republican-front publicity channels. Yet conservatives have the chutzpah to accuse liberal academics and journalists of cronyism!
More significant for today is Bloom’s influence as mediator between the ideas of his mentor at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, and what has become known as the “neconservative cabal” of Straussians behind the Iraq War in the administration of George W. Bush. Paul Wolfowitz was Bloom’s student; Bellow’s Ravelstein says of Wolfowitz’s fictitious counterpart, “It’s only a matter of time before Phil Gorman has cabinet rank, and a damn good thing for the country.” Ravelstein depicts Ravelstein’s apartment as a high-tech communications center with a Wolfowitz-like disciple in Washington and other movers and shakers in international affairs during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including the Gulf War — in which Ravelstein and his protégés (few of whose real-life counterparts ever served in the military) privately condemn President Bush for a failure of nerve in not taking Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein.
Avowed Straussians invoke Strauss’s key ideas such as the defense of the manly, militaristic exercise of power by nation-states acting for virtuous ends, the running of government by a behind-the-scenes intellectual elite serving as advisors to the ostensible rulers, and the elite’s use of “noble lies” extolling patriotism, war, religion, and family values, to manipulate the ignorant masses into supporting pursuit of tough-minded realpolitik. My sense, however, is that Strauss’s, and Bloom’s, high-minded philosophical formulations of these ideas have just been vulgarized by Republicans as a pretext for unprincipled American imperialism, hypocritical manipulation of their conservative base’s faith in “moral values,” opportunism by would-be Machiallevian advisors-to-the-Prince, and the kind of tawdry autocracy, secretiveness, venality, and lying that came to mark George W. Bush’s administration. Bellow portrays Ravelstein reveling in the money, celebrity, and influence in Republican politics that ironically resulted from his best-selling book that decried such vulgar distractions from the life of the mind. He is thrilled at being feted by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, as Bloom was. The implicit moral is that intellectuals, whether of the left or right, who aspire to be the erudite power behind the throne typically end up groveling before it.
Even more anomalously, in the past decade or so, conservative attacks on liberal academics — whom Bloom and others like Podhoretz earlier accused of betraying scholarly non-partisanship and intellectual standards — have taken a turn toward ever-more-stridently populist, partisan derision of scholarship and intellect altogether. I made this point in an a column here last year with reference to David Horowitz inciting know-nothing Republican state legislators like Larry Mumper of Ohio and Stacey Campfield of Tennessee to government interference with academic freedom under the banner of The Academic Bill of Rights. (All of the bloviating conservative commentators on my column evaded the issue of conservative flip-flopping between elitist and ad populum lines of argument.)
Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh have presented themselves as champions of the rights of the ordinary people against the latté-sipping “cultural elitists” in university faculties, media, and politics itself — as in the belittling of John Kerry in 2004 as French-looking, or the derision of Al Gore’s scholarly demeanor. Thus Bloom continues to be revered by conservatives, without their registering the bothersome fact that he advocated precisely the kind of cultural elitism that they now savage. (Never mind his atheism and preference for ancient Greek over Judeo-Christian culture, or his tidbits of gay lingo, as in his half-admiring description in The Closing of Mick Jagger, “male and female, heterosexual and homosexual ... tarting it up on the stage.”
All these contradictions in Bloom’s texts and life are an exemplary case of the long-running schizophrenia of American conservatism in what resembles the old Good Cop-Bad Cop routine — Good Cop intellectuals who lay claim to aristocratic traditions and high moral or academic/intellectual standards, and Bad Cop philistines who are the public face of conservatism, in presidents from Coolidge to Reagan to Bush II, in vulgarian billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, along with the corporations and their executives whose pursuit of ever-increasing profits debases culture to the level of the lowest common denominator of taste. The baddest of the Bad Cops are rabble-rousing enforcers like Coulter, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, and Horowitz. It is the utter failure of Bloom and other conservative intellectuals to dissociate themselves from or even acknowledge the vulgar variety of conservatism, that ultimately exposes the hypocrisy of their lofty ideals and their selective indignation against every variety of liberal/leftist villains.
The same compartmentalized thinking that enables highbrow conservatives to champion Straussian-Bloomian elitism yet not speak out against philistine conservatism has enabled them to evade the issue of Bloom’s homosexuality, particularly in regard to Bellow’s Ravelstein. Bellow avowed that his Ravelstein was modeled on Bloom in virtually every detail. The novel’s narrator, a Bellow near-double and Ravelstein’s best friend, repeatedly insists that Ravelstein designated him as memorialist and instructed him to tell the unvarnished truth. That Bloom like Ravelstein was and notoriously misogynistic, is undisputed. In an article on Ravelstein in The New York Times Magazine, D.T. Max quoted Wolfowitz saying that in Bloom’s Chicago circle when he was alive, “‘It was sort of, Don’t ask, don’t tell.’” But whether Bloom had AIDS is disputed. Bellow’s narrator explicitly describes Ravelstein having the symptoms and medical treatment for HIV. After galley proofs circulated, Max reports that pressure was put on Bellow to revise, and he backed down to the extent of telling D.T. Max, “‘I don’t know that [Bloom] died of AIDS, really. It was just my impression that he may have.’” Yet Bellow subsequently made only minor revisions in the passages about HIV for the final book.
Furthermore, both Bloom and Ravelstein had a young, long-term male companion, whom they held in high regard and made their heir. In the galleys, they are said to be lovers, but in the published version Ravelstein “would sometimes lower his voice in speaking of Nikki, to say that there was no intimacy between them. ‘More father and son.’” Ravelstein also “disapproved of queer antics and of what he called ‘faggot behavior.’” Yet Bellow’s narrator also says Ravelstein “was doomed to die because of his irregular sexual ways.” Ravelstein himself says, “I’m fatally polluted. I think a lot about those pretty boys in Paris. If they catch the disease, they go back to their mothers, who care for them.’’
A rather vague sequence in which the dying Ravelstein says he still obtains sexual relief from “kids,” and asks the narrator to write a check for an unidentified one, is apparently a censored version of a passage in the galleys that, according to Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, read as follows:
Even toward the end Ravelstein was still cruising. It turned out that he went to gay bars.
One day he said to me, “Chick, I need a check drawn. It’s not a lot. Five hundred bucks.”
“Why can’t you write it yourself?”
“I want to avoid trouble with Nikki. He’d see it on the check-stub.”
“All right. How do you want it drawn?”
“Make it out to Eulace Harms.”
“Eulace?”
“That’s how the kid spells it. Pronounced Ulysee.”
There was no need to ask Ravelstein to explain. Harms was a boy he had brought home one night. . . . Eulace was the handsome little boy who had wandered about his apartment in the nude, physically so elegant. “No older than sixteen. Very well built....”
I wanted to ask, what did the kid do or offer that was worth five hundred dollars....
James Atlas’s biography of Bellow confirms Hitchens’ account of the galleys and adds, “On one occasion [Ravelstein] recruits a black youth from the neighborhood to satisfy him, insisting that he practices ‘safe sex.’” The racial factor here is disturbing, especially since the passage immediately follows a scornful comment by Ravelstein about the South Chicago “ghetto.” It also highlights the absence of any mention in The Closing of the vast black “neighborhood” that surrounds Bloom’s idyllic University of Chicago.
Atlas’s Bellow biography, published shortly after Ravelstein in 2000, contains only a few pages about the novel tacked on at the end, which cite Max and Hitchens but add little to their accounts of Bloom, other than the above sentence and another saying, “A frequenter of the sex emporiums of North Clark Street, Bloom confessed to Edward Shils that he ‘couldn’t keep away from boys.’”
Now, both at the time of Bloom’s death, when the obituaries labeled his cause of death a combination of bleeding ulcers and liver failure, and subsequently, the issues of Bloom’s predatory homosexuality and AIDS have been evaded by Bloom’s allies. Bellow’s own accounts are quite confusing. After proclaiming that Ravelstein was a true-to-life homage to his great friend Bloom, it would seem malicious beyond belief for him to have fabricated out of whole-cloth a character “destroyed by his reckless sex habits,” whom he knew everyone would identify as Bloom — especially if, as he later claimed in the Max interview, he really didn’t know the truth.
These questions might not be worth dwelling on if Bloom and his book had not been canonized by social conservatives and Straussians, both of whom anathematize homosexuality and sexual promiscuity of all kinds. If Bloom’s private life was indeed louche, doesn’t that render suspect the encomiums in The Closing to Platonic love, especially in The Symposium, and Bloom’s denunciation of modern sexual license? And might the stonewalling by Bloom’s allies be an instance of the Straussian “noble lie”? (In his Commentary review of Ravelstein, Podhoretz, who elsewhere rages against homosexual promiscuous “buggery” and pederasty, displayed his infallible double standard toward leftist adversaries versus rightist allies in ignoring the more tawdry details to give Bloom dispensation for keeping his homosexuality discreetly closeted, and in accepting at face value Bellow’s late disclaimer about Bloom having AIDS.) Indeed, the Bloom case might be paradigmatic of neoconservatives’ predisposition toward dissembling and covering up vices in their own ranks that belies their exacting of moral rectitude from everyone else.
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Comments
Lazere article
ok, so the man was a hypocrite, engaging in homosexual activity while decrying the moral behavior of radicals in the Sixties. some of his followers became partisans of Ronald Reagan, and critical of left-leaning professors. yet the article by mr. Lazere is itself narrowly partisan and gossipy. one would think Bloom’s ideas—sound or unsound—should be engaged on their intellectual merits. smearing his character does not speak well of the author or the editors of your publication.i agree with the professor who complains that the predictable rant from the two extremes in this long-running “debate” tends to discourage intelligent discussion.
jim brogan, at 8:35 am EDT on September 18, 2007
Pot calling kettle black
” .. in vulgarian billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, along with the corporations and their executives whose pursuit of ever-increasing profits debases culture ..”
Vulgarian? This is vulgar —
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZXv_s1GQQAw
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VAtUz7JM7TI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cfnn7wTgoE8
by self-entitled, tax-aided Tenured Radicals and their mindless minions whose pursuit more money and control debases culture — and Stalin-stomps on the basic constitutional rights of others.
And BTW: what does homonormativity have to do with economics? Nothing — unless one wants to just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah ...
Also: who’s network has given U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) 300% more airtime, Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch?
Murdoch, geniuses. His network is talk-oriented, not video-oriented.
Buzz, at 8:50 am EDT on September 18, 2007
BRAVO!
Licentious, greedy hypocrites all.
Conservative republicans rail against “Big Government” controlling our lives, but have no problem with “Big Church” telling us what to do. The one exemption in Government is “Big Military".
Of course, “Big Business” is a special category of its own exempted from all liability and effects of their causes.
Rapacious profits fattened by no taxes, no social conscience or feelings of philia are the hallmarks of “me first” conservatives.
Kinder, Gentler Liberal Idealist, at 8:50 am EDT on September 18, 2007
I am taken aback by the attempt in the other letters to dismiss the critical importance of hypocrisy. Certainly, the article goes on a bit long on Bloom’s/Ravelstein’s sexual peccadillos, but there is something at essence here, which is that the conservative ideology is rife with hypocrisy. Critiquing non-marital sexuality, yet indulging (in a growing number of cases) in very different practices themselves, whether it be girlfriends outside their own marriage while impeaching a President, airport bathroom antics, multiple marriages, preying on Congressional pages, etc. or sending young men to war when they themselves, in great number, have never gone. If this is the battle for civilization itself, why are Bush’s daughters not signed up? And yet, you think it’s ok to send these conservative hypocrites to teach youth? Actually, it’s not OK. Stanford has a real dilemma on its hands letting Rice back to resume her tenured position. It’s not her academic freedom, it’s her lying in public to please her master. Should someone like that be allowed to teach? And what about Wolfowitz? He well knew that this whole Iraq thing was planned from the mid-90s and that he and his colleagues only sought the excuse, which they found in 9/11. Should someone like that be allowed back at Johns Hopkins simply because he has tenure? Liars and hypocrites set loose on youth!? In my opinion, this is not a minor matter to be dismissed with a “let’s get on with it.” The article discusses the essence of conservative double-talk, the duopoly of shills (thinkers and publicists), and it is not a good idea to avoid these issues. One could say that Bush II learned his arrogance of power lessons from Bush I when he avoided prosecution on Iran Contra, and now look what we have with Iraq. No, it is not good to allow the indiscretions and hypocrisies to go undiscussed—and perhaps unpunished.
Gary, Hypocrisy—No Big Deal, at 9:15 am EDT on September 18, 2007
predators
Excellent article, and I especially like Gary’s response. I would only add, as the article does, that the sexual behavior of so many of these closeted conservative hypocrites isn’t just unavowed homosexuality, it’s also in many cases predatory. These creeps are worse than hypocrites. Why the fascination, anyway, with underaged boy bodies?
millie wink, Assoc Prof, at 9:25 am EDT on September 18, 2007
Tu Quoque
Before any more conservative commentators jump in with the tu quoque fallacy, along the lines of, “Yeah, well liberals are hypocrites too,” please note that this is basically arguing that two wrongs make a right. Is this not precisely the kind of moral relativism that Bloom and other conservatives denounce? Aren’t you folks the ones who defend absolute moral values and practicing what you preach? So shouldn’t conservatives—who are so ostentatiously self-righteous— be the first ones to criticize hypocrisy in their own ranks? Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone.
An editorial cut obscured my point that Irving Kristol, William’s father, was a key figure in the Olin Foundation. And I goofed in saying William was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff when he reviewed The Closing in the Wall Street Journal. Quayle wasn’t elected Vice President until the next year.
Donald Lazere, at 10:10 am EDT on September 18, 2007
I think Professor Lazere’s analysis of the contradictions in Bloom’s book (and life) is fundamentally sound. I regret, though, that Lazere succumbs to the temptation of using some of the same ad hominem, guilt-by-association rhetoric for which he rightly decries the “bad cops” on the right like Coulter and Horowitz. Unfortunately, this kind of rhetoric is common to both the academic left and the academic right. And as others have pointed out, it tends to obscure many more interesting potential sites of debate.
For example: I just quickly re-read the third part of “Closing,” and was struck by how eerie it is that Bloom’s critique of Martin Heidegger, in light of Professor Lazere’s analysis, applies equally well to Bloom himself.
Tim Mayers, Associate Professor at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, at 10:55 am EDT on September 18, 2007
Lazer on Target
Professor Lazere’s article reconfirms many other research studying the authoritarian personality. The first studies began after WWII with the F-factor, which defines one of the characteristics of authoritarian personality as the tendency of projectivity, to project undesirable traits on to others (“Pot calling kettle black”). (1)
In the 1960s, Diana Baumrind’s studies found that different personalities could be attributed to four types parenting styles (Authoritarian, Authoritative, Indulgent, and Uninvolved). The parenting styles depend on the balance of responsiveness and demandingness. Authoritarian parents “are obedience- and status-oriented, and expect their orders to be obeyed without explanation.” This results in “children and adolescents from authoritarian families (high in demandingness, but low in responsiveness) tend to perform moderately well in school and be uninvolved in problem behavior, but they have poorer social skills, lower self-esteem, and higher levels of depression. (2) The Alfred Adler Institute has a more detail description of parenting styles. (3)
More recently, a study published in the APA Bulletin called “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” found a correlation between political conservatism (authoritarian personality) and the following personality traits: Fear and aggression; Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; Uncertainty avoidance; and Need for cognitive closure. (4)
A Harvard study demonstrated that the conservative editorial pages (Wall Street Journal and Washington Times) “are more intensely partisan, and far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than the liberal pages (New York Times and the Washington Post) are to take on a Democratic administration. (5)
A neurocognitive study correlated between conservatism and liberalism, supported through brain imaging that “conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” (6)
Authoritarian personality seems to be correlated with pedophilia and Ephebophilia. (7)
Sources: 1) http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=...37%3A4%3C316%3AAFAOTF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I 2) http://www.athealth.com/Practitioner/ceduc/parentingstyles.html 3) http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/HStein/parentin.htm 4) http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/07/268673.shtml 5) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2...Id=A20093-2003Aug5¬Found=true 6) http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Amodio et al. (2007) Nature Neuro.pdf7) www.armchairsubversive.org/
Daniel Pedroso, at 12:15 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Lazere, Gary and others here illustrate, even amplify, Bloom’s point. Apparently most academics are wholly ignorant of practical reasoning and good rhetoric. Anyone heard of the fallacy called ‘ad hominem tu quoque’? No? It figures: as academics you’ve been insulated from the effects of errors in practical reasoning. Leftist bigots, like Lazere, like to trot out motive as a refutation. If a conservative defends America against leftist accusations of “injustice in American society and foreign policy,” then he must have the motive to “[rationalize] the policies of the Republican Party.” Yeah, so what? Lazere commits the Motive Fallacy. Motives are only relevant if we are judging testimony, i.e. only when we are asked to take someone’s word for something. Bloom doesn’t offer testimony, but rather an argument. Lazere conspicuously avoids Bloom’s argument in favor of smuggled evaluations, all negative. But Lazere has demonstrated something. He has demonstrated that Bloom isn’t perfect, that he didn’t live up to his own principles. Why is this so shocking to academics? When in recorded human history, did ANYONE live up to the highest principles perfectly? Bloom advocated principles that he imperfectly embodied. In more respectable hands than Lazere’s, we might have read an account of this universal aspect of human life. But we are in the hands of an academic. The human failures of conservatives are shown as failures of principle. This is where Lazere goes wrong. He confuses practical reasoning, with its inevitable pragmatic component, with theoretical reasoning, with its notable lack of a pragmatic component.Nice hit piece Lazere. Does it entitle me to discount your leftist principles of universal toleration? Under your specious rhetorical principles, I could. Unfortunately, I’m a conservative. I have to engage your principles directly.
Jeff, Hypocrisy is important, but the author has it wrong, at 12:40 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
On Bloom and conservatism
I know nothing of Bloom’s alleged homosexuality and could not possibly care less. Still, you all would probably classify me as a social conservative if you knew my politics. I would suggest that this topic is a curiosity to you all because you have such a narrow understanding of conservatism. You are quite correct that there are conservatives who would be appalled by Bloom’s behavior as recounted here. Perhaps to them, if these allegations are true, Bloom himself, as a man, would be discredited. Yet there are many conservatives, like myself, for whom these article, even if presumed to be true, really has nothing to do with the truth of what Alan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind or elsewhere. Even those who would reject Bloom himself, if he was what is suggested here, might not reject him as a thinker nor what he wrote and said inasmuch as he might be right.
Kate, at 1:20 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Righteous Right
Thanks to Prof. Lazere for another informed, intelligent study of conservative hypocrisy. This well-written essay is a refreshing antidote to the nonstop right-wing rhetoric attacking individuals and policies that are left of center.
Ira Shor, at 1:40 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Laughing coast-to-coast
” .. A neurocognitive study correlated between conservatism and liberalism ..”
.. provided laughter for “Wall Street Journal” readers from Palo Alto (one research site) to lower Manhattan (another research site). In fact, the laughter was so loud in Palo Alto, that site reportedly no longer exists.
Possibly the funniest thing: Rupert Murdoch could probably pass the AP-History exam because he’s well-read.
His “brilliant” critics could not. That’s because most of Murdoch’s critics are so blinded by their mindless ideology, they don’t know names, dates, locations, and events. All they know how to do is argue, endlessly to no worthwhile conclusion.
Pity. Such a waste, destined to work for Starbucks, an eternity.
Buzz, at 1:40 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Jeff FTW
“Apparently most academics are wholly ignorant of practical reasoning and good rhetoric.”
Wait for it. . .
Hold. . .
Hold. . .
HOLD!. . .
“He [Donald Lazere] has demonstrated that Bloom isn’t perfect, that he didn’t live up to his own principles. Why is this so shocking to academics? When in recorded human history, did ANYONE live up to the highest principles perfectly?”
Good man Jeff! That showed ‘em!
Joseph C., at 1:55 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
It’s Probably Just a Rounding Error
I was a program officer at the John M. Olin Foundation for 15 years before it spent itself out of business in 2005. The most the foundation ever disbursed in a year was less than $25 million, as compared to the $55 million Mr. Lazare asserts was the amount given out at Olin’s peak. His readers may judge the rest of the article in light of Lazare’s inability to get such a small, simple detail right.
William Voegeli, Visiting Scholar at Claremont McKenna College, at 3:05 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Is there any evidence for this other than a novel?
Is it just me or am I the only one who finds it odd to base an article that rather severely blasts a dead man on a novel? Maybe you can use the ‘everyone knows’ for being gay, but I would feel better if these accusations of Bloom being a predatory sexual exploiter of children, a racist and even of dying of AIDS (isn’t there any hospital report?) were based on something a bit more solid.
William Song, at 5:35 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Knees autonomically jerking left
” .. His readers may judge the rest of the article in light of Lazare’s inability to get such a small, simple detail right ..”
The writer is well-known for his “anyone who disagrees with me is wrong” attitude. Facts are merely conservative, right-wing Republican devices to attempt to stop his pursuit of “truth.” Correcting him and his kind is a full-time job, though an unpleasant waste of time.
BTW: “Two wrongs don’t make a right?” Isn’t that Bill O’Reilly’s line?
In that vein: is it true that the writer only attacks non-Democrats? Is he faultless?
Heck, if Ward You-Know-Who says there is no “truth” — should you believe Wart?
Buzz, at 5:40 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Prof Lazere"s Albatross
Without question, this is the most unprincipled ad hominem hatchet job I have seen from a colleague in the humanities in a while. This is the exact opposite of scholarship. I hope as many people in Academe as possible get to see this thing, and that it is permitted to color our assessment of everything Professor Lazere has written and will write in future. He gives himself these permissions because, well, what’s a little character assassination and distortion, and who needs fact checking and all that other dreary stuff when one is on the side of the people? These activists and ism’s pushers are self-limiting and in the very short run will fade away. They are amusing, but beneath contempt.I think Bloom touched a nerve, what?
E. Moran, at 6:30 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Formatting Problems
Unfortunately, when I posted the sources cited encountered formatting problems.
I always found it interesting that the death cry of the hyena sounds like laughter. As for those interested in actually reading the research on “neurocognitive study correlated between conservatism and liberalism,” before commenting please use the address below:
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiolab/Amodio et al. (2007) Nature Neuro.pdf
Or,
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/amodiola...%20al.%20(2007)%20Nature%20Neuro.pdf
One can only believe that the “site reportedly no longer exists,” if one believes that New York University Psychology Department no longer exists. Or, one has an “uncertainty avoidance” personality.
Daniel Pedroso, at 9:35 pm EDT on September 18, 2007
Joseph C. provides another illustration
” [Jeff wrote,] ‘Apparently most academics are wholly ignorant of practical reasoning and good rhetoric...When in recorded human history, did ANYONE live up to the highest principles perfectly?’ Good man Jeff! That showed ‘em!”
The implication being this: I’m allowing for Bloom’s failure, but not for Lazere’s.
Again we see the peculiar lack of practical reasoning. I’m not claiming that academics fail to live up to their standards, but rather that their standards are incorrect.
As I wrote before, Lazere is emblematic of current academic practice, thus his article is an ironic demonstration of Bloom’s thesis.
Jeff, Joseph C. provides another illustration, at 6:00 am EDT on September 19, 2007
“Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire- not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”
That’s the type of argument the right wing media celebrated him for. Meanwhile he was sleeping with underage boys while he knew he had aids. It was ok though, so long as he lied about it. Welcome to neo-con morality.
Phil, at 6:00 am EDT on September 19, 2007
“left” & “right” together, tripping the light fantastic...
Do intelligent, sane people —even Ivory Tower academics— still believe in the “left-right” political spectrum?? Are “conservatives” and “liberals” always so far apart when it comes to actual policy??
I note that Prof Lazere calls the Vietnam War an “injustice.” Indeed. It was terrible. He also mentions Prez George Bush Senior’s first war in Iraq. However, he forgets Prez Clinton’s wars in Yugoslavia, especially the bombings of civilian targets in Serbia [parenthetically, these wars refute those whining Muslim political spokesmen and their Western supporters who like to complain about how the West is always against Muslims and Islam]. In case Lazere has forgotten, Clinton was a Democrat, as were John Kennedy & LB Johnson, the first two presidents of the Vietnam War, an “injustice” according to Lazere. Indeed, both JFK and LBJ were considered liberals. So if Lazere deplores the alleged Straussian/conservative belief in the good, manly character of war, how about deploring the liberal belief in “good wars” as manifested in the policies of Kennedy, Johnson, & Clinton???
Anyhow, since the Iranian bomb is now in the news, let’s recall that the Democratic “liberal” administration of the unspeakable j carter, guided by the master puppeteer, Zbig B, did a great deal to bring Khomeini —hardly a liberal by reasonable standards— to power in Iran.
Now, maybe Prof Lazere can explain how Democrats & Republicans, “left” & “right,” “conservatives” & “liberals” differ in reality on the policy level.
As to Bloom, don’t his ideas deserve to be judged on their own merits, rather than on an ad hominem basis?
Elliott A Green, at 8:10 am EDT on September 19, 2007
Turn out the lights, the party’s over...
Reading Prof. Lazere’s essay was a pleasure, and I look forward to the possible publication of a Symposium we have in the works on Bloom and Hirsch (Lazere is a participant). While I agree that if Bellow’s representation of Bloom was accurate, it must to some degree compromise his legacy as thinker who is associated with “conservative” causes, I disagree with Lazere’s claim that his apparent hypocrisy diminishes the importance of his insights on American intellectual life. As a young scholar, I am particularly inspired by Bloom’s refusal to allow the life of the mind to be dominated by the spirit of the party (ANY party). I know that Prof. Lazere agrees with me that the ever widening ideological divide in American politics is troublesome. Yet it seems to me that the first step to repairing the breach is for thoughtful Americans to vehemently reject party politics. We all know the ways in which the party can demand complacency from the individual, retroactively determining the possible positions on a given issue before critical thought has even begun. We need to start working beyond the tired categories of “liberal” and “conservative.”
Adam Ellwanger, U of S Carolina, at 3:15 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Calling All Bloviaters
There the conservative bloviaters go again, unable to respond to substantive arguments and so reverting to their script of namecalling, childish derision, character assassination, straw man arguments, and irrelevancies—and then projecting these fallacies onto me. (Some of the liberal responses were just as lame.) Their game is given away by the near-total absence of direct quotations, in context, and accurate paraphrases of what I actually wrote.
Suppose I reiterate my main arguments and ask you, in all good faith, to respond directly.And please refrain from any further, “Yeah, well, liberals do the same,” two-wrongs-make-a right, arguments. I have no stake in arguing that the left is guiltless, which it isn’t; my point was that Bloom and other conservatives are the ones who claim to reject moral relativism like yours and to defend absolute standards of morality and truth, as well as believing that “If a man smite thee, turn the other cheek.” True or false?
1. I said that Bloom’s boast of being a philosopher “above attachment to a party” was belied by his multiple collaborations with the Republican-Party and Olin Foundation intelligentsia (William Simon, Irving Kristol, William J. Bennett, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, et al.), and by their ample financial support and publicizing of his work. Doesn’t anyone here find something fishy about The Closing having been reviewed in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal by beneficiaries of the same foundation that funded the book? Am I indulging in “guilt by association”? No, I am not inventing these associations, and they were quite overt. My other argument, that conservative intellectuals also associate themselves with anti-intellectual vulgarians like Limbaugh, Coulter, Robertson, and O’Reilly was based on the fact that rarely, to my knowledge, have they explictly DISSOCIATED themselves from them. True or false?
2. One factual matter WAS raised by William Voegeli of the Olin Foundation, who disputed my claim that Olin at one time spent $55 million a year supporting conservative causes. My source was the 1988 annual report on Olin’s webpage. If Mr. Foegeli can produce evidence to the contrary, I will welcome the correction with apologies. To err is human—although conservatives like the commentators here only seem to grant this dispensation to their allies like Bloom, rarely to their liberal opponents. True or false?
3. I said, “That Bloom was homosexual. . . is undisputed” (“homosexual” was dropped in an editing error). My sources on this included Max’s article on Bellow and the quotation from Wolfowitz in it, Norman Podhoretz’s review of Ravelstein, J. Bottum’s review of Ravelstein in The Weekly Standard, and James Atlas’s biography of Bellow, in which he says, “Bloom confessed to Edward Shils [one of his closest friends] that he ‘couldn’t keep away from boys.’” All of these sources discuss BLOOM, not the fictional Ravelstein. Podhoretz writes, “Allan Bloom’s homosexuality was no great secret.” Bloom’s promiscuity was common knowledge among his colleagues at Chicago, and several conservatives there dissociated themselves from him because of it. If anyone has evidence that he was not homosexual, let’s hear from them now.
4.I also wrote, “Whether Bloom had AIDS is disputed.” My main point here was simply to raise the question (which I have never seen discussed elsewhere) of why on earth Bellow, another of Bloom’s closest friends and his chosen memorialist, would have invented a Bloom clone “destroyed by his reckless sex habits” out of wholecloth. If there was “character assassination” here, wasn’t it by Bellow, not me, and shouldn’t it be Bellow we’re discussing? My ultimate point about Bloom’s sexuality was not to judge him but the homophobic conservatives who canonized him, for being in denial (as all these hysterical responses confirm). True or false?
Finally, my purpose was to discuss continuing controversies about Bloom as a person, not to re-evaluate The Closing, which I have written extensively about elsewhere, with no mention of his personal life, and with a mixed verdict. (I also found Bellow’s portrait of Bloom in Ravelstein to be extremely appealing in many ways.) In an article in College English in 1992, I wrote, “By the testimony of many former students, Bloom is a fine teacher and scholar. . . He brings vast erudition to bear. . . He is eloquent in lamenting the disintegration of liberal education. . . . His analyses of ‘the Nietscheanization of the left and vice versa’. . . are to my mind basically accurate.” Does this sound like the raving ideologue my critics paint me to be?
Donald Lazere, at 6:00 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Crouching Tiger, Phony Umbrage
When one positions oneself as a crusader for civilization, and to the exclusive benefit of a political ideology no less, it is axiomatic that the crusader’s hypocrisy in those same presumed civilized values undermines one’s position. Thus, I have no sympathy at all for the right wing howls of indignation at Lazere’s dissection of Bloom. Bad winners, they.
I, too, share the desire of some discussants to make the left-right dyad obsolete. However, to do so when discussing a work in which the left-right political spectrum is an embedded assumption is wilful blindness. Bloom may have posed as non-partisan, but hopefully none of us have ever been walloped in the head so hard that we can accept a whopper like that one. It’s like objecting to a critique of James Baldwin on the basis that old definitions of race are obsolete!
Clark Iverson, Professor of English, at 6:35 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Olin Foundation Largesse
The John M. Olin Foundation’s annual report in 1988 showed $55 million worth of grant commitments on the books at the conclusion of that year, but most of this money was paid out over several ensuing years. The New York Times story on the closing of the foundation in 2005(http://www.ncrp.org/goalsreachedNYT.asp)pegs the upper level of annual outlays at $20 million, which is correct.
William Voegeli, at 8:00 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Response to Voegeli
So my account of Olin’s spending in 1998 was correct—at that time. I refer readers back to the wording of Mr. Voegeli’s previous claim and his insulting commment that “readers may judge the rest of the article in light of Lazare’s [sic] inability to get such a small, simple detail right.” So readers may judge the credibility of the Olin Foundation by the fact that it is Voegeli who could not get such a small, simple detail right—the sum, as well as his spelling. This might have been a legitimate disagreement in interpreting statistics, but could it not have been resolved in a civil manner without resorting to invective, which was always the style of the Olin Foundation, may it rest in peace?
Donald Lazere, at 9:15 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Real politik
When one writes for “The Nation,” when one’s targets for alleged “critical thinking” are always of the loyal opposition — just random development of a cool, objective analysis?
That is so absurd and two-faced, even a certain unnamed CU ex-professor would laugh out loud.
Someone want to look up hypocrisy? Chat up Democrat voters in the South Bronx after dark. Lot of great, in the writer’s words, “liberal” work there. Let us know if the writer gets out alive — no police escort.
How about looking at Medicaid fraud? Great society the “liberals” created with that. And after that: the “Big Dig,” the productivity of tenured English faculty v. adjuncts, the impact of Medicare fee-for-service and the number of Lexus autos sold, why ambulance-chasing trial lawyers only donate to liberals, Whitewater, Travelgate, 100-1 gains in beef futures, liberal earmarks, when Social Security will go bankrupt, why college tuition is rising at twice the rate of inflation, what happens to ballot boxes in Chicago on election day, why liberals can’t stop spending tax money like its supply was infinite, when The New York Times is going to apologize for its Duke lacrosse editorials ..
That’s a start on liberal hypocrisy. If anyone would like a thousand more leads, let me know. Happy to provide them.
Unless, of course, someone is just trying to prove Geo. Will, PhD (Princeton) correct: money to higher ed goes directly to the Democrats. Which was really the case, in this column. That’s the real-politik.
L.L., at 9:20 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
English Teachers Without Borders
Well, I think it’s a good thing that Professor Lazere is willing to instruct us in Political Philosophy, Ethics, and anything else; after all, he is an English teacher.
And he certainly seems morally superior.
And, like the pygmy dancing around the dead elephant, he ain’t scared of no dead Scholar.
E Moran, at 10:15 pm EDT on September 19, 2007
Response to Moran and LL
I thank E. Moran and LL for their brilliantly reasoned rebuttals to the four specific arguments I invited response to. I stand corrected. Moran earlier dismissed my column as an “ad hominem hatchet job...character assassination and distortion,” and he now shows that he is far above such tactics himself. EM and LL are model Christian conservatives in loving their enemies and turning the other cheek. God bless.
Donald Lazere, at 4:15 am EDT on September 20, 2007
Technicians teach English
” .. Well, I think it’s a good thing that Professor Lazere is willing to instruct us in Political Philosophy ..”
Like non-engineering adjuncts leading a “preach-in” on the murderous 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack and the steel structures involved. Credibility south of zero; just inane and sub-sophmoric.
Why not just get rid of the English faculty and let the technical staff teach English? Given declining verbal exam scores and performance, the techies could not be any worse than the incumbents. Plus the techies care about “technical” accuracy, which the incumbents consider arcane, anti-constructivist and a right-win conservative Republican conspiracy.
L.L., at 4:20 am EDT on September 20, 2007
What?
I’m not sure how L.L. and Moran have taken Donald Lazere’s arguments to these particular issues, but I sure am disturbed by the ridiculous logic and rhetoric being used in their posts. Donald Lazere’s article deserves to be argued on its merits. The man summarized his main points for those of you who might have misunderstood. Can we not argue like intelligent academics? We have now gone off on tangents such as the worthiness of English instructors to teach composition. Can we get more idiotic? For once, can we argue the point?
William Thelin, at 1:45 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
“Swinish politics, our ball and chain.”
“Swinish politics, our ball and chain.” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
Professor Lazere would be surprised to learn some of his opponents aren’t partisans. But this writer is not a Christian, or an ideologue of any persuasion. All the ism’s including the ones that get Lazere so exercised, pro and con, only make me smile. I read Bloom with admiration years ago, and use his criticism in some of my classes. I think he will endure as a critic, and I share his love for literature and philosophy.
It never occurred to me to speculate about his sex life (I knew he was homosexual), or, for that matter, about the frequency and quality of his bowel movements. I’m sure his medical history would put me to sleep.
Hypocrisy is no rare thing, in the sense that we can all postulate and preach a better life than we can live.We should acknowledge that and keep trying, I guess.
I am not a conservative, not a liberal, and with Thoreau I would disclaim membership in all the other labeled groups if I could get hold of a complete list. I am repelled by group activities, mobs, causes, and sweaty activists of every stripe. I have never been sure I was right about any of the big questions.
Anyway, Professor Lazere, though you will not agree, none of this slimy political stuff, none of this ideology, is worth the time of someone who could actually be teaching English.
E. Moran, at 5:50 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
Here’s the point for the politically illiterate
” .. We have now gone off on tangents such as the worthiness of English instructors to teach composition ..”
No, sir, it is you who has missed the point.
An English instructor begins to expound on political science.
What qualifies the English instructor to lecture on political science?
Nothing. He’s actually a politician, not a political scientist, trying to tear down someone whose written work was read by 25,000,000 more people than his own work.
Envy is a terrible thing.
L.L., at 5:50 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
Here’s a point for the ignorant and aggressive
“No, sir, it is you who has missed the point.
An English instructor begins to expound on political science.
What qualifies the English instructor to lecture on political science?”
He is critiquing a text and an author, something that people occupationally involved with language do.
Now I’m not going to call you a paid shill who has just exposed his ignorance of academic norms, but I will say that the efforts to muzzle Lazere show a presumption of entitlement that is unbecoming of any academic, so I doubt that such an obvious miss comes from someone in higher ed.
Clark Iverson, Professor of English, at 7:15 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
Wha?
” .. the efforts to muzzle Lazere ..”
WTF?
The writer can howl at the moon for all I care. I’m not a member of MoveOn.org or some other fascist liberal cult. Get a grip on reality, please.
But I will not be forced to think of the writer as anything but the always-complaining English instructor. Who poses as a political scientist, while really being a political operative.
That will never, ever happen. The veil on that kind of pseudo-academic political theatre is done, it is through. Get used to it.
L.L., at 8:10 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
Dpnald’s first point in his comment above has been repeated often enough by liberal critics that conservatives have to recognize and respond to it. The criticism is two-fold: one, that conservative intellectuals compromise their integrity when they associate too closely with conservative political groups; and two, that conservatives need to renounce media figures on the Right (Coulter et al).
On the first point, why stick with a cynical interpretation that says involvement with political powers jeopardizes intellectual composure? Why not admit that any involvement with public life involves compromises, but that’s the cost of trying to convert one’s values into public policy. Of course it will mean simplification of ideas into political forms, and the acceptance of some aspects of the political powers that you don’t like. But withdrawing for that reason (at least if it doesn’t reach a certain point of over-compromise) is to adhere to a purism that never gets anything accomplished at all.
As for the second point, why not say that conservative intellectuals simply aren’t interested in spending time on media personalities, for the same reason that liberal intellectuals don’t spend time on Dan Rather.
mark b., at 9:20 pm EDT on September 20, 2007
We’re doomed
At a peace rally in Austin a few years ago I watched a liberal (I was going to put the labels in quotes, but I give up) trying to discuss a point with a conservative who, red faced and sweaty, screamed “FREEDOM ISN’T FREE!” every time the liberal drew breath. Two people separated by a light year.
The way conservatives redirect liberals to spin their wheels defending themselves appalls me, but the chasm that’s opened up between the left and right is just as astonishing. We just can’t talk to each other anymore.
tim snead, at 6:40 am EDT on September 21, 2007
Mark B, you make a good point about liberals and Dan Rather. In the case of conservative intellectuals though, I’d say their disinterest does matter since in this case we’re talking about cultural conservatives- people who make a critique of contemporary culture as having been progressively coarsened, barbarized, degraded, etc. Therefore, their blaming the lousy state of the culture on the lowered discourse of Public Figure A, while completely ignoring Public Figure B, seems rather disingenuous. Especially since Figure A is so often some totally obscure academic who has considerably less influence in the culture than these media personalities. To put it another way, how many posters here sound just like Martin Heidegger? Now, how many sound like Sean Hannity?
As for Lazere’s article, it does seem that most of the commenters have heaped calumny on his biography rather than addressing his arguments. However, the title of the article really is unfortunate as it leads one to expect a discussion of the book instead of a discussion of Bloom’s own biography. Maybe something like ‘The Hidden Life of Allan Bloom’ would have been better.
rufus, at 7:10 am EDT on September 21, 2007
Degraded?
” .. we’re talking about cultural conservatives- people who make a critique of contemporary culture as having been progressively coarsened ..”
Hmm .. yes .. I see how the question is posed ...
1964, Berkeley, Calif. —
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KCEUr1kBBhs
To 2007, across the USA —
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZXv_s1GQQAw
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VAtUz7JM7TI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cfnn7wTgoE8
It would be better to have political books reviewed by PhD political scientists, not English instructors. Serious scholars are needed, not political operatives. English instructors ought to be concerned about declining verbal test scores, not electing their friends.
Buzz, at 11:00 am EDT on September 21, 2007
Response to Mark et al.
So where are the answers to the specific questions for which I invited a “True or False” response in “Calling All Bloviators”?
Mark is a conservative scholar whom I respect and with whom I have amicably collaborated in the past. (We’re planning a collaborative column to submit to IHE.) But he unfortunately misses the point of my argument about the politics of conservative intellectuals like Bloom and Podhoretz. I do not criticize their engagement in partisan polemics or party activism, but their DISSEMBLING about it, as when Bloom crows about being above “attachment to a party.”
Liberals and leftists tend to have the modest advantage of being forthright about their political (and sexual) allegiances—for which they are crucified by conservatives. (The conservative ethic seems to be, get away with anything you like as long as you keep it in the closet.) Let’s see, was Allan Bloom politically neutral as a teacher and writer? He seems to have actively recruited his students like Wolfowitz and many others into the Republican party hierarchy. He was also a philosopher, not a political scientist. Are philosophers more qualified in Political Science than professors of English who might, like me, be specialists in political literature and the study of public rhetoric (the conception of English studies that formed the thought of the l8th Century American founding fathers)? Some of the ignoramuses about academic disciplines in these responses seem to think that English studies end with Freshman English. My realm of scholarship coincides precisely with Norman Podhoretz’s book “The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet.” Yes, the same Podhoretz whose bachelor’s and master’s degrees were in ENGLISH. How come he doesn’t need a Ph.D in Political Science to write about politics, Buzz and LL?
And Mark, do you really put Dan Rather on the same level with Ann Coulter or Pat Robertson, about whom Podhoretz and Irving Kristol wrote groveling rationalizations for his anti-semitism and lunacies like viewing 9/ll as God’s punishment for liberalism, calling for assassination of Hugo Chavez, and raving about teachers’ unions condoning child abuse (on which he was seconded by David Horowitz on Larry King’s show). Why did they excuse Robertson? Because he’s pro-Israel, of course, in the belief that a Middle-Eastern conflagration will lead to the Apocalypse—a widespread view among the Christian conservatives who are neocon intellectuals’ strange political bedfellows.
Come on, Mark, aren’t you willing to attest that the Coulters and Robertsons, as well as some of the conservative respondents here, like LL (who has no qualms about personally insulting ME), are as great an embarrassment to responsible conservative intellectuals as Ward Churchill and Michael Moore are to liberal ones? True or false?
Donald Lazere, at 4:10 pm EDT on September 21, 2007
Norman Podhoretz
” .. Yes, the same Podhoretz whose bachelor’s and master’s degrees were in ENGLISH. How come he doesn’t need a Ph.D in Political Science ..”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Podhoretz
Norman Podhoretz has never claimed to be an academic. He has never attempted to pose with academic authority, outside his field of specific expertise. He has never proclaimed, “Prof. Podhoretz of XYZ Polytech, here to comment about health care policy.”
Expect the public to demand more disclosure in matters like this.
L.L., at 11:55 pm EDT on September 21, 2007
Maybe we can talk?
None of this political BS matters.
Someone who has had any real contact with great literature and poetry, felt it touch his heart and mind the way it can do, would not for a moment waste his time with this disgraceful collective public activism. One more excited chanter at the big rally, wearing his ribbon for whatever. Really.
Look at the responses you’ve garnered. Do you want to “discourse” with this bunch? You’re on their level; I know you can’t be comfortable with that.
I understand why you want to bring Bloom down. He’ll be okay and he doesn’t need my help. The Canon can take care of itself too, along with Art with a capital A. The humanities will survive.
But all this overheated rhetoric and utopian certainty you peddle will sink into the swamp leaving a few bubbles and a bad smell, maybe even soon enough for you to slip unnoticed back into the teaching of literature. I might still be there. Maybe we can talk.
E. Moran, at 8:55 am EDT on September 22, 2007
Literature and Rhetoric
Thanks to E. Moran for finally posting a semi-civilized comment. But I still see no substantive responses to the specific questions I posed, nor any direct quotations from my column that showed “overheated rhetoric and utopian certainty.” Indeed, skeptical uncertainty, a central theme of much great literature, was precisely what I was defending against the pompous certainties and utopian moral absolutes preached by Bloom & Co.
As to LL’s ignorance of academic disciplines, English studies are not, and never have been, limited to grammar and creative literature, but have always always included the study of rhetoric, defined by Aristotle as “the art of persuasion.” Indeed in past centuries, what we call literary studies were part of a curriculum in “Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy,” which also included POLITICS. One of Bloom’s major appeals, with which I totally agree, was for a return to such a unified curriculum, in opposition to the kind of arbitrarily specialized disciplines you folks are defending.
So one of my academic fields is the time-honored one of the critical analysis of public rhetoric and mass culture. As for literature, a major portion of the literary canon deals centrally with politics. Does this mean literary study can be reduced only to politics? Of course not, but neither can politics be excluded from it, and why should the study of overtly political literature not be a legitimate field for study in English?
I don’t understand why the conservative respondents howled at my criticism of the degradation of culture and taste in mass society and media corporations’ unprincipled quest for profits. This has been a central refrain of literary figures like Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and F. R. Leavis (Trilling and Leavis were Podhoretz’s mentors).
You folks are entitled to trash the QUALITY of my work in these fields—and I’m sure you will continue to get off on such ad hominem, infantile derision—though you show no sign of having read my books on Albert Camus, the rhetoric of American media and mass culture, or my textbook in argumentative writing.But I think you are mistaken to deny that these areas are legitimately within the scope of English studies, and that a specialist in them is as entitled to discuss politics, especially in a journalistic medium like IHE, as the philosopher Allan Bloom or Norman Podhoretz are.
By the way, LL, what are YOUR academic credentials for pontificating on these matters?
Donald Lazere, at 2:05 pm EDT on September 22, 2007
Yes
” .. maybe even soon enough for you to slip unnoticed back into the teaching of literature .. “
Yes — except that would be too logical, too anti-constructivist, too close to being productive. To consider the challenges of —
.. He that made this/knows all the cost,For he gave all his heart/and lost.
Something to consider, monopolists and their minions everywhere.
L.L., at 2:05 pm EDT on September 22, 2007
My qualifications
” .. By the way, LL, what are YOUR academic credentials for pontificating on these matters?”
Just an everyday taxpayer who is tired of paying gas-bag psuedo-academics who pontificate on topics outside their area of stated expertise, rather than teaching.
Just an everyday person who has the ability to do something about it. Like a George Meany. Like a Jimmy Hoffa. Like a Donald Trump. Like a Richard J. Daley. Like a Robert Novak. Like the average person who can spot chronic-complainers, crackpots, cranks, fakers and phonies, from miles away.
Happy now? Probably not. Well — that’s your job, not anyone else’s. TTFN.
L.L., at 4:20 pm EDT on September 22, 2007
no attempt at debate?
What’s revealing here is that no critic of Lazere’s has attempted to take on the substantive matters of his article, particularly that so many conservatives, like Bloom, decry partisanship while shamelessly debasing themselves in it. Also unrebutted is Lazere’s contention that so many on the right ignore the elitist entitlement of Bloom and other conservative paragons while loudly thumping their chests about being just another everyday Joe. Will no one from the right attempt to answer Lazere’s four questions posted above?
So far, most of the comments attacking him serve only to provide yet more evidence of Lazere’s contentions. You might be tempted to think that some of the seemingly conservative posts here are actually parodies intended to buttress Lazere’s argument. Sadly, that seems unlikely.
john o’connor, at 4:15 am EDT on September 24, 2007
Thanks
Thanks for the invite, John, but I have such a busy semester I think I would be well advised to shamelessly debase myself in that. Perhaps Lazere could argue with you? I am so uninformed in this area anyway; imagine my surprise when I discovered that the significance of Bloom’s work was Political. I like to talk about books, plays, poetry. I would bore you awfully, I’m sure. I’m all for elitist entitlement in the Arts, but I know people find that threatening; the leveling, egalitarian impulse is to tear down, make everything political and adversarial.
As I have mentioned I’m not anything you would label. Professor Lazere’s questions could only be answered by someone willing to step into the world of social-cultural-political criticism, where all is fair in the defense of the oppressed, which I won’t do. I found the article repulsive.
Maybe he would have more civilized respondents if he didn’t lead his posting ‘Calling All Bloviators.” I know, I know. They made him say that. Still.
E. Moran, at 1:45 am EDT on September 25, 2007
What an extraordinarly worthless review! The reviewer doesn’t bother paying attention to Blooms’ arguments and then goes into a rant about Bush and the usual suspects. He then uses inuendo from Bellow’s Ravelstein to go into another rant about homosexuality and, it’s insinuated, racism. Did anyone teach this reviewer how to write a review? Better, the reviewer should have read Bloom’s book—in which he would have found that his monomania is precisely the sickness that the liberal education is supposed to address.
C’mon Higher ed—you can choose more qualified reviewers. . .
N Alexander, at 7:30 pm EDT on July 12, 2008
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And there is no vulgarity or hypocrisy among the Left, or in its blogosphere, as it rails against anything “conservative?”
Spare me. There isn’t one position from either side that can’t intelligently and maturely be countered by the other.
Books like “The Closing...” and articles about how bad it is convince no one to choose any particular opinion—and certainly never change minds already made up.
It’s time to move on. The purpose of academe is to educate our young adults and prepare them to lead the nation in the future. It is not to brainwash them into becoming mouthpieces for either side.
More Teaching, Less Preaching!!!
Former History Prof, at 7:55 am EDT on September 18, 2007