Welcome back to the new thinkable. My name is David Barnes with me as always is my good friend Alex pre-hury yachts. How do you know neighbor? How you doing man?
I'm doing well, and our good friend Greg Mac do go. How are you doing Greg doing great good to be with you tonight David Alex as always Oh, likewise. Oh, how many episodes are we up up to like 142? Wow, we should celebrate.
What are you drinking to celebrate Alex? Drink a champagne every night. Can't do it. I'll let French Parisian all that money.
Yeah, that's something else. I got some of the well-mones. What about you? My friend.
What are you drinking, Greg? I'm drinking a Bud Light, and I got to tell you I'm really proud of this company. They you know, I was in my youth. You guys remember the Bud Light commercials?
My youth? They were like girls in the canis, and it was really sort of shamefully exploiting the sexuality of girls. But now they've got this girl on the can and she's got a dress on and she looks kind of matronly or motherly. She's a sort of wholesome.
I'm just glad that they've I'm glad that they've changed directions here and celebrated, you know, a sort of more traditional woman, I suppose. Yeah, she's a handsome guy. Are you a thing? Yeah, yeah, very handsome.
Are you increasing your butt-lop intake? I mean, thank you for going on this wholesome direction. I can't see how I would, you know, use anybody else for my cheap domesticated beer intake. Yeah, I've seen a similar similarly wholesome women on the country music awards.
And I've never seen gals like that before in country music awards past. Yeah, they used to be more rough-and-took-and-toots routes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's also on the country music awards you're saying?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I gotta check that out. I've tuned out country for some time. Maybe they'll bring me back if that's the sort of direction they're going, I will get back to country music.
Frankly, I find these jokes you guys are making very close-minded and it only proves the thesis of our author, Alan Bloom, who wrote, why? The closing of the American Mind. I feel like he didn't pause enough for long after dance. I knew the answer.
I was right. It was on tip my tongue. Yeah, closing my hand. What else was it?
Closing my mind. So we have closing our mind. We're reading the introduction, our virtue, right? Our virtue.
Yeah, yeah. And it's a pretty interesting book. What bar are you going to give some background on Bloom and maybe the book and will we launch into our reading? Sure.
So Alan Bloom, it was probably the most famous student of Leo Shrass. I think that's accurate. Just because of the splash. I think it's your pastrass's fame.
And then maybe Shrass is now again more famous. I mean, Bloom is probably the most famous drowsy. Yeah. Yeah.
As a people-tale note, so this book came out, this is like the first shot of the culture wars really in a deep kind of way. It's published in 19, so really quick. So Alan Bloom meets Leo Shrass at the University of Chicago in the late 50s, early 60s, and he was born in 1930. And he studied with other famous classes, like Kosia, like David Green and famous philosophers, like Kosia overseas.
Bloom has wonderful translations of Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Inheal. Rousseau's Letter to Down and Bear. So a big Rousseau scholar, Plato's scholar. And then he has collections of essays that are wonderful.
So he was one of the first straw scenes along with his best buddy, Harry Jaffa, to take Shakespeare seriously. So today is a small collection of essays called Shakespeare's Politics. And he also has a number of interpretive pieces on Shakespeare in another collection called Love and Friendship. And Bloom is a beautiful writer, obviously very interesting, a colorful person.
But what made him famous to America at large was this closing of American mind published in 1987. He was on Oprah. I mean, that's how big this book was. And it, what was the subtitle Alex?
Because people forget. It's the closing of American mind. And it was just exactly right. Higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students, which is a reference to the original title, The Souls Without Longing.
Right. So, but which is a great title. But I like this title anyways. One thing I should say, yeah, I should go.
Which is a very last piece of context. We might discuss, certainly Bloom discusses it later in the closing. He was a professor in the 60s at Cornell University. Cornell University, the administrative buildings were taken taken over by armed students.
And he capitulated to them. And it was like racial politics mixed in with other things. And Bloom saw the way that Cornell responded, which was a non-response kind of caving. And so he departs for Toronto.
And right to get that right. Yeah, it got rid of some more hard line administration. And then there was a capitulation. And so this ended up, I think his argument was that this inverted the actual structure of education.
I made it, you could say, excessively democratic, right? Instead of, yeah, so now beyond beyond the norm. I mean, the constant capitulation of popular opinion and student to the point that you go to, they're like universities are resorts now, like they're trying to make it so comfortable and cozy and fun. You can see.
And I think that the problem is that Bloom diagnoses and the problems that he saw with his students, right? He said best, erratically the best students in the country going to schools like Cornell and Yale. Those students are now the professors today and they're totally off the reservation. And so Bloom diagnosed very early.
Well, we're seeing come to full maturation and a number of unpleasant ways. No. One thing I'll say about your summary, just so it's two major translations he did were, which shows in Yale and Plato's Republic. And then this would be a third word.
And I think it's fair to say that the theme of the biggest theme of his writing is education. And he was by all accounts, an extremely talented teacher. I mean, the number of faculty who went through his classroom and were just fell in love with the philosophical life by virtually his rhetoric, his ennobling rhetoric was kind of staggering. The Shakespeare book on the Love and Friendship book, I think, show other themes that are related to the education theme, which is poetry and love, right?
We sure intimately related, right? If you look at the Republic, the idea there is that more education involves the kind of errors for the noble or the beautiful, which involves poetic forming of your character. And one of the things he complains about the selection we're reading for today, the introduction, is that we don't have those. We're looking at the United States, not in the way that older, like, you know, you know, the United States do is to say nothing of the Greeks.
And he's sort of trying to chart out why that's the case. So this is, I like to think of this book and the way he writes it. If you've read the meal, and especially if you've read the Republic, it reads like he's cribbing off of it and applying the lessons in a very sophisticated way. It's not just sort of, you know, recurgitated, but it's really showing a keen awareness of the souls of his students and keen application of the ideas.
And so it reads like the fruit of decades of thinking about what it means to be a teacher and in his regime. And that's why I think you see it. His classes were so popular, it was standing remotely. It was packed constantly and he would just chain smoke more of the reds.
And people just, yeah, you know, there's a famous fictional biography written by his friends with friends. It should be understood in ironic quotes of Saul Bello, his final novel, Ravelstein, I guess, based on Bloom, but it seems like he took a lot of liberty with his friends' character. So it's not, he's still not accurate. I understand.
Bello wrote that forward to this book too. That's right. I'm going to talk a little bit closer. Read to the time liberties.
I mean, his name is Ravelstein. That's right. That's not the same kind of thing. One thing I want to add about the Strauss connection is that Strauss is responsible in the 20th century for reviving, you know, platonic political philosophy and reviving the serious study of ancient thought is still viable.
And the idea there is that your, you know, basic idea of photographers to tell you in political thought is that all your habits, your customs, all of your ways, your desires are informed by your regime. And so what's absolutely necessary for self knowledge is a regime analysis, your opinions and their form by customs and all that. And Bloom, I think, is kind of an inevitability that somebody would write a book like that would be a best seller is one thing, right? But that one of the fruits of this would be such an incisive critique of American education relative to the regime.
It just seems like it was inevitable. And I think, you know, when you look at that lines, it seems like a great fruit of that sort of that tradition or that revival is just an issue. You mentioned you see the resilient influence here. I see a sort of resilient sensitivity, maybe, and maybe the rhetoric is resilient.
But as far as the diagnosis of the souls of his students, that strikes me as greatly platonic. Like he sort of put his finger on their longings in a way that's the credit, recognizing seems to as well, sort of diagnosing what it is that animates them or something like this. But do you see a resilient influence on the diagnosis as well? I think he's especially in the introduction.
He's later a little more explicit. But I think he's aware that the Rousseauian revolution is part of what's causing problems. No, okay, sure. Yeah.
And so you absolutely right. The rule out, I think he's a hundred percent consistent in this do out in his analyses and his criticism of our sort of self understanding or student self understanding. He's consistently using the basics of a platonic political psychology, the relationship to reason, desire, the passions and all that. I mean, it's I would also say in the ranking of did you just say this in the ranking of souls?
And so Bloom cares deeply about the fate of higher education. Yeah. But it's a one charge level against him was, well, you're not just some democratize of a education like he's the opposite. There are only a few students.
If you were lucky, one student in class who you can charm with the great books. And that's really who you're dealing with. Everybody else is kind of lost to business school or legal profession. And so Bloom was constantly called in the leadist.
Right. I think that's a fairish accusation. I mean, one of his, I forget, it's in Johnson's Warps maybe his lecture. He gave it a Harvard all about the closing American mind begins by his creating Roosevelt's fellow immigrants line when he's speaking to the dollars that the American Revolution bloom begins, defending the enclosed American mind by fellow leadists because they're at Harvard.
And these these defenders of great egalitarianism are sort of wagging their fingers at Bloom for being a leadist. That's sort of the height of the box. But to amplify the leadism charge just a little bit or I don't know if those amplifiers are not. But I think one of the things that folks often do is misread him.
And when they sort of think that this is what Bloom is saying about all students in Bloom, this is not in what we read in the introduction. It's in what is just called the preface maybe page 22. Yeah, that's in the preface. He says a word about his sample in the study and samples in square scare quotes, which I take to be a kind of finger in the eye of political scientists.
It consists of thousands of students of comparatively high intelligence, materially and spiritually free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they're privileged to have. And sure, the kind of young persons who populate the 20 or 30 best universities. So he's not talking about students at, you know, Shabwigan State University and all these kinds of things. So one of my questions actually is how much this is infiltrated as it has sort of come down from the top 20 or 30 universities does it permeate them all now?
But he's not talking about all students. He's talking about the best students at the best universities, probably from upper class or upper middle class homes. Especially so elites, it seems to me, right? Yeah.
The kind of people who know that Shabwigan is not a state. Yeah, it's a city. Sometimes there would be Shabwigan who needs to be in state. There are all kinds of state universities with state in the name.
Is that right? Yeah, more head state university where I worked before. What's more handy that it's named after the city. Oh, it's where it is.
There. Yes, it's. I'm the dumbass. Yeah.
That's pretty common, actually. I feel like when you spent your entire life in the silver spoon, Parisian circles at Alex. Yeah. It's pretty good.
They're city universities and cities in rural parts of it. Then they call them state universities. Well, that's stupid. Yeah.
Sorry. Anyway, moving on. So the introduction is not just called introduction as a subtitle or virtue. And that you take it to mean Americans.
And I have a question. Who is our number? Yeah. I mean, this actually links to my question closing American mind.
Does this call back to? I mean, I assume this is a reference to sort of maybe even what is the American mind and sort of Jefferson's allusion to the American mind? And the letter he wrote. I mean, this is too far.
But like the idea that what is the American mind? It was this thing that was formed as Jefferson says by Locke, Aristotle, Cicero, Sidney, etc. There's this religious component. And so there is this great history of it of what it was.
And it was somehow I guess it was open at some point. So there's this guy. He doesn't ever locate that Supreme Open this historically, right? Unless I, I guess he doesn't say there's some house on his page where America's mind was fully ready to receive.
No, I think it's in both. I think it's twofold. And what he means by closing and what he means by our version, right? For those who are, like who is he grouping himself with?
Is it fellow philosophers or is it his fellow Americans? That's a question. And in line with that twofoldness, virtue also has a twofoldness. The virtue, the only thing that names is a virtue is openness.
But openness has two kinds, one of which is a kind of false openness and one which is a genuine philosophic openness. And he makes this point a couple of times, but it's so easy to pass over it. That, I mean, he tells a story of talking, I think it was to a psychology professor having a debate. So yeah, very.
And yeah, I thought it was a little early, but yeah, he said, where he destroys the prejudices. Yeah. And he says, Oh, I kind of think it's my job to actually give them prejudices. Yeah.
And so there's a kind of good closeness and there's a bad closeness, right? And there's a good openness and a bad open. So is the closeness that he means the closing of the mind that is this false openness, which he thinks is bad? Or is it this closing that would involve a kind of, which I think he's trying to do here, a reverence for the great books?
He does praise the founding quite a bit, but he's not just trying to push you in the direction and he wants you to appreciate the founding, but he also wants to see it in this larger tradition. And so one of my my thoughts here, or one of my suspicions of the subtler more sort of what you think sees suggesting is that in a way, the old America that was closed and had this tradition that Greg mentioned, that's gone. And I think he attributed it to the wave of immigration since the end of the 19th century, especially in light of World War II. It's gotten to multicultural and therefore you have to be highly tolerant.
And he sees that you have to come up with some other sort of solution to this open minded tolerance that is indiscriminate, right? That doesn't discriminate between, you know, Gerta and like, you know, whatever garbage they're teaching at Shabwigan to this, it is in Brad's great last set. So, right. So I don't know if that wasn't very clear, but I think there's something like that is suggested by the title of the book and of the very paradoxically our virtue is openness, which means we're closed off to some of the most serious being opened everything closes you off to other certain things, particular things.
What one other small point in the title, you guys are pushed back. I when I took our virtue to be the students and so Bloom is lumping himself in, I think not entirely genuinely therefore with the students because he obviously doesn't have this openness that they do. I think he's not open in the same way as his students are open. Right.
It isn't the virtue openness that we're talking about our students. There's more broad than that. It's almost a backhanded compliment. At some point, he describes the the advantage that American students have over their European counterparts is either to the college experience, they're totally unformed with respect to the great books.
Whereas European children will have been introduced, even in my way, to the great books. And so the charm that can happen to a lucky few in the United States during the college years is not an operation in Europe. You either are charmed or most people, you're kind of numb to it and nobody deal versus the American child who's who's totally untutored and is, ah, there's something here I feel. And so it's like we're morons and.
No, that's right. We're empty heads. I mean, empty heads and then sorry. No, it's OK.
Maybe this openness is more general. Maybe it's all Americans, but just like the second paragraph is on page 26. The students of course, not defend their opinion, but kind of moral relativism. It's something with which they've been indoctrinated at the end of that paragraph.
The purpose of their education, the students, not ours, is not to make them scholars, but to provide them with the moral virtue openness. So it seems like there's a way in which I think he's kind of putting himself in the same category somewhat disingenuous and then in generously with the students as a way of muting the blame, maybe. Yeah, he has a remark later. It's not in this chapter about how he's different from his parents, who had rituals and exercises for Jewish beliefs, which is funny because in this chapter, he talks about some kid telling us the end of class doesn't exist.
Yeah, they're not Jewish. It was pretty, I thought those so ironically says that more. But yeah, and so I think he I think he might, I don't know, I haven't thought about this enough, but I think he might lump himself into a certain degree. He's like, yeah, I had an earlier version of this.
Right. Yeah. Right. So my thought, my thinking here is that openness comes out of a desire to tolerate, right?
Sure. Toleration is different from openness in that you can tolerate something, but not still not necessarily make its cultural features part of the regime. Right. You can say, yeah, give us your sticker, pour whatever, we'll tolerate you.
And also just keep in mind, this is largely a Christian country and we believe in certain things and you will have to get those beliefs. Right. But when you look at the root of toleration, he points to, is it's a federalist 51 on factions, right? And one thing I took him to be suggesting, but he doesn't want to say it too loud, because I think it's too critical of the US.
I think there's too much of that going on in his opinion, right? But I think what he might say is that perhaps the toleration of faction, rather than the emphasis of the tradition, is one of the problems of the founding, right? That we got too focused on on integrating others and bringing others in and eventually a desire for tolerance and openness, tolerance turned into openness of a desire not to oppress others, right? So does that make sense?
I wonder if that's like somebody's subtly suggesting around the US. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I thought that he said, I thought that he was a deeper problem lies in just the democratic regime. But I don't know then why he doesn't criticize.
This isn't a book about the European state of higher ed, but he seems to at least think that they're in a better place in the late 80s than we are. We're not so far gone, but they're democratic regimes overseas at the very time. So why aren't they plagued in the same way? Does that make sense?
It might be because the American talks about deeper traditions. Yeah, there's a deeper tradition there, but we're more abstract, right? Yeah. How does he put its early on?
So he just craps tok bill. Yeah, I think there's a lot of tok bill here, by the way. Yeah. What does he say says?
Is on the bottom of page 30. Yeah. So the equal protection laws did not protect demand from contempt and hatred as a Jew and Italian or black. The reaction to this problem was in the first place resistant to the notion that outsiders had to give up their cultural individuality and make themselves into that universal abstract being who participates in the natural rights, or else we do exist on the fridge.
And when he talks about this abstraction, you get a sense that it's really double etched, that it's not state, right? Like, yeah, you do have to become abstract, so it's a degree to become an American, right? You can't be attached to abstraction. Yeah.
Right. That's kind of the problem here. And I think this is what, I mean, not to get it too far afield, but I think this is what Lincoln's doing in the, like, same address and the Gettysburg address and the second inaugural trying, trying to give it more meat and more half realizing that this abstract connection can't do it. So I think he's a good company there.
That really is a little bit out of order, but I'd like to go back to the psychology professor. This is at the very end. There's so much I can hear to talk about, but this is the last paragraph, paragraph, 38, and I want to bring this up because I just have so many professors like this. Not necessarily psychology professors, but just professors and general liberal arts colleges.
When I was a young teacher, Cornell, I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. He knocked them down like 10 pens. I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with.
You mentioned that the beginning that the balloon has reflected a great deal on what it means to be a teacher. And it seems that he's pointing out here how few teachers actually take that, their tasks seriously. They don't reflect sufficient responsibility. And I've taught, I never went to have a conversation with a colleague who said something very similar, and he's prone to using terms.
And so he described, because I was kind of, I don't think I had articulated as neatly as a living head that he's trying to instill prejudices in his students. And I said, I try to lead these prejudices very much intact and very careful, and some of them are salutary. And he sort of accused me of something like idolatry and putting certain ideas or something up on a pedestal that are sort of off limits for criticism. And I was trying to argue with him and he just went and got just, well, you're talking about a conicalism and that strikes me as extremely responsible.
You're just exploding the things that these students believe in. What are you, what real favor are you doing? I mean, I think I just want to bring this up because it seems like it seems like a real type. I mean, this is a fairly common type I would say in the academy.
Someone who delights in like the Santa Claus kid who just delights in showing these students that their opinions are awful. Yeah, though now this is one point where I think it's maybe changed a little bit. They're definitely, they're definitely trying to like debunk quite a bit. But at the same time now there's this reduction in not trying to.
Yeah. I mean, so one of the things he says later in the book is when he's talking about how everything is sexist, he's like, nobody would think to do this with racist. I'm like, Oh, hello. Look, I call two plus two equals four races.
Keep them enough. Which is this first example he gives by the way. Exactly. Yeah.
So it's, I think he underestimates the how bonkers is going to get, right? But he, yeah. Yeah. So I think there is an attempt by just these people now to instill a kind of prejudice, but it's just, yeah.
Oh, different kinds. So this is the same on the same lines. One of the great things. He sees how bonkers go on.
Great. But you go on. I'm sorry. Well, I don't see the relativism is the problem in universities anymore.
And I've heard criticisms of him along lines. But you just announced that the universities aren't really relatively, they're actually very committed to a particular exception of justice, right? And so they teach it in this very, in the way that you're saying, they're trying to instill or indoctrinate even if one will. But I'm not sure that that's reading Bloom right.
I think he does see and anticipate that this relativism does not give way to a kind of, well, whatever goes, right? Although it does seem to, but it actually manifests itself as a sort of only a spirit, a assertion of one's own conception of justice. So kind of counterintuitively, these relatives give way to some very dogmatic believers and justice of a certain kind who are not, they're not open, for example, shouting you down, hitting the table, this kind of stuff. Yeah, there's power.
Yeah. There's a good example of that in another conversation. That's when he's an undergraduate talking to a history professor. Remember this one?
Right. Right. And he says, George Washington, Yeah. And the history professor is just kind of optimistic that what he's doing, we'll just make everything more democratic and therefore better.
And then Bloom points out, yeah. But when you know, George Washington held those values apparently, but you're saying it's just class inches, you know, like essentially who's to say that us doing that isn't going to be held to look like class. And now you look at it now and it's basically all of these, these like good efforts by, you know, great Americans of the past to, you know, further integration and unity are now interpreted as sort of defensive runs for white supremacy. Right.
So you look at that and you're like, oh, he's exactly right. He's calling it. So I agree with you very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, way more radical than what we're seeing. I mean, we're seeing a lot of protests and conservatives written out on a rail at universities, but I mean, an arm takeover with guns.
I haven't seen that in a while. No. I mean, there was a radicalism of the 60s was violent on university campuses. Right.
No, that's a good point. But to me, it's almost like you took the beginning of Strauss's natural right in history and popularized kind of filled it out with problems in the economy. Yeah. I think so.
I mean, the central section is called nihilism American Stalin. Listeners should let us know if they want us to do the other, I mean, we could do an episode on each section easily, to be more obsessed. But if you're interested, we have to do that. But the nihilism American stops just reads like an application of the worries that Strauss issues in the introduction of the first chapter and then using later stuff to tell diagonals.
In many ways, it's, you know, Strauss has this American lens for natural right in history, but it's not as American of a book as this is. And it seems like it's working it out on a formal regime basis or anything. I mean, you may already touch on this. By getting extremely both your views on this.
I mean, let me push back a little bit. Isn't openness a virtue? I mean, maybe you already touched on this with the toleration bit. But like, there is a kind of, isn't there kind of moral decency to not being, I mean, the pushback's obvious, right?
Like the defense of what Bloom is saying. But isn't there a kind of moral decency to sort of not being excessively judgmental and live and let live and kind of play? I mean, let me try this in a way. One could collapse what Bloom is doing into a kind of moralizing scolding, right?
And sort of rejection of anything non-traditional. And it can be very, I mean, this book has been read by thoughtful people and unthoughtful people alike. And I think that it's easy to, like, there's a certain closeness that I think Bloom would definitely not embrace, but that I just wonder if there's an openness that's a kind of, I don't know, it's morally decent. Well, I thought it's not just the intellectual openness, but like you were talking about, I thought, but kind of moral openness.
Go ahead. Oh, I guess that the openness was a prerequisite to philosophy, right? Sure. My question's right.
That's right. So definitely an intellectual plus, but I'm actually wondering if there's kind of a moral upshot to openness as well. I mean, kind of moral humility or something like this. Yeah.
So maybe we should just read the passage on page 41, where he identifies the two kinds of openness. Yeah. And I think what you're suggesting, I think, is that there's a third kind between them. Yeah.
But and I want to connect this also to something earlier, he said, plus there are two kinds of openness. The openness of indifference, promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride, and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don't want to be knowers, right? So knowers have an intellectual pride, as a way to suggest. And the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a really an array of examples for examination.
The second kind of openness encourages the desire that animates and makes interesting every serious student here. He writes something quotes, I want to know what is good for me. What will make me happy? Well, the former stunts that desire.
And one of the many, the way to put this is that it's not clear that the second kind of openness comes with pride. It doesn't mention again, but maybe there's like an intellectual pride that he's trying to encourage, right? And say, it'll be proud of being well read, be proud of being well versed in the tradition. And that's why I think the great book stock comes in it.
That's often, I think, a tactic some conservatives and even more philosophically minded people take is like, well, okay, I get it. We need to be open. But open means reading the best, not reading any old junk that's indiscriminate, right? Discrimination is important when you're discriminating high for low, right?
Not, you know, us versus that. But I think it's something you said earlier about the instilling prejudices, right? It's very strange for a guy to tell you, I'm giving you myths, I'm instilling prejudices, right? When the whole thesis about philosophy presents, very eloquently and clearly is that there's a difference between what is good and what is your own, right?
He's so open about that. And yet you're like, well, I thought you said you're going to try to instill prejudices. So who is ours? Is it us as Americans and you're making a better American or is it ours as philosophers?
And he speaks, he flits back and forth, I think, between both registers and it's hard to untangle what exactly is edifying from what's philosophically like acute, right? Well, as David said, I mean, this kind of second kind of openness is available for so few people. It seems that the edifying part is there for most. And that helps us learn.
I think why this book was so popular. I think that a lot of people mistook the morally edifying part as the major thrust of the book and didn't focus as much on it. I mean, of course, they paid lip service to it or maybe there were some praise for it, but most of the focus was on this. This is a simply a traditional morality in a lot of ways, which I think is a great mistake.
That's not what this is. I mean, the tradition is better than this sort of gentle nihilism, but it's still vastly inferior to this philosophic openness that you're talking about. Which, yeah, in the philosophic openness means an ability to face and accept arguments that are, I mean, that are, the philosophic positions that are unpleasant. And that's certainly what you would have been playing conversation.
Is it this chapter where he talks about, and you said Alex, that we talked about his father and his parents and grandparents? I mean, they seem to be, I think it's later, he seems to speak about them with a kind of, they're serious. And I think that that's in a way I think he would put that type of head of or above these students that he's encountering, or most of the students he's encountering, with this sort of easy going openness. I can be the passage on page 60.
He says, it is later, though, yeah. He says, I'm not saying anything so trite, is that life is fuller when people have made this to live by. I mean, rather than a life based on the book, Capital B book, is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies, as part of our natural vision, there's nothing to see out there and eventually little left inside.
The Bible's not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished. And you can ding this passage as, I mean, here, Jaffa, we're in a very critical review. He didn't get for this passage because there's a kind of relativism, seems like here, like anyone would do. But I think one of the things he's trying to do, and this goes back to the chapter we did read, and this is paragraph 26 on page 36, I think he sees in the multiculturalism of America a possibly fertile ground for a confrontation between the closeness of non-Western societies that have these traditions that are, should be honored and should be tested and thought through, reading their great books, and the sort of spirit of Western science, right?
And that you look, you've got to figure out a way to sort of revise serious study. Perhaps the way it is is when you ring in, you know, people from India, you take seriously Buddhism. If you bring in people from China, you take seriously Taoism and you study those texts and you examine their arguments and you see what they get right, what they get wrong, and that might be a way of reviving this tradition. So I think sometimes his relativistic side is his attempt to provide something morally and also intellectually salutary given the present situation.
I mean, it's just a... Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, what a tough balancing act that he's trying to achieve here.
It seems that only a few students, he wants to carve out a safe space for a few of these precious few bright students. He doesn't call them philosophers, but he'll learn those who sense those ranks, just Alex and Greg. But he wants to carve out that space for those precious minds. And to do so, he has to create a kind of...
he has to create a friendly environment. So this book's operating on those two levels, I think. That's not some great insight of mine. Can I ask you guys a question?
How old were you when you first read this and what was your reaction? Like what were you... 48. 48.
Well, when it came out. That's true. Came out. Actually, that was Greg.
Say again? I read this book in college because of Greg. Was that right? Yeah.
Greg mentioned it to me this before I took in class with Butterworth. You know, I'll confess to you, I had probably three or four fall starts that happened with the personal number a few years. I'd only... I'd only get 50 pages in.
Like the same show, I jumped one, chucked two stuff on rock and roll, blah, blah, blah. And it gets this weird hide at your stuff. I can't pray. And so it was later in grad school, I read the whole thing.
But just that beginning was enough to kind of get me excited to start taking classes on political philosophy. So I did the track. Awesome. That's really cool.
I found it on my own. I was reading the Republic in class, reading the reading of actually, just two of us with Bob Bartlett, Bob who never mentioned anything about these guys. And on the back cover of the Republic, the author also of The Closing of American Mind. So I can still see it in my head going over to the stacks of the library, I mean, virtually and checking it out like you, David, reading it and not making head to tales of it.
And then making sense at the beginning and then losing it and then making a couple more starts and finishing it. And then I remember reading it a second time right before I started grad school. The summer I was studying Greek. I was studying Greek every waking moment of every day.
And finally, I was like, I need to read something else just to give my mind a break. And so I read I bought The Closing of American Mind and read it for the second time through. I was an undergraduate. Like you guys and teacher recommended it to me.
And I was just bold over by it. I thought it was pretty good. I even went to, I remember going to like a dance and everybody's grinding. I was like, God damn, get jagged with you.
I remember I asked because I was wondering if you guys had similar experiences and follow me. Oh, yeah. I think this is something that's only come with you. It gives you kind of stashes, but also kind of contempt for vulgarity.
I mean, you just you can't come away. Same thing. Yeah, I guess it's like maybe like drinking fine wines or something. I mean, like you come to appreciate that there are high things from this book, like high, intellectual and world.
I'll say here's what spoke to me the most. I found this book. I was a junior or senior college. And I probably told you guys to start before.
You know, I went to Emory as David mentioned, which is a pretty elite university. I was wondering there. And but I don't mean to speak ill of my alma mater, but so many of my classes where exactly his bloom had described it. Yeah.
And so I was just like, yeah, this is right. They're all garbage. So I took a head to take a non-western course that he describes and I took a ladnick and study a square switch. Right.
Why that's non-western seems like 50-50. It's in the West. It's literally. Yeah.
I mean, yeah. So I mean, the teacher was one of these like white ladies who'd gotten Native and like felt like she had found herself, but it just means she's like uprooted. But she told the story about, I think you read a short story or something and it's about how the fields in the village were like not going well. And so they got this Western like agricultural scientist and he didn't do a good job.
And then the native like crushed some bugs in like a towel and stuck it on the corners of the field. And the field got better. And I was like, I was just like, I don't think this works. They just go to the West and I said, but she's like, yeah, but they get the victory.
I'm like, yeah, but it's fake. It's completely made up this wouldn't work in real life. This is, I mean, it's like, you know, if you said, oh, well, I believe in like, you know, Jesus. And he came back from the dead.
She would have that same reaction. But but it was like, it's clear. It was like this attempt to make you like respect them while also denigrating the achievements, the distinct achievement of the West. Right.
For me, it was about, I mean, it was a series of classes that made the most interesting writers who've ever written uninteresting. It was cultivating me a distaste for great books. Because all of those was at lit in the oven. Here's this, you know, dead white sexist racist, so and so.
I was like, why am I wasting my time reading this guy if he was so bad? I don't understand it. So. Yeah, that's what that's what spoke to me is it was like a completely true to my experience that one of the kind of universities he's talking about.
Yeah. And that was true. And I know many of my peers, but my fellow students, I mean, even the decent ones sort of this described them to a T, I think. Well, yeah.
So the music section has zero effect on me. And I was like, well, I'm a great philosopher. I'm a continuous and violent rap music. And I'm just going to laugh at it.
Right. And so, and like I talked to Henry Higuera when I was at St. John's about, uh, Cervantes, he's a little Cervantes book. And, um, I brought a balloon or something and he said, yeah, I always disagree with him about the rock and roll stuff.
There's one thing I agree with him fundamentally on though, like it is about sex. Um, like, it is, I mean, he's like, say what you want, but it's, I mean, it's even the word rock and roll is a euphemism for sex. If I've not mentioned this on the show before, I apologize. This is one of my favorite insights.
This is when I realized that the word rock and roll is a euphemism for sex because then if you just change sex out for the lyrics in a word and a song and a song that has the word rock and roll in it, you start to realize how hilarious or how dirty some of these songs are. I want a rock and roll all night and party every day. Oh, that would wear me out in a hurry. Jailhouse rock really changes that one up.
If you can't find a partner, use a wooden chair. Let's rock. Anyway, but Paul McCartney actually recently, um, we built this city. We built this city for sex.
Yeah. But Paul McCartney actually admitted that. I saw this article with Paul McCartney recently within the last year where he said, and he used the word arrows. He said all of the Beatles songs were about arrows and, and Bloom, what Bloom says that Paul McCartney confirmed is the lyrics didn't matter.
Like, if you're like, how would this be about sex? The lyrics don't have to do with sex. It's the rhythm. It's the melody.
It's the rhythm. It's the beats. And it's, it's, it's, it's, I think he's, you guys can call out the Beatles in his book. He does not call out the role.
Yeah. There's that lovely Beatles line. She was 17 if you know what I mean. It's not, I don't know what they mean.
It's not a puzzle to me. Like, can you be clear, John? Anyway, um, and then he was able to get that. So you listen to rap music.
I mean, it's, yeah. You can so clearly see the deleterious effects that has on the minds of young people. I mean, now of course I say, now you know, I'll do it. But, um, it's true.
I mean, I, uh, I fell in, I thought he was spot on about music, like 95%, right? And potential also. I'm using music. I was not doing the puzzle.
Yes. Exactly. Oh, yes. It's the thing that doesn't matter me.
That's when I started listening to classical music and jazz is more than just like a sort of past time on the side. It's taking it seriously. And the thing I found happening with me is that I started enjoying the music so much that if I tried to attentively listen to more pop music, you can find little interesting things that they do. It's not completely devoid of musical merit, but it's just like, it's like a drop in the bucket compared to like what you may find.
But just any old. No. I mean, That was the country music while I was drinking blood, so these, the salt on rock and roll didn't bother me at all. For sure.
You're getting your balance. Listen to the country music. With your, oh, yeah. Yeah.
I did listen mostly country. Well, that's I think is an interesting exception. Does he really talk about country at all? He doesn't actually, somebody criticized him for not doing it.
But the reason he doesn't do it, again, goes back to that's not his sample. Kids at the top 23rd universities don't listen to country music. Yeah. And if it was worth the lyrics of country music have by and large, there are the most interesting examples, of course, exceptions.
But by and large country is fairly more early, salutary. Like, I'm a little one. It's not just a. Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. Now, there are of course the most interesting exceptions of Johnny Cash, right? The outlaws all together. But even still, even it's that still applies to those guys.
Yeah. That's all. Yeah. And it's part of that tradition of like American air and sea.
You don't love it. Leave it. Yeah. Exactly.
So there's, but there's a, he does praise jazz. I know. Can we, let's go back to the nonwestern stuff. I want to just point out two passages that I think are interesting on page 35 36.
He says, the point of the sort of thing is to propagandize acceptance of different ways. And indifference to the real content is as good as it means as any. It expands on this on page 36. The point is to force students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not better.
It is again, not the content that counts, but the lesson to be drawn such requirements are part of the effort to establish a world community and train its member, the person devoid of prejudice. And this is exactly why would you force somebody to take a nonwestern course as though that's like a group, right? Right. You're being forced to take it because they want to, to make you appreciate it, but also to sort of push this regime.
So this is one of these moments of regime analysis. Now he then says all of these, all of these cultures is actually ethnocentric. And they think their way is the best. And it's after this that he gets the paragraph 26.
We're the only culture that doesn't do this. Western culture is the only culture that doesn't insist on its own superiority. So the paradox, of course, is we're the best because we don't do that. Yes.
Yeah. We've done this silly thing of holding our own to the standard of the good, rather than just assuming that our own is the good. So in 26, he outlines an alternative way. And he says, only Western nations, that is those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one's own way?
One should conclude from the study of non-Western cultures that not only prefer one's own way, but to believe it is best, superior to others, is primary and even natural in the sense of natural to men. Exactly the opposite of what is intended by requiring students to study these cultures. What we are really doing is applying a Western prejudice. A scientific study or further scientific study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon.
And then he continues and says, if we are to learn from these cultures, we must wonder whether such scientific study is a good idea. Consistency would seem to require professors of openness to respect the ethnocentrism or closeness they find everywhere else. However, in attacking ethnocentrism, what they actually do is to assert on a way as the superiority of their scientific understanding and inferiority of the other cultures. So they're still guilty of Western hegemony, right?
But it's hidden and it's hypocritical. What they ought to do is actually make this confrontation much more thematic, and that would be a version of the conflict between recent and revelation. What he's arguing? Do you think that these days that it actually has gone farther in that direction and begun to affirm the superiority of other cultures to Western cultures?
I mean, explicitly affirm it. They're in greater touch with the Earth. They lack the sort of imperialism, all these kinds of things that we've had in the West, ignoring the fact that they tend to be much more racist and sexist and xenophobic than the West is, for example. Out more inbred.
Yeah, that's fair. Well, I think it's a natural, I think what you're talking about is this sort of natural thing that as the West seems to not have a clear path before it. The kind of two directions to go is to look beyond the West or to look to where in the history things went wrong. Is this the theme of well-bex novels?
I was just, you think? I don't know, I'm different. Okay. But it's like, where Heidi does, he starts looking to the East.
Taste. Yeah. Even religious types, they go back to their faith. Right.
Strauss goes back to the Greeks, you know, Greek political thought. Yeah, that's right. Huh. Very cool.
This is such a good book. I love the opportunities to reread it. I've reread it several times over the years. Actually, I encountered a student today that I thought about giving a copy to.
Do you think I still speak to a college student? Or is it just too outdated? No, I think it will. The biggest thing that this book did for me, and it's also dangerous too, is you get obsessed with the Western Great Books.
Right. And your mind becomes close to other sources of wisdom. Yeah. I think that's a potential drawback.
All right. Is that a drawback? I, I, you see, you can't go spunking down a Re-K, right? So you're just immediately going to say, well, you know, we have it all.
Oh, I don't know. Gotcha. I see. But, but then again, like, look, you only have one life.
I, you know, we know that that our culture, like Western culture has these great works and that they have a lot to teach us. Right. I'm happy. We're here today.
I'm happy to study non-Western things, but I mean, maybe we've said this before and it may be spent a hundred times, but there are two reasons. There are two arguments to me that are so powerful. And number one is one of the reasons I'm drawn to the Western things, and maybe to a certain extent, these non-Western things could do this, is that the Western things help me unpack my own prejudices by sort of exposing them in a way that, in other words, I'm not a part of those other traditions. And so therefore I don't hold those prejudices that would never need to be.
Now, of course, I guess it's possible that reading something entirely other might also get you reflect on your own into questions. But the more serious hesitation I have is you only have one life, which is what you just said, David, that there's no way. I mean, I'm interested in particularly Indian kinds of things, but I mean, for how in the world am I going to find the time? I mean, if I'm going to seriously do it, I mean, you have to stay sensitive.
And that's, I mean, I studied Greek and it took years to be able to do that. And I think that I just think the impediments are so much greater for non-Western kinds of things, the barriers to learning. And then by the way, it would only be on the basis of suspicion that something is there. And then can you imagine, like, I've devoted 20 years of my life to learning language X because I think maybe, and then I thought this was just garbage, actually.
What have I done in my life? Well, that's what we should do on a stop close, but not philosophy book. Well, we did the one great episode with Jim Carrey on Indian philosophy. And I'll just one quick plug, by the way, I can't wait.
I'm sorry I'm saying this to be on the episode. Maybe we should say something at the beginning of the next episode. I was just at ACTC, the Association for Cortex and Course's annual conference. They're great fans of the great thing.
And we should do a panel there next year. We are rock stars for this very narrow segment of this very narrow segment of this very narrow segment of academia. They love us there. But I sat next, I was in a panel with Jim Carrey and Josh Perrin, who sort of have sparred a little bit in writing or at least of conferences.
And boy, it was fantastic. So that was all around by saying, Jim Carrey is episode on Indian philosophy. That was very, very good. And so I do think we should do the Anastoplo but not philosophy, but we should do it by bringing in a series of serious thinkers who can talk about those texts and the way that the four of us can't do.
I mean, we can do it on our own, but what do I know about Confucius? So I kept thinking about that book as I was reading. I don't think it's even stronger, Clem Greg, which is to say that in so far as the world has gone Western, that we've accepted the modern Western sort of political paradigm or we're determining ourselves negatively against it with this paradigm of modern natural science and classical liberalism, the sort of capitalism and scientific outlook. This is just a powerful combination.
Everybody's going to be the Western tradition. And now if you're an Indian and you find yourself born between that, you might have to examine your own history. Why did we come to be this way? And you'll look at imperialism and you might raise gripes about imperialism as having uprooted you from your tradition.
But as Westerners, you do have to kind of look at your regime, the American regime, if you're in the US and you have to look at these books and you go through it. I think the mistake that people make is they think people who study the Western tradition do it out of a mere romanticism or cultural love. And it's strange. I don't love all Western books.