The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

“The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.” 

Regardless of their social, religious, or political backgrounds, most students enter elite American universities sharing two beliefs: Truth is relative, and equality is the defining American value. Accepting diversity means embracing relativism and rejecting absolute ideas of good and bad, which, in our society, embody the norms and ideology of the dominant White, European, Christian demographic. The belief in a fixed notion of good and evil is tantamount in practice to racism and intolerance. Truth and knowledge are social constructs according to this view. The relativity of truth, Bloom insists, is a moral position, not a theoretical conclusion based on reason.

“[R]elativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. […] The point [of the new curriculum] is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any.” 

Bloom argues that relativism negates the traditional moral purpose of liberal education, which is to discover what is good and true through the rational investigation of nature and human cultures. Education always embodies a moral aim; in a democratic society, the aim is to produce citizens useful for democracy who espouse the ideals and master the skills conducive to the preservation of the democratic system. The agenda of many university courses introducing students to non-Western cultures is to promote the idea that all cultures and belief systems are equally valid, thus promoting the ideology of tolerance.