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The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
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Part 2, Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Nihilism, American Style”
Chapter 5 Summary: “The German Connection”
After the Second World War, American intellectuals began to embrace a new moral vocabulary imported by German academic refugees who had fled the Nazi regime. Embodying an entirely different worldview, this language marks an epochal shift in how we view morality, politics, and the self. The philosophical wellspring of value relativism lies in the intellectual culture of late-19th-century Germany and the Weimar Republic of the 1930s. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and the nihilism that would afflict Western civilization as a result of this discovery rippled through the German cultural consciousness at the turn of the century, influencing Freud, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and other intellectuals and artists preoccupied with the experience of existential despair forecast by Nietzsche.
The loss of belief in the Christian God, who provided the theological foundation for a system of morality defining good and evil in absolute terms, results in an emptying out of moral categories and a loss of meaning in life. The collapse of traditional values, Nietzsche claims, heralds nihilism, since the motivation for human behavior, once stripped of the regulating influence of established norms, becomes the unrestrained will to power. Unmoored from their transcendent origin, good and evil are no longer objective or universal ideas but are discovered to be subjective and contingent constructions. Moral absolutes yield to a multiplicity of culturally specific values, none of which can claim greater authority than another. This destabilizing and decentering of moral foundations represents a profound crisis in values with immense cultural, psychological, and religious implications.
Theoretically, the discovery that the Christian concepts of good and evil are not universal frees the individual to create their own values, crafting a life-affirming morality in accord with personal desires and aspirations. Nietzsche felt only a small elite—the spiritual aristocrats and seminally creative artists—were strong enough to responsibly assume the risks of value creation. The vast majority would either live in hypocritical denial or succumb to nihilism when the traditional theological underpinnings of morality were removed. Bloom points to the existential crises and political extremism of 20th-century Europe as evidence of the tragic consequences of a culture surrendering to value relativism.
In contrast to the European struggle with Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy, America has embraced relativism in a superficial and pragmatic fashion. In America, nihilism is a mood of unease without a sense of the existential abyss, and pop psychology touts relativism as an opportunity for self-fulfillment. Nihilism results in the chaotic confusion of the passions, which are no longer subject to a hierarchy of value. In America, Bloom claims, egotism and the focus on creating an individual “life-style” are symptoms of the collapse of traditional values. Rather than seek what classical philosophy calls the “good life,” based on a rational knowledge of good and evil, today one expresses one’s values through a potpourri of choices in fashion, ethics, sexuality, politics, spirituality, and other interests that demonstrate one’s creative nonconformity. Value positing, the creation of a personal morality, becomes the antidote to value relativism. Psychotherapy considers the forging of an individual lifestyle the hallmark of psychological well-being; self-acceptance, self-assertion, and satisfying one’s desires form its gospel of prosperity. Transforming the despair and angst of continental philosophy into a therapy of self-affirmation, psychotherapy creates an American “nihilism with a happy ending” (147). It fails to grasp, however, the destructive effect of value relativism on social cohesion.
Bloom is astonished at how the phenomenon of value relativism has morphed from its esoteric origins in Nietzschean philosophy to become the commonplace attitude of Americans today. The tragedy is that Americans lack the education, historical experience, and cultural temperament to comprehend the consequences of the collapse of a morality based on universals. Moreover, the philosophy of value relativism is anathema to the founding principles of American democracy, which is grounded in the Enlightenment concepts of reason and inalienable, universal rights.
The 19th-century German philosophy from which relativism emerged, by contrast, views values as the organic creation of the national folk-soul, not as universals discovered by reason. The Romantic idea of an organic culture, generating its own sacred values that embody the mystical soul of the people, is tribalist and anti-rationalist. America, Bloom suggests, has ignored the question of whether value relativism is good for, or even compatible with, democracy. The American attraction to German philosophy and psychology represents an unconscious yearning for spiritual profundity felt lacking in the democratic experience, defined primarily by materialist and economic interests. In German thought, Americans discovered the self as the primary subject of being, the source of all values, which have no other validation than that of arising from the mysterious freedom within the individual psyche. The embrace of relativism and elevation of the individual self as the wellspring of values, however, has severed American democracy from its roots in Enlightenment thought.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature”
After tracing the German origins of value relativism, Bloom situates the American democratic experiment within the historical context of 18th-century political philosophy. He explains the conflict between the political aims of the Enlightenment and the deconstruction of reason that gave rise to relativism and eventually contributed to the emergence of Nazism in the 20th century. Bloom focuses on the philosophical grounds of liberal democracy as theorized by Hobbes, Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Their conflicting views of the state of nature, the core concept underlying their theories of civil society, survive in the bifurcated character of American experience.
The American and French revolutions were the social realization of the ideas of Locke and Rousseau, who argued that men are endowed by nature with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In America, democracy took root easily thanks to the equality of conditions that prevailed among the former British colonies. In France, the establishment of democracy required the abolition of the monarchy and regicide, the unsettling of the aristocracy, and the displacement of the powerful Catholic Church. As a result, while Americans were largely satisfied with a political arrangement that enabled them to pursue their economic interests confidently, France experienced tumultuous resurgences of conservatism as the Left and Right battled for supremacy. The French Revolution was less successful in translating democratic ideals into stable institutional forms, and the enfranchisement of the French bourgeoisie provoked critical responses in Europe that were to play a significant role in the emergence of value relativism.
The problem was spiritual and cultural as well as political. The democratic regime produced narrow-minded, soulless, and selfish men, oblivious to the higher feelings of magnanimity and beauty that had been the cultural prerogative of the aristocracy. Americans saw the enfranchisement of the middle class as the realization of the egalitarian ideal and the unbridling of liberty and economic opportunity; Europeans saw the rise of the bourgeoisie as an insidious cultural threat. The term “bourgeois” came to signify the worst and most contemptible type of human, the antonym of the artistic, heroic, noble individual.
The ambiguity regarding the type of character democracy produces is rooted in the psychology of human nature that underlies liberal democracy. The American and French revolutions were philosophically indebted to Locke’s and Rousseau’s views of the “state of nature,” which posits that all men are endowed with natural rights and the freedom to pursue their interests. Before civilization, competition for resources would inevitably lead humans to conflict and war, and some form of civil society was necessary to avoid bloodshed by providing for personal safety and adjudicating the claims of individuals. The individual, for Locke, was motivated by self-preservation and physical appetite, fundamental drives that a rational political order must recognize and accommodate its legal principles to. Locke believed that the self-sufficient individual, enabled by liberal democratic ideals, could freely pursue his economic interests under the protection of an egalitarian and rational legal framework. Basing the political order on this enlightened self-interest would promote civil harmony, since safeguarding the rights of the individual would secure the consent of all to a government based on those rights.
Locke’s secular model became the paradigm for the American political solution, but it rebuffed those offended by his suppression of the spiritual and sentimental aspects of human existence in favor of the economic. Rousseau, the champion of human sensibility, emotion, and the inner life, was acutely aware of the psychological deficiency of Locke’s representation of human nature. Man’s original state, Rousseau believed, was not a deplorable condition of violent savagery, but a primal wholeness that was destroyed by the rise of urban life. Society was the cause of man’s uncomfortable self-division, and the return to nature could heal that wound. The sweet sensation of being in touch with one’s feelings and the natural world could serve as an antidote to the rampant hypocrisy and alienation of society. For Hobbes and Locke, nature was a negative to be overcome; for Rousseau, nature was the key to our true self. Rousseau’s nostalgia for nature permeates American environmentalist thought from Thoreau to the hippies’ experiments in communal life in the 1960s.
The conflict between Locke’s and Rousseau’s views of nature has fundamentally informed the American experience. Nature is seen, on the one hand, as an unlimited source of material wealth to be exploited for economic profit and, on the other, as a reservoir of spiritual sustenance. Locke’s legacy is embodied in America’s economic focus, concern for private property, and system of rights; Rousseau’s is found in our ideas of the meaning of life. Intellectually, America is divided between unsentimental materialism and brooding romanticism, each of which labors with its own contradictions.
Part 2, Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In the second part of the book, Bloom analyzes the complicated history of post-Enlightenment thought that gave rise to value relativism. He traces the pathways by which a new language of morality, having emerged in 19th-century German philosophy as a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, was exported to America by intellectual émigrés fleeing Nazi Germany and was widely assimilated here. Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, and Max Weber are the chief figures in the genesis of value relativism and its successful translation into mainstream American life. The core of Bloom’s thesis is that the European historical and cultural contexts that produced relativism are foreign to the rationalist spirit of American liberal democracy, and we have uncritically adopted a philosophical language inimical to our political foundations whose true significance we don’t understand.
In these chapters, Bloom traces the roots of relativism in Nietzsche and his German successors and contrasts this philosophical legacy with the liberal tradition established by Hobbes and Locke, and later modified by Rousseau, that was politically realized in the American and French revolutions. It is, in part, the story of the Enlightenment and its discontents, involving fundamental oppositions between reason, clarity, universality, objectivity, secularism, and the modern scientific method, hallmarks of 18th-century Enlightenment thought, and the subjectivity, irrationalism, spirituality, folk-consciousness, and psychology of the self that are associated with Rousseau and romanticism. The critique of the Enlightenment pioneered by Rousseau and culminating in Nietzsche eventuates in a twin tragedy: a civilization losing the moral compass that was provided by institutional religion and liberal democracy losing faith in the rational ideals on which it is founded.
Nietzsche’s prediction of the nihilism that would follow the discovery that God is dead is the catalytic moment in this development. Atheism, for Nietzsche, was a metaphysical disenchantment with awesome consequences, not at all the joyous triumph of reason over superstition celebrated by the French philosophes. The collapse of good and evil as moral absolutes rips our supreme life-sustaining values from their transcendent origin, leaving a vacuum that the self must fill with its innermost desires. This vacuum clears the ground for a chaotic array of self-generated “value systems” that serve to distinguish the individual, embodied by a personal lifestyle, the modern substitute for virtuous character. In Europe, Nietzsche’s prophecy of nihilism and deconstruction of traditional metaphysics spurred intense philosophical grappling with the existential anxieties and spiritual disorientation of this epochal disruption. Bloom emphasizes that in America, by contrast, nihilism is felt as a vague dissatisfaction that can be readily cured by the appropriate psychotherapy. He is astonished by two facts: the widespread adoption of an elite German philosophical language laden with tragic overtones by mainstream America, and the superficiality of our dalliance with nihilism and the value relativism it encourages. The pragmatic, optimistic character of the American soul wants a nihilism with a happy ending, one that reassures us of our essential goodness. Psychological health, accordingly, is not found in the arduous task of trying to be virtuous, but in adjusting one’s values to one’s temperament and situation. Creating our own values becomes a comfortable antidote to the vaguely threatening—but also liberating—condition of value relativism, serving as just another means of self-assertion.
To Americans, the social appeal of relativism lies in its presumed ability to reconcile the diversity of faiths, opinions, and identities of the nation in a manner consistent with the democratic promise of egalitarianism and freedom. Tolerance for diversity, Bloom cautions, is not the unequivocal result of relativism, however. Relativism offers the path of least resistance, on the one hand, while also sanctioning extreme, even fanatic, positions that may be severely intolerant on the other. This possibility owes to the fact that “values,” as Nietzsche recognized, are not deduced from reason or the objective nature of things but embody a radically subjective conception of good and evil. Unlike the traditional Christian ideas of good and evil, values aren’t grounded in a metaphysical or transcendent reality; they originate in the mythmaking unconscious, the irrational wellspring of creativity. With Nietzsche, the transcendent horizon of human experience collapses, yielding unforeseen possibilities for human growth on one hand, and the specter of nihilism on the other.
The essential question that America has avoided, Bloom claims, is whether value relativism is compatible with democracy. He believes it is not, citing the failure of the democratic Weimar Republic and the disregard that identity politics movements have shown for the Enlightenment ideals of natural rights and reason, the seminal ideas underlying the founding of the United States. America was the brainchild of the rationalist belief that all men are created equal and enjoy inalienable rights, a credo that should supersede other powerfully felt, but more contingent, identifications—whether religious, racial, or cultural. In German philosophy and depth psychology, Bloom argues, America belatedly discovered the profundity of the individual self, which, with the decline of traditional religion, came to replace God as the source of value, meaning, and morality. Bloom sees Nietzsche’s philosophy of relativism as transforming Rousseau’s romanticism of the self into a moral solipsism that undermines the fabric of secular democratic society. The great dualism of American democracy lies in the tension between two traditions: the materialist, selfish economic opportunism of its Lockean origins and the brooding introspection of its visionary, Rousseauistic side.
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