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

In these chapters, Bloom discusses the invention of the modern idea of the self, tracing its development from Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau up to Freud. The essential thread of this concept from the Renaissance to the present is that man is a natural being, defined more by feeling and desire than reason. The supremacy of the self, the discovery of its profundity, the liberation of its desire, and its self-realization in creativity and culture constitute the environment from which value relativism emerges. As the modern concept of the self replaced the earlier Christian idea of the soul, the Romantic conception of culture came to supersede the Enlightenment notion of the political state.

Hobbes’s and Locke’s theories of the “state of nature” revolutionized the concept of human identity. The dominant Christian tradition, prior to Machiavelli, held that the individual was composed of body and soul, opposing principles mysteriously joined in a state of permanent tension. The soul, metaphysical in origin, strove virtuously against the desires of the body, seeking to live morally and transcend man’s animal nature. Spurred by the methods and discoveries of the scientific revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment discarded the Christian model of the individual, replacing the concept of the soul with a new idea of the self as the essence of human personality. Man was no longer divided between a corruptible body and immortal soul, but a natural being who sought to satisfy his bodily appetites and instinct for self-preservation through reason and industry. Locke, the first great exponent of this idea, assumed that a society of men, each motivated by his own self-interest but bound by an efficient and well-designed agreement to preserve the liberty and natural rights of all, would be more ethical and egalitarian than traditional monarchies preaching Christian virtue while practicing rampant hypocrisy. Reason recognized man’s selfishness and devised a political order effectively accommodating his natural impulses, thereby securing the consent of the governed on a rational basis.

Locke’s notion of the self, however, jettisoned the spiritual and sentimental aspects of the individual in favor of the economic. Recognizing this failure, Rousseau sought to recover the sense of the mysterious uniqueness and wholeness of the human being and, in the process, invented modern psychology. Rousseau sees feeling, rather than reason, as the core of the self. He celebrates the irrational germinations of the individual consciousness—reverie, the dream, memory, and imagination—as they craft a narrative of self-becoming. Unlike Socrates, for whom knowledge of oneself meant the rational search for truth about the nature of mankind in general, self-knowledge for Rousseau was a solitary plunge into the depths of his own unique and idiosyncratic being. Self-love, rather than objective knowledge, was the supreme goal and guide for Rousseau.

Rousseau was the most influential critic of the Enlightenment’s failings, a prophet of Romantic subjectivity defending the sanctity of the individual psyche against the narrow objectivity of science and utilitarianism. Modern psychology’s language of the self, creativity, and culture stems largely from Rousseau and the cult of creative genius championed by the Romantics against the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution. Freedom, for the Romantics, was embodied by the creative artist, whose genius gives material form to their vision, and who establishes their unique personality by their creative act. The marks of creativity and personality served to distinguish the geniuses in egalitarian society, revealing their superiority from the bourgeoisie. However, democracy abhors elitism. In democratic society, Bloom laments, the meanings of the words “creativity” and “personality,” once reserved for artistic prodigies like Beethoven, are trivialized and devalued until they apply to everyone. This degradation of language obliterates the distinction between the remarkable and the pedestrian. Virtue and character, moral qualities that once distinguished the best individuals, have been replaced by creativity and personality, terms that no longer mean anything but are simply “a kind of opiate of the masses” (183).

The same degradation of meaning applies to the word “culture,” which has implications for our fascination with multiculturalism. The idea of culture began to develop a special significance during the Enlightenment, signifying an organic social affiliation distinct from “nation” or “civilization.” Like Rousseau’s return to nature, culture represents a solution to the nature/society tension, an effort to restore the wholeness of the individual that was lost when civilization superseded the primal state of nature. Culture reconciles humankind’s natural desires with morality, enabling the individual to develop his faculties in a way that is consonant with social expectations. In this philosophical sense of the term, culture is a universal historical achievement.

Romanticism, however, quickly focused on the particularity and multiplicity of individual cultures, not the Enlightenment idea of universal culture. Individual cultures generate their own systems of morality; they deny any transcendent authority dictating moral principles to them. Consequently, respect for individual cultures means rejecting the idea of universal human rights, since such rights are based on reason, which transcends cultural particularity. Multiculturalism in America is the trivialized result of this trend, Bloom argues. The idea of “culture” was once intended to express the dignity of man; now the term is used for everything—the “drug culture,” “gang culture,” “S&M culture”—any form of social behavior or tribal identity, regardless of moral worth. Bloom concludes, “Failure of culture is now culture” (184).