I first read this book when I was in college in the late 80s, after my father read it and sent it to me because he thought I would like it. Bloom and the Straussians have been a fascination of mine ever since. My Positive Liberty compatriots, Jon Rowe and Timothy Sandefur, have a lot more experience and knowledge of this area than I do and I've learned a lot from them. Have you read Ravelstein, Saul Bellow's book about Bloom and those around him? I did not know until Rowe told me that Bloom, the defender of social conservatism and absolute truth, was himself a nihilist, an atheist, and an extremely hedonistic homosexual.

I read about half of it, set it down for something else, and 10 years later have only rarely felt the urge to pick it back up. I seem to recall he enjoys being a "college man" and he had something against the Rolling Stones. (Actually, that last part, I may have gotten from another author I briefly confused for Allan Bloom and that is Howard K. Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. Just, by the way, I really enjoyed the Lucifer Principle when I last read it 5 or 6 years ago. Don't know if it stands the test of time or the tastes of a discerning reader.)

Interesting about Bloom being a nihilist and atheist. (Next thing you know, Friedrich Hayek will turn out to have been a Marxist.) What I've heard about the Straussians is that they held the teachings of religion to be "salutary myths," good for the masses so as to keep society in order but not to be taken seriously by the few who were capable of philosophy. They thought that ancient authors who (like Plato) professed to believe in a god were really just saying this to keep themselves from being killed (like Socrates), and that they left clues in their writings so that future philosophers (like the Straussians) could understand what they really meant. Hence the need for "esoteric reading," or "reading between the lines," a specialty of the Strauss seminars.

Which is funny, because Bloom really seemed passionate about some of the things he was saying in favor of belief and against nihilism (ironically, he charges that nihilism was imported with the wave of professors who fled Germany before the war - one of whom was Strauss!). One oddity about his whole discussion of German ideas is that he tells us we shouldn't trust anything from the country that produced Hitler, as though all these German ideas had a certain "German flavor" that we don't want on our palate, and then he goes on to say that what's specifically wrong with these ideas is that they consider truth to be a cultural product, rather than something universally true or false. In which case, why blame these ideas for being German? Why not just say they're false? There's something fishy about the whole thing.

This whole thing reminds me of those old stories where the devil will pretend to be a pious believer, and say everything a pious believer should say, but he'll slip one little treacherous thing in there to ensnare you and bring you down. Bloom stresses the values of the Bible, but then says that culture (and implicitly religion) is a cave, and the philosopher will ascend from it to the light of reason. So basically, the Bible gives us our values, and when we become philosophers we learn to understand and rationalize those values (the Platonic progression from opinion to knowledge). In a Christian context, this would mean learning the values as a child through the story of Christ, and then rediscovering them through the use of reason as a philosopher. But I think that if a great Christian thinker like Dostoevsky or C.S. Lewis were here, they would say that the apex of all knowledge is the story of Christ, which defies all rationalizing attempts and without which any reasoned morality is ineffective and empty. So my question is, does the Christian thinker need Bloom (or philosophy, for that matter)? Should we follow his prescriptions, or is this simply a well-laid snare?

Tocqueville said that America was able to give her citizens so much freedom because they were restrained by the mores of Christianity. Bloom says that America has lost her Christian values, and so the universities desperately need to start teaching philosophy - good Platonic philosophy. Notice he does not suggest a revival of Christianity - something that has happened many times in America's past. Notice also that he's a bit overzealous in describing how no college students anywhere have any knowledge of the Bible or belief in absolute truth. I went to the University of Chicago from '99 to '02, and quite a few students knew the Bible and believed in absolute truth - probably a majority. Nor exactly was it what you'd call a conservative student body. So either there's been some kind of religious awakening since Bloom was there, or he's yelling "fire" after somebody lit a match. The question is, why would he be misstating the facts so much in this way? What's hidden between the lines?

Check out my lastest few posts on Bloom and that book.

The Jahn essay is great. Although, some of his other stuff is real strange crackpot stuff.

I haven't read the book, so I probably shouldn't comment on it, but I can say that in general I have little trust or patience for peddlers of esoterica, especially those claiming a more profound understanding of certain troubling ideas--out in the open for all to see--merely because they have found themselves more disturbed by them. When a philosopher claims that few have the capacity to reach his insights, he is either daydreaming or his insights consist of mostly nonsense. One need only remember Xenu to lose all hope in special claims on knowledge.

I think it's one of those books that everybody bought and nobody actually read, like A Brief History of Time or The Bell Curve.

When it came out, it got enormous publicity, and liberals in the media were borderline hysterical about it. I think that's how it became a best-seller. And I think nearly everyone who tried to read it (including myself) maybe got to the second or third chapter before abandoning it and picking up something interesting.

JohnR wrote:

I think it's one of those books that everybody bought and nobody actually read, like A Brief History of Time or The Bell Curve.

I had the same thought when I first read it - how on earth did this become a bestseller? A vanishingly small percentage of the population is capable of reading it with any kind of comprehension, and even among the brightest and best educated they will often have to read sections of it many times in order to discern the meaning (only to have someone else tell them that they don't get the esoteric meaning of the whole thing, only an even smaller group of the Elect understand that meaning). Nonetheless, it's a book that continues to fascinate me.

It all reminds me of New York or L.A. nightclubs, where you have to look just the right way to get in, then there's a VIP room inside of there that only the elite of the elite get are allowed in. And inside of there, I imagine there is a phone booth where only Jack Nicholson is allowed.

"like A Brief History of Time or The Bell Curve."

I don't think you can put those two books into any category narrower than "volumes printed in English." The former was a competent review of a complicated subject by a competent scientist; the latter was none of those things.

Had you said "The Mismeasure of Man," on the other hand....

Paul wrote:

I don't think you can put those two books into any category narrower than "volumes printed in English." The former was a competent review of a complicated subject by a competent scientist; the latter was none of those things.

Had you said "The Mismeasure of Man," on the other hand....

I agree completely, though Gould's book was not a bestseller the way Bell Curve was. And that is a shame.