Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 31:2 (Jun 1988)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JETS 31:2 (June 1988) p. 203

Book Reviews

The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. By Allan Bloom. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 392 pp., $18.95. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. By E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 251 pp., $16.95. The Gift of Fire. By Richard Mitchell. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 188 pp., $7.95 paper.

Not long ago, according to Allan Bloom, the world got turned upside down. The many moral absolutes upon which our civilization was reared were exchanged for a weak substitute: the belief that everything is relative. Bloom’s book is devoted to tracing the consequences of that exchange. His is a graphic delineation of how the “Peter principle” operates in the realm of ideology: The worst ideas and the worst thinkers seem to rise to the top.

Bloom shows that relativism, like a strong presidential candidate, has long coattails. Its ascent brought with it the sad substitution of “relationships” for love, of “opinion” for reason, and of “feeling” for thinking. The distressing result of this superficial intellectual openness is actually what Bloom describes in his title: the closing of the American mind. When one believes no answers exist, one ceases to be open to them or to search for them. We now live in a more mindless world than we used to, one where “commitment” seems to weigh more than truth. If freedom is choice, as Milton taught us, then our mindlessness and relativism have meant a loss of freedom. We have lost our options because we have lost sight of issues that pertain to truth. Real choices are possible only for those who face real questions. In a world where all answers are equal, real choices no longer exist. Any choice will do because no choice (except traditional hierarchicalism) is considered wrong.

The university has failed us, Bloom contends, because it succumbed to cultural pressures. In the Soviet Union, for example, historians must rewrite the history books every time a new regime comes to power—eliminating this item, adding that. While we rightly deplore the intellectual prostitution that such academic practices reveal, we fail to see that American scholars and universities have done the same thing and still are doing it. In our case, however, it is not the government but contemporary culture that plays the tune to which we dance. We too have rewritten our textbooks, even our Bibles. We recently have put women, blacks, gays, and evangelicals in places of historical or theological prominence they never occupied. But the liberal democratizing of people and ideas (“no one is better than anybody else, and no idea is better than any other”) is so pervasive and so deeply rooted in our ...