Allan Bloom and America

"The cause of our current malaise, in Bloom's diagnosis, is modern philosophy, which has infected us in two ways — through politics and through 19th and 20th century continental European thought. As for politics, says Bloom, America was founded on modern principles of liberty and equality that we got from Hobbes and Locke. Liberty turned out to mean freedom from all self-restraint, and equality turned out to mean the destruction of all differences of rank and even of nature. Our Founders may have acted, or have pretended to act, "with a firm reliance on divine providence" (Declaration of Independence) but their natural-rights philosophy, says Bloom, came from the atheists Hobbes and Locke. (Bloom hedges on whether the Founders were self-conscious atheists or merely the dupes of clever and lying philosophers.) Bloom characterizes the Lockean doctrine of the Founders in this way:
[In the state of nature man] is on his own. God neither looks after him nor punishes him. Nature's indifference to justice is a terrible bereavement for man. . . . [This doctrine] produced, among other wonders, the United States. (163)
The practical result:
God was slowly executed here; it took two hundred years, but local theologians tell us He is now dead. (230)
Similarly, the Founders may have thought they were establishing a political order based on reason: Bloom stresses our initial claim to be the first political order so grounded. But the regime of reason turned out to be the regime where reason discovers the virtue of unleashing the passions. At first reason legitimates only the modest passions of industriousness and money-making. But having abandoned its older claim to be the rightful master of the soul, reason eventually lost its authority and became impotent against demands for self-indulgence and mindless self-expression.
The story of America, according to Bloom, is a tale of the practical working out of the degradation inherent in the logic of our founding principles:
This is a regime founded by philosophers and their students. . . . Our story is the majestic and triumphant march of the principles of freedom and equality, giving meaning to all that we have done or are doing. There are almost no accidents; everything that happens among us is a consequence of one or both of our principles. . . . [T]he problem of nature [is] always present but always repressed in the reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality. (97)
Eventually, Bloom says, the infections occasioned by our political principles sapped the strength of religious faith and traditional morality. The relativism of today's students is, in Bloom's view, a perfect expression of the real soul of liberty, which from the start, in Hobbes's thought, meant that life had no intrinsic meaning. Here, in Bloom's view, is the ultimate source of the view that liberty means nothing more than self-realization or self-expression with no intrinsic moral limit. The anti-nature dogmas of women's liberation, which deny the obvious natural differences between men and women in the name of equality, are destroying the last remnants of the family, which had been the core of society through most of America's history. Likewise, the anti-nature dogmas of affirmative action — insisting that equal opportunity be suppressed until all categories of Americans come out exactly the same — deny the obvious natural differences among human beings in regard to ambition and intelligence.
Thus, according to Bloom, equality and liberty eventually produced self-satisfied relativism, which sees no need to aspire to anything beyond itself — "spiritual detumescence." They also produced left-wing political movements which try to implement the "reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality" and which not only threaten but dominate important parts of our leading universities. Further, Bloom argues, Hobbesian-Lockean liberty was also designed to liberate scientific technology in order to conquer nature and make life comfortable. The very idea of a conquest of nature implies disrespect for natural limits and has contributed to the decline of respect for nature's guidance in all areas of contemporary life.
The second cause of our problems today, Bloom tells us, is post-Lockean modern philosophy. The big names are Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but their views have been popularized (and degraded) by such men as Marx, Freud, and Max Weber. Their ideas have worked their way into our universities and our speech, giving us "The Self," "Creativity," "Culture," and "Values" (four of Bloom's chapter titles). These continental writers, more radical than Hobbes and Locke, all strongly denounced "bourgeois society," i.e., democracy American style. From them we have learned to think of ourselves as despicably low. Yet at the same time, we have vulgarized the grand conceptions of especially Rousseau and Nietzsche and fitted them into our own democratic prejudices. Thus every nursery-school child is encouraged to be "creative."

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