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

In these chapters, Bloom returns to the essential question of what happens when values take the place of good and evil. The rationalist dream that the scientific orientation of life can provide human happiness, modernity’s powerful myth that inspired the creation of liberal democracies, was forever destroyed by Nietzsche, who saw that only religion and culture, not reason, can generate values answerable to human desire. Nietzsche recognized that the loss of belief in God was tragic and meant that man had lost the ability to value—the essence of his humanity. The value-creating function of man, embodied in culture and religion, is irrational; reason cannot substitute for it, and the liberal regimes of the West grounded on rational principles face the profound crisis that their foundation is illusory.

The realization that God is dead—that the spirit of scientific rationalism has killed him—precipitates nihilism, which can be destructive or creative. Brought to the existential abyss by the meaninglessness of life, the truly creative individual can struggle with the irreducible oppositions of life in to create new values out of the fertile tension of the spirit. The alternative is despair or spiritual suicide. Few, in Nietzsche’s estimation, have the honesty, stamina, and moral fortitude for such a daunting task. Only thoroughgoing disenchantment with the old values—a hardhearted refusal to seek solace in outworn metaphysical consolations like Christianity—will incentivize the dangerous leap into the depths of the human soul to revitalize our exhausted spiritual constitution. Nietzsche insisted that only a genuine psychology of creativity could shed light on value formation. Values are irrational; they don’t embody or answer to truth but enable cultures to exist. The value of a value is the degree to which it is life-affirming and culture-generating; from the perspective of truth, values are life-sustaining myths.

Creativity—and the creation of values—is a function of the unconscious. Nietzsche, anticipating Freud, realized that the id, unfathomable and amoral, is the source of creativity. However, though values aren’t derived from the universal standards of reason and can’t be judged true or false, they are not all equal. The creators of enduring values, such as Moses, Jesus, and the Buddha, establish cultures whose worldviews are typically inimical to each other. Since values are not grounded in truth or rational premises, they must be imposed, which frequently involves war between cultures. Nietzsche recognized that cultural relativism inevitably results in cruelty, not compassion.

The artist, for Nietzsche, epitomizes the creative spirit who mines the unconscious for the hidden sources of life that will reinvigorate the exhausted culture of the West. The unconscious contains all the divine forces, the erotic, creative, and spiritual daemons, that were banished by scientific rationalism. Nietzsche’s historical importance lies in his refocusing of philosophy on the interrelated questions of creativity, psychology, and the religious function while demystifying the supremacy of reason as a philosophical myth.

Bloom argues that Nietzsche’s theory of value formation entered the American consciousness largely through the work of the sociologist Max Weber. Weber refuted Marx’s interpretation of history as a rational process of class conflict, leading ultimately to the ascendancy of the working class and the establishment of a truly egalitarian society. Weber suggested, rather, that the charismatic individual, like Calvin, makes history through decisive action—willing change empowered by a radical commitment to values that are irrational in origin.

Weber’s emphasis on charisma, the quasi-spiritual force by which certain leaders compel subservience, exemplifies the paradoxical shift toward religion—or religiosity—in modern politics. Secularism, democracy, and totalitarianism, Bloom argues, are all displaced forms of religion, which was presumably discarded from the political sphere by enlightened liberalism. Weber, like many others, did not seriously consider that the extremism that Nietzsche prophesied would fill the vacuum left by the death of God, and charisma is notoriously ambiguous from the perspective of morality. Hitler is the most obvious example of the danger of charismatic political leadership. In personal life, the current vogue for the sacred and the eclectic cultivation of one’s spirituality represents another side of this trend. Bloom argues that the superficiality with which we approach “the sacred,” as if it were just another fashionable commodity, testifies to the extent to which moral distinctions have vanished and true commitment has weakened in contemporary society. 

In the transmogrification of German ideas into American pop psychology and philosophy, Bloom is particularly surprised by the Left’s adoption of Nietzsche, which is a case point in the transformation of a tragic European worldview into American feel-good optimism. Nietzsche loathed the bourgeoisie, celebrated individual genius, and detested the mediocracy and demagoguery of democratic society. Aligning himself spiritually with the Right, Nietzsche was imported into the progressive Left’s intellectual fold to fill a void left by Marxism’s cultural critique, which had very little to say about art, the creative life, and how humankind would live after the proletarian revolution. Sophisticated Marxists found deeper inspiration in the cultural interpretations offered by Nietzsche and his followers—such as Freud, Sartre, Weber, and Heidegger—so that contemporary Marxism in America is really Nietzschean, with a nod to Marx’s economic analysis but little faith in the utopian future of working-class solidarity predicted by Marx.

Nietzsche’s influence on the concept of revolution was decisive as well. In classical Marxism, revolution is the product of historical necessity and directed toward the goal of ending the exploitation of the laboring classes and establishing a class-less society, a goal requiring prolonged struggle. To Nietzsche, struggle is essential for human life. The cessation of conflict destroys man’s capacity for creativity, resulting in the stultification of the human body and spirit. Revolution in a Nietzschean world is an act of the will; it is an end in itself rather than a means toward one, since only by constant struggle can man overcome himself. The newer revolutionary is no longer inspired by a noble “truth” to be attained through violence, leading to peace and order. Man needs war, and the revolutionary wills chaos to sustain “the movement,” which no longer represents progress toward a definable social goal and therefore lacks a moral center. A vague sense of “commitment,” rather than a clear idea of the truth, motivates revolutionary action today.

After this discursive exploration of Nietzsche’s impact on intellectual history and the rise of relativism in America, Bloom concludes the second part of the book with a meditation on our desire for choices without consequences. We abhor conflict and avoid it instinctively. Social disapproval, feelings of guilt, deferral of pleasure, and problematic outcomes have always been the bittersweet fruit of the serious dilemmas facing humans. Such consequences are the material from which high art and culture are formed. Americans have been taught to believe that the unavoidable discomfort and ambiguity attending serious choices are not an essential condition of humanity and can be cured by psychotherapy or political action.

Risk-free choice lacks dignity, however, since it does not pose the challenges and dangers that ennoble human choice and demonstrate character in the face of tragic circumstances. Students today are uncomfortable with the idea of intractable moral conflicts and expensive trade-offs, assuming they can have it all without painful sacrifices. In short, Americans have interpreted Nietzsche’s value philosophy and its offspring, Freudian psychoanalysis, as manifestos of liberation from repression, failing to grasp the darker implications in these visions of the human condition. Bloom argues that Nietzsche’s and Freud’s sexual interpretations of art and culture have had a corrupting influence on Americans, who relate only to the sex, not the sublime, in sexual sublimation. Freud and Nietzsche viewed culture and the fine arts as the products of the sublimation of sexual desire, yet the concept of sublimation, which necessarily implies renunciation to channel instinctual energies toward a higher end, seems anathema to the contemporary American temperament. Sublimation is merely a state of sexual repression from which we are joyously, if belatedly, emerging.

The crucial moment in this development, for Bloom, is when sex became a political expression of one’s identity. Indulging in one’s sexual inclinations is now celebrated as an act of authenticity and moral courage, and since self-affirmation is the highest good, morality increasingly becomes self-serving. If whatever you are is good, then whatever you do is good; there is no longer any impetus to think through your behavior; rather, you simply affirm it as the freely-chosen expression of your identity. Our moral positions are thoroughly infected with self-serving intentions, masquerading as disinterested principles, while others’ opposition to our actions from a moral perspective must be merely prejudice or political bias.

We are largely oblivious to the error and perilous consequences of this turn because we are enchanted by the language of value relativism we have borrowed from the Germans. Language constitutes reality in subtle and imperceptible ways, yet we lack the education, cultural sophistication, and historical experience to comprehend the significance and motivation of the vocabulary we’ve adopted. Nietzsche’s project of reawakening the tragic and noble sense within man, who risks death to establish new values by which to live, becomes for us a handy tool to avoid conflict and reassure everyone that they’re okay, no matter who they are or what they do.