“Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home during his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, life-like electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy.”
The ponderous wit, the leaden sarcasm, the massive lack of humor, the utter lack of self-awareness, coupled with the fact that Bloom’s own taste in orgasms ran heavily to barely post-pubescent boys—the man deconstructs himself before our very eyes. Bloom’s his own worst enemy, and his critic’s best friend.
But, as I said before, Bloom deserves a measure of sympathy and respect. He, and his generation, were catapulted from the best of times—the supremely earnest (and supremely prosperous) fifties and early sixties—to the worst of times—the supremely raucous, and often unprosperous, seventies and eighties. One might think that Bloom, who clearly thought he taken the measure of man, and of life, might have seen the symmetry of it all—that the forces of unreason might not contain themselves within the tame and tepid channels of academic discourse forever—but philosophers are rarely so philosophical. Spinoza, whose shelf life, I suspect, will far surpass that of Mr. Bloom, flew into a rage when a pupil forsook reason for Jesus, and Plato, so at ease on Olympus, turned into a dyspeptic old grouch in The Laws*—sounding, indeed, a lot like Mr. Bloom.
Bloom and his ilk loved the fifties because it was a time of both open meritocracy and elitist values—the best of both worlds. But as the youth population swelled, both in numbers and in wealth, a tipping point, to coin a phrase, was eventually reached. Culture, instead of coming from the top down, came from the bottom up. All of a sudden, Cornell, that demi-paradise, was no country for old men. And Bloom, who probably hadn’t noticed up until that point, was one of them.
Afterwords
Were he alive today, Bloom would probably get a chuckle over the fervid turmoil in the “lesser” social sciences: the “stanfordization” of anthropology departments, for example, which occurs when an anthro department splits in half so that scholars can go about their business without having to deal with colleagues who disagree with them, and the shrinking of sosh. “I firmly believe a great discipline [sociology] has turned rancid,” said Irving Lewis Horowitz in his book The Decomposition of Sociology (1994), published in reaction to the fact that sociology departments were shrinking if not disappearing around the country. “Sociology has largely become a repository of discontent, a gathering of individuals who have special agendas, from gay and lesbian rights to liberation theology.”
Since Bloom’s notion of “wisdom” was entirely restricted to the humanities—a sort of disease excellently diagnosed as “German mandarinism,” by Jürgen Habermas, who knew excellently whereof he spoke—he probably would not be much impressed by the extraordinary strides in such fields as computer science and biology, or the triumphs of free-market theory, in academia if not in the real world, though he might have a few kind words to say about opera on blu-ray and wide-screen. As for gay liberation, well, Bloom believed that libertinism was the privilege of the few, rather than the right of the many. However indiscreet he was in private—and he seems to have been compulsively so, if you can believe Saul Bellow’s notorious portrait in Ravelstein—he was entirely otherwise in public—which is surely how he felt the world should be.
*If there’s a worse idea than laying down the law, I’ve never encountered it.
