Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Allan Bloom’s "The Closing of The American Mind"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on The Closing of The American Mind by Allan Bloom. It begins:

In the late l940s, before television made those who watched at best passive observers, radio engaged the attention, and the imagination, of those who listened. One show did this in what even then was considered an unusual way, The Whiz Kids, in which several young teenagers answered, or tried to answer, serious questions about serious things. Their age told part of the story. Instead of high school freshmen, they were already in college, and not just any college, places like the University of Chicago. One of them could easily have been Allan Bloom, who would years later write The Closing of The American Mind, a critique of American higher education that was not expected to sell more than the initial print run of 10,000 copies, but ended up selling more than a million copies in the Untied States and another million in the rest of the world. It was a book that would never have been written had Bloom not begun his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago just after the end of the Second World War, in 1946, when he was only fifteen years old.

Bloom understood the moment he stepped on campus that the University of Chicago was different. The buildings might be fake Gothic, gray stones that had the look of wind worn battlements, but they “were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.” A great university, it announced that “there are questions that…are not asked in ordinary life.” These were the kind of questions Bloom wanted to explore. Fifteen when he began his undergraduate education, he was eighteen when he graduated and began graduate school in the Committee on Social Thought which, in a way, was almost a university within the university. The only students taken were those who wanted to devote themselves, in that now quaint-sounding phrase, to the “life of the mind.” Bloom studied Greek history and thought, wrote his dissertation on the Greek statesman and orator Isocrates, was eighteen when he started and almost twenty-five when he finished.

Whatever else Bloom learned as a student in his years at Chicago, nothing was as important, or as influential, as what he learned from Leo Strauss. When Leo Strauss began talking about something Socrates had said in one of the dialogues Plato had written, it was as if you were listening to someone tell you what he had just heard in a conversation he had had with Socrates himself early that morning. Strauss knew what was worth reading and how that reading should be done. He explained it in a way that was really quite simple: The mind needs teachers, teachers are themselves pupils, but there cannot be an infinite regress, i.e. there must be teachers who are not pupils. These are the great minds, the greatest minds, and they are extremely rare. The only access to them are through the books they have written - the great books. It is what liberal education is all about.

One of the greatest minds - some would say the greatest mind - is Plato, who of course wrote in Greek. There are translations, but those who did the translations were not themselves very close students of what they were translating and were, many of them, satisfied with giving a kind of general account of what they thought Plato was trying to say. F. N. Cornford, whose translation was the most widely used, removed many of the exchanges between Socrates and other participants in the dialogues because he thought they were too formal and tended to become tedious. Bloom decided that a better translation was needed. In l968, his literal translation of Plato’s Republic was published and for the first time Plato could be understood by English speaking students as Plato understood himself. That did not mean students had to like it.

This is the thrust of Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind. The proof, which at first does not appear to prove anything, is that “Classical music is dead among the young.” If this seems irrelevant to the question whether the American mind is open, as most would like to believe, or closed, as Bloom insists, his dismissal of the music those same young people came to embrace, will strike many as the closed-minded sentiment of a hopeless reactionary. Rock music, he writes, is nothing so much as a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. If...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind.

--Marshal Zeringue