Closing of the American Mind

What am I in for?

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One of the best non-fiction books ever written by an American

Purple prose, lame arguments

Guy complains that leftists are destroying the humanities, while conservatives are cutting funds and closing his department.

>muh liberals are fuckin with muh morals
>muh conservatives aren't giving me enough money
I hate centrists so much.

>conservatives cutting funding to private colleges
what

Yeah:

Among elite private universities, like Harvard and Yale, the average taxpayer subsidy is $13,000 per student per year, while the annual subsidy at the most selective public universities, like the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of California, Los Angeles is more than $23,000 per student annually.

academia.stackexchange.com/questions/81056/how-much-public-funding-do-private-universities-in-the-united-states-receive-di

Naturally this doesn't stops universities to skyrocket tuitions. Which means less people enroll in humanities, because humanities don't offer a way to repay that debt. Less people enrolling in humanities, mean more departments closing, less hirings, which leads to less scholars and less people enrolling. Which leaves us all with a population of uneducated people who think that books are stupid. Which is what Bloom refers to as the closing of the American mind.

Stop thinking tribally. How does an attack on leftist politics automatically suggest being in concurrence with every conservative policy?

More millennial have enrolled in college than any other generation in our history, so your thesis that rising tuitions lead to fewer enrollments isn't true.

No but it's a valid criticism towards the book since syllabi are pretty much unchanged since the 90s despite his criticism, while conservative politics (together with administrations' greed) are responsible for impoverishing the american public.

He completely misread the situation. He thought that we would pay professor for not teaching Plato, and instead what happened is that professor fiercely try to keep teaching Plato while being starved.

Enrollment in the humanities...

insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/14/study-shows-87-decline-humanities-bachelors-degrees-2-years

English stays strong at community colleges because of low tuitions.

The conservative view on this is more justifiable than the leftist one. A system where people who belong to particular groups deemed to be disadvantaged receive government subsidies for education makes less sense than either an entirely private system, or an entirely public one. But Bloom's contention was with the content of the classes, not their accessibility. So your point be tangentially related to his argument, but it doesn't invalidate anything he says in the book.

Stop working off the false premise that fewer people have access to education now than they did in Bloom's time. That's literally the opposite of the truth.

>since syllabi are pretty much unchanged since the 90s despite his criticism
How the students are made to engage with their syllabus has changed tremendously since the 80s, hence the the state of student activism today.

That's not due to a lack of access, it's due to its decreasing relevance in our culture, which is something that Bloom explains in the book. If access were the issue, then you'd see a decreased enrollment in every subject, and not an increase in STEM and business.

Bloom was concerned about the loss in our culture of the love for education and the cannon that created good and responsible leaders.

He is mistaken in diagnosing how this was pushed by the left, rather than by a philistine and anti-intellectual right who for years has been repeating "english major? enjoy your job at mcdonalds".

If you want to understand why people don't read Plato today look at market forces.

That's not my premise. My argument is that there is a drop in liberal art majors because tutions are too high. And that if people don't read great books they will not understand their value and they will be less likely to defend them when they will be under attack by politicians.

Their lack of job security due to an over-saturation of professors and a lack of interest from students. Government subsidies would only go towards the professors teaching subjects students are interested in anyways. It's not like limited government funds are going to the teaching of dead subjects

The decrease relevance in our culture is due to the fact that the market has been pushed as the only source of value.

Here too it's full of people saying that studying literature is useless because you don't get a job with it.

And there you go, it's people reasoning like you that killed the humanities, not the left.

You are openly contradicting Allan Bloom by exactly calling what he was defending (the old univeristy that taught the greeks) dead subjects.

One last thing: sure there is an over-saturation. I guess that is why colleges have to employ dozens of TA and overburden phds with teaching assignments.

If there is funding but not over saturation you can put the people to do research. Or how about dedicating some professors to follow phd candidates, since so many candidates just complain about being left to their own devices.

I'm presenting the reality of our economic situation. A government-subsidized school isn't going to use its limited resources funding economically irrelevant subjects. This is true both for public and private schools.

>You are openly contradicting Allan Bloom by exactly calling what he was defending (the old univeristy that taught the greeks) dead subjects.
No i'm not. Interest in the subject precedes funding for it. The problem is primarily cultural. If people going to college have no interest in the classics before they get to college, they're not going to choose majors that involve studying them.

That's a cultural problem that isn't going to be solved by funneling more money into universities. People not caring about our cultural heritage is much more due to leftist cultural criticism than right wing materialism.

Yeah they don't have interest in the classics because no one reads them. No one reads them because there is no money to be made by reading them. There is no money to be made because the market has no utility for the western canon.

So yes sure, the market is always right and the perfect allocator of value is def. a position of the left.

>He is mistaken in diagnosing how this was pushed by the left, rather than by a philistine and anti-intellectual right who for years has been repeating "english major? enjoy your job at mcdonalds"
What's being taught is a much more pertinent factor when it comes to the decline of the humanities than apparent economic use. People are alienated by the increased focus on activist disciplines, and the necessary decreased focus on "dead white men." I switched major not because I wasn't interested in the canon, but because its teaching become politicized to the point of being intellectually stifling

There's absolutely money to be made off the canon. Just look at Penguin's classics imprint. The problem was that leftist critiques of Western intellectual hegemony forced many schools to change their curricula to accommodate less culturally relevant subjects for the sake of inclusion. Less de Beauvoir and more Plato, and you'll see how kids will perk up and take interest.

now that's a sick burn

Yeah absolutely, the fact that culture keeps repeating go into stem or you'll end up cleaning up fast foods has nothing to do with it.

I bet it's also because of the culture that people go into law school and accounting. It's all those matlock re-runs and ben affleck's movie.

Please. Don't be naive.

Please, have you been in the book publishing industry? Sales are going really bad, there is no career advancement, and you start at 30k and if you are lucky and a lot of people above you die you might get at 95k after a 30 years career.

If you don't believe me:

Financial

Bertelsmann’s group revenues from continuing operations declined by 1.1% in 2016, from 17.1 billion EUR to 17 billion EUR. The loss is primarily due to negative exchange rate effects, disposals, as well as declining organic revenues at Penguin Random House and Bertelsmann Printing Group. Despite start-up losses for digital and new businesses the operating EBITDA increased by 3.3% to 2.6 billion EUR during 2016.

Revenues at Penguin Random House declined by 9.6% from 3.7 billion EUR to 3.4 billion EUR, due to portfolio and exchange rate effects. The organic growth was -3.9 %, impacted by a decline in e-book revenues that was partly due to new sales conditions in the retail market.

publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/74544-global-publishing-leaders-2017-penguin-random-house.html

>the fact that culture keeps repeating go into stem or you'll end up cleaning up fast foods has nothing to do with it.
Kids going to college aren't making responsible career choices, they're getting into what interests them. STEM hold a place in our public consciousness not just due to its economic use, but because the technical objective knowledge of the sciences interests kids over the subjective and politicized knowledge of the humanities. Would you rather get into a subject that lets you understand precisely how your smartphone works, or get into the arcanum of long-standing political debates? Would you rather get into subjects that will lead to the knowledge required to colonization Mars, or spend half a semester studying white privilege? I'm not downplaying the importance of the humanities, i'm just explaining why the methods used to teach it contribute to its decline. Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, and Austen are inherently interesting, but having to power through the political stench left behind by the 1960s is too big a price to pay for most students.

>Plato, Homer, Shakespeare, and Austen are inherently interesting, but having to power through the political stench left behind by the 1960s is too big a price to pay for most students.

So which is it:

Students don't want to read the classics because they are leftists, or students don't want to go into the humanities because they are marxists.

You are getting into slippery territory here and contradicting yourself.

But the truth is this:

>Would you rather get into a subject that lets you understand precisely how your smartphone works, or get into the arcanum of long-standing political debates? Would you rather get into subjects that will lead to the knowledge required to colonization Mars, or spend half a semester studying white privilege?

The toxic culture for western values is just capital. The imperative of productivity and capital and making money.

I mean who are the philistines? They are the self-satisfied middle class middle brow citizen who think that the humanities are big waste of time and thinks that books are stupid and that watching a documentary and tv is much more efficient.

Ps. to answer your rhetorical question just to show you how you are imbibed in a culture of consumerism that you can't even realize how ideologically brainwashed you are: I don't care about smartphones, or mars, or anything like that.

I always found the pleasures of studying so much more rewarding. In fact I studied logic and history of philosophy.

>Students don't want to read the classics because they are leftists, or students don't want to go into the humanities because they are marxists.
How is this difficult to get? The teachers are leftists, and the students aren't interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A classical study of Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod would interest students, but that's not really what they get when they enter the humanities. Unless they deliberately choose to study the classics, they usually just receive fractured, contextless pieces of the canon interpreted through modern critical lenses. Kids aren't interested in that.

>you are imbibed in a culture of consumerism that you can't even realize how ideologically brainwashed you are
If you can't see something inherently interesting about technology and space exploration, especially given that we're having this conversation precisely because of advances in technology, then you have a severely limited imagination. My philistinism is nothing compared to your parochialism.

>The toxic culture for western values is just capital.
So after destroying the public perception of every classical virtue for being "reactionary," leftists complain about a lack of higher values?

>How is this difficult to get? The teachers are leftists, and the students aren't interested in feminism and post-colonial studies. A classical study of Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod would interest students, but that's not really what they get when they enter the humanities. Unless they deliberately choose to study the classics, they usually just receive fractured, contextless pieces of the canon interpreted through modern critical lenses. Kids aren't interested in that.

So you disagree with Allan Bloom, because what he says is that the students are the leftists and that are pushing the professors to teach those subjects.

>If you can't see something inherently interesting about technology and space exploration, especially given that we're having this conversation precisely because of advances in technology, then you have a severely limited imagination. My philistinism is nothing compared to your parochialism.

Or maybe I'm not enthralled by cheap sci-fi. Be ware I never said I don't appreciate science or research. I just don't find particularly the obsession with gadgetry and the romanticization of market activity.

>So after destroying the public perception of every classical virtue for being "reactionary," leftists complain about a lack of higher values?

You are cherrypicking. Most leftists are lovers of the cannon. See all of the Frankfurt School and see the New York Review of Books. Where is the conservative money in promoting great books?

>So you disagree with Allan Bloom, because what he says is that the students are the leftists and that are pushing the professors to teach those subjects.
Bloom was writing in the 1980s about the 1960s. The activist students he's talking about are the teachers of today. And i'd submit that while those student activists were influential, they were likely a minority at the time. Their outsized influence came from the fact that everyone else agreed with them on the one issue that mattered most at the time: the Vietnam war.

>Or maybe I'm not enthralled by cheap sci-fi.
Technology shapes nearly every aspect of human relations in the 21st century. It affects how we communicate, how we date, how we live. Even if it doesn't interest you personally, its effects are important enough to elicit even a cultural interest in the subject.

>You are cherrypicking. Most leftists are lovers of the cannon.
Bullshit. At least not in my experience. The leftist decrying "dead white males" cliché is very real where I live, and enough of a turn off to make me want to study the canon by myself. I took up programming in school to avoid those people. And the people whom I took classes with hated them as much as I do.

Which is pretty much what happened, no?

Kind made be hate americans less. But only pre 1950s americans.

Book has an extremely amateur understanding of Hediegger. Strauss should have tutored Bloom more.

>Which is what Bloom refers to as the closing of the American mind.

You are leaving out, the fact that Great Books were a stable of many families, not in state education, but the family unit itself. You don't need more humanities students when you are already trained in that within your family.

Americans are stupid and love to be ignorant for a reason I cannot fathom.

Yeah except now nobody understands the great books because English and History are taught like shit because schools are “let’s teach kids how to code because this is what corporations want” and for some reason philosophy is not even in the high school curriculum.

Really don’t kid yourself that the closing of the American mind happened for any reason that isn’t the absolute penetration of the market and anti-intellectualism of conservatism.

Or atleast when your reaction to structural problems that are destroying our ability to understand and pass on the western canon is “who cares, coding is better anyway” don’t fucking pose as lovers of the art. Because you are unwittingly showing yourself for the philistines who until an year ago were disgusted by the humanities

I have enjoyed reading your conversation, anons. I think to an extent you are both correct. Conservatives cry foul over the teaching of humanities, make references to flipping burgers, and then seek to cut funding while talking about the greatness of STEM fields. Leftists in many non-Classics humanities departments at top-tier universities teach through modern leftist lenses (and, in the United States, largely Marxist lenses, which is something I've seen less of in the UK and Europe more generally). Both of these things hurt enrollment in the humanities.

The older tradition of a liberal education as the education properly befitting a free man is largely lost unless young students come into the university with the specific intention of seeking it out.


An aside:
>Where is the conservative money in promoting great books?
I suppose I think of The Teaching Company's various lecture series as essentially conservative and still promoting/being coned with the great books of the Western canon.

concerned* with

I would say the teaching company is fairly non-political, in that it tends to treat all topics fairly and in a not biased way. I used to have an office job and would listen to them all day long and often lectures about medieval history would have feminist analysis of women conditions at the time, or chapters dedicated to women characters in certain ancient literary traditions, I mean the kinda of unacceptable thing that conservatives say is driving students away.

Also I disagree that Marxist interpretations are common in the US. Marxist interpretation is a mode that privileges the economic factors as a lense through which to analyze the subject, and literary outside Harvard there is very little resurgence of this. So please name names of professors doing materialist analysis.

>I don't pay attention to politics, but I sure do hate liberals! amirite, /pol/ bros?

All critique of American culture is just "I hate daddy, I like sex".

Says the American.

>Equality begets in man the desire of judging of everything for himself: it gives him, in all things, a taste for the tangible and the real, a contempt for tradition and for forms. These general tendencies are principally discernible in the peculiar subject of this chapter. Those who cultivate the sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and the study of facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow-man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to point out the weaker points of their neighbors’ opinions. Scientific precedents have very little weight with them; they are never long detained by the subtility of the schools, nor ready to accept big words for sterling coin; they penetrate, as far as they can, into the principal parts of the subject which engages them, and they expound them in the vernacular tongue. Scientific pursuits then follow a freer and a safer course, but a less lofty one.

From Tocqueville, Democracy in America Bk I Ch. 10

Asking Americans to care about theory and literature is like asking a cat to bark.

What pol/tards think is feminist analysis: “hurr durr the odyssey is about dead white men and an instrument of the patriarchy”

What feminist analysis really is: “Telemachus becomes a ma by executing slave girls who really didn’t have any agency over their actions, and nobody cared in 2500 years of commentaries”

You're in for 1) a very readable polemic that 2) conceals the extent to which it's in support of radical philosophic positions.

I read this before I read his Republic commentary and his more academic essays, and reading the latter gave me the impression that there's a good deal more careful rhetoric hanging over this thing then most people care to notice.

What are the radical philosophical positions?

Harder to discern in specifics, because he's also hiding behind the philosophers himself, and the book seems to be ultimately an argument to look to them directly. I can at least note that it's striking how often it's the case that he describes a phenomenon of the soul in such a way that you're inclined to think that he thinks it's bad, but he never comes out and says it, suggesting sometimes very highly qualified agreement. I think he's not necessarily that far from a stance of nihilism, but concealed by a great deal of concern for edification. It's at bottom and at least a defense of Socratic philosophizing that attempts to appeal to how edifying it looks to non-philosophers, while the Socratic philosophic position that Bloom's aiming to preserve consists of radical skepticism (in the ancient sense of unceasing inquiry into all things, and not the modern sense of the lack of or rejection of belief in certain ideas or dogmas).

Gotcha, but doesn’t that seem a bit of an unserious take on Strauss. Strauss was the tragedy bloom the farce.

Farce because he really didn’t have any reason other than greed or cleverness to not take the position of Rorty. But yeah switching the blame on the leftists while the conservatives were dismantling higher education made him rich and famous as we can see in Ravelstein.

Hm, maybe not necessarily an unserious take; I think The Closing is ultimately a limited failure, but the intent seems pedagogical. Perhaps move some of those in the Straussian "cave beneath the cave" into the cave so that they might come out of it.

I think part of the difference between Bloom and Rorty is that the latter is a misologist who at bottom loves edification because it's edifying, while the former is (at least comparatively?) open to the possibility of coming to know, even if the Truth is ugly. Though I see why you'd think that, since his relationship to the edifying gets uncomfortably close to that of Rorty's position.

There is literally zero difference between your two examples

You're downplaying the effects the rise of visual media has had on the decline of literature. People don't read anymore because they've lost the ability to concentrate on long works of fiction, not because they perceive it to be a waste of time. Our culture still views reading as a valid intellectual activity, and people who read great works are still called smart. The real issue is that the internet makes people too lazy to read, not that they don't want to read.

The latter example is as ridiculous and contextless.

You don't think that it's a valid point to make, that actually the only people large son telemachus kills are teenage slave girls. And he doesn't even have the guts to kill them with a sword, like Odysseus proposes, but decides to hang them?

I think it's a very good point to make, and if you don't see it it's because you are blindsided by your ideology.

To the idiot who thinks “conservatives” are responsible for the death of the humanities:

It is not conservatism that is to blame. It is economics itself. As more people are attending college and seeking management positions, it is no longer good enough to just have a degree and be a smart college student, because there are thousands of others just like you graduating in the same year. Hence the rise of business degrees. Students have to prove their competency for the job in advance, even if they probably could learn the job function in a couple months without taking a bunch of business courses at school. It is not a cultural issue as you claim, simply the need to secure an income.

I actually don't disagree, but again that is not the point that Allan Bloom does in his polemic. He actually attacks those who in many ways have been hostile to entertainment and media, singing the praise of high art.

Meanwhile the conservatives talked about elitism and praised populist entertainment.

The humanities were always a minority interest. I bet as large a percentage of Americans read Plato in school today than did in the 19th century. The only difference is that a much larger percentage of our overall population goes to college, and of that larger percentage many aren't economically-secure enough to go for a major that doesn't automatically lead to a high paying job. So the students going for MBAs rather than degrees in English literature today probably wouldn't have gone to college in the 19th century.

You're still thinking in a conservative/leftist dichotomy. Bloom wrote this as a critique of the leftist activism he felt was invading academia, not as a de facto praise of American conservatism. It's also worth noting that the biggest conservative at the the time was William F. Buckley, who very much cared about the Western canon, probably more so than any leftist public intellectual at the time.

And who is the vector of Economics is always right, we don't need for society to balance it out its excesses?

Conservatives.

Who has declared that the school's goal is only that of forming workers and cater to the needs of businesses instead of forming moral and aware citizens?

Conservatives

Who has defunded art and humanities programs in middle schools and highschools?

Conservatives.

So don't even start saying there isn't a political design, because I kept receipts and I know where the philistines who hate culture are.

No, I'm just saying he missed the mark, because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics, and he willfully was not seeing the people that were destroying what he loved under his nose.

He was schmuck, he got flattered by conservatives, and was running in their speech circuits, and getting a lot of money, not seeing how he was actually condemning what he loved.

And conservatives immediately embraced him because once the humanities went to shit they were looking for an easy scapegoat to pin that too.

>conservatives are all free market Ayn Rand types
>conservatives aren't interested in Plato and Aristotle, more so than feminists and race activists are
>conservatives don't praise the classics as a means of deriding the state of contemporary art by comparison

all the relevant conservatives, those in power, are free market ayn rand types.

Name one policy advocated by conservatives that would be in favor of the humanities.

Yeah, their being in favor of the humanities is bitching and moaning about how ugly the stuff at art basel is, while doing absolutely nothing about it.

Maybe the stuff at art basel is so fucking ugly because they have created a situation where literally the only people who can afford to make art are trustfund kids.

>because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics,
He was living at time when leftists were literally shouting "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" in the streets surrounding Stanford. When respected leftist writers took every chance they got to attack Western culture and its hegemonic status. When popular feminists perceived Western culture as being synonymous with patriarchy. Even his friend Susan Sontag talked about how the evils of the white race couldn't be justified by the works of great Western art it produced.

>oy vey, goyim, you know how American higher education became a politicized cesspool?
>it's all the fault of those germans like Heidegger and Nietzche!
>we the chosen people have nothing to do with that, i swear upon the 6 gorillion!

That wasn't true at the time Bloom was writing. William F. Buckley hated Rand's books.

Politics has nothing to do with it. Economics is a force outside of anyone's control just like the weather or gravity. You can't change the economic facts of life, and one of those is that very few people have the free time and wealth necessary to pursue a humanities education.

So you agree with him that it is a date analysis and he has largely missed the mark on where the threat was coming from?

Ps. Susan Sontag's comment is irrelevant for this discussion because it doesn't mean that we have to throw away the canon, but argues whether it was worth it the history of atrocities. Which is a legitimate position. As an anti-natalist I don't believe that any result of the humanity is worth what it cost in pain.

So you agree that Bloom misses the mark and the closing of the american mind has not happened because of leftists students but because the Western Cannon is not economically viable.

The enemy of western civilization, according to you, is the economic system with its immutable laws, a force outside the control of any political actor.

He identified a problem and laid out its causes in a subtle and detailed manner. Even if one were to concede your point that economic forces are what lead to the downfall of the humanities, and that conservatives tend to be more in favor of letting those apolitical economic forced take over increasingly larger sections of our culture, that still wouldn't make his critiques of leftist activism any less salient. All it would suggest is that he's looking at half of the picture, rather than the entire thing. And a particular half of the picture that no one else was looking at at the time.

I'd also submit that nearly all of cultural forces that kept vain materialism at bay were dismantled by the left for being "reactionary". You're more susceptible to economic exploitation after all of the previous sources of meaning have been systematically destroyed by your culture.

>because Leftist activism has been the only force in american academia that has defended the humanities and the classics
Defended the humanities, sure, obviously. Defended the classics? That's been one of their main targets in academia, and Bloom wasn't wrong to note that they were targeting the classics, whether for being "racist", "sexist", "elitist", etc.. The fact that the classics still get read at all in the academy is a miracle, but a precarious one, and those readings are often "critical readings", i.e., the application of some other system of thought or hermeneutic to the text, whether it be a "Marxist reading", a "psychoanalytic reading", a "Heideggerian reading", a deconstructive one, a feminist one, a post-colonialist one, and on and on, anything but to take the text itself seriously, or acknowledge oneself as possibly ignorant and able to be informed by taking seriously the old books through careful study. Selective readings and treating them as a ready-to-hand punchingbag isn't a defense of the classics.

Not at all! He missed it 100%.

It's as if he predicted that 2008 economic crisis would have been cause by the no-global movement of seattle and the after the crisis you come here and tell me: "yeah ok the crisis was causes by the housing bubble, but Bloom has correctly identified the problem by pointing at the seeattle protests"

You keep saying he "missed it". Okay, money where your mouth is. Analyze an argument in the book where you think he's wrong, and show us how.

Elitist is a word used by the right.

And if the leftist is so much against the cannon, and if the left control colleges, then why the position of the canon is still completely there?

Also expanding the canon doesn't me being against that. The fact that now you study Baldwin in composition doesn't mean that shakespeare and plato are any less important.

>the application of some other system of thought or hermeneutic to the text, whether it be a "Marxist reading", a "psychoanalytic reading", a "Heideggerian reading", a deconstructive one, a feminist one, a post-colonialist one, and on and on,

Reading is not a neutral mode, you can't seriously argue that certain interpretations are better than others, or that kind of interpretations are wrong.

Also psychoanalytic and heideggerian readings are conservative readings. And you will have a very hard time using heidegger against the cannon. In fact the only reason american conservative attacked him is because he was a nazi, without even reading him.

I think your ignorance about interpretation and those philosophers you criticize is starting to show.

That's a ridiculous analogy. I'm drawing a direct connection between the decreased emphasis on the classics in the humanities and a decreased enrollment in the humanities. And i'm blaming the decreased emphasis on the classics on the activist left who valued diversity over conserving our culture's legacy.

I think you have yet to prove that there is a decreased emphasis of the classics in humanities.

Everywhere the programs are pretty much the same. You are given more choice, so if you want to focus on the classics nothing is stopping you.
There is no shortage of classes on ancient classics nor on shakespeare or modernism.

And if Foucault and Freud and Marx are thought is because they ARE part of the cannon.

When you use a particular critical lens to interpret a work you limit its scope by forcing everything through the pinhole of a single ideology. Literature is much more complex than marxist or feminist readings can elucidate. There are aspects of human nature and biology at play; religion and psychology play important roles; the life of the author is worth exploring. What the left has done is picked three or four major interpretive lenses, and then forced a 3,000 year old canon through that leftist grinder. Many of them don't even believe in human nature. If you don't believe that human beings are basically the same throughout most of our history, then what's the point of even maintaining a canon?

theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers

>Undergraduates at Yale University have launched a petition calling on the English department to abolish a core course requirement to study canonical writers including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, saying that “it is unacceptable that a Yale student considering studying English literature might read only white male authors”.

washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/teacher-why-i-dont-want-to-assign-shakespeare-anymore-even-though-hes-in-the-common-core/?utm_term=.91d7f39b2136

>I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question.

>What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important. In the 25 years that I have been a secondary teacher, I have heard countless times, from respected teachers (mostly white), that they will ALWAYS teach Shakespeare, because our students need Shakespeare and his teachings on the human condition.

These examples are representative of the rhetoric in most schools across the US.

1/2
>Elitist is a word used by the right.

Yeah, sure, sometimes, when it's contrasted with populist sentiments or expressions. The Left lobs the term around too, for example, against anything that might stink of a hierarchy of human types, and in some cases of arguments concerning whether something or other is better or worse.

>And if the leftist is so much against the cannon, and if the left control colleges, then why the position of the canon is still completely there?
First off, I don't know whether you're conflating me with another user or not, but maybe try arguing with the contents of what I said than the lame strawmanning you're shoving in my mouth. I don't claim the Left controls colleges. Now, I would claim that the Left is predominantly represented in Humanities departments, and the reason the canon might still remain in some form or other could be explained for quite a few reasons, but one would have to start by noting that "the Left" means many things, and not one monolithic entity. There might be features similar or related between Left movements or figures, but one has to address the situation in truth. In the case of that part of the Left that seeks the dismantling of the canon, the supposed preservation is an illusion; the canon is meant to be made an example of to students, it being assumed that the students are already in some way or another familiar with such and such work of the canon, with the aim being to remove the wool from the eyes of the students and show them the implicit oppressions, prejudices, and negative causal effects of works of the canon. The aim is to enlighten the students so that the canon can be eventually altered in light of the critique, with the bringing-to-presence of those voices and narratives ignored or suppressed prior to our historical period. This is a part of a certain Leftist aim. And sometimes the preservation is as trivial as someone above the department head saying "fuck you I'm not giving funding to the study of some obscure Ethiopian semi-philosopher 'just because'; tell me something about Augustine or whatever and we'll talk money."

>Also expanding the canon doesn't me being against that. The fact that now you study Baldwin in composition doesn't mean that shakespeare and plato are any less important.
You must be new to all this. That, say, Nussbaum might offer some figures to read in addition to everyone else is a different claim in kind then the increasingly more popular vulgar Leftist position that wants to see Plato removed in favor of Hypatia, or Descartes and Nietzsche removed in favor of Zera Yacob, or to see Austen replaced with any other woman author of her period who discusses race. That the position you're describing exists I don't think any of your interlocutors in this thread would deny, but no one who's detailing a concern of Leftist attacks of the canon is bothered by that position, but by the one you're ignoring.

2/2
>Reading is not a neutral mode, you can't seriously argue that certain interpretations are better than others, or that kind of interpretations are wrong.
Didn't claim it was neutral; the fuller argument is that if all you're doing is applying ready-made hermeneutics to "work x", then "work x" is irrelevant and arbitrary in itself; what's to learn after all in the Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare? Better to skip the pretense and stick to learning Marx and applying his analyses to news items if you need examples.

And Nietzsche of all people would claim that it's silly to pretend that some interpretations aren't better than others; the Will to Power is supposed to be a better interpretation (because more comprehensive) of the phenomena of life than many (if not all) others.

>Also psychoanalytic and heideggerian readings are conservative readings. And you will have a very hard time using heidegger against the cannon. In fact the only reason american conservative attacked him is because he was a nazi, without even reading him.
That's trivially untrue in both cases, and I can point to Irigaray in the former case and Derrida in the latter case of figures who use Left oriented psychoanalytic and Heideggerian readings. You sound so impressed with yourself for noting Heidegger's conservatism, as if it weren't already noticed by some scholars (Thomas Sheehan, Stanley Rosen) how peculiar it is that the blatantly conservative Heidegger has figures of the Left appropriating his work.

>I think your ignorance about interpretation and those philosophers you criticize is starting to show.
Hahahaha, yeah, okay

I went last year at yake still plenty of white writers

Who's saying these people have succeeded? The issue is that they're trying and gaining very strong sentiment.

>You must be new to all this. That, say, Nussbaum might offer some figures to read in addition to everyone else is a different claim in kind then the increasingly more popular vulgar Leftist position that wants to see Plato removed in favor of Hypatia, or Descartes and Nietzsche removed in favor of Zera Yacob, or to see Austen replaced with any other woman author of her period who discusses race. That the position you're describing exists I don't think any of your interlocutors in this thread would deny, but no one who's detailing a concern of Leftist attacks of the canon is bothered by that position, but by the one you're ignoring.

Increasingly popular where? Proposed by who (certainly not by foucault, derrida, or even butler)?

It's a position that it exists only in tumblr leftism and in the polemical strawman of the Blooms (both harold and allan).

It is largely ignored and in fact nothing has really changed in the syllabbi. Really there is no difficulty of access for courses on the great books.

>what's to learn after all in the Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare?

A marxist interpretation of Shakespeare explores how the economics of theater shaped his art. Which again is nothing banal since the importance that selling his art to the public had for Shakespeare.

The point of those analysis is not to apply a ready made made apparatus, but to engage with the text on a different plane with different questions.

Of course there is bad essays. There is people who mine the text for snippets of info that tells them they are right and they just report their fudging with the data.

But bad scholarship is everywhere, look at the sciences and replication crisis, but that is more an effect of careerism and the publish or perish culture (which incidentally is why I dropped out of academia, I couldn't keep up with the pace and write articles I was satisfied with, so I preferred not to produce more trash).

>That's trivially untrue in both cases, and I can point to Irigaray in the former case and Derrida in the latter case of figures who use Left oriented psychoanalytic and Heideggerian readings.

And that shows that the theory is not in itself politically tainted but offers different questions to different people. And ofc it is that way.

Let's take psychoanalysis: to a sexually repressed society it is progressive, to marxists it is conservatives.

And also there is nothing blatant in appropriating Heidegger from the left. Heidegger's philosophy especially the part of dasein analysis is apolitical since it is just a derivation of the conclusions of phenomenology. And Husserl was a liberal progressive himself.

His conservativism comes later with his ethical analysis and the whole doctrine of care.

Similarly deconstruction in itself is not conservative or progressive. It is a fact of texts that can be interpreted in both ways.

Only when Derrida started to talk about Justice, hospitality, forgiveness that we have seen the root of his leftism.

Certainly not me, nor most leftists. Nor deconstructionists (they depend on canon), nor nietzscheans, nor marxists.

Or anyone who reads Adorno, who again was a big defender of the canon.

Read Richard Velkley’s book on Strauss And Heidegger, all Straussians are essentially following in the footsteps of Heidegger and his unceasing questioning regarding the return of philosophy to an endless questioning that challenges the modern conceptions of ideas of things that really on forgetting the original problems the Socratic tradition illuminated.

And also why are you not concerned about the politics that are actually succeeding in dismantling the teaching of the canon in our universities?

As a person who is concern with keeping people teaching Homer and Shakespeare in universities Bloom doesn't tell me anything. I see brilliant students of the classics literally starving to keep their TA jobs hoping one day to go to college and teach kids what they love, and Allan Bloom instead of addressing the real culprits of this occupational crisis, he just says "oh, uh, the kids are not polite and that is going to ruin us"

Even as an example of western values Allan Bloom fails. He is utterly cowardly and decides to attack people with no power (students) rather than the powerful and the politicians that have pushed the humanities out of the discourse. And his cowardice is exactly why he died a celebrated and rewarded man by the powerful.

Liberals suck.

Cool it with the Reddit spacing, read a book, and grow the fuck up. You're disgusting.

Your conception of Bloom as someone who attacks students in order to protect the interests of the economic elites is ridiculous. Throughout his book he portrays leftists students as being the victims of a cultural and educational force that's been brewing since the 1940s; he thinks that the students are being manipulated. He's less concerned with assigning blame than with dispassionately explaining what he views to be the causes of leftist parochialism.

>And also why are you not concerned about the politics that are actually succeeding in dismantling the teaching of the canon in our universities?
I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I am concerned with intersectional politics and poststructualism, yes.

>And if Foucault and Freud and Marx are thought is because they ARE part of the cannon.
Doesn't change the fact that there are a great deal of powerful people who want destroy the canon a build a new one with Lorde and Baldwin as its cornerstone.

>socialists ruin humanities programs
>conservatives close ruined humanities programs
what is the problem?

Both accounts are wrong. Professors are pressured by students to stop teaching Plato because that would be neo-colonialism.

I say that all the time because it's not like these humanities departments are churning out knowledgeable students capable of thinking themselves out of a wet paper bag. The degrees are worthless in every sense of the word and do not qualify anybody for a job more demanding than fast food.

>revenues of companies down primarily because of exchange rates
wow you really sent my noggin for a joggin

this guy gets it

A Zio-Con psy-op.

And who are these powerful people manipulating the students in the 80s? Let me guess he doesn't say, so anyone can project their little personal enemy there.

>I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I am concerned with intersectional politics and poststructualism, yes.

Which Allan Bloom's criticism doesn't touch, because instead of posing a serious critique of those philosophies, he aestheticizes about a time when students were more polite. And then he switches his gear to say that students don't agree with him because "they don't have enough moral character"

Utter trash philosophy.

Name names.

Name a top college where you can't study plato

The problem that that isn't Bloom's argument.

Plenty of successful philosophy students in the world. So you are just projecting.

Probably "as well as declining organic revenues" went over your head. It's ok there is a reason why they use that expression to say "declining sales"

You haven't read the book.

Typical straussian hand waving when someone points out that their whole castle is nostalgia masquerading as philosophy.