Coddling the Closed American Mind

On Wisdom and Its Opposite

Socrates, at the end of the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, recounts an ancient Egyptian myth about the invention of writing. In the tale, a god brings this newly developed art to King Thamus, claiming his practice, “once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory.” The king, though, is skeptical countering, “One man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them.” He then rejects the god’s contention, showing him that what he has truly invented is a tool to “introduce forgetfulness.” No longer will individuals have to internalize knowledge because now they can simply point to external signs whenever necessary. Thus, Thamus concludes, it will merely give “the appearance of wisdom.”

In response to Socrates’ tale, Phaedrus retorts, “You’re very good at making up stories from Egypt, or wherever else you want,” in an attempt to dismiss this insight. He entirely ignores its substance, focusing instead on the superficial trappings — the identity of the speaker. To overcome this facile rebuff, Socrates doubles down with another mythos:

There was a tradition in the temple of Zeus at Dodona that the first prophecies were from an oak tree. In fact, the people back then, not being as wise as you youths today, deemed that if they heard the truth even from an oak or rock, it was enough for them; you, however, do not consider whether something is true, but who the speaker is and what place he is from.

This time, Phaedrus ruefully replies, “I deserved that, Socrates. And I agree that the Egyptian king was correct about writing.”

It is hard to imagine this outcome happening today.

For so many of our precociously wise American youth, identity and ideology have become inextricably linked: who we are — our ethnicity, gender, orientation, experiences, and all the incalculable intersections between them — determines how and what we think. It is believed to be the sole source of each one of our philosophies. This was the inevitable result of “identity politics” in a country whose foundation is laid so firmly in individuality.

While group identity is still appealed to when useful as a rhetorical bludgeon, epistemology has become entirely personalized. Just as the market promises to always “have it your way,” our psychology and politics follows suit (although the causal direction is a bit hard to determine). What is true is whatever we happen to feel, whatever bubbles up from our unfiltered and unchecked epithumia: the irrational, desiring component of Plato’s tripartite soul. And who are you to judge the validity of my feelings?

This is, of course, a frequently commented on phenomenon these days; and for anyone who has read The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which purports to document the rise of this method of thinking — or rather unthinking — it is likely a familiar one.

Yet, as the above tale from the Phaedrus reveals, this is hardly a novel problem.

The conflation of identity and ideas as a threat to free thought seems to be a perennial concern for us human beings. The natural, that is to say, the easier way to engage with others’ ideas is to dismiss them based on stereotypes we hold about a speaker. Actually listening and judging the merit of another’s thought based on its soundness requires much more time and effort than most are willing to give.

For Socrates, this pernicious thinking was the result of prejudice or simply laziness. Yet today, paradoxically, it is being sold to us as the means to overcome these afflictions. As the first epigraph of Coddling exhorts, education traditionally attempted to “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child” to challenge students’ complacent self-satisfaction. For some reason, though, this notion has been flipped on its head and replaced by a toxic combo of “good intentions and bad ideas” that would instead reinforce someone like Phaedrus in their unexamined preconceptions.

But what is most concerning about its current historical form is its seeming takeover of the very institution — the university — which professes to be dedicated to that much vaunted modern virtue “critical thinking.” Understanding the full nature of our situation, then, seems to be of the utmost necessity.

WHAT MAKES OUR present predicament so challenging (and ironic) is that this fallacy has become most prevalent on the Left, who since its birth during the French Revolution has generally considered itself “the party of science.” This is especially evident in responses from Leftists to the claims made in Coddling, and was even embodied in almost perfect Platonic form in a review of it titled “How Elite US Liberals Have Turned Rightwards” by Moira Weigel in The Guardian.

The essence of this new mode can basically be summed up in a single quote from her article: “The book is less interesting for its arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style” — a style, she goes on to assert, that has been taken up by “a growing number of white men [like Francis Fukuyama] who hold power in historically liberal institutions [but] seem to be breaking right.”

Rather than addressing directly any of the claims made in Coddling, Weigel focuses entirely on the authors’ identities and psychologizes them, allowing her to dismiss anything they say as a cover up for their real, perhaps even unconscious, motives. This sort of reaction to the book is particularly absurd because Lukianoff and Haidt prophesied this exact phenomenon in a footnote to chapter 4:

[W]e can make a prediction right now, while writing this book in 2017: Most of the negative reviews and responses to this book will at some point note our race and gender and then directly assert or vaguely hint that we are racists or sexists who are motivated primarily by the desire to preserve our privilege.

That is, following Phaedrus, their identity and ideas will be conflated in order to not have to engage in a debate over the actual content of the book. And what exactly is the substance of this apparently objectionable style? Reason: an attempt at philosophic or scientific disinterestedness; the belief that who we happen to be does not necessarily determine how or what we think.

There is, however, one thing that Weigel does get right about the book — albeit it for the wrong reason — that I have somehow not come across anywhere else, not even from the authors themselves: the affinities between The Coddling of the American Mind and its obvious namesake, the 1987 best-selling exposition of higher education, The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

She brings up this older work in an attempt to discredit Coddling as just another tiresome entry in our longstanding “culture war” — a characterization Lukianoff and Haidt patently reject. Their argument, they contend, is entirely “pragmatic” not “moralistic,” and that “whatever your identity, background or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger and more likely to succeed in pursuing your goals” if you follow their advice.

Yet, despite Closing once being proclaimed by Camille Paglia to be “the first shot in the culture wars,” neither was the former. While Weigel’s description of the book, as an “attack on the ‘relativism’ that [Bloom] said threatened the achievements of western civilization,” is not completely off base, his true object of defense is not the West, but philo-sophia, the love and pursuit of wisdom — which he too held to be equally available to all individuals, regardless of time, place or identity.

WHILE I DO BELIEVE Coddling to be a timely and worthwhile read, ultimately, it is a little disappointing. With its focus centered on the newly college-aged generation, Lukianoff and Haidt’s investigation seems to begin where it should be ending. Consequently, in this self-proclaimed “social science detective story,” you cannot help but feel that the culprit gets away.

Other than vague denunciations of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse, there is not much in the way of preamble to the apparent upsurge in solipsism they document in the recently dubbed iGen. But the parenting habits and politics of our day that they believe to have fostered this obsession with identity did not suddenly spring forth full-grown one day from the forehead of Zeus — and in fact, its birth was thoroughly and intimately detailed in its patronymic predecessor.

Somehow Closing is only mentioned once throughout the entire book in an early footnote indicating that its publication initiated the “canon wars” of the 1990s that sought to broaden collegiate reading lists beyond “old dead white men.” Thus unsurprisingly, as the authors’ reveal, its “succinct and provocative” title The Coddling of the American Mind was not conceived by them, but was suggested by the editor of the original Atlantic article Don Peck.

It does not seem that the work figured at all in the writing of the book, yet I believe it to be essential reading if one truly desires to understand the issues plaguing us today.

As Weigel concludes, again correctly, in her parallel of the two works: while Lukianoff and Haidt “are clearly hoping to tap into the forces that made Bloom [a bestseller], this is a repetition with a difference. Rather than Plato they want data. Rather than a canon, they want to preserve mental health.” And it is this opposition of a canon and individual well-being she proposes that best points to the true source of our present troubles.

At the heart of the “canon wars” was a battle over what should an educated person know; or formulated slightly differently, what is the goal of a liberal education? Bloom contends that it ought to be “human completeness”: an attempt to make the potentialities inherent in human nature, to put it in Aristotelian terms, into actualities.

In its original conception, the canon consisted of the so-called “great books” of western civilization whose timeless wisdom could aid students in this odyssey. While this list was not thought of as the be-all, end-all, any new work that hoped to be added would have to be equally capable of offering assistance in this realm. Bloom’s opponents’ end goal, on the other hand, he claims is “openness” — that is, open-mindedness or mere awareness of difference.

A further contrast in character between the two camps can be well-illustrated by the divergent definitions of “trauma” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders discussed in the first chapter of Coddling. Bloom’s model would be represented by the 1980s description of a traumatic event as one that would “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and is “outside the range of usual human experience.” The modern notion of a liberal education is analogous to the early 2000s restyling of trauma as something “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning.”

Whereas our contemporary version rests entirely on subjective experience, the classical looks to a universal — or at the very least, communally verifiable — standard.

The results of this transformation in education is whence the title of Bloom’s book originates: What has been advertised to us as a “great opening” of the American mind is really a “great closing.” With its focus on external difference, i.e. identity, rather than substance, openness cannot help but become indiscriminateness. As Weigel indicated, the modus operandi of this countermovement is “relativism,” which Bloom maintains suppresses our capacity to make nuanced judgments by disabling our reason.

What this has led to is a closing off to the very possibility that there might be a truth outside of ourselves — beyond our mere feelings. Ultimately, it is a rejection of philosophy and science as valuable and worthwhile pursuits. For Bloom, “Who am I?” and “Know thyself” mean in the first place “What is man?” (or in right-speak, human). Without comparing and contrasting ourselves against the range of human possibilities that have been discovered using our reason, there is no way of knowing who or what we are.

Furthermore, this erasure of a telos, a vision of what a human being is or should be, has made the actual content of what is taught irrelevant. Education — the intergenerational transference of wisdom from old to young — has been replaced with indoctrination of a single moral lesson: tolerance or an unthinking acceptance of all ways of life other than one’s own (while simultaneously ruthlessly criticizing how you were raised — at least for those of us who live at certain intersections).

While proponents of this new pedagogy claim that this will foster diversity, Bloom counters that what actually results is “American conformism.” Prohibited from seeking after “the natural human good and admiring it when found,” we no longer are able to understand the essence of difference. Instead, we simply abandon ourselves to the passions of the moment or follow the ever-shifting irrational trends of the market. Without the inner strength built up by training in the “mental gymnasium” recommended by Lukianoff and Haidt, the will to resist either blindly following our desires, or the dictates of public opinion (think “virtue signaling”) atrophies.

WHEN CLOSING WAS first published, it was generally misunderstood, thus condemned, by those on the Left because all they saw was some cranky old “elitist” white man declaiming against progress and his imagined loss of privilege. Yet in 2000, when the book Ravelstein — a roman à clef by novelist Saul Bellow based on their intimate friendship — was published, it was revealed that Bloom was a homosexual who likely died of AIDS. Likewise, against the caricature of him as some sort of arch-WASP culture warrior, he was actually born to thoroughly middle class, second-generation Jewish parents who were both social workers.

Nothing in Bloom’s biography would ever lead one to suspect that he would hold the ideas expressed in The Closing of the American Mind.

Nor, for that matter, would you expect his exquisite meditation on eros, Love and Friendship, that he dictated while on his deathbed as a last will and testament to the overpowering necessity of human communion and resonance with the world outside our heads. His opinions, he maintained, were but the result of a very careful study of the nature of things, which although may be affected by one’s identity, are in no way determined by it.

As King Thamus cautioned in Socrates’ myth, “One man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them.” The reason for this disparity is that one of the hardest things to know — and be critical of — is one’s self, for there is no impartial place from which to view it. This is why Bloom was such a strong proponent of classical liberal education: It seeks not only to teach competing perspectives on the world, but to train our faculty of judgment to better determine “what is good for me, what will make me happy” — that is, to help us find what will lead to the “good life.”

Our present method instead inculcates what Lukianoff and Haidt call “three Great Untruths”: do not challenge yourself, accept uncritically your feelings, and always assume your “tribe” is right. But as they wisely counter, “While feelings themselves are real, and sometimes they alert us to truths that our conscious mind has not noticed, sometimes they lead us astray.” It is in learning how to discern between these two situations, though, that makes all the difference.