The Closing of the American Mind

"There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech."

"Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?"

"Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise ... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine."

"Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion."

"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part."

"The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance."

"When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing."

"There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display."

"No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice."

"These are the reasons that help to explain the perversity of an adult who prefers the company of youths to that of grownups. He prefers the promising “might be” to the defective “is.”"

"It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral and political knowledge…. It begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all…[and] of course the result is that…the argument justifying freedom disappears, and…all beliefs begin to have an attenuated character."

"Liberalism without natural rights, the kind that we knew from John Stuart Mill and John Dewey, taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them."

"The regime established here [in the U.S.] promised untrammeled freedom to reason—not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion."

"Merely methodological excision from the soul of the imagination that projects Gods and heroes onto the wall of the cave does not promote knowledge of the soul; it only lobotomizes it, cripples its powers."

"They [students] learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything."

"Nietzsche … argued that the spirit’s bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung. Its activity, he believed, comes from culture, and the decay of culture meant not only the decay of man in this culture but the decay of man simply. This is the crisis he tried to face resolutely: the very existence of man as man, as a noble being, depended on him and on men like him—so he thought."

"So we have a culture in which to root education, but we have begun to undermine it. The idealism of the American founding has been explained away as mythical, selfishly-motivated, and racist. And so our culture has been devalued."

"Religion, too, has been explained away, but this has left us without a standpoint from which to understand our experience as humans."

"Parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.”"

"Nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth…. Tradition has become superfluous."

"Nietzsche said the newspaper had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois, meaning that the busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life."

"The distance from the contemporary and its high seriousness that students most need in order not to indulge their petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves cannot be found in the cinema, which now only knows the present."

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that the here and now is all there is."

"As it now stands, students have powerful images of what the perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing."

"Plato—and Nietzsche also—understood that “Civilization or, to say the same thing, education, is the taming of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them…."

"Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art."

"To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul."

"Students are not in a position to know the pleasures of reason; they can only see it as a disciplinary and repressive parent."

"We are left with a culture filled with “the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us..."

"In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such."

"Parents are in denial about the effects of their children’s indulgence in rock music, and have thereby lost “control over their children’s moral education at time when no one else is seriously concerned with it.”"

"Mick Jagger played the role in their [students’] lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions."

"Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. There isn’t any malice in this self-centeredness; but it has become so entrenched in American culture that it isn’t even recognized as unusual."

"The decline of the family and the increasing ease of geographic mobility have left Americans with a degree of independence previously unexperienced."

"This indeterminate or open-ended future and the lack of a binding past mean that the souls of young people are in a condition like that of the first men in the state of nature—spiritually unclad, unconnected, isolated, with no inherited or unconditional connection with anything or anyone…. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?”"

"The sexual revolution was precisely what it said it was—a liberation. But some of the harshness of nature asserted itself beneath the shattered conventions: the young were more apt to profit from the revolution than the old, the beautiful more than the ugly. The old veil of discretion had had the effect of making these raw and ill-distributed natural advantages less important."

"Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the soul. It has no place for the natural superiority of the philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are impregnated with that psychology live in a sub-basement and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the world of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity."

"What is so intolerable about the Republic, as Plato shows, is the demand that men give up their land, their money, their wives, their children, for the sake of the public good, their concern for which had previously been buttressed by these lower attachments."

"I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them."

"Nietzsche said, “the greatest deeds are thoughts,” that “the world revolves around the inventors of new values, revolves silently.” Nietzsche was such an inventor, and we are still revolving around him. … The spectacle consists in how his views have been trivialized by democratic man desirous of tricking himself out in borrowed finery."

"Americans … do not naturally apply the term “bourgeois” to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content. … The term “middle class” does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist—all good."

"Locke … wanted to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature in the civil order, and the result of his mistake is the bourgeois."

"If Rousseau is right, man’s reason, calculating his best interest, will not lead him to wish to be a good citizen, a law-abiding citizen. He will either be himself, or he will be a citizen, or he will try to be both and be neither. In other words, enlightenment is not enough to establish society, and even tends to dissolve it."

"Plato would have united with Rousseau against the bourgeois in his insistence on the essential humanness of longing for the good, as opposed to careful avoidance of the bad. Neither longing nor enthusiasm belongs to the bourgeois. The story of philosophy and the arts under Rousseau’s influence has been the search for, or fabrication of, plausible objects of longing to counter bourgeois well-being and self-satisfaction."

"It is easy today to deny God’s creativity as a thing of the benighted past, overcome by science, but man’s creativity, a thing much more improbable and nothing but an imitation of God’s, exercises a strange attraction."

"Universality and rationality were the hallmarks of all these teachings. But very quickly culture—which was for Kant and, speaking anachronistically, for Rousseau, singular—became cultures."

"Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity."

"Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. One might as well be a Christian if one is so naive."

"The disenchantment of God and nature necessitated a new description of good and evil."

"To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable."