My project in this series is to document the history of the rhetoric of attacks on “political correctness” (“anti-PC discourse” for short), to show how it evolved over time.
The last post was mainly about the 1984 Bennett Report. This post is about Allen Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind (wikipedia, archive.org, pdf), which both increased the heat of the rhetoric and introduced new tropes.
Closing was not expected or intended to sell well, but it became a surprise bestseller, selling nearly 500,000 copies in hardcover and a similar number in paperback. I confess this entirely flummoxes me. To my mind, the book has all the flaws of academic writing, memoir, and polemic, with vanishingly few of the compensating virtues. I just don’t get its appeal. It somehow hit a cultural moment in a way that seems inexplicable to me.
Fortunately, my project doesn’t require me to answer the question “What were you thinking, gushing reviewers in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor?” I just want to look at how this text does what it does, and how it sets the stage for later anti-PC rhetoric.
A bit on the book’s content
A summary of Bloom’s main argument seems appropriate, though, for context.
Closing is superficially aligned with Bennett’s 1984 critique of the US humanities: colleges should teach Western and specifically American culture because that’s essential to being a whole person who operates in that culture. Bloom says the question (his emphasis) is:
“What is man?”, in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs. A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern.” (p. 2)
Such questions and their answers are key to Western and (particularly) US philosophy and culture. They should be taught so that that culture can be replicated. That’s what was done in the past: The page numbers I cite are those internal to the PDF. Because of unnumbered pages at the beginning of the PDF, you add 15 to the internal page number to get the page number in PDF (“Go to page…") numbering. Further complicating things is that when the Index of Proper Names refers to page 151, it should be pointing to page 116. I suspect this means the internal page numbers are off by 35 from the hardcopy original.
“Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. […] Above all [the properly educated man] was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history […] A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man.” (p. 7)
The result, historically, had been homogeneity:
“[B]y recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers.” (p. 8)
Homogeneity is good, but things began to break down because of …
“the presence in the United States of men and women of a great variety of nations, religions, and races, and the fact that many were badly treated because they belonged to these groups. […] Although the natural rights inherent in our regime are perfectly adequate to the solution of this problem, provided these outsiders adhere to them (i.e., they become insiders by adhering to them), this did not satisfy the thinkers who influenced our educators, for the right to vote and the other political rights did not automatically produce social acceptance. The equal protection of the laws did not protect a man from contempt and hatred as a Jew, an Italian, or a Black.” (p. 11)
Instead of striving for (other people’s) assimilation, intellectual and cultural elites “resist[ed] the notion that outsiders had to give up their ‘cultural’ individuality and make themselves into that universal, abstract being who participates in natural rights or else [is] doomed to an existence on the fringe.” (p. 11) The elites “weaken[ed] the sense of superiority of the dominant majority […] That dominant majority gave the country a dominant culture with its traditions, its literature, its tastes, its special claim to know and supervise the language, and its Protestant religions.” (p. 11)
The result of this lengthy project “Much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purposes of making an assault on that majority.” (p. 11) was that, whereas students used to come to college with “knowledge of American history and those who were held to be its heroes” (p. 14), they no longer do. “[N]othing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures and a few social science formulas. […] [R]elativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life.” (p. 14)
In college, students meet professors whose goal is to “propagandize acceptance of different ways.” (p. 15)
To what end? Partly they promote pure relativism, the belief that one should not make value judgments: Bloom’s use of the word “relativism” confuses me. Sometimes he qualifies it – value relativism, cultural relativism, democratic relativism, and pop or cheap relativism. “Cultural” and “value” are the most common adjectives, but no adjective is also common. It may be that “cultural relativism” is Neitzsche’s version and “value relativism” is due to sociologist Max Weber, but I don’t know what the substantive differences are, nor how they differ from other sorts of philosophical relativism that arguably date back to Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–420 BC). Bloom also uses “nihilism” in ways that seem interchangeable with relativism, but he may be referring specifically to Nietzsche. Without more clarity about the language, it’s hard to evaluate his various claims that some X is an example of relativism, or value relativism, or cultural relativism, or nihilism.
“One of the techniques of opening young people up is to require a college course in a non-Western culture. […] [I]n every case I have seen this requirement […] has a demagogic intention. The point is to force students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not better.” (pp. 15-16)
As in the previous installment, bold emphasis is my own. I use it here to show that, while Bennett described people with misguided goals, Bloom has enemies. Despite being relativists, these enemies actually do make value judgments that they use to “assault the majority”:
“Sexual adventurers like Margaret Mead and others who found America too narrow told us that not only must we know other cultures and learn to respect them, but we could also profit from them. We could follow their lead and loosen up, liberating ourselves from the opinion that our taboos are anything other than social constraints. We could go to the bazaar of cultures and find reinforcement for inclinations that are repressed by puritanical guilt feelings. All such teachers of openness had either no interest in or were actively hostile to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” (p. 13)
Whereas Bennett thought it was a fine thing to learn other cultures, “The college curriculum must take the non-Western world into account, not out of political expediency or to appease interest groups, but out of respect for its importance in human history.” Bennett, p. 39 Bloom thinks there’s really no point to that:
“[I]f the students were really to learn something of the minds of any of these non-Western cultures – which they do not – they would find that each and every one of these cultures is ethnocentric. All of them think their way is the best way, and all others are inferior. […] Only in the Western nations, i.e., those influenced by Greek philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way.” (p. 16)
“Greek philosophers are the first men we know to address the problem of ethnocentrism. […] They were open to the good. They had to use the good, which was not their own, to judge their own. […] But the awareness of the good as such and the desire to possess it are priceless humanizing acquisitions.” (p. 17)
Therefore, universities should go back to teaching Western culture in its specifically American incarnation, and they should do it in the traditional way. This is the same general prescription as Bennett, but less diplomatic, more dogmatic, and more judgmental. The main difference is that Bennett emphasizes using the great minds of the Western tradition to learn how to grapple with perennial questions (and then supplementing that with at least one non-Western tradition). Bloom is much more about emphasizing the answers that those great minds arrived at. Universities should counter the fact that people in the Western world are now accepting the wrong answers from later thinkers.
Rhetoric
What does this book add to the 80’s anti-PC discourse?
An expanded list of gripes
The history Bennett tells has two causal drivers: career-obsessed students and research-obsessed teachers.
In Bloom’s world, there are many drivers that are all working together. Some are old. For example, he faults Enlightenment thinkers for downplaying the importance of the passions and for exaggerating the role of the individual. And consumerist capitalism, while valuable, caters to people’s lazy individualism, self-absorption, and desire to have a distinct lifestyle, all of which degrade the moral character.
But things really started to go to hell after World War II.
Take divorce:
“A university teacher of liberal arts cannot help confronting special handicaps, a slight deformity of the spirit, in the students, ever more numerous, whose parents are divorced. […] They are full of desperate platitudes about self-determination, respect for other people’s rights and decisions, the need to work out one’s individual values and commitments, etc. All this is a thin veneer over boundless seas of rage, doubt, and fear.” (p. 90)
His chapter on music includes this:
“Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing 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 lifelike 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 nonstop, commercially packaged masturbational fantasy.
“This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such. […] People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats.” (p. 50)
And there’s the immodesty that feminism and the sexual revolution have encouraged in women. “Modesty” isn’t defined I can’t think of any term that does have a proper attempt at a definition. So I guess it’s unsurprising that there isn’t a conventional index where you can look up terms like “modesty” or “value relativism.” There is an Index of Proper Names, which makes sense due to the density of name dropping. (Plato is mentioned on 88 of 327 pages. Nietzsche is mentioned on 78.) So if you’re me, and you see that “equality” is mentioned on 48 separate pages, yet you’re still not sure what Bloom thinks about it, you might want to look at the index, hoping that the first page reference under “equality” is the key or defining one. But the best you can do is find out what Bloom says about Plato and the concept of equality, which is: “Can private property and equality sit so easily together when even Plato required communism among equals?” (p. 126) That’s it for “equality” in the index. except that it “impeded sexual intercourse, [and so modesty’s] result was to make such gratification central to a serious life and to enhance the delicate interplay between the sexes, which makes acquiescence of the will as important as possession of the body.” (p. 73) Nowadays, men and women attempt to be “just lawyers and pilots together, [without modesty, here personified as a voice] constantly repeating that a man and a woman have a work to do together that is far different from that found in the marketplace, and of far greater importance.” (p. 74)
And there’s radio and television:
“Along with the constant newness of everything and the ceaseless moving from place to place, first radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. […] 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. Now television has replaced the newspaper.” (pp. 34-35)
Traditional western civilization is beset on every side.
Catastrophism
As you may have noticed, Bloom’s rhetoric is, um, heightened. Here’s an interesting passage:
“Value relativism can be taken to be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with their cargo of shame and guilt, and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin. Intractable good and evil cause infinite distress—like war and sexual repression—which is almost instantly relieved when more flexible values are introduced.” (p. 109)
I have to suspect that when Bloom filled out those “rank your satisfaction on a scale from one to five” surveys, he never ever used two, three, or four.
Similarly, things never go a little bit wrong:
“Unfortunately the West is defined by its need for justification of its ways or values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, it will collapse.” (p. 18)
To this, my impulse is to reply as Adam Smith did when it was clear that the British were going to lose their American colonies. John Sinclair had written to him, “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined.” Smith replied, “Be assured my young friend, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
Smith was right. I have to admit name-dropping is fun. The British Empire did OK without those 13 colonies. Western civilization will be OK too, I think.
Catastrophism becomes a central trope in anti-PC discourse. Bloom’s approach becomes a template:
- Bad ideas are powerful and fast-acting.
- Good institutions (marriage, Western civilization, the delicate interplay between the sexes) are weak in the face of bad ideas.
- Good ideas are not compelling without a lot of practice and education.
- Therefore, recovery from a weak institution ruined by bad ideas will be long, slow, and difficult – if possible at all.
I’m not saying catastrophism was invented for anti-PC discourse – it’s been around forever. I’m saying it was embraced by it and became central to it.
Words have power
“A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual, unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people’s articulation of the world. When bishops, a generation after Hobbes’s death, almost naturally spoke the language of the state of nature, contract and rights, it was clear that he had defeated the ecclesiastical authorities, who were no longer able to understand themselves as they once had. It was henceforward inevitable that the modern archbishops of Canterbury would have no more in common with the ancient ones than does the second Elizabeth with the first.” (p. 108)
This will become another common theme in the discourse. My default reaction to name changes is a shrug, so I’m not the best person to explain why people get so hot about it. Nevertheless, I think I have a credible hypothesis for what’s going on.
But first, we need a bit – just one paragraph – of semiotics.
Conventional semiotics asks you to think of the word “tree” as a signifier: it points to something. What it points to is the concept of Tree, called (clumsily) the signified. (If used in a sentence, like “watch out for the falling tree,” the particular tree referred to is the “referent.”)
Some people act like the link between the signifier and the signified is, by rights, immutable. To pick an example from my childhood, some people were surprisingly upset when those who were at the time called airline “stewardesses” wanted to be called “flight attendants.” To those getting upset (and, I wager, to the stewardesses themselves), that was not simply relabeling a job: it was changing the job. The new signifier points to a different signified. And that’s sort of true. For example, “stewardess” had been explicitly female, whereas a flight attendant could be male.
But the real underlying gripe, I believe, is that the former stewardesses were angling for higher status, disrupting an established social hierarchy. Swatting a stewardess on the butt (it happened a lot) is just naughty fun, but a “flight attendant” seems more professional. At that time, I believe most larger commercial flights had a third person in the cockpit: the flight engineer. You wouldn’t swat him on the butt, would you? See also the (less serious, I think) attempt to relabel janitors “sanitation engineers.”
It’s notable that such renamings rarely have much of an effect. (The signified remains pretty much the same.) Swatting stewardesses on the butt is now out of bounds, but that was more due to a change across society (and in the legal regime) than because of a name change. It doesn’t seem the job’s status has shifted much. People are still pretty rude to flight attendants. So fulminating over a change of formal title could be seen as much ado about not much, but where’s the fun in that?
“Sanitation engineer” didn’t make it into the lexicon (except in the sense of engineers who, for example, design sewage treatment plants), but “flight attendant” did. I expect that’s because it’s actually convenient to have a gender-neutral term for a job that’s open to everyone. Though I can see how it might make it harder for the people trying to clear the aisle for takeoff to remember that “a man and a woman have a work to do together that is far different from that found in the marketplace.”
In sum, I think it’s not that people object to a name change; it’s that they object to what they think the change will do. And – perhaps because of catastrophism, perhaps because words are taken to have inherent power – it will do a lot. One cannot, as is my reflex, just shrug and go along.
The Gish Gallop
Although the term wouldn’t be coined for another seven years, Bloom in this book is a practitioner of the “Gish Gallop.” Per Wikipedia, “The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.”
While “Gish Gallop” is a term usually applied to live debates, there’s an equivalent writing style. It consists of a large number of factual claims, stated with utmost confidence. Later claims are justified primarily by reference to earlier claims. It’s like building geometry from Euclid’s axioms except that there are a hundred or two axioms, many overlapping, instead of five.
The effect is that you know there’s got to be more to any given paragraph: claims that are arguable, counter-arguments that ought to be mentioned. You could stop reading and dig into that, but there are an endless number of paragraphs coming, and life’s too short. In effect, a Gish Gallop has something of the form of an argument, but it’s empty of what makes argumentation useful: things like definitions, on-point examples, fair summaries of other people’s arguments, claims supported by a chain of reasoning that the reader can follow, and all that. Moreover, a given chapter might contain several arguments, interwoven, with unclear callbacks to ideas introduced in previous chapters.
An example would be handy right about now. I chose the first chapter of the second part of the book. The part is titled “Nihilism, American Style,” and the chapter is “The German Connection.” It blames our current mess in the humanities on “affinities between our real American world and that of German philosophy in its most advanced form.” (p. 109)
But there’s a problem. Reading the chapter is something like listening to a small child explain something exciting that happened that day, except with way more subordinate clauses and considerably less cuteness. Every time I’ve commented on the text, I bog down exactly as you would if you were annotating that small child’s story. It’s boring. It also requires something like one of those conspiracy theorist corkboards with photographs and note cards and colored twine linking related claims.
Source thebeaverton.com. Click to enlarge.
But you deserve an example. So here’s my last try, a small one, a single (though longish) paragraph that shows but part of a Gallop.
By way of background, the chapter says that, starting with Nietzsche, German philosophy embraced the idea that “Values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life.” (p. 109) While values can be invented (rather than discovered), they cannot be ranked. Nietzsche “profoundly influenced” two people who “divided up Nietzsche’s psychological and social concerns between them.” (ibid.) Sigmund Freud got psychology. Max Weber (one of the founders of sociology) got the social. A third figure, Martin Heidegger, amplified Nietzsche’s “antirational and antiliberal turn.” (p. 115) Refugees from Hitler’s Germany brought those ideas to America, where they taught them to American academics, who were enthusiastically receptive, “literally inebriated by the unconscious and values.” (ibid.) (The unconscious from Freud, the incommensurability of values From the link: “value incommensurability concerns comparisons among abstract values (such as liberty or equality).” Which is worth more, liberty or equality? How many units of liberty equals one unit of equality? from Weber.)
“All were either Marxists or New Deal liberals. […] Psychotherapy would make individuals happy, as sociology would improve societies.” (ibid.)
I’m going to discuss paragraph 19, but the end of paragraph 18 sets the stage:
“It was not until the sixties that the value insight began to have its true effects in the United States, as it had had in Germany thirty or forty years earlier. Suddenly a new generation that had not lived off inherited value fat [sic], that had been educated in philosophic and scientific indifference to good and evil, came on the scene representing value commitment and taught their elders a most unpleasant lesson.” (pp. 116-117)
And what is that unpleasant lesson? The next paragraph answers:
“The image of this astonishing Americanization of the German pathos can be seen in the smiling face of Louis Armstrong as he belts out the words of his great hit ‘Mack the Knife.’” (p. 117)
record scratch noise
I think I would have led with an example more “most unpleasant” than a popular song, especially one recorded in 1955 (and thus actually prior to the sixties' “true effects of the value insight”).
Bloom’s argument in favor of the malign effect of “Mack the Knife” is fairly linear. In what follows, I’ve omitted no words. All citations are to page 117. If you want to read the full paragraph all at once, click here.
“As most American intellectuals know, [Mack the Knife] is a translation of the song “Mackie Messer” from The Threepenny Opera, a monument of Weimar Republic My hunch is that most Americans know one thing about the Weimar Republic, the post-WWI German democracy that preceded Hitler: that it’s the setting for the 1972 Bob Fosse film “Cabaret.” It’s a bit odd that Bloom doesn’t mention that film, but unlike (arguably?) “Mack the Knife,” “Cabaret” doesn’t inspire anyone to think, “Say, I wish I lived in the society described by this piece of art.” popular culture, written by two heroes of the artistic Left, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.”
This is true. What Bloom doesn’t mention is that “Mackie Messer” was taken from the 1728 ballad opera “The Beggar’s Opera,” a satire of the London underground. Bloom may not have known about the source material. But he surely knew that The Threepenny Opera is set in London, making it a view of English life (or, really, life under capitalism) by two Germans, not (directly) a picture of life in the Weimar Republic. There, he was called “Macheath.” And Macheath was based on a real-life thief, John “Honest Jack” Sheppard (1702-1724), who became something of a English folk hero by escaping four times from prison in a single year. (But they caught him again and hanged him.) You’ll see the relevance shortly.
Now there’s a shift in subject:
“There is a strange nostalgia among many of the American intelligentsia for this moment just prior to Hitler’s coming to power […]”
Nostalgia for what, specifically?
“[…] and Lotte Lenya’s rendition of this song [Mackie Messer] has long stood with Marlene Dietrich’s singing “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt” in The Blue Angel as the symbol of a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment not quite present to the consciousness.”
It seems to be a longing for a mood.
But there’s something the intellectuals don’t know, something it turns out they’re actually longing for:
“Less known to our intelligentsia is an aphorism in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book well known to Brecht, entitled “On the Pale Criminal,” which tells the story of a neurotic murderer, eerily resembling Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who does not know, cannot know, that he committed murder out of a motive as legitimate as any other and useful in many important situations, but delegitimized in our pacific times: he lusted after ‘the joy of the knife.'“ Bloom has this annoying habit of stating a judgment without making it clear whether it’s his opinion or an opinion he’s mocking. I’m pretty sure that here he’s mocking the idea that “the joy of the knife” might be legitimate; only a Nietzsche could think that.
Oho! “Mack the Knife” has smuggled a Nietzschean idea into an American popular song! And what attitudes does that song prompt?
“This scenario for “Mack the Knife” is the beginning of the supra-moral attitude of expectancy, waiting to see what the volcano of the id will spew forth, which appealed to Weimar and its American admirers. Everything is all right as long as it is not fascism!”
So “Mack the Knife” prompts a longing to see “monsters from the id” in action, which is a bit different than “a charming, neurotic, sexy, decadent longing for some hazy fulfillment.”
“With Armstrong taking Lenya’s place, as Mai Britt took Dietrich’s, it is all mass-marketed and the message becomes less dangerous, although no less corrupt.”
How does translating “Mackie Messer” into English reduce its danger but retain its corruption? Or is it the singer who makes the difference? And who the hell is “Mai Britt”? She is not mentioned anywhere else in the book. Per Wikipedia, May Britt was a Swedish actress who starred in “a much-criticised remake of The Blue Angel (1959) in the role first created by Marlene Dietrich.”
It is thought to be folk culture, all-American, part of the American century, […]
He seems to be saying here that real American culture wouldn’t celebrate violent anti-heroes. Seriously? Billy the Kid? Bonnie and Clyde? Such anti-heroes are ubiquitous in Western culture. As noted above, Jack Sheppard was an English anti-hero. Given a chain of influence moving from an 1728 English ballad opera to a 1928 musical play to a 1955 popular song, how can Nietzsche be at fault?
[…] just as “stay loose” (as opposed to uptight) is supposed to have been an insight of rock music and not a translation of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit.
Oh, come on.
-
“Hang loose” is widely attributed to surf culture. “Stay loose” is a synonym, often used by athletes. It did become popular during the hippie era, but because of Heidegger?
-
It is true that Heidegger used “Gelassenheit” to mean “releasement” or “the spirit of disponibilité [availability] before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.” Does that seem a plausible origin story for its use in rock music?
-
Heidegger borrowed the term from mystical Christian Anabaptist tradition, where it means roughly “submission to the will of God.” If a German word was the source of “stay loose,” why not attribute it to the Anabaptists?
As Wikipedia editors often write, citation needed. I don’t think there’s a single citation in the book. I very often could have used them. For example, I can’t really square what Bloom says about Max Weber with what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about him. Where would I look for more about Bloom’s interpretation?
There’s a final sentence, but I have nothing to say about it. It’s another unsourced claim:
The historical sense and the distance on our times, the only advantages of Weimar nostalgia, are gone, and American self-satisfaction—the sense that the scene is ours, that we have nothing important to learn about life from the past—is served.
The stirring conclusion
All that (tediously) said, a sentence-by-sentence fisking can distract from the big weakness in the paragraph:
What on earth does the intelligentsia’s ignorant fondness for “that ambiguous Weimar atmosphere in which liberals looked like simpletons and anything was possible for people who sang of the joy of the knife in cabarets” (p. 120) have to do with how the sixties generation “taught their elders a most unpleasant lesson”? Is it plausible there’s a strong causal chain leading from Nietzsche to Freud and Weber, thence to Weimar Berlin’s cabaret scene, to the supposedly novel introduction of “the joy of the knife” into American culture, to whatever violent things the youth were doing from the sixties through the eighties? Or is it more plausible that American history would have been almost exactly the same if “Mackie Messer” had never been translated? And that Nietzsche’s influence on the huge changes in post-war America was fleeting compared to widespread prosperity, the Baby Boom, the contraceptive pill, and many other things not the thought of some dead German? You might object that Bloom does give causal power to divorce, rock music, feminism and female modesty, and television. But I believe he presents all these as downstream of the acceptance of relativism. So it still goes back to Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, and Heidegger. I think he’s way overdoing the causal power of German philosophy.
My theory is that Bloom at one point remembered Nietzsche wrote of the “joy of the knife” and that “Mack the Knife” has a lowlife character fond of knives, and so – by geometric logic – the one must have led to the other, and listeners to the song absorbed Nietzsche’s nihilistic message through Armstrong’s gravelly voice. The fact that ballads of anti-heroes predate Nietzsche – and that the whole story of a pop song corrupting the youth could be told without mentioning any philosophers In 1928, Cole Porter wrote a song titled “Let’s Do It”. You’ve probably heard it: “Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it.” The listeners knew very well what the “it” was that was to be done, just as Paul McCartney’s listeners did, forty years later, when they heard “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road” and just as the Rolling Stones' listeners in 1967 understood the implications of “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” All three of those songs were attacked for corrupting the youth, but it would have taken a special person to claim those songs were channeling some pro-sex philosopher. Bertrand Russell, say. – just couldn’t derail an emotionally-satisfying dig at people Bloom dislikes.
It seems to me that anti-PC rhetoric characteristically claims to be driven by reason, whereas it’s actually driven by emotion (and tribalism), which prevents its practitioners from realizing how weak their arguments are.
That may be too kind. Alternately, the intended result of a Gish Gallop, and the actual result of a successful one, is that readers – perhaps a million of them – just swallow it when, for example, Bloom writes, of students in 1986, “The best point of entry into the very special world inhabited by today’s students is the astonishing fact that they usually do not, in what were once called love affairs, say, ‘I love you’.” (p. 92).
Does Bloom actually believe that? Or is a huge part of anti-PC discourse angling to prevent the reader from stopping and saying “Really? How could that possibly make sense? In what universe do people behave that way?”