In 1987, the bicentennial of the Constitutional Convention, three very important best sellers swept America: Robert Bork’s The Tempting of America, E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. They presented essentially the same message about law, society, and education respectively: that we have strayed from our founding—and not in a good direction. In fact, together they are a sort of update to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Consider Allan Bloom’s profound analysis of American education . . . First, societies are successful when people choose to be good. If people choose mediocrity, they end up with mediocre society. If they choose excellence, they build an excellent society; if they choose decadence, society decays. This is not only common sense, it is historically accurate.
Second, people choose to be good when they are taught and believe in good. People’s choices are a direct result of their beliefs. And their beliefs are profoundly influenced by what they are taught by parents, friends, teachers, clergy, etc. If they are taught a falsehood or even evil, and if they believe it, they will choose poorly. Teaching influences belief, which guides action.
Third, the thing which determines how well they are taught is their national books. A national book is something that almost everyone in the nation accepts as a central truth. The national book of the Jews is the Torah; Muslims, the Quran; Christians, the Bible; etc. It could be argued that Shakespeare is a national author for England, Goethe and Luther for Germany, Dante and Machiavelli for Italy, Tolstoy for Russia, and so on. Whatever the nation, its national books—the books almost everyone in the nation revere and believe in—will determine the culture. Good national books, like the Bible or Shakespeare’s works, will lead to a good nation. Bad national books like the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf will lead to bad nations until they reject such books.
Now, what of a nation with no national book, with no central text which almost everyone agrees upon as the measuring rod of right and wrong? Such a nation is simply without culture, or at best it is in the process of losing it.
In the 1980s it changed again: students began listing various rock n’ roll music artists as the thing they revered and turned to for truth and answers. Practically every college student knew this new fountain of truth, studied it daily and for long hours, and felt passionate about it. If you doubt it, Bloom suggested, try to tell a group of youth why their music is bad and they will respond with the same energy and even anger as if you had tried to tell a group 100 years ago that the Bible was bad. This obviously could have some very negative ramifications for America’s future, but even rock music isn’t truly a national book because it is only shared by the younger generations.
In fact, there is no true national book in America today. No national books means no culture; and this is ominous for the future. Any society which loses its national book declines and collapses in ignorance, dwindles and perishes in unbelief. In Bloom’s own words: “The loss of the gripping inner life vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own . . . The delicate fabric of the civilization into which the successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised not educated . . . “People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.
“The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth . . . In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and . . . provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise—as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.”
Bloom is not only correct about the failure of the American family to fulfill its role as the primary center of education, his analysis of the modern famine of classics as the source of education is equally important: “My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible’s commandments, and their explanation in the Bible’s stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the seeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material . . . There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief . . .
“Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.”
If Bloom is correct, and I think he is, then America cannot remain free, prosperous or moral unless the overall culture adopts a central text of the caliber of the Bible. This is not only profound, it is actually a marching order for parents and educators. The whole problem is a result of families failing to teach, educate, train, and civilize.
