Back in July, on its 10th birthday, I introduced the Prospect Reading Group to this blog, and wondered out loud why reading groups were treated with such suspicion.
I promised to share our future discussions, but as things would have it, the last meeting on August 30 was a real set-to, and I’ve only had time now to pull together a report. Anything I write will inevitably reflect my own views, but hopefully members of the group – and of course anyone else – will add their comments.
The discussion focused on a nonfiction/fiction pair: The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, and Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow, which reportedly used Bloom as inspiration for the main character. In the scrum over Bloom, Bellow’s novel ended up receiving a good deal less attention.
Bloom is now dead but his arguments, first published in book form in 1987, are still part of a continuing debate. Even in our relatively homogenous reading group (professional, well-educated and international) there were strong and differing responses. Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most members of the group could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.
Bloom’s answer is to insist that all university students be acquainted with Plato, and the broad narrative of Western philosophical thought, if the best of its values are to survive. Here, our group may have offered proof for another Bloom argument, that people are not only unfamiliar with the heritage, but also unsympathetic to it: some group members joined wider critics in finding him guilty of elitism, irrelevance or neo-conservatism.
I am not in that camp, and I don’t remember finding the book hard to read (another charge) although I see that I left unmarked the entire first section, where he vents ‘grumpy old man’ prejudices about modern life. But despite its faults I find it prescient: why else do we seem to have so little to say now in defence of western values, except that we are ‘free’ to wear skimpy clothing? (I know, I know, there’s more to it than that, but I am making a point).
I would add that the main reason why Bloom is associated with the right is that, at the time he wrote the book, the left had vacated the space where ‘values’ and western intellectual heritage could be reinterpreted in a positive light. In fact, since then, it has arguably re-entered that space, but that is the topic of another blog, or article, or book.
I think your point in the last paragraph is well-made. ‘Re-entered’ is a good choice of word, implying a job half done. Why, for example, has the UK’s ‘left-wing’ party presided over an increase in the number of faith schools? As one of the members of the group who allegedly has a background in the subjects Bloom touches on, but who found my knowledge lacking in key areas, I think it’s worth adding that Bloom’s precis of some key points from Enlightenment thinkers including Locke and Rousseau (Rousseau being a key inspiration for him) was a useful and interesting part of the book.
Bloom invites identification with the political right because of his appeal for a revival of forgotten values, as captured in the ‘classics’ – by definition a conservative quest. The political left traditionally [if that’s the right word] appeals for an overthrow of past values, which the ‘classics’ are viewed as uselessly fossilising rather than usefully preserving. In its more desperate moments in the 1970s and 80s, the American and British social-democratic left succumbed to its own conservatism. The Democrat and Labour parties struggled to defend early postwar values (social welfare, full employment, redistributive taxation, UN-led multilateralism), and adopted a Bloom-like nostalgia – evoking the ‘classics’ of Keynes, Beveridge, Tawney, even Rousseau and Marx. But twenty years on, the Blair- and Brownite left (echoing Harold Wilson’s 1960s ‘white heat of technology’) has found the electoral benefits of identifying with ‘innovation’. This fits neatly with a (western?) cultural outlook that prefers endlessly rediscovering and repackaging old ideas, believing them to be new, than reviewing past thought and realising that the same ideas have been presented and analysed before.
Is there any intellectual discipline, at least in the English language, that still reads or remembers its ‘classics’? In social science, classic texts are unreadable (or not worth reading) to today’s practitioners because they are in another language, lacking the ‘formal’ presentation now equated with mathematical restatement and statistical measurement. But the same burial that befell (among others) Keynes in economics, Goffman in social pyschology and everyone other than Marx, Weber and Durkheim in sociology seems to have affected the humanities just as dramatically. English literature is surely unique in not only permitting the neglect of Shakespeare, but in diverting energy towards proving the non-existence or illiteracy of the national poet. British visual art seems to take pride in awarding its top prizes to people who by-passed the traditional techniques, going straight into their parody and negation.
I agree that Bloom is hard to read. But having read him, it’s very hard not to sound like him. If anyone can show me that social science has produced a genuinely new idea in the past 50 years, I might change my mind. Unless cultural forces have already closed it.
Yes Alan cultural forces have almost totally elliminated even the possibility of the emergence of anything new.
For the past 200 years the “mind” of the West has been trapped in Webers Iron Cage—or the reductionist ideology of scientific materialism.
This is particularly so in the universities or left-brained mind factories. The essential nature of left-brainism being that it is inherently reductionist in its disposition or asana altogether. It automatically objectifies everything that it puts its attention on. It thus also seeks to control whatever it looks at, and thereby essentially kills it and even the possibility of entering into a participatory relationship with any and everything altogether.
The deadly Western Gaze.
Real God has been well and truly dead, killed off by the world dominant reductionist mind of scientism.
Free open-ended mindless psychic participation in anything, whether in Art in its various manifestations and the world-process altogether is TABOO.
Everything is thus reduced to dead matter and the idolatry of words—endless wordifying.
Most (ALL) of our “culture” has become the mere exchange of dead words between brains!
We “live” in a “world” of left brained abstractions.
Anything apparently “new” immediately becomes enfolded within the prevailing individual and collective staus quo.
These related references address this phenomenon.
1. http://www.dabase.org/ilchurst.htm
2. http://www.dabase.org/spacetim.htm
3. http://www.aboutadidam.org/lesser_alternatives/scientific_materialism/index.html
Plus “The Realization of The Beautiful” which gives a unique appreciation of Platos Symposium—it is also a scathing critique of our normal dreadful reductionist “sanity” and its dreadful consequences.
1. http://www.adidamla.org/newsletters/newsletter-aprilmay2006.pdf
Also:
1. http://www.mummerybook.org
One gets the feeling that this reading group has missed out on the very good continental social theory produced this century.
For instance Bourdieu’s work kicks Bloom’s back to basics approach into touch, pointing out how important it is to consider how values operate in practice.
Virtue is a complex thing worked out in the specifics and complexities of life. Idealists(and Plato is really idealist)are often incompassionate and cruel in their inability to understand this, insensitive in their holy crusades.
Modern Secular societies are good in ways that are complex and hard to understand, and remember, the world is far less violent now than it was then. Is this a sign of weakness? I do not see continental Europeans bankrupting themselves with ridiculous colonial adventures.
This is old news to the French, just go and watch Les Miserables. Or read Zigmunt Bauman, or any other post-holocaust writer on ethics.
Also, beware of global fashions, it is not nice to be a monkey to the Washington organ grinder (see my last comment here):
http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2007/09/27/prospects-new-issue—the-search-for-british-values/
Daniel, you seem to be on a mission to spread Bourdieu’s word – I have spotted various contributions from you on this theme across the Prospect blog.
Perhaps you are not aware of it, but your assumptions come across as patronising. Bourdieu and Bauman are indeed interesting, but if no one in our group is citing the Continental philosophers in this case, maybe it’s because we don’t think they have made the problem go away.
Why are we following a “global fashion” or being Washington’s monkey, just because we are not interested in what you are interested in? And do you really think your own viewpoint is immune from fashion? In this case, the very odd reflex among many British intellectuals to idealise the French…
Well part of the problem is that you (collectively in the original post and personally in your reaction)don’t really state a position Susan.
I am actually very interested in the issues raised, I just suspect I don’t agree with you, but only debate will tell.
It is not the French bit I like, it is the bit that makes sense. What exactly is the problem that won’t go away?
Patronising is a way of getting a response, apologies, I am far more civil in person.
I will take you very seriously if you actually advance an argument.
Aaah OK, found it…
“Many members found his book pleasantly challenging: especially the last third, about the deficiencies of modern university life. But the unfamiliarity of the material to most readers could be seen as proof of his main argument, that people in the west lack knowledge of their own culture’s intellectual traditions.”
The youth of today…
Well a lot of them are more concerned with practicing democratic values rather than talking about it, take the 170,000 people in the support Burma Facebook group.
The problem is that young people today are far better informed, and so not so dependent on tradition for their ethical decision making, which conservatives of course dislike.
And you call me patronising.
I’m not really clear what is your own position Daniel. Is the central point that “Virtue is a complex thing worked out in the specifics and complexities of life.” I’m not sure anyone would disagree with that, i’m sure Bloom would have agreed. I don’t think, however, that it is much of a road-map for living an ethical life.
You say “Modern Secular societies are good in ways that are complex and hard to understand” Does that mean that you are confident that they will remain so? Why?
And I don’t think that young people today are particularly well-informed. They may react (in a wholly inconsequential way) to recent events in Burma, but how many young people have a meaningful opinion on whether there should be a European president, or what is the best way for government to deal with gun crime, or whether recent Labour health policy has been effective, or whether multi-culturalism has been a successful policy, or whether the rise of sovereign wealth funds is a good thing, or whether the collapse of Northern Rock implies important weaknesses in the banking regulatory system? Yes the modern world is complex and no it is not enough simply to approach every issue with a blank sheet of paper.
My position? Is a classic enlightenment one that conscience is the core of any ethical life, and that rules are very often a way to disengage one’s conscience, secure behind lazy guidelines.
I am particularly concerned with social justice and human suffering, and it is clear that the poorest in this world face lives perilously close to the edge, where many nasty surprises may await them. This often means that new developments in the world, such as climate change, bio-fuels, rising oil prices, GM food, and trade rounds, often affect their lives in unexpected ways (sometimes unexpectedly good, it is not all gloom).
So in order to deal with such things, to be able to understand the situation of people living on the edge, it is important to have a very open viewpoint, able to take on board the shifting conditions that may determine their life or death.
Thanks for taking an interest, if you want more detail then read up on the literature about ethnographic approaches to development, particularly in relation to food security.
You lay out a position also, nice to see:
“And I don’t think that young people today are particularly well-informed. They may react (in a wholly inconsequential way) to recent events in Burma, but how many young people have a meaningful opinion on whether there should be a European president, or what is the best way for government to deal with gun crime, or whether recent Labour health policy has been effective, or whether multi-culturalism has been a successful policy, or whether the rise of sovereign wealth funds is a good thing, or whether the collapse of Northern Rock implies important weaknesses in the banking regulatory system? Yes the modern world is complex and no it is not enough simply to approach every issue with a blank sheet of paper.”
You seem to assume that your opinion on such things is more consequential than the protests about Burma, but if you are not a swing voter in a marginal constituency, then the chances are you have little influence.
Oh and Yoof. I imagine young people today (I am 32, so might even count as one, in my more optimistic moments) are better informed about such things than at any time in the past. How do you explain that more people are in higher education now than ever before? How do you explain the level of social engagement with social issues such as climate change and global poverty, complex issues, little understood even by mainstream opinion formers even 5 years ago?
I am not particularly fond of the “Blank Slate” metaphor by the way. Nobody approaches things with “a blank sheet of paper”, they have their life experience to bring to bear. To my mind, not attempting to reduce that experience to a set of rules before the event is a sign of intelligence.
Oh and by the way, that “blank sheet” metaphor is actually an artifact of being a modern, in an world of exchange and a liberal notion of self governed by law and based in the blankness of equality.
Has it never struck you how odd it is that you assume that without rules you are a universal open space. That is very culturally specific to a law governed liberal-economic polity.
Which is why perhaps you should keep more of an open mind and take a look at your assumptions.
Oh and no, I am not sure that modern secular societies will remain good. The shock and surprise of climate change and its resulting denial seems to be pushing us towards a position where we just keep on consuming and abandon the poor to their fate.
This is a surprising outcome, and one that carries a terrible risk of the developed world completely using its moral compass. But I am not sure Aristotle or Bloom have any solutions for that, we will probably need to engage our minds and consciences…
But (sorry to keep on, but I like to finish a thought process) if you are interested in taking up the position of a rule-maker, or allready work as one, there is more substantive work on how and why rules arise in practice, and the value of then in therms of maintaining common public spaces.
One area is from a Prospect Author Ken Binmore, regarding how game theory and social contracts are related. This is a formal approach to modelling practice, but clearly a lot more substantive than Bloom’s idealism.
Another area that bears on the emergence of social morality in practice is looking at the relationships between inequality and the environment, something fairly relevant these days:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691128790/ref=ord_cart_shr/026-5267341-1657236?_encoding=UTF8&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
So if you are at all interested in the real world, you might want to take a look at one of these in your reading circle.
If you are interested in ultimate goals rather then consequence ethics, then you might want to consider what is the ultimate point of human progress, and what are the ultimate resources we draw on. In that case the New Economic Foundations report on the Happy Planet Index, makes some interesting observations about the philosophy behind how we measure progress:
http://www.happyplanetindex.org/
Some fresh European food for thought, to offset all that presrevative-based philosophy.
Sorry, here is the Binmore link, the first article “The Origins of Fair play” is a good intro into his position.
http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/newweb/displayProfile.php?key=2
I am glad that you have so much insight into my assumptions! Hmmm.
The Binmore article is interesting though. A philosopher called David Lewis wrote a good book on convention also, called (I think) “Convention”.