Was Bloom PC?

Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue amadienne d'etudes americaines Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 1996, pp. 1-26 Was Bloom PC? Phil Ryan If I were called upon to write a book which w::1sto be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to ~1pprehend. (Augustine, Co11/essions, 12.J 1) Allan Bloom? The man whose Closi11g olthe A111eric:a11 Mind "best articulates the critique" of political correctness and "represents the key text" (Platt 1992, 123), who demonstrates "an excessively ossified, hierarchical, and immutable view of the cultural tradition" (Kurzweil et al. 1991, 226), who has been "subjected to an unremitting barrage of criticism and abuse from the academic Left" (Kimball 1990, 3), whose "name has become virtually synonymous with traditionalist views of higher education" (DePalma 1992), who began a speech with the salutation "Fellow elitists" (Bloom 1990, 13)? Allan Bloom,s passionate opposition to many of the dearest values of the politically correct is well known. He was an ardent defender of the "great books," appalled at deconstructionism, dismayed by the easygoing relativism of his students, and scornful of the spirit of "openness" that holds that "ind1scnminateness is a moral imperative" (1988, 25, JO). And yet, if there was one thing that Bloom stressed to his students, it was the importance of returning to the text without being captured by the conventional interpretations. 1 Bloom also suggests that, "in what appears sirntlar, 2 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue cmwdiemze d'hudes 11111himmes one should look for the differences; and in the different, the similar" (1990 1 306). When we return to the texts of Bloom himself, we find a writer whose concerns in the face of what is now termed political correctness coexist with certain affinities with that phenomenon. This essay will reexamine Bloom's relation to the political correctness debate, and will argue that one's location of Bloom within that debate depends upon how one understands the debate itself. Various difficulties arise, however, when one seeks to examine the relation between the thought of Bloom and that of the politically correct (PC). First, it is not dear that the latter exist. We seem to have an antithesis with no pnor thesis, explicit opponents of political correctness without explicit proponents . While North Americans have been treated to various tomes warning of the perils of political correctness, the alleged carriers of the virus have limited themselves to critiquing the critique. Thus, this group might more accurately be termed the "anti-anti-PCs" (McGillvray 1991). Since this term 1srather cumbersome, however, we will use the designation upolitically correct ," which can be read as short-hand for "those labelled politically correct by their critics." 2 But there are also difficulties in pinning down the thought of Bloom. There is, first, a problem of voice: Bloom will go on, at times for pages, as an apparent medium for the voice of Nietzsche, Rousseau, Kant, and so on. When one reads that "progress culminates in the recognition that life is meaningless" (1988, 169), just who is speaking? Bloom? Rousseau according to Bloom? The very paucity of textual indicators that would allow the reader to answer this question with confidence is itself of interest: one has a text marked by "plausible dcniability," in which the author can simultaneously affirm and deny the affirmation.·~ Yet even if we could identify Bloom's ipsissima verba, a further difficulty presents itself. Like Ronald Reagan's Soviets, Bloom's philosophers reserve to themselves the right to lie and cheat. "The philosopher, 11 says Bloom, "loves the truth. That is :m intellectual virtue. He does not love to tell the truth. That is a moral virtue" (1988, 279). This seems to turn Bloom's work into a "This sentence is a lie" puzzle. Is the real Bloom the writer who scorns generalizations and pleas for concreteness (254; 1990, 307), or the man who Phil Ryan I J roundly declares that the "dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape passes belief" (1988, 57), "feminists favor the demystifying role of pornography" (104), and "we are all...