In his Weekly Standard cover story on Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind” 25 years later, Andrew Ferguson writes of Bloom, “As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive.”
Ferguson adds,
The crisis was– is–a crisis of confidence in the principle that serves as the premise of liberal education: that reason, informed by learning and experience, can arrive at truth, and that one truth may be truer than another. This loss of faith had consequences and causes far beyond higher ed. Bloom was a believer in intellectual trickle-down theory, and it is the comprehensiveness of his thesis that may have attracted readers to him and his book. The coarsening of public manners, the decline in academic achievement, the general dumbing down of America– even Jerry Springer–had a long pedigree that Bloom was at pains to describe for a general reader.
“[College students] are united only in their relativism,” he wrote. “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate.”
Relativism, in fact, was the only moral postulate that went unchallenged in academic life … What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable… he doubts, finally, that they even exist.
I think Professor Bloom was only partially right. It’s quite true that an unwillingness to believe in objective moral truth is widespread in the academy and among those on the left — but only on certain issues. On other matters –gay rights and same-sex marriage, race-based affirmative action, a constitutional right to an abortion, gun control, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, Guantanamo Bay, rendition, the right to a Palestinian state, anthropological global warming, the Tea Party v. the Occupy Wall Street movement, Rush Limbaugh v. Sandra Fluke, and others — those on the left don’t believe truth is relative. They believe, in fact, that their positions are right, moral, and objectively true and better. If a social conservatives debates a social liberal on gay marriage, the odds are quite high that the latter will not say to the former, “Your values are as good as mine. Truth is relative. Who am I to judge?” If you ask liberals “whose truth?” they will gladly tell you, “my truth.”
The problem is that many modern-day liberals can’t quite tell you why their truth is superior to the one embraced by conservatives. They might invoke fairness, though without being able to anchor it in anything permanent or normative. But they are not relativistic or especially tolerant of views they consider to be unenlightened, benighted, and primative. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ask liberal New York Times columnists about Rick Santorum’s social views and you’ll get more than a shrug of the shoulders.
Their relativism, then, is selective, a moral postulate in some circumstances but not others. It turns out that even relativism is little more than an instrument to advance an ideology.
From Mr. Bloom's preface in his translation of Plato's Republic: n n
Liberals are at a disadvantage not because their ideas are inferior to those of conservatives but because they gave up on America a long, long time ago. Their defense so often seems a "pragmatic veneer." n nIt's an oddity that while their ideas and their goals are parasitic and they necessarily leech-off what they have no ability to create, their blood-letting seems necessary to prevent fatality. n nHealthy development of the person depends on many things, family, first of all. It’s the primitive church that economics, more than religion, developed. n nFrom AT’s Democracy in America: n n n
As politicians pursue the truth, as best they can, from base to center, and if I thought for one minute they cared, ultimately, about governing for the sake of governing, I'd ask both President Obama and Governor Romney to read and heed James Madison's words from Federalist 37: n n n
I think the working deduction for the left is, "There is no truth, therefore I'm right." n nPower, power, power – that's it, that's all.
The advantage of The Christian conservative is that he/she can ground their arguments to Corresponding facts, which they ground further to the Unmoved Mover and the Word of God. Something a Liberal refuses to do, yet co-ops, or better said "smuggles" in "Should's" and Should nots" all the time to defend their defense-less positions all the time. n nWhen you are a liberal the only words that are usable are preferences such as, I like, I dis-like. Since according to your world there is no objective morality/Truth.
Orson Scott Card in _Speaker for the Dead_ said (paraphrasing as quote is not in front of me) that we question everything except the things we really believe, and those we never question at all. I think that's true in general, but think it answers the article's comments how "liberals" can be both rigid about some issues and relativistic on others.
I don't mind relativism as long as the respective underlying principles are understood and the principles of others are respected. What's taken place here is that the Left, for the most part, has abandoned any pretense of respect for conservative values. This is why their "truth" is inherently superior, because fairness, for example, is more important to them than individual responsibility. n nYet ultimately their ideology is flawed in that they can't possibly believe the hierarchy of principles that bring them to their conclusions. Only a complete fool would live their life based on the values they demand from the government. So to insulate themselves from the folly of their own fairly ridiculous belief system, they demonize conservatives and reduce their own ideology to the simple battle of good vs. evil. n nThe Left has indeed become the monster they've been warning us about. n n
Very good article. Just one small correction: it’s anthropogenic, not anthropological, global warming.
Over a hundred years ago G. K. Chesterton warned Britain that it was progressing along the wrong path. In _Heretics (1905)_ he writes, "The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. … When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, … holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded." There are consequences. In Britain the principle of free speech has been abandoned to mob rule via the state. As an example I refer to the district judge's comment, "I have no choice but to impose an immediate custodial sentence to reflect the public outrage at what you have done." in the Liam Stacey hate speech trial.