The Closing of the American Mind

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0:00 This book was pretty important to me. So, it was the first book that I read after graduating my PhD in Hebrew science where I saw a lot of the insanity that we were talking about happening firsthand with the censorship and riots and wokeness and all that. So, this book closing the American mind uh the subtitle I think really was very impactful. How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students. So the fact that this idea of the soul comes to the forefront of the plume's argument as I later found out in the teaching of Socrates is crucial and I think what's really missing today. So this passage I wanted to start us off with I think really draws a st contrast of what's missing in higher education. So it's a little bit long but I'll I'll read through it. So he says, "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

1:01 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 deeds of 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 enobling past. Their simple faith and practice link them to great scholars and thinkers who deal with the same material not from the outside from an alien perspective but believing as they did while simply going deeper and providing guidance. 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 dividing high and low into a single body of belief. I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but cliche cliché,

2:03 superficialities, the material of satire. So this idea that his grandparents were not educated at all and they have a spiritual richness and now he has these um cousins who are educated to the highest degree in the American system and have no spiritual richness at all. That's kind of what I had seen in university and what I think led to a lot of the insanity. So I guess asking your opinion on that and then um the idea of I guess include a question that's related to the book more of uh how does the notion of the soul fit into Bloom's notion of education. Well, uh let me take the soul and education first. So, well, actually, let me ask, I mean, if you guys think about what uh Bloom wrote and what uh Nick read, do you have some reference point in your own lives for that a parent or a grandparent who was rooted or maybe you yourselves come from a tradition that remains rooted and is still rooted um in a deep understanding that may not be academic. And like in that passage Nick read, you probably

3:11 know people who have gone through a technical training or a professional training and have become somehow global citizens, citizens of the world, but in no way meaningfully rooted in an understanding of their heritage. Uh no sense of a legacy that they're receiving from a past generation, handing down to a future generation. And so if you have models from your own life of people who embody one or a different one or another trajectory there, then you'll see what Bloom was talking about. Now, he encountered this not just in the case of his family members, but with the students that he was seeing because the students didn't have anything. They came into school knowing so much, you know, knowing quote unquote knowing so much, right? In fact, what's the thing that you can know so well that it's going to stop you from ever having to learn about your roots? the knowledge of progress that we know more today than they knew back then. So why would we waste our time studying them, right? I mean, Plato did not have AI and we do, right? He does not have the ability to go type anything he wants in. So therefore, he's got questions that he has to spend all

4:13 life sitting around and thinking about. Meanwhile, you can put on Grock voice mode on your drive over here and get those questions answered. So I think it's this idea built into an understanding of progress that we don't need to pay any but like archaic respects to the past. It doesn't have to shape us inform us. We just have to say you know thank you you played your part when you did and off we go uh into a future yet to be discovered and yet to be created. So it is important to try to understand what is it built into an understanding of education that would have us break our bonds with the formative components represented largely by the old books and the traditions around them. Um I'll give you a quick example of this problem. There's a book you guys may or may not have heard of. I understand it's popular in Bitcoin circles and it's called the sovereign individual. Has anybody heard of that by any chance? I think it's from the late ' 80s and it sort of predicts that they're going to be monetary and other technologies allowing people to escape the sovereignty of the state because let's say I have a million dollars in

5:15 real estate and suddenly the state becomes tyrannical. I can't pick up my real estate and run but if I can transfer my digital assets to another locality then technically you know I can escape the tyranny of the state to a certain extent and just flee. Okay. So that's a book that predicted some of the tens in uh some of the tendencies in monetary technology and in this um individual opposition to state power. Interesting book. A lot of the predictions there were on uh on the money. But one of the things that the authors say towards the end of the book is this. They say that although our technological elites are developing all of these new technologies, so you have again sort of speed the speed of being able to move your money out of the country and all these other sorts of things. uh they haven't taken one step past the old moral foundations that you get in Plato, the Bible, and Confucious. I think those are the three that they mention because morality doesn't progress in the same way that technology progresses. That's not an insult against morality. That's something having to do with the nature of morality. But if

6:17 you're all in on future technological progress and you ignore those moral roots, you can't be informed by them. You can't be shaped by them. You can't learn from them. and you're a moral idiot. In other words, you're definitely badly educated even though you may be technically skilled. So, that's another way of conveying the importance of the old traditions and how a progressive mentality can uh block access to them. So, those are a few of the things that come to mind. Again, you have to see who in the world today preserves some component of an anti-modern um tendency, a traditionalist tendency. So I think there are American patriots who see the tradition of the American founding as worth preserving and of course there are non-western non-American traditionalists who see their own religious um ways of life as worth preserving and sometimes they try to destroy the modern world and sometimes they try to find um a motus vendi with the modern world. You know, I think it's difficult to be an American patriot through and through and to be anti-modern or something like that because, you know, you have to find the

7:17 right kind of uh balance between the classical and the modern in defending uh America's founding principles which many students of Strausses did um including um you know Bloom and Thomas Pangle and so on. So those are a few things that come to mind on that uh on his story about grandparents and cousins about the soul. So it's interesting because you could say that the classical view it's almost like saying you know what do wheels have to do with a car? Well, try, you know, it's very difficult to think of a car without thinking about its wheels, like having wheels, right? So, education has to do with the soul. I mean that's what education is classically that educating means you're educating the soul to have the right loves the right aspirations the right longings to be oriented towards the right things to have some sense of the capacities of the soul whether it's our uh practical judgment over things that can be different or whether it's our speculative knowledge of things that are like you don't have control over whether

8:19 2 plus 2 equals 4. So that is a certain activity of the soul comes to grasp mathematical relations. You do have control of whether you're going to spend, you know, $100,000 or $10,000 or $1,000 or nothing if somebody is um whatever, right? On the street begging for money. So there's certain acts of the soul that have uh choice. In other words, we have choice in the matter. That's the whole realm of practical wisdom, prudence, practical judgment. There's the higher speculations of the soul up to and including the divine science are, you know, physics, mathematics, theology. So it has I would say classically been understood that education is the education of the soul. It's very difficult to my mind probably because I've been trained on you know the books of Strauss uh and his students to to see education as distinct from the soul. But that's actually exactly what Bloom is telling us. We took something that is so fundamental. Okay, let me just put it to you this way. Plato's Republic which is absolutely important for Alen Bloom. He's the translator of the authoritative translation let's say. Okay. Um, Plato's

9:20 Republic culminates in some sense in the image of the al, you know, that cave allegory or the cave image. Something that I think everybody has some rough familiarity with whether or not you've ever read Plato, whether you've ever read the Republic. And what does Socrates himself say about that image or that allegory at the outset? He says it's an image of our nature with respect to its education. The cave allegory shows us that education consists as Socrates says when he concludes the image. I mean among all the many other things in that very rich and beautiful account he shows us that education is the turning around of the soul from the world of becoming which is intermixed with non-being to the world of that which truly is where we can put our soul into relationship with as it were a true being or reality or that you know the thing the knowledgeables the things that can be known. So if you have right at the heart of the greatest book

10:22 of political philosophy ever written the most powerful image in the history of philosophy and it concerns education as the conversion of the soul the turning around of the soul. So now imagine you are Alan Bloom and you've been reading Plato and Aristotle and you have some sense of the richness and beauty and power and majesty and truth of this view of education and then you have students who say oh truth what are you like there's no such thing as truth you you know you have your truth I have my truth soul what are you talking about like you some sort of Christian fundamentalist like there's no such thing as the soul or you know Buddhists have their idea of the soul everybody's got their idea of the soul and everything like is starting from uh starting from scratch in some sense for Bloom. And as you I think saw in the passages that you read or may have read, he said it's actually it's not only a turn of phrase, so to speak, that they're starting from scratch. What Bloom says is that these students have had their opinions destroyed as prejudices and they are left with nothing. Nothing except sort of their own. They're full of

11:27 themselves. They're full of themselves and of opinions that have no uh no good basis and no good history and no good weight to them, you know. So it's a it's um it is true that for the classics education has to do with the correct order of the soul and all of the different ways in which you might educate that. I mean let me add one thing here which is obviously it was recognized that there is a certain sort of technical training that a person can receive. you know, how am I going to um build a horseshoe and put it on my horse, right? Like what are the arts and crafts? So, there is such a thing Greeks understood, needless to say, that there is such a thing as technical training and that in some sense you can receive an education in technical training, but they reserved the full sense of the word education for a liberal education that frees the soul and that, you know, elevates the soul, that dignifies and enobbles the soul by putting it in its right order. Um so you shouldn't think when we talk about in education having to do with the conversion of the soul that it's like well you know again what about all the different areas of

12:31 learning. No they acknowledged areas of learning but they just you know the soul is the most important um phenomenon. You know the soul is the most important thing. It's the most it's what makes us who we are. It's very mysterious and puzzling. We can get some grasp of it though. It's not like we're working with nothing. But um but for Bloom, you know, we live in a world of souls without longing, which I think was the original version of uh the original title of Closing of the American Mind, souls without longing. You know, souls that don't even know their souls, don't want to be souls, have nothing to aspire to, and uh have been have been led astray, not because they're wicked, but because their teachers have been um uh you know, their teachers have dropped the ball. So that's how Bloom sees it. And therefore somehow if you want to save the souls of the American uh youth you have to do you have to do so through a reflection on education on the great books of education uh which for him includes the history of political philosophy um Plato to Rouso the two great I mean he goes in some sense before Plato and Pastor Rouso but for him Plato and Rouso are two two of the beautiful pillars of reflection on education and uh Bloom translated both Plato's Republic as I've already

13:35 said and Rouso's great meditation on education uh the amir Mhm. Yeah, it's a it's a great question and it's completely completely natural that we should hear the word soul with all of its whatever connotations that it has for us. I mean when I took my first philosophy course and Plato's Republic was the first book that we read uh the

14:35 professor warned us he said look when the when Plato says soul you shouldn't automatically think immortal eternal Christian soul that goes to heaven or to hell and that you know um or is in limbo or purgatory whatever the case is because one of the beautiful things about studying the history of ideas let's say the history of political thought and the history of uh human thought is that we actually get to see oh let's try to let's try to run this back in a way and say, "Yeah, we don't want to necessarily take the Christian interpretation right away or the Jewish or the Muslim or the religious or the spiritual but not religious because we want to try to reconstruct and see what it meant for the Greeks." So, one of the very beautiful things and not just by the way for the Greeks. That's also a generalization because it means one thing for Plato may not mean the same thing for Aristotle, although they're both Greeks. So, we learn to sort of like set aside our preconceived notions, watch out for our generalizations, and discover what it might mean for each author. Now, why it's a very amazing thing to do and why the books are indispensable. Well, it's not like we're left with no guidance because Aristotle has a book called On the Soul. And if we

15:39 wanted to know what Aristotle thinks about the soul, it's very useful for instance to study his book called on the soul where he says even though it's one of the most difficult and most important topics, still he's able to make some relevant distinctions about the vegetative soul. That's the part that's, you know, the human being like plants grows. But that doesn't tell us what's distinct about the, you know, what's distinct about man, what's distinct about ourselves. But he calls that the vegetative soul or the nutrative soul. You know, uh, people like animals move. Okay, that doesn't tell us what's uniquely human, but he does call that, you know, the animal soul, like the p we we we perceive and we have sensation just like my dog does, you know, but at some point we get to the intellectual soul, the whole world of discourse, of reflection, of contemplation, of speculation, of reasoning. Um, and then we start to see what appears to be distinctly human. So in Aristotle's case when he describes or does his exposition of the nature and structure of the soul it's the kind of thing that he's thinking about and you shouldn't believe that he has 100% clear doctrinal answers to every question because there are some puzzling passages

16:45 in Aristotle about the immortality or even the spirituality of the soul by which I mean there's a question is there a part of us that is not bodily or stated even more drastically here is there a part of us that is separate from the body or separable from the body. Okay. So for example, Socrates had said that philosophy is learning to die or practicing dying. Why would philosophy be practicing dying? Because in dying the soul, some part of ourselves seems to separate from the body. So there's some acknowledgement of some sort of duality or interplay or non-material aspect or element. And when we philosophize, we seem to concentrate our energies in that non-bodily part of ourselves. In some cases, okay, for Socrates, in some cases, we seem to, you know, move ourselves up into that, let's say, purely intellectual or um dematerialized element. In that case, we it's like we practice death. In Aristotle, there's this notion of the active intellect. Now, I won't go into the details. There's a long tradition of

17:45 commentary, but the active intellect is another kind of aspect of Aristotle's account of the soul where it seems like there's something that at its best when it's really firing on all cylinders is not reducible to the body. And then there are debates that went through middle ages and continues still for anybody who cares about this sort of stuff about well is there just one soul or are there many souls or souls created and destroyed? So there's a serious thoughtful philosophical reflection on the nature and the faculties and the structure of the soul like I say Aristotle in Plato if you were to read the republic let's say you were only to read the republic I mean there are other works Plato's alsetes is very beautiful work that I understand had the traditional subtitle on the soul where Socrates is talking to Alabides beautiful strong wealthy promising young um politician potential politician uh you know politicians putting it mildly okay he could be the great leader of the Athenians And Socrates tells him that you know you can't be a great leader if you don't have the knowledge required for great leadership. And in some sense

18:45 the greatest knowledge required for the greatest leadership is the knowledge of your soul. So he has to have a conversation with Alabides that shows alites not only do you not know you know this that and the other thing when it comes to correct leadership you for sure don't know justice because you haven't learned it from anybody and you for sure don't know even your own soul. So there are parts of Plato that are nice and short and sweet on the topic of the soul like Elpatis. But in the Republic, let's say you come to the Republic, you say, "I don't know what the I don't know what Plato means by soul. What will I learn potentially that will help me to get some sense of how the Greeks or Plato thought about the soul?" Well, he begins to say things like, "Haven't you ever noticed that there's, let's say, something that attracts your attention, so you want to look at it, but at the same time, another quote unquote part of you knows that you shouldn't be looking at it because it's kind of not right to do. So, you kind of like you want to, but you know you shouldn't." And then you have your action, either doing it or not doing it. And then you have your

19:45 like anger or whatever, right? So imagine something comes up. Elon Musk posts something ridiculous on the timeline or whatever. Okay, there's a car crash and there's a mutilated, god forbid, one of his examples, okay? And you just can't help but look, even though you know you shouldn't. You do look and then you're angry at yourself. So he says we can actually like distinguish certain acts of now here's where we fill in the blank. Acts of what? Acts of our self. Well, they the way that they think about it is acts of soul. acts of this central component of ourselves. This acts of this um of the who we areness of ourselves. Okay, whatever. There's different ways of putting it. So, we seem to have desire seems to be a component of of the human soul. Will seems to be a component of the human soul. Reason, reflection, judgment seems to be a component of the human soul. And this spiritedness, this like anger at yourself or at somebody else, you know, righteous indignation. So that's how they do a c certain sort of quote unquote psychology to try to understand the nature of the soul. Now the thing that distinguishes in a way

20:49 the modern accounts of the mind or the spirit or the psyche as the self is that they have built their account in some sense on top of certain presuppositions or arguments that they make against Plato and Aristotle. So let me give you a little example. If you begin to believe that only that which can be measured matters, let's say, or even is real. In other words, if you become, you know, materialist in a reductive sort of way or an empiricist, again, in a reductive sort of way, then you say, well, we shouldn't even really talk about, you know, the soul. The the soul is kind of like an imaginary mythical fiction type thing. What we can really do is measure you know we can measure uh you know heart palpitations and this that and the other thing and you can do tests psychometrics to try to understand what's going on within a person and maybe ultimately think that it's all um you know a proc biochemical process and somehow in this way you denature I mean you denature the soul from the Greek

21:57 perspective even as you are padding it even as you are like biologizing it in another sense You see what I'm saying? So like biologizing the soul's way of denaturing the soul or something like that. And then there's a whole tradition. Again, these are very deep and complicated questions. So I'll just leave you with one last remark on this point. If you think, you know, if you think about what I said, desire, will, reflection, emotion, everything that's packed into the older view of the soul. And then you imagine transformations of thought over the centuries and millennia, whether they're whatever empiricist, idealist, romanticist. You can imagine any one of these facets being sort of like drawn out in any one direction. So maybe I'm just interested in the immateriality part of the soul and suddenly you know I have some notion of spirit that develops from that or I'm really interested in the um the spiritedness of the soul and then I have like a theory of emotion that follows from that. You see what I mean? So what what what is like a a beautiful complex blossoming complexity uh for the Greeks this notion of the soul um in in the

23:03 development through medieval modern and not to say postmodern times it can get sort of chopped up parcelled out flattened in some cases you know uh drawn in a grotesque or exaggerated way and that's why you have all these different approaches um you know up one of the most um one of the most important I guess to be discussed in our our time broadly speaking is the notion of an unconscious you know that no the idea that we can be transparent to ourselves through reflection is bogus because we have all these repressed desires and things working on our you know working on our thoughts and and therefore Freud you know takes his hammer against the uh the old conception and so on. Um I have a question um as regards I guess the political paradigm that Bloom was writing in and that we progressed to in the 20s almost 30 years since he wrote. Um, you mentioned that you studied uh uh Dugan at the beginning and Yes. One thing that I've I've studied a I've read a little bit of Dugan and his

24:10 I guess contend one of his contentions is that the liberal paradigm is simply one paradigm among others and the liberal pretension is that the liberal paradigm is the best and should be imposed upon the rest of the world and that he would like to see that stop. And I guess my I've been strug struggling intellectually with this for some time because on the one hand I do see western imperialism having run a muck. Um western liberalism has become materialistic hedonistic. Um, on the other hand, once you step outside of liberalism, unless you have an authoritative tradition that you're going to step into, you fall into what we all experienced four or five years ago with um, white culture is being on time and working hard and um, Native American culture is different and black

25:18 culture is and just this hodgepodge of uh what would you call them? Folkways taking uh people people resorting to folkways in order to sort of uh mask over their inadequacies. Yes. Well, Bloom does write about that as a concern where he says on one hand you have the universalism of human rights which gets criticized as American imperialism. But on the other hand, you have this manyiness of cultural types which apparently does not leave us with any rational standards of judgment. Uh since everything is just a matter of you know how we do it like this here, you do it like that there. And it would seem like for anybody with I don't know the right way of putting it here. I don't want to say well I'll tell you what I was going to say which is that for anybody with a philosophical inclination or some sense or intuition that human reason somehow transcends our cultural caves our particularistic here and now uh it is you know that obviously you want to try to split the difference between how can we preserve rational

26:20 standards in a way that speaks to what's universally human about us if anything which there seems to be while at the same time giving proper and due account to the limitations posed by the particularities because that the the imperialism of a specific point of view is a temptation and it is a pitfall and it can blind you to many things that are true outside of your tradition. I mean it is a certain risk and this is a classical nothing I'm saying here is postmodern uh in these terms because let's say a very common formulation by Strauss in his commentaries on the Platonic uh and Socratic texts is that there's always a tension between love of the good and love of one's own. That's another way of putting it. And it's not the case that one's own always overlaps with the good. Although that's what traditionalists who are uh zealots for their own tradition believe, right? That what's mine and what's the good is the same. We have the true tradition. We have the true religion. We have the divine ancestry in the in our case the good and the own overlap. But actually you can see whether that is the case or not that there's still you can still distinguish

27:27 love of one's own and love of the good and uh in some sense the culturalists are you know all in on the love of one's own some sense so are the universalists they just see their own as the universal so there are puzzles here Dugan navigates them in one way and acknowledges some and not others bloom likewise you know I think as I say in the passages that were selected for today's reading if you didn't do them no problem but in the passages that were selected the problem has alluded to um Strauss said also very often about this issue. I mean it really concerned him. Um it really concerned him that on one hand you you know there are risks involved in directing people to the universal good also because imagine let's let's imagine that somebody somebody a thousand years ago somebody hears Socratic writers say hey love of one's own and love of the good are not always the same. He stops me and thinks okay all right let me see this now. So I belong to such and such a tradition. For example, I belong to an Islamic

28:27 community in the in the middle ages and um it's my community and it's our religious law and I believe it to be you know absolutely true. I have believed it to be absolutely true. But maybe if I begin to treat it somewhat Socratically then I'll look around and I'll see you know what can I learn from the heathens? What can I learn from the pagans? What has been true in non-Muslim times and places? You begin to study that question and before you know it maybe you are at odds to a certain extent with your own community. That is a risk inherent to philosophizing within a tradition and that risk is an established risk in the in the history of political uh philosophy classical medieval and uh contemporary because I would say that that that's what happened to a certain extent to people who tried to philosophize under the orthodoxy of liberalism. If they and if they ended up with an illiberal perspective that's exactly like being a you know that's like you had to be a martyr for freedom just like in in the Islamic world you might have had to be. So there are all kinds of strategies here too where what can you say openly and not say openly.

29:27 It gets pretty complicated. So I'll give you a very very quick example of this. Dugan is a platonist. Now that can mean very many things because Strauss is a platonist and Dugan and Strauss are not the same. So there are different ways that you can be a platonist. I would say in a word kind of Dugan is more of a Christian Platonist and Strauss is more of a pre-Christian or non-Christian Platonist again a lot of sorts of nuances here but you can say can Dugan really be a cultural relativist through and through where he says look all there are are many daines and each daine has a civilization every civilization has its own standards of judgment and what we need is to recognize this multiplicity through a multipolarity and you know everything goes within that like no sense of high or low, no sense of better or worse, no sense of noble and base, no sense of beautiful and ugly. No, as you go through Dugan's work, you see that he he's on uh he has a sense of noble and base, beautiful, ugly, just and unjust. He's aware of the kind of paradoxical situation that how do you defend multiplicity of cultures

30:30 and at the same time a kind of single hierarchy? You see what I mean? A single hierarchy of better, worse, good, bad, high, and low. And it takes him, you know, it's much more difficult for him to do. I would say he gives it his best shot. It takes him many, many, many volumes to, uh, to articulate that vision. Um, whereas for Strauss, for Strauss, it's easier. When I say Strauss, I incorporate Bloom, okay? Because Bloom, you may not know this. He doesn't mention Strauss on every page of Closing of the American Mind, but you know, this is a book that is written, you could say, in honor of Strauss, and it works within the theme set by Strauss. So for all intents and purposes, if we say if I say Strauss, it's like talking about Plato and Socrates, okay? Talking about Strauss and Bloom. For all intents and purposes, I'm referring to the a similar set of concerns and interests here. Um, you know, Strauss has to deal with a single sort of model. You have Plato's cave. In other words, you have the world that is uh not quite fully real. It's not fully false. It's not like the shadows are the shadows are cast by something. They

31:31 didn't just miraculously materialize out of nowhere. In other words, our political opinions bear some relationship to reality and to the truth. They participate or they, you know, they are partial. They're they're between being and not being. They're not totally bogus and bunk. But that gives that pretty much tells you almost everything you need to know about the multiplicity of cultures and folkways. It's that people have opinions about life, death, the gods, human soul, justice, all what's right and what's wrong. But their opinions, that's all represented, you could say, by the image of the cave. And the possibility of knowledge is represented by, you know, a scent out of the cave. So you don't, it's not like you have a problem of a hundred different philosophical ascents. You know, you have opinion and the attempt to transform it into knowledge. And you know from your own lives around the table, seven of you, I'm sure there's some topic on which you'd have seven if not more opinions. You you don't need to be um we don't need to have any special experience of the world to know that people have different

32:35 opinions concerning good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, noble, base and all the rest of it, right? And if it's not the seven of you, then it's you knock on your next door neighbor's door and I'm sure you guys will find something to disagree about very quickly, right? So that's the character of opinion. And it's not obvious that uh recourse to folkways gets us that much further than recourse to opinion does as you know accounting for the multiplicity of human affairs. Um and then what's distinct what cuts through all of that is the possibility of philosophy you know and I want to remind you about what Bloom says here uh to connect this to the general theme of education to connect this to in some sense an important thesis of the book itself. Bloom says at the end of the introduction that um our educational challenge what is it our educational challenge the first task of it he says our first task perhaps it is our first task to resuscitate those phenomena those natural phenomena so that we may again have a world to which we can put our questions and be able to philosophize this seems to me to be our

33:40 educational challenge so in other words he says we need uh we don't need this gray network of critical concepts which were invented to interpret nature's phenomena but which strangled them and destroyed their razetra. We need to resuscitate these phenomena so we may have a world to which we can put our questions and philosophies. So the way that Strauss said it is he said this is just a nice little image okay to help you encapsulate thoughts into an image if need be. Um education begins in Plato's cave with us in the cave. Okay that's that's we begin in that that's where we all begin in some sense. Okay we all begin between being and non-being. Um, but that's our natural situation. Strauss said that we find ourselves today in a cave beneath the cave. We have to work just to get back to our natural ignorance as a starting point for a genuine education. I think that's a pretty powerful model, you know, and uh you can even expand on it because being in a cave beneath the cave, there's something like Titanic about that. There's something about wanting to go deep down. There's something like um heavy and terrestrial about it and something artificial and technological about it. Because again in order to drill all the way down to the

34:45 artificial sun at the center of the earth or whatever um you know you need you need heavy machinery and so on. But the let's keep it at the simplest version of the model. Strauss said we need to do work. Bloom agrees with this perfectly. It's encapsulated in that last paragraph of the introduction. We need to return to a state of natural ignorance from which education as philosophy is possible. The only way we can do that is by sort of somehow like removing this net of gray concepts that we've thrown over the natural phenomena and sort of letting them speak to us again. They're not going to deliver us immediately into the truth, but they're going to deliver us into the ignorance that is a precondition for the ascent of education. I have a question. Where do you believe this radical left originates from? What what does this have its roots in? Where does this come from? So, I'll put it this way. Okay. First, I don't know. But with that out of the way, I'll give you two two ways that I

35:45 think uh you could answer it. One that's more in my wheelhouse and one that's less in my wheelhouse. Okay. So, one is what was it let's say in the recent decades 1920s, 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. Okay. What was the experience of the Soviet Union? What was disillusionment with the Soviet Union? And what was the nature of the academics who came to American universities and you know all of that sort of thing. Okay. What was the influence of Nietzsche and Haidiger on thought in France that then got transported. By the way, Bloom does talk about it a little bit. He has a a chapter here called the Nitianization of the left which partially begins to say something in that like near-term institutional history of the uh you know of the arise of the left and a certain form of leftism in you know in the American academy. So that I would say and there are people who have their various accounts of that again I think Bloom himself is helpful in that chapter and that's kind of like a research program you could say like Chris Rufo wrote a book I think about it you know radical a radicalism in the American Academy I don't remember what the book

36:45 is called but it traces these tendencies and some of the main thinkers but the other kind of approach or the other element of an answer that I think is important especially since we're channeling or I'm trying to channel here at Bloom and Strauss for you is when we say is there anything like a classical version of this craziness or this excess or just of this position and uh and I think that the answer is yes and there are examples there are examples of you know the following view like this is it's established in Plato and Aristotle that there were people who believed that justice is equality equality and who therefore were dedicated ated in some sense to the project of attacking any natural sources of inequality in order to have an outcome of political or social equality. This was sometimes lampuned. You know, it's like a it can be a comic thing because even though

38:12 say, "Wow, I can't believe anybody thinks this is hilarious and that could be reduced to absurdity if only comedy hadn't been made illegal and unfunny." Um, but you have classical comics who like, for example, uh, you know, sexual equality is a big one. So, you know, any any good-looking guy can sleep with any good-looking girl as long as he first sleeps with an ugly old hag. You know, that cuz that's going to introduce some principle of sexual equality. Like that's fine. If you want to hook up with um what's her face? That jeans girl. Uh Sydney Sweeney. No problem. But you have to go have you got have to go sleep with this, you know, 80-year-old um you you see what I'm saying? Like horrible ugly person first. Lampuning the idea of sexual um equality, reminding people of the way that natural inequality is a stone on which all of these egalitarian projects get shattered. So the fact that there's anything like a philosophical and a comic account of what happens when you try to chase nature out with a pitchfork in order to have a sort of artificial equality tells me that it's a kind of recurring erroneous opinion that can be driven to

39:20 exaggerated extremes. So that's what I would say. There's some recent intellectual developments that facilitate that. For example, as I say, Freud's attack, you know, Freud's account of the unconscious. Sometimes like one very simplistic kind of account is, you know, you combine Freud and you combine Marx and you combine these sorts of uh philosophers of suspicion who attack the superructure yada yada yada and you can take all of their intellectual methods and basically show that every hierarchy and every structure is, you know, false consciousness or alienation. And then you can, you know, you can use these intellectual constructs to try to pull everything down into a liberating egalitarian impulse or outcome. But as I say, that's like if you treat it from what was the influence of these thinkers in the last where what is it 100 years, okay? Or whatever something like that. Um, but we should always remember if there's anything to the argument that Plato has taught us timeless truths about politics

40:22 or Aristotle has taught us timeless truths about politics and we want to see well so what's the timeless element of woke leftism you know I think it is it is this uh it is this adabsurdum right it's this like reductio adabsurdum of the principle of equality but but in in in the Christian uh I mean does not do not are we not all equal in the eyes of God and under under the Christian um kind of religion and why do we see this wokeism primarily in the western world is there a relationship between Christianity is this a perverse kind of interpretation interpretation of Christianity yeah so I think the the um the Christian element and the you know the Jewish element from the he it's uh as much of part of the Hebrew Bible as it is of the Jewish tradition of the Christian tradition that um you know everybody's created in the image of God. We're equal

41:24 before the eyes of God. Um there's something to that you know to the development of these other um streams of thought that relate to Christianity. Yes, in some sense it's a uniquely western phenomenon but again you could say like NZ said Christianity is plism for the people. So there's a certain you can you know say to what extent does Christianity and the development of these thoughts in Christianity owe something to Plato and Aristotle to what sense is modern liberal Christianity a function of the rejection of Plato and Aristotle so they're like the complex sort of uh um operations that we have to do but yes I think broadly speaking you could see it as a western phenomenon but again that encompasses when we say western phenomenon that encompasses some big tendencies of thought and the difficult interplay between them and among them and for sure there are versions of religious thought, Christian thought that recognize the that in some sense, you know, that's there's always these qualifications, right? In some sense, we're equal, but what is the specific sense in which we're equal or in some sense equality is a political and a legal goal, but in what sense exactly, right? So, we all have equal recourse to the law is different from we

42:25 all have equal outcome for unequal inputs of our labor and time and all the rest of it, resources, right? So, there's all of the conceptual distinctions. Well, equal with respect to what? You know, equal in what sense exactly? Um, there's always a recognition you could say that I'm simplifying and generalizing here, but to make what I think is broadly speaking, okay, a valid point that in all but the most exaggerated cases, the the notion of degrees of rank coexists together with the notion of being created equally in some sense, you know. Oh, so again to be to be created in the image for all human beings to be created in the image of God and to be equal in that respect that we're all creatures of God. It doesn't really follow for many of the religious uh thinkers who have to be honest with themselves that therefore we have again equal uh equal X Y and Z, however you want to carve

43:28 that up, okay? Equal intellectual ability, right? Equal um uh harms and goods that we bring upon the world, right? All of these equal equal desserts that we all are owed the same rewards and punishments. Like none none of that follows. Um even if even if you think well you know at the end of time we're all going to be redeemed in a certain sense or while we're here on earth we're all sinners in a certain sense um it's this in a certain sense that casts everything in a slightly different shadow and you have to remember too that in the history of political philosophy whatever a person may think about where we were before we were born and where we're going after we were born and whether God created us or whether we're you know souls are eternal whether the universe has come to be or has always been which don't think these are small questions. I'm uh in another context I'm teaching my monities or discussing my monities with a student. Mymones is a medieval Jewish thinker uh for whom you know the the dichotomy arisatilian view the world is eternal Jewish view the world was created it's not a small thing I mean the view that

44:33 the world is created is what's necessary to defend the law the Jewish law in this case as revealed. So it's like before too long as I mentioned earlier my interest is in the relationship of politics and ontology or politics and first philosophy. You see a very nice case here. Somehow you can't have the divinely revealed code of law if you believe that the universe is eternal which is what Aristotle believed. So you get you get a lot of big and deep puzzles pretty quickly. But uh as I said I know less about the recent you call it institutional intellectual history of woke leftism. For sure, it owes something to Christianity run a muck, which is why a lot of people like to pick out the Nietian passages against Christian egalitarianism and, you know, use them as a kind of um response to all of that. You know, call it slave morality and so on. Um there's just too many nuances to go through all of them, I think. But uh but to reiterate, it's an old temptation to try to see justice as equality and It is possible

45:35 that that can lead to extremes not only under Christian modern conditions but in principle at all times if it's not corrected let's say by uh by another view of human nature and uh and the nature of justice. I'll say that the idea of equality is one thing but when uh uh some body or some group of people wants to make equality happen already they stepped outside of their own idea of equality because they're anointing themselves as the people uh who they think can make it who who can make it happen in that sense uh better than or at least different from the reds. Mhm. Yeah. There are, you know, there are all kinds of interesting, I would say, paradoxes or contradictions um that can arise. Same with freedom, same with tolerance. I mean, in fact, Bloom himself in the preface, I think it is, he points to some of these contradictions that in trying to be

46:40 super open and tolerant in order not to be judgy and authoritarian and fascist, you know, what do these young students become? they become extremely extremely insular where unless it's like you know if you are a if you are somebody who believes that the truth is not relative then you are basically Hitler and you should be killed not just as baby Hitler but as you know you should be just exiled from society. So the things that Bloom talks about is another example of the paradoxes of uh or the contradictions of inclusivity, of tolerance, of openness, perhaps of equality and of uh of freedom as well. Now you should keep in mind one of the things I think we learn from intelligent teachers of politics is that these principles are they all have something plausible to them. I mean there's some there's some sense in which we do want to respect equality. I mean there and Aristotle says a family for instance has a variety of regimes in it like maybe I'm uh you know I'm not on equal basis with my children but you know there's

47:45 like kind of sort of on an equal basis with your spouse in a way that you are not with your children. So within a family there are regimes of relationships that can be equal or not equal. So the the all all of these political problems are actually not self-evident. They're very interesting and um it's one of the great things that we can learn from a teacher like Bloom is that even something as simple as you know what I just said what is the nature of equality and freedom within a family and how does that translate when you have several families and so on and so forth. I mean Bloom and Strauss and Pangle and the other people in this school they as part of our education not just our civic education which is no small thing but our human education they direct us to these most thoughtful accounts and really have us like you know what let's not assume that we know what we don't know and let's just you know take it somehow from the beginning. Michael I think I'll I'll ask just one last question before we close up. Um, so

48:45 just to kind of put a ribbon on all this, you know, as we all endeavor to educate ourselves, enhance our own souls, what types of things should we seek, and h how do we know if it's working? How do you know if it's working? That's an interesting question. Uh, let me think about that. But what kinds of things you should seek? I mean, okay, I'm partial and biased here because in the context of what we're discussing, you seek great teachers and thank God we have some. I mean, if all you ever had in your life as a teacher of political philosophy was Strauss and Bloom, that is uh, you know, basically you hit the jackpot. And they're not the only ones because there are other great teachers who studied with them, okay? Or studied alongside them. But we need great teachers. And great teachers are really just people who have studied a little bit longer than we have, who have understood a little bit more than we have, who can share something that is going to meet us where we are and contribute to where we're going. So, I

49:48 think you should consider knowing about the name Strauss and Bloom to be like a jackpot for your education. That's just me, okay? And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying put them up on a pedestal and idolize them. You may find somebody who for you, these are the ones who work for me, okay? But you may find somebody who for you, you're reading an intelligent book and suddenly it just hits you in a way and everybody I mean I assume that everybody around this table at some point has had kind of the experience that Nick had with the closing of the American mind. Something somewhere along the way in your education has struck you in a specific sort of way. Whether something a teacher said or something you read or something that clicked or something you thought about after. And that is uh that is kind of an undeniable spiritual psychological experience having to do with education where you will feel like you're again I'm not going to poeticize it and dramatize it but you'll know it when it happens and if it's happened before you know it. And uh as you pursue that you know that's kind of like there's something almost mystical about it. I think when you

50:51 pursue education you're kind of like putting yourself into this invisible college of people past, present and future. here there and everywhere who are on a similar path and you begin to become aware of certain sympathetic resonances and so on. Uh so look for those okay again for me it happened to be Strauss and therefore I share him uh in Bloom I share him as a teacher is very competent but be on the lookout for your own sympathetic resonances with teachers with texts with ideas and uh and be you know be true to them. you will know uh in some sense it's like you know Augustine has this work in this written in the Christian spirit that we have our greatest teacher within ourselves and if you pay heed to the teacher within yourself you will not be led astray and if you are you know if you take a scenic route it will be worth the while. So you have to just be, you know, you have to be attuned to the teachers around you and to the teacher within you and um and do that sort of in an honest and forthright way and your conscience will sort of be your clearest guide on whether you're making progress or uh stagnating or god forbid um uh

51:57 running headlong in the opposite direction. Thank you for your time, Michael. Okay, thank you guys for having me. It was a pleasure as always. Good luck with your studies, conversations, and all the rest of it. and uh enjoy the rest of your evening.