Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind:

In the late l940s, before television made those who watched at best passive observers, radio engaged the attention, and the imagination, of those who listened. One show did this in what even then was considered an unusual way, The Whiz Kids, in which several young teenagers answered, or tried to answer, serious questions about serious things. Their age told part of the story. Instead of high school freshmen, they were already in college, and not just any college, places like the University of Chicago. One of them could easily have been Allan Bloom, who would years later write The Closing of The American Mind, a critique of American higher education that was not expected to sell more than the initial print run of 10,000 copies, but ended up selling more than a million copies in the Untied States and another million in the rest of the world. It was a book that would never have been written had Bloom not begun his undergraduate career at the University of Chicago just after the end of the Second World War, in 1946, when he was only fifteen years old.

Bloom understood the moment he stepped on campus that the University of Chicago was different. The buildings might be fake Gothic, gray stones that had the look of wind worn battlements, but they “were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.” A great university, it announced that “there are questions that…are not asked in ordinary life.” These were the kind of questions Bloom wanted to explore. Fifteen when he began his undergraduate education, he was eighteen when he graduated and began graduate school in the Committee on Social Thought which, in a way, was almost a university within the university. The only students taken were those who wanted to devote themselves, in that now quaint-sounding phrase, to the “life of the mind.” Bloom studied Greek history and thought, wrote his dissertation on the Greek statesman and orator Isocrates, was eighteen when he started and almost twenty-five when he finished.

Whatever else Bloom learned as a student in his years at Chicago, nothing was as important, or as influential, as what he learned from Leo Strauss. When Leo Strauss began talking about something Socrates had said in one of the dialogues Plato had written, it was as if you were listening to someone tell you what he had just heard in a conversation he had had with Socrates himself early that morning. Strauss knew what was worth reading and how that reading should be done. He explained it in a way that was really quite simple: The mind needs teachers, teachers are themselves pupils, but there cannot be an infinite regress, i.e. there must be teachers who are not pupils. These are the great minds, the greatest minds, and they are extremely rare. The only access to them are through the books they have written - the great books. It is what liberal education is all about.

One of the greatest minds - some would say the greatest mind - is Plato, who of course wrote in Greek. There are translations, but those who did the translations were not themselves very close students of what they were translating and were, many of them, satisfied with giving a kind of general account of what they thought Plato was trying to say. F. N. Cornford, whose translation was the most widely used, removed many of the exchanges between Socrates and other participants in the dialogues because he thought they were too formal and tended to become tedious. Bloom decided that a better translation was needed. In l968, his literal translation of Plato’s Republic was published and for the first time Plato could be understood by English speaking students as Plato understood himself. That did not mean students had to like it.

This is the thrust of Bloom’s The Closing of The American Mind. The proof, which at first does not appear to prove anything, is that “Classical music is dead among the young.” If this seems irrelevant to the question whether the American mind is open, as most would like to believe, or closed, as Bloom insists, his dismissal of the music those same young people came to embrace, will strike many as the closed-minded sentiment of a hopeless reactionary. Rock music, he writes, is nothing so much as a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. If few think this is in any way a problem, it is because, as Bloom puts it, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” But why, exactly, does it matter what kind of music appeals to the sensibility of one generation or another? What difference if the preference is for Mick Jagger instead of Mozart or Beethoven. Bloom has an answer. “To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempt to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul - to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal, to give man’s duties a fulness."

Music, it should be noted, meant more than singing or the playing of instruments; it included language, poetry and prose that produced a rhythm and a harmony in the souls of those who listened. The education Socrates discussed in The Republic consists of two parts - gymnastic for the training of the body; music for the training of the soul. The most important passages about the best regime in Aristotle’s Politics concern musical education; his Poetics is an appendix to the Politics. All this changed with the Enlightenment. Music became unnecessary. Rationalism, that is to say, the method of “the new science of nature that masters and conquers nature, providing prosperity and health,” provided “other ways to deal with the irrational part of the soul.” The desire for what came to be called “comfortable self-preservation,” was thought sufficient to keep everyone’s attention on what had to be done everyday to acquire the wealth that was needed. In Aristotle’s philosophy, “soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature.” In the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke and the Enlightenment altogether, man is only a part, and not the microcosm, of nature, and nature itself has changed. It “has no rank order or hierarchy of being;” it is matter in motion which can be conquered for whatever use men want to make of it. This, however, eventually led to the belief that something was missing, that “life was meaningless.”

The “emptiness of modernity” led to Nietzsche and the last man, the man who is not unhappy, but “his happiness is nauseating.” Nietzsche’s attack on the Enlightenment is an attack on “rational equalitarianism,” the belief that everyone is equal in the most decisive respect, the ability to choose their own values, and that everyone’s values are as legitimate as those of everyone else. This, for Bloom, is the “most important and most astonishing phenomenon of our time, all the most astonishing in being almost unnoticed; there is now an entirely new language of good and evil….” The term ‘value,’ this “radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil serves the easygoing quest for comfortable self-preservation.” This, for Nietzsche, was “an unparalleled catastrophe; it means the decomposition of culture and the loss of human aspiration.”

No one knows this. It is not part of the education we receive. Competing visions of what an educated human being is are no longer brought before us. We no longer have the kind of liberal education by which “the student’s whole life” is “radically changed,” so that “what he learns may affect his actions, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation.” No one, or practically no one, reads the classic literature as they were once read - to find out if they are true. “Aristotle’s Ethics is not studied to learn what a good man is; it is read to find out what the Greeks thought about morality.” It is worse than that. “One need not have read a line of philosophy to be considered educated in this country.”

What is to be done? Somehow bring back the study of the Great Books, especially Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile, which Bloom translated from the French, the two greatest books ever written about education; two books that, according to most of those who write about education today “are the cornerstones of an outlived cannon,” a judgement that would have been dismissed as the height of ignorance when Emile first appeared on the scene and Kant called its publication “an event comparable to the French Revolution.” Emile was written to “defend man against a great threat which bodes well to cause a permanent debasement of the species, namely, an almost universal dominance of a certain low human type which Rousseau was the first to isolate and call the bourgeois: the man “whose primary concern is comfortable self-preservation,” someone who thinks only of himself when dealing with others, and only of others when he tries to understand himself. He is the rational and industrious man Locke insisted would make republican self-government possible, and the Founders had in mind when they created the American republic. The “rational and industrious,” however, are not the kind of men that are able to create the kind of poetry which depict “great human types who embody visions of the right way of life, who make that way of life possible, who produce admiration and emulation.” Rousseau sought to find a way to change this to turn attention to something more enabling than the endless pursuit of material advantage. He found it in sex.

One of the most important, if perhaps least noticed changes in American higher education is the way in which the relation between the sexes, and the way in which that relation is understood, has been transformed out of all recognition since the l960s. This happened, according to Bloom, in two successive waves: the sexual revolution, which marched under the banner of freedom, and feminism, which marched under the banner of equality. Bloom observed that sex had become in the minds of students, “no big deal.” Sexual passion “no longer includes the illusion of eternity.” This was precisely what Rousseau thought the result of the rationalism and equalitarianism of the Enlightenment: sexual differences would, like class and national distinctions, be destroyed. In Emile he tried to show sexual passion, the need that brings men and women together, could become the means by which to instill a genuine concern for the well-being of others, and how delayed satisfaction, the courtship by which friends become more than friends, could become the condition of idealism and love. Even more disconcerting to those who insist there are no essential differences between the sexes, Rousseau “argues that woman rules man by submitting to his will and knowing how to make his will what she needs to submit to.”

Emile teaches the importance of the family, that is to say, the way in which the private life of individuals leads to well-educated citizens. In The Republic, Socrates teaches the replacement of the family with the common ownership of property and women. Women and men are trained together to fight against those would attack, or in any other way destroy the city. To make sure they have no other loyalty, they have nothing of their own, no property, no husbands, no wives, and, though they produce children, never know who they are; they are taken at birth and raised in common. Everyone, everyone in this class of guardians, is educated the same way. Male or female, it makes no difference; everyone follows the direction of the wisest among them, that rare human being, the philosopher who loves nothing more than wisdom and for that reason cares only for what is best for the city he has been chosen to rule. Like the education given to Emile, this is an impossibility, but an impossibility that helps clarifies the understanding of what is better and what is worse among the things that may be possible.

Emile and The Republic together provide a thorough investigation of all the known alternatives to one of the most fundamental questions of human society. This is what an education in the Great Books, and only such an education, can do. In the introduction to The Closing of The American Mind, Saul Bellow explained that he wrote the novel Herzog, the novel that brought him the Nobel Prize for Literature, “to show how little strength ‘higher education’ had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he had no education in the conduct of life….” Saul Bellow’s friend, Allan Bloom, with whom he walked every morning, tried to show how this could be changed.

It has been nearly forty years since the publication of The Closing of The American Mind and the American university has become even less than it was before a place where the liberal arts - the Great Books - are taken seriously. A college education, we are told constantly, provides the training necessary to compete in the world market and universities are measured and ranked by the salaries their graduates command. Bloom would not have been surprised. He understood that most students are content with what the present considers important and that only “a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous.” It is precisely for these few “that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for who they are than for what they do.” Without them, Bloom adds, “no society - no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments - can be called civilized.”

Now, forty years later, does anyone seriously believe that the American mind is more open to the liberal arts - the Great Books - than it was when Allan Bloom and Saul Bellow tried in their different ways to show how the American university had failed to provide the kind of education that teaches the only thing that really matters - how we, as human beings, should live?