Christianism, Bloomism, and Immutability

September 13, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, Culture 

From 1980 onward, Ronald Reagan, followed by the religious right and conservative intellectuals helped to minimize the debate on good government to their home turf in the universe of cultural values:

That was when the Reaganites pronounced government irrelevant, even obstructive, to the improvement of social life, thereby shifting the Republicans’ center of operations from politics to culture. In short order, the Reagan revolutionaries invited into their cause the Christian right, who set their self-contained cultural universe against secular cultural values that the liberals had never dreamed would be under explicit siege.

Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive. Enter Allan Bloom. In 1987, Mr. Bloom published his bestselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” an attack on what he perceived as coarse popular culture and a destructive political correctness at the universities. Taking up the Christian right’s banner in his cosmopolitan intellectual’s hands, Mr. Bloom married the religious right to the mostly secular neo-conservatives. He began the work completed by William Bennett in the latter’s sensationally popular “The Book of Virtues.” Mr. Bloom redefined culture as “values.”

Mr. Bloom gave the impression that it was hopeless to fight for his beloved Great Books because the Great Books had been driven to extinction by angry left-wing professors and vulgar forms of diversion. High culture was irretrievably lost to the average person. Culture for Mr. Bloom now meant not literature or art, but the struggle for the American individual’s endangered “soul” (a word repeated throughout his book). This secular Armageddon was vividly embodied by Mr. Bloom in his now-notorious image of a solipsistic American teenager masturbating alone in his room while listening to deafening rock and roll. In one stroke, Mr. Bloom submerged politics irrevocably, and fertilely, in culture, and he defined culture in the broadest way as the necessity of living a meaningful life. Values, in other words.

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