Sunday, February 12, 2017

Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind"--again

Each time I peruse the bookshelves to do some clearing out, my hand pauses at this best seller of 30 years ago. It was about a year ago, I looked and put it back. Looked again today.

In Alan Bloom’s book, "The Closing of the American Mind” (1987)--a book that began as an essay and became a best seller--he discusses how the meaning and acts of sex and sexuality changed between the 50s and 60s and the 80s, and that the college students he knew saw a sexual arrangement as convenient, but not lasting or a commitment. “They are roommates with sex and utilities included in the rent.” (p. 106). 

With the looming strike of women (they are angry about the election of Trump and mad at the Electoral College) and the January 21 Women’s March in DC, I think he missed his mark in thinking the “rights” push was over.  It’s not over because it's never over for the Left which needs a victim, and over 50% of the population are women and 57% of the college graduates since the 90s are women.  For the Left  no matter what progress women, homosexuals or transsexuals make, there’s always a new victim to be found which can be folded into the original goal.  The push to normalize sex with children is the most recent one, as polygamy or polyandry will just be too boring and acceptable since sex with adults has lost all meaning. Relativism, Bloom said, makes students conformist and incurious. Their supposed open-mindedness closes their actual minds. And that continues as the students of the 80s are the parents and professors of today's college students.

Bloom writes about relationships in the mid-80s: “Men and women are now used to living in exactly the same way and studying exactly the same things and having exactly the same career expectations.  No man would think of ridiculing a female premed or prelaw student, or believe that these are fields not proper for women, or assert that a woman should put family before career.  The law schools and medical schools are full of women, and their numbers are beginning to approach their proportion in the general population.  . . The battle here has been won. . . They do not need the protection of NOW (p. 107)  And he goes on to note that not only do his students have nothing to learn about sex from their parents, but also believe they have nothing to learn from old literature or history  [and I would add the Bible, but he doesn’t] so when they have problems with relationships, they have nothing to go back to.

 http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-book-that-drove-them-crazy/article/634905

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