I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.
—Donald J. Trump
If we do not make it to the Great Wall we are not real Chinese.
—Mao Zedong
I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall.
—Richard Nixon
Donald Trump repeatedly promised to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and Ronald Reagan promised to protect “states’ rights.” President Xi Jinping has praised classical philosophers like Confucius for forging the “unique mental outlook of the Chinese.”1 Conservative intellectuals have warned of the dangers of higher education betraying “our Western heritage.” And contemporary philosophers, including ones who identify as politically progressive, click their tongues about how everything outside the traditional canon that goes back to Plato and Aristotle is not real philosophy.
They are all in the business of building walls.
Although these camps disagree about many things, each is deploying an ethnocentric and chauvinistic view of culture to distinguish “us” from “them” in a way that makes clear that “we” are rational, self-controlled, just, and civilized, whereas “they” are illogical, impassioned, unfair, and barbaric. Sometimes they are explicit; other times they speak in code. Some of them are fully aware of what they are doing; others have absorbed subconsciously a worldview that they would reject if they could see it for what it is. Sometimes they try to make their views palatable by masking them in what are essentially myths of noble savages, quaint and childlike, untouched by the deformations of Western thought—but, for that very reason, excluded from dialogue with it. But all of them are building and maintaining walls.
BUILDING RACIAL WALLS IN AMERICAN POLITICS
Trump has compared his proposed US-Mexico wall to the Great Wall of China in terms of its grandeur and feasibility. He could stand to learn a bit more about Chinese history. The Great Wall was completed around 1570, and China was conquered by the Manchus in 1644. This is hardly a model of success. Why does Trump want to build a wall?2 The supposed reason was to stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”3 The reality is that the number of illegal immigrants from Mexico living in the United States has been steadily declining since 2007.4 In other words, illegal immigrants from Mexico have been leaving the United States for years, so if a border wall would be good for anything, it would be for keeping illegal immigrants in. In addition, immigrants as a whole are substantially less likely to commit crimes than those born in the United States.5 Since there is no genuine policy reason for building the wall, the only explanation for the immense popularity of the suggestion among Trump’s supporters is that it is symbolic of the need to separate “us” from “them.”6 Trump’s success in capturing the Republican nomination and then the presidency in 2016 was so shocking, and confounded so much conventional political wisdom, that it is tempting to think that he is some kind of aberration. In reality, Trump is merely appealing explicitly to ethnocentric rage and fear that previous mainstream politicians have encouraged implicitly, or at least benefitted from.7
When Reagan ran for president in 1980, one of his first campaign speeches was at the Neshoba County Fair. No presidential candidate has spoken at this event before or since, and there is no good reason to choose this as a site for a speech—except for one. The fairgrounds are a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered, with the direct participation of local law enforcement officers, for the “crime” of registering African Americans to vote. In his speech in Neshoba, Reagan stated that he supported “states’ rights.” The official name of the openly segregationist “Dixiecrats” (the southern Democrats who opposed Truman because of his support for civil rights) was the “States Rights’ Democratic Party,” so the message was transparent to Reagan’s audience.8 I have no doubt that some people have voted Republican because they interpret “states’ rights” as a principled commitment to limited government. But to do so is to be blind to what this phrase actually means for a substantial number of people.
If one has any remaining doubts about the racism underlying Reagan’s appeal, they should be crushed by the admission of Lee Atwater, a top political strategist for both Reagan and G. H. W. Bush, and later Republican National Committee chairman. In an infamous but frank interview, Atwater admitted that the GOP had consciously decided to use coded language to appeal to racist voters:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.… I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “we want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”9
If we consider the preceding facts, a clear picture emerges. The party of Lincoln made a deal with the Devil to win over voters who want to build walls between races.
Surprisingly, this sort of racial nationalism is not that different from certain forces at work in contemporary China.
BUILDING WALLS TO PROTECT CHINESE CIVILIZATION
In January 2011, a thirty-foot-tall bronze statue of Confucius was unveiled in Tiananmen Square. Just three months later, a scaffold went up around it. When the scaffold came down, the statue was gone.10 Official sources were initially silent about the removal of the statue. Eventually, they explained that the plan all along had been to temporarily display the statue in Tiananmen Square, and then later move it to a courtyard in the nearby museum of antiquities, where the statue now sits. However, if this were the plan, why hadn’t the authorities announced this in advance, or at least explained it immediately when questioned about the statue’s disappearance?
Tiananmen Square is a sensitive location for many reasons. It is in front of the Forbidden City, the home of China’s emperors in the Qing dynasty. It is the location of the mausoleum of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), the founder of the People’s Republic of China.11 And it is the site of what is discreetly referred to in China as “the incident of June 4, 1989,” in which student protestors agitating for government reform were killed by the army. Consequently, the political significance of anything that happens there is magnified. The peek-a-boo of the Confucius statue reflects an ideological struggle for the soul of China between China’s left and right. For China’s left, Confucius is a symbol of feudalism, superstition, and exploitation of the people by the privileged. For China’s right, Confucius is an example of the greatness of Chinese civilization, a guide to personal morality of contemporary relevance, and a symbol of what unifies all Chinese as a people. In order to understand the contours and significance of this debate, we need to take a quick look at recent Chinese history.
After leading the Chinese Communists to victory in the civil war against the Nationalists (1949), Mao Zedong instituted the radical agricultural and industrial “reforms” of the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). The results were disastrous. Tens of millions starved during the “Great Famine.” Officials were initially reluctant to report the truth for fear of being persecuted, but when the extent of the disaster became known, moderates like Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) began to edge Mao out of power. Mao responded by launching the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (1966–76), in which students were encouraged to drop out of school and join the paramilitary Red Guards. With all the mercy of the Inquisition and all the objectivity of the Salem Witch Trials, the Red Guards humiliated, tortured, and killed whoever appeared to them to be a supporter of feudalism or capitalism. The temple of Confucius in his (supposed) hometown of Qufu was vandalized. Worse yet, many people (including Deng) were tortured on trumped-up charges. On a recent visit to China, I talked with a retired professor who showed me the scars left from when Red Guards drove nails into his hands, trying to get him to confess to being a foreign agent. The evidence against this professor? He had studied German literature abroad.
After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping returned to power and led China in a much more moderate direction. A significant part of “Deng-ism” is acknowledging Mao’s mistakes. The official slogan is that Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. However, China continues to wrestle with Mao’s legacy. Mao founded the People’s Republic of China, so to completely repudiate him would be to disavow Communism. The Communist Party is woven too intimately into the very fabric of government to do that. (Recently a popular TV host got in serious trouble when a video of him making some sarcastic comments about Mao at a dinner party came to light.)12 However, there is almost nothing recognizable as “Mao-Zedong-Thought” per se in the actual practices of Chinese society, culture, and economy.13
Professor Paul Gewirtz of Yale Law School describes the social and political problem that faces China:
China today places great value on making money and on self-interested material success, long denied to the Chinese. But values in addition to individual materialism are needed to hold a country together and make it a good country. Where will these values continue to come from in China? The announced ideology of China’s Communist Party no longer seems to be a source of moral values for Chinese society. Indeed, it is no longer clear what that ideology really is. China certainly has no equivalent to the United States’ faith in its Constitution as a continuing source of our country’s values, as almost a civic religion.
Moreover, China does not have a strong conventional religious tradition that can be the source of values. Furthermore, the close family structures that were a traditional forum for the generational transfer of values have been weakened as Chinese society has become more mobile and, yes, more free.14
Why should we regard this situation as problematic for China? There are at least three issues. (1) First, as thinkers in the hermeneutic tradition have stressed, human beings are creatures who can only make choices against the “horizon of significance” that an ethical vocabulary supplies.15 The seminal sociologist Emile Durkheim used the term “anomie” to describe the feeling of alienation that results when the individual lacks a horizon of significance and feels at sea in an amoral society. Anomie (which we might also describe as “alienation”) is, at the very least, unpleasant, and it seems to be a serious issue for some in China. A recent mental health survey of students at Peking University reported that over 40 percent of freshmen feel that life is “meaningless.”16 In addition, there is some reason to think that it is one of the causes of the second problem. (2) When individuals have no ethical vocabulary in which to articulate deep values, they are easily prone to certain kinds of wrongdoing. Everyone can see the force of satisfying immediate and superficial desires, such as desires for food, sex, wealth, prestige, and power. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these motivations. However, if pursued without regard for other values, they can easily lead to corruption and cruelty.17 (3) A third problem is that, in the absence of an ethical vocabulary, it is far too easy for those who wield power to do so in an arbitrary or self-serving manner. I take this to be part of the point that Milan Kundera is making when he writes that “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”18 Insofar as we, as a community, remember our shared ethical vocabulary, we can deploy that vocabulary to resist arbitrary exercises of governmental (or other) authority. For all three of these reasons, post-Mao China needs new ethical vocabularies in which people can believe.19
The complexity of the intellectual situation in China was brought home to me at a conference I attended in Wuhan, China, in 2014.20 Of the Chinese philosophers in attendance, I would say that about 40 percent were Marxist philosophers, approximately 40 percent were specialists in some kind of Anglo-European philosophy (including Western political philosophy), and about 20 percent were specialists in traditional Chinese philosophy (who seemed interested only in narrow philological issues). Throughout the conference, the three groups largely spoke past one another. I don’t assume that these exact percentages are representative of the state of the field in China as a whole; however, the discipline of philosophy in China is largely segregated along these lines, and dialogue across the divides seems minimal.
This is the complex situation that China’s President Xi Jinping has inherited. Xi was born into privilege: his father was a high-ranking official in the government and the Chinese Communist Party. However, during the Cultural Revolution, Xi’s father was purged from power and jailed, and Xi himself was, like many young intellectuals, “sent down” to do farm work in the countryside. “Bullied” is far too weak a term to describe the physical, verbal, and psychological abuse Xi suffered at the hands of the Red Guards.21 Reflecting later on his experience, Xi said: “I think the youth of my generation will be remembered for the fervor of the Red Guard era. But it was emotional. It was a mood. And when the ideals of the Cultural Revolution could not be realized, it proved an illusion.”22 Because of this background, what Xi and many other Chinese government officials see as particularly important today is to avoid the mob rule and violence of Cultural Revolution–era China.
Xi has also inherited a nation with numerous separatist movements. Most Westerners are aware of the unrest in Tibet. But many people in Hong Kong, which only rejoined the People’s Republic in 1997, are also unsatisfied. Hongkongers are most comfortable speaking Cantonese or English, and angrily refer to the throngs of Mandarin-speaking shoppers from the Mainland as “locusts.” Xinjiang, the huge and natural-resource-rich province in China’s northwest, is largely populated by the Uighurs, a Muslim group, which sometimes chafes under Beijing’s control. The island of Taiwan has had an independent government since 1949, but the People’s Republic has made clear that it will go to war if it formally claims independence. The United States has regularly sent aircraft carrier strike forces to Taiwan as a show of strength whenever it has been threatened by the mainland. This happened as recently as 1995. This is why Trump’s decision (while he was president-elect) to accept a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan’s president was a serious and potentially dangerous strategic error, rather than a minor diplomatic faux pas.23
In order to give the Chinese people something to believe in that can unify them as a race, Xi has frequently praised the legacy of Confucius, something that would have been unthinkable under Mao.24 I would classify Xi’s appropriations of Confucianism into four groups: genuine, vacuous, confused, and nationalistic. One of Xi’s exhortatory addresses to Communist Party members illustrates him genuinely understanding and correctly applying a Confucian saying. Xi stressed the importance of avoiding greed, being self-disciplined, and maintaining one’s integrity. He appropriately illustrated this with one of the most famous lines from Analects: “One who rules through the power of Virtue is analogous to the Pole Star: it simply remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars.”25 Xi’s message, prompted by the widespread corruption in China’s government, is that citizens will not respect and obey the Party unless its members show genuine integrity.
Other times, classical allusions are simply empty window dressing, because Xi seems completely uninterested in what the passage he cites actually means. In a speech delivered to the Chinese Academy of Engineering praising technological innovation, Xi cites a line from a canonical Confucian text merely because the latter uses the word “new.” However, the original Confucian classic is praising moral renewal, not new technology.26 Xi shows a similar lack of interest in the original meaning of expressions when he quotes Confucius’s famous autobiographical comment “at forty I became free of doubts” merely to note that it was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Brazil.27
Xi sometimes attempts to sincerely apply a phrase, but fails to understand it. In an address to the students of Peking University, Xi admonishes them with a phrase that he takes to be a description of an ideal person: “In his speech he insists on being trustworthy, and with regard to his actions he insists they bear fruit.” However, in its original context, Confucius is criticizing, not praising, the “narrow, rigid little man” who insists on these rules.28 In fact, the later Confucian Mengzi would explicitly state that “As for great people, their words do not have to be trustworthy, and their actions do not have to bear fruit. They rest only in righteousness.”29 Confucius and Mengzi are not advocating casual lying. They simply disagree with those who (like Kant in the West) claim that the obligation to tell the truth may not be broken in any circumstances, even to save an innocent life.30 In denying that actions “have to bear fruit,” they are suggesting that actions should be judged by their intentions and motivations, not by their actual consequences. (Hmm. These sound suspiciously like philosophical issues, don’t they?)
In my opinion, what is most significant about Xi’s appropriation of Confucianism is his use of it to inspire racial identity and nationalism. This comes out most clearly in an address he gave to students at Peking University:
Chinese culture emphasizes that “the people are the foundation of the state,” “the heavens and humans form a unity,” “harmonize without forming cliques”; it emphasizes that “just as the actions of the heavens are reliable, the gentleman improves himself unceasingly”; “the great Way is to treat the whole world as one community”; it emphasizes that “whether the world rises or decays is every ordinary person’s responsibility”; it stresses ruling the country by means of Virtue, transforming people through culture; it emphasizes that “the gentleman cares about righteousness,” “the gentleman is magnanimous,” “the gentleman takes righteousness as his substance”; it emphasizes that “speech must be trustworthy, and actions must bear fruit,” “if a person is not honest, how can he be acceptable?”; it emphasizes that “virtue is never alone, it is sure to have neighbors”; “the benevolent love others,” “help others to do good,” “that which one does not like, do not inflict upon others,” “be friendly to one another whether coming or going, help one another in keeping watch,” “treat the old and young of one’s own family as you should and extend it to the old and young of other families,” “support the poor and rescue those in difficulty,” “do not be anxious over having little, be anxious about inequality,” etc. These sorts of thoughts and ideals, both in the past and today, all clearly have the distinctive characteristic of our nation; they all have an unfading value for one’s era.… Most fundamentally, what makes us Chinese at birth is that we have the unique mental outlook of the Chinese, that we have a perspective on value that the common people intuitively employ daily. The core values of socialism that we advocate have simply fulfilled and embodied the inheritance and refinement of the distinguished Chinese tradition.31
What is important here is not the undigested barrage of quotations. What is important is the inspiring feeling they leave his audience with: the feeling that they should be proud to be Chinese, that the Chinese have a unique perspective on the world, and that socialism is the way that this proud heritage will be preserved. In this respect, Xi’s support of the Chinese classics is as insincere as the invocation of the Bible by US politicians who would bar refugees (“He loveth the stranger in giving him food and raiment, love ye therefore the stranger” [Deuteronomy 18:19, KJV]) or cut funding to the needy (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me” [Matthew 25:40, KJV]), or as the violence done in the name of the Qur’an, a scripture that explicitly condemns harming noncombatants (“whosoever kills a human being, except (as punishment) for murder or for spreading corruption in the land, it shall be like killing all humanity; and whosoever saves a life, saves the entire human race” [5:32]) and preaches love of those who practice other religions (“all those who believe, and the Jews and the Sabians and the Christians, in fact any one who believes in God and the Last Day, and performs good deeds, will have nothing to fear or regret” [5:69]).32
President Trump’s expressions of respect for the Bible are similarly hypocritical. He claimed that the Bible is his favorite book, but in a talk at Liberty University it became clear that he does not even know how to pronounce the name of one of the most commonly cited books of the Bible. (He referred to 2 Corinthians, which any Christian knows is read as “Second Corinthians,” as “Two Corinthians.”)33 On another occasion, when pressed to name his favorite Bible verse, Trump said it was “never bend to envy”—a line that is not found in the Bible.34 (Lest I be accused of hypocrisy, my own favorite Bible verse is Micah 6:8: “and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” [KJV])
Political figures who invoke philosophical or spiritual works for nationalistic purposes have no interest in the actual content of the classics they claim to revere. What is important in each case is that the classics are symbols of what is distinctive and superior about us as opposed to them. The distinction between an “idol” and an “icon” is helpful in understanding the deformed role that spiritual traditions often play in politics. As historian Jaroslav Pelikan explained, to treat something as an idol is to worship a finite worldly thing, regardless of whether that thing is a statue, a text, an institution, or a person. In contrast, to treat something as an icon is to regard it as an important gift to humanity, but one that points beyond itself to some higher truth that the icon can never fully reveal to us.35 Nationalistic demagogues around the world are guilty of idolatry, of worshiping some limited product of human history as if were the truth that it guides us toward. There is a problem with encouraging idolatry, though. The classics are classics for a reason, and if you tell young people to revere the classics, they just might take you seriously. In other words, they might start reading the classics with care and understanding, so that they search for the great truths that the classics point toward. All great philosophies and religious traditions have sometimes been co-opted as ideologies to support the status quo, or to encourage nationalistic intolerance. But thinkers in every generation have been inspired by these same traditions to think for themselves, challenge injustice, and fight for the well-being of the common people, not just the elites. This is what gives us people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Akbar the Great (1542–1605), and Kang Youwei (1858–1927).
As we shall see in the next section, there are those who genuinely treat the classics as icons rather than as idols, but nonetheless want to build walls between civilizations. However, I will argue that their views are ultimately incoherent. Once you are serious about seeking the truth, you cannot have any plausible reason for silencing other voices in that quest.
BUILDING WALLS TO PROTECT WESTERN CIVILIZATION
In his recent book Too Dumb to Fail, conservative commentator Matt K. Lewis discusses “the dirty secret of the conservative movement in America today: everyone knows that it has lost its intellectual bearings.”36 Lewis states that, prior to the rise of the Tea Party, “the story of the rise of the conservative movement … is one of big, thoughtful ideas that address serious existential questions about human nature and the rise of civilization.”37 Specifically, “Conservatism is about conserving the good things about Western civilization.… It’s the belief that Western civilization didn’t merely happen, but was instead the result of the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. It’s about a realization that Western civilization and its institutions evolved naturally, and that long-standing traditions must be preserved.”38 The italics in the quotation are mine, but I don’t think they unfairly distort the underlying message: there is something special about Western civilization as opposed to other civilizations, and the unique Western tradition is under threat by those who wish to dilute it with something else. Lewis warns that “almost every facet of the culture, from the music industry to the worlds of food writing and travel writing … are dominated by people of the Left.”39 The undermining of culture doesn’t stop there: “conservatives worry about the ‘feminization’ of sports.”40 (True. Every time I watch the Super Bowl, I just shake my head and sadly mutter, “Butch it up, girls!”)
Lewis traces the development of the sort of conservatism he represents to Aristotle’s Politics (fourth century BCE) and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Aristotle strikes me as an unlikely ally for a contemporary conservative, because he believes that the state is responsible for raising children in the right habits. Aristotle would have no tolerance for fundamentalist parents who want to home school their children to “protect” them from socialization, or for those who want to leave education to the uncertainties of the free market. Aristotle’s position on the responsibilities of the state for the education of the young seems more like Hillary Clinton’s slogan “It takes a village to raise a child.” Moreover, the anti-intellectualism of contemporary conservatism (that Lewis laments and that we shall explore in chapter 4) is in direct opposition to Aristotle’s view of a good life. Aristotle regards manual labor and trade as necessary to support a civilization, but unworthy of cultivated gentlemen, who should devote their time to purely intellectual pursuits. Wealth, for Aristotle, is not for gaudy individual displays of conspicuous consumption; wealth exists to educate people and to give them the leisure to think, to discuss, and to research. Unsurprisingly, Aristotle regards a plutocracy (in which the wealthy rule) as one of the worst forms of government, so he would be horrified by the level of influence of money in contemporary US politics.
Edmund Burke (1729–97) is a more promising inspiration for conservatism. Burke was horrified by the French Revolution, and showed considerable prescience in recognizing that it would turn into an orgy of anarchic violence. The lesson to learn, Burke claimed, was that human institutions have gradually evolved to meet human needs, and we do not always fully understand how or why they work. Consequently, to radically restructure society in the light of a utopian ideal will have unforeseeable and dangerous consequences. Burke was right about genuinely radical utopian schemes. As Lewis notes, the horrors of the Russian Revolution were as bad as those of the French. He might have added that a further vindication of Burke’s thesis can be found in Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward (discussed earlier).
However, there is a problem with trying to be both Aristotelian and Burkean. For many contemporary Aristotelians—from lay Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre to progressive secularist Martha C. Nussbaum—what is inspiring about Aristotelianism is precisely that it is not a static catalogue of “a priori” truths (as Lewis describes it), but a framework that can adapt and improve in the light of new experiences, including exposure to new cultures.41 As MacIntyre explains:
We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate.… Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.42
Moreover, it is simply a mistake to try to apply Burke to mainstream political disagreement in the United States. A woman who wants to be paid the same amount as a man for doing the same job, and doesn’t want to be groped or ogled as a condition of her employment, is not Madame Defarge, gleefully condemning innocents to the guillotine. African Americans who want to exercise the right to vote, or receive the same treatment during a routine traffic stop that a white person expects, are not destroying the foundations of the rule of law: they are asking to fully participate in it. Hispanics and Latinos who want to have their citizenship and their ethics affirmed, not challenged, are not lining Czar Nicholas II and his family up against a wall and executing them. Gays and lesbians who can now marry and adopt children are not undermining the oldest human institution; they are happily integrated into it. And, to turn specifically to the main topic of this book, it is hard to see how giving students the opportunity to be inspired by Buddhism in addition to Platonism, or Confucianism in addition to Aristotelianism, will lead to (in the immortal words of Bill Murray’s character from the original Ghostbusters) “human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”
For me, one of the most valuable lessons to learn from the French Revolution and Burke’s insights about it is that a society that does not gradually evolve in response to changes and social pressures will eventually suffer sudden and disastrous upheaval. France, Russia, and China did not have violent revolutions because those in power agreed to moderate changes. They descended into violent chaos because change was denied for so long. Contemporary philosophy professors who insist that “We already get students of color in our classes. Remember that one last year?” are expressing the “Let them eat cake” of our era. (Remember the Stoic adage cited in chapter 1: “The Fates lead those who come willingly, and drag those who do not.”)
Lewis is part of a long line of conservative US intellectuals whose thought emphasizes protecting Western civilization, including William F. Buckley, whose book God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, accused the professors of his alma mater of undermining their students’ faiths in Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism.43 Buckley expressed the outrage of a conservative undergraduate confronted by liberal professors, while Allan Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987, vividly described the experience of a conservative professor who found the traditional canon to which he had devoted his life under siege by student agitators.44 Both books were surprise best sellers, and Bloom’s is particularly relevant to our topic.
I am not completely unsympathetic to Bloom’s frustrations. I was a graduate student at Stanford when undergraduates occupied the president’s office to chants of “Hey hey, ho ho! Western culture’s got to go!” and used the acronym DEWM to describe a curriculum consisting only of the works of dead European white males.45 Even though I am (obviously) completely supportive of broadening the curriculum, it is not because I do not also love the best of the Western tradition. And the comments and actions of the students did manifest a sort of contemptuous and uninformed dismissiveness that I found grating. I suppose in a parallel universe I am an educational fundamentalist with a goatee. (That’s a Star Trek reference, in the unlikely event that anyone reading this is not a nerd at heart.)
However, I disagree with substantial aspects of Bloom’s diagnosis of the problem. Bloom complains bitterly that nowadays
One of the techniques of opening young people up is to require a college course in a non-Western culture. Although many of the persons teaching such courses are real scholars and lovers of the areas they study,* in every case I have seen this requirement … has a demagogic intention. The point is to force students to recognize that there are other ways of thinking and that Western ways are not better.… Such requirements are part of the effort to establish a world community and train its member—the person devoid of prejudice.46
Many readers will find themselves nodding and wondering what is wrong with any of this. Bloom’s response is that a certain degree of ethnocentrism is necessary for the well-being of the individual and for society:
Men must love and be loyal to their families and their peoples in order to preserve them. Only if they think their own things are good can they rest content with them. A father must prefer his child to other children, a citizen his country to others. That is why there are myths—to justify these attachments. And a man needs a place and opinions by which to orient himself.… The problem of getting along with outsiders is secondary to, and sometimes in conflict with, having an inside, a people, a culture, a way of life.47
In short, in order to continue to exist and to flourish, it is necessary for the members of a culture to believe that “their way of life is the best way, and all others are inferior,” even if myths are needed to sustain this ethnocentrism.48
So Bloom’s position on the importance of studying the classics of Western civilization is importantly different from that of traditional conservatives like Lewis or Buckley. Bloom is not committed to the specific value of the Bible, or the free market system, or even belief in God. What is important for Bloom is that we avoid spiritual shallowness and ethical nihilism by being educated into “our” cultural tradition, and respectfully participating in the great conversation that runs through classics like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Pascal’s Penseés, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government, Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, and Rousseau’s Émile (each of which Bloom discusses in the book). Bloom is fully aware that there are competing voices in this conversation (like Nietzsche and Heidegger), and it almost doesn’t matter to him which voice one prefers, as long as one (deferentially) adds one’s own to it. But this brings out the fundamental incoherence in Bloom’s view. He states that “the Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.”49 I actually agree, but with an emphasis on the qualification “a book of similar gravity.” If reading the Bible intently and seriously gives breadth and depth to one’s mind (and it certainly does), why not also the Mengzi? or the Bhagavad Gita? or Chūshingura? There is more than one “great conversation” in the world, and more than one way to furnish a soul.
In addition to his call for a return to the reverential study of the classics of the Western tradition, many other things that Bloom said endeared him to US conservatives. He asserts that affirmative action led to colleges having “a large number of students who were manifestly unqualified and unprepared,” and therefore facing a dilemma: “fail most of them or pass them without their having learned.”50 I have not experienced the dilemma Bloom alleges occurred. (And I suspect that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy for Bloom: if you don’t expect a particular group of students in your class to do well, they probably won’t.) Furthermore, what discussions of affirmative action typically miss is that, even if race ceased to be a factor in admissions tomorrow, no competitive college or university would admit students solely based on standardized tests and high school grades. It is well established that standardized tests like the SAT and ACT are weak predictors of academic success in college, and so many applicants with strong grades and test scores apply to competitive schools that colleges almost have to use some other criteria to select students. Moreover, at the undergraduate level, the influence of athletic affirmative action dwarfs that of racial affirmative action. Does this have a positive effect on education? Brock Turner was a championship swimmer and was attending Stanford University on an athletic scholarship when he sexually assaulted an unconscious woman in 2015.51 Although his case attracted considerable media attention, he is hardly unusual. Fifty-four percent of student athletes admit to engaging in coercive sexual activities.52 (How many more are less self-aware about what they have done?) Where are the calls to eliminate athletic affirmative action? In addition, elite schools continue to give preference to children of alumnae. For example, George W. Bush had poor grades and mediocre SAT scores. His admission to Yale was based almost solely on his being a “legacy” (the son and grandson of Yale graduates). Donald Trump was able to transfer to an Ivy League business school because his elder brother was high-school friends with the admissions officer of the Wharton School. Where is the outrage over this class-based affirmative action?53
The fact is that not everyone can afford to take the standardized tests multiple times; not everyone can afford test prep courses; not everyone can afford for an editor to go over their application essay. Most importantly, not everyone even knows these are options.54 I have been fortunate over the years to have many students—of all races and social backgrounds—who were bright and passionate. But I have also taught a few of the George W. Bushes and Donald J. Trumps of the world: white, wealthy students whose writing and reading comprehension skills are mediocre at best, who show up for class smelling of “weed,” and who put the bare minimum effort into their courses because they know their family connections will get them a good job after they graduate. Thanks, but I’ll take the first-generation college students trying to make a better future for themselves and their families any day.
Bloom’s defense of the Western canon, his criticisms of affirmative action, and his disdain for the supposedly lax morals of his colleagues and students made him a star in conservative circles. There is an ironic coda to Bloom’s association with conservatism, though. The GOP has always taken a hard line against gay rights. Two decades before Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, William F. Buckley had publicly denounced novelist Gore Vidal as a “queer” in a televised debate (long before the term was “owned” by gays).55 In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Reagan’s press secretary simply cracked jokes when asked what steps the administration was taking to address the disease that was rapidly spreading among members of the gay community.56 In 2016, in the wake of the deadliest single incident of violence against LGBTQ people in US history (in which forty-nine people were murdered and fifty-three were injured by a shooter in an Orlando gay nightclub), the GOP approved what the Log Cabin Republicans condemned as “the most anti-LGBT Platform in the Party’s 162-year history. Opposition to marriage equality, nonsense about bathrooms, an endorsement of the debunked psychological practice of ‘pray the gay away’—it’s all in there.”57 Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and said that same-sex marriage could lead to “societal collapse.”58 However, after Bloom passed away, he was outed as gay by his close friend Saul Bellow, who also suggested that Bloom died of AIDS.59 As critic D. T. Max wondered, “How many members of the right will want their money back now?”60
Demagogues like Trump are explicit about wishing to build walls to separate races and religions; earlier politicians have made similar promises using coded language. Chinese nationalists like President Xi Jinping want to boost support for Confucius as a symbol of Chinese culture, to preserve a Chinese racial identity distinct from the West. Some intellectual US conservatives want to separate what they see as the individualistic, rational philosophy of the West from its decadent counterparts in the rest of the world.
Many Western philosophers have similarly built a wall between “real” philosophy and some “other.” As we saw in chapter 1, this is sometimes done by claiming that “real” philosophy has the same kind of rigor that is characteristic of the natural sciences, while everything else is poetry or nonsense. Of course, the philosophers who assert this do not actually bother to read non-Western or other less commonly taught philosophies to see whether they are rigorous. Other times, the wall-building is done by stipulating that both philosophy and the overcoming of philosophy must be historical descendants of the Greek philosophia. This argument treats philosophy as if it is a hermetically sealed dialogue with one particular set of ancient canonical texts, and thereby both ignores and precludes the diversity and creativeness of philosophy. These sorts of shallow arguments are found among both analytic and Continental philosophers. Almost all philosophers would categorically reject explicit racism. But I ask my fellow philosophers to recognize whom you are implicitly aligning yourself with when you reject—without genuinely investigating—philosophy from outside the Anglo-European tradition. You are helping those who build and maintain walls: walls between races, walls between religions, walls between civilizations. These walls need to come down. Let us take inspiration from the Bible:
So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets: and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. (Joshua 6:20, KJV)
Although I have criticized many different kinds of intellectuals in this chapter, all of us have one opponent in common: the anti-intellectualism that rejects all philosophy as pointless or impractical. I respond to this trend in the next chapter.
*Bryan waves.