I named my post after a book by Allan Bloom called The Closing of the American Mind, which is about modern day philosophy, culture, and education. However, I will not base my post on the book, which I thought merited both applause and criticism. Instead, I will cite ideas from this book to make a case for better education, and by education, I mean preparing students to become better souls. Now I confess that I read only half of Bloom's book up to this point (but I will continue to read the rest), so I will not pretend to be an expert on what he has to say. However, it's important that I regurgitate his most important point which I have come across so far, that although we won World War 2 on the Atlantic front, we lost on the spiritual front (I doubt that Bloom believes in God, but he does use the word "spiritual").
Have you ever heard the phrase, "God is Dead?" These words were used by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He actually said, "God is dead. God remains dead, and we killed him." I am not an expert on Nietzsche, either, but fundamentally, he believed that by eliminating morality, we can create our own morality and thereby become "supermen." Nietzsche was aware that a long period of nihilism would follow, but this did not seem to concern him.
Now here's what this has to do with us. Many of the words that we use and even the way we think originate from such German thought, which became an influence in American society even before world war 2. To quote Allan Bloom, when Americans were "Americanizing" the world by handing everybody blue jeans, the world's souls were also being tailored to this very German thought that used Americanism as a vehicle to propagate itself.
The whole world wears blue jeans and listens to rock and role, but nihilism also persists in every country, especially in ours. When it was once scorned upon to look at pornography or engage in pre-marital sex, those things are now the norm. We call good evil and evil good. Anybody who does not practice what is evil in the sight of God is a social outcast. But the social implications are only the tip of the iceberg. When God is removed from the picture, what refrains us from throwing each other into cages and selling each other on the meat market? Germany already did this, but instead of meat markets, Jewish babies were burned alive in little ovens.
What is striking is that the road that the German people went down so swiftly has been happening to us, but we have been moving at a more gradual pace until now. At this day in age where relationships are mechanically sexual, and in which people admire other cultures but know less and less about their own, we are conditioning a people who are becoming less than human. Could the end result be nothing less than the abolition of man?
