The classical undergraduate humanities curriculum in America was destroyed and replaced over the course of the twentieth century. The destruction is usually blamed on postmodernism in the 1970s, but the replacement was already well under way by then. Neither the attackers nor the defenders of the old curriculum can (or will) explain what happened and why.

Allan Bloom's essay "Our Listless Universities" (the 1982 essay later expanded into The Closing of the American Mind) is the most famous attempt at a defense, and it reads at first as though it has no argument at all: it asserts the superiority of the Western Tradition and the badness of rock music without much visible reasoning. But if I relax my eyes and let the nearby details blur, a latent argument floats into focus. Bloom sees that a certain kind of value relativism, imported from German philosophy — Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger — dissolved the American university's commitment to truth. As diagnosis, this is correct. As explanation, it is incomplete. Something had already weakened the tradition. Bloom does not say what.

Bloom's essay is trying to say "America is over, let's think through rationally what to do next" in a way [...]

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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