This is not to say, like George, that there are not merits to the critics of culture studies. It is to say that Bloom's response, like his response to pretty much everything in academia, is the response of a college sophomore.
Far too often, the self-appointed guardians of our inherited western cultural tradition act as if the Greeks, the Catholic philosophers and theologians, the philosophes, the German idealists and Romantics, the novels and poems and drama of Britain and France and Germany, spoke a single voice, in a single language. For far too long we have been hectored that any appeal to democratizing culture is a decision against the inherited wisdom of the ages in favor of mediocrity. From Tocqueville through Bloom and former Education Secretary William Bennett, cultural commentators have thought the dangers of our peculiarly American preference for workable solutions would sideline what has always been thought to be the essence of our heritage - genius. Borrowing from Nietzsche, it would seem we are the epitome of the last men, who favor comfort over wisdom.
Yet, the choice, it seems to me, is false. While it may be so that the vast bulk of Americans will never "get" the subtlety of Hegel, or appreciate the vigor of Voltaire's novels poking holes in the bloated egos of the powerful, this has always been the case and is hardly an argument against a peculiarly American approach to the life of the mind. George quotes, at length, from that most American of voices, Walt Whitman:
America . . . must, for her purposes, cease to recognize a theory of character grown of feudal aristocracies, or form'd by merely literary standards, or from any ultramarine, full-dress formulas of culture, polish, case, &c., and must sternly promulgate her own new standard, yet old enough, and accepting the old, the perennial elements, and combining them into groups, unities, appropriate to the modern, the democratic, the west, and to the practical occasions and needs of our own cities and agricultural regions. Ever the most precious in the common.
George follows this directly:
The genius or splendor of the few may afford the rest of their society a sense of participation in infinity and immortality. But if the maturation of a people requires the exchange of this vicarious experience for the direct experience by the many of their own, more limited individuality, then such an exchange should — with a proper sense of the genuine loss that maturation always involves — be accepted. Growing up (remember Kant’s definition of Enlightenment: “humankind’s emergence from its self-imposed minority”) has its compensations.
Yet, this is not the end of the argument against the kind of intellectual hauteur Bloom advocates. As George points out, while Bloom certainly seems to prefer Nietzsche's, and Plato's, preference for a rule by the wisest, Nietzsche's framing of this decision is, unlike Plato's, ironic precisely because Nietzsche could not accept any metaphysics. The decision, for Nietzsche, was based solely on a preference against those he deemed "culture-philistines", the last men and their advancement of mediocrity. He recognized this argument as one of preference, without any philosophical underpinnings at all; Bloom insists there must be. Yet, the best American thinkers have always scoffed that democracy, either in politics or culture, is in need of any justification outside its own existence. Thus, George quote Richard Rorty:
From Plato through Kant down to [Habermas and Derrida], most philosophers have tried to fuse sublimity and decency, to fuse social hope with knowledge of something big…My own hunch is that we have to separate individual and social reassurance, and make both sublimity and agape (though not tolerance) a private, optional matter. That means conceding to Nietzsche that democratic societies have no higher aim than what he called “the last men” — the people who have “their little pleasures for the day and their little pleasures for the night.” But maybe we should just make that concession, and also concede that democratic societies do not embody anything, and cannot be reassured by anything, larger than themselves (e.g., by “rationality”). Such societies should not aim at the creation of a new breed of human being, or at anything less banal than evening out people’s chances of getting a little pleasure out of their lives. This means that citizens of those societies who have a taste for sublimity will have to pursue it in their own time, and within the limits set by “On Liberty”. But such opportunities might be quite enough.
As, indeed, they seem to be. American culture is not a singular thing, even as an appeal to a pragmatist argument in favor of the hodge-podge may seem to make it so. America has produced some quite fine art and literature and music and even thought. That we would also celebrate what has been deemed "folk" - in art, in music, in wisdom - is not to be derided, but celebrated as a uniquely American contribution to our store of cultural inheritance. It is more than possible to celebrate the beauty of both our more popular cultural artifacts as well as those less well-known but by that token even more profoundly beautiful. At its heart, this is what America bequeaths to the world: a celebration of the precious in the common, as Whitman insisted.
And should it be that such inclusiveness is impossible, in the end, to sustain, it is a noble project, an experiment worthy of the attempt. Nothing is lost in the process and much can be gained. As Lincoln pointed out, America is still an experiment in liberty, as true 140 years ago as it is today. Our self-appointed guardians of high culture would do well to remember that we are America, and our voice does not speak in Greek or Latin or strident, convoluted Teutonic sentences.
