Cave Dwellers 

      At the recommendation of a parishioner, I took down off the shelf a book I had read back in1989, the book entitled The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom.  (The date is easy to remember, for it was this very work I was reading, while living in Vienna, the night the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.)  Novelist Saul Bellow wrote the foreword to The Closing, in which he noted that Bloom’s book would be a thorn in the side of American academia, entrenched as it is in its self-imposed mediocrity: 
 

Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things.  Writing about the higher education in America, he does not observe the forms, manners and ceremonies of what is called (usually by itself) the community of scholars.  Yet his credentials are irreproachable.  He is the author of an excellent book on Shakespeare’s politics, and has translated Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile.  It will be difficult for nettled colleagues to wave him away, and many will want to do just that, for he is shrewd and mettlesome, and well as learned, and a great observer of what Mencken would call, when he was being mean, “the higher learning.” 
 

      Professor Bloom, in his introduction, gets right to the cause of the problem of this “closing” or, as becomes clear in this book, the problem of close-mindedness.  “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of:  almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”  He notes that if students are challenged on this, “they will be uncomprehending.”  They are astonished that anyone would not consider this proposition as self-evident; and then the key words, “These are things you don’t think about,” for it has the nature not of a “theoretical insight” but of a “moral postulate,” that the students cannot defend, since “it is something with which they have been indoctrinated.”  In adhering to it, the student feels himself “virtuous,” because he is exercising the really only virtue necessary:  that of “openness.”  But, again, not an openness to the truth – which to him is relative – but to any and every opinion around him:  one is just as good as another, and so the student settles into the “good habit” of being open, with a shrug and a yawn, to “whatever.” 

      It is ironic and tragic that modern students are “educated” into the very place or condition that classical thinkers presumed as the starting point.  To illustrate this, Plato (perhaps the greatest of mere mortal teachers) used his analogy of the cave.  It’s rather dark and crowded in the cave, with people sitting and milling about always facing the subterranean wall opposite the opening through which a dim light streams in and cast the shadows of their movements on the wall.  They imagine that what they are viewing is reality in all its fullness.  But for Plato, reality, truth – very far from being relative and therefore nonexistent – is attainable by all who would turn around and begin to make his way toward the light, to make his way out of the cave into the world of reality.  In this endeavor, Plato followed his mentor, Socrates, in goading his fellow citizens with questions about truth and reality, to get them to think and realize that as difficult as it may be there is truth to be known – an endeavor that cost Socrates his life, when he was condemned by the new “democratic” regime in Athens, content as the leaders and people were to live in a cave with its fanciful projections of themselves.  Or, as it would be described in America as “so-and-so’s opinions are as good as mine or others’, since they’re all shadows on the wall.”

      Pope Benedict XVI has aptly labeled this view as the “dictatorship of relativism.”  For nothing is more dictatorial than pulling out of the magician’s hat the rabbit of relativism – “truth is relative,” a statement that purports to be true and is, therefore, self-contradictory – and then demanding that everyone adhere to this sleight of the hand.  The “authorities” themselves do not adhere to this:  they have all kinds of presumptions of what is acceptable or unacceptable and argue more fiercely for their viewpoint than almost any self-identified dogmatist does.  Fact is, the absence of truth leaves a vacuum that is then filled with power.  Bloom warns of this with his comparison between the present culture of America and of Weimar Germany between the world wars, when relativism was enshrined as national dogma and the vacuum created was eventually filled by Hitler’s brown-shirts.  It boils down to this:  if there is no truth, then the will of the most powerful rules.  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle perceived this in their debates with the Sophists, the relativists of their day, who used their skill in rhetoric to deny truth and to gain power and position for themselves. 

      These three great philosophers, lovers of wisdom, taught that the health of the polis, the community of the city, the republic, depends on the health of human souls.  For a well-ordered society, there have to be well-ordered souls, and the soul that does not believe in truth is a sick and lost soul, inhabiting darkness.  But the cave is comfortable, its dancing shadows now morphed into a flickering TV screen, its dimness shielding the eye from the glaring light of reason and truth and reality, a bunker-refuge from the discipline of real thought that would, with humility, lead to knowledge of the truth and wisdom.  The great teachers, who at least urge the student to desire to know the truth, would lead people out of the very place that modern “education” plants them.  “For the wise men of old,” writes C. S. Lewis in his The Abolition of Man, “the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.”  Now the only “virtue” is “openness,” which so generously compliments one’s neighbor’s shadow on a wall, but refuses to be open to the light.