The following are selected passages from Allen Bloom's
(Ques.#4-Bloom selections)
1.- "From the earliest beginnings of liberal thought there was a tendency in the direction of indiscriminate freedom. Hobbes and Locke, and the American founders following them intended to paliate extreme beliefs, partricularly religious beliefs, which lead to civil strife. The members of sects had to obey the laws and be loyal to the Constitution; if they did so, others had to leave them alone, however distasteful their beliefs might be. In order to make this arrangement work, there was a conscious, if covert, effort to weaken religious beliefs, partly by assigning - as a result of a great epistimological effort - religion to the realm of opinion as oposed to knowledge.
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2.- It was possible to expand the space exempt from legitimate social and political regulation only by contracting the claims to moral . . . knowledge. The insatiable appetite for freedom to live as one pleases thrives on this aspect of modern democratic thought. In the end it begins to appear that full freedom can be attained only when there is no such knowledge at all. . . . The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute.
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3.- When Oliver Wendell Holmes renounced seeking for a principle to determine which speech or conduct is not tolerable in a democratic society and invoked instead an imprecise and practically meaningless standard - clear and present danger - which to all intents and purposes makes the preservation of public order the only common good. (Note that while being basic to the pursuit of the common good, the maintaining of public order in no way exhausts the demands that the pursuit of the common good lays upon us as citizens. Proof of this is the fact that when no other demands are clearly identified and enforced, we create a social setting in which public order itself becomes first of all difficult, and then impossible to sustain.) . . . .But openness (in the sense of a rejection of the very idea of there being moral judgments possessed of truth) , nevertheless won out over natural rights, . . .partly because of a political rebellion against nature's last restraints.
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Ques.#5-Bloom's selections)
4.- "The contention that there is no objective or universal (moral) truth has achieved a measure of official status among us by fiat of the Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood V.Casey, for example, the Court declared that it is up to each individual to determine 'the concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." John Paul, by contrast, warns agaimnst 'the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism.' When truth itself is democratized - when truth is no more than the will of each individual or a majority of individuals - democracy, deprived of a the claim to truth, stands naked to its enemies. Thus does freedom, when it is not 'ordered to truth,' undo freedom." Richard John Neuhaus
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5.- Liberalism without natural rights, . . .taught us that the only danger confronting us is being closed to the emergent, the new, the manifestations of progress. No attention had to be paid to the fundamental principles or the moral virtues that inclined men to live according to them. This turn in liberalism is what prepared us for cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction, which seemed to carry that viewpoint further and give it greater intellectual weight.(1)
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6.- History and social science are used in a variety of way to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric. . . We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that - accidents of their time and place.. . .So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it.(2) (One of the principal goals of a good education is the ability to discriminate between what is wise and what is foolish about the doing of one's life.)
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7.- Greek philosophers were the first men we know to address the problem of ethnocentrism. Distinctions between the good and one's own, between nature and convention, between the just and the legal are the signs of this movement of thought.. . . They had to use the good, which was not their own, to judge their own. . . .History and anthropology were understood by the Greeks to be useful only in discovering what the past and other peoples had to contirbute to the discovery of nature. Historians and anthropologists were to put people and their conventions to the test, as Socrates did individuals, and go beyond them . . . They wanted to be able to evaluate themselves and others . . . Openess used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. . . Openness to closedness is what we teach.
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8.- Cultural relativism succeeds in destroying the West's universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to be just another culture. So there is equality in the republic of cultures. Unfortunately the West is defined by its need for justification of its ways or values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, it will collapse. . . The regime established here (the United States) promised untrammeled freedom to reason - not to everything indiscriminately, but to reason, the essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion.
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(1)Cf. Ayers in the notes dealing with the problem of MORAL TRUTH.
(2)Cf. Chesterton: "I give thanks every day for the grace of never having become a child of my times."