What I've been reading

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (free here). This book was written in 1987, a critic against the state of university education in this country. But yet this book is more irrelevant today than ever. Little has changed in the past quarter century and it has only gotten worse. The irony now is all his critic has been so conveniently assimilated and euphemism-ed as "American culture", so anybody who dares to ridicule is branded as unpatriotic. So much for freedom and liberty. Fad camouflaged and assimilated into culture for convenience cannot become culture. Culture evolves from reason, responsibility and righteousness which is mutually exclusive with an ephemeral fad.

Any pseudo moralist outside America dwells in a self-fulling relativistic superior moralistic wring under the skull should read this book. There are "real" moralist's all over in the world, morale never was and is culture, geographic and religion centric. It's an innate human gift but can only be developed by perceptual self-reflection, a cumulative process in a bayesian inference style and never can be developed by hitchhiking on past generations virtues or inferring from an overpaid polemicist cognitive miser on the air.

Bloom elegantly "laments" on some the following "timeless" dissonances.

1. Openness - to new ideas and having an open mind - here.

2. Rock Music - Well, it's self evident.

3. Relationships -  the perpetual adolescence which the society promotes is a the crucial factor in the lack of pursuing any serious relationship. And there is that ubiquitous fillers like "no big deal", "fun", "cool" et al.

4. American style nihilism - virtues, creativity, culture etc - This is not trait developed by some spontaneous genesis but by understanding history, philosophy etc. But the "know it all" generation vilifies the quest for wisdom as boring.

Reading this book makes one wonder, if all these ramblings are really true or just figment of our imagination since it has become so rare and abstract, albeit one can quantify it in an instant with little cognition.

"There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world." - On Morals

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is." - On Reading

"Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice." - On Prejudice

"Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?" - On Ignorance

"As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing." - On Education

"Indignation is the soul's defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematics."