Final Judgments, Without Tragedy
Here is the final paragraph of Allan Bloom’s indispensable essay on the fate of the American mind:
This is the American moment in world history, the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before. The gravity of our given task is great, and it is very much in doubt how the future will judge our stewardship.1Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, 382.
The relation has become a reciprocal deflation, and the deflation now appears complete. If the consolation of philosophy lies in the possibility of understanding reality, which is to say clearly recognizing what is and why it is, even when that reality is awful and the reasons for it demand an acknowledgment of ultimate failure, then this moment, which is definitively answering Bloom’s open question from 1987, offers a poignant demonstration of why the philosophic life is best. For all doubts concerning the future’s judgment of American stewardship are now resolved, all hopes of America responding at last to the gravity of its task evaporated. The United States of America, at precisely the historical moment when all might have been won, has freely and definitively elected to lose, in an act of pure and unbridled nihilism. America has chosen to surrender freedom on Earth to Russian and Chinese dictatorship, civic decency to tribal warfare and insatiable materialism, and republican prudence and moderation to the unlimited indulgence of the seven deadly sins, as embodied in comical form by the headless id that the country has elevated to its highest seat of power.
But for those happy few still given to rational reflection and the joys of pursuing wisdom, there is something valuable in a moment of historical clarity, even when what is becoming clear is so utterly disappointing from the point of view of practical aspiration. Philosophy often asserts its nobility most discernibly in moments that cry out for tragic feelings. Tragedy is born of a soul immersed in the perspective of the all too human. From the divine vantage point, which is philosophy’s (and only philosophy’s) goal, there is no tragedy, only truth, and truth is always good.
