Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 15, 1993 TAG: 9311240259
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by KENNETH M. LOCKE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Allan Bloom was widely respected for his intellectually conservative ``The Closing of the American Mind,'' a reactionary throwback to the deification of thoughts attributed to Dead White Males.
In ``Love & Friendship,'' finished shortly before his death in 1992, Bloom seeks an answer to the lack of love and friendship in our modern culture, which he traces to the deterioration of erotic (not to be confused with sexual) imagination. Bloom's remedy is simple: forsake our modernist ways and return to a detailed study of Plato and Shakespeare. Want great sex? Read (Bloom's idea of) great books.
In the course of this elaborate, long-winded diatribe, Bloom despairs of everyone and everything from Freud and Kinsey to Rousseau and Romanticism. His explicit arguments against them are weak and commit the same offenses of which he accuses the modernists. His implicit arguments are that no other culture nor any religion has produced serious thought on the nature of human relations, that the scientific method and that modern psychology cannot help us, and that multiculturalism is nonsense.
At their core, Bloom's arguments are drawn from the same cauldron as that used by fringe hate groups. The difference is that his arguments are wrapped in the respectable mantle of academic (and therefore elite) obscurity.
Literary smoothness and well-crafted arguments cannot hide the fact that Bloom has preached a sermon to the choir in the language of the initiated. The faithful will love it but ``Love & Friendship'' will not convert anyone.
\ Kenneth M. Locke is campus minister for the Presbyterian Church of Radford.
by CNB