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Allan Bloom’s provocative book, The Closing of the American Mind, warned us twenty years ago of the trivialization of American life and culture brought on by relativist thinking and the obsessive search for pleasure and longing for communion.  I thought Bloom was a right-wing nut job who just didn’t see the possiblities of a new, revolutionary, boundry-less culture. I still think lots of thinking was nutty, but now, twenty years later, Mark Steyn in The New Criterion uses rock music as a lens to see what Bloom was writing about.  And after twenty years of wondering what all the excitement was about, I’m thinking hard about Mr. Steyn’s Bloomish ideas about the culture we boomers have tolerated into existence.

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.  - Mark Steyn

Read Twenty Years Ago Today here.
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