 William Congreve (1670-1729), public domain via Wikipedia
Today: Editor and writer Maria Bustillos.
Issue No. 203Closing Time
Maria Bustillos
Closing TimeWant to hear something gross? No? You’ve been hearing nothing but gross disgusting stuff every moment for weeks on end, you’re saying? I know, but for what I hope will be an illuminating conclusion, please join me for this excerpt from an enormously popular book about the culture wars. Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.
The “Walkman headphones” are a tell. These weirdly prurient ruminations are from Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. Camille Paglia once called this godawful bestseller “the first shot in the culture wars.” She was wrong as usual! But when was it, really, the first shot in the culture wars? I don’t doubt there are earlier examples, but 1642 leaps to mind, the year Cromwell’s Puritan parliament closed all the theaters in London, because Project 1642 did not care for “stage-plays representative of lascivious mirth and levity.” And then the theaters stayed shut, or mostly shut, for 18 whole years, until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. After that came about a zillion glorious Restoration plays, wonderful satirical comedies filled with dazzling wit and moral heft, like William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700). That wasn’t the end of it, though. Because in 1698 the English clergyman Jeremy Collier wrote A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, calling out the playwrights’ “Smuttiness of Expression; Their Swearing, Profainness, and Lewd Application of Scripture; Their Abuse of the Clergy; Their making their Top Characters Libertines,” etc., and it got a lot of play. Again! Just 38 years after the theaters had reopened, and here is another Puritan bozo all on about lascivious this and that, smack in the middle of one of the greatest literary flowerings in English history. Nobody was forcing Jeremy Collier to go to the theater! But that wasn’t the point he was making, the point was to forbid people from sharing ideas, literature, gaiety. Freedom. Historians relate that William Congreve, then just 28, never really got over the sting of being dragged through the mud. His response, Amendments of Mr Collier's False and Imperfect Citations, reads like John Kerry defending himself against the Swift Boat Veterans, or maybe Tom Stoppard attempting to explain his work to Catturd. Even in 1698 there was no percentage in assenting to some lowlife yelling, “Debate me!” For Congreve, Collier “teaches those Vices he would correct,” a 17th-century way of saying “this fucking creep is projecting.” Congreve never wrote another play after The Way of the World.
The Closing of the American Mind is still a conservative bible. It advocates for the indoctrination of young minds into the ways of the Great Books, the One True Path to being a right-thinking citizen of the Top Nation. Bloom, a classicist educated at the University of Chicago, made a big to-do in this book of being all horrified by the permissiveness of youth culture, the unbridled sexual license, the low escapism of rock and roll, and the widespread uncertainty over the very existence of good or evil. His proteges included Paul “Comb Sucker” Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama, leading lights in the neoconservative movement at the dawn of the Iraq War, and that tracks perfectly. People who were ready to demand obedience, and to obey their own bosses. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
— Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
The closed mind is the one that obeys unquestioningly but “intellectual” conservatives seem always to miss that bit, or maybe they are just looking to be the ones who are obeyed. To this day they are still yapping about the decline of standards and the Death of the Book in The Atlantic, yabbering on and on about “dumbing down.” They can’t read and nobody should listen to them, but cranky, fifth-rate ivory-towerists and sin-addled weirdos will never, ever go away, and they will never stop with their bumper-sticker versions of “ideas” about literature, “civilization,” free thought and inquiry, and they will never stop interfering with other people’s plays and films and books. The fight isn’t over because it is never over. Learning what has happened before, again and again, is the only thing that can cure people of believing their own situation to be unprecedented.  Allan Bloom. (Image: Regina Kühne [CC-BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons) Bloom did a lot to turn “moral relativism” into a thing for modern conservatives to hate. His concept of youth culture is still with us, echoing all the way down the years. By the aughts you could hear him in the lurid harangues of Christine O’Donnell and Rick Santorum; today in Samuel Alito and the entirety of Project 2025, and their nightmarish visions of the subjugation of women and marginalized people and the brutish, ignorant suppression of education and of literature. So Allan Bloom has a lot to answer for, only he can’t because he died in 1992. And there’s this other thing. Despite the lofty, furious moralizing, Bloom had lived a “quietly gay” life, semi-closeted, a life of which many of his conservative colleagues in the ’80s would have disapproved. His close friend Saul Bellow was much criticized for outing Bloom in 2000’s Ravelstein, a roman à clef that dished out a ton of personal details in typically Bellovian fashion. In the novel, Bloom is portrayed as having died of AIDS, though this has never been confirmed. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that a man whose circumstances in life led him to take as allies people who believed him to be damned to hell was practicing moral relativism of a different kind.
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