The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

Relativism is the philosophical idea that truth, knowledge, and morality are historically and socially determined phenomena, not absolutes. Relativism denies the existence of universal truths and the correspondence of knowledge with a stable, fixed nature that is knowable-in-itself. In modern European philosophy, relativism is a critically relevant theme in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, who argued that atheism undermines the grounds of traditional Christian morality and leads to the decentering condition of value relativism. Bloom’s work focuses on the social and educational crises that the embrace of value relativism and multiculturalism poses for America in the second half of the 20th century. He argues that American education has dogmatically adopted cultural relativism as a moral position to increase tolerance for minority groups and identities within American society. 

The natural rights doctrine holds that certain human rights and freedoms are universal and inalienable, and therefore not subject to legal sanction or abolition. The concept originates in the political philosophy of liberalism developed by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson identifies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as natural rights of man. In his Introduction, Bloom claims that our understanding of what it means to be American has shifted from an identity based upon natural rights to one based on one’s religion, race, and ethnicity, which have come to be regarded as having priority over universal rights.