Allan Bloom: Prophet of Doom

Allan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with the following sentence:

‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’

In the twenty-five years that have passed since the book’s publication, that belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. It’s not simply true of American universities, it’s true of British universities as well. Indeed, this all-encompassing relativism — which Bloom says is regarded as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free society’ — is shared by the educated and uneducated alike. The only people in contemporary Britain who don’t believe it are religious fanatics, such as Islamic Fundamentalists, and they’re regarded as peculiar — insane, even — precisely because they think their particular beliefs are true.
        
How did this happen? The superficial answer is that children are taught to believe this.