Nena Arias | February 13, 2023
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
(Matthew 6:21)
People will always need freedom. They will always seek for it at all cost. This is why even in the most controlling regimes; people make plans to escape for an opportunity to be free. They prefer to lay down their lives and even to be martyred rather than live under complete enslavement and tyranny.
The law of sowing and reaping goes without mentioning since nature tells us we cannot plant an apple seed and reap tomatoes. Nor should I need mention that we reap more than what we sow, even if you are not a farmer or have ever planted a garden you know this to be true, or do you? Nowadays, through critical thinking, it’s not hard to know that people’s thinking has strayed from truth and common sense and where this is taking us. This is especially true since we have been witnessing the dumbing down of the American mind and it only continues to grow into full bloom.
In 1987, author, philosopher, classist and academic, Allan Bloom (1930 – 1992) wrote a book titled, “The Closing of the American Mind”, which you can read for free in PDF. The book also had a subtitle “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”. He was a political philosophy professor at the University of Chicago.
Rachel Donadio, in her Essay published by The New York Times September 16, 2007: Revisiting the Canon Wars, says:
“Bloom’s book was full of bold claims: that abandoning the Western canon had dumbed down universities, while the ‘relativism’ that had replaced it had ‘extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life’; that rock music ‘ruins the imagination of young people’; that America had produced no significant contributions to intellectual life since the 1950s; and that many earlier contributions were just watered-down versions of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud and other Continental thinkers. For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the ’60s, when universities took on ‘the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war,’ he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change ‘possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.’”
Donadio goes on to say:
“… Bloom’s book shared space at the top of the best-seller list with E. D. Hirsch’s ‘Cultural Literacy’ (1987), which argued that progressive education had left Americans without a grasp of basic knowledge. It also inspired further conservative attacks against the university, including Roger Kimball’s ‘Tenured Radicals’ (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Illiberal Education’ (1991).”
Her follow-up remarks are very telling:
“Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation. However polarizing Bloom may have been, many of the issues he raised still resonate — especially when it comes to the place of the humanities on campus and in the culture.”
Keep in mind that Donadio wrote this essay in 2007, what would she say now about what Bloom proposed?
Even though Alan Bloom passed away 31 years ago, (at the time of this writing), there is clear undeniable evidence through his writings that he is still saying to the early 21st Century of Americans, “I told you so.”
Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind, (pp. 55-61) demonstrates that the decline of Biblical knowledge in America is what led to the abdication of true education, a task that was solely delegated by God to parents. The full responsibility of this has always been in the home and still is, (Deuteronomy 6:6-7, 11:19).
The Bible was the only common culture we had in America, and it was one that united us no matter our status in life. It was the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things.
Our homes in the America of the past may not have been so knowledgeable of many things by our standards today, but our homes, for the most part, were more spiritually rich and there was better order not only in our homes, but as a result it overflowed into society with better morals and ethics, it gave us a better government and the economy reflected this also.
There was a respect for real learning through the truths from God and education, not indoctrination like today. All we hear now from all angles are clichés, superficialities, false claims of freedoms and the focus on materialism as a cure-all. Without God’s higher revelations of wisdom, we have nothing but frivolous thinking and chaff. Nothing of real and lasting substance will always leave us empty. Without real substance, our learning goes unfulfilled.
The principle institutions that have failed us are the home and the churches. The rest of society reflects the poor neglected condition of our homes and what we worship.
The battle for the soul of America is no longer just a cliché phrase as many thought it was; only the morally and spiritually blind cannot see where we are and where we are going. Jesus told the Jews of his generation: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14).
The warning signs against America have greatly increased and only Almighty God knows if there are enough righteous people to spare the nation from his just wrath.
The Bible is the only Document that is relevant now more than ever, and I mean THE ONLY ONE! The government has destroyed The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. The question for biblical Christians is are we going to focus on the original Document of true freedom, the Bible? This is the only way to go forward confronting all adversity, including the humanist socialists, progressives, liberal societies and the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes that are at the helm of the leadership in our churches, seminaries, and Bible institutes. Are we the generation with the backbone and unbending determination to take back what rightfully belongs to our God and Savior Jesus Christ and rebuild what past generations destroyed? (Isaiah 61:1-4)
The future will reveal our decision. It is high time to refocus our trust and dependence on him, and him alone.
“But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.”
(2 Corinthians 2:14)