Nonjudgment Day

TEN years ago, Allan Bloom wrote of American college students: “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.” According to the world view of his students, “Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger.”

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom was describing the university of the 1980s, but he could just as well have been looking over Alan Wolfe’s shoulder in Cobb County, Georgia, in the 1990s. Wolfe’s account of the moral outlook of the American suburban middle class in his new book, One Nation, After All, is a dismaying depiction of the inroads that the cult of niceness has made in the “sensible center.” New Class is meeting middle class; the pretensions are not as great, nor are the careers as high-powered, but the easy relativism and apotheosis of self are the same.

About the Author

Rich Lowry

Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.

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TEN years ago, Allan Bloom wrote of American college students: “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.” According to the world view of his students, “Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger.”

In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom was describing the university of the 1980s, but he could just as well have been looking over Alan Wolfe’s shoulder in Cobb County, Georgia, in the 1990s. Wolfe’s account of the moral outlook of the American suburban middle class in his new book, One Nation, After All, is a dismaying depiction of the inroads that the cult of niceness has made in the “sensible center.” New Class is meeting middle class; the pretensions are not as great, nor are the careers as high-powered, but the easy relativism and apotheosis of self are the same.