Visionaries - The Culture Wars: Then and Now.

“The Culture Wars: Then and Now.” In 1987 Allan Bloom published "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students," and in that same year E.D. Hirsch published "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," and the culture wars were on. xx point was (or should have been) rather innocuous - you can't think critically (or even uncritically) unless you have something to think about. But Bloom's position was certainly controversial. He attacked Nietzschian relativism, advocating a notion of absolute truth. But is anything, even physics (or especially physics) absolutely true? And he favored Western culture over other cultures about which he know little. (And he attacked rock and roll, a position one should have gotten over decades earlier.) Today we look back and see how the culture wars still roil today.