Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Bloom

Tradition doesn’t die when people stop doing it; Bloom’s barb is that it dies when people start labeling it. The moment a practice becomes self-conscious - pinned under glass as “heritage,” “custom,” “our values” - it stops functioning as an invisible operating system and turns into a museum exhibit. What’s ruthless (and effective) about the line is its timing: “as soon as” implies an almost automatic collapse. Recognition isn’t enlightenment here; it’s embalming.

Bloom is writing from a conservative, anti-relativist worry about modern education and modern life: that we’ve shifted from inhabiting inherited forms to “studying” them, from being shaped by moral and civic habits to treating those habits as optional lifestyles. In that world, tradition becomes one more object for critique or consumption. You don’t kneel because kneeling is what one does; you analyze kneeling, compare kneeling traditions, maybe keep kneeling for aesthetic reasons. The authority leaks out, replaced by choice - and choice, in Bloom’s framing, is a solvent.

The subtext is a complaint about modern reflexivity: the Enlightenment habit of stepping outside every commitment to examine it. That posture flatters the modern self as sovereign and unbound, but Bloom’s sting is that it also hollows out the very things that once formed character and meaning. The line works because it weaponizes a paradox: to “recognize” tradition is to stand apart from it, and that distance is already the death of belonging.