"Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?"

Allan Bloom’s words point toward a paradox at the heart of modern education and intellectual life. Socrates, emblematic of philosophical inquiry, spent his life interrogating himself and others, stripping away layers of assumed knowledge, and ultimately arriving at an awareness of his own ignorance. For Socrates, such self-awareness was both a hard-won achievement and a moral stance: recognizing the limits of his knowledge was the foundation for genuine wisdom.

The contrast with the contemporary condition is sharp. Bloom observes that today, even young students readily declare their ignorance, wearing it as a badge of sophistication or humility, often without the labor that Socrates endured. This signals a shift from intellectual humility rooted in investigation, to a form of facile relativism or skepticism in which all claims to knowledge are treated as equally uncertain, and so the work of examining, questioning, and seeking truth is short-circuited.

Bloom’s rhetorical question, “How did it become so easy?” is laced with irony. The hard attainment of Socratic ignorance is rendered trivial. Instead of each generation painstakingly discovering its own ignorance through questioning and intellectual struggle, the posture is quickly adopted without inquiry. This cheapened humility equates not-knowing with wisdom, overlooking the disciplined effort and uncomfortable confrontation with our own assumptions that Socrates embodied.

At a deeper level, Bloom is critiquing a culture that valorizes openness, skepticism, and the equal plausibility of all perspectives to the extent that the search for truth appears naive. Students are sometimes taught that certainty is dangerous or dogmatic, and so they bypass the arduous process of justification and debate. The Socratic path involved an endless quest, a refusal to accept easy answers coupled with the aspiration that, through dialogue, some truths can emerge. Bloom laments that what was once the summit of philosophical self-awareness has now become a shortcut, devoid of the rigor and passion that gives such awareness meaning.