Wit & Attitude Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom is twisting the knife into a very modern kind of self-confidence: the belief that if we just think hard enough, we can deduce what matters. His phrasing makes it deliberately humiliating. “Stupidiest” is almost schoolyard language, an anti-academic slap meant to puncture the prestige we attach to “reason” as a moral engine. Then he escalates to “pernicious,” signaling that this isn’t merely a category error; it’s a cultural hazard.

The intent is to draw a hard line between rational calculation and the sources of value: tradition, religion, eros, civic attachment, the thick stuff that forms commitments before we can justify them. Bloom isn’t arguing against reason as such; he’s arguing against reason’s imperial ambition. When reason pretends it can “establish values,” it smuggles in values while claiming neutrality. The subtext is a critique of liberal technocracy and the university’s posture of value-free inquiry: in trying to avoid “imposing” standards, institutions end up with an implicit standard anyway (comfort, tolerance-as-highest-good, procedural fairness) and call it rational.

Context matters: Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind lands in the Reagan-era culture-war landscape, but its target is older - the post-Enlightenment hope that ethics can be rebuilt on the model of science. He’s warning that when value questions are treated as solvable by method, people don’t become more humane; they become more malleable. If nothing is truly worth allegiance, then power - administrative, cultural, political - gets to decide what counts as worth it.