Success Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom’s line isn’t a gentle plea for literacy; it’s a warning shot at a culture he thinks has mislaid its depth perception. “Enfeebles the vision” frames reading as a kind of moral and intellectual eyesight: without “good books” you don’t merely lack information, you lose range. You can still see, but only up close - politics as chatter, pleasure as default, life as whatever scrolls past today.

The more interesting knife twist is the “most fatal tendency”: presentism, the conviction that the here and now is self-sufficient. Bloom treats that belief as not just naive but dangerous, because it severs the individual from any standard bigger than appetite or fashion. If all there is is what’s trending, then nothing can really judge you - not the past, not tradition, not hard-won arguments about virtue, justice, love, or the good life. “Good books” function as an antidote precisely because they refuse to flatter the reader’s moment. They smuggle in rival realities: other moral vocabularies, older anxieties, alternative models of human excellence.

Context matters: Bloom wrote amid late-20th-century American university battles over the canon, relativism, and what he saw as the hollowing-out of liberal education. This sentence carries that fight in miniature. The subtext is polemical: the decline isn’t accidental; it’s a self-reinforcing cycle where cultural amnesia produces narrower lives, which then demand even less of education.

There’s also a strategic ambiguity in “good books.” Bloom doesn’t list them here, because the argument needs “good” to feel like a category we’ve forgotten how to recognize. That’s the provocation: if you bristle at the phrase, he’s already diagnosing you.