Aging & Wisdom Quote by Allan Bloom

In Bloom's hands, "an age of reason" is less a victory lap than a danger sign. The line pivots on a paradox: reason, treated as an unquestioned sovereign, can become its own kind of dogma. Bloom is warning that rationality unmoored from larger questions of meaning, virtue, and ends doesn't stay neutral; it slides into technocracy, careerism, and a thin procedural mindset that can justify almost anything as long as it "works."

The intent is institutional and moral at once. He isn't romanticizing irrationality. He's arguing that universities shouldn't merely generate more clever arguments or more efficient expertise; they should cultivate habits that keep reason honest. That includes exposing students to the strongest rival visions of the good life, not to "balance" them but to force reason to confront its blind spots: reductionism, smug certainty, and the temptation to treat human beings as problems to be optimized.

The subtext carries Bloom's broader critique from The Closing of the American Mind: modern higher education, in his view, mistakes openness for emptiness and skepticism for sophistication. When reason becomes purely instrumental, it can't defend itself against fashionable cynicism or ideological capture because it no longer knows what it's defending beyond process.

Context matters: post-1960s campus politics, the rise of specialization, and an academy increasingly oriented toward research output and professional credentials. Bloom's line is a plea for the university as a braking system, not an accelerator: a place where the culture's prized tool is interrogated, disciplined, and reattached to questions it would rather declare "unscientific."