The following is another quote from The Closing of the American Mind. There will probably be more quotes in the future because it is such a good read. This one is about the disappearance of Family in America. My friend Nate at The Treekiller Press asked me to write a review of the book. So that may show up sometime too.
“The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and perform its function.
Its base is merely bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation of civilized human beings. In teaching a language and providing names for all things, it transmits an interpretation of the order of the whole of things. It feeds on books, in which the little polity–the family–believes, which tell about right and wrong, good and bad and explain why they are so. The family requires a certain authority and wisdom about the ways of the heavens and of men. The parents must have knowledge of what has happened in the past, and prescriptions for what ought to be, in order to resist the philistinism or wickedness of the present. Ritual and ceremony are now often said to be necessary for the family, and they are now lacking.
The family, however, has to be a sacred unity believing in the permanence of what it teaches, if its ritual and ceremony are to express and transmit the wonder of the moral law, which it alone is capable of transmitting and which makes it special in a world devoted to the humanly, all too humanly, useful.
When that belief disappears, as it has, the family has, at best, a transitory togetherness. People sup together, play together, travel together, but they do not think together. Hardly any homes have any intellectual life whatsoever, let alone one that informs the vital interests of life. Educational TV marks the high tide for family intellectual life.
The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, “culture,” i.e. boring.
As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than information. With the “information explosion,” tradition has become superfluous. As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the kids. In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, on that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and–as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible–provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing.
And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for the to be wise–as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise.
Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.”
Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (pg.57-58)