THE CLOSING OF THE WESTERN MIND 

The triumph of Western liberal education is 'value relativism'. 

Kulananda wonders how it will get along with Buddhism. 

You could be anywhere in the Western world. You have just led a session of
the metta-bhavana practice at an introductory class at the local FWBO
centre. Everyone has appreciated your efforts to encourage them to cultivate
feelings of warmth, goodwill, and friendliness to all living beings. But during
the question-and-answer session at the end of the class the stock question
arises: 'Surely all religions are ultimately the same. Aren't they all, after all,
heading in the same direction, toward the same ultimate truth?' 

This situation arises again and again and, for Order members who are new
to teaching meditation, represents one of the first hurdles on the path to
becoming a good Dharma teacher: how do you break the cultural taboo
against the. idea of real differences in certainty and belief whilst at the same
time not appearing to be merely intolerant. 

Buddhism is significantly different from Christianity. They are not both
heading in the same direction. And yet, these days, to assert that view with
any conviction will usually provoke accusations of narrowness and
intolerance. As a decent and kindly meditation teacher one is naturally
expected to subscribe to the commonly held view that any perceived
differences between people and ideas are merely manifestations of different
perspectives: no one is right and no one is wrong. To think that you are right
is the only wrong. 

Professor Allan Bloom, an American university teacher of many years
experience, has written at length about such issues in his book, The
Closing of the American Mind. Professor Bloom has very clear ideas about
the task facing a university teacher. As he puts it: 'Attention to the young,
knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of
the craft. One must spy out and elicit those hungers. For there is no real
education which does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is
trifling display.... Most students will be content with what our present
considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as
family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small
number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous.... Without their
presence, no society-no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how
technically adept or full of tender sentiments, can be called civilized.' 

Professor Bloom has a very high ideal for university education. He sees it in
terms of encouraging the dormant individuality of his students, and this
individuality requires the formation of judgments: the discrimination of right
from wrong, truth from falsehood. Striving to live by the truth, for Bloom, is
the heart of true autonomy. And yet, in his experience of the contemporary
American campus, almost all students believe, or say that they believe, that
truth is only relative. Whether they are theists or atheists, to the Left or the
Right, whether they intend to become scientists, humanists, professionals,
or businessmen, be they rich or poor, they are all unified in their relativism 

These attitudes are not confined to American university campuses. They are
increasingly endemic to the whole modern world. The belief seems to be
that relativism in the face of conflicting claims to truth, various ways of life,
and kinds of human being, is the great insight of our times. Those holding
strong beliefs are perceived to be the only real social danger. 

When their relativism is challenged his students respond with disbelief and
indignation tinged with fear, for the danger they have been taught to fear
from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is seen to be
necessary to 'openness', and openness is the virtue, the only virtue, which
the modern world is willing to sanctify. The study of history and of culture is
seen to indicate that the world was mad in the past: men always thought
they were right-and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, xenophobia,
racism, and chauvinism. The point, it is now believed, is not to correct the
mistakes of the past and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right
at all. 

Confronted by such bland relativism, Bloom poses questions to his
students, designed to expose the conflicting claims of different value
systems and to make them think. 'If you had been a British administrator in
India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow
at the funeral of a man who had died?'. Openness born of relativism provides
his students with no means of addressing this sort of problem. Openness is
the only virtue with which they have been inculcated. They lack the
framework of values by means of which such questions could be addressed.

Bloom knows that we are likely to bring what are only our prejudices to the
judgment of what is alien to us. Avoiding that, he avers, is one of the main
purposes of education. But trying to prevent it by removing the authority of
our capacity to reason is to render ineffective the instrument that can
correct our prejudices. True openness is rooted in a real desire to know, and
thus in an awareness of one's current ignorance. To deny the possibility of
knowing good from bad is actually to suppress true openness. It allows us
to avoid a confrontation with our moral ignorance and leaves unchallenged
our own prejudices. 

The process of the gradual subordination of the principle of fact to
value-judgment in its metaphysical, scientific, and moral dimensions is
concisely traced by Bloom in his book, and although one may have some
hesitations concerning his underlying political agenda, the tale he has to tell
repays close study. 

As Buddhists, we are concerned to develop Perfect Vision-knowledge and
vision of things as they really are. Perfect Vision,-Bodhi, Enlightenment-, is
not achieved overnight. It is the culmination of a long process of replacing
'wrong view' (micchaditthi) with 'right view' (sammaditthi), discriminating true
from false, right from wrong, good from bad, in all areas of our life. Buddhism
recognizes that to know the truth is not a simple matter. Ultimately only an
Enlightened being, a Buddha, can really know the existential truth of every
situation. But between us and Enlightenment there lies a path, the Dharma,
which reliably leads in the direction of truth. 

This path is marked by degrees. Some attitudes, actions, and beliefs
accord more nearly with the goal than do others, and we should feel free to
use the faculty of reason to distinguish between them. Seeing
Enlightenment as the highest possibility for human beings, Buddhism looks
into the individual human psyche and at the wider human situation and
proclaims a system of values that is universally valid. All beings seek the
cessation of suffering which Enlightenment represents, and all beings will
benefit by moving closer to, rather than away from, that goal. It is by this
light that Buddhists make moral and metaphysical judgments. 

In taking our stand upon the absolute and universal value of Enlightenment
we Buddhists would seem, necessarily, to be putting ourselves at odds with
a major ideological current in the modern world. We believe that, even
though it might be very difficult, it is vitally important that we seek to develop
clarity concerning questions of value: right and wrong, good and bad. This
process, indeed, lies at the very heart of the Buddhist spiritual life and it
could very well be an important gift that modern Buddhists now have to offer
the rather bewildered world we live in. 

This being the case we need to be resolute and outspoken. We should take
a firm stand against woolly thinking and confusion - confusion which leads
so easily to those forms of injustice which wear kindly, liberal masks. We
need to speak out against value-denying pseudo-egalitarianism which, in
denying the pertinence of judgments of difference, reduces all human
thought and activity to a single plane of indifferent valuelessness. We need
to be on our guard against the all-pervasive manifestations of the doctrines
of relativism with which so much of modern thinking is saturated. 

Accurate judgments of value are very hard to make. To make them we need
to be wise. What we require of our education system is that it should
dedicate itself to the long and hard task of the cultivation of wisdom. And
yet it seems to be heading full pelt in the opposite direction, teaching either
forms of highly specialized materialism or, in the liberal arts and humanities,
a value denying nihilism. In the face of this onslaught it is the task of
modern Buddhists to assert positive, spiritual values.