"There are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference—promoted
with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us
be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don’t want to be
knowers—and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and
certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a
brilliant array of examples for examination. This second kind of
openness encourages the desire that animates and makes interesting every
serious student—”I want to know what is good for me, what will make me
happy”—while the former stunts that desire. Openness, as currently
conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or
worship of vulgar success, look principled. It is historicism’s ruse to
remove all resistance to history, which in our day means public
opinion, a day when public opinion already rules."
-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, p. 41
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