On March 6th, students gathered for a meeting concerning an excerpt from Allan Bloom's eye-opening polemic, the The Closing of the American Mind. In the text, Bloom decries the decline of American society, culture, and higher education in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Drawing upon his long tenure as a professor and scholar, he identifies relativism and historicism as two particularly destructive intellectual currents.
Students discussed the implications of widespread relativistic beliefs. They then debated whether an individual with a relativistic worldview is capable of fully manifesting and upholding the self-evident truths of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness enumerated by the Founders. Students identified the lack of a common moral and intellectual framework in modern American society as one of the fundamental sources of our nation's polarization.