"Nihilism without terror of the abyss"

That's how Allan Bloom characterized the mentality of the typical university student in 1982.

There's an interesting discussion going on at The Corner and NRO-- prompted by this Jim Sleeper piece and Roger Kimball's response -- about how to interpret Bloom's conservatism. See here, here, here, and here. Ross Douthat at The American Scene comments thoughtfully here.

Bloom was an intellectual and an elitist (in the best sense), and he was tempermentally at odds with the religious populism (for lack of a better phrase) that marks a faction of the current conservative movement, but any attempt to claim him as a man of the left is bound to founder upon -- among other things -- Bloom's antipathy to modernism and his repudiation of the wholesale trashing of the soul that was accomplished by the various philistine "rebellions" of the Sixties. By any reasonable standard, Bloom belongs to the "conservatives," and the recent attempt to appropriate him resembles a phenomenon that Bloom himself analyzed -- the left's attempts to bend Nietzsche to their own ends. That modern-day liberalism is on the verge of becoming "Bloomianized," just as the left was previously "Nietzscheanized," is a testament to the power of Bloom's ideas. The strategy seems to be not exactly "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," but rather "if you can't beat 'em, make it seem as though they've joined you."

Finally, I love Bloom's phrase "nihilism without terror of the abyss." It perfectly encapsulates the kind of meaninglessness on the cheap that so many people seem to go in for these days. Nihilism without the abyss is like faith without the leap, and the result is a world bereft of either tragic nihilism or true faith. What's the ultimate cultural expression of "nihilism without terror of the abyss"? Seinfeld. Not that there's anything wrong with that.