Alan Bloom, perhaps modern education’s greatest post-war critic, wrote presciently on Western elites’ decaying moral and intellectual fibre. Bloom’s 1987 best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, parsed the corrosive effect the pervasive ethic moral relativism was having on student bodies at the elite universities where he taught.

None of the foul, wicked manifestations of antisemitism on campuses across the Western world since October 7 would have surprised Bloom, an American Jew born and raised in the Midwest. And the wanton dumbness of the nascent pro-Hamas sentiment that’s sweeping across the global education landscape wouldn’t have surprised him either; his book’s title was, after all, prophetic. It’s one thing to indulge a childish lust for rebellion and quite another to rationalise gruesome premeditated rape and murder as justifiable actions in a righteous war.

If nothing else, campus antisemitism is stupid, illogical, and unreasoned. It does not reveal its supporters’ broadening intellectual capacity, but rather their reduction to pre-rational, pre-civilisational tribalist idiocy.

Moral relativists, of course, don’t see themselves this way. On the contrary, their self-purported virtue lies in a conception of reasoning unencumbered by the petty restraints of custom and empiricism. Who cares if we can actually see the bodies of decapitated Jewish children…? When reason has left the body for the realm of unencumbered thought, the sight of bloody tragedy in the real world becomes but a nuisance to the abstractionist’s glory in the false one.

The modern university arrives at this terrible juncture because long ago its leaders abandoned their duty – their sacred duty – to care for the souls of the young. We must tell the truth and go further: the 21st Century university is embarrassed to imagine that a soul exists at all. Such a concept, to them, is a hokey anachronism, a trite relic to be thrown into the basket of deplorables alongside fellow travellers’ religion, dress codes, hierarchy, and earnest conversation.

The implicit claim within moral relativism is that its amorality is, in itself, morally virtuous. Recognising that we human beings make value judgements, the relativist’s claim to virtue is that by declaring all things valid, modern man might escape the neutering effect of inherited custom, bias, and preference.

But this is a fallacy. Such a world exists only within a mind untethered to real life lived and experienced with real people. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe Western elite universities are just unreal places – sinecures for the old or conforming; expensive and stressful social (or more properly, anti-social) clubs for the young. Do the indolent professors who abandon the field of laissez-faire to unchallenged and dangerous intellectual currents actually see the tortured bodies of Jewish victims? Perhaps they really don’t. Perhaps they observe, mentally sketch their outlines, and rationalise the numerical problem of bodies and bricks and missiles and mortars. But they don’t truly see.

Certainly, a tragically large – and growing – number of students don’t truly see either. Seeing – in its full etymological import – demands grasping, knowing, understanding, having revealed to oneself, and so very importantly, experiencing that which one beholds.

Alan Bloom knew our elite universities would eventually lead students to functional blindness. But Bloom’s original title, Souls Without Longing, was intended to penetrate farther than the mind’s eye. His hypothesis? When university education was reduced to a relativistic, mechanistic ethos, eros – human longing for love, for wholeness, for completeness – would be starved and whither away.

In the vacuum of eros’ departure, the evil on campus this month has revealed a worldwide diaspora of elite institutions that do not prepare their students to see. Their moral relativism has manifested as it always would – in a devolution from intellectual amorality to insidious immorality. Reason, cognisance of problems, healthy debate and the rest of those beautiful, edifying activities that universities must uphold, have been casualties along the way. Produced in their stead is a surging crowd of distressed bodies, unable to make sense of truth hiding in plain sight, running unguided by the institutions that long ago abandoned their sacred duty to cultivate the souls of the young.

Ben Crocker is Director of Special Programs at UATX, in Austin, Texas, and a Senior Fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington, DC.