Posted on 12/04/2018 11:57:26 AM PST by Mrs. Don-o
Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting and explosive thinkers of our time. She transgresses academic boundaries and blows up media forms. She’s brilliant on politics, art, literature, philosophy, and the culture wars. She’s also very keen on the email Q and A format for interviews. So, after reading her new collection of essays, Provocations, Spectator USA sent her some questions.
You’ve been a sharp political prognosticator over the years. So can I start by asking for a prediction. What will happen in 2020 in America? Will Hillary Clinton run again?
If the economy continues strong, Trump will be reelected. The Democrats (my party) have been in chaos since the 2016 election and have no coherent message except Trump hatred. Despite the vast pack of potential candidates, no one yet seems to have the edge. I had high hopes for Kamala Harris, but she missed a huge opportunity to play a moderating, statesmanlike role and has already imprinted an image of herself as a ruthless inquisitor that will make it hard for her to pull voters across party lines.
Screechy Elizabeth Warren has never had a snowball’s chance in hell to appeal beyond upper-middle-class professionals of her glossy stripe. Kirsten Gillibrand is a wobbly mediocrity. Cory Booker has all the gravitas of a cork. Andrew Cuomo is a yapping puppy with a long, muddy bullyboy tail. Both Bernie Sanders (for whom I voted in the 2016 primaries) and Joe Biden (who would have won the election had Obama not cut him off at the knees) are way too old and creaky.
To win in the nation’s broad midsection, the Democratic nominee will need to project steadiness, substance, and warmth. I’ve been looking at Congresswoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois and Governor Steve Bullock of Montana. As for Hillary, she’s pretty much damaged goods, but her perpetual, sniping, pity-me tour shows no signs of abating. She still has a rabidly loyal following, but it’s hard to imagine her winning the nomination again, with her iron grip on the Democratic National Committee now gone.
Still, it’s in her best interest to keep the speculation fires burning. Given how thoroughly she has already sabotaged the rising candidates by hogging the media spotlight, I suspect she wants Trump to win again. I don’t see our stumbling, hacking, shop-worn Evita yielding the spotlight willingly to any younger gal.
Has Trump governed erratically?
Yes, that’s a fair description. It’s partly because as a non-politician he arrived in Washington without the battalion of allies, advisors, and party flacks that a senator or governor would normally accumulate on the long road to the White House. Trump’s administration is basically a one-man operation, with him relying on gut instinct and sometimes madcap improvisation. There’s often a gonzo humor to it — not that the US president should be slinging barbs at bottom-feeding celebrities or jackass journalists, much as they may deserve it. It’s like a picaresque novel starring a jaunty rogue who takes to Twitter like Tristram Shandy’s asterisk-strewn diary. Trump’s unpredictability might be giving the nation jitters, but it may have put North Korea, at least, on the back foot.
Most Democrats have wildly underestimated Trump from the get-go. I was certainly surprised at how easily he mowed down 17 other candidates in the GOP primaries. He represents widespread popular dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Both major US parties are in turmoil and metamorphosis, as their various factions war and realign.
The mainstream media’s nonstop assault on Trump has certainly backfired by cementing his outsider status. He is basically a pragmatic deal-maker, indifferent to ideology. As with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump rose because of decades of failure by the political establishment to address urgent systemic problems, including corruption at high levels. Democrats must hammer out their own image and agenda and stop self-destructively insulting half the electorate by treating Trump like Satan.
Does the ‘deep state’ exist? If so, what is it?
The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies.
The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.
What is true multiculturalism?
As I repeatedly argue in Provocations, comparative religion is the true multiculturalism and should be installed as the core curriculum in every undergraduate program. From my perspective as an atheist as well as a career college teacher, secular humanism has been a disastrous failure. Too many young people raised in affluent liberal homes are arriving at elite colleges and universities with skittish, unformed personalities and shockingly narrow views of human existence, confined to inflammatory and divisive identity politics.
Interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was everywhere in the 1960s counterculture, but it gradually dissipated partly because those most drawn to ‘cosmic consciousness’ either disabled themselves by excess drug use or shunned the academic ladder of graduate school. I contend that every educated person should be conversant with the sacred texts, rituals, and symbol systems of the great world religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam — and that true global understanding is impossible without such knowledge.
Not least, the juxtaposition of historically evolving spiritual codes tutors the young in ethical reasoning and the creation of meaning. Right now, the campus religion remains nihilist, meaning-destroying post-structuralism, whose pilfering god, the one-note Foucault, had near-zero scholarly knowledge of anything before or beyond the European Enlightenment. (His sparse writing on classical antiquity is risible.) Out with the false idols and in with the true!
There’s a lot of buzz about the ‘intellectual dark web’. One of its leading figures is Jordan Peterson, who is in some ways like you — he provokes, he works in an array of disciplines, he encourages individual responsibility. I saw your podcast with him. What did you make of him? Why is he so popular?
There are astounding parallels between Jordan Peterson’s work and mine. In its anti-ideological, trans-historical view of sex and nature, my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), can be viewed as a companion to Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999). Peterson and I took different routes up the mountain — he via clinical psychology and I via literature and art — but we arrived at exactly the same place.
Amazingly, over our decades of copious research, we were drawn to the same book by the same thinker — The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), by the Jungian analyst Erich Neumann. (My 2005 lecture on Neumann at New York University is reprinted in Provocations.) Peterson’s immense international popularity demonstrates the hunger for meaning among young people today. Defrauded of a genuine humanistic education, they are recognizing the spiritual impoverishment of their crudely politicized culture, choked with jargon, propaganda, and lies.
I met Peterson and his wife Tammy a year ago when they flew to Philadelphia with a Toronto camera crew for our private dialogue at the University of the Arts. (The YouTube video has had to date over a million and a half views.) Peterson was incontrovertibly one of the most brilliant minds I have ever encountered, starting with the British philosopher Stuart Hampshire, whom I heard speak impromptu for a dazzling hour after a lecture in college. In turning psychosocial discourse back toward the syncretistic, multicultural Jung, Peterson is recovering and restoring a peak period in North American thought, when Canada was renowned for pioneering, speculative thinkers like the media analyst Marshall McLuhan and the myth critic Northrop Frye. I have yet to see a single profile of Peterson, even from sympathetic journalists, that accurately portrays the vast scope, tenor, and importance of his work.
Is humanity losing its sense of humor?
As a bumptious adolescent in upstate New York, I stumbled on a British collection of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams in a secondhand bookstore. It was an electrifying revelation, a text that I studied like the bible. What bold, scathing wit, cutting through the sentimental fog of those still rigidly conformist early 1960s, when good girls were expected to simper and defer.
But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.
We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.
Paglia and Dershowitz are both left-wing in their idiosyncratic ways. Both are rare figures of honesty, though, compared to just about everyone around them.
Interview answer of the day/week/month/year!
‘Who made you?’
quite obviously my parents begat me...
‘Do you have a purpose?’
yes...to live my life as fully as possible according to the skills and tendencies I possess...
‘What are you here for?’
see my first response...
‘What are you supposed to be doing?’
see my second response...
‘Where are you going?’
am I a clairvoyant...?
‘And don’t waste our time with any Sartre or Nietzche stuff.’
you consider the study of epistemology and existentialism a waste of time...?
You had nothing to do with your coming into existence. You are not a self-invented entity. You had no choices to make about your physical, mental, or emotional characteristics, your talents, your temperament, your genetic, environmental, or social endowments, neither your nature nor your nurture, nor even your inclinations or preferences.
NOTHING you have is "from you."
The whole concept of "freeborn," it seems to me, represents a failure to grasp your own fundamental condition.
I may have misunderstood what you mean by it; so if I have been barking up the wrong tree, please redirect me and tell me what you're talking about.
I think that's very much an open question, especially if you eliminate religious revelation from the argument. (Religious revelation introduces points not revealed by pure observation.)
We are born helpless, utterly dependent on others for whom we can do nothing for years of our lives. If we are allowed to live, solely through the effort of others, do we not owe them some form of servitude, at least for a period of time, in exchange for our lives?
And on the other hand, some argue that it is parents, having inflicted life upon their children, who are in the position of being obligated to serve the children. "Why do I have to clean my room? You decided to have me!"
Hot damn, this woman has a way with words.
‘you honestly can’t think of anyone you might oughta serve?’
nope...not if the servitude is tied to threats of bodily or mental harm...
Camille supports some Dems because it allows her to critique from the Left. It’s a good position for her; who knows how she really votes.
Brilliant writer on art. I recommend her book Glittering Images which has beautiful reproductions of paintings on high-quality paper.
“The mainstream media’s nonstop assault on Trump has certainly backfired by cementing his outsider status. He is basically a pragmatic deal-maker, indifferent to ideology. As with Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump rose because of decades of failure by the political establishment to address urgent systemic problems, including corruption at high levels. Democrats must hammer out their own image and agenda and stop self-destructively insulting half the electorate by treating Trump like Satan.”
While I disagree with her Leftist ideology, she is both honest and perceptive - she pegged this one, like no one else on the Left ever has or ever will. She should probably worry about getting burned at the stake by her own crew.
Yes, but she’s Very smart; too smart to be a Leftist.
I would have LOVED to have seen a discussion between Camille Paglia and William F Buckley !!
‘If we are allowed to live, solely through the effort of others, do we not owe them some form of servitude, at least for a period of time, in exchange for our lives?’
what you have described here is most emphatically not subservience, enforced by physical or mental threats...yes, we owe those who have mentored and guided us our allegiance and loyalties...
The fact that she is a leftist suggests that the connection you posit between intelligence and political affiliation does not exist.
Camille has it right on feminism.
Thanks but life is too short to read Pags’ garbage.
‘You had no choices to make about your physical, mental, or emotional characteristics, your talents, your temperament, your genetic, environmental, or social endowments, neither your nature nor your nurture, nor even your inclinations or preferences.
I had nothing to do with who I am...? are you serious...?
‘The whole concept of “freeborn,” it seems to me, represents a failure to grasp your own fundamental condition.’
‘fundamental condition’; talk about a non referent...but I’ll take that to mean that I don’t acknowledge a divine spark in my formation, to which I would answer I am not an atheist, but an apatheist; it is not belief of it I lack, but a sense of its necessity...
Total shift of topic! I'm talking about the woman who gestated you for 9 months and gave birth to you at great risk to her life and health (except for the last ... what? 100 years of human existence). I'm talking about feeding you when you could do nothing but twitch and gasp. Changing diapers, working to provide you with food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education.
A case could be made, based strictly in human reason, that you owe those people servitude, not just "allegiance and loyalties." A case can be made that they had the right - perhaps even the obligation - to abandon you to die or to actively take your life if you proved unsatisfactory at any point. They could have in classical Greece or Rome.
In summary, I do not believe there is much support for your contention that humans are "freeborn."
And with that, I hope you have a nice evening. I have to take a son to a school meeting.
A flock of sheep in a rail car, speeding out of control down a track and the next bridge is out.
She stands and says to the other sheep; "doctor, take this and heal thyself".
2. Camille Paglia and Alan Dershowitz
You are correct, but she appears to be intellectually honest which is the difference.
If you can't admit you owe a degree of servitude and humility for at least being raised and cared for by others, then you'll remain helpless as the infant you were.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.