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.
i think she is loyal to a phantom Democratic party that hasn’t existed in some time, if ever. probably a classic liberal, not a Dem.
CP bookmark
Why? What has Kamala Harris accomplished thus far that would cause Ms. Paglia to believe her last few years of life would be enriched (literally or figuratively) by a Kamala Harris Presidency?
She voted for Bernie. She thought Kamala might be a better, younger Bernie.
I suspect you're looking for too much in her statement. If you hear about somebody from your party who manages to get elected someplace and people are talking him or her up, you might have high hopes ... until you learn more about the politician in question. That's a pretty common experience.
I enjoy reading her commentary but she is truly intellectually inconsistent!
2 without a doubt in my mind.
That the categories I mentioned above are your endowments rather than your accomplishments, cannot be disputed.
That is not to say that you have no choices, or that your choices have not shaped --- as well as proceeded from--- who you "are." Everything we think, intend, say, and do, is both gift and task. But first, and enduringly, it's gift. And to be "task," you have to know what these gifts of yours are good for. (As in "good scissors.") How do you know you're a good man if you don't know what you're for? Anyone can just follow that they think will be self-fulfilling. Anybody can be Harvey Weinstein. Paradoxically, a world full of self-actualizing individuals, defining "good" and "evil" for themselves, and fulfilling themselves under the assumption they owe no "subservience" to anybody because they are "freeborn," would be unlivable..
Then I thought, "I can not make YOU a reuben sandwich and YOU can't give ME a coupla minutes." That's the way it goes,for contingent beings like ourselves...
Is this a good pair of scissors? It's very poor for hammering in quarter-rounds. Useless for opening tuna cans. No good for pillowing your head while falling asleep. No good as a writing instrument. No good as a spouse. No good as a god. But it will cut paper and cloth: yes, it's a good pair of scissors.
Are you a good man?
None of this is really answerable, I think, unless you know what a man is for.
I already wasted a lot of time with Nietzsche and Sartre> They're about as good for my journey as Pauline Reage.
If you switch them around they might make more sense "o)
I have enormous respect for Camille. She needs to be read and listened to, widely. Her wit is sharp and she nails the “new left” brilliantly. She loves Peterson because she enjoys bright people with depth, no matter their ideology - it’s the exchange of thoughts and humor and differing ideas that challenge and interest her.
As a country we need more of her, fewer of Hillary. I had several friends like her- and they were real friends- years back. We’d argue and debate and then go out to dinner. Life was larger then, and much larger than politics. We’ve become very small and limited and insular.
I guess you’re right. It could mean more like, “I hoped she might be a real presidential contender,” as opposed to, “I had reason to believe she might accomplish something specific that I care about.”
This makes me think that we've been arguing about different things without making the necessary distinctions.
I have been regarding "subservience" and "humility" in this discussion, anyhow, in a filial sense. Which is to say, a way that is conformed to reality. "Humility" in this context is practically a synonym for "realism." We did not make ourselves, we are contingent beings and therefore indebted beings, we live "referred lives", which is to say, lives that refer, inescapably, to others; and we are born into a society and a world we did not make.
We are not born "free". We are born into a predicament.
Your kids will say, as you yourself said, or at least thought, as a kid: "Why do I have to live in this world I did not make?" "What do you expect *me* to do?" That's the predicament.
I agree with that. However, I also think that the most common experience of human beings over time is "subservience, enforced by physical or mental threats." To conclude from this that humans are "born free" in any sense is far from obvious.
Great. Glittering Images is at my local library in Georgia. I’ll check it out tomorrow. Thanks.
A society pervaded by this "filiality" would be just and good, but it is a justice never perfectly expressed on this earth. We live with, at best, some approximation of this justice. We enact, at best, some approximation of it. We desire it.
Hungering and thirsting for justice is as good as it gets in this life. Those who hunger and thirst are called "blessed."
During Pat's school meeting, I was translating next Sunday's lectionary; it helps me with my grammar and vocabulary, as well as focusing the mind. In the first reading from Baruch, it says (my translation), "God will give you a name forever: 'Peace in justice and glory in reverence'."
Just beautiful.
“But it is extremely mystifying that with her towering intellect she continues to adhere to the intellectually bankrupt Democrat lie.”
That is attributable to her same-sex attraction disorder.
Bkmk
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