More Paglia Love

It's so refreshing to agree with someone at least partially that I hardly mind that 85% of the time it's Camille Paglia, Regina Lesbona, the new age realist yin to my pomocon yang. The overlapping portion of our Venn diagram gains exciting new contents every few months, and now to an ardent appreciation for Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul" I may add the following:

As an atheist, I wasn't offended by Romney's omission of nonbelievers from his narrative of American history. On the contrary, I agree with him that the founders of the U.S. social experiment were Christians (even if many were intellectual deists) and that our separation of church and state entails the rejection of an official, government-sanctioned creed rather than the obligatory erasure of references to God in civic life.

Finally! How refreshing. Of course, though, there's always a 'but':

But what does Romney mean by the ongoing threat of a new "religion of secularism"? The latter term needs amplification and qualification. In my lecture on religion and the arts in America earlier this year at Colorado College, I argued that secular humanism has failed, that the avant-garde is dead, and that liberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe. But primary and secondary education, which should provide an entree to great art and thought, has declined into trivialities and narcissistic exercises in self-esteem.

This is great and full of integrity until the last sentence quoted here. I wonder how we are supposed to educate primary and secondary school kids into the 'grandeur of man' and the 'vast mystery of the universe' without adding, at taxpayer expense, state-sponsored sex play to the more typical trivialities of in-class ego welfare. I suppose part of the answer is more private school, but if there's any private school I'd keep my kids away from it'd be run by brilliant lesbian older women whose curriculum supplies a double-headed dose of top-flight intellectation and physical education of the kind that will probably become typical for a certain element of the upcoming World Elite. A highly refined bisexuality as a mark of nobility is already being beta-tested among our celebrity girl class. Once we remember how to adore the male sex object with equal fervor, things will really take off. But where was I?

Oh yes -- God. Man-worship, even when combined with universe-worship, can't but exclude the capacity to worship a Creator of all that has been Created. It's unclear to me why Paglia won't admit and account for this loss. Maybe she thinks it's minor, and, I suppose, as a matter of direct effects it may be. Tocqueville thought so, probably. But as a matter of indirect effects it seems to me to push everyone, or everyone but a very kooky and tiny elite of supersmart humanists who have lost the urge to rape and kill, toward adopting the sort of habits and outlooks that undermine the worship of anything.

But I hate to nitpick when Paglia's so clearly on the right side:

Popular culture, once emotionally vibrant and collective in impact (from Hollywood movies to rock music), has waned into flashy, transient niche entertainment. The young, who are masters of ever-evolving personal technology, are besieged by the siren call of materialism. In this climate, it is selfish and shortsighted for liberals to automatically define religion as a social problem that needs suppression or eradication. Without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs -- including the tranquilizers that seem near universal among the status-addled professional class of the Northeastern elite.

Even if she'd transform my daughter into a pansexual pantheist Blake scholar, Paglia'd never let her become an It Girl, and that seems like a net plus for everyone.

UPDATE: Nice round of reax to Paglia playing out at Rod's shop.

Comments

[Andy]

I think you misread Paglia slightly. Between the sentence about substituting Art and Nature for God and the sentences about education there is a paragraph break. I don't think these thoughts are connected. Ms Paglia is saying that she personally subscribes to a sort of pantheism, but she isn't suggesting that her views should be promoted as some sort of civil religion.

My guess is that, in Paglia's ideal world, religion would be taught in schools, but as literature rather than dogma. We would be presented with the great works of western art along with the religious views of the artists.

[drbk]

what is this wierd fear/obsession with bisexuality you have? Like its worse than being exclusively gay, because it represents some horrifyingly disorderly breakdown of sacred categories? I never knew being "gay" was so sacred to right-wingers like you.

[Joules]

People often say "you have a fear and obsession with..." to imply that the person to whom they are speaking is attracted to the activity they are criticizing. This gets in the way of good discussion, I think. For my two cents' worth, I think bisexuality suggests further confusion of mind/personality/sexuality than homosexuality.