There's that pesky Kantian enlightenment, still trying to spread o'er the world. But will the dream live us? Camille Paglia presents another smooth and graceful brief for the limitations of practical reason as the lodestar of our lives:
Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.
The whole piece is putatively about the way art and religion have intertangled in Christendom and post-Christendom (and everywhere, everywhen), but the subtextual contemplation of the pathologies of Catholicism is even more intriguing. And then of course you get classic lines like these:
And I would question whether Mapplethorpe's cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.
Yet the Paglia Protocol, for all it's worth, runs us headlong toward the eclectic pseudotheism of Jungian psychology -- a therapeutic use of faith entirely in accord, as Rorty never wanted to admit, with pragmatic reason. Alex Wendt, that amateur philosopher and IR genius, understood the therapeutic uses of science itself:
The emergence of an international public sphere signals the emergence of joint awareness, however embryonic at this stage, of how their own ideas and behavior make the logic of anarchy a self-fulfilling prophecy. With that joint awareness comes a potential for self-intervention designed to change the logic and bring international society under a measure of rational control. In individuals we might call this 'therapy' or 'character planning'; in social systems like international society it would be called 'constitutional design', 'engineering', or 'steering' (Social Theory of International Politics 376).
But in privileging of a scientific understanding of friendship and truth, Wendt missed the way therapeutic logics keep bringing other understandings back into culture. For now I'll have to leave that first claim unelaborated. (Maybe this is a relief to you.) But as far as the second, other concepts of friendship and other understandings of verity -- like those you get from philosophy, politics, or religion -- are placed under great pressure, and almost squeezed out entirely, under the logic of Wendt's academically popular brand of secular practical reason. This makes it radically incomplete, as Paglia, Jung, Obama, Huckabee, and others reveal to us all the time. The inability of secular scientists to fully model therapeutic logics blinds them to the way especially religious or metaphysical conceptions of verity may be integrated into frameworks of therapy that end up challenging the status of empirical truth itself. Perhaps more painfully, acolytes of secular practical reason must lower their expectations as encounters with devotees of political, philosophical, and religious conceptions of truth and friendship fail to result in transformative social progress -- or turn (back) into anxious neoconservatives and neoliberals.
"There can be no doubt of it: chivalry is now thoroughly dead. Our one preoccupation is to be safe. We don't know what we love, and if we do we don't dare mention it. We are willing to become anything, to be turned into any sort of worm, by the will of the majority. We are afraid of starving, of standing alone; above all we are afraid of having to fight. And when nevertheless we are forced to fight, we do so without chivalry. We do not talk of justice, but of interests. We have become very numerous, we have established a great many industries, we have encouraged a great many peoples to wish themselves very rich. All this has to be maintained, it has a great momentum, which we cannot resist. And we need our neighbour's land and markets and colonies; at least we need a strip along their borders, so as to be able to expand a little, and to breathe. For as it is, we are dreadfully crowded and insecure and unhappy; as if it made any essential difference whether 20 million more people read the same newspaper, and thought and said the same thing at the same moment. Is there in this megalomania a remnant of imitation of religious propaganda? Is it for the salvation of foreigners' souls that we wish to annex and to standardise them? Is it to prevent those who are unlike ourselves from being eternally damned that we long to exterminate them?
Meantime our society has lost its own soul. The landscape of Christendom is being covered with lava; a great eruption and inundation of brute humanity threatens to overwhelm all the treasures that artful humanity has created. Brute humanity has the power to destroy polite humanity, because it retains the material equipment of modern industry which has recently grown upon man like fresh hide, horns and claws."
George Santayana, Dominations and Powers, 1951
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