Camille Paglia on her new book and other stuff

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Fascinating interview (11 min). Curious as to just how much she's on to in terms of the notion that the sociology's about to recompact.

Great interview-essay with Camille Paglia over here:

https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camill ... der-world/

It's very wide ranging — I'm only halfway through it so far. One excerpt:

Interviewer: The #MeToo movement seems to have many features of a moral panic, for example, there are exhortations to “believe all women” without relying on due process, and a great deal of weight is being placed on weak evidence, such as eyewitness testimony, and so forth. Would you agree that we are seeing a moral panic, the type of which has been depicted in Miller’s The Crucible, or Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon?

Paglia: The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed.

I’m not sure that I would find “moral panic” in our recent glut of accusations and public histrionics. It is obviously a positive development that sexual abuse is no longer hidden or tolerated. In 1986, I developed moderate sexual harassment guidelines in my “Women and Sex Roles” class and presented them to the college administration for adoption. I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.

The actual problems in play are complex enough that most people will generally cop out and jump on some tribal bandwagon. The only thing I'm sympathetic to is the idea that things really need to hurt in a culture, in serious ways, before power structures shift - or at least that's true from where we stand at present time.

I'd actually be in favor of a rethink of capitalism, ie. considering ways to make it less Darwinian and let the awareness that it's success is eating its own foundations (ie. essentially as a workfare system - which it will function less and less well as as it gains in efficiency). An actual 'Game B' might come with the understanding that there are useful things people can do - especially as it concerns issues of the commons - that aren't involved in manufacturing, IT, programming, or finance which are important enough to the quality of what we have to pay people properly for them. We're going through a crisis of valuation (scalability and novelty being everything) and I think Jordan Peterson nails it when he mentions that women are stuck with really a horrible economic situation - ie. to either strap themselves with all of the corporate responsibilities of men and forego motherhood or to be mothers but simultaneously shoot themselves in the foot career-wise, and if they were to fight for anything it should be a fight to remodel the system in such a way that better respects the course of fully lived human lives. Government does that terribly, finding ways to rethink economics and even rethink how economic competition and incentive structures can be routed seems like it would be a really good idea right now.

here's from the wikipedia entry of Germaine Greer, a major voice of second wave reminism.... I'm sure JP say "radical feminist" with this spireful tone of voice he also has when he says "postmodernists":

Greer is a liberation (or radical) rather than equality feminist.[a] Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation", she wrote in The Whole Woman (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual."

Well... she was right, and JP agrees with her. Except, where JP is only offering women to embrace being unfree women, rather than opting to be unfree men, Greer demanded a third option. I can understand why she'd do that.

Same as JP, Paglia says a lot of things that sound right, but then she goes off into strange rants. I saw her speak on art (apparently she's an teaching at the university of the arts, Philadelphia) - and ended in praising star wars episode 3 as the greatest artwork of our times.
yes, episode 3.
I fell asleep watching it, and didn't see a reason to rewatch what I had missed.
Her explanation was the epicness of this fight of Anakin against ... uhm. Obi wan? I don't know. The forces of good and evil in an epic battle in the mouth of a volcano. That's what she praised it for.
But for good and evil to believably exist, you need to create a whole universe in which manichean dualism makes sense. Our universe is so much more complex, to the point that Star Wars is just epically meaningless.
Since I saw that interview, I always wonder what goes on in her head... but I'm convinced she's argueing from a standpoint from which she reaches conclusions that I occasionally agree with out of coincidence, not because I agree with her values or thinking.
So when she says things like women need to take responsibility for themselves and stop blaming men, I agree, but I am sure I can not certain I'm agreeing with her reasoning behind that.

Where it's tough to want to follow into going back and forth on these details I think is best described in what you said about Manichean dualism being a huge paper mache monster.

We need not just a new way of thinking of these things but a way that actually broadens out and re-homogenizes the culture. We can't say much to absolute meaning, we can say that there's rather intense need for personal meaning and for a great many people (I can't say for sure most but definitely close to it) the lack of it is like suffocation or drowning. The 20th century seemed like it was the 'ends justify the means' century and I think what shreds of that motif that are still left hanging around to go as fast as possible. We, or at least those who are planning to in any way be at the helm of culture, need to stare unflinchingly into truth and hash out agreements with reality that wok. That's what the IDW has on offer and I'd think anyone else whose doing that would generally role into their ranks in some way even without Eric's direct blessing.

I guess I'm also not that worried if conversations like the ones Jordan or Camille have don't go perfectly. Heck, I was listening to Jordan in Oslo and he made a pronouncement about disliking pugs - I could care less that he did so whether or not it impacts his ability to relate to Count Dankula. The substance of the idea is that hierarchy is a part of human beings grouping and since we can't get rid of them we have to make the decision to keep them geared toward competence far more than toward power to the best of our ability. I don't see there being many lucid arguments to be had against that idea.

Gabor Mate had a few choice criticisms of Peterson, and I can't say I necessarily disagree with his observations - some of which he's far more qualified to make than I'd figure I am. I would love to see people like him take a chisel to Jordan's ideas in the same way that he did with Sam Harris for four live events.

JP would answer that he doesn't so much advocate for christianity, but for his interpretation of what the jesus myth encodes - a story about the best person one could imagine, being tortured and killed. because life is suffering.
Peterson also doesn't attack Marx or Marx's writing, at all. But ONLY his interpretation of it. Which actually isn't so much Marx as it is Nietzsche's description of Christianity. Which is interesting.
I'd love to hear Peterson try to talk about commodity fetishism or surplus value.
I think I mentioned it before: he interprets Ideas and Movements on individual psychological motivations.
All of the Nazis he explains by the personal resentment that drove Hitler. Not a word about the millions of people who just lived their lives at a certain point in history, were taught certain things in school, didn't question their society much and just wanted to work themselves up in their given dominance hierarchy.
Here's a question: if you want to show you're competent, but the hierarchy demands you do that by guarding a concentration camp as a step in your career, is rejecting the hierarchy altogether a reasonable thing to do? Let's imagine this is not a corrupt hierarchy. Imagine the best concentration camp guard will get promoted, based on comptence, and run the extermination scheme, and fulfill a function that is seen as honourable in his society, and get rewarded etc..... You don't have to be resentful, individually, for that. You are just a child of your time, trying to work yourself up the ladder to earn money and get some fine woman...


I was (ironically) mumbling "damn resentment-driven postmodernist" the second Maté used the word "simulacrum".
The way he thinks about Peterson is interesting and elaborate, though. I mean ... I would have said "Peterson always seems to be just a few inches away from saying: sometimes a child just needs a good smacking to understand where the line is" - and I would have either not gotten answers or been attacked for my interpretation/impression.
So... thanks, Gabor Maté, for this more civil, more learned way to put things.

I don't think that's even quite a hypothetical. See these sunny/happy SS officer's families on break from duty, and I've heard there's quite a lot of this sort of memorabilia out there:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/laughi ... witz-1942/

I think back to John Gray's mention of what the Christian/Protestant newcommers to Tasmania did to the natives there, and I also think of those old stories of David being asked to go out and get 200 Philistine foreskins and coming back with 400. Yes, it seems like for the longest time we've been willing to do just about anything that our incentive structures would demand and our capacity, really need, for self-delusion has been great at making up the difference on hiding what should be horror and repulsion and giving us instead a warm and fuzzy feeling (Peterson's probably right about the serotonin piece on this) that we're in a good, respectable place in our hierarchy and doing things that are seen as respectable.

On the flip side, and I can't always tell how much of this is my autism and how much of this is just me being deeply different in ways I can't help, I've seen where being a decent human being can get you treated like your the scum of the earth - ie. get taken for weakness, get taken for you being a buttkiss, and all kinds of anything that people will do when they notice increasingly that you're not exactly like them.

This dynamic has been so bad (ie. me as the kindly monster) over the course of my life and a cause for such ongoing inward crisis and misery that I've taken something of a perverse pleasure in retooling Matthew 5:29-30:

'If your right eye causes you to not to conform, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to not conform, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.'

This is where I sort of have to agree with Gray that there's something of a practical function that sweeps through and that our sense of morality is a vapor, it's almost never about absolutes and more about what the terrain your in is doing. The moment people do realize what the terrain is doing, if they're lucky somewhere in childhood and in a way that occurs without their need to think about it, every impulse becomes absolute and total matching to their peers in interests, in what they'll watch or won't watch, what they'll listen to or not listen to, what they know or don't know, and there's almost a fight to get as far into the center off the bell curve as possible. If that early development apparatus for selling yourself out as far as possible for safety isn't in place you have to be incredibly competent, and incredibly tough, to survive. It's that apparatus though, for conformity first, that sets up cultures for such absurdities as vibrantly happy SS families on holiday.

Back on this note, someone in my Facebook circle posted an article on Giacomo Leopardi's work. A lot of it rang bells with me and I'm seeing where I definitely need to put him on my reading list:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-read-the-nih ... ardi-today

while reading John Gray, I felt vindicated in my pessimism towards the current era. Combined with Yuval Harari's books, it's quite a potent mixture.
I have a feeling Leopardi might fit well in there.... which is why I don't feel the urgent need to add him to my list.
Lately, I'm looking for new ways to see the world, rather than confirmation/mere elaboration of my judgements.
Timothy Morton is good for that, particularly his demand to take the aesthetic dimension on board when thinking about the environment...
But also good for new ideas: Bruno Latour

I was listening to Sam Harris w/ Johann Hari earlier today and I couldn't help but laugh where Johann brings up that people take doses of psilocybin to quit smoking, have cessation success proportionate to the depth of the mystical experience, then have to go back to work in environments that force them to give up the lessons they learned and often times relapse in whatever it was they were trying to quit. If we as human beings weren't good at destroying each other I do sometimes wonder what would be left of most people.

Yeah... If the epiphanies gained on drugs were to stand the reality-test ... Haha. I just realized the reality-test is probablymore difficult to pass than the acid-test...
Also: I managed to quit smoking. For years. But I didn't like it. At some stressful occasion, I started again. And I feel more of myself since I started again. Nicotine is a strange drug...

The trouble with drug epiphanies is that they have a way of bringing you back to certain fundamental truths (more hippy-ish and positive ones, of the sort that you can get from considering humanity in abstract rather than having your face in the trenches) and things that could be maximized if life wasn't beset with constant struggle with and against other people. It's important to be reminded that such things provisionally exist occasionally but it seems like we have a long way to go in figuring out how to bring those things to flourish as a culture and too many people get their rocks off gouging each other at the present time for things to change much.

yeah... I'm a Rousseauian, as long as I stay indoors.
when I go out, I turn into a Hobbesian.