Camille Paglia v. The Hive

Silverfiddle Rant!

Nothing tingles my intellectual anticipation like a fresh Camille Paglia essay.

Camille Paglia is a brilliant professor who occupies that strange, abandoned no-man’s land of humanities, arts, literature and social criticism unencumbered by partisan ideology. 

She's an atheist who laments the destruction of our Judeo-Christian foundations and the concomitant rise of nihilistic nothingness. She is a lesbian who decries the passing of the classic macho, testosterone-driven manly gentleman, and she has told the #MeToos to grow up and stop infantilizing women. She has rightly pointed out that cultural vandals and moral panic peddlers have destroyed the sexual mystique that has driven male-female relationships in all cultures since the dawn of mankind.

Here are some excerpts from her latest essay. Her wisdom approaches the Talmudic...

“…secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.”

“But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature." 

"Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.”

“when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone.”

“A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.”

“Their (#MeToo movement) 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.”

“... #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track... No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.”

“What I see in both the Women’s March and #MeToo is an atavistic rediscovery by Western women of the joy of their own mutually nurturing solidarity—a primary feature of daily life during 10,000 years of the agrarian era that has been lost over the past two centuries of industrialization. As I have often noted, the sexes throughout human history actually had very little to do with each other. There was the world of men and the world of women, each with its own spheres of influence and activity. Women didn’t take men that seriously, and vice versa. ”

“What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways. Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood)."

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.”