I love Camille Paglia. But like those of many otherwise respectable people who reach beyond their particular disciplines, her musings on politics and forays into social science I find usually odious. For instance, she considers heself a libertarian (small 'L'), yet is willing to afford the government a very un-libertarian amount of space in our private lives. I wish she would stick to art history. I would even give her some space for cultural studies, as long as she can bring it back home with a tie-in to overarching themes of Western Culture as they present themselves in the mirror of art.
She wrote recently on her perceptions of the culture's declining attention spans. While I, as an easily identifiable product of Sesame Street and other Children's Television Workshop brain candy, have a reluctant desire to agree with her, a good dissection of tangents to her claim can be found here, on the web log of some Penn linguists. Good stuff!
Chomsky is the same - he seems to think that his brilliant work in linguistics qualifies him to tell us why we are all mindless dupes of the Joooos (oops, of course he really means the US military-industrial complex and all that jazz).
Paglia is becoming a reactionary in her dotage (but it does not preclude corkers like this - http://www.bu.edu/arion/paglia_cults00.htm).
Lomborg puts it nicely in the Skeptical Environmentalist (p42):
'An Assyrian stone tablet ...tells us of the obstinate feeling of decline: "Our earth is degenerate these days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching"'.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...
Posted by: Toby | April 23, 2004 at 01:33 AM