Camille Paglia, Defender of the West

By Jim on April 23rd, 2007

Good article here on Camille. I agree with her on quite a few things. Give it a read.

“I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition,” she tells me. “They reduce it all to the lowest common denominator of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That’s an extremely small-minded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture.”

Dr. Paglia, one of three judges for this year’s Hiett Prize, has been saying that for a while now, which is one reason that conservatives love her. If modernity is, as one traditionalist conservative writer put it, a “perversion of the responsibility of stewardship,” then Dr. Paglia, by championing Western culture against the sophisticated barbarians inside the academy, counts as a convicted anti-modernist.

But that wouldn’t be quite right; she’s a passionate partisan of modernist giants like Picasso, as well as low-culture rock ‘n’ roll Dionysiacs. What galls Dr. Paglia is that the politics of leveling – affirming or denying greatness according to therapeutic political standards – is compromising scholarship.

This is not just an academic dispute. If students don’t learn the Western canon, they will remain rootless, ignorant and alienated. They will fail to grasp what makes the West unique – and why it should be cherished, conserved and defended. Sexual Personae was a tour de force of cultural criticism, arguing that the genius of the West came from the irreconcilable conflict between classical paganism and Judeo-Christian religion.

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