Quote of the Day: Camille Paglia

July 29, 2015 • 1:00 pm

I’ve blown hot and cold over Camille Paglia, and have gone to see her speak several times, especially because the Q&A after her talks is, predictably, incendiary. I like that fact that she’s a contrarian and says exactly what she thinks.

But as she’s gotten older, she’s become extremely self-centered and arrogant, repeatedly claiming that anything interesting and innovative in modern culture derives from her. And so, in an interview in today’s Salon (part one of a three-parter, the rest of which I plan to miss), she takes on the New Atheists, trotting out the same tired old tropes, like “not enough study of theology!” Not only that, but she claims that all modern atheism derives from her.

She also goes after Jon Stewart and praises Fox News, the Drude Report, and Donald Trump’s latest activities. In other words, she’s not even wrong. But she does manage to dredge up a few encomiums for Bernie Sanders as the “true voice of populism.”

Sadly, her take on the New Atheism doesn’t burnish her image. In her answer below, I’ve put in bold everything that I think is tripe.

Salon (David Daley): You’re an atheist, and yet I don’t ever see you sneer at religion in the way that the very aggressive atheist class right now often will. What do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith?

Paglia: I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”  It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general–from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum.

I’m speaking here as an atheist. I don’t believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system.  They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny.  Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization.

The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.

But yes, the sneering is ridiculous!  Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer art–and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. There’s a tremendous body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be called cosmic consciousness.  It has to be remembered that my generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism, which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every direction–you had the Beatles and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Ravi Shankar at Monterey, and there were sitars everywhere in rock music. So I really thought we were entering this great period of religious syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But all of a sudden, it disappeared!  The Asian religions vanished–and I really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow environment where they’re peppered with images from mass media at a particularly debased stage.

There are no truly major stars left, and I don’t think there’s much profound work being done in pop culture right now.  Young people have nothing to enlighten them, which is why they’re clinging so much to politicized concepts, which give them a sense of meaning and direction.

But this sneering thing!  I despise snark.  Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it’s horrible for young people!   And this kind of snark atheism–let’s just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid. Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” was a travesty. He sold that book on the basis of the brilliant chapter titles. If he had actually done the research and the work, where each chapter had the substance of those wonderful chapter titles, then that would have been a permanent book. Instead, he sold the book and then didn’t write one–he talked it. It was an appalling performance, demonstrating that that man was an absolute fraud to be talking about religion.  He appears to have done very little scholarly study.  Hitchens didn’t even know Judeo-Christianity well, much less the other world religions.  He had that glib Oxbridge debater style in person, but you’re remembered by your written work, and Hitchens’ written work was weak and won’t last.

Dawkins also seems to be an obsessive on some sort of personal vendetta, and again, he’s someone who has never taken the time to do the necessary research into religion. Now my entire career has been based on the pre-Christian religions.  My first book, “Sexual Personae,” was about the pagan cults that still influence us, and it began with the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of Willendorf in 35,000 B.C. In the last few years, I’ve been studying Native American culture, in particular the Paleo-Indian period at the close of the Ice Age.  In the early 1990s, when I first arrived on the scene, I got several letters from Native Americans saying my view of religion, women, and sexuality resembled the traditional Native American view. I’m not surprised, because my orientation is so fixed in the pre-Christian era.

With Paglia it’s all “Me, me, me, me, and MINE!”, like the seagulls in “Finding Nemo.” She’s appalling, and, I think, irrelevant.

h/t: Berry

121 thoughts on “Quote of the Day: Camille Paglia”

    1. Yes and worse the constant “that comes from me” is something 2 year olds say.

      1. I would have bolded a lot more than Jerry did. I don’t think I’ve even heard of this woman, although I’ve got a shockingly bad memory for names, so who knows? However I’m put off wanting to know more by her sneering attitude. Like many, she’s doing exactly what she accuses others of. She’s certainly never influenced me as far as I’m aware.

        1. She’s a kind of 21st Century Mcluhan, with her rapid-fire, colorful opaque prose in interviews, though she was publicly known in the early ’90s. I was always struck by the cover of her Sexual Personae book cover, which has nefertiti on one half and Emily Dickenson on the other, creating an image that looks alot like Paglia herself. It was a fun read at the time.

          1. I think she’s been around since at least the 80s: slick sounding, but basically full of hooey.

    2. That goes for me as well. I suspect she’s older than my consciousness of the goings on of the world, which is regrettably later than it should’ve been.

      I’m always struck by the vehemence the opponents of ‘The New Atheists’ tend to use. None of their accusations come close to the mark, in my judgement. I have to think they, the New Atheists, strike fear in the minds of many, precisely because they tell the truth of things, and the truth tends to scare some folks. Again, this is in my judgement.

    4. Jerry _has_ mentioned her, but it seems she is completely forgettable.

    5. I know the name, she did an interview for Playboy last century. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I only read it for the interviews. 😉

  3. That’s just sad, such self-aggrandizing. I would counter that she herself has not studied the apt criticisms of religion if she thinks they’re just adolescent rebellion. To think that it is best for societies to be structured around religious institutions ignores all the evidence of why that’s bad.

  5. > It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents – they’re still sneering at dad in some way.

    Oy! That’s just unoriginal. She could have gone for a real zinger of pseudo-freudian deep hit, by suggesting Dawkins is compensating the sexual abuse he suffered from a priest! I’m still expecting to see that one some time.

    1. Heck, she could have at least used the “insecure atheist” line. Atheists who militate against religion and spirituality are tragic figures, secretly aware that everyone else has the magic spiritual qualities their sorry little lives lack, but still too clouded and stunted to fully appreciate it. So subconsciously, they are enviously angered into sneering at a faith they can’t have, and too depressed with their own shallow lives to treat it with anything but contempt.

      Really go to town, you know? She looks like she’s hardly trying.

    2. I don’t think it was a priest, I think it was one of the masters at his school.

    1. Yeah me too. I think religion and the religious need to be metaphorically slapped in the face a bit to make them understand. Some of the shit they get away with is just offensive, if not immoral or illegal.

  7. In my system, I offer art–and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. There’s a tremendous body of nondenominational insight into human life that used to be called cosmic consciousness.

    Oh ffs. She’s Spiritual-Not-Religious. And … here we go again.

    Paglia isn’t an atheist attacking New Atheism. She’s on the other side. I don’t give a damn what she calls herself. I recognize the patter.

    And her “traditional Native American”and pre-christian views are almost certainly the sort of modern inventions and reconstructed tripe re the Noble Savage that Steven Pinker so deftly deconstructs and savages. They used to be so feminist and into human rights and the environments before the patriarchal religions took control. Except they didn’t.

    And she’s sneering at OUR understanding of history. What a maroon.

    1. I could just about take this garbage in 1967 but to spout it now seems . . . adolescent.
      And SPIRITUAL is my trigger word brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

    2. Oh and here she is on the divine Sarah:
      ‘And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.’
      ‘I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.’

      http://conservatives4palin.com/2011/07/they-said-what-the-25-most-unlikely-palin-fans-%E2%80%93-10-camille-paglia.html

      2. I think of Palin and then I think of Elizabeth Warren, and the contrast is infinite. One is a buffoon and one is exceptional in several ways. One has remarkable intelligence to go with her ‘extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness’, and one does not. I guess that makes me one of the stupid ones. Add that to my newly acquired membership as a Snarky Atheist.

      3. WOW!!
        She’s so smart that only she can see how truly brilliant is Sarah Palin. She manages to sully the enterprise of democracy, public speech and be-bop jazz in less than a paragraph, that would be impressive if it weren’t so self-serving and ridiculous.

    3. Yeah, her Venus of Willendorf analysis is pure spirit… unfounded belief. [See my longish comment below.]

      Understanding of history, my ass!

  8. I made Camille’s slide set for art history class when I was in college, which even though she wasn’t my professor is something I still find kind of funny. The sets were old, not well masked and a couple were mounted backwards, so one of the library’s projects was to make new sets. But no, Camille, I don’t sneer at my dad. My dad doesn’t want me to remind everyone how they’re going to burn for eternity for not believing in him the way the speakers for the imaginary dad surrogate do.

  9. Ha!
    I read that this morning and I wondered if WEIT would tackle that quote and I’m glad to see it being discussed here.
    I clicked on the link because I thought to myself that I needed to be more familiar with Camille Paglia as I have read very little of her work. Although now that I’ve read that piece, I don’t think I’m missing very much. Whomever it was in the comment thread that accused Paglia of self-aggrandizement pretty much nailed it.

  10. Hitchens and Dawkins and Krauss and Dennett et al aren’t poopooing the importance of religion’s past nor its contribution to aesthetics or even literature, they’re just saying “enough already”; “We can discard religion like discarded full body hair at 6 months pre-birth.

    2. The “but is it true?” question isn’t going to impress anyone who gets herself into a tizzy over the idea of religious syncretism, when the religions of the world all merge together into one great big sloppy love fest of Faith, God, and Art. It’s such a juvenile concern, after all.

      1. I wonder how much she takes into account the tendency of religions to split into new denominations rather than to glob together.

        1. My guess is that she thinks the splintering is the sad result of human cultures distorting a purer understanding of the Source and engaging in politics. Or, perhaps, that it’s the wonderful variety of expression which needs to be celebrated for itself, as if we were dealing with styles of music or pastries. It’s also possible to advocate both positions — though usually not at the exact same time.

          2. Sastra, you once again prove yourself to be The New Age Whisperer. You should get a TV series – it would be a relief to all the stupid ghost hunting ones & such.

          3. If I was a “whisperer” and could get them to behave themselves it would be a relief to more than tv viewers. “Translating New Age into English” can be done by a lot of people — but it would be a truly horrible job.

    3. I know it seems as if I pander to our host a lot, and perhaps I do, but I really do feel he should be mentioned in the same sentences as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Krauss, et al. Between his two incredible books and this daily post his contributions, at least to my own education, has been, well, enourmous.

      2. Could not agree more, Ken! Just read weit and fvf back to back! Jerry is a fantastic writer! He had me fist pumping from start to end!!

  11. I think contrarians are typically arrogant and self-centred. It’s one thing to legitimately contradict something because of opposing evidence, but quite another to contradict it because it gets you attention and makes you seem hip.

  12. Now here is someone who has never been introduced to reality. Her imaginary world seems to be a hate filled place.

  14. It is quite obvious she is not an atheist. Equally obvious is her need for attention. Finally, for someone who hates snark, she sure is snarky !

    1. Oh, she may well be an atheist, but what she clearly is not is a rationalist. What seems to really rile up believers, particularly moderates and New-Agey spiritualists, isn’t that Dawkins and company espouse atheism but that they insist on evidence and logic as the basis for beliefs. Atheists who have bought into excessive multiculturalism or post-modernism, who still view faith as a good thing or as deserving respect as “another way of knowing”, those atheists are fine. But the ones who will treat fairy tales as such, regardless of their popularity? Well, we’re just jerks.

  15. Any remaining doubt’s as to Paglia’s status as an intellectual fraud can now be laid to rest.

  16. camille paglia:

    a jumbled manic mess of a mind.

    full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

  17. I’m picturing blue hair, a porch and rocking chair. Damn kids these days….turn that noise down…..get off my lawn…..

  18. This woman found out she was brilliant at age sixteen but then forgot to continue thinking anything further.

  19. Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion?

    This particular argument has always seemed so incredibly bizarre to me. It’s akin to asking “What can we replace this massive head wound with?” I don’t know…a wicked paper cut? A bad rash? It’s lunacy.

    How about we heal the wound, rehabilitate the body and strive for full health and prosperity? How about that instead?

    2. Thank you! That was excellent.

      “What we have here, fellow citizens, is a
      crassly egocentric, raving twit.”

    5. Thanks. On the one hand, it was great to read some Molly Ivins.

      On the other hand, now I miss her all over again.

  23. ” . . . she’s become extremely self-centered and arrogant, repeatedly claiming that anything interesting and innovative in modern culture derives from her . . .
    She . . . praises . . . Donald Trump’s latest activities.”

    The two apparently are kindred spirits.

  25. She respects religion because of architecture?

    No, what she respects in that case is talented architects.

    She really put the non in non sequitur, there.

  26. “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”
    It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way.

    Sneering? She got that wrong, when it comes to religion ‘old lady’ try the one fingered salute. Being juvenile has it’s rewards.
    And respect? only for an illusion that has outplayed it’s hand and like a good doctor, we the atheist, are giving it a helping hand to die with perhaps a little dignity.

  27. I don’t understand what was appealing about Paglia in the first place. She mostly made it her business to argue that feminism was a bigger problem than sexism, and just kept on going from there. Her latest foolishness is just more of the same.

  29. Profound
    adjective, profounder, profoundest.
    1.
    penetrating or entering deeply into subjects of thought or knowledge; having deep insight or understanding:
    a profound thinker.

    How exactly does she claim that a false system gives deep insight and knowledge into the Universe? She says we need to read more theology? Well, I say she read more dictionaries. Oh, I’m sorry, that was snark! 😉

    1. I would hazard to guess that she’s talking more about the human condition and honoring our past and still present tendencies towards religion and the like and what drives us from the inside out, rather than, say, molecular science which is from the outside in. A kind of internal POV vs what really is, as Coyne and Harris have both talked and written about extensively (no free will).

      1. A good point! Science has killed romantic subjectivity but its dying noises are shrill and long.

      2. Sure, there is validity to the internal POV and use in studying it, but my objection is labeling this “knowledge about the Universe.” It fits that claim only in the most trivial sense that we are a subset of the Universe and any knowledge about anything we find is “knowledge about the Universe.” But a deep knowledge about the Universe? Profound insight? Religion, western religion in particular, has given us many insights about the nature of the Universe that have been shown to be false in both the subjective and objective sense. She should keep the profound insight labeling in the realm of personal experience and leave the Universe out of it. We have much more specific words for what she’s trying to get at, and you’re right, Sam Harris does write extensively about this. And, as other posters have pointed out, it’s not atheism’s job to fill whatever perceived gap is left out by removing religion’s false promises anymore than it is the astronomer’s job to fill the gap left by eliminating astrology’s false promises.

        1. Utterly agree. And it has to be factored in that, when someone speaks of oneself to the degree that she does, where the ego is a leading actor, any attempt at a universality regarding the universe has to be wholesale disregarded as mere opinion. She’s got one foot in “fuck science” and one foot in psychology, which = pseudosomethingorother.

        2. » it’s not atheism’s job to fill whatever perceived gap is left out by removing religion’s false promises anymore than it is the astronomer’s job to fill the gap left by eliminating astrology’s false promises. «

          QFT.

          /@

          >

  30. Thanks for this, I has awakened a memory of being enthusiastically passed a few bits of Paglia to read. Although thoroughly indigestible, I do remember the word “chthonian” being frequently repeated. Rumaging around on the internet looking for a passage to torture myself with i found that chthonian had featured on “word of the day” in 1997, complete with Paglia quote and a bonus joke:

    “The chthonian superflux of emotion is a male problem. A man must do battle with that enormity, which resides in woman and nature.”

    — Camille Paglia, “Sexual Personae”

    The Word-Of-The-Day editor then added this:

    Ms. Paglia’s somewhat extravagant rhetoric, and frequent use of today’s word, has become the subject of a widely circulated joke on the internet:

    “Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?

    Camille Paglia: It was drawn by the subconscious chthonian power of the feminine which men can never understand, to cross the road and focus itself on its task. Hens are not capable of doing this–their minds do not work that way

  31. She nearly lost me at “adolescents” (how?), and definitely lost me at “respect”. What religion deserves that?

    But I shouldered the harness and plowed on, for a bit:

    All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced.

    That soil is sterile! The ‘profoundness’ of religious beliefs are a water drop compared to the ocean of the profound in science.

    Paglia’s efflux isn’t even manure.

    [Other tidbits: “Sexual Personae … the earliest religious artifacts, like the Venus of Willendorf in 35,000 B.C.”

    Sex or religion? The fact is that no one knows what “the Venus of Willendorf” symbolizes: “Very little is known about its origin, method of creation, or cultural significance;”. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf . Yeah, not even manure.]

    1. There’s a *problem* with characterizing anything as a religious artifacts from places where there is no clear seperation of activities. (Inuit come to mind: they have shamans, who do wear various artefacts, but they would regard their activities as of piece with the hunters. Sort of luckbringers.)

      And since we know nothing at all about whoever carved the statuette in question, that’s even more difficult here.

  32. “I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives.”

    Taken out of context, I do agree with this bit.

  33. Paglia has always been a sort of thinking man’s Ann Coulter (when I say ‘thinking man’, I refer to CP’s ideal of a ‘thinking man’, and think not altogether happily of Andrew Sullivan, who too often mistook what he thought to be style for substance): that is to say, she is principally interested in making a lot of noise, which she supposes is provocative and cogent and amusing for those ‘thinking men’ she wants to appeal to, as opposed to thinking women like Molly Ivins, whose piece in her quoted above by some kind commenter, is brilliant and devastating.

    1. I think this has to go on my list of favorite quotes: “I always thought the world was divided into only two kinds of people—those who think the world is divided into only two kinds of people, and those who don’t. “

  34. “Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion?”
    Okay, just how little does she know of Dawkins’ work? It’s not like he hasn’t written a book titled “The Magic of Reality”, and talked and written at length about how awe-inspiring the natural world is…

      1. Not to mention there is plenty of evidence that many people have been influenced by Dawkins’ writing to see the world with more awe than they had before. His “Convert’s Corner” is full of people who find the “real world” more glorious and satisfying than the
        mythical religious version they grew up with.

        If Paglia can not recon with the real world, and be awed and inspired without it somehow being “informed” or infused by the errors of ancient people trying to figure it out, all the worse for her philosophy.

    2. Exactly. Anyway, what do we all have to replace Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy?

      It’s got to be a last ditch defence by accommodationists and believers when they realise their arguments fail, a bit like “Think of the children.”

      1. We do. We think of the children that many theists’ proposed god allows to die of disease and natural disasters all the while helping people in the first world locate their lost iPhone. Even if this were true, why is such a being worthy of worship? I’m sorry, but snark is one of the nicer ways of addressing such idiocy.

  35. How clever of her to have thought of replacing religion with art. I’m certain an atheistic society would simply stop producing it if not for her suggestion.

  36. Paglia: “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”

    Characteristic of a juvenile is not a stunted imagination but an over active imagination. As an adult I guess my imagination is stunted when compared to a child’s but that’s as it should be if one cares at all to be able to distinguish between imaginings and reality.

  38. “The Asian religions vanished…”

    Maybe she should visit Asia to see how much they have vanished.

    More seriously, I think she means that vanished or receded from western culture. Not surprising, since their presence was really a fad, and it died.

    2. No worries. They’ll be back, predictably, after they’ve been gone long enough to be cool again.

  39. i don’t think her comments re: profundity pertain to anything in the “natural sciences” but more to “what can we learn about how people are”. think hamlet, not horticulture.

    as an aside, she was advised by harold bloom and i always found it hilarious how similarly bombastic their writing and speaking styles became!

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