INGRID SISCHY: The last time we talked, it was about where the new frontiers
are. It was a theoretical conversation, and we were both wishing to see
things that pushed and discovered more about new frontiers in art, in
science and in culture. It was before September 11. Since then, many of
those new frontiers have become all too clear. What's been going through
your mind?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: It feels like the late Roman Empire--which I've had a
foreboding about for years. When the empire overexpanded and lost its
ideals, it became vulnerable to raids from the outside--Vandals, Goths,
Huns. Last May, in fact, I gave a lecture in California about our need to
regain a sense of cultural continuity in the West, and I lamented how the
practice of contemplating ruins has vanished--something central to European
education in the 18th and 19th centuries. Little did I dream that by the
time that lecture was published [Arion, Fall 2001], one of the most horrific
contemplations of ruins in human history would be underway.
IS: What are some of the big changes that you are noticing?
CP: When I got to college in 1964, my professors believed that literature
contained human wisdom, that it was the repository of great insights into
man's folly and hubris. But the idea of wisdom or enlightenment in art was
thrown out the window in the "theory" era of irony and cynicism. Now we're
facing the basic questions of existence again--which we haven't had to do
since French existentialism in the wake of the Nazis and World War II. Once
again, we're staring into the void, one of the great metaphysical exercises
in Hinduism. But we can't grasp it yet, it's too enormous.
IS: Yes. You know it's interesting--I've heard so many people talking about
their desire to know more about history right now.
CP: I see history as very long processes that are worked out by certain
pivotal moments--which is why the study of ancient history is so crucial.
Knowledge is power. After September 11, many educated people were numbly
asking, "Why do they hate us so much?" The real question is why have
Westerners been so oblivious to the long, ferocious movements of history?
There were many warning signs over the last 10 years that we were far too
insular in our thinking. I've crusaded to get archaeology into the core
curriculum. For 20 years, people have acted as though Western culture is
eternal. We put our faith and money in the stock market, assuming that too
is permanent. But nothing is permanent. As Heraclitus the preSocratic said,
nothing is stable, everything changes. History shows that the most pompous
and most glorious civilizations, whether ancient Egypt or Babylon or Rome,
all eventually fell into ruin. People once recognized the continual turn of
fortune's wheel and man's fate. Those big, profound, tragic questi ons,
which were very near and dear to our teachers, have been forgotten. My
teachers had lived through World War II; they knew the realities, the
horrors of war. They had seen the concentration camps, the atom bomb. They
had experienced life. But nothing big has happened to the baby-boom
generation since the Vietnam War. There's been a smug complacency about the
efficiencies of our affluent society. We had freedom from fear and disaster.
And now world war has been brought home to our doorstep.
IS: And so has our love of America and what it stands for. Just look at
what's been happening with the American flag. Suddenly it's
everywhere--including in places where we couldn't have imagined it just a
few months ago.
CP: I've been troubled about Americans' attitude towards the flag: For 30
years, the white professional class has snobbishly regarded display of the
flag as declasse, naive, whereas workingclass neighborhoods don't feel that
way. Service in the military or National Guard has prestige there. Since the
disaster, however, the flag has become a way to remember the dead.
IS: You're a teacher. How is all this affecting what's going on in the
classroom?
CP: Well, it's very painful and disorienting for the students. This will be
the defining experience of their generation, in the same way that the
assassination of John F. Kennedy [in 1963] was for us. For young artists and
writers, it forces a confrontation with existential issues as nothing has in
all these decades ruled by shopping malls, easy CD acquisition, and so on.
American kids know nothing outside their own world. Our media has done a
terrible job for 20 years in conveying an international perspective.
Multiculturalism was in, yet there was little actual study of the central
texts or cultural artifacts of non-Western societies. American schools
substituted sentimental, feel-good, I'm OK/you're OK crap for history and
geography. It was also a mistake for our secular system to remove or
de-emphasize the Bible. Though I'm an atheist, I think the Bible needs to be
taught as history or literature to understand Western art and iconography.
For a decade I've called for a truly global multicultural curriculu m
centered on world religions. In light of recent events, what could be more
crucial for our young people than to know what's in the Koran? Our students
need direct contact with other cultures. We're so isolated physically by two
oceans. It's the responsibility of education and mass media to broaden the
Citizenry's perspective. The world gets our attention only by the most
extreme fanaticism. My God, Lockerbie [the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103
over Lockerbie, Scotland] was 13 years ago! The first attack on the World
Trade Center was in 1993. The terrorists waited and waited and then struck
like a snake when we relaxed. In the middle of the Monica Lewinsky thing,
when President Clinton dropped missiles on Sudan, I thought we should go on
security mega-alert. But the media just went galumphing after the Monica
scandal. What will it look like in the history books, that we spent the
entire summer of 2001 obsessed with Gary Condit when there was a major
terrorist plan afoot that would kill thousands of people, o ne of the worst
atrocities in the history of the world?
IS: I must admit it took up until last year and the Taliban's destruction of
those humongous Buddhas for me to really begin to get the full picture of
the cultural conflicts that are being waged.
CP: Yes, that was chilling. Ironically, the idea of the West as destroyer
has been pushed down the throats of students at elite universities--yet
we're the only ones in history who have gone to such lengths to recover the
past, reassemble the jigsaw puzzle, reconstruct past cultures. Those great
stone Buddhas, smashed by cannon fire, were on trade routes dating from the
period of wandering hordes that attacked Rome. History will say that the
destruction of those images was an early warning sign of something that was
about to happen to us. Those falling monuments were a prefiguration of the
collapse of the Twin Towers.
IS: I want to talk with you about surveillance. By the end of the Cold War
it was thought that things like phone tapping and general monitoring were
leftover forms of paranoia. We cut back and back on agencies like the FBI
and the CIA. In light of what's happened, how do you think people feel about
them now?
CP: We criticized the FBI and CIA for their intrusion on our civil
liberties. My generation was very concerned about establishing the right to
privacy. We came of age when the police did have excessive powers. They
could round up gays--they could make a sweep of a park and haul people in
for loitering. They could ruin people's careers. Eventually, legislation
curtailed the powers of the CIA, FBI and local police. We've been consumed
with domestic issues and the rights of the individual. But we lost sight of
the need for reliable intelligence. It was thought, We're at peace. The Cold
War is over. That was a tremendous misjudgment. This is a very critical time
for our civil liberties organizations to act as watchdogs and make sure that
police power is not so permanently strengthened that it removes the whole
raison d'etre of American democracy. On the other hand, Americans have to
realize that in time of war many personal comforts and entitlements go on
the back burner. The last incursion on the U.S. mainland w as the War of
1812 when the British burned the White House.
IS: So, in light of all this, where would you say the new frontiers are
right now?
CP: It's almost as if there is no frontier, because by definition a frontier
is the point where civilization is pushing us out into the unknown. What
we're facing now is the void or heart of darkness created by a fanatical
hatred of progress, of history, of science. The way the terrorists used our
technology against us--that's another horror. To turn those tremendous
jetliners against the Twin Towers: It's like reversing the whole 20th
century--the history of flight and the great skyscrapers, the apex of
architecture. To create this giant void where nothing is recognizable--even
I, with my catastrophic imagination, never envisioned that civilization
would do that to civilization.
Camille Paglia's column appears regularly in Interview. Illustration: RISKO.
Damion Matthews wrote:
> Interview, Dec 2001 v31 i12 p88(3)
<snipped>
How did the Kennedy assassination define us? We have to understand something
before it can define us, and if you want to take the opportunity to be defined,
check this out:
http://www.geocities.com/jfkawards/links.htm
It is certainly a defining revelation
Words for eternity. Thanks Damon, sincerely.