Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  The aggressive Anglophilia of the Main Line elite was a calculated strategy against diversity, as was also the invention of country clubs in the Northeastern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The country club, ostensibly devoted to golf and tennis, was a sanctuary for the preservation of WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) hegemony. A related development was the creation of associations tracing lineage to the colonial period, such as Sons of the American Revolution, founded in 1889; the Colonial Dames of America and the Daughters of the American Revolution, both founded in 1890; and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, founded in 1897. These organizations, which were clearly a reaction to the rising tide of immigration, undertook to proclaim who the real Americans were, now under assault by grubby ethnic invaders.

  Publication of the Social Register, starting in 1886 with the volume for New York, catalogued the important individuals and families in polite society in every major city, virtually all of whom were Protestants. Metropolitan men’s clubs also arose in this period, allowing the leaders of finance, industry, and law to meet in leisurely, privileged access behind closed doors. Discrimination could be overt: it is reported that the original University Club in Cincinnati, founded in 1879, was dissolved seven years later during a controversy over the admission of a Jewish member. New England boarding schools and Ivy League universities became arenas for inter-city reinforcement of the WASP cultural code. The initial lack of diversity at those institutions is demonstrated by the fact that no Ivy League humanities department appointed a Jewish tenured professor until after World War Two.

  Indeed, I can recall even upon my arrival at the Yale Graduate School in 1968 how charged the atmosphere was in the Yale English Department over faculty appointments, who remained mostly Protestant. Jewish professors still felt like an embattled minority, and there had just been a rumored purge of gay male teachers, who had all gone off to Smith College. I was jestingly questioned about the pronunciation of my Italian surname by the chairman of the English Department in what I felt to be an offensively condescending manner. When Yale named its first Italian-American president in 1978, it is no coincidence that he had always called himself A. Bartlett Giamatti—Bart for short—when his real first name was Angelo.

  I could detail here incidents of overt discrimination or insulting treatment experienced by my immigrant family (all four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy) when they were transplanted to old Protestant upstate New York, the location of the Endicott-Johnson shoe factories where my grandfather and many other relatives were employed. Given this background, it might be assumed that I would welcome all campus initiatives to achieve tolerance and diversity, but I have certain reservations. Surely tolerance and diversity in regard to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation must also be extended toward ideological diversity, if colleges and universities are to succeed in their mission of fostering the free exchange of ideas. But from my own observation, as well as my participation in the long-running culture wars, little deviation is permitted from approved political positions, which are usually predicated on a utopian, big-government liberalism that bears little resemblance to the fiery, freedom-oriented liberalism of my student days in the 1960s. I for one am not entirely comfortable with a national environment in the humanities where I am surrounded by fellow Democrats who vote exactly the way I do (although in the last presidential election I rebelled by casting a protest vote for the Green Party).

  Elite American colleges and universities have undermined their credibility and authority by their intolerance to conservative views, particularly in regard to ethical issues such as the debate over abortion, which has divided the nation for nearly a half-century. My militant pro-choice position, based on my libertarian principles, does not blind me to the great moral weight on the pro-life side, whose arguments should be honestly presented without prejudice to students. Furthermore, despite their claims of seeking and nurturing diversity among the student body, the elite universities still end up homogenizing everyone to the same bland, genteel Protestant style that I found so limiting and prejudicial when I arrived at Yale in the late 1960s. The costliness of the uniformity of thought imposed at elite universities over the past three decades—some have called it a “monoculture”—is now becoming manifest in the failure of major new intellectuals or culture critics to emerge among the young.

  To create an atmosphere of tolerance on college campuses, the spectrum of permissible ideological opinion must be broadened, a reform that must begin at the classroom level. Second, it must be shown through a study of history that no group has ever had a monopoly on the truth and that virtually every political or social movement has been subject to factionalism and eventually fanaticism. Third, efforts must be made to undo, wherever they occur, power concentrations that impede free thought and free speech. Currently, those reside in the bureaucratic sprawl of campus administrations, which have eaten up budgets and slowly usurped faculty prerogatives. For it is ultimately well-meaning administrators, in their zeal to comply with sometimes intrusive government regulations, who have diverted tolerance and diversity from noble goals into dictates of social engineering that turn institutions from the organically dynamic to the soullessly mechanical.

  * [Lecture in series on “Justice, Tolerance and Diversity,” Ethics/Religion and Society Program at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio, April 5, 2013. Published in Justice Through Diversity?, ed. Michael J. Sweeney (2016).]

  53

  ON GENIUS*

  The idea of artistic genius descends from paganism: the Romans saw a “genius” or generative spirit dwelling in a man or house or natural locale. The classical Greeks envisioned a semi-divine “daimon” that guided a man’s path through life; it descended in turn from the mysterious forces of nature propitiated by early Greek religion.

  Although the Greeks venerated Homer and honored tragedians, painters, and sculptors, it was the Italian Renaissance that invented artistic genius as we understand it: the prototype was the brooding, misanthropic Michelangelo, a titanic creator in many genres. Romanticism, with its flamboyant personae from Beethoven to Byron, revived the Renaissance model and laid the groundwork for modern pop stars.

  Yes, indeed, the word “genius” has been lamentably overused. Today, when there are so few major artistic innovations, our idea of greatness has shriveled—helped along by shallow postmodernist academics who disguise their own mediocrity by denying that greatness has ever existed at all.

  Geniuses there certainly have been in this century—Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, Martha Graham. Claims could also be made for Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Jackson Pollock, Ingmar Bergman, and Bob Dylan. And there are scores of performers we must call “brilliant” in dance, theater, opera, and film. A “masterpiece,” on the other hand, should be a large, definitive statement but may be too difficult to make in this commercialized era of fragmented, niche audiences.

  If critical coinage seems debased, it’s partly because criticism has waned along with the high arts over the past thirty-five years. Criticism is now dully content-driven on and off campus: aesthetics have been superseded by strident politics and mushy therapeutics. Cultural energy has moved into other areas like technology and the Internet, where fluid interactive communications are antithetical to perfection of a finalized object.

  As for the hypothesis of “unconscious” genius: yes, I believe that the initial inspiration and primary ideas of much important work have come from an obscure, subliminal area of the artist’s dream life. The drive to express is often rooted in the artist’s need to work out and to clarify painful internal conflicts. The material form of paper, paint, sound, or gesture externalizes, fixes, and exorcises, as in ancient pagan ritual. (My theory of art was partly influenced by the Cambridge School of Anthropology, notably Sir James George Frazer and Jane Harrison.)

  But unconscious impulse is no
t enough: there must be a strong foundation in the discipline of the genre. Dante was dogged by nightmares, visions, guilt, and a lust for vengeance, yet he also possessed the formalizing framework of medieval scholasticism. Dante surely heard his intricate terza rima stanzas taking shape in his head and may have sometimes felt as if he were taking dictation. There is some form-making faculty buried deep in the creative mind—but it must be nurtured through practice and hard work.

  * [In response to a reader letter saying the terms “brilliant” and “masterpiece” are now “vague from misuse over time” and asking for Paglia’s “theory of genius,” Salon.com column, February 3, 1999.]

  54

  THE MIGHTY RIVER OF CLASSICS:

  TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN MODERN EDUCATION*

  In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” one of the classic texts of English Romanticism, a “sacred river” runs for miles, “meandering with a mazy motion” through a paradise realm and then falls down through caverns to “a sunless sea.” The river continues underground, then reappears as a “mighty fountain,” a geyser forced up with such power that boulders are tossed in the air like “chaffy grain.” The river now runs overland, only to fall again beneath the earth and disappear.

  Though his setting is imperial China, Coleridge calls his river the “Alph,” probably after the Alpheus, a river in the Greek Peloponnesus that flows past the sacred precinct of Olympia and was thought to pass in a single pure stream through the Mediterranean Sea until it reappeared as the fountain of Arethusa on an island in the harbor of Syracuse in Sicily. According to legend, the river god Alpheus had fallen in love with the nymph Arethusa, and when he pursued her, the virgin goddess Artemis protected her by changing her into a fountain.

  By shortening “Alpheus” to “Alph,” Coleridge also evokes the Christian use of the first and last letters of the alphabet as a symbol for God, who is the “Alpha and Omega,” the first and the last, a paradox often illustrated in the wall decorations or mosaics of churches. Coleridge’s alternately “mazy” and “mighty” Alpheus seems to me an excellent metaphor for the classical tradition in Western culture, which flows down like a river from antiquity and sometimes seems to disappear underground. But despite constant prophecies of its extinction, it always reappears, forced up again with renewed power.

  We are in yet another period when the validity of the classics as the foundation of Western learning and education is being questioned and when there are many signs of erosion—as in the reduction or outright elimination of Latin language courses in public high schools and classics departments in American universities and when the amount of classroom time devoted to the classics in freshman survey and composition courses has in many institutions drastically diminished. There are several reasons for this. The demand after the 1960s cultural revolution for contemporary “relevance” in the curriculum produced a relaxing of academic methods and demands and a proliferation of courses oriented toward the present. Popular culture has entered the classroom as teaching tool as well as subject—a phenomenon toward which there are quite different views. I myself, as a product of the 1960s, feel that popular culture has massively shaped American society over the past 150 years and that students, who have been immersed for their lifetimes in pop, need a map to it—to understand its evolution, technology, modus operandi, and persistent themes. On the other hand, an education that has tipped toward popular culture at the expense of the past threatens to become frivolous, faddish, and merely reactive. There is a way to teach or discuss popular culture, I would argue, that can be integrated with and can reinforce the classics, since so much of Hollywood’s use of sex and violence—from molten sex goddesses to larger-than-life action-adventure heroes—can be seen as an analogy to and even as a direct survival of classical mythology.

  A second reason for the turn from classics in the past quarter-century is the new interest in multiculturalism, which also originates in the 1960s. Veterans of World War Two had come home with direct experience of Europe, the Pacific islands, the Philippines, and Japan, but in the domestic preoccupations of the postwar period and in the exacerbation of political tensions in the Cold War stalemate with the Soviet Union, with nuclear warfare hanging in the balance, a certain xenophobia took over, so that the rest of the world was sometimes regarded as picturesque to visit but always improvable if it would only Americanize. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement and labor activism for migrant workers put the theme of racial and class justice front and center. When the controversy over the Vietnamese war split the generations, the patriotism of protestors was often questioned, partly because leftism from the mid-nineteenth century on has indeed been programmatically internationalist. Proletarian solidarity was premised by Marxism to cut across national boundaries, even though the working class from common observation has always been fervently patriotic. In cultural terms, the 1960s were also permeated by Asian influences, coming from Zen Buddhism, an interest of the West Coast branch of the 1950s Beat movement, and then Hinduism as well.

  Multiculturalism is in theory a noble cause that aims to broaden perspective in the U.S., which because of its physical position between two oceans can tend toward the smugly isolationist. It is no coincidence that much of the primary impetus toward multiculturalism began in California, because of its Hispanic heritage and its pattern of immigration from Mexico, Latin America, and the Pacific rim. What poisoned the debate over educational reform, however, was that so many of the proposals for multicultural change were explicitly political, using a leftist frame of reference that polarized the campuses. Shortcuts were resorted to to get quick results in democratizing the curriculum: the number of texts by dead white European males was reduced to make room for those by women or people of color, sometimes without due regard for whether the substitute texts, which were often contemporary, had the same cultural weight or substance as what they replaced.

  Indeed, for some in this movement, questions of quality were fundamentally elitist, having been created, it was alleged, by a cabal of imperialist white males to perpetuate their own power. The actual mechanics of canon-formation over time were either unknown or ignored: in point of fact, major writers and artists have rarely possessed or were significant beneficiaries of power in the political sense; in most cases (as in that of the embittered Dante) they were eccentrics or social failures. Second, only sporadically, as in Victorian England, can it be shown that major art was primarily a political vehicle—and even then, it had little effect on the curriculum, which was still based on the classics. When scrutinized over a time-span of thousands of years, canon-formation, a process always fluid and open to dispute, is more intimately linked to artistic impact than to political ideology. We declare something is important and assign it to the curriculum when we find evidence of its influence on other artists. In other words, the canon is really about artistic or intellectual fertility; it is the dynasty of works that have generated other works. To return to my river metaphor, art is a cascade down the centuries, like the cataracts that mark the changes of level of the descending Nile.

  The laudable mission of multiculturalism also unfortunately got entangled with academic careerism. Job creation, recruitment, and promotion became attached to multiculturalism. Some established academics were so resistant to change that as universities sought diversity in the student body and curriculum, an add-on strategy was hastily adopted. New programs and departments multiplied so that diversity was achieved not by genuinely revising the curriculum but by turning the campus into a crazy quilt of competitive fiefdoms.

  Furthermore, the nascent multicultural programs were more allied with campus administrators than with the older professors with their classical erudition. A host of assistant deanships were created nationwide whose positions and budgets were wed to particular campus constituencies and which therefore fostered divisiveness rather than reconciliation. Over the past thirty years, American education at both the
primary and secondary levels has been deformed by a steady expansion of bureaucracy that not only drains resources and usurps prerogatives that belong to the faculty but that sometimes encourages administrators to be more committed to external public relations than to internal academic quality.

  In this first decade of the new millennium, I have yet to be persuaded that college students are graduating even from the elite schools with deeper or broader knowledge. They are certainly well-tutored in sentiment—that is, in how to project approved attitudes of liberal tolerance, though how well these will survive the test of adult life remains to be seen. Too much academic writing in multiculturalism, whether about the Americas or the Indian subcontinent or the modern Mideast, has been filtered through post-structuralism—which is ironically just about as Eurocentric and elitist a technique as can be imagined. Furthermore, too many proponents of multiculturalism have adopted the social realist or Stalinist view of art as an instrument of indoctrination, deploying positive social messages as a prelude to political action. However, on the other extreme, those most intellectually prepared to give multiculturalism a scholarly system—the professors of ancient history and classics—frequently did not respond to the demand for change except as a challenge to their survival. They set no counterproposal before the nation and lost the opportunity to take control of the momentum of reform.

  The grand sequence of the classical tradition, which extends in various strands through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the scientific Enlightenment and modern era, is actually a master paradigm for how to structure an authentically multicultural curriculum on a global scale. All students abroad as well as in the U.S. need to learn the general contours of the world’s major artistic and cultural traditions. These long channels of lineage can best be understood as streams—mighty rivers that are fed by tributaries and that are a confluence of mixed and varied material. The great rivers of cultural tradition are nearly always powered by religion, even when they slow down and spread out into the secular delta of modern life.