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causticusHere's a great Camille Paglia quote I came across today. Despite being an atheist academic, she fully realizes the value of metaphysics-based belief systems and the futility of petty political ideologies like Marxism and Secular Humanism as being substitutes for a spiritual worldview.
What passes for "the humanities" in today's Western academia is both morally and intellectually bankrupt. And, IMHO, rather than being a nefarious "Cultural Marxist" conspiracy of radical infiltrators posing as professors (that so many on the right these days like to envision.....but yes some of these professors are precisely that), it's more or less a jobs program for talentless careerists and bureaucrats posing as scholars. Feigning knowledge while collecting a cozy salary and enjoying a flexible daily schedule (i.e. not being chained to a cubicle for 8 hours a day) isn't such a bad deal. The supremely relativist and nebulous framework that is Postmodernism, allows for a great deal of meaningless BS, pretentious sophistry, and self-referential obscurantism, allows for an endless amount of make-work to prop up this ridiculous jobs program -- well, until the student loan racket bubble bursts, but that's a whole 'nother topic for another day.
I said in the introduction to my art book, Glittering Images (2012), that secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They “frame” the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind.
But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil.
My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite...A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.
What passes for "the humanities" in today's Western academia is both morally and intellectually bankrupt. And, IMHO, rather than being a nefarious "Cultural Marxist" conspiracy of radical infiltrators posing as professors (that so many on the right these days like to envision.....but yes some of these professors are precisely that), it's more or less a jobs program for talentless careerists and bureaucrats posing as scholars. Feigning knowledge while collecting a cozy salary and enjoying a flexible daily schedule (i.e. not being chained to a cubicle for 8 hours a day) isn't such a bad deal. The supremely relativist and nebulous framework that is Postmodernism, allows for a great deal of meaningless BS, pretentious sophistry, and self-referential obscurantism, allows for an endless amount of make-work to prop up this ridiculous jobs program -- well, until the student loan racket bubble bursts, but that's a whole 'nother topic for another day.
