La dolce Camille

I had a blast today talking on the phone with Camille Paglia. I hadn't spoken to her in several years. I'm writing a column in connection with a local humanities event she had something to do with, so I'm saving my choicest quotes for the paper, but I can share some of our conversation here.

I was pleased (though not surprised) by how much we agree on the culturally desolating quality of modernity, and how imperiled Western civilization is by the loss of the religious sense. Camille said it's at the heart of Europe's cultural decline. She said that even a bisexual atheist like her can see how important religion is to keeping civilization stable and alive (in fact, her "Sexual Personae" argues that the cultural genius of the West lies in the creative and life-giving tension between its Greco-Roman pagan roots and its Judeo-Christianity). She thinks we're likely in a Late Roman Empire phase, in which tolerance and rigor has gone over into acedia.

"I think its possible that the Muslim culture will win," she told me. "I think it's quite possible. It all depends on which of the two cultures is mor econfident, more vital and more creative. I don't think we know how that's going to come out. I do think my fellow Democrats are far too complacent about this issue. They honesty think that if we're nice ot everybody they'll be nice to us. But I've studied history."

Camille said that she's been really disturbed over the last five years by the lack of knowledge among her students of basic Biblical concepts, characters, themes and motifs -- the forgetting of which makes so much Western art, literature and culture opaque. Get this:

"The worst moment was a year and a half ago. I have a class on song lyrics, and I was presenting the Negro spiritual 'Go Down, Moses.' I was talking about how it's a coded message of liberation, a way for slaves to make political statements without being recognized. I suddenly realized to my absolute horror that so many of these students had no idea who Moses was! In this class of 30, not one white person, only African-Americans, understood the Biblical references. The only people I'm getting at my school [Philadelphia's University of the Arts] who recognize the Bible are African-Americans. And the lower the social class of the white person, the more likely they are to recognize the Bible. Lots of these white students, if they go to church, it's all feel good social activism. There's no preaching anymore. The Bible is one of the West's foundational texts, and they don't know it anymore."

Our interview ended with this grim observation about the West: "People here live in a bubble. They think it's going to go on forever."