Published today to
SignOfContradiction.Blogspot.ca
What follows is a very impressive and insightful piece by
Camille Paglia although I would amend the title to
The Modern World Cannot
Comprehend Evil. To my thinking the terrifying reality she expresses is a
consequence of losing our Christian insight on The Fall and the constant
struggle in this world between Good and Evil. This may sound very basic but we
have abandoned the basics.
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Camille Paglia: The Modern
Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil
The disappearance of University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two
weeks ago is the latest in a long series of girls-gone-missing cases that often
end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound former football player who fled to
Texas has been returned to Virginia and charged with “abduction with intent to
defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on
American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often
distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of
abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,”
the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault
are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas,
arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing
supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders
on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police,
not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.
Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets,
seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable,
overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s
modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.
Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating
illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from
Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and
that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually
bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of
mankind.
The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary
and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and
imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be
smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which
religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the
forces of darkness and light.
Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism
these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising
political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is
more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the
cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a
slapdash script for a cowboy movie.
The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are
rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be
revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by
sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will
fundamentally alter all men.
But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level
that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology,
as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a
central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into
happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.
There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women
do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is
well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male
sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The
sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures,
is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely
because he turns his victims into prey.
Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession.
A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female
sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the
“commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is
women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and
annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.
Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their
upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark.
They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement
containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They
do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of
savage nature.
