Classical Values :: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

Via Drudge, I found a wonderful essay by Camille Paglia, which everyone should read.

I can't do justice to the entire post, but here's something I especially liked, because it touches on why I blog:

The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning. The jump and jitter of U.S. commercial television have demonstrably reduced attention span in the young. The Web too, with its addictive unfurling of hypertext, encourages restless acceleration.

Knowing how to "read" images is a crucial skill in this media age, but the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination.....

I concur with Paglia about the negation of logic, and the neglect of magic and mystique as part and parcel of "post-structuralism" and "postmodernism" (including, of course "deconstructionism"). However, in my darker moments, I often suspect that the promoters of such academic and cultural nihilism are well versed in things such as logic, magic and mystique; they just don't want their students to be! It is much easier to manipulate the ignorant with rhetorical tricks and flourishes, by appeals to emotion, and by flooding the mind with hard-hitting images. A deliberately uneducated public will be much more likely to fall for these things without understanding why.

This ties in with recent evidence that children who watch a lot of television at an early age are more likely to develop "attention deficit problems." Oh well. I guess that means parents should ask their teachers whether it's time to put the kid on drugs to make them pay attention.

Big Brother has plenty of solutions. Ways can be found to make you and your child behave -- and believe!

Real education, though, must be reserved for the cultural heirs of the Mandarins and the Mayan priests.....

Go Camille!