Interview with the Vamp

Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1995 issue

(Page 6 of 6)

I was already in the process of considering the degree to which one has to accept Freud's idea of civilization and its discontents. Everything that is civilization is based on some form of instinctual repression or delayed gratification. And maturity is really about realizing the limits on one's ego, and where social reality begins. I don't believe in obedience, total obedience. I am a '60s social activist. I believe that where there is injustice, one must act out to remedy it, and I'm very confrontational in my life. But I began to realize that I had been very insulting about institutions--that in point of fact, institutions are civilization. They are not oppression. They are civilization.

Reason: When you write about gay men, you seem to appreciate them mostly as exemplars of the dramatic in life, of rebellion against bourgeois society. But I personally know a lot of gay men who want bourgeois lives, and that is very much the cutting edge of at least part of the gay movement today. People want to be themselves but to have committed relationships, to be very bourgeois.

Paglia: It's an argument going on now in the gay world, with Bruce Bawer coming out with his book [A Place at the Table] on that side and so on. What I'm saying is the contribution of gay men to culture, what makes them highly individual in the history of culture, is not that they are settling down and being like everyone else--that is, just responding to their natural and normal human needs--but rather what they have done in terms of the history of consciousness.

That's part of my argument, for example, with my friend Harvey Mansfield, the conservative at Harvard. His argument would be that homosexuality is antithetical to civilization and to culture, that it is disruptive and anarchic. And my argument is the opposite: that gay men--not all gay men, but many gay men--have in fact built Western civilization. That their contributions to the history of consciousness and the creation of art have been major in making the West what it is--for whatever reason.

It is natural to want to settle down. There should be an experimental period in one's life, it seems to me, where one tries everything new, but if you continue in that stage beyond, let's say, age 30, I think that that kind of restlessness is a sign of immaturity rather than creativity.

Reason: Right now there's a lot of nostalgia among people who define themselves as communitarians, on both the left and right, for the 1950s. You portray the 1950s as boring and claustrophobic. What do you think of this current nostalgia?

Paglia: The '50s were a wonderful time if you happened to be a blonde WASP cheerleader. Great! But if you were Jewish or gay or a tomboy, like me, or any kind of dissident, it was a very repressive and conformist period.

David Halberstam's book [The Fifties] is talking about how wonderful the '50s were--it was a very vigorous time. Well, he's a little older than me. So what he is remembering is authentic. There was indeed a very vigorous Jewish culture at that time. I think the New York world for Jews at that time, intellectual Jews, was wonderful.

But please! For my generation, the baby boomers, born just after World War II, the '50s were a horror. I don't care what David Halberstam says about his experience. It is just inaccurate. Certainly there were things going on that led to the '60s, absolutely. I've said this all along that the beatniks were the precursors. But they were the adversary culture--the oppositional culture. They were stereotyped and pilloried everywhere. Anyone who tries to say that mainstream culture was fab in the '50s, they're just not thinking straight.

Reason: Most of the nostalgia isn't of the intellectual, Halberstam variety. It's that families were stable, streets were safe.

Paglia: It is true. Things were very stable. But the point is that we've gone through enormous cultural changes. Just take the example of the automobile. I remember riding my bicycle to school in Syracuse--it was about 1957, '58--and riding quite an enormous distance on this old bicycle, and there were hardly any cars. You wouldn't dream of doing that today. The number of cars has not tripled but quadrupled. In photographs of New York City from the '50s, you can hardly believe how little traffic there is.

All of a sudden there was an enormous explosion of people who owned cars. Cars became very dangerous. Young people were driving cars. Then the '60s unleashed the dangers of assassinations and kidnappings and murders, and all kinds of stuff.

You can't go back again. The idea that we can recreate that, that is just crazy. It's absolutely crazy. We are moving forward, for good or for ill.

Reason: Somebody once described you as "Ayn Rand on mushrooms." I'm curious whether at some point in your life you've had any encounter with Ayn Rand's work or people influenced by her.

Paglia: Ayn Rand was an enormous figure for people who were intellectuals in college in the mid-'50s and late '50s. I entered college in '64, so I never heard her name in college. She was just gone.

I never read Ayn Rand until people started to compare me to her. Since I came on the scene it has come up repeatedly--people have asked me about Ayn Rand, followers of Ayn Rand. I might be on a call-in show; they always asked. Because I was being asked so much, I went out and I read some of Ayn Rand. And I was struck. I could see what the parallels are.

That is, she was influenced by many of the same works that I was. She was reading Romantic thinkers and Nietzsche and so on. There are certain passages in her where I went, "Oh my God, that sounds like a passage from Sexual Personae." So I was really struck.

At the same time, I saw the differences. First of all, she's a libertarian or a radical individualist as I am, but she is very--like Simone de Beauvoir--contemptuous of religion. I am an atheist, but I respect religion. I respect all the world religions, and I regard them as these symbol systems, belief systems that are like poetry. I love these great mythological systems. I feel that mystical and religious thinking tells you more about the universe in many ways than ordinary prose, or even science, does.

So I'm uncomfortable with that. For both de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand religion is symptomatic of an infantile mind, or of an overemotional mind. I believe in mystery; I believe in both Apollo and Dionysus. So I think that my system is more complete.

And what else? I find both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand deficient in humor. Comedy is my attitude toward life, and I feel that comedy is the spirit of the last half of the 20th century. The first half of the 20th century would have been the age of Beckett and Waiting for Godot and that whole bleak, nihilistic attitude toward the world that Susan Sontag is still carrying around with her like a big black hat. The attitude of the last 50 years is like that of rock and roll--energy, comedy, exuberance, the pleasure principle, improvisation, spontaneity. These are my principles. So I think I have a kind of childlike quality and playfulness that are missing from the dour adulthood of both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand.

Also I am a little bit uneasy, OK, with the politics. I don't think that Ayn Rand is a fascist particularly, but I think there is a kind of contempt for ordinary people in Ayn Rand--a little bit. I love the high achiever, I am a great worshiper of the high achiever. But I also feel at home with people of the working class. And I think that in Rand there's a little bit of a kind of snobbish elitism about those vulgar masses out there. That makes me a little uncomfortable with her.

But I think if one is looking at parallels, there is no doubt that there are a lot. I'm very happy to be considered one of her successors, even if not influenced by her directly. And I think there is no doubt that my impact on many people is exactly like her impact on many people. That is, we came as kind of a fresh breeze into a period of conformism. She and I say to people, "Think for yourself! Don't be such a toadie! Stop going along with the group! Don't be such a sheep, just going along passively with other people!"

One would think that women's studies, if it really obeyed its mission, would make her part of the agenda. But no, of course not! Women's studies has been oriented toward rediscovering the mediocre thinker, or the writer who talks about her victimization, rather than someone who preaches individualism and independence as Ayn Rand does.

Reason: You always talk about the limitations of nature and you emphasize the imperfectibility of the world--you're anti-Rousseauian--but you do seem to be optimistic, to believe in some kind of progress.

Paglia: I think I am a progressive thinker, ultimately. But I do believe that we go two steps forward and one step back. But there is still a general movement forward.

I'm also a decadent thinker, so far as I see cultures as waxing and waning. I see this cyclic movement in history, where you have a society that grows, expands, overexpands, and collapses. And there's a period of a dark age, and then you have another culture slowly building up.

In that sense I've been going against the grain of a lot of thinking in the post-structuralist-influenced humanities departments: "History is a bunch of meaningless fragments." Well, that's not what I see. And that's not what Jews see, who at Passover remember something that happened 5,000 years ago. So I do think that history is a story, that it's a narrative and that it's our obligation as teachers to try to pull together all the disparate parts--to try to give the students a coherence, a core sense of the cohesiveness of history, without these tired formulas of multiculturalism. I believe in an enlightened multiculturalism based on scholarship, but I hate this kind of moralistic trumpeting about the imperialism of the West and the atrocities of white men versus women and people of color. I'm so tired of that.

I think I'm like this one-man truth squad who goes around and hits, hits, hits on all these issues. At the same time I am basically in agreement with most of the progressive agenda. Sex studies should be on the agenda, not as women's studies but as something else. I have given my career to that, long before anyone thought of women's studies.

Every single issue where the P.C. academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and to expose and to say what they're doing--the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley, for example--is a piece of crap.

I'm outside the establishment completely, and no one can co-opt me. They can't get to me. Because I don't apply for grants, they can't punish me like that. And I appear out of nowhere! They think they can avoid having to deal with me, never mentioning me and so forth, and then all of a sudden, the students invite me. And there I am! And I come on campus, and I name names on the podium. And then I leave and create disorder, and they all have to deal with it for weeks. It's great! It's wonderful!