Good morning, everyone. Let’s get straight to business, shall we? First up, Emily Esfahani Smith surveys Camille Paglia’s provocations: “A professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984, Paglia became an intellectual celebrity after the 1990 publication of Sexual Personae, her first book, which carries the subtitle Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Melding history and psychology with art and literature and laced with references to popular culture, the book delivered a one-two punch to academe. A feminist critical of the modern women’s movement, Paglia insisted on the greatness of Western civilization, though it was already unfashionable to do so. And she asserted that its greatness resulted from a creative but violent tension between male and female—between the Apollonian male principle of order (civilization) and the Dionysian female principle of chaos (nature). Two of the book’s most quoted lines are ‘If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts’ and ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.’ Reading Sexual Personae, one reviewer wrote, was ‘a bit like being mugged.’ Now, nearly 30 years later, Paglia has once again found herself in the middle of the culture wars.”

Brian T. Allen recommends the new Museum of the Dog in New York: “The niche world of dog painters, until recently, was dominated by women. Starting in the 1860s, French art schools like the Académie Julian in Paris catered to women, and places like the Royal Academy in London and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts offered women’s classes. Professional success, though, was nearly inaccessible, undermined by prejudice and stereotypes. Dog painting was an exception. The field was not so much marginal as intimate and private.”

Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews a recent book on the Golden Age of Science Fiction: “For one who knows the subject matter, or who thinks so, reading Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding will prove an enriching but also a disturbing experience. Enrichment belongs obviously to Nevala-Lee’s intention. He sees John W. Campbell—editor of the science fiction magazine Astounding from 1937 until his death in 1971—as a central figure in American popular culture. Nevala-Lee acknowledges the stable of writers whom Campbell recruited and encouraged as having significantly shaped the American popular imagination in the mid-twentieth century, and not merely in terms of the genre that they cultivated and patented. Indeed, Nevala-Lee documents that during the Second World War the federal government saw in Campbell and his authorial coterie a high-level propaganda asset and duly put them to work to aid the war effort. The disturbing aspect of Astounding, one which links itself only tenuously to Nevala-Lee’s intention, consists in the study’s exposure of the selfish, banal, and prurient little world that his group of contributing personae, all of whom knew and socialized with one another, constituted.”

Titus Techera reviews Paul A. Cantor’s Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: “Paul Cantor has a new book on popular culture, completing his long-term project on the American dream. His previous book, The Invisible Hand In Popular Culture, established how real the American dream is and how it connects freedom and success. His new book, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies, examines the dangers of individualism: apathy and violence; the yearning for success whatever the cost; and the ongoing failure of confidence in America.”

Most people believe they have an “internal voice” and that they think in words, but that may not be the case: “Psychologist Russell Hurlburt at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent the last few decades training people to see inside their own minds more clearly in an attempt to learn something about our inner experiences at large. Though many individual studies on inner speech include only a small number of participants, making it hard to know whether their results apply more widely, Hurlburt estimates he’s been able to peek inside the minds of hundreds of people since he began his research. What he’s found suggests that the thoughts running through our heads are a lot more varied than we might suppose.”

Essay of the Day:

In City Journal, Roger Scruton debunks Yuval Noah Harari’s post-humanism:

“Homo Deus repeats the central argument of Sapiens, concerning the way in which human powers are indefinitely amplified by trust. But Harari also recognizes an impasse. Our religious fictions came to us by the invisible hand. They were believed and passed on with the effect of enhancing our power, yet it was not power but meaning that we were looking for. The power conferred by the imagined order, that is, depended on our pursuing something else. In this way, the self-sacrificing renunciation of power became a power immeasurably greater than the power renounced. To use the language of game theory, renunciation became a winning strategy in the game of domination, as in the monastic orders of the Middle Ages.

“Now, though, it is all out in the open. The myths have been debunked, and the truth that they concealed is exposed to our view. Meaning is a fiction; the reality is power. As Harari puts it, modernity offers us a deal: ‘Give up meaning in exchange for power.’ There is no purpose in the world, only the unending chain of cause and effect. Hence human beings have no predetermined role, and we can use our knowledge as we please. This knowledge, which tells us what we are, also confers the power to change what we are. ‘On the practical level,’ therefore, ‘modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning.’ Instead of acquiring power through the invisible hand of faith, we can now seize it directly and compel the world to obey us.

“This does not mean that we will be particularly pleased with the outcome. Harari is skeptical of our progressivist illusions—the obsession with economic ‘growth,’ the transhumanist attempt to complete the ‘Gilgamesh project’ and to free us from death, the bland satisfactions of the consumer society, and the attempt to live for creature comfort alone. But he also has a more subtle response to the ‘modern deal,’ which ‘offers us power, on condition that we renounce our belief in a great cosmic plan that gives meaning to life. Yet when you examine the deal closely, you find a cunning escape clause. If humans somehow manage to find meaning without predicating it on some great cosmic plan, this is not considered a breach of contract.’

“The name of this escape clause is humanism, ‘a revolutionary new creed that conquered the world during the last few centuries.’ It is a creed that exists in many forms—liberal, socialist, evolutionary, and even nationalist. It has led us into the great destructive wars of the twentieth century and into the horrors of totalitarianism but also into the modern free economy with its unprecedented prosperity and the expansion of wealth across the globe. But ‘what will happen,’ Harari asks, ‘once we realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarket?’

“That sentence is typical of the tone of voice with which Harari addresses the future. The Brave New World scenario has been presented many times before, and the response has usually been ‘Don’t go there.’ But Harari thinks that knowledge will take us there, anyway. He believes that a yet-newer religion is arising from the wreck of humanism. He calls it ‘dataism.’ As we develop forms of artificial intelligence that do not merely take over our cognitive abilities but enhance them beyond our grasp, we will rapidly find ourselves marginalized, our distinctively human capacities no longer useful for running the great machine that we set in motion by accident when Alan Turing gave us his definition of the mind. A machine has a mind, Turing maintained, if it responds to human questioning exactly as a human would. For Harari, ‘Once the Internet-of-All-Things is up and running, humans might be reduced from engineers to chips, then to data, and eventually we might dissolve within the torrent of data like a clump of earth within a gushing river.’”

Read the rest. 

Photo: Hong Kong

Poem: Richard Kenney, “Science Today”   

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