8 June 2001 
 
I have to dash off a quite note - I've been reading "Junk Bonds and Corporate 
Raiders: Academe in the Time of the Wolf", an essay by Camille Paglia, this 
morning.  She is my muse.  Even though the bulk of her writing consists of 
ridiculing mushy-headed ponderings of intellectual invisible men (mmm, what would 
sex be like if one were intangible? feh.), she gives me hope for meaning and 
depth in intellectualism in general.  Also, some of the most cherished concepts 
of the foundationless ideologists parading themselves as scholars, are at their 
core =affirmed= by Paglia.  For example, there =are= "other ways of knowing" 
other than empirical scientific traditions - it's just not something one can 
divvy up by sex, race, or class.  She does divide it by ethnicity, but I divide 
it by inherent subject matter. There are ways at truth through the humanities 
which one will not achieve through the scientific route.  This does NOT mean that 
every individual is condemned to a single mode of thought.  For crying out loud, 
I do not apply empiricism to religion (whether mine or others).  Neither do I 
apply empiricism to mathematical theorems (I mean, I =do= try examples, but the 
inherent truth of mathematical statements depends on deduction, and not a 
probabilistic process).  I have learned to use different mixtures of thinking 
modes to learn music, do needlework, and program in Perl.  There will be an 
inherent difference in the way Stu & I think of any children I bear, and even if 
we were to adopt a child, there =still= would be a difference based on the 
difference of our sex, and not on our individuality (though that will pertain as 
well). 
 
What I'm tired of is the compartmentalization of knowledge, the rehashing of 
reductionism in our time.  Reductionism has not left since the time of Newton, 
but one can see risings and falls in its hold on the popular psyche.  There was a 
time when people saw Man, the Machine.  When physics was being systematized 
starting with Newton, people thought that one could model Man as an interacting 
system of pneumatics and springs.  When chemistry came into its own, people 
thought that we could be described by the gross chemical reactions would explain 
the mind, behavior, digestion, and the like.  Nowadays, people have become 
blinded by the smallest bits of us, the genes, as explaining all, which is the 
largest load of crap I ever did hear.  In all of these cases, people forget to 
use common sense to bring up obvious counterexamples, or, completely aware of 
these counterexamples, say "oh, but that's =different=" (I hate that phrase, but 
I just used it the other day in referring to a person.  But I didn't say it to 
the person's face, which is my usual experience - people saying it to me.  "Well, 
=I= like red meat." "Oh, but you're =different=."  Listen to Mr. Rogers -- 
everyone is different - that kind of weakens anyone's argument based on 
generalities which ignore entire categories of people and things) or, even worse 
in my opinion, dismiss such things as unimportant.  What I find amusing in 
Paglia's essay is that she keeps pointing out the glaring counterexamples to 
Halperin and Winkler's premises; I so want to find responses to that essay, to 
search for the inevitable "oh, that's =different=" and "that is unimportant" 
comments I'm sure were used as defenses. I also have a sneaking suspicion that ad 
hominem attacks would come in, thinking that Paglia's criticism of the personal 
being used as valid bases for academic comments (the "so-and-so died of AIDS" 
trying to indicate that therefore the person is an expert in sexuality (one might 
think for a moment that such a death might imply =lack= of practical knowledge of 
sex.  Sex theory seems silly to me, if the people practicing it seems not to pay 
any attention to the realities of sex in their own lives.) 
 
Ugh, behemoth paragraphs. 
 
Anyway, there's a sensuality embedded in the writings of Paglia, to which I 
respond heartily.  I can see why she felt stifled in the WASPy Ivy League 
structures (hell, I don't know how much I could trust someone who felt 
=comfortable= in those circumstances). In ways she celebrates hedonism, which we 
have a false sense of in America, on the whole.  Starbucks coffee is not 
hedonism.  Getting fat on McDonald's fries and Coca-Cola is not hedonism.  Buying 
designer jeans is not hedonism.  They are pale attempts at hedonism - trying to 
get sensual pleasures on the cheap, gluttony replacing the pleasures of the 
flesh.  The true sin of gluttony is giving short shrift to the physical pleasures 
of food - substituting quantity for quality.  People sit sipping their diet 
colas, drinking their syrupy bubble-water, when they could have bought a fresh 
plum to bite into, getting =real= sweetness and lushness.  Gluttony is the 
rejection of being a good animal. 
 
So I make my proclamation to the world: I will eat no bad food for no good 
reason.  Survival is an obvious good reason.  I could name others, but I'm not 
going to make up for any lack of imagination on your part.  So I shall end it 
here.