"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

There is a tragicomic aspect of the blatant hypocrisy on both sides of the political divide these days.

Donald Trump and the left-wing fascists on our university campuses are soul mates. It's so obvious that it's amazing that anybody could miss it. And yet neither the Trumpist right nor the intersectionalist, politically correct left recognizes that when either looks at the other, it is seeing its own reflection.

Camille Paglia doesn't fit neatly into anybody's categories. She has been described as an "individualist feminist." I have no idea what that is either.  She confuses people. She delights me. She makes me think, and she and I are similar enough in temperament that I think I "get" her.

Making people think is the idea. It's what drives the woman.

She has always been a contrarian. Carmelia Metosh, her one-time Latin teacher whom Paglia once described as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards," says of Paglia, "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, and she does now."

I have to admit that I identify. Part of the reason I like Paglia so much is that I can understand that instinct. Others may interpret that trait as liking to "stir the pot," as a fondness for creating conflict- what St. Paul called "an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words," (I Tim. 6:4). In some folks, that might be what's going on, and maybe at times, it can actually be that for me;  I am, after all, peccator as well as justus.  But for the most part, I believe that in me and also in Paglia, it's a recognition that all human ideas are flawed, and that not even but especially ideas we like need to be challenged and examined from all angles and played with in order to be fully understood.

I am personally of the opinion that nobody truly understands an idea unless he or she can debate both for and against it. Most people, of course, absolutely despise seeing ideas they hold dear challenged. That's one of the things that have led to the malignant "echo chambers" in which contemporary Americans live their lives, never encountering people whose viewpoints conflict with their own on intimate enough terms to know them and understand them and their reasoning and motivations. Buying into caricatures of those people and of what makes them tick is much easier. That such a state of affairs is poisonous to society and lethal to democracy (or to a "constitutional republic," if you prefer) may be the central political truth of our age.

Challenging ideas for the sake of challenging them can stir up unnecessary trouble, and that's a major downside to life as a curmudgeon. The trait can be destructive, and that potential must always be borne in mind. But in its place, I believe that to be a curmudgeon is a useful thing and can even a calling. Look at the prophets, after all!

The trick is to keep it in its place, and that's admittedly sometimes more easily said than done.  But Socrates did it. Jesus did it. If you doubt that last one, take a look at Matthew 19:16:30, Mark 10:17-21, and Luke 18:18-23.  It's amazing how many people think that Jesus was advocating a lifestyle of poverty when he challenged the young man in that story. If that's your take on the conversation, try putting yourself into the mindset of the young man, and read it again. Something deeper and far more universal was going on, something which speaks to any of us, whether rich or poor, who is confident that we measures up to what God expects of us.

Never has there been a time in the history of civilization when so much information was so easily available to so many. On the other hand, never has there been a time when so many people were as culturally illiterate as they are today. The schools no longer teach things that have been handed down to generation after generation. Our opinions are all the more stubbornly held for being formed more by the circles in which we spend our lives than by the wisdom of the past, and we live with the paradox that at the very moment when knowledge is more readily available and available in greater volume than ever before, most of us know less than our parents did, and far less than did our grandparents. And because the availability of information far exceeds our ability to separate truth from half-truth or downright falsehood, a great deal of what most of us "know" doesn't happen to be true.

But facts, as John Adams observed, are stubborn things. The universe, to paraphrase Einstein, is remarkably unimpressed by our opinions about it. Perhaps more now than ever, we need curmudgeons to challenge us all to question everything. But we lack faith in our own ideas. Half the time, we don't even understand our own ideas. We just know that they're ours.

We find it easier to dismiss not only ideas which make us uncomfortable but also the people who hold them than to see them challenged and meet that challenge. So we hunker down in our "echo chambers," surrounded by people like ourselves who think the way we do, and each of builds his own pocket reality which we tell ourselves is the real thing. We tell ourselves our stories, and jealously guard the truth in them, at all costs preventing it from being called into question by those who think differently.

But some of us find living that way... boring. That doesn't mean that we don't retreat into our echo chambers and hide, sometimes, too. But sometimes we feel the urge to climb out of the boxes we live in and stretch our legs. Some of us- for better or for worse- even find it to be fun. And depending on the context, that can either be good or bad.

Paglia encountered a significant metaphor for her subsequent life when, as a Girl Scout, she poured too much quicklime into a latrine. It exploded.  "That symbolized everything I would do with my life and work," she later wrote. "Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology ... and I would drop the bomb into it." Paglia is a lesbian. In fact, she identifies as "transgender" because she has "never identified at all with being a woman." And that has made her especially subversive because she is best known for challenging the revisionist ideas about gender and sexuality upon which so much of the social left has built its own echo chamber, reaching all the way back to the presuppositions which flow from the so-called "sexual revolution" back when she and I were both young.

Since 1984, she has been a professor in The School of Critical Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It doesn't grant professors tenure anymore. But Paglia was granted tenure back when it did- and the fact that she's so difficult to fire drives the campus left nuts.

Paglia's first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, was rejected by seven publishers before becoming a best-seller. One of its shocking and subversive theses was that there were differences between the sexes other than the purely anatomical and that they, too, are based on biology. She considers herself a libertarian, a political viewpoint for which I myself have little sympathy but some points of agreement.  She is a global warming skeptic. She is fond of the term "pagan" and proud of having once written that "God is man's greatest idea;" needless to say, there is much that we do not have in common. But I find her intellectually stimulating (even if she does say "OK" too much) and believe that she has a great deal to say which contemporary society needs to hear. And her challenge to political correctness and groupthink is something I especially appreciate.

But feminists and campus activists do not. There have been movements to ban Sexual Personae from the curricula of several colleges and universities; it's encouraging that at one, Connecticut College, the students themselves insisted that it remain on the reading list when faculty members called it "trash" and compared it to Hitler's Mein Kampf. The head of the Women's Studies Department said in the campus newspaper that

Whenever we think about freedom of expression, we need to think also about the damage that certain kinds of speech can do. Let’s not be fooled by packaging into mistaking any hate-speech or sexist or racist doctrine for ideas.

It's a viewpoint which is ravaging Western society right now. The United States is one of the few Western democracies in which one cannot be fined, jailed, or otherwise taken to court for simply saying something which offends a member of a minority group. Our legal tradition insists that the law must take no notice of mere words; that if they cause actual, practical, empirical damage to a person or group the one who wrote or spoke them can be sued for the damage they cause, but not for speaking the words themselves. The courts have even held that a speech calling for the violent overthrow of the government is actionable at law only when uttered under conditions in which violence of a breach of civil order or other damage not only directly results from the speech, but could reasonably have been foreseen to be a possible outcome of it. Even then, the speech as such has been held by the courts to be protected by the First Amendment.

Conservatives are justifiably outraged at the breach of individual liberty involved in the Canadian and British and Australian laws against hate speech, and by the attempt to stifle any disagreement with leftist orthodoxy on college campuses. But they were somehow not outraged when Donald Trump proposed changing the law to make it possible for him to sue publications which print "purposely false" news stories, despite the utter impossibility of proving motivation and the difficulty in separating objective facts from the subjective interpretation of those facts. The president meets with approval from his supporters when they encourage violence against protesters at his rallies; how that differs from campus violence against conservatives remains unexplained. But many of his supporters seem to think that there is one.

And the reverse is also true. Campus radicals are outraged that Mr. Trump and his supporters want to penalize flag burners and question the right of Saturday Night Live to satirize him. But as we've seen, intolerance of reprehensible ideas is justified by the bizarre argument that they somehow are not ideas, and the ridiculous claim that it's not intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance thrives on campus and on the left in general despite the obvious fact that the border between intolerance and justifiable criticism is subjective and depends strongly upon one's viewpoint.

If one's criterion for legitimacy is that one agrees with a particular viewpoint, that isn't a problem. But it's a rather large problem otherwise. That's why the writers of the Enlightenment insisted so strongly that only if one is free to express the vilest and most reprehensible ideas and viewpoints can anyone be said to enjoy the freedom of expression. There is, after all, no viewpoint that someone cannot find beyond the pale, and probably does. And should that someone achieve power, there is no idea whose suppression cannot be justified by precisely the logic used by the campus left.

I went to college over the course of more than a decade. The college from which I graduated was one with an extremely conservative student body which saw nothing wrong with tearing down or defacing Carter-Mondale posters during the 1980 campaign and on which the tellingly uncomprehending phrase "biased editorial" was often used for pro-Carter editorial content in the college newspaper. Those who used the phrase were apparently unaware that editorials and columns, being expressions of opinion rather than the reporting of facts, are supposed to be "biased!" Those columns and editorials advocated a point of view with which those students disagreed; therefore, to them, they should not have been expressed in the newspaper even in a section of the paper which by custom and definition is reserved for the expression of subjective opinion.

A question: how does this attitude toward the expression of dissent differ from the attempt of students at the University of the Arts to get Carmen Paglia fired for suggesting that the current trans-gender mania is a symptom of the decline and imminent collapse of Western society, that there are differences between men and women which are intrinsic and hard-wired, that climate change is a hoax, that rape may include a sexual component rather than being entirely about power, and that feminism fosters an unhealthy "victim mentality" that is demeaning to women?

When-with candidate Trump's encouragement- protestors at his rallies were physically assaulted and in one memorable case promised that he would pay the legal fees of anybody who got into trouble for beating them up, how is that more outrageous than when students resort to or threaten violence when Ann Coulter appears to give a talk on campus, or when it costs the state of California $600,000 to guarantee Ben Shapiro's personal safety at Berkeley?

It's remarkable how clearly both left and right see the intolerance of the other, but even more remarkable how neither can see that it's reflected in their own intolerance. That's the cost of living in echo-chambers. We mirror the hypocrisy of those we claim to despise, and condemn in others precisely what we insist is permissible for us.

The problem is not the fault of the right, and it is not the fault of the left. Though he has exploited it- and arguably even built his political career out of it- it's not even finally the fault of Donald Trump. But our polarized political climate has created a climate of hypocrisy in which even our justified complaints against the other side are reflected in our own speech and behavior- and we don't even see it. The pot needs to be stirred- not to incite us against each other, but to raise the question precisely among those with whom generally we agree (they'd never listen to the other side), "Why the hell don't we see it?"

Voltaire probably never actually said, "I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," as congenial as the expression is to his philosophy. But without such an attitude prevailing, freedom cannot exist and democracy cannot function.  Yet how many conservatives are aware that the doctrine that the mere causing of emotional distress is not grounds for a lawsuit was set forth by the Supreme Court in a lawsuit in which the plaintiff was not some left-wing campus snowflake, but Jerry Falwell?

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