Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson - Modern Times Transcript

Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson - Modern Times Transcript

A wide-ranging, quotable conversation between two contrarian thinkers. A few highlights:

Peterson: "See that also seems to me to be related to the postmodern emphasis on power because there's something terrible underground going on there. And that is. . . I think this is the sort of thing that was reflected in the Soviet Union, too. Especially in the 20s when there was this idea, a radical idea, that you could remake human beings entirely because they had no essential nature.

"So, if your fundamental hypothesis is that nothing exists except power, and you believe that, then that also gives you the right in some sense to exercise your power at the creation of the kind of humanity that your utopian vision envisions. And that also seems to me to justify the postmodern insistence that everything is only a linguistic construct. It again goes down to the notion of power, which Derrida and Foucault and Lacan are so bloody obsessed with.

"It seems to me what they're trying to do is to take all the potential power for the creation of human beings to themselves without any bounding conditions whatsoever. There's no history, there's no biology, and everything is a fluid culture that can be manipulated at will.

"In Canada there are terrible arguments right now about biological essentialism, let's say. And one of the things that happened, which was something I objected to precisely a year ago, is that the social constructionist view of human identity has been built now into Canadian law. So there's an insistence that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently with no causal relationship between any of the levels.

"And so that's in the law, and not only is it in the law, it's being taught everywhere. It's being taught in the Armed Forces, it's being taught in the police, it's being taught to the elementary school kids, and the junior high school kids. And underneath it all I see this terrible striving for arbitrary power that's associated with this crazy utopianism."

Paglia: "You had a situation, an environmentally difficult situation like the deserts Mesopotamia, or the peculiar character of Egyptian geography where you can only have a little tiny fertile line along the edges of the Nile. Otherwise, desert landscape. So [understanding] civilization and authority as not necessarily about power grabbing but about organization to achieve something for the good of the people as a whole.... By reducing all hierarchy to power, and selfish power, is utterly naive. It's ignorant.I say education has to be totally reconstituted, including public education, to begin in the most distant past so our young people today, who know nothing about how the world was created that they inhabit, can understand what a marvelous technological paradise they live in. And it's the product of capitalism, it's the product of individual innovation. Most of it's the product of a Western tradition that everyone wants to trash now."

Paglia: "I feel that the cafeteria menu of the university curriculum has to be abandoned. We must return to historical courses that begin in the earliest period, in the Stone Age and antiquity in order to give perspective to our present. . . An analysis to our present culture. I want fifty to seventy-five percent of college administrators fired and the money be transferred over to faculty and to libraries and to instruction. I think that obviously the way people are being trained right now, including at the public school level. . . I think the public school level has gone to hell.... I mean, I've been teaching for 46 years. So I can tell the slow degradation of public school education to the point now that the students have absolutely no sense of world geography, of world history. They know absolutely nothing. . . They don't know anything about wars. And the reality, the barbaric reality of most of human history. . . What a fantastic culture we live in."