Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

On our reduced attention span

Camille Paglia--always interesting, often odd--reflects on both loss of words and still images in the mind and imagination of today’s student. A thoughtful piece for a lazy afternoon. A sample:

"Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. Technology, like Kubrick’s rogue computer, HAL, is the companionable servant turned ruthless master. The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today’s students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images."

Discussions - 1 Comment

I’m a conservative who really likes Camille Paglia. She’s very insightful and a classical liberal. I appreciate her love of art and history in context. Professors like her are a dying breed.

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