Monday, December 11, 2017

A jazz session of ideas

A conversation: What Happened to Men and Women? - Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson. Two public thinkers, admirers of traditional western civilization but with immensely different personas.

Camille Paglia is a July 4th/Guy Fawkes Night public speaker. Ideas flashing across the sky, bangs, pops, whistles. She doesn't stop, it is an outpouring of sound and energy and passion. She generates ideas like a sparkler throwing off sparkles. She carries her argument with flashbangs and sheer energetic momentum. Her parents were Italian immigrants, she is a lesbian atheist.

Jordan Peterson is deliberate, crafting his statements, reviewing them as he speaks, knitting together evidence and logic and trying to build a sustaining structure of an argument. He is out of the classical liberal model (what we now often call conservative), Christian, straight.

They are nominally so different and yet both are enormously committed to Western Civilization and the Age of Enlightenment ideas of natural rights and freedom. I have no idea how much they agree on and how much they might disagree. This is not so much a debate as it is two intense thinkers thrown into a room to talk and see what happens.

There is a torrent of ideas, not building to a conclusion as with a classical musical piece, but more like a jazz band playing off the riffs of one another. It is joyful entertainment with food for thought.


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