Maverick feminist Camile Paglia has joined the chorus singing paeans to
capitalism on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal. In her contribution,
titled “How Capitalism Can Save Art,” she argues there is a simple reason why art
has lost existential ground over the last couple of decades – what elese could
you expect, if “the most
talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the
economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible.”
This, of course, is a refrain of the conspiracy theory embraced by all sorts of
cultural/social “conservatives” – and Paglia has swallowed it as self-righteously,
though she describes herself as “a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.”
This fatal attraction of conspiratorial thinking is in fact quite curious.
Such an attachment to conspiracy theories is usually
attributed to people who have grown up in fatalistic or marginalized
communities – Serbs who think Western governments and shadier interests have
combined forces to keep them down, African-Americans who believe the CIA
deliberately inundated inner cities with drugs, etc. It seems, though, that the
causal explanations spun by intellectuals can be equally unsophisticated. Why
do rural whites in the US Middle East
failed to unleash universal admiration for Western policies and values? There
is always a comforting explanation pointing to one conspiracy or another. It
seems acknowledging the role of some systemic forces or imperatives would,
indeed, be a lot more disconcerting to even some of the brightest minds around.
