Dear Bowdoin College,
Over the past few weeks, a fruitful controversy erupted surrounding my use of the word "pagan" to describe cultural currents I saw streaming through elements of Bowdoin's GLBTQ community. Through hours of conversation with professors, discussion with fellow students, and book browsing in the library, I came to see that there is a lively debate about the meaning of the word "pagan." So I should clarify—when I wrote it, I had just read the provocative 1994 essay, "A Pagan Theory of Sexuality" by Camille Paglia, who transfigures and glorifies paganism invoking the word as shorthand for our "Greco-Roman" inheritance as compared with the more traditional inheritance from what she calls the "Judeo-Christian moral tradition."
In any case, after these discussions, and after Ivies weekend, it is clear to me I was in the wrong. I sincerely respect, and even celebrate, the courage of homosexual people on campus and should not have singled them out as "pagan"—mostly because I now believe that the whole campus deserves this compliment. It is hard to say what people do in private, but I feel confident saying that Bowdoin College is an institution of public paganism.
This noble paganism at Bowdoin is mostly visible in the intellectual origins of three prominent cultural movements that find robust expression at the college—environmentalism, sexual libertarianism, and academic postmodernism. While each of these currents finds its own way of harmonizing with inherited religion, all of these currents are accompanied by legitimate grievances against traditional Judeo-Christian morality. They have combined to strip religion of its former prestige and successful forge a "culture of public paganism."
Despite the recent mainstreaming of environmentalism which has made it more religion-and-commerce-friendly, Bron Taylor in "Resacralizing Earth" paints its intellectual forerunners in America as "environmental pagans" frustrated with traditional religion. As the College elevates sustainability as a communal value and drapes the campus in black and green posters that read, "We're committed, are you?," it carries with it a deep strain of paganism, beginning with Sierra Club founder John Muir (1838-1914) who decisively proved that, "pagan religious sentiments leading to environmental activism are not a new phenomenon in America." His thick pantheism glitters through his prose—"I fancy I can hear a heart beating in every crystal, in every grain of sand and see a wise plan in making and shaping of every one of them. All seems to be dancing to divine music. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness."
Edward Abbey (1928-1989) continued in this vein, calling for an imagination strong enough to "abandon forever such fantasies of the supernatural." Like a psychedelic Muir, he sees in nature a "Hindu pantheon of divinities" and further writes, "Each time I look up at one of the secretive little side canyons I half expect to see...the leafy god...a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, about to speak my name." Bringing us to present day, we have the activist and Poet Laureate of "deep ecology," Gary Snyder (b. 1930). Developing a "utopian eco-political philosophy," he harbors hopes that "if people stay somewhere long enough...the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's the power of the spirits coming up from the land."
Although contemporary homosexuals harmonize more with religion, it is not disputed that many earlier proponents of sexual libertarianism held grievances against the restrictiveness of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Many would either develop more progressive theologies or, as Paglia advocates, midwife a "return to paganism!" We attend a college where it is considered sinful not to pursue your desires and where homophobia is disciplined and punished. In my interview with Outpeer, BQSA member, Q editor, and resident Judith Butler expert, Alanna Beroiza '09, these intellectual transformations seem to be kicking in—"Bowdoin professors continue to do a better job of welcoming the pagan vocabulary of sexuality in the classroom. They show a willingness to think outside the Judeo-Christian norms and this translates into more meaningful acts of queer resistance."
The victories are the fruits of a decades-long struggle. In 1964, Michel Foucault called for a reversal of the Christian battle for chastity against "concupiscence." He lamented that "fornication" was considered "the most disgraceful of all the vices, the one that is most shameful." From this perspective, Christianity "is a confessional religion; it imposes very strict obligations of truth, dogma, and canon, more so than do the pagan religions." Calling for the "intellectual destroyer" to resist the "power structures" of society, he might have agreed with Paglia in 1994 when she recommended that gay people, "concentrate...on winning recognition of the pagan line as a counter-tradition whose major contributions have been science and art and whose philosophy of sexuality is both broader and subtler than the Judeo-Christian."
A final current with serious grievances against Judeo-Christianity is academic postmodernism. The widely influential Richard Rorty protests religion in the name of a "romantic polytheism," which welcomes "the substitution of poetry for religion as a source of ideals." After saying that only humans can "dictate moral choices," he encourages like-minded colleagues to work as "liberal ironists" who can favor what [Arnold] called "Hellenism" over what he called "Hebraism." The academic postmodern and the "scientific atheism" flourishing today under the auspices of Richard Dawkins and "The Four Horsemen," also represent the scientific grievances against religion—it promotes violence, it is intellectually dishonest, it devalues science, and even accuse it of "immorality!" More serious postmodern academics and partisans of paganism blame the tradition for its exclusivity, its lack of pride, or its colonial and imperial nature.
The legitimate and facetious grievances emanating from environmental paganism, sexual libertarianism, academic postmodernism are more than opposed to traditional Judeo-Christian morality. They have combined to create a forceful repudiation of our religious inheritance and it is now cleansed from our public square. You could follow Old Scalia's criticism and argue this repudiation has relegated religion to a "purely personal avocation that can be indulged, entirely in secret, like pornography, in the privacy of one's own room." Yet, this privatization of religion can also open up space for us to search for a new goal to unify our culture.
In this series, entitled "Imagining Bowdoin," I've taken our public paganism for granted and used each column to consider a different thought that might be capable of goal unifying Bowdoin. I considered several—overcoming "the awkward," invigorating the suburbs, a "political kinesiology" to get America back into shape, reconciling the '60s spirit with Judeo-Christian morality, and the possibility of an "Athleticist" culture. I spent a great deal of effort pondering what kind of goal this could be, but for different reasons, each of these goals falls short. Nonetheless, this "problem of culture" calls on all of to seek some kind of goal that can reunify us. I end where I began a little less than three years ago—beguiled by this one quote, presented by Professor Franco in his September, 2006 speech, "Nietzsche and Liberal Education:"
"Perhaps this is one of Nietzsche's most enduring lessons—not his specific solutions he came up with, but the tireless quest to find a goal for culture and education in a world that had lost its traditional bearings, and was headed into the long twilight of nihilism. Though he may not have discovered a goal that we find compelling today, he brings home the danger, especially for education, of doing without any goal at all."
The series "Imagining Bowdoin" is now over and I will likely retire forever from all journalism. For all those faithful readers of this column, thanks for giving my scribblings your time. I now invite you to embark on the far more important task of engaging this "problem of culture"—a genuine perplexity I take to be the most important question facing we firstlings of the 21st century.
Your Friend,
Ross D. Jacobs