Indeed …

… Force of Nature. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… according to Paglia, who teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Western civilization was erected as a bulwark against the dark, destructive forces of existence, including our base instincts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth had envisioned nature as maternal comforter, and individuals in a natural state as innocent. Their descendants are liberals and feminists who think we can expel aggression and inequality from the world if only we get our heads straight and our institutions right. Paglia sees nature, especially human nature, undercutting them at every turn. Sexual Personae describes our nightly descent “to the dream world where nature reigns, where there is no law but sex, cruelty, and metamorphosis.” Nature, she says, “is Pandemonium, an All Devils’ Day.” To contemplate it is to grasp “the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology, the Darwinian waste and bloodshed.”