The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

by Michael Walsh

  A world, in other words, that sounds very much like Heaven. It is the world promised us by Critical Theory and by the principal figures of the Frankfurt School: the music critic Theodor Adorno; the sex theorist Wilhelm Reich (whose theories and writings I shall examine in detail); as well as founding fathers Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács.

  Instead, as empirical evidence proclaims, this world has become Hell. The world sought by the Frankfurt School and its Critical Theory disciples is all an illusion, just as surely as the Teufels Lustschloss was. The corpses of the untold millions who have died in the attempts of the literally Unholy Left to found the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth, divorced from God, surely testify. Our pleasure palaces are many and varied, ranging from the creature comforts of modern civilization and its nearly endless opportunities for self-abnegating entertainment to our gleeful, olly-olly-oxen-free abjuration of formal religion, and to our false sense of enduring cultural security, which was only partly dented by the events of September 11, 2001. And yet our pleasure palaces can and will fall, as have those of all civilizations before ours. And unlike in Schubert’s opera, this time there is no guaranteed happy ending.

  Something wicked this way has come, and we are in the fight of our lives. How, or even whether, we choose to fight it is not the subject of this book. The subject is why we must.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHOSE PARADISE?

  And fast by hanging in a golden Chain

  This pendant world, in bigness as a Star

  Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.

  Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,

  Accursed, and in a cursed hour he hies.

  — Paradise Lost, Book Two

  Rage is the salient characteristic of Satan and of the satanic in men. There are others, including guile, deceit, and temptation. But at the heart of Satan’s mission is an overwhelming animus against God and the godly. In the second book of Milton’s epic poem, Satan has a conference with his fellow demons, determined to loose the bonds of Hell, where he has been chained, and carry the fight to the Principal Enemy (the name, let us recall, that the Communist Soviets gave to the capitalist United States during the Cold War) in the only battlefield that remains open to him: Earth.

  Miraculously, God lets him do it. Passing the twin guardians of Hell’s gate—Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death—he launches himself upward “like a pyramid of fire.” Directed by Chaos, Lucifer traverses the void, leaving in his wake a bridge from Hell to Earth, to provide a pathway for the demons who will surely follow upon its completion.

  Since this poetic moment—itself derived from the oldest Western foundational narrative of them all, Genesis—the war, the fight, the struggle, the Kampf has raged essentially uninterrupted. It is Genesis that first lays out the ur-Kampf, the primal conflict, with which we are dealing even to this day. One may deny the specifics of Genesis; the cult 17 of “science” has made that easy to do. But what one cannot do is deny its poetry, which resonates deeply within our souls. And poetry clearly precedes science, so which is more likely to be truer to the human soul?

  Please note that I am not making an “anti-science” argument here but merely questioning the modern notion of the supremacy of modern science over its antecedents, poetry and drama. Science has much to teach us, but its primary function is incremental, not universal (no serious scientist pretends that it is). There is no “settled science,” but there is a settled ur-Narrative, no matter how much or how often the Left may inveigh against it and try to substitute new norms for it. Before we were aware of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, we were aware of the movements of our hearts.

  Conflict is the essence of history, but also of drama. Without conflict, there can be no progress, without progress there can be no history, without history there can be no culture, without culture there can be no civilization. And—since nothing in this world, or any other possible world in the universe, is or can be static—without the cultural artifact of drama, there can be no civilization. The least dramatic place on earth was the Garden of Eden. Then Eve met the Serpent, and the rest is history. From Genesis, Chapter Three:

  1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

  2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

  3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

  4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

  5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

  6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

  In other words, to Eve’s question “Why?” the Serpent responded, in classic Frankfurt School/Critical Theory fashion: “Why not?” All our troubles stem from this crucial moment, this crucial choice, this key “plot point,” when the protagonist (in this instance, Eve) must make a choice—but, crucially, at this point in the story, without enough information and backstory (Who is this Serpent? How does he speak like a human being?) to make an informed choice. So she takes a bite. Why not? Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

  This is, to put it bluntly, one hell of a claim, delivered right at the beginning of our recorded history. Satan is promising Eve, the ur-Mother, that she can transcend her human perfection (sinless, immortal) and become godlike by knowing both good and evil. One might observe that Satan ought to know, since evil comes into the world through his rebellion. And yet, paradoxically, it is her transgression—her Original Sin in reaching for the Godhead—that makes her, and us, fully human. Would we want it any other way?

  As Milton reminds us in the Areopagitica:

  Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

  What, after all, was wrong with the Garden? It was perfect. But its very perfection made it imperfect. Would you, as a human being, rather be human or angelic? Surely, the angels could not have been jealous of a subspecies such as Homo sapiens if humans were not potentially superior to the angels, precisely because of their free will, which endows them with the capacity to live a heroic narrative. (Is St. Michael a hero or merely the instrument of God’s divine will? And, if so, does that make him less heroic than, say, Cincinnatus or Horatius?) Is worshipping God at the foot of his throne, as the angels do, the true destiny of humans? Or does Milton’s Satan make a valid point when he says that it is better—more human—to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven? Is Satan’s assertion not one of the most human statements ever penned? (The compellingly heroic Satan of Arrigo Boito’s opera Mefistofele could not have put it better.)

  To the Devil his due; he won a kingdom; he has a purpose. He even appears heroic, with one crucial exception: He cannot die fighting. He has no real skin in the game. His war with God—which by definition he cannot win—is an illusion. Is it therefore a test? Of whom? God? Satan? Us?

  The yearning for a prelapsarian state of grace is present in all cultures; the Fall of Man is one of our most potent stories. It is at once retroactively aspirational (a restoration of the status quo), religious (Jesus saves), and comfortingly chil
dlike (was the Garden of Eden really filled with ever-ripe fruit trees?). Did we, via Eve and the apple, bring the Fall upon ourselves, or was it engineered by satanic forces; and, if so, why did God not stop it? The simple answer to the last question is: because then there would be no freedom, no drama. No choice (to use a current leftist buzzword).

  Thus, this primal drama becomes the hallmark of civilizational self-awareness. Recall that it is only after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that Adam and Eve realize they are naked and thus sexual beings. And self-awareness is far more essential to human advancement than are the creature comforts of science. We consider the civilization of the ancient Greeks great—indeed, foundational—because of Homer, Plato, Euripides, and Aristotle, not because of their modes of transport or their health-care system.

  And not, one should note, because of their political system either, from which the Western democracies draw much of their inspiration. The Greek political system was an outgrowth of Greek culture, with its sophisticated sense of self, not the other way around. Societies cannot create a political system from the top down (as opposed to one that grows organically) any more than they can create a truly living language from the top down, as shown with Esperanto and Volapük, languages that linguists constructed but that failed to take hold. Languages are plastic and evolutionary, but they are never random. Neither are the cultures to which they give rise.

  This is not a trivial issue. As bilingual speakers know, one thinks slightly differently, depending on the language one is using, not simply in matters of vocabulary, but in sentence structure, even conceptualization of both concrete and abstract ideas. “Evening” or “twilight,” for instance, evokes one image in English (the fading of the light), while the German “Abendrot” conjures up something richer, more colorful, even poignant; the English “gloaming” probably comes closest. Richard Strauss chose “Im Abendrot,” based on the poem by Eichendorff, as one of his ineffable Four Last Songs, and a more affecting evocation of day turning to night has never been written.

  The situation becomes even more complex when the two languages are not members of the same family of tongues. Obviously, it is possible to switch smoothly between, say, English and Chinese, but that does not mean it is easy, and much imagery will inevitably be lost in translation. No matter how much or how often the egalitarian Left tries to argue in favor of its one-size-fits-all ideology, empirical evidence and experience tell us that this is simply wishful thinking, advanced for a political purpose. Not all languages or cultures are the same; nor do they have the same value. But despite the plain evidence of your senses, the Left has ways of making you toe the line.

  “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him,” ventured the Nobel Prize–winning author Saul Bellow in 1988, thus setting off a firestorm of feigned outrage among the bien-pensant readers of the New Yorker—an early violation of the repressive strictures we have come to know as political correctness.

  “The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin,” Bellow later explained in a 1994 piece for the New York Times, defending himself. “Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see. . . . My critics, many of whom could not locate Papua New Guinea on the map, want to convict me of contempt for multiculturalism and defamation of the third world. I am an elderly white male—a Jew, to boot. Ideal for their purposes.”

  Bellow concluded with this remarkably prescient passage:

  Righteousness and rage threaten the independence of our souls. Rage is now brilliantly prestigious. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority’s admission of guilt for past and present injustices, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and “justly” angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism. As a one-time anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists, or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

  In other words, celebration of diversity stops where any possible cultural superiority or inferiority might begin. But, to use leftist cant, isn’t diversity our strength? And if so, where did that diversity begin?

  Seen in this light, the incident in the Garden takes on a new meaning: Eve is not the cause of the Fall of Man, but its enabler. The Serpent’s Temptation of Eve is not only the first great satanic crime—although, to be sure, Adam and Eve had free will before the First Mother encountered the Snake—it is also the liberating act, the felix culpa, or happy fault that freed Man to fulfill his destiny as something other than God’s humble, obedient servant. As St. Augustine wrote in the Enchiridion, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.”

  Paradise may have been lost, but what was gained may have been something far more valuable, something, when you stop to think about it, that more closely comports with God’s stated plan for humanity: creatures endowed with free will and thus potentially superior to the angels. Eve’s first bite of the apple is not, then, simply Original Sin—it is the inciting incident of mankind’s own drama. Something was lost, to be sure, but something was gained as well, implanted in our breasts from the beginning: a sense of where we are going. Evil, sin, change, flux, drama, and death itself are the means to get there.

  As poets and authors have known since the time of the ancient Greeks, a world without conflict cannot exist. And, by our lights, accustomed to this world, if it did, it would be a very dull place indeed. For here, outside the Garden, without God available for direct consultation, it is only in the clash of conflicting ideas that truth—furtively, hesitantly—emerges, however unwelcome that truth might ultimately be. Oedipus’s search for his father’s killer first drives him into the arms of his mother and later, when the truth is revealed, to his own self-blinding and exile.

  So the modern American tendency to regard peace as man’s natural state and war as its aberration has it exactly backward. We intuit this about man’s nature, and history validates this insight recurrently and bloodily. To be human is to be Fallen. But to be satanic—that is to say, to accept uncritically the legitimacy of Critical Theory’s anti-human argument—is to have no chance at redemption at all. For how can nihilism be redemptive?

  A world at peace, absent the arrival of the Second Coming, would surely be a very dull and unproductive place, perhaps possible only through a universal tyranny. While no one wishes war, sometimes war must come; war is an inevitability, and peace is the outcome of its successful, if temporary, sorting-out. Hobbes was right, although he failed to allow for man’s nature, divine as well as human. Though red in tooth and claw, nature occasionally calls for, and sometimes obtains, a temporary state of balance, out of which the world promptly spins and begins the cycle again. This is not pessimism, this is realism. Free, we differ, argue, fight, and sometimes kill. Enforced peace ends in slavery and the grave—as one of the world’s major religions promises and, in its Dar al-Islam (house of Islam), tries to practice. Trying, testing, questioning, pushing: These are man’s true natural attributes, and trouble, his natural state.

  A world without conflict, or post-conflict, however, is exactly what various all-encompassing political systems have promised. But the path to this utopia has been paved with much misery and death. In our time, the main retailer of such a myth has been socialism, in two forms: German National Socialism and Soviet Marxism—especially the latter.

  The two prime movers of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, sought to overturn the existing order—first the moral order and then the political order—like the the nineteenth-century radicals that they were. (Except for their outsized influ
ence, there is nothing “modern” about either thinker.) More akin to anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Luigi Lucheni (who assassinated the Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898), Gramsci and Lukács had no interest in any compromise that could be the result of the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For them, there were only winners and losers—and in this, we must grudgingly admit they were right. To compromise is to negate the validity of one’s own position and succumb to the temptation to see reason at work, when the true radical knows that reason is only a tool, put to base uses. In the ur-Kampf, both sides seek a lost Paradise, and it is clear from both cultural and religious tradition whose side each is on. The forces of good seek a kind of Edenic restoration, with man this time taking his place alongside and above the angels at the throne of God, while the vengeful revolutionaries dream of a new, better Paradise that they themselves control, one from which God is entirely absent.

  Which raises this important question: Just whose Paradise has been lost? The conventional interpretation of our Genesis-based foundational myth is that it is our paradise, the Garden of Eden, that has been lost. But man’s heroic post-lapsarian quest is not to return to Eden, but to get to Heaven—something that is explicitly denied forever to Satan and his minions. They made their choice when they allied themselves with the seductive and beautiful angel Lucifer, and now they (save only Abdiel, the angel who was tempted by the satanic but in the end returned to God) must suffer eternally in the realm of the hideous, deformed Satan into whom the angel Lucifer has been transformed.

  The Paradise that has been irrevocably lost is not ours but Satan’s. No wonder those who advocate the satanic position fight for it so fiercely; it is not Eden they seek to restore but Heaven itself, albeit under new management. Bent on revenge, it is Satan who, in the form of the Serpent, tempts Eve to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (Satan, it should be noted, is extremely sexually attracted to the gorgeous Eve.) In Milton’s poem, it is Satan whose journey we follow. For some divine reason, he has been given a sporting chance for revenge, and, by God, or somebody, he is going to take it.