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

by Michael Walsh

  Among the Frankfurt School’s members was the half-Russian Richard Sorge, who became a spy for the Soviet Union. While he contributed little in the way of cultural theory to Communism, his work as a traitor and double agent is worth remarking upon. After serving in World War I, Sorge—the name means “worry” in German—became a Communist in 1919, but he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 to burnish his German bona fides. Under journalistic cover, he was the first to report to Stalin that Hitler was planning Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1940, a report that Stalin disbelieved. While undercover in Japan as a reporter, Sorge informed the Soviets that the Japanese would not open up an eastern front with the Soviet Union, thus allowing Stalin to transfer military assets to the east to combat Hitler. Sorge was discovered by the Japanese in late 1941 and hanged three years later. In honor of his service to the Motherland, he was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.

  The Frankfurt School included both Marxists and Freudians in its ranks, which was crucial to its later success in the United States (and a more toxic combination of nineteenth-century voodoo can hardly be imagined). As the website Marxists.org proudly puts it:

  In 1931/32, a number of psychoanalysts from the Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis and others who were acquainted with members of the Institut [für Sozialforschung] began to work systematically with the Institut. . . . In joining what was predominantly a “Hegelian-materialist” current of Marxists, these psychologists gave the development of Marxist theory an entirely new direction, which has left its imprint on social theory ever since. . . . The intellectuals who founded the Frankfurt Institut deliberatively cut out a space for the development of Marxist theory, inside the “academy” and independently of all kinds of political party [sic]. The result was a process in which Marxism merged with bourgeois ideology. A parallel process took place in post–World War Two France, also involving a merging with Freudian ideas. One of the results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeois ideology.

  Thanks a lot. To this day, we can chart the Institut’s baleful effects through the prisms of artistic narrative (including literature, poetry, music, and opera) and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, minus the illusory synthesis.

  It was the Berlin-born Marcuse—who taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego—whose political influence was, on balance, the greatest of them all, owing to his voguish popularity among college students in the 1960s (he was the flip side of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who had nearly as great an influence on young conservatives of the period). Marcuse came up with the particularly nasty concept of “repressive tolerance,” a notion that has guided the Unholy Left since the publication of his essay by the same name in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Marcuse, Robert Paul Wolff, and Barrington Moore Jr. It might be best described as “tolerance for me, but not for thee.” But let Marcuse explain:

  The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. . . . Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e., in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. . . . Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

  This casuistry is deception in its purest form. In the half-century since Marcuse’s essay, “tolerance” has taken on the status of a virtue—albeit a bogus one—a protective coloration for the Left when it is weak and something to be dispensed with once it is no longer required. It is another example of the Left’s careful strategy of using the institutions of government as the means for its overthrow. Saul Alinsky precisely articulated this as Rule No. 4 in his famous Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.” By casting human frailty as hypocrisy, Alinsky and his fellow “community organizers” executed a nifty jujitsu against the larger culture, causing it to hesitate when it should have been forcefully defending itself. And the shot at Christianity (there is no one “Christian church”) is a characteristic touch as well.

  Today, we can see the damage of such cheap sophistry all around us—in our weakening social institutions, the rise of the leviathan state, and the decline of primary, secondary, and college education. But destruction was always the end, not just the means. As Marcuse noted in “Reflections on the French Revolution,” a talk he gave in 1968 on the student protests in Paris: “One can indeed speak of a cultural revolution in the sense that the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of the existing society.”

  In the same year, in a lecture titled “On the New Left,” he went into greater detail:

  We are faced with a novelty in history, namely with the prospect of or with need for radical change, revolution in and against a highly developed, technically advanced industrial society. This historical novelty demands a reexamination of one of our most cherished concepts. . . . First, the notion of the seizure of power. Here, the old model wouldn’t do anymore. That, for example, in a country like the United States, under the leadership of a centralized and authoritarian party, large masses concentrate on Washington, occupy the Pentagon, and set up a new government. Seems to be a slightly too unrealistic and utopian picture. (Laughter.) We will see that what we have to envisage is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.

  Marcuse, by reason of both his longevity and residence in the U.S., spoke directly to the counterculture of the late ’60s, and his words fell on fertile ground, sprouting like the dragon’s teeth sewn by Cadmus to create a race of super warriors, the Spartoi. They still dwell among us.

  Even more important, however, is the Frankfurt School’s literary role as antagonist to what we might characterize as heroic Judeo-Christian Western culture—which was formed from Greco-Roman civilization, the conservative impulse of the Thomistic Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (whose ultimate expression was the Constitution of the United States)—as well as Victorian and Edwardian high culture (perhaps the apogee of Western civilization). That civilization, in the classic literary fashion of the hero’s subconsciously pursuing his own destruction, gave birth to the resentful philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the destructive First World War, the various socialist revolutions (some, such as Russia’s, successful and others, as in Bavaria’s, unsuccessful), the Cold War, and the short interregnum of “the End of History” before the long-dormant Muslim assault on the West resumed in earnest on September 11, 2001. Obviously, this list of world-historical events is not exhaustive, no more so than a plot synopsis can stand in for, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).

  It does, however, establish the framework for a discussion in which I seek to demonstrate that far from being a natural outgrowth of a strain of Western political philosophy that culminated in Marxism and, worse, in Marxism-Leninism, the cultural philosophy of the Frankfurt School was itself aberrational in that it was profoundly anti-religious as well as anti-human. While substituting its own rituals for religion and unleashing its murderous wrath on the notion of the individual, it masqueraded as a force both liberating and revolutionary, when in fact its genesis is as old as the Battle in Heaven.

  Consider the death toll alone. Ye
s, the European wars of religion—including the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648 and Cromwell’s invasion of Catholic Ireland in 1649—inflicted a horrible loss on the population, and we cannot underestimate the Great War’s toll on the cultural confidence of European civilization. Moreover, with German connivance, WWI opened Russia to Communist revolutionaries. But the twentieth-century wars unleashed by Marxism-Leninism took wartime slaughter to a new, mechanistic level, both domestically—Stalin’s forced starvation of Ukrainians, the Maoist revolution in China, the Stalinist purges, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the repressive society of North Korea, and the wholesale slaughter that followed the American collapse in Southeast Asia—and internationally, from World War II through Korea and Vietnam, Angola and Afghanistan. If Satan needs corpses, the Marxist-Leninists have been only too happy to provide them.

  Further, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, brought about by its own internal contradictions (as the Marxists might say) opened up the U.S.S.R.’s southern flank to the forces of Islamic extremism, itself in part a reaction to the Soviets’ ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan and poorly executed attempt to subvert Iran (after the fall of the Shah in 1979) via the Communist, pro-Soviet Tudeh Party. Osama bin Laden battled the Soviets in Afghanistan and wrongly concluded that he and his “holy warriors” had beaten the Red Army. In fact, the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was more attributable to the Russians’ loss of cultural self-confidence brought on by the decadent, self-discrediting Marxism-Leninism of the Brezhnev era than it was owing to the losses inflicted by a ragtag band of mujahideen armed with Stinger missiles. The army that had bulldozed Hitler from Stalingrad to Berlin had nothing to support it after the Soviets had hollowed out Russian society and morals with their imported philosophy. After that, of course, Bin Laden turned his sights upon the United States, seeing America as another “weak horse.”

  A wonderful illustration to Faust by Eugène Delacroix depicts Mephistopheles in winged flight over Wittenberg, one of several “Lutherstädte” (Luther towns) in Germany associated with the events of the Protestant Reformation. As a depiction of the sacred (the church spires) and the profane (the fallen angel, his wings still intact, flying impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy), it vividly expresses the ongoing battle between good and evil. It also unites many of the images—innate images, as I have argued, the embedded ur-Narrative we all share—about which we have been speaking, including the divine, the daemonic, and the satanic, the Battle in Heaven, the Fall of Man, and the Faustian bargain.

  For Satan, as for Marx, religion was an impediment to the grand design of transforming humanity from a collection of free-willed, autonomous individuals into a mass of self-corralling slaves who mistake security for liberty and try to keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum in order to function.

  The Marxist view of religion has gone through an evolution, to the point where some of the Frankfurt School’s defenders argue that cultural Marxism did, in fact, make a place for “religion” (or at least transcendence) in its weltanschauung. It “evolved,” they say, past the official atheism of Marxism-Leninism as practiced by a backward society like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  It is worth a moment to reflect on the use of this word. “Evolution” is most closely associated with Darwin, thus affording it a patina of “science” as far as the Marxists are concerned, but whenever the word is used by the Left, it takes on an added, quasi-teleological meaning: We are evolving toward something, a “higher state.” Thus, Supreme Court justices are said to have “grown in office” or “evolved” as they make their way from right to left during the course of their lifetime tenures. And politicians are said to have “evolved” whenever they switch positions from something more conservative to something rather more liberal (as with gay marriage). As Rob Clements noted on the blog The Other Journal (which has the tagline “an intersection of theology and culture”):

  In its most prolific phase, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the [Frankfurt School] consisted mainly of dissident Marxists who believed that orthodox Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the rise of fascism as a working-class movement. This led many of these dissident Marxists to take up the task of re-appropriating Marxism in light of conditions that Karl Marx himself had never considered. The school has a clear genealogy, appropriating elements of Marxist materialism, Hegelian philosophy, German idealism, Gestalt psychology, and atheistic Jewish Messianism. This synthesized analysis gave expression to a transdisciplinary, anticapitalist intellectual tradition with both immanent (material) and transcendent (metaphysical or spiritual) themes.

  In a nutshell, here we see the problem with nontraditional theory and dogma: It must constantly change the terms of the debate to accommodate, however reluctantly, reality, as much as the Marxists would like to ignore it. T.H. Huxley (the quotation has been attributed to others) spoke of the “murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts.” Cultural Marxist theory is always getting used to such brutal facts and twisting its theory to fit them—thus, the necessity for “evolution” as part of its unholy eschatology.

  Dubbing revision “evolution” also gives a patina of “science” to Marxist theory, something it desperately seeks, having largely abandoned its claims to economic “science” in the wake of a century of failure. Having co-opted, if not actually invented, the “social sciences” (the inherent oxymoron generally goes unremarked), cultural Marxism and Critical Theory seek to legitimize their attempted murder of beautiful facts with a gang of brutal theorems, each one more beguiling that the last, iron fists in velvet gloves, grimacing skulls beneath seductive skins.

  Something that has “evolved” is better than something that has not. New and improved is better, fitter than the old and diminished. Whether this is true, at least in the sociopolitical realm, is very much open to debate. Rhetorically, the point is to establish the inevitable teleology of “progressivism,” always moving “forward” into a bright and shining future and casting off the vestigial physical and moral attributes of the past.

  Thus is born Critical Theory, the hallmark of the Frankfurt School’s “progressive” (in reality, ultra-regressive) guerrilla assault on Western and American culture—Critical Theory, which essentially holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or attacked. Our cultural totems, shibboleths, and taboos are declared either completely arbitrary or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages—as degenerate modern feminism blames male “privilege” and other forms of imaginary oppression. If the feminists have an argument, it is with God, not men; but since few of them believe in God, it is upon men that they turn their harpy ire.

  In its purest form, which is to say its most malevolent form, Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism: rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons, and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.

  “Satanism” is a strong word, but for the purposes of our discussion, it is a vital one. With no artificial Hegelian synthesis at our disposal—as there was none for Milton or Goethe or any other storyteller of stature who has pierced the veil of darkness—we are left with a stark, elemental choice. If the myth of the Fall is correct—and either it is, or it is a mass hallucination that somehow, against all odds, has sprung up and endured—then there can be only good and evil, with no accommodation between them possible.

  Further: God seeks no accommodation with Satan. There is no divine principle worth compromising, no request from the heavenly side of the conflict to meet Hades halfway on matters of faith and morals. No, all the requests for compromise and pleas for negotiation come exclusively from Satan. As Antonio says in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

  Mark you this, Bassanio,

  The
devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

  An evil soul producing holy witness

  Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.

  A goodly apple rotten at the heart.

  O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

  Goodly indeed. Throughout literature, the Devil is frequently portrayed as sincere, earnest, reassuring and cajoling, slow to reveal his terrifying face. Deception is his stock-in-trade, and human beings who give him the slightest benefit of the doubt end up unhappily, and worse. To doubt the accuracy of these portrayals—no matter whence they originate, whether from folk tradition or (as I argue) some deep, Jungian wellspring of primal memory and collective unconscious—is to doubt nearly the entire course of human history (although Critical Theory presumes to do just that). It is to believe that only in the past century and a half or so have we been able to penetrate religion’s veil of illusion and see reality for what it is: nothing.

  This is nihilism, which often poses as sophisticated “realism,” and I argue that it is just another form of satanism. Denial of the eternal becomes a way of temporal life; and, by extension, Death is embraced as a way of Life. En passant, it is amusing to note that the practitioners of nihilism are often the same people who denounce “denialism” in other aspects of everyday life (various psychological conditions, “climate change,” etc.), just as those who describe themselves as “pro-choice” with regard to abortion are anti-choice in just about every other facet of their political lives, including health care, school choice, and so forth.

  In the movie Independence Day, the scientist played by Jeff Goldblum realizes shortly after alien ships appear over the world’s great cities that their intentions are far from benign—that, in fact, the aliens are coordinating a massive attack using earthling technology. “They’re using our own satellites against us,” he explains, making a hasty sketch to illustrate his point. So does Satan—or the satanic forces, or the iron laws of history, or la forza del Destino, call it what you will—use our own best qualities and noblest intentions against us, pervert them to his own ends in order to accomplish his singular mission, which is the moral destruction of humanity.