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

by Michael Walsh

  Pascal’s famous wager—What is the downside to betting on the existence of God?—comes into play here, and in its most basic form. Let us posit that there exists neither God nor Satan, Heaven nor Hell, that human oral, religious, and literary tradition is one long primitive misapprehension of reality, that we emerged accidentally, ex nihilo, and to eternal nihil shall we return. (Note the implied belief in eternity, no matter which side of the argument you take.) But why then would any self-respecting individual wish to cast his or her lot in with the dark side of the proposition? Is Nothing more attractive than Something? Is Nothing a goal devoutly to be sought, a prize fiercely and joyously to be won? Again, we turn to storytelling.

  Aside from a brief flurry of nihilistic films from the late 1960s and early ’70s, few are the movies that offer a hero who doesn’t care if he lives or dies, and who doesn’t fight death with all his power in order to win the particular battle we see him waging during the course of his story. (Even film noir heroes do that, though they usually lose.) One that comes to mind might (might) be an exception: To Live and Die in L.A., written by former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich and directed by William Friedkin. The movie’s hero, Chance (William Petersen), plays fast and loose with life (we first meet him bungee-jumping off a high bridge), inadvertently leads his partner to his death at the hands of the counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), and vows to get Masters by any means necessary—means that wind up getting a federal agent killed. Near the end of the film, in a shootout in a locker room, Chance is killed with a shotgun blast to the face, his life’s work left unfulfilled.

  Or maybe not unfulfilled after all: His mania to get Masters has been passed on to his new, straight-arrow partner, who kills the villain in a final, flaming confrontation and then takes Chance’s informant mistress as his own. “You’re working for me now,” he coldly informs her. Temporary victory has been achieved, and the cycle goes on.

  Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

  What evidence is there that there is an arc of history and that it bends in any particular direction? One would think that the Unholy Left would be the last to assert such a grand pattern, given their disbelief in the Deity. Whence comes this “arc”? Who created it? Where did its moral impulse toward “justice” come from? What is “justice” anyway, and who decides? And if the word “justice” bears a bien-pensant modifier (as in “environmental justice”), the only “justice” is likely to be the “justice” of revenge. The word “justice,” in the hands of the Left, has come to mean pretty much any policy goal they desire.

  None of this matters, however, when the purpose of the assertion is not to offer an argument but to shut down the opposition via the timely employment of unimpeachable buzzwords and to advance a political agenda that has little or nothing to do with the terms deployed for its advancement. Indeed, martial metaphors, not moralistic catchphrases, are the key to understanding the modern Left and its “scientific” dogma of Critical Theory: Theirs is a Hobbesian war of all against all (bellum omnum contra omnes), of every man’s hand against every other man’s. As Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the intellectual fascism of the Left, wrote in 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” These three aphorisms are the official slogans of the Ministry of Truth in 1984, and the truth is whatever the Ministry says it is. Truth is malleable and fungible, a function of day and date. The Devil will say what he has to say and will quote such scripture as he requires in order to achieve the sole objective remaining to him: the ruination of Man and his consignment to Hell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE SLEEP OF PURE REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

  At the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya produced a suite of etchings called “Los Caprichos,” the most famous of which was El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The Age of Enlightenment was receding as Romanticism took hold, Kant had issued his Critique of Pure Reason, and the publication of Goethe’s Faust was less than ten years away. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Romantic monsters had broken through the steel of the Enlightenment’s rational faculties, unleashed first by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Weber in Der Freischütz (1821), Berlioz in the Symphonie Fantastique (1830), and, soon enough, in the music of Liszt and Wagner.

  Goya expanded upon the etching’s caption in some editions: “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” It is at once a statement and a warning: The Romantic spirit, in a kind of Newtonian equal-and-opposite reaction, would now impel men to probe the depths of their thoughts and hearts, to go deeper than even Enlightenment science (or the science of today, for that matter) had ever hoped to go. But what might be revealed was not guaranteed to be beautiful; in fact, it was almost certain to not be.

  Romanticism gave birth to much great art, but it also gave birth to—as Peter Viereck argues in Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind (1941)—Hitler, by way of Father Jahn, Johann Fichte, Hegel, and Wagner, from whose coinage Viereck derived his title. “How shall we classify Wagner’s ideas and his psychological development?” asks Viereck. “On this score his biographers and critics of all schools are for once unanimous. His fiercest enemy, Nordau, calls him ‘the last mushroom on the dung-hill of romanticism.’ His ablest admirer, Thomas Mann, finds ‘the concept of the romantic is still the best label for him.’ ” Viereck goes on: “Quite correctly, Wagner himself stresses his kinship to the German romantic school by his terminology, operatic themes, literary allusions, and basic postulates. He worships the first romantics, be it noted, for ‘arousing the Volk spirit in the War of Liberation.’ ”

  “The Volk spirit in the War of Liberation”—these words, slightly updated, apply today. Now, however, they are acted upon with the full force of a political party and the devotion of many millions of people who have bought into the notion of Critical Theory, especially as applied to the law—a new enormity called Critical Legal Theory.

  Writing of the events in Ferguson, Missouri, which occasioned ready-made riots and protests across the nation in the fall of 2014, the scholar and military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote:

  Ferguson illustrated many of the problems of postmodern liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that the facts of the shooting of Michael Brown did not matter much; critical legal theory, which ignored the time-honored role of a disinterested grand jury; the tolerance of illegality as some sort of acceptable protest against the system; and the liberal media’s hyping a crisis on the understanding that the ramifications of the violence were safely distant from their own schools, neighborhoods, and restaurants.

  Critical Theory, applied to the law, is little more than mob rule and anarchy; like everything else it touches, it is the negation of what it purports to examine. No one any longer pretends it is anything else. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards” is no longer regarded as a perversion of the ideal of blind justice but, in fact, is understood as justice itself. Indeed, it is a “higher” form of justice that is meant to rectify a long litany of past wrongs: justice as payback, capital punishment that is not only deserved but welcomed by the victim.

  This is
the dark side of the Romantic impulse, the drive to right wrongs (whether perceived or real), to crush the hated foe and, if necessary (if possible?), die in the attempt. It is why Byron chose to perish, quixotically, fighting the Ottoman Turks in Greece. The last lines of his poem “January 22nd, Missolonghi,” written on his thirty-sixth, and last, birthday, are instructive:

  If thou regret’st thy Youth, why live?

  The land of honourable Death

  Is here:—up to the Field, and give

  Away thy breath!

  Seek out—less often sought than found—

  A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best;

  Then look around, and choose thy Ground,

  And take thy rest.

  This is how the Romantics saw themselves. The academics and theoreticians of the Frankfurt School may not have looked much like Lord Byron, but they felt like Lord Byron in their sense of mission. For them, the Western world—which had given them its complex, poetic, and scientific languages as their birthright—was the moral equivalent of the Ottoman Empire. It stood for everything they opposed. It was crushing, dogmatic, aggressive, arbitrary, unjust, and it had to be destroyed—to use a current favorite phrase of the Left—by any means necessary. There was no time for, and no point to, “morality.” In order to right the monstrous wrongs of the West, its reason must be put to sleep. The monsters (from the id!) must be set free.

  Only an unholy combination of artist and sadist could do that. As Viereck notes in Metapolitics: “Hitler’s wound as a rejected artist never healed. . . . The disciplined militarist and the arty bohemian co-existed in Hitler. The mix enhanced his sadistic brutality. The mix also enhanced the air of mystery needed for his charisma.”

  The Frankfurt School, some of them artists manqués themselves, certainly knew what monsters looked like. Back home in Germany, one of history’s greatest monsters, Hitler, was slouching toward them, hell-bent on his own form of payback. Partially disguised by his own anti-capitalist obsessions, two strains of Socialist thought, national and international, were about to collide. In a prolonged discussion about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in his introduction to the 2003 edition of his book, now retitled Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, Viereck observes: “To the end, Wagner retained some kind of socialist idealism, and his was in part a left-wing, anti-banker anti-Semitism.” (The anti-Semitism was obviously a deal-breaker for the Frankfurt School, and their antennae were up early.) “Already in the 1941 edition I quoted Hitler’s statement that ‘whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.’ ”

  Stalin, too, was caught in Satan’s bands of illusion when he forged the short-lived Nazi-Soviet pact; he couldn’t believe that a man he admired, Hitler, would be capable of such treachery as Operation Barbarossa. “For the first days, Stalin refused to defend Russia against the invaders, believing it was somehow a British-plotted provocation to destroy his comradeship with Hitler, with whom he had divided Poland,” writes Viereck. “Only recently Stalin had sent Hitler, via Ribbentrop, the reassuring message that Stalin, too, was gradually purging the government of Jews. And through Molotov in Berlin, Stalin had promised Hitler to join the Rome-Berlin axis against the West, in return for territorial concessions in the Balkans.” Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned, and the Russian revenge against their former allies—the exception to “no enemies to the left!”—was terrible.

  Of course, to this day, the “premature anti-fascists” of the Left refuse to admit their ancestors’ kinship with the National Socialists. They have a conveniently sliding definition of “socialism,” which means whatever they say it means—as words did for Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass:

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “It means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

  “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that is all.”

  One way to regard the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School—the correct way—is as Rousseau’s Romantic bastards who inherited their sense of mission from the nineteenth century. They were essentially men of the fin-de-siècle, but at the same time they grew obsessed with the bogus “scientism” of the new age. Why were not the hearts and minds of men subject to the same “scientific” laws that governed the rest of the world? Had not Marx shown that the very “laws” of history must be scientific? Had not Freud proved that the human mind could be “cured” of mental illness, in the same way that bodily illnesses could be cured by the timely application of the proper medicine? Only remove man’s antiquated moral code and the whole animal was yours.

  Their followers took these wrongheaded principles and kept going. What, really, was the difference between men and monkeys? After all, did we not share the vast majority of our genes in common? Who could prove any scientific difference among the “races,” a social construct? Further, what were, really, the differences between men and women? Who could say for certain, except for the naughty bits, that there were any? Against the evidence of their senses, they insisted on the egalitarian principle, embodied for Adorno in Schoenberg’s method of composing with the twelve tones—a system that required all twelve notes of the chromatic scale to be sounded individually in a sequence called a “tone row” before any one of them could be repeated, thus affording all notes equal importance. For Critical Theorists, dodecaphonicism (also known as the “twelve-tone system”) was the perfect metaphor for the egalitarian world they sought to create.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t; Shakespeare’s Hamlet knew more about science than did Adorno, and a rational person can spot the flaw in Adorno’s arguments at once. The greatest difference in the universe is not the distance from Earth to the farthest star, or between 96 percent (the common gene pool of chimps and humans) and 100 percent, but between 0.00000000000001 percent and zero percent. It is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. It is the difference between the Void and Genesis—and even a committed atheist has to believe that the universe started somewhere, or else admit that it is timeless. It is the difference between atheism and God.

  So back we go to this word, “really,” and to the concept of illusion. For reason can sleep just as soundly when it is overtaxed, exhausted, left staring at words or numbers on a page until the lines begin to wiggle and hallucinations set in. Faust was a creature of pure reason, and yet it was not enough; the Critical Theorists thought of themselves as creatures of reason, and yet they indulged themselves in a bacchanalia of cultural destruction. They beat both philosophy and the arts into the ground, stripped them bare of all meaning, twisted history to conform to the ravings of a nineteenth-century obsessive in the British Museum—a true child of his time, a man of no social use at all, a freeloader, a sponger and a parasite, a stranger in a strange land he could not and would not trouble himself to understand, except superficially. A man whose economic theories were so wide of the mark as to be laughable—yet Marx was, and continues to be, admired and emulated because he sounds serious.

  For the Left, any “revolutionary” idea can be entertained because, after all, there are no consequences to entertaining it; it’s like the fly inviting the spider into the parlor, with tea steeping in the pot. What’s the worst that can happen? Raised in a country at the peak of its international wealth, power, and influence, leftists could not conceive of any diminution (even the “fundamental change” they demanded) that could possibly affect their own personal standard of living—or anything outside that (everything within the Standard of Living; nothing outside the Standard of Living). Nothing could disturb their long march through the institutions or affect their pensions derived from the fly-infested corpse of the social state they were, however unwittingly, savaging.

  The question then arises, as we survey the results of leftist philos
ophical ascendancy since 1964, did they know what they were doing? No animals, besides humans, attack their own living quarters. None deliberately destroys his own nest or invites predators into his home. Granted, there is a human impulse toward suicide. (Does any other animal willingly kill itself?) People kill themselves over losses in finance, over love, in frustration or despair, after defeat in battle. But to deliberately set out upon a program that can only result in mass self-destruction—this is something relatively new. I do not refer to the mass suicide of the Jews at Masada in 74 A.D., as the Romans were about to breach the walls of their fortress; or the desperate members of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry who, when surrounded and well aware of the unutterable fate they would face at the hands, clubs, and knives of the Indians, shot themselves rather than fall victim to the enraged warriors of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations. These deaths were both understandable and noble—they were a last gesture of defiance in the face of an implacable and merciless enemy. Better to die by your own hand than like a dog at the hand of your mortal foe.

  But when reason sleeps, monsters follow, even when reason doesn’t know it has dozed off. In our darkest moments, the bats alight upon our shoulders, and the raven taps on the window while we muse over our lost loves. Poe, instinctively, had it right, introducing his narrator pondering, like Faust, “weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.” Compare his situation with Faust’s, complaining of his ignorance, despite all his scholarship: