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

by Michael Walsh

  Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!

  Und bin so klug als wie zuvor . . .

  (Now here I stand, poor Fool I!

  Just as smart as before . . .)

  Weary Faust, searching for answers that only Heaven can provide, easily falls prey to Hell. Mephistopheles offers to free him from the jail cell of his private study and show him a world he never dreamed existed—the real Tree of Knowledge. That world promised love, sexual pleasure, and forbidden fruit, yet ended with the deaths of Gretchen, her brother, her mother, and her baby by Faust. In the same way, the modern world proposed by Critical Theory promised heaven but brought only hell to the millions of people who fell victim to both strains of totalitarian socialism—Nazism and Communism—and who continue to suffer under some form of it to this day.

  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a large Russian community has found a home in the United States, and almost to a man, and woman, they want no part of the socialists’ vision for America, having just fled it. They have seen this movie already and know the outcome in a way that most Americans cannot grasp. They were mugged both by the beautiful theory and the brutal gang of facts, and they would rather deal with facts, thank you very much. Americans, hitherto a fact-based, empirical people, have in recent decades been exposed to the siren song of European theory, with its “scientific” calibrations, parsed nuances, and confident projections. That almost none of what these theoreticians say ever comes true is, for a time, beside the point. The elites of academia and government, accompanied by their trusty stenographers in the press, have spoken.

  But an unrelenting record of failure eventually begins to tell. What at first seemed impressive—charts! graphs!—turns risible, then mockable. Finally, the people realize they are being had. They see that the entire revolving-door system of academe, government, and the media—bound together through myriad incestuous ties, along with their offshoots, such as the left-leaning think tanks and nonprofits that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to “global warming” and other questionable causes—is one giant, taxpayer-funded racket designed to enrich the “clerisy” and impoverish the proletariat. The truth will out: The people are being governed by a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

  At root, and as with any criminal organization, the primary goal of the Frankfurt School, its acolytes, and its Critical Theory adherents—however camouflaged by the squid ink of altruism, ideology, and philosophical pretenses—was the attainment and retention of power in order to amass wealth. No one who lived or spent any time in the old Soviet Union could miss that salient fact about that country. The nomenklatura drove through the sparse traffic on the streets of Moscow in limousines, summered at their dachas, patronized state-run beryozka shops, where they used valuta (foreign currency) to purchase luxury Western goods unavailable in the regular stores where proles shopped. Everybody else stole caviar from the kitchens, hawked bootlegged cigarettes from the trunks of their cars, or simply sold themselves. Russia at the end of the Soviet period was a country of a wealthy few, all politically connected, and the subsisting masses. In the same way, the Democratic Party’s base consists of, at one end of the spectrum, the well-connected and often obscenely wealthy rich, who profit from their personal and business relationships with government, and, at the other end, the very poor, who depend on that same government.

  But then, in the eyes of the Left, a nation of free citizens, equal before the law and not necessarily equal in much of anything else save opportunity, does not much look like the America that “fundamental transformation” is intended to bring about. By their lights, they are patriots, just not “American” patriots. They are patriots of America of the Future. The country they hope to bring into being will be still be called “America,” it just won’t be America.

  This is what happens in a country created by the Enlightenment when reason goes to sleep. The men of the Frankfurt School pretended they were bringing typically German ratiocination to bear on a host of challenges: destroying tonal music, in the case of Adorno and Schoenberg; destroying the family, in the case of Gramsci and Lukács; destroying conventional morality, in the case of Marcuse and Reich. But they were no more intellectual than Faust after his wager with Mephistopheles, although their particular bargain was with another devil. They had the illusion of reason, to be sure; yet in no other country on earth has this illusion done more damage than in Germany, the country that gave the world both Marx and Hitler. But that the country of deep philosophers, brilliant scientists, Romantic poets, and towering composers produced such monstrosity should not come as much of a surprise. The sadistic mix is in the blood. As Faust shows, the problem with accomplishment is not mastery; it is the devilish boredom that follows mastery.

  Symbolically, Wagner destabilized conventional tonality with the now-famous “Tristan chord” in the opening phrase of his opera Tristan und Isolde. It announces, in the second bar, not only the emotional core of the work but the disintegration of European musical culture that would soon follow in the wake of the opera’s debut in 1865. The four notes of the chord (F-B-D#-G#, a perfect fourth on top of a tritone) appear throughout musical history, from Machaut and Gesualdo to Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, although the chord’s harmonic function differs widely. But the prelude to Tristan atomized harmonic expectations through the opening line’s floating chromaticisms, setting the mood of sexual desire and sexual frustration that, to this day, disarms audiences during the great “Liebesnacht” love duet in the second act (coitus interruptus in music) only to be erotically released by death in the final “Liebestod,” when the chord finally stabilizes into B major—in retrospect, not very far from where the opera began, but a world away.

  But after such mastery, what? European composers after Wagner went in several directions, but all roads ultimately led back to the anarchy implicit in the Tristan chord, featuring its harmonically unstable tritone, the “devil’s interval,” in the bass. Debussy, trying to reject Wagner, fled straight into his arms, with Pelléas et Mélisande; Schoenberg, edging away from tonality as fast as he could, wrote Verklärte Nacht, helping himself not only to the Wagnerian idiom, but to one of the composer’s favorite words and concepts, Verklärung (transfiguration). One of Richard Strauss’s early tone poems, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), couldn’t possibly be more Wagnerian if it tried.

  Symphonically, Anton Bruckner took the huge Wagner orchestra and redirected it back toward the explicitly sacred, erecting gigantic “cathedrals in sound” with his symphonies, and dedicating his final, unfinished Ninth Symphony to God. There is probably no greater spiritually triumphant moment in symphonic music than the closing measures of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, when the composer’s mighty orchestra dispels the doubts and clouds of illusion in a giant, wheel-of-the-world brass fanfare that proclaims the work’s essential thematic unity: St. Michael’s victorious flaming sword, in music.

  In the novel Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann explicitly linked the twelve-tone system to the composer Leverkühn’s daemonic inspiration, brought on by a syphilitic infection contracted from a prostitute. The great novelist sensed there was something unholy about the method’s egalitarianism, that in seeming to be the product of pure reason, it was monstrous. Schoenberg had moved in a careful musical progression from Romanticism to atonality (no fixed central key, inevitable after Tristan), via Pierrot Lunaire, to outright dodecaphony, creating ever more “rational” music that became progressively uglier and unlovable. The system of ratiocination had come to outweigh the music’s purpose; or, rather, the music’s purpose had come to serve the system.

  That Mann felt the need to address the issue is not surprising. A great Wagnerian musical streak runs throughout his work, from the short stories—whose number includes “Tristan” and “The Blood of the Wälsungs”—to the use of Wagnerian-style leitmotifs in The Magic Mountain.

  The Magic Mountain, which takes place in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium, was conceived around the time of Wor
ld War I and published in 1924. It is a novel of ideas, but also of disease. (Doctor Faustus is also about disease, this one venereal, the curse of the Ewig-Weibliche, or the Eternal Feminine.) Castorp, the novel’s holy fool, comes to Davos intending to stay a magical seven weeks; instead, he stays an enchanted, crippling seven years. Among Leverkühn’s compositions are Apocalypse and his magnum opus, The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus. On the cusp of performing it for the first time at the piano for a few selected friends, Leverkühn collapses into madness.

  Mann’s works, in short, embrace all the salient elements and events of Central European history from the Kaiser to the birth of postwar Germany; very little escaped his attention. The members of the Frankfurt School may have thought they were modernists, moving beyond the culture, but in fact they were little more than perfect Wagnerians, their reason clouded by Klingsor’s bands of illusion. “Kinder, schafft Neues!” (“Make something new!”) wrote Wagner in an 1852 letter to Franz Liszt (nineteen months older than he and not yet his father-in-law). That they could not do so speaks of the Faustian bargain they had made: Thanatos without Eros, death without life, a world without love, and nothing new to show for their labors in the caves of Nibelheim.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DESCENT INTO HELL

  In the Apostles’ Creed, which dates from around 700 A.D., there is this astonishing passage: “Jesus Christ . . . suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into Hell. On the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into Heaven.”

  “Jesum Christum . . . passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, es sepultus; descendit ad inferna; tertia die resurrexit a mortuis; ascendit ad coelos.”

  What?

  The phrase “descended into Hell” has become so controversial within Christianity that is often now dropped from the prayer. It has been interpreted to mean that Christ did not literally descend into Hell on the Saturday after the Crucifixion, that is, into Satan’s abode, but rather dwelled among the dead, those deprived of the Light, there to give witness to the Good News of the imminent Resurrection. Augustine taught that Christ actually went to Hell, but he expressed puzzlement over the implication of his belief; Aquinas wrote that Christ visited both Purgatory (the souls confined there would eventually be saved) and Hell itself, to shame unbelievers (which seems a bit of an un-Christ-like victory lap).

  In more recent cultural history, we have a parallel in the most influential work of art of the nineteenth century: Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, complete with the chief god’s own descent into Hell, or in this case, Nibelheim, the realm of the dwarves. Wotan must journey there to steal the magic ring and the rest of the treasure that the evil dwarf, Alberich, has fashioned from the stolen gold of the Rhine. (This occurs in the tetralogy’s prologue, Das Rheingold).

  In the Ring—which employs Nordic saga as semi-Christian allegory; at the end of his life, Wagner embraced Christianity explicitly in Parsifal and apparently was bruiting an opera about Christ himself when he died in Venice in 1883—Wotan brings about his own God-crisis, first by his brazen theft of the Rhine Gold and then via his concupiscence. Like the priapic gods of Greek and Roman myth, he has gotten himself into trouble by heedlessly fathering the Wälsung twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde. When, in Die Walküre, the second opera of the cycle, Siegmund arrives one dark and stormy night at the home of Sieglinde and her brutish husband, Hunding, the siblings (who were separated at birth) instantly fall in love and into an incestuous relationship that produces the hero, Siegfried. And it is Siegfried, the innocent, who must expiate Wotan’s original sin. Like Christ, he must restore the natural order, a project that is cut off by his death at the hands of the treacherous Hagen. It is thus left to the Walküre—the Valkyrie, Brünnhilde—and the three Rhine Maidens to fulfill Siegfried’s mission, destroy Valhalla, and cleanse the world with the healing waters of the Rhine.

  But Christ is a greater hero than Siegfried, and a greater God than Wotan; not only does he face the most horrible and agonizing of deaths, but he ventures into the lair of Death itself and (unlike Wotan) destroys it. Death’s eradication might take a while—it might take from here to eternity—but it has been done, and one can only imagine the consternation of the demons as they watched the Principal Enemy enter their own kingdom and slay Death itself. “And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven,” says Jesus to the disciples in Luke 10:18–19. “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy.”

  But the ur-Narrative goes beyond that; it also includes the figure of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, crushing the Serpent beneath her feet. It is not for Christ to defeat Satan; his job is to kill Satan’s lot, Sin and Death, and rescue humanity from the scourge unleashed even before the Fall. Instead, that task is given to a woman, the Woman: Mary, the Mother of Christ.

  Interestingly, Blake’s two famous paintings on this subject, both drawn from Revelation, show not the familiar figure of Mary crushing the serpent but the Great Red Dragon, Satan, attacking the pregnant Virgin just before she is to give birth to the Savior. This is Woman at her most vulnerable. In these two pictures (“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun” and “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun”), the laboring Mary seems helpless in the face of the Beast’s onslaught. Revelation 12:3–4 describes Satan: “And behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth.”

  Still, we know the outcome: that in the profoundly and essentially feminist Christian myth, it is Eve who falls, beguiled by the serpent’s flattery (in Paradise Lost, Adam addresses Eve as “O fairest of Creation, last and best of all God’s works”), but it is Mary who confronts the demon and, even in the midst of her confinement, vanquishes him.

  Female empowerment is a theme that, despite what modern, anti-female “feminists” claim, long ago entered Western storytelling. At the end of Fatal Attraction, it is not the Michael Douglas character who finishes off Glenn Close’s psycho stalker but his long-suffering wife, who shoots the monster as she tries to resurrect herself from a near drowning in the bathtub. Countless other stories—harkening back even to Beowulf, in which the truly formidable monster is not Grendel, but Grendel’s irate mother—feature formidable females, thus giving the lie to one of Critical Theory’s most persistent critiques of Western culture, that it demeans women or places them in secondary positions to men.

  This brings us to the most pernicious of Critical Theory’s unholy offspring, political correctness, a kind of Hell in itself, bringing to mind Satan’s plaintive observation in Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” Political correctness turns our innermost thoughts hellish and bids fair to punish humanity for the crime of free thinking. What could be more satanic?

  Let us recall that in Milton, Satan created his daughter, Sin, who sprang directly from him (grotesquely parodying the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus); then Satan begat his only son, Death, upon the half-woman/half-fish mermaid body of his daughter. But Sin is cursed to eternal childbirth labor (the opposite of sinless Mary’s sole, transformative, virgin pregnancy), giving birth to an endless succession of canine-like creatures that hound humanity. Sin is thus almost a parody of contemporary “feminists,” who fantasize about a world without men—who can complain more about men than Sin, constantly impregnated without recourse?—but fail to understand the practical consequences of just such a world.

  Political correctness is not simply a pack of Hounds of Tindalos (although it is all of that) but the most brazen assault on Western culture that one can imagine: a ravenous, lupine force that can never be satisfied. In Frank Belknap Long’s memorable addition to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, the eponymous Hounds of Tindalos are clearly the offspring of Sin: “ ‘They are lean and athirst!’ he s
hrieked. . . . All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies?” Best described as “foul,” the terrifying, ichor-filled Hounds pursue their victims with unrelenting ferocity across dimensions, space and time. Such vividly described creatures recall Milton’s poem and thus fall into the overall ur-Narrative scheme I have been describing: the recurrence (or emergence) of figures from the primal myths of human origins.

  The term “political correctness” seems to have originated with Trotsky to describe the early Bolsheviks who were forced to adapt to constantly changing “correct” modes of Soviet political thought, and it was later picked up by Mao, among others. Today it is the Unholy Left’s counter-narrative, a fascism of the mind meant to discourage independent thought and encourage lazy sloganeering; in other words, a political tool that has nothing to do with “morality,” “tolerance,” “diversity,” or “the arc of history.” It is simply evil. But to say it is a very great evil is to underestimate it. It goes against liberty in all her forms, which is precisely its object, although it cloaks itself in the folds of another bogus virtue, compassion.

  “Without freedom of thought, there can be such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech,” wrote “Cato” (British essayists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon) in 1720. “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.” There’s a reason that revolutionaries target newspapers and radio stations first.

  Subduing the freedom of speech is precisely the goal of the Jacobins of the Unholy Left, who cannot countenance any thought unmoored from policy prescriptions or social goals. Over the past few decades, they have waged a war, at first covert and now overt, on the First Amendment, trammeling it wherever they can: in campus “speech codes,” for example, or in social ostracism should a hapless renegade wander off the reservation and accidentally speak his mind.