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

by Michael Walsh

  Earlier we have noted, in the case of Wagner for example, that one must separate the man from his art to get a clearer picture of each and make a true assessment of the art. It is easy, in this age of political correctness, to trump up a series of latter-day charges against almost any dead individual, exhume his corpse, and, like a Cadaver Synod run by a grad-school Nuremberg court, like Cromwell or the Mahdi (the two have much in common besides the manner of their posthumous desecration), cut off his head, mount it on a pike, and chuck the body into a ditch.

  So let us look, then, at the art: What we see in the works of Rousseau is something archetypically inimical to Western civilization, the godless worm at the core of Eve’s apple. Rousseau was the viper in the breast, “the whisperer in darkness” (the title of another memorable Lovecraft short story), the tempter hissing in the bulrushes.

  There are few more arresting images in all of literature than the opening of Paradise Lost, which finds Satan and his cohort chained to the Lake of Fire and wondering how the hell they got there. The bard dares open his long poem in medias res; the Battle in Heaven has already played out before curtain rise. What is Satan’s first desire? Revenge. Helpless to restorm Heaven, the fallen archangel who once attended the very throne of Heaven can now only plot against God’s new toy, humanity. In the poem’s second book, during the infernal conference among Satan and his henchmen, Moloch makes the argument:

  Or if our substance be indeed divine,

  And cannot cease to be, we are at worst

  On this side nothing; and by proof we feel

  Our power sufficient to disturb his heaven,

  And with perpetual inroads to alarm,

  Though inaccessible, his fatal throne:

  Which if not victory is yet revenge.

  Satan and his minions have one small advantage. God has given mankind pride of place over the angels, because unlike them, Man has free will. (Which raises the question: Why was Lucifer suddenly afflicted with the very human sins of pride and jealousy, which occasioned the rebellion in Heaven in the first place? Was that not a human characteristic?) But the angels cannot protect Man against Satan’s blandishments; mankind is, to mix a metaphor, a sitting duck.

  Sin and Death come before human love. The sexual act—the thing that brings humans closest to God—is only possible after the Fall. The first human child, Cain, kills his brother, Abel, and then receives the Mark of Cain from God in return—not as a sign that he is cursed but that he is protected, and that God and God alone may be allowed vengeance upon Cain for his transgression.

  So the innate nature of Man is not divine, but wild: his hand against every man’s, and every man’s hand against his. (As the voluptuous Toon occasion of sin, Jessica Rabbit, says to the human detective, Eddie Valiant, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”) This would seem to be evidence that the myth of the noble savage is not foundational, since the story of the Fall well precedes Rousseau; Adam and Eve did not begin as savages, but their children became them, and they were hardly noble.

  For “savage” is the operative word, not “noble.” The Unholy Left has little use for nobility, except in the service of its moral fantasies. But the savage . . . oh, him they admire. The child of nature, needless of religious superstition and heedless of civilization. Running free, living off the land, a tomahawk or spear in his hand, killing as he goes. The very thought shivers their knickers.

  Destruction fascinates them; they find satisfaction and even consummation in the tearing-down, not the building-up. Creation is a bore; annihilation is a joy. They take a childish pleasure in extermination, and the most extreme eliminationist rhetoric (meant purely rhetorically, of course!) is never very far from their lips. So much of leftist art of the past century and more is the tiresome mud-splatterings of those whose mantra is épater le bourgeois, while they finger their imaginary daggers and wish they had the courage to plunge them into their patrons’ breasts. Not believing in Heaven, they not only wish their own heaven here on earth, but its earthly revenge as well.

  But that is what the atheist State is for. That would be the armed atheist State, whose agents are legally equipped with lethal means to force compliance with its wishes and diktats. In the State’s precincts, one is free only insofar as one’s actions and predilections and even thoughts conform with those of the State—Rousseau’s General Will.

  Anyone who lives in a major American city controlled by leftists is familiar with a notice posted in front of many of the best houses in the poshest (and usually therefore the most racially segregated) neighborhoods: Armed Response. This does not mean that the inhabitants of such a dwelling are in favor of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the individual’s right—the right, not the State’s optional dispensation—“to keep and bear arms.” Far from it. Rather, it signifies that the owner reserves the right to have a secondary, contracted employee arrive at his premises in response to an electronic alarm and possibly employ deadly force against whichever miscreant may be in the process of violating the laws against burglary, especially if that violation occurs when the owner—who in fact does not believe in the Second Amendment and on moral grounds would never have a gun in his house—is at home.

  This is the essence of La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that hypocrisy is the tribute vice (anti-Constitutionalism) plays to virtue (self-defense). It is also the sign of a degenerate culture posing as a virtuous one; it is as if Gary Cooper’s Will Kane, faced with his own imminent demise, had tossed away his six-shooter, embraced his wife’s Quaker passivity, and gone willingly to his death at the hands of the varmints coming to kill him—but with the foreknowledge that his own hired band of gunslingers would show up at the station just in time to save him from the consequences of his unmanly rectitude. Where is the heroism in that?

  There’s the rub. I have been discussing the inherent, innate ur-Narrative that is implanted in every human’s breast, but I’ve failed to note that there are two different versions of heroism, and of the hero’s archetypal journey. I’ve thus far failed to note it because one version is anti-heroism aping heroism, the heroism of the suicide cult, which decrees it is better to die “nobly”—that is, passively, “like a dog!” as Joseph K. exclaims right before he is executed at the end of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess (The Trial)—than to fight back. This is not heroism; it is the behavior of a goldfish being flushed down a toilet, and with as much moral resonance and suasion.

  Kafka, the greatest Jewish writer of the fin-de-siècle, and one of the greatest writers of the modern age, is an especially persuasive witness on this point. The poet of Prague and its discontents could not have been more prophetic about our rancid past century had he tried. A more anti-savage intellectual—the anti-Rousseau in almost every particular—could hardly be imagined. Here was a man who foresaw the horrors to come, looked at them unflinchingly, and recorded his nightmares in lucid, beautiful German.

  “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested,” begins The Trial, and there is probably not a more arresting opening sentence in modern literature. Like Gregor Samsa in Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Josef K. awakens from what must have been uneasy dreams to find his life transformed, and not in a good way. An “investigation of a citizen above suspicion” (to quote the title of the 1970 Italian film directed by Elio Petri) then ensues, and Josef K. becomes ever more deeply drawn into the insane workings of a “justice” system that bears no resemblance to any justice he can conceive of. What is his crime? What has he done? What is the truth? Who knows? Who cares? The State, like God, has its reasons, and they are not for mortals to know. “The proper understanding of any matter and the misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude one another,” the priest instructs Josef K. Three felonies a day, etc.

  Josef K. has entered the Devil’s Pleasure Palace—a topsy-turvy, not-so-fun house in which “up is down, black is white,” as the line in the Coen broth
ers’ masterpiece, Miller’s Crossing, goes. In that film, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) takes Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) out to Miller’s Crossing to whack him. Bernie exclaims: “I can’t die here out here in the woods, like a dumb animal,” echoing Josef K.’s last words. And Tom (like Upham in Saving Private Ryan) lets him go, to his eternal regret. What’s done may not be undone—“What’s done is past! What’s past is done!” exclaims Mephistopheles during the Walpurgisnacht—but what’s not done in the past surely must be undone in the present for the future to have any meaning. Thus, eventually, Upham must kill Steamboat Willie; Tom must kill Bernie. Even though both killings are done in cold blood, and both are most certainly a crime, neither feels wrong. Rather, the universe has been put right, at whatever the cost to the killer’s immortal soul.

  Kafka himself died in 1924, six months before Adolf Hitler was released from Landsberg Prison. And yet Kafka had foreseen it all before it even happened: the blunt force of the State, in The Trial and The Castle; the savagery of the Soviet occupation of Germany, in “Ein Altes Blatt” (“An Old Manuscript”); even Henze’s talking trained ape, in “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (A Report to an Academy”). Not to mention the adumbrations of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and their grisly “medical” experiments, and the Soviet Gulag, in “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”), with its graphic depiction of a machine that tattoos the sentence on the condemned prisoner as he dies.

  In Kafka’s world, a world in which God is conspicuously absent, man is a plaything; he can be turned into an ape or a giant bug in the blink of an eye, condemned and executed for nothing. Even the Greeks had more of a chance than this. There is nothing of the noble savage about Kafka; on the contrary, Man is what stands between the State and utter anarchy, not the other way around. (One thinks of Terry Gilliam’s best film, Brazil, in this context, which also takes 1984 as an inspiration.)

  Were there in fact such as thing as a really Noble Savage—not as envisioned by Rousseau, but an authentic hero—what would he look like? Expressed in a modern context, he might be Winston Smith in 1984; he would be any one of scores of Hollywood heroes who fight the power in service of individual freedom. He is Will Kane in High Noon, Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, Neo in The Matrix, battling an endless army of Mr. Smiths. He is Man against the Machine.

  In short, he’s us. He has no need for the State. He has only a need for like-minded fellows to support him in his quest and carry on the work after he is gone. He is Jesus, the crisis in the life of God. The story, infinitely refracted, infinitely recursive, goes on. We keep telling it because we need to, to keep the forces of Hell at bay. Hell has no need for heroes; God does. That we keep providing them is one of the surest proofs of his existence.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OF EROS AND THANATOS

  In 1931, two strains of twentieth-century thought combined forces at the Institut für Sozialforschung: Freudian psychiatry and social Marxism. Among the shrinks was Wilhelm Reich, who later fled the Nazis and settled in America, where he (to quote the website Marxists.org) “developed his own doctrine of sexual liberalism as an antidote to political conformism and social psychosis.” After Marcuse, no other member of the Frankfurt School had such a negative impact on the culture.

  Too crazy even for the Freudians and the social Marxists, all of Reich’s work after 1932 (he died in 1957) was initially self-published. Sex-mad in a way that embarrassed his Freudian cronies and amoral Marxist colleagues alike (he coined the term “the sexual revolution”), Reich believed that the problems of economic Marxism were caused by sexual frustration, which hindered the political consciousness of the proletariat. He stripped his patients nude, the better to break down their “muscular armor,” and pursued “vegetotherapy” while chasing the perfect orgasm. The Function of the Orgasm is his most famous work. Reich also invented something he called “orgone,” a kind of sexual “cosmic energy,” and built “orgone accumulators” in which to contain it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration called him “a fraud of the first magnitude.” He died, intermittently psychotic, in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a prison that had once held Al Capone.

  “In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to understand the Holocaust, and intellectuals disillusioned with Communism fled the security of their earlier political positions, Reich’s ideas landed on fertile ground,” wrote Christopher Turner in a 2011 essay in the Guardian. Assessing Reich’s influence, he continued:

  After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich’s theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted Left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism’s failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. . . . In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals to view their promiscuity as political activism and justify their retreat from traditional politics. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the “frozen,” grey, corporate consensus.

  Reich defended the scientific legitimacy of his crackpot ideas (Woody Allen parodied the “orgone energy accumulator” as the “orgasmatron” in Sleeper) in the preface to the second edition of The Function of the Orgasm with this classic example of Teutonic bafflegab:

  Sex-economy is a natural-scientific discipline. It is not ashamed of the subject of sexuality, and it rejects as its representative everyone who has not overcome the inculcated social fear of sexual defamation. The term “vegetotherapy,” used to describe the sex-economic therapeutic technique, is actually a concession to the squeamishness of the world in sexual matters. “Orgasmotherapy” would have been a much better, indeed more correct term, for this medical technique: That is precisely what vegetotherapy basically is. It had to be taken into consideration, however, that this term would have entailed too great a strain on the young sex-economists in their practice. Well, it can’t be helped. Speak of the core of their natural longings and religious feelings and people will either laugh derisively or snicker sordidly.

  Summarizing something every teenage boy knows after his first encounter with porn, Reich goes on to illustrate the “scientific” principles behind his revolutionary new theory: “The orgasm formula which directs sex-economic research is as follows: MECHANICAL TENSION → BIOELECTRIC CHARGE → BIOELECTRIC DISCHARGE → MECHANICAL RELAXATION. . . . The immediate cause of many devastating diseases can be traced to the fact that man is the sole species which does not fulfill the natural law of sexuality.”

  If it feels good, do it. Many artists and intellectuals, and not all of them teenage boys, found Reich’s theories compelling. Among Reich’s mature enthusiasts were Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Arthur Koestler, and William S. Burroughs. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his New York Times review of Adventures in the Orgasmatron, the book that the above-mentioned Christopher Turner wrote about Reich, “Is it too easy to simply speculate that men will make fools of themselves for the sake of sex?”

  Hitchens characteristically ends his review of Turner’s book with this arresting, contemptuous image:

  Adventures in the Orgasmatron has many fine and engaging passages, but I think my favorite must be this one, in which Alfred Kazin describes the pathetic trust in Reich shown by the writer Isaac Rosenfeld. Has there ever been a better description of the baffled naïveté of so many “New York intellectuals”?:

  “Isaac’s orgone box stood up in the midst of an enormous confusion of bedclothes, review copies, manuscripts, children, and the many people who went in and out of the room as if it were the bathroom. Belligerently sitting inside his orgone box, daring philistines to laugh, Isaac nevertheless looked lost, as if he were waiting in his telephone booth for a call that was not coming through.”

  On the Unholy Left, ther
e is no idea too stupid to try, no institution unworthy of attack, no theory not worth implementing without care for its results, no matter what the practical cost. Intentions are everything, results are nothing. Results are an illusion; theory is what counts, because theory can be debated endlessly within the safe harbors of academe. The key is to examine what those intentions really are. The answer lies in the Left’s own sense of narrative or, rather, anti-Narrative.

  The works of the Frankfurt School make up a contrarian manifesto, expressed as a political program. Individual words no longer have specific meanings but stand as categorical imperatives. Women, blacks, gays, the environment, “choice,” and big government are all Good Things; their opposites are not. To use the word is to evoke the emotion associated with it, not the noun. (“Rape” has recently undergone a similar linguistic transformation, mutating from forcible sexual intercourse into acts of verbal aggression or “microagression,” or whatever the “victim” dislikes.) Thus language is used to silence discussion and criticism; it is “anti,” with “anti” now treated as an absolute good. To be “anti” almost anything is to be on the Right Side of History, surfing the Arc as it bends toward Justice. It requires no thought, only emotions. It requires no reflection upon the conundrum of Chesterton’s Fence, only reflexes. It should be an embarrassment to anyone who cannot defend it intellectually, and yet it is not—because it is dogma.