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

by Michael Walsh

  That with reiterated crimes he might

  Heap on himself damnation, while he sought

  Evil to others . . .

  Some successful rebel, he who cannot even move his head without God’s permission. But not only does God give the fallen angel liberty to move and speak, he even frees him from his chains on the Lake of Fire, allows him to pass through the Gates of Hell and make mischief on Earth. What kind of a kingdom, then, does Satan have, except at the sufferance of God? Only a fool can howl at the moon and then, as the sun rises, congratulate himself on his fearsome prowess that can affect the heavens.

  Still, to give both devils their due, there is something in our earthly imaginings of Satan that is heroic; it is what makes him at once so attractive to some and such a compelling dramatic figure to others. Satan, or his surrogate, not only appears in two of the greatest poems in the Western canon, Paradise Lost and Faust, but in a host of other works as well, both as himself and in various disguises. Devils pop up in the works of the Russians, including Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov; the satanic figure of Naptha materializes to tempt the nubile soul of Hans Castorp in Mann’s Magic Mountain. (Naptha, the Jewish Jesuit turned Hegelian Marxist, was based on Lukács, as Mann himself admitted, and the role of the Wagnerian “pure fool,” Parsifal, is here taken by the novel’s weak protagonist, Hans Castorp, with the Kirghiz-eyed Clawdia Chauchat, the hot kitten, as his Kundry.)

  Operatically, the Faust legend has been brought to the stage in multiple incarnations, including by Gounod in Faust (which the Germans sometimes dismissively perform as Margarete), Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele, and Ferrucio Busoni’s Doktor Faust; for many years, Gounod’s was the single most-performed opera in the history of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Boito, Verdi’s great librettist on Otello and Falstaff, took the demon by his horns and made him the principal character of his lone opera, a work that had to wait until 1969, in the Met’s production featuring bass Norman Treigle (and, later, Samuel Ramey), before it would receive its just plaudits.

  Whether Mephisto—also the subject of several Liszt waltzes for the piano, ranging from the virtuosi to the gnomic—wins his infernal bet with Faust, as he does at the end of both Marlowe’s and Busoni’s treatments, or loses to God, he is always a worthy antagonist. But this does not make him a hero; rather, by storytelling maxim, a hero can achieve greatness only when he goes up against a figure equal to or greater and more powerful than himself. The lowly hobbits of The Lord of the Rings must defeat the satanic Sauron; Siegfried must slay a fearsome dragon and then confront Der Ring des Nibelungen’s real anti-hero, Wotan—his own grandfather.

  The would-be grandfather-slayers of the Frankfurt School, malcontents to a man, felt it their sworn duty to upend the old order. Heroes in their own minds, in order to do so they needed to create the satanic doctrine of political correctness, not to slay their enemy but to preemptively disarm him. As the military-affairs writer William S. Lind wrote in an essay based on his monograph Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology: “Political Correctness is the use of culture as a sharp weapon to enforce new norms and to stigmatize those who dissent from the new dispensation; to stigmatize those who insist on values that will impede the new ‘PC’ regime: free speech and objective intellectual inquiry.”

  Having abandoned the chimera of economic Marxism, the Frankfurt School was forced to embrace the Gramsci-Lukács “long march” paradigm, which logically concluded in a necessary, but stealthy, assault on the First Amendment. Like “tolerance,” free speech was to be pleaded for only until it was no longer necessary to seek constitutional protection. Then it could be dispensed with. Satan’s adoption of the form of the as-yet-uncursed Serpent, wheedling Eve in the Garden to take just one little bite, is all of a piece with political correctness’s protective coloration as protected speech, the symbolism of the ur-Narrative in action.

  The mainstreaming of pornography—Reich’s theories brought to vivid life—in American culture began with Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, two pornographic films that won crucial legal victories in the mid-’70s on free-speech grounds. Pretty soon there were porn shops and peep shows everywhere; Travis Bickle even takes the girl he’s ineptly wooing to one in Taxi Driver. Under the steadfast pounding of Critical Theory, what had once been criminal quickly enough became, for a time, chic, and over time, so acceptable as to be unremarkable. Today, hard-core porn is freely available on the Internet, and even public nudity is legal in some places.

  Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it liberation or libertinism? The central argument of Camille Paglia’s seminal study Sexual Personae is that when sexuality or any other taboo is heavily repressed, it does not disappear but goes underground. Certainly, mores change from age to age. The saucy sensuality of the eighteenth century—of the Enlightenment, but also of Tom Jones and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill)—gave way to the rather more straitlaced dress and manners of the Victorian period (which, in accordance with Paglia’s theory, also produced volumes of choice literary pornography, such as A Man with a Maid, and which was also the time of Jack the Ripper). This duality, so human, is neither morally good nor bad. It is simply an acknowledgement of the dark side, with which humanity is constantly flirting—with which, as I’ve argued throughout, it must flirt in order to be fully human. Of saints we have few and of sinners, many. The rest of us fall in between, living tributes that vice pays to virtue.

  Where Reich and others went wrong was in thinking that repression was a bad thing per se. Why should it be? Any artist or architect knows that rules are better than no rules and that creativity comes from operating within them, not outside them. There is very little creativity in pornography, only a theme and variations; like Kansas City in Oklahoma!, it’s gone just about as far as it can go.

  The campaigns to permit the publication of such literary classics as Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer were fully justified on artistic grounds; that these books also may have appealed to prurient (but how, one wonders) interest is part of their appeal. Many great works, including Shakespeare, have at various times been denounced by the Pecksniffs and Bowdlers as immoral or obscene. Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre was taken to court in New York City in 1933 for obscenity; the list of works banned in Boston included, at one time or another, Leaves of Grass, Elmer Gantry, Manhattan Transfer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Naked Lunch, among others. Whether any of these works coarsened society is debatable (they probably did), but in any case they were the creations of major authors in a way that, say, porn is not. The question for a moral society is where to draw the line; the assertion of an immoral or amoral society is that there is no line to be drawn.

  Morality, however, is not law. There are many things that are immoral that are perfectly legal. In one sense, therefore, it is true that we don’t legislate morality. Not that we can’t; we can and do, drawing many aspects of our legal code from the Ten Commandments, such as “Thou shalt not murder,” while ignoring for legal purposes the Decalogue’s moral proscriptions again covetousness. This may be hypocrisy or it may be mere accommodation to earthy realities; we live with it.

  Man is a complex creature, far more so than the angels. He is the only being who combines good and evil within the same shell casing, intermixed in every possible way; there is no one without the other. We have met the enemy, and he really is us.

  Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918)—short, bitchy biographical sketches of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General George “Chinese” Gordon—contains a remarkable discussion of this very phenomenon in the chapter on Gordon at Khartoum. Not about Gordon, whose fervent religiosity comes in for a good deal of dismissive Strachey piss, but his bête noire, the British prime minister William Gladstone:

  The old statesman was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career. . . . Yet—such was the peculiar character of the man, and such the intensity
of the feelings which he called forth—at this very moment, at the height of his popularity, he was distrusted and loathed; already an unparalleled animosity was gathering its forces against him. . . . “the elements” were “so mixed” in Mr. Gladstone that his bitterest enemies (and his enemies were never mild) and his warmest friends (and his friends were never tepid) could justify, with equal plausibility, their denunciations or their praises. What, then, was the truth?

  What indeed? It is hard for us today, with the passions of the late Victorian age long since cooled, to think much of anything at all about Gladstone. He is just another dusty figure in the passing parade of statesman who once strutted upon the stage, making life-or-death decisions that have, at best, only a lingering effect today. In Gordon’s case, the descendants of the Mahdi control Sudan even more surely than they did in 1885, when they finally overran Gordon’s fortifications. Was his sacrifice in vain? Strachey continues:

  In the physical universe there are no chimeras. But man is more various than nature; was Mr. Gladstone, perhaps, a chimera of the spirit? Did his very essence lie in the confusion of incompatibles? . . . His very egoism was simpleminded; through all the labyrinth of his passions there ran a single thread. But the centre of the labyrinth? Ah! the thread might lead there, through those wandering mazes, at last. Only, with the last corner turned, the last step taken, the explorer might find that he was looking down into the gulf of a crater. The flame shot out on every side, scorching and brilliant, but in the midst there was a darkness.

  This is an apt description of the problem of humanity in general. For all the bluster, for all the sound and fury, is nothing at our center but a darkness? Are we beings of almost infinite surface complexity, but with a hollowed-out core? Are the flames of our existence just an illusion, another of the Devil’s jokes? Are we nothing more than black holes in the fabric of the universe?

  Our faith tells us no. Our literature tells us no. Our actions tell us no. To believe in the absence of humanity at humanity’s core is still to believe in a god, but in an evil and unjust God who has created Man for sport—in other words, a satanic God. Gordon himself reflected on this near the end in a letter to his sister, Augusta. He was surrounded at Khartoum, his hope in a British relief column rapidly fading, and very well aware that he had sealed his own doom by refusing to evacuate the Egyptian garrison in a timely manner and thus had condemned the people of Khartoum to certain death. In a pause in the fighting, he wrote to her:

  I decline to agree that the expedition comes for my relief; it comes for the relief of the garrisons, which I failed to accomplish. I expect Her Majesty’s Government are in a precious rage with me for holding out and forcing their hand. . . . This may be the last letter you will receive from me, for we are on our last legs, owing to the delay of the expedition. However, God rules all, and as He will rule to His glory and our welfare. His will be done.

  To Strachey—throwing rocks at Gordon’s head from the safety of his sinecure as a charter member of the Bloomsbury Group (in a sense, Britain’s own, home-grown Frankfurt School of cultural sappers and spoiled children)—Gordon’s sacrifice was quixotic and inconceivable. Eminent Victorians appeared the same year the Great War ended; cynicism about national purpose was the order of the day in the wake of the fearful slaughter in the trenches to no apparent purpose. The cream of British manhood lay dead in Flanders’ fields, while those unfit for military service eventually inherited the country; soon enough, they would manage to stumble into World War II, thus finishing off the British Empire they so loathed. Seen in retrospect, Churchill was the aberration (and Thatcher the throwback), Chamberlain and Atlee and Bevan the shapes of things to come. There could be no more heroes, because there was no future left to fight for.

  As Gordon lay dying, a spear through his chest, descended upon by scimitar-wielding dervishes about to hack him to pieces, what went through his mind? Had God forsaken him? Had he fulfilled his fate and function upon the earth, and if so, what was it? Would Heaven be his reward, or would he find only Gladstone’s darkness awaiting him on the other side? Obviously, these are things we cannot know. But even today, in the face of recrudescent Islam and a leftist high tide, some still honor his memory and his sacrifice; his statue still stands on the Embankment in London. On some profound level, we know that honoring him is the right thing to do, and that is a sign of a healthy society.

  Yet Mephisto, the head greeter at the Ministry of Love, continues to demand his due as well. The same forces who would tear down the statue of Gordon with Marxist criticisms (imperialism, hegemony, etc.) wish not to erase his memory but to transform him into an anti-hero, a kind of white devil himself, piratically seeking plunder in Countries of Color. They cannot see him any other way, and yet they still make him an anti-hero, because their cause requires villains for anyone to take it seriously. Thus they cannot escape the central conundrum of the Battle in Heaven and its aftermath: Perhaps God simply desires an opponent. Perhaps Satan, for all his seductive power, is just another tomato can, a chump who hasn’t figured out yet that he’s supposed to throw the fight.

  Certainly, Satan requires love as much as God does and is wounded when he doesn’t get it. His brave bluster at the beginning of Paradise Lost—“better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”—is the boast of a loser. He is up and out of the Lake of Fire and through the Gates of Hell, pronto, ready to begin his long guerilla war against man and God. Here he is in Book Four, surly and petulant and brimming with false confidence as he confronts his former friend, now foe, the Archangel Gabriel:

  Gabriel, thou hadst in Heav’n the esteem of wise,

  And such I held thee; but this question asked

  Puts me in doubt. Lives there who loves his pain?

  Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,

  Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,

  And boldly venture to whatever place

  Farthest from pain, where thou might’st hope to change

  Torment with ease, and soonest recompense

  Dole with delight, which in this place I sought

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  . . . Let him surer bar

  His Iron Gates, if he intends our stay

  In that dark durance . . .

  Call it what you will—the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, Xanadu, the Venusberg, the land of the Sirens, the Ministry of Love, his own kingdom—Satan’s residence is an unhappy place, and he would gladly trade it for ours. For as much pleasure as it gives him to torment us, in the end there can be no happy ending for him; like the rest of us, he is just a pawn in God’s hands, except that his free will, unlike ours, is just another illusion. Even the Devil fails to “see how the Devil may joke.”

  One of the most contemptible of human beings is the man who constantly tries to fool you and trick you and cheat you out of what is rightfully yours. The mountebank is justly scorned by society, shunned and avoided whenever possible, jailed when not. The members of the Frankfurt School expended a great deal of squid ink in the defense of the indefensible—they were, proudly, cultural seditionists, operating in the no-man’s-land between culture and law, advocating destruction and anarchy without ever quite calling for it. Yipping dogs in the manger, they chased the cars of the American caravan. Now that they’ve caught them, what?

  “Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination,” wrote Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi-set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.”

  This was published in 1964, in a decade that started, culturally, after the death of John F. Kennedy. This was a time when Marcuse’s rhetoric might—might—have sounded plausible to the Baby Boomers (my generation) who had g
rown up in the security of the Eisenhower administration, only to be rudely thrust into the Age of Anxiety: nearly three years of the Kennedy administration’s brinksmanship, including the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Berlin situation, the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. We learned to duck and cover, and images of nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll were a regular feature of our classroom instruction. The center, which had once seemed so secure, was falling apart.

  But look more closely as Marcuse’s argument and you can see immediately how simplistic and flawed it is. For one thing, it could only have been written by a resentful foreigner—worse, a German. German notions—especially postwar German notions—of creature comforts were, shall we say, severely restricted. Having been bombed back to the Stone Age by the Russians, the British, and the Americans, and being congenitally suspicious of urban environments in general, German Communists such as the Frankfurt School adherents hated and resented both American hegemony and American technology, which they viewed as soulless and vulgar. They could not make allowances for the bias of their own background: that the people, whom they theoretically championed, actually liked their cars and gadgets and homes; that Americans, living in a country vastly larger than Germany, did not want to be confined to streetcars and trains, hemmed into small apartments in confined cities, and forced to live under the mentality of both wartime and postwar shortages. For them, philosophically, it was turtles all the way down—they had no understanding of the assumptions on which they grounded their theories.

  Further, there’s no lecturer like a German—one of their least endearing national characteristics. To live in Germany is to be subjected to near-constant, unsolicited hectoring about the state of the world, including the environment (die Umwelt), politics, America’s cultural hegemony, and why crossing against the stoplight should be punishable by death. Within all the Frankfurt School writings swirls an arrogant incomprehension of the American world, a resentment at having been forced to engage with it, and a passionate wish to be free of it, once and for all. Ingrates indeed.