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

  © 2015 by Michael Walsh

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  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walsh, Michael, 1949–

  The devil’s pleasure palace : the cult of critical theory and the subversion of the West / by Michael Walsh.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-59403-769-6 (ebook)

  1.Critical theory—United States. 2.Nihilism (Philosophy) 3.United States—Civilization—194–I. Title.

  HM480.W35 2015

  149’.8—dc23

  2015002549

  For Ann Patricia Walsh, my mother, who taught me to love words

  Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

  — Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

  But I can’t listen to music often, it affects the nerves. One wants to say pleasant stupidities and stroke on the head the people who, living in this dirty hell, can create such beauty. And today it is impossible to stroke anyone on the head—they bite off your hand, and it is necessary to beat heads, beat them ruthlessly, although we, ideally, are against any sort of violence against people. Hmmm, the task is diabolically difficult.

  — Vladimir Lenin, as recounted by Maxim Gorky in Days with Lenin

  Only a humanity to which death has become as indifferent as its members, which has died to itself, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

  — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

  You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you . . . Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

  — Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

  It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the “Day of Judgment.”

  — Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times

  At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.

  — P. J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance

  The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

  — Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy

  The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.

  — Leo Strauss, The City and Man

  Contents

  Preface: The Argument

  Introduction: Of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace

  Chapter One: Whose Paradise?

  Chapter Two: Thesis

  Chapter Three: Antithesis

  Chapter Four: The Sleep of Pure Reason Produces Monsters

  Chapter Five: The Descent into Hell

  Chapter Six: The Eternal Feminine

  Chapter Seven: Of Light and Darkness

  Chapter Eight: Of Words and Music

  Chapter Nine: The Venusberg of Death

  Chapter Ten: World without God, Amen

  Chapter Eleven: Of Eros and Thanatos

  Chapter Twelve: The Consolation of Philosophy

  Chapter Thirteen: Mephisto at the Ministry of Love

  Chapter Fourteen: The Devil Is in the Details

  Chapter Fifteen: Oikophobes and Xenophiles

  Chapter Sixteen: Good-Bye to All That

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  THE ARGUMENT

  In the aftermath of World War II, America—the new leader of the West—stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, a burgeoning transnational elite in New York City and Washington, D.C., embraced not only the war’s refugees but also many of their resolutely nineteenth-century “modern” ideas as well.

  Few of these ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the so-called Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory—like Pandora’s Box—released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable Central European nihilism that was celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the new nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service. They have sown (as Cardinal Bergoglio—now Pope Francis—has written of Satan, who will play a large role in our story) “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny”—and all disguised as a search for truth that will lead to human happiness here on earth.

  Of course, what has resulted is something far from that. Were any of the originators of Critical Theory sill among us, they might well say, quoting Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe, and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.

  The Frankfurt School sucker punched American culture right in its weak solar plexus. Americans have always been sympathetic to an alternative point of view, sympathetic to the underdog, solicitous of strangers, especially foreign refugees fleeing a monster like Hitler. Largely innocent of the European battles over various forms of socialism, and softened up to a certain extent by the Roosevelt administration’s early, frank admiration of Mussolini as it tried to solve the economic crisis of the Depression, the American public was open to self-criticism.

  The problem with the Frankfurt School scholars was that they arrived with ideological blinders—men of the Left fighting other men of the Left back in the old Heimat—and were unable to see that there was another, different world welcoming them in the United States if only they would open their eyes. (How, for example, could they hate California?) They appear not so much scho
larly as simple, viewing American capitalism as a vast, deliberate, conspiracy against their own socialist ideas, when, in fact, their ideas were simply wrong, their analysis flawed, and their animus ineradicable. They were creatures of their own time and place, with no more claim to absolute truth than the man on a soapbox in Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park or the lunatic staggering down Market Street in San Francisco talking to himself. Everybody’s got a beef.

  One thing they did get right, though: Popular culture lay at the heart of the American experience. It was hugely influential in a way that surpassed the understanding of European academics; without official sanction, it spoke for the people in a way that state-sponsored Socialist Realist art never could. They knew pop culture was potent, very potent, but they had no idea how to create more of it, or control it. They were so obsessed with their crude and unsophisticated Marxism, so devoted to their paradigm of the class struggle, that they worried about pop culture’s destructive top-down effect on the gullible proletariat and viewed Hollywood and the mass media as, naturally, a capitalist plot to seduce the rubes. (Seduction, they believed, was their socialist birthright, not capitalism’s.) They desired self-improving, consciousness-raising art to be a matter for the State, and they disdained the profit motive, though they certainly had no objection to making money. But their successors had no such quibbles with mass culture. They grasped that the “long march through the institutions” (as the Marxists characterized it) would be the ticket to ideological hegemony and even greater wealth—evolution, not revolution.

  This is a book about how we got here. It is also a book about good and evil; about creation and destruction; about capitalism and socialism; about God, Satan, and the satanic in men; about myths and legends and the truths within them; about culture versus politics; about the difference between story and plot. It is about Milton versus Marx, the United States versus Germany, about redemptive truth versus Mephistophelean bands of illusion and the Devil’s jokes. It concerns itself with the interrelation of culture, religion, sex, and politics—in other words, something herein to offend nearly everybody.

  And, I hope, to inspire. For the taboos of our culture are also its totems, and the political arguments that rage around them are symptomatic of both disease and good health, of infection and immunity. They are not simply battlefields in the larger contemporary culture war—they are the culture war, a war that has been raging since the Garden of Eden but that manifests itself today in the unceasing attack of cultural Marxism (which molts and masquerades under many names, including liberalism, progressivism, social justice, environmentalism, anti-racism, etc.) upon what used to be called the Christian West.

  Although this battle is simply the latest front in an ancient war, this critical struggle—“the Fight” or “the Struggle” (or der Kampf), as leftists call it—is the defining issue of our time. It will determine not only what kind of country the United States of America will become but also whether the Western world will continue the moral, cultural, and technological dominance it shares with the larger Anglophone world, or finally succumb to a relentless assault on its values and accept the loss of its cultural vigor. In other words, will it—will we—repel the invaders, organize sorties, ride out and crush them—or wearily open the gates to the citadel and await the inevitable slaughter?

  The aggressors include the Frankfurt School of (mostly German) Marxist philosophers, theoreticians, and writers, as well as their intellectual descendants and acolytes in the U.S., including the followers of Saul Alinsky, the Marxist “community organizer” whose influence has only waxed in the years since his death in 1972 and has extended even to the Oval Office. Throughout, I refer to this cabal as the Unholy Left, a term unapologetically both descriptive and judgmental. It is a term I suspect they would dearly like to embrace but can’t quite bring themselves to yet, if only for electoral reasons.

  I am not talking of garden-variety “liberals” (actually, big-government statists, so long as that big government does not come down on them), who see Washington as a kind of taxpayer-funded supra-charity, dispensing goodies to the deserving poor and making sure chemicals aren’t dumped in the drinking water. Rather, I refer to the hard Left, the radicals, many of whom are now in power, who would remake (“fundamentally transform”)—wreck—the United States of America and, by extension, the civilization of the West.

  On the other side are not conservatives per se, but those who see themselves in the role of conservators—preservers of the Western legacy who recognize that we should not lightly abandon a long, shared cultural tradition that, whatever its real or perceived faults, has been the primary engine of human moral, spiritual, social, scientific, and medical progress.

  Therefore, I propose to look at the history of the Left–Right conflict (to put it in its simplest terms) not only in terms of politics but in terms of art and culture as well. If the Paleolithic cavemen who painted the walls of Lascaux kept precise, detailed, written astronomical records, we don’t know about them. But their symbols and images of animals and people, left on the walls of ancient caves in France, might well contain astronomic information—preserved via the medium of art. Via their paintings, they left us a nearly indelible image of their world. Looking at the vivid illustrations of bulls, stags, and horses—and even other human beings—we can begin to understand who we are in a way that science cannot teach us. The cave paintings are not only evidence; they are human interpretations of evidence, part of our shared heritage. Their artists were who we still are today. They are trying to tell us something.

  Similarly, the worldview of the ancient Greeks comes down via the medium of poetry and oral narrative, later preserved in written form; and this slender reed of happenstance, subject to the vagaries of selection and preservation, is, together with Jerusalem, one of the pillars upon which rests the entire edifice of Western civilization. Legends they seem to us, but like the cave paintings, they are interpretations of phenomena, internalized by the artists and then re-externalized in the form of narrative—our ur-Narrative, or founding myth, from which all that is human in our society flows. We ignore the philosophical and moral significance of this patrimony at our peril and should never dismiss it as mere superstition or storytelling, somehow inferior to the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The writings are all of a piece, clues to our essence, messages in sacred bottles, washed ashore upon the sands of time.

  They are stories of gods and goddesses and titans, but mostly they are stories of heroes. Humanity is inconceivable without heroes; we are not egalitarian members of an ant farm, shuttling from cradle to grave, indistinguishable from one another and easily replaceable. Not everyone can be a hero, but everyone can dream of heroism. Bravery has always been a cardinal human virtue, so great that it was embodied by none other than Jesus Christ, another foundational cultural pillar of the West.

  In his book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jack Miles looks at the story of Jesus of Nazareth as the tale of the hero of the New Testament, complete with the happy ending of the Resurrection. As Miles write in his prologue:

  All mankind is forgiven, but the Lord must die. This is the revolutionary import of the epilogue that, two thousand years ago, a group of radical Jewish writers appended to the sacred scripture of their religion. Because they did so, millions in the West today worship before the image of a deity executed as a criminal, and—no less important—other millions who never worship at all carry within their cultural DNA a religiously derived suspicion that somehow, someday, “the last will be first, and the first last.” (Matt. 20:16)

  The humbly heroic Christ—born into straitened circumstances of a virgin mother, a precocious teacher and rabbi who undertook a brief, three-year ministry that was both populist and political, who was captured through treachery, unfairly tried, tortured, and executed, and who returned in triumph over death—is the archetypal Christian hero, supplanting the Homeric heroes (Achilles, Odysseus) who did not give their liv
es for something larger than themselves, their families, or their tribes. But Christ, the Lamb of God, the Redeemer, Messiah, willingly fails in order to succeed, bestowing a gift upon a humanity that is still not sure whether it wants to accept it. His story—what used to be unapologetically called “The Greatest Story Ever Told”—resonates down through two thousand years of Western history, touching nearly ever major subsequent tale of heroism, from the Chanson de Roland to The Little Mermaid.

  For what we—in an increasingly secular West—misread as a political argument is, in reality, nothing of the sort. It is a literary argument, if we define literature properly not as “fiction” but as the expression of the soul of a people, in this case, of all people. Politics (which for many has come to replace sports as the subject of rooting interest par excellence) is merely its secondary manifestation, the generally tiresome litany of regurgitated policy prescriptions and bogus campaign promises that residents of the Western democracies routinely encounter today. But where once in our culture raged religious arguments (whose moral underpinnings were never in doubt), today we are concerned not simply with the details of a system of governance and social organization, but with the very nature of that system itself. In fact, at issue is the essence of Western civilization and how it may be subverted to achieve a vastly different—indeed, opposite—end than originally intended. For one side has changed the meaning of the principal words in the debate, including “democracy,” “culture,” “civilization,” and “justice,” among others. The two sides speak different languages, but with a superficially shared vocabulary that serves as a means of deceit for one and confusion for the other.

  Seduction, subversion, sedition—these are the tools of a creature we once called Satan, the Father of Lies, the loser of the Battle in Heaven. Yet he continues the fight here on earth with the only weapons at his disposal: man’s inherent weaknesses and zeal to be duped if the cause seems appealing enough. Chief among the weaknesses of Western man today are his fundamental lack of cultural self-confidence, his willingness to open his ears to the siren song of nihilism, a juvenile eagerness to believe the worst about himself and his society and to relish, on some level, his own prospective destruction.