The Devil's Pleasure Palace (23 page)

In the Venusberg,
John Collier, 1901. Wagner provides us with his own version of the Devil's Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in
Tannhäuser
.

Lilith
, John Collier, 1892. “She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold. . . / fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”

CHAPTER TEN

WORLD WITHOUT GOD, AMEN

I
n his final book,
The Fatal Conceit
, the economic philosopher Friedrich Hayek wrote that “an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition.” While his criticism aptly applies to all leftist critics of Western social organization, Hayek's primary target was Rousseau, the harbinger of postmodernism and the man perhaps most responsible, even more so than Marx or Gramsci or Alinsky, for the state of the modern world. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then Rousseau is Exhibit A, influencing the French Revolution, the upheavals of 1848 (in which Wagner took part) and its encore, the student “revolutions” in both Europe and America in 1968.

That year, 1968, remains one of the most significant in modern America history; it was the year things came apart and the center could not hold. During the student riots in France in May that caused de Gaulle to dissolved the National Assembly and call for new elections (which he won), my college French teacher turned to us and said, in a remark I did not fully understand at the time, “You are all just the children of Rousseau.” To this day, given the passions of the moment, I am not sure whether he meant it as criticism or compliment.

For the historian Paul Johnson, the Swiss-born Rousseau is “the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all,” as he writes in his 1988 book,
Intellectuals
. He continues:

Rousseau was the first to combine all the salient characteristics of the modern Promethean: the assertion of his right to reject the existing order in its entirely; confidence in his capacity to refashion it from the bottom in accordance with principles of his own devising; belief that this could be achieved by the political process; and, not least, recognition of the huge part instinct, intuition, and impulse play in human conduct. He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity. An astonishing number of people, in his own day and since, have taken him at his own valuation.

In other words, Rousseau might as well be the Second Coming of Christ. Or, failing that, the Second Coming of God himself. For what is the power to remake humanity except godlike? The more militant the atheist, it seems, the more godlike he wishes to become. His “atheism” stands revealed not as disbelief in a higher power but as an affirmative belief in
himself
as that higher power. It's often remarked that atheism is simply religion by another name (as the officially atheist, now deceased Soviet Union demonstrated). Else why would atheists be so adamant and aggressive about their beliefs? Not only do they choose not to believe in God, or even a god, but they demand that their fellow citizens submit—there is that word again—to their ideology and purge all evidence of the (Christian) religion from the public square. Never mind that the Founders were Christians (even if some of them only nominally) and fully expected their faith to undergird their new country. While the First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing a national religion, there was no such proscription against the states, and both Massachusetts and Connecticut had established churches—Congregationalism—well into the nineteenth century.

An established Church of Atheism now seems the likely fate for a country whose official motto, “In God We Trust,” was codified into law as recently as 1956; the phrase “under God” had been added to the Pledge of Allegiance only two years earlier, both events during the Eisenhower administration. As usual, leftists are employing the shields of their enemy as swords against them, waging “lawfare” against American institutions with audacity and near-total impunity. Thus, in their zeal, they demonstrate the need for some sort of faith, even it is anti-faith; there is, after all, a hierarchy in Hell.

Rousseau, a man of the Enlightenment, is identified with the cult of the “noble savage,” but the scope of his indictment of civilization is much wider. Rejecting nascent materialism, he espoused a view of nature that took the Romantics by storm (where would nineteenth-century Germany have been without Rousseau?) and created a new version of the Fall of Man, this time brought low not by the Serpent in the Garden but by the material advancement of the Industrial Revolution. Mankind had become divorced from the state of nature and seduced by the acquisition of property, Rousseau argued. Humanity, in his view, had become competitive, preening, boastful, and vain—in short, alienated. Born a Genevan Calvinist, and later becoming a “convert of convenience” to Catholicism in Italy, Rousseau was the archetype of the modern, dissatisfied leftist, an insolent failure at just about every trade he plied, relying for sustenance upon the kindness of strangers, especially women. Finally finding his métier, he hit upon his true calling: telling others what to do via the medium of essay and autobiography, with himself as his own hero.

As with Wagner, a cult of personality formed around the constantly querulous, paranoiac, hypochondriacal Rousseau (“one of the greatest grumblers in history,” notes Johnson). He preached truth and virtue, although he had little of either—indeed, of the latter, almost none. He regularly deposited his bastard offspring by his lifelong mistress, Thérèse Levasseur (of whom he wrote, “the sensual needs I satisfied with her were purely sexual and were nothing to do with her as an individual”), on the steps of the nearest foundling hospital—five in all—and never even bothered to give them names. Like so many after him, Rousseau was one of those liberals who loved humanity but couldn't stand people.

Often contradictory in his views on atheism and religion, Rousseau nevertheless was certain of one thing: that the State should be the final arbiter of the human condition, in the name of something he called the General Will. Only the State, he thought, could make postlapsarian man well again. One can practically smell the fascism coming off his pages, all in the name of compassion, of course. No wonder his more perceptive contemporaries, including Voltaire, considered him a monster.

Many others, however, were greatly influenced by him, including most of the great monsters of the twentieth century. Without Rousseau, Marx is unthinkable; without Marx, Lenin is unthinkable; without Lenin, Stalin is unthinkable; without Stalin, Mao is unthinkable; without Mao,
Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot are unthinkable. In
The Communist Manifesto
, Marx and Engels claimed of their Principal Enemy, the bourgeoisie: “It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”

And so on. The bit about “religious fervor,” as if either of them cared a whit for it, is a nice touch, although the crack about “philistine sentimentalism” rings truer to their real ethos. La Rochefoucauld defined hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue, but what if the virtue itself is counterfeit? What if it is all a sham, a satanic illusion—the mouse emerging from the comely witch's mouth in the
Walpurgisnacht
scene from
Faust
?

In this famous scene, Faust and Mephistopheles have magically flown to the Brocken, atop the Harz Mountains, Germany's most haunted spot, to partake of the Witches' Sabbath. Mephisto is feeling old, and he identifies his own weakness with the end of the world:

       
MEPHISTOPHELES

       
I feel the people drawn to Judgment Day

       
For I scale this mountain for the last time

       
Because my keg runs turbid.

The World, too, is down to the dregs.

Then the revelries begin. Faust tells the Young Witch about a dream he's had, a dream of apples, as it happens: “I had the most wonderful dream / In which I saw an apple tree / Two beautiful apples gleamed thereupon / They lured me, and I climbed up.” To which the Young Witch replies: “The little apples please you very much / Because they came from Paradise. / I feel myself moved by joy / Because they grow in my Garden as well.”

This little exchange—the sacred—is immediately followed by the profane utterings of Mephistopheles, who is dancing with the Old Witch and makes a crude remark about a “cloven tree” with a hole in the middle of it: “
So—es war, gefiel mir's doch.
” (“So . . . it was, I liked it though.”) To which this Old Witch lewdly counters with a challenge to Mephisto to provide something large enough to fill the hole.

Fruit forbidden and fruit readily available—we have seen from
Paradise Lost
that the eating of the one led to the taking of the other. From tasting of the Tree of Knowledge to history's first poetically interpolated recorded sex act—not exclusively, it should be noted, an act of love but an act of suddenly realized humanity, at once passionate, fearful, desperate, and defiant—was but the work of a moment. Which is to say, from Original Sin to the birth of the first child, Cain, history's first murderer. Condemned from the start? Or free to choose? Were Eros and Thanatos inseparable from the beginning? And which came first?

It should be here noted that there is a double sexual subtext to Milton's recounting of what took place in the Garden during that fateful encounter: Eve's desire for the apple is palpably sexual, but then so is the Serpent's desire for Eve. (“She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold . . . / Fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”) He gazes at her naked body in highly eroticized awe and, appealing to her vanity, tells her that she is too beautiful not to be admired by all.

His temptation to her, remember, is to remove God from Paradise by becoming like a god herself. So, practically from Creation, the notion of a world without God was formed. And yet, as history shows, man has signally failed at replacing God. Rousseau's life and works are proof that vice and virtue may be, when combined in the same man, not hypocrisy but evil. That Rousseau's life, like Marx's, was devoted entirely to self-aggrandizement masquerading as empathy for his fellow man is beyond dispute. (Rousseau conflated himself and his own needs, wants, desires, and hopes with those of all humanity, something entirely characteristic of many a leftist.) So is the fact that so many fell (and fall to this day) for his professions of benevolence.

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