The Devil's Pleasure Palace (9 page)

A wonderful illustration to
Faust
by Eugène Delacroix depicts Mephistopheles in winged flight over Wittenberg, one of several “
Lutherstädte
” (Luther towns) in Germany associated with the events of the Protestant Reformation. As a depiction of the sacred (the church spires) and the profane (the fallen angel, his wings still intact, flying impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy), it vividly expresses the ongoing battle between good and evil. It also unites many of the images—innate images, as I have argued, the embedded ur-Narrative we all share—about which we have been speaking, including the divine, the daemonic, and the satanic, the Battle in Heaven, the Fall of Man, and the Faustian bargain.

For Satan, as for Marx, religion was an impediment to the grand design of transforming humanity from a collection of free-willed, autonomous individuals into a mass of self-corralling slaves who mistake security for liberty and try to keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum in order to function.

The Marxist view of religion has gone through an evolution, to the point where some of the Frankfurt School's defenders argue that cultural Marxism did, in fact, make a place for “religion” (or at least transcendence) in its weltanschauung. It “evolved,” they say, past the official atheism of Marxism-Leninism as practiced by a backward society like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

It is worth a moment to reflect on the use of this word. “Evolution” is most closely associated with Darwin, thus affording it a patina of “science” as far as the Marxists are concerned, but whenever the word is used by the Left, it takes on an added, quasi-teleological meaning: We are evolving toward something, a “higher state.” Thus, Supreme Court justices are said to have “grown in office” or “evolved” as they make their way from right to left during the course of their lifetime tenures. And politicians are said to have “evolved” whenever they switch positions from something more conservative to something rather more liberal (as with gay marriage). As Rob Clements noted on the blog The Other Journal (which has the tagline “an intersection of theology and culture”):

In its most prolific phase, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the [Frankfurt School] consisted mainly of dissident Marxists who believed that orthodox Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent development
of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, particularly with regard to the rise of fascism as a working-class movement. This led many of these dissident Marxists to take up the task of re-appropriating Marxism in light of conditions that Karl Marx himself had never considered. The school has a clear genealogy, appropriating elements of Marxist materialism, Hegelian philosophy, German idealism, Gestalt psychology, and atheistic Jewish Messianism. This synthesized analysis gave expression to a transdisciplinary, anticapitalist intellectual tradition with both immanent (material) and transcendent (metaphysical or spiritual) themes.

In a nutshell, here we see the problem with nontraditional theory and dogma: It must constantly change the terms of the debate to accommodate, however reluctantly, reality, as much as the Marxists would like to ignore it. T.H. Huxley (the quotation has been attributed to others) spoke of the “murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts.” Cultural Marxist theory is always getting used to such brutal facts and twisting its theory to fit them—thus, the necessity for “evolution” as part of its unholy eschatology.

Dubbing revision “evolution” also gives a patina of “science” to Marxist theory, something it desperately seeks, having largely abandoned its claims to economic “science” in the wake of a century of failure. Having co-opted, if not actually invented, the “social sciences” (the inherent oxymoron generally goes unremarked), cultural Marxism and Critical Theory seek to legitimize their attempted murder of beautiful facts with a gang of brutal theorems, each one more beguiling that the last, iron fists in velvet gloves, grimacing skulls beneath seductive skins.

Something that has “evolved” is better than something that has not. New and improved is better, fitter than the old and diminished. Whether this is true, at least in the sociopolitical realm, is very much open to debate. Rhetorically, the point is to establish the inevitable teleology of “progressivism,” always moving “forward” into a bright and shining future and casting off the vestigial physical and moral attributes of the past.

Thus is born Critical Theory, the hallmark of the Frankfurt School's “progressive” (in reality, ultra-regressive) guerrilla assault on Western and American culture—Critical Theory, which essentially holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or
attacked. Our cultural totems, shibboleths, and taboos are declared either completely arbitrary or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages—as degenerate modern feminism blames male “privilege” and other forms of imaginary oppression. If the feminists have an argument, it is with God, not men; but since few of them believe in God, it is upon men that they turn their harpy ire.

In its purest form, which is to say its most malevolent form, Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism: rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons, and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.

“Satanism” is a strong word, but for the purposes of our discussion, it is a vital one. With no artificial Hegelian synthesis at our disposal—as there was none for Milton or Goethe or any other storyteller of stature who has pierced the veil of darkness—we are left with a stark, elemental choice. If the myth of the Fall is correct—and either it is, or it is a mass hallucination that somehow, against all odds, has sprung up and endured—then there can be only good and evil, with no accommodation between them possible.

Further: God seeks no accommodation with Satan. There is no divine principle worth compromising, no request from the heavenly side of the conflict to meet Hades halfway on matters of faith and morals. No, all the requests for compromise and pleas for negotiation come exclusively from Satan. As Antonio says in Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice
:

       
Mark you this, Bassanio,

       
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

       
An evil soul producing holy witness

       
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.

       
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.

       
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Goodly indeed. Throughout literature, the Devil is frequently portrayed as sincere, earnest, reassuring and cajoling, slow to reveal his terrifying face. Deception is his stock-in-trade, and human beings who give him the slightest benefit of the doubt end up unhappily, and worse. To doubt the accuracy of these portrayals—no matter whence they originate, whether from folk tradition or (as I argue) some deep, Jungian wellspring
of primal memory and collective unconscious—is to doubt nearly the entire course of human history (although Critical Theory presumes to do just that). It is to believe that only in the past century and a half or so have we been able to penetrate religion's veil of illusion and see reality for what it is: nothing.

This is nihilism, which often poses as sophisticated “realism,” and I argue that it is just another form of satanism. Denial of the eternal becomes a way of temporal life; and, by extension, Death is embraced as a way of Life. En passant, it is amusing to note that the practitioners of nihilism are often the same people who denounce “denialism” in other aspects of everyday life (various psychological conditions, “climate change,” etc.), just as those who describe themselves as “pro-choice” with regard to abortion are anti-choice in just about every other facet of their political lives, including health care, school choice, and so forth.

In the movie
Independence Day
, the scientist played by Jeff Goldblum realizes shortly after alien ships appear over the world's great cities that their intentions are far from benign—that, in fact, the aliens are coordinating a massive attack using earthling technology. “They're using our own satellites against us,” he explains, making a hasty sketch to illustrate his point. So does Satan—or the satanic forces, or the iron laws of history, or
la forza del Destino
, call it what you will—use our own best qualities and noblest intentions against us, pervert them to his own ends in order to accomplish his singular mission, which is the moral destruction of humanity.

Pascal's famous wager—What is the downside to betting on the existence of God?—comes into play here, and in its most basic form. Let us posit that there exists neither God nor Satan, Heaven nor Hell, that human oral, religious, and literary tradition is one long primitive misapprehension of reality, that we emerged accidentally, ex nihilo, and to eternal
nihil
shall we return. (Note the implied belief in eternity, no matter which side of the argument you take.) But why then would any self-respecting individual wish to cast his or her lot in with the dark side of the proposition? Is Nothing more attractive than Something? Is Nothing a goal devoutly to be sought, a prize fiercely and joyously to be won? Again, we turn to storytelling.

Aside from a brief flurry of nihilistic films from the late 1960s and early '70s, few are the movies that offer a hero who doesn't care if he lives or dies, and who doesn't fight death with all his power in order to
win the particular battle we see him waging during the course of his story. (Even film noir heroes do that, though they usually lose.) One that comes to mind might (
might
) be an exception:
To Live and Die in L.A.
, written by former Secret Service agent Gerald Petievich and directed by William Friedkin. The movie's hero, Chance (William Petersen), plays fast and loose with life (we first meet him bungee-jumping off a high bridge), inadvertently leads his partner to his death at the hands of the counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), and vows to get Masters by any means necessary—means that wind up getting a federal agent killed. Near the end of the film, in a shootout in a locker room, Chance is killed with a shotgun blast to the face, his life's work left unfulfilled.

Or maybe not unfulfilled after all: His mania to get Masters has been passed on to his new, straight-arrow partner, who kills the villain in a final, flaming confrontation and then takes Chance's informant mistress as his own. “You're working for me now,” he coldly informs her. Temporary victory has been achieved, and the cycle goes on.

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it's simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool's errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

What evidence is there that there is an arc of history and that it bends in any particular direction? One would think that the Unholy Left would be the last to assert such a grand pattern, given their disbelief in the Deity. Whence comes this “arc”? Who created it? Where did its moral impulse toward “justice” come from? What is “justice” anyway, and who decides? And if the word “justice” bears a bien-pensant modifier (as in “environmental justice”), the only “justice” is likely to be the “justice” of revenge. The word “justice,” in the hands of the Left, has come to mean pretty much any policy goal they desire.

None of this matters, however, when the purpose of the assertion is not to offer an argument but to shut down the opposition via the timely employment of unimpeachable buzzwords and to advance a political agenda that has little or nothing to do with the terms deployed for its advancement. Indeed, martial metaphors, not moralistic catchphrases, are the key to understanding the modern Left and its “scientific” dogma of Critical Theory: Theirs is a Hobbesian war of all against all (
bellum omnum contra omnes
), of every man's hand against every other man's. As Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the intellectual fascism of the Left, wrote in
1984
: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” These three aphorisms are the official slogans of the Ministry of Truth in
1984
, and the truth is whatever the Ministry says it is. Truth is malleable and fungible, a function of day and date. The Devil will say what he has to say and will quote such scripture as he requires in order to achieve the sole objective remaining to him: the ruination of Man and his consignment to Hell.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE SLEEP OF PURE REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS

A
t the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya produced a suite of etchings called “Los Caprichos,” the most famous of which was
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
. The Age of Enlightenment was receding as Romanticism took hold, Kant had issued his
Critique of Pure Reason,
and the publication of Goethe's
Faust
was less than ten years away. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Romantic monsters had broken through the steel of the Enlightenment's rational faculties, unleashed first by Goethe in
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), Weber in
Der Freischütz
(1821), Berlioz in the
Symphonie Fantastique
(1830), and, soon enough, in the music of Liszt and Wagner.