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.”

       Preface to the Paperback Edition

      The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a book about Good and Evil, about the Fall of Man and our long journey home, and about how Art, not Science, is the medium best suited to steer us toward that beacon of magic fire which lights the path to redemption. Big themes, worthy of capitalization.

      But rather than a single Virgil, conducting us back to the first principles of Western civilization from which our culture has sprung, the reader will encounter a score or more: Milton, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Goethe; Joseph Campbell; the philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Marxist intellectuals; Marcus Aurelius, Boethius; Hegel and Marx; Francis Ford Coppola and Walt Disney. Some are saintly, some diabolical—but all, in their fashion, have helped us understand the central questions of man’s existence: Why are we here, and where are we going? If it is not the Pilgrim’s Progress, it is at the very least the story of the Hero’s Journey, the hero in this case being all of us.

      Please don’t be frightened by this ghostly parade of cultural icons; at heart, this is an adventure story, analyzed via the medium of the oldest of human activities, storytelling itself. Call it what you will—myth, legend, narrative fiction, faith—the human need for stories that help explain the human condition antedates organized religion by millennia. Tales of gods, monsters, and heroes extend back to Homer, the Celtic legends, and Nordic mythology. Each of them tells essentially the same tale, lays out a moral framework for life, and shows us how to achieve it.

      And yet, too often we have ignored this most primal mechanism for self-understanding in favor of fashionable psychological twaddle, exacerbated by our perverse penchant to believe that each new generation casts off the antediluvian superstitions of the past and reinvents the world anew; the truth, therefore, must be the exact opposite of what hitherto we have all believed. Only in this way, goes the thinking, lies true enlightenment.

      Balderdash. Innovation is always to be sought and admired, but the wanton destruction of the past in a fit of adolescent rebelliousness—fanned by those who would do the culture irreparable harm—must be rejected if the cultural-Marxist Left’s long march through the institutions is to be halted and reversed, as it must be if civilization is to survive.

      The critical response to this meditation upon fundamental principles has been most gratifying. The book quickly found a place in the contemporary canon of conservative argument, was favorably compared to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, has stayed on various Amazon best-seller lists for nearly two years, and now appears in the paperback edition you hold in your hands.

      This is a political book only in the largest possible sense, springing from my belief that culture produces politics, and not vice versa. You will not find a word herein about contemporary, and hence transient, political figures, or even specific issues. Rather, my attention was to directly challenge both our notions of public and foreign policy with this dagger at their heart: