The Devil's Pleasure Palace. Michael Walsh
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since compromise, even in the smallest things, leads to synthesis, and there can be no synthesis between Good and Evil. As the crude metaphor goes, one part ice cream mixed with one part dog poop is dog poop, not ice cream.
The objection now will come that mine is a Manichaean view of the world: black and white, with no shade of gray between, much less fifty. Critics will label my notion—in a term much favored by adherents of the Left—“simplistic” and cry that it fails to allow for the subtleties and nuances of the human condition.
But so what? That is akin to observing that firearms are bad because they are designed to kill people—when no one would disagree that killing is precisely their object, which is, far more often than not, a force for good. There is no nuance in a handgun. It is either loaded or unloaded. Its safety, should it have one, is either on or off. It is either pointed at the target or it is not pointed at the target. The bullet is either fired or it is not.
A hero given to inaction while he studies the subtleties and nuances of a critical situation is not much of a hero. We remember Hamlet not for his heroism but for his inability to act. His most famous soliloquy is a paean to omphaloskepsis—navel-gazing. And yet, we can put even that—“to be or not to be”—within a Manichaean frame, because Hamlet’s inability to come down on one side or the other until it is too late gets a lot of people killed.
Far from being admirable, Hamlet is an archetype of the contemptible fence-sitter, and he pops up again and again in popular storytelling. Take for example, the character of the mapmaker Corporal Upham in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Hastily assigned to Captain Miller’s rescue operation after the carnage of the Normandy landing, Upham at first argues for the release of a captured German soldier (“Steamboat Willie”); later he fatally hesitates in a ruined stairwell while one of his comrades, Private Mellish, is overcome and stabbed through the heart with his own souvenir Hitler Youth dagger on the floor above. Near the end of the film, Steamboat Willie returns to kill Captain Miller in the final battle on the bridge and, after he surrenders, is shot in cold blood by Upham—freed at last of his nuances, Upham commits a war crime as a retributive act for his own earlier cowardice and foolishness. There is something to be said for recognizing good and evil after all.
And yet how often in real life we fail, including the statesmen among us. Neville Chamberlain botched Munich when he failed to take the measure of Hitler. George W. Bush failed with Vladimir Putin (“I looked the man in the eye. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul”). Collectively, the West is confounded by Islam because it fails to credit the plain words of Islamist animus against the West; how much interpretation, after all, does the slogan “Death to America” actually require?
We know this thanks to our ur-Narrative, our primal story, the divine spark hidden deep within us that gives our lives meaning. Critical Theory seeks to undermine this self-knowledge at its root by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged.”
Once again, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny instead of the reverse: The primal, universal, species-wide story (phylogeny) is buried deep within each individual organism (ontogeny), within the heart, soul, and psyche of every human being. Story is not a reflection of the world but its engine and essence. Story alone will not achieve the final triumph of Good over Evil, but it propels the way.
“For Germany, the criticism of religion has essentially been completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” wrote Marx in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844. “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call upon them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call upon them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” (Emphases are Marx’s.)
These are the demented ravings of a dangerous idiot, given a claim to legitimacy by the facile turns of phrase, the insistence on having it both ways (for the Unholy Left, something can be itself and its exact opposite at the same time), and the rage against reality, in this case the “vale of tears.”
Goethe’s Mephistopheles—a literary adumbration of Marx if ever there was one—could not have said it better, for it takes a Father of Lies to convince others to rebel against the evidence of their hearts and their senses, not to mention their own self-interest. If we simply analyze the words of Marx’s famous statement about the opium of the masses, what do we get? References to “protest,” of course—that would become a staple of leftist agitation for more than a century afterward—as well as “illusion.” This recalls the scene in Faust, Part One, outside the venerable Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, in which Mephisto frees a group of students from a spell with these words: “Irrtum, laß los der Augen Band! Und merkt euch, wie der Teufel spaße.” (“O Error, let loose their eyes’ bond! / And heed how the Devil jokes.”)
Lying is the centerpiece of both the satanic and the leftist projects. Since few people would willingly consign themselves to Hell, the rebels (for so they always reflexively think of themselves) must mask their true intentions. Reviewing François Furet’s 2014 book, Lies, Passions, and Illusions, Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, wrote in National Review:
Communism’s power to seduce, Furet begins, was partly based on the mendacity of Marxist regimes and their followers. “Communism was certainly the object of a systematic lie,” he writes, “as testified to, for example, by the trips organized for naïve tourists and, more generally, by the extreme attention the Soviet regime and the Communist parties paid to propaganda and brainwashing.” Yet these lies were exposed quickly and often, almost from October 1917 on. They wouldn’t have remained so effective for so long without the emotional pull of the grand illusions that they served: that the Bolsheviks were the carriers of history’s true meaning, and that Communism in power would bring about true human emancipation. . . . Describing Communism as a secular religion isn’t an exaggeration.
Faust’s famous bargain with the Devil (made at Easter, let us recall), was not simply for perfect wisdom (he expresses his frustration with imperfect, earthly modes of study in the poem’s famous opening), but also for a brief moment of perfect happiness, a moment to which he can say, “tarry a while, thou art so fair”—something he believes to be impossible. To Faust, this seems like a good bet:
FAUST
Were I to lay me down, becalmed, on a idler’s bed,
It’d be over for me in a trice!
If you can fawningly lie to me,
Until I am pleased with myself,
If you can deceive me with gaiety,
Then that will be my last day!
This bet I offer you.
MEPHISTOPHELES
You’re on!
FAUST
And you’re on!
Were I to say to the moment:
“Abide with me! You are so beautiful!”
Then you may clap me in irons,
Then will I wish to go to perdition!
Faust, so very German, is also the perfect modern man: born in the