The Devil's Pleasure Palace. Michael Walsh
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can have a sense of national purpose or identity. And thus its entire prior history is rendered worthless.
Here lies the threat: Wave after wave of what I dub “satanic” leftism—in the sense that Satan cannot create, but only destroy—has gradually eroded and undermined our own belief in ourselves. This book, then, is explicitly and implicitly an argument against globalism, one-worldism, cultural relativism, and fatuous moral equivalence—not just made by me, but by Roman emperors, medieval philosophers, cavaliers of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century revolutionaries, and twentieth-century daemons. It is not for the squeamish, the dense, the dull, the ignorant, or the easily offended.
I hasten to add that, despite the theological issues treated within—inevitable in any discussion of both Paradise Lost and Faust—this is not a book about religion, except in the sense of narrative drama. Whatever your feelings about Christianity, it cannot be denied that the Jesus story, about a man learning first to understand and then embrace his destiny, is the story of just about every hero in Western literature, from Odysseus and Finn McCool to Tarzan of the Apes.
It is, however, a call for a new Counter Reformation, an engagement with the inimical intellectual and cultural trends that have some Western Europeans and Americans questioning their reason for existence—or, at the very least, making them feel guilty about it. It is at once a call to faith, and a call to arms.
In a companion volume—The Fiery Angel, which is forthcoming—I will lay out more specifically the nature of this restoration. For now, however, enjoy the story of man’s first disobedience, the fruit of that forbidden tree, and the Faustian bargain that has led us straight into the hell of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace.
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 scholarly 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