The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West

by Michael Walsh

  As tastes and times change, so do story endings. In the Chanson de Roland, Roland dies, but not in vain—his deaths rouses Charlemagne’s Christian Franks to victory against the invading Muslims. It would be easy to recast the victory as the triumph of nihilism, to conclude that Roland, led into a trap and too proud to call for reinforcements in a timely manner, ultimately dies for nothing. Looking at the quickening pace of the current Muslim Reconquista—this time of the entire Dar al-Harb (non-Islamic world of war) that must be brought to submission so that the peace of Allah might reign, via the infiltration disguised as “immigration” of the Crusader homelands (Islam has a long memory)—one could easily envision such an ending, depending on the outcome of the current struggle. Will that be the West’s fate? Or are there still enough Rolands to fight, both morally and physically, for what used to be considered a superior way of life?

  One of the seeming paradoxes in modern American political life is the alliance between the Unholy Left and recrudescent militant Islam. It does not seem to matter that a worldwide Muslim caliphate under barbarous sharia law would mean the executions of homosexuals, the removal of women from the public sphere, the extinction of art and musical culture—all things the Left professes to care about passionately. And yet they were silent when the Taliban, after it seized power in Afghanistan in 2001, dynamited to smithereens the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas on the grounds of idolatry. Nor has the destruction of priceless Mesopotamian artifacts in Iraq or Roman ruins in Syria bothered “progressives” overmuch.

  And yet there is no real mystery. As the fighting emperor, Marcus Aurelius, wrote in his collection of battlefield musings known as the Meditations: “Ask yourself, what is this thing in itself, by its own special constitution? What is it in substance, and in form, and in matter? What is its function in the world? For how long does it subsist? Thus must you examine all things that present themselves to you.” What the Left and Islam have in common is the only thing that matters to either: a will to power and a desire for submission on the part of their enemies. Doctrinal differences (and there are many) between two innately totalitarian movements can be sorted out later. What matters is that the Principal Enemy first be defeated, since he—us—represents an immediate moral and mortal threat. The swiftest path to victory for both lies not in confrontation, but in our unilateral cultural disarmament.

  The theoreticians of the Frankfurt School could offer aught but sweet utopian nothings in place of anything constructive; they preached freedom but brought only slavery (“freedom is slavery,” as in 1984); they promised the self-actualization of all men but instead reduced the populace of whole nations to the status of collaborators and clerks; they guaranteed peace but brought only the unending warfare that obtains when too much is never (and never can be) enough. The pursuit of earthly perfection, as Faust discovered, ends in misery, murder, and death. However tarted up in their often impenetrable German turns of phrase, at the root of their deceptive philosophy lie incitement and rage in the service of a quest for power over their fellow men. The Devil always wears the same mask, and yet each generation must penetrate the disguise for itself or perish.

  But not until recently has cultural nihilism leapt the bounds of literature and, to a lesser extent, philosophy and found its expression as a full-rigged, democratically installed political system instead of merely savage tyranny, dispensed by conquering warlords. The injected poison of Critical Theory undermines at every step the kind of muscular cultural self-confidence that distinguished Western warriors and leaders through the end of World War II. A general such as George S. Patton Jr. would be nearly unthinkable today. Darkness descended upon Eastern Europe in the wake of the postwar political stalemate, and with no one to stop it, it was only partially dispersed by the fall of Communism in the East Bloc. The ethics of the Soviet Union were unhappily transplanted, like an airborne virus, to the child of the Enlightenment, the New World.

  Not for nothing has the age of European artistic, scientific, philosophical, and geographic discovery been called the Enlightenment, which followed the Renaissance’s rediscovery of Greco-Roman culture after a century of European feudalism (the period idealized by Erich Fromm, when the serfs and peasants knew their place). Scholars generally date the beginning of this extraordinary flowering of knowledge at around 1685, which just so happens to be the year of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth. Although a good deal of modern scholarship has been devoted to dispelling the notion of Europe’s “Dark Ages” (a chauvinistic coinage of the Renaissance), there is no doubt that the liberating influence of the Italian Renaissance, paving the way to the breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, led Europeans into an age of unprecedented discovery.

  Most of the commentary on the Enlightenment addresses the scientific and philosophical advances in Western European culture, but we should not overlook the role of music and opera, particularly one of Mozart’s last works, the German Singspiel (song cycle) known as The Magic Flute. No clearer representation of the conflict between the forces of light and darkness exists in the operatic canon, and it is worth spending some time with it.

  In Milton, light and darkness symbolize the opposing forces of God and Satan. The poet opens Book Three with this invocation:

  . . . since God is light,

  And never but in unapproached light

  Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,

  Bright effluence of bright essence increate

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  . . . thou, celestial light

  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

  Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

  Of things invisible to mortal sight.

  Such imagery was and is particularly potent in northern Europe with its short winter days and long nights. There, the return of the light at Christmas, both literally and symbolically, is visible in a way that it is not in the more southerly climes of the United States. The sun’s daily ascendancy can be measured in minutes, not seconds, and the solar orb’s progression across the southwestern and western skies offers a daily reminder of the march of the seasons that is wholly absent at the equator.

  Light and darkness figure prominently in many works of art, both visual and on the stage, but Mozart’s The Magic Flute is paradigmatic. The composer’s penultimate or even last opera, depending on how you count (La Clemenza di Tito was mostly written after the bulk of The Magic Flute but beat it to the stage by a few weeks), was composed for Emanuel Schickaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, to a Masonic libretto by the impresario himself. Schickaneder also appeared as Papageno in the first performances in the fall of 1791, just a few months before Mozart’s death in December of that year.

  Conducted by the ailing composer, and sung in German with spoken dialogue in the same language, it was more akin to what we might regard as musical comedy, as opposed to the more “operatic” Tito, sung throughout in Italian. It was instantly popular, combining folk elements (the “bird man” Papageno and his mate, Papagena) with the more ethereal main story of Prince Tamino’s love for Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night, and the trials the lovers must endure to earn their happiness at the opera’s end.

  So far, so conventional. But what distinguishes The Magic Flute as the opera par excellence of the Enlightenment is the very moral issue we have been discussing throughout: the masking of evil as good, the shrouds of illusion that the forces of darkness cast upon the innocent and the unwary. As the opera opens, Tamino (a “Japanese Prince”) is lost in a strange land, pursued by a giant serpent, which causes him to faint in fear. The unconscious man is rescued by Three Ladies. They show him a picture of the beautiful Pamina, telling him she has been kidnapped by the evil sorcerer, Sarastro. Tamino immediately vows to rescue her, both in gratitude for his deliverance and because, like Faust with Gretchen, he has instantly fallen in love with her image.

>   The reality turns out to be quite the opposite. Before the three temples of Wisdom, Reason, and Nature, Tamino encounters Papageno and the lovely Pamina, but he is quickly separated from her by Sarastro and his cult of high priests, who are actually servants of the Light. (In storytelling parlance, this is known as “the reversal.”) He learns that Pamina’s mother, the high-flying (both dramatically and musically) Queen of the Night, and her attendants are creatures of Darkness, and that he and Pamina must undergo biblical trials of fire and water, to be purified and made worthy of each other before they may unite.

  The trials symbolize the path to Enlightenment that only the strongest and most worthy may undertake. Though he fainted dead away in the face of adversity at the story’s beginning, Tamino finally becomes a man, while Pamina is cleansed of whatever sins she may have inherited from her mother, who is vanquished and cast down by the power of the Sun: “Die Strahlen der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht,” proclaims Sarastro near the end of the opera as he defeats the Queen of the Night. “Zernichten der Heuchler erschlichende Macht.” (“The streaming rays of the sun drive away the night / Destroying the hypocrites’ conniving power.”) As the Queen and her Ladies sink into the earth, they exclaim, “We are all fallen into Eternal Night!” And this from the character who sings, in one of opera’s most challenging coloratura arias, “The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart.”

  Remember, The Magic Flute was popular entertainment. Perhaps it was popular because of, not in spite of, its elemental nature. Tito, written nearly simultaneously, was a throwback to the opera seria, or “serious opera,” of Mozart’s youth, tales often set in ancient Greece or Rome. Tito contains some marvelous music but is less often performed than The Magic Flute today. The Mozart operas that form the cornerstone of the contemporary operatic repertory all deal with human beings and human emotions; beside them, Handel’s gods-and-monsters opera seria are excruciatingly dated and (thanks to the dreaded da capo arias) very long sits. We can practically date the full flowering of the Enlightenment from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute.

  Still, were The Magic Flute merely didactic or some form of special pleading for the Masonic values that informed the lives of Mozart and Schickaneder (and several other figures involved with the composition and production of the opera), we would probably see it today as a curiosity, an artifact of a vanished civilization. Naturally, it has come under attack from politically correct leftists, who view the depiction of the lonely, treacherous Moor, Monostatos, as “racist,” mostly because of the libretto’s now often-censored lines: “Weil ein Schwarzer haesslich ist . . . Weiss ist schön, ich muss sie küssen / Mond, verstecke dich dazu.” (“Because a black man is ugly . . . White is beautiful! I must kiss her / Moon, hide yourself so I can.”) As early as the 1970s, opera house were already altering these lines to protect delicate sensibilities. I saw a production in that era that made Monostatos fat rather than black—which of course would be equally un-PC today.

  Such “sensitivity” is just another hallmark of the attack on Western culture, and in particular that aspect of the attack that employs the wormwood of guilt as a weapon. Never mind that the figure of the Moor in the late eighteenth century was well recognized as a villain, the embodiment of a literally existential threat to Christendom. One of Mozart’s earlier operas, The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), dealt with the then-topical problem of Turkish Muslims employing captured European women as harem concubines. (The opera ends with a notable act of mercy from Pasha Selim, no doubt confounding modern expectations.) But in a world that filters everything through the lens of Critical Theory, no sin of the past may go unnoticed or unpunished.

  If you can attack Mozart, one of Western Europe’s greatest geniuses, then you can attack anybody. But that is precisely the point of Critical Theory. There is no need to consider the sum total of the artist’s life and works; instead, all that is necessary is to find a single politically incorrect remark, attitude, or letter with which to discredit him, and the task is complete. The totalitarian Left (and its impulse is and must always be toward totalitarianism in the name of “compassion”) cannot brook the slightest deviation from its self-proclaimed norms. As with satanic darkness, there cannot be a single point of light to disturb the suffocating blanket of orthodoxy, lest someone somewhere see the light.

  Our forefathers knew that the Darkness was always out there, just beyond the reach of the candle, the torch, the floodlight, that the night held terrors we feared even to dream about. When the Irish writer, Bram Stoker, set about to pen his speculative epistolary novel, drawing on Middle European folklore and the nickname of Vlad the Impaler of Wallachia (1431–1476), he tapped into one of Central Europe’s most primal fears. (In Bulgaria, a 7,000-year-old grave with skeletons staked through the heart was discovered in 2014.) The novel was Dracula, whose gloomy resonance we continue to feel to this day. Indeed, as shown by the Twilight movie saga and the True Blood books and TV series, vampires are more popular than ever. Personified in the 1931 film by Béla Lugosi in one of the earliest talkie horror movies, the vampire is suave, seductive, and sexy (well-dressed, too). He promises eternal life in exchange for eternal death; he is often irresistible, especially to women. Having consigned his soul to Satan, he wanders the eternal darkness, searching for fresh souls, in no need of light. He is, in fact, deathly allergic to light. Folklore has it that the rays of the sun—“die Strahlen der Sonne”—will destroy him, just as surely as they destroyed the Queen of the Night and her attendants in The Magic Flute.

  Often in vampire myth, it is the woman, the monster’s main target, who confounds and defeats him. In F.W. Murnau’s sleek, seminal, Expressionist Nosferatu (1922), starring the aptly named Max Schreck as (for copyright reasons) Count Orlok, the heroine Ellen willingly sacrifices herself to the Count, opening her bedroom to him and keeping him occupied with her blood until, distracted by lust, he is turned to dust by the morning sun as the cock crows. (The sexual and religious imagery in the film comes thick and fast, up to and including an eroticized Agony in the Garden.)

  At first, this might seem contradictory: Woman (except Pamina, freed from her mother’s sin) is evil in The Magic Flute, while she is the victor over the vampire in Dracula. But it is all of a piece. Woman is closer to bloody, chthonic Darkness than is Man; she knows Evil more intimately. Made from Adam’s hewn rib, she is the last and best thing in God’s creation, the end point. Although the first to fall, she is also the Redemptoris Mater, the Mother of the Redeemer, the Woman Clothed in Sun whose final, transcendently vengeful victory over the Great Red Dragon—the Serpent who brought both her sex and mankind low—forms the climax to the great ur-Narrative implanted within our hearts and on the lips of our bards and storytellers.

  How the most heroic tale in human history came to be transformed into an anti-myth of female enslavement is a wonder for the ages. But unless the Left can extinguish the Light of Woman and her godlike powers of human creation, it cannot hope to win. And so it hopes to convince Woman she is nothing more than an inferior man, to plant the seed of resentment, nourish it with bile, and hope it gives birth to reason’s sleep—a monster.

  The dark side is an essential aspect of the human character and psyche; no one denies that. Religion acknowledges this primal fact; so does storytelling. There can be no drama, no conflict, without good and evil, light and darkness, protagonist and antagonist. But storytelling also reminds us that while the darkness may win from time to time (as it does in Chinatown), it is a temporary victory. Everyone has a chance to see the light.

  In 2007, the late novelist Doris Lessing published an essay in the New York Times upon winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Born in Iran to British subjects and educated in Rhodesia, Lessing embraced Communism as a young woman (her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, became the East German ambassador to Uganda, where he was murdered in 1979). She eventually settled in London, finally breaking with Communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of H
ungary, when the true nature of the Communist beast could no longer be disguised behind its humanitarian façade. In the essay, an adaptation of a New York Times op-ed she originally published in 1992, she describes her disenchantment with Communism:

  The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was by chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do. . . . It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. . . . I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

  The search for “another dogma” to replace the Judeo-Christian message of darkness and light, of sin and salvation, is as old as religion itself. And yet, even in the folk tales that emerged long after Jesus of Nazareth, the same elements remain in play. And it is remarkable, upon reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, how closely they foreshadow various Christian tenets, which were not to come for more than a hundred years after the emperor’s death. The moral consistency contained in the world’s collected folk wisdom bespeaks some primal source that no amount of mid-nineteenth-century Viennese pseudoscience can explain away.