The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West
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The answer from the serialists was: because. Because a great deal of intellectual work had gone into the structure of the dodecaphonic piece, worked out on paper; it could not be compared with chance music, even if there was a resemblance in performance. One was “deep,” the other was not. And both were superior to the tonal idiom of the past 350 years because . . . they were new.
This circular reasoning is, I believe, one of the attractions of Critical Theory and progressivism in general. It appears to require thought, but in fact all it requires is faith—faith in the ritual and the dogma and in the trappings of thought, but always in the service of novelty for its own sake, masquerading as “dissent” or “revolution.” As Orwell predicted in 1984, sloganeering eventually must replace free inquiry if the System is to survive and prosper; there can be not even a single ray of light in the darkness, lest the people glimpse the truth.
CHAPTER NINE
THE VENUSBERG OF DEATH
It is the thesis of this book that the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us. Note here that the Left constantly invokes morality—indeed, often quotes from scripture—while refusing to identify the source of its morality. If “social justice” morally demands equality of outcome, obtained by stealing property and selling it to someone else in exchange for his vote, then what is to stop “social justice” proponents from arbitrarily announcing at a future date that it also morally demands the death of its opponents? What, after all, is the material difference between “thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not kill?”
To the Left, there is no material difference; for them, effectively, both Commandments have been repealed, one by the legislative process (the welfare state) and the other by judicial fiat (Roe v. Wade).
No issue motivates them more than the demographic self-destruction known as abortion; as has often been noted, “a woman’s right to choose” (their favored euphemism) is for them a secular sacrament, and the more babies killed in the womb, the better. Never mind that a rational person would think that a woman’s right to choose might be better and less lethally exercised at the moment when she considers whether to have unprotected sex with any given man; if you are going to stop conception, why not start at the beginning? It’s not as if condoms and other prophylactics are not readily available. But there is no logic to their malevolence. It is not enough, in the leftist scheme of things, to be able to have as much sex as one wants; no, it must be consequence-free sex. The wages of libertinism might be death, but death only for the unwanted by-product of libertinism itself. According to their lights, no female participant in the sex act should ever be held responsible for anything. She should have absolute right to the Pill, to an abortifacient, to an abortion, even a partial-birth abortion. Or—should she finally invoke her “right to choose” upon childbirth, and choose life, she should have the unquestioned right to financial support from the father, whoever he may be. The chant of Thanatos as the prescription for Eros is never very far from their lips.
In a larger sense, however, that would be death for thee but not for me. Despite their cultish fascination with the deaths of others—whether babies in utero or the millions who have died under National Socialism and international Communism—leftists generally try to live as long as possible themselves; cowards to a man, there is literally nothing they would die for, not even their own alleged principles. Largely deficient in the self-sacrifice gene, and with the word “altruism” essentially foreign to them, they are obsessed with their health, with medical care and coercive government schemes to “provide” such services at someone else’s expense. Always cloaking their demand for larger, more intrusive, and more punitive government in the guise of “compassion,” the only thing they are willing to fight for (other than “the Fight” itself) is their own survival, even as they declare it to be utterly meaningless.
And yet Death fascinates them. Whether it is the death of society (think of Lukács’s constant invocations of “destruction” and “annihilation”) or the deaths of millions of innocents in the purges and atrocities of National Socialism and Soviet-style Communism (can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs), death is a constant feature both of their philosophy and their political prescriptions, which include not only abortion but, increasingly, euthanasia. Wearing their customary mask of solicitous compassion, they can’t wait for you to die to steal your stuff.
There’s a remarkable passage in the second act of Wagner’s Siegfried in which Mime—the brother of the evil master dwarf Alberich, who has raised the orphan foundling Siegfried to young manhood—tries to tell Siegfried how much he cares for him and loves him. But Siegfried has just slain the dragon Fafner and tasted its blood, which has given him the power to understand the speech of animals and penetrate human lies and illusions. So he understands all too well that Mime simply wants to kill him and take the hoard of gold—as well as the magic Tarnhelm and the powerful Ring—for himself. After hearing his stepfather out, Siegfried dispatches him with a snickersnack of his vorpal blade, Nothung (his father Siegmund’s sword, handed down from Siegmund’s father, Wotan). Then he tosses Mime’s corpse on the golden hoard and blocks the entrance to Fafner’s lair with the dragon’s own dead body.
It is a powerful and lesser-remarked moment of symbolism in the Ring, which has otherwise been exhaustively analyzed. Siegfried has come to Fafner’s cave not to seek treasure but to learn the meaning of fear. But he fails to find it in the former Giant (and one of the builders of Valhalla) who has transformed himself into the dragon, a Wurm who, though terrifying, spends most of his days napping as he guards the Rhine Gold that Alberich stole from the Rhine Maidens—the original sin that sets the entire cycle in motion.
Although the opera is called “Siegfried,” for the first two acts it might as well be called “Fafner,” since it is the dragon’s suffocating presence that suffuses the musical language from the opening of the first act: low strings and low brass color the orchestration, and we sense that Siegfried’s confrontation with the monster approaches with every beat and bar. It is only in the third act that the hero finally encounters the only thing he will ever fear: Woman, in the form of the enchanted Brünnhilde, leading to the cycle’s most inadvertently comical line, “Das ist kein Mann!” (“That is no man!”), which Siegfied exclaims as he removes the sleeping Valkyrie’s breastplate to suddenly confront what lies beneath.
And yet it’s not really funny, now matter how buxom the soprano portraying Brünnhilde might be. Siegfried has met everything in his short life—dwarves, monsters, even his own grandfather, Wotan, disguised as The Wanderer, whom he defeats in combat by shattering the Spear (the visible and aural symbol of Wotan’s authority), thus sealing his fate, Brünnhilde’s, and the fate of all the gods—but he has not yet met The Other, the Ewig-Weibliche, the Eternal Feminine. Only Brünnhilde can strike fear into his fearless breast; only she can bewitch him. It takes that favorite Wagnerian device, a magic potion, to make him betray her. Only she can redeem him and consummate his quest to return the Ring to its rightful owners, the Rhine Maidens (who, with their voluptuous bodies, try in vain to seduce him) and bring about the end of the gods, a doom that, by the end of the tetralogy, is something the defeated Wotan, hoist upon his own petard, himself devoutly wishes.
Wagner began as a man of the Left: a firebrand during the Continent-wide republican, anti-monarchical Revolutions of 1848, a fugitive for years thereafter, and a vicious anti-Semite (except musically; Wagner’s first major opera, Rienzi, consciously aped Meyerbeer, and when it came time for the premiere of his Christian epic, Parsifal, he chose a Jew, Hermann Levi, to conduct it). He was also a relentless seducer of other men’s wives and taker of other men’s money, including most famously that of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who partly built Bayreuth for him. Most notoriously, Wagner was an idol of Adolf Hitler’s. Born six years
after Wagner’s death, Hitler, as Reichskanzler, attempted to stage Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with all Germany as the set and wound up producing Götterdämmerung instead.
(It is an oddity of history that Wagner privately feared he was part Jewish, as did the high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich—the principal architect of the Final Solution—and as did even Hitler himself. Wagner’s uncertainty about his paternity—his stepfather, the actor Ludwig Geyer, who may or may not have been Jewish, may also have been Wagner’s biological father—was a source of deep concern to him.)
But musically and dramatically, it is another story. In this arena, Wagner was no scapegrace. Without question, he is the dominant figure of nineteenth-century music, perhaps of any art of the Romantic period. Yes, “Wagner has his great moments and long half hours,” as the possibly apocryphal saying goes. (This has been attributed variously to, among others, Mark Twain and Rossini, who died in 1868, shortly before the premiere of Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring operas, and well before most of Wagner’s mature works.) And yet Wagner’s influence has been so profound that, almost from the start, he created a cult of personality around himself (as “the Master”) that has lasted well over a century and counting.
True, some acolytes—Friedrich Nietzsche, in Nietzsche contra Wagner and in Der Fall Wagner: Ein Musikanten-Problem (The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem)—broke with him, criticizing him both personally and musically. Freed of Mephisto’s “bands of illusion,” or, in Wagner’s case, Klingsor’s (how ironic that in Goethe’s poem, Faust’s pupil is named Wagner), these acolytes came to see him as a cheap trickster, a manipulator of conventional musical tropes—new wine in old bottles—and purveyor of half-baked philosophical ideas derived from his betters, such as Fichte and Hegel. Nietzsche wrote of Wagner’s musical technique:
If we wish to admire him, we should observe him at work: how he separates and distinguishes, how he arrives at small unities, and how he galvanizes them, accentuates them, and brings them into preeminence. But in this way he exhausts his strength; the rest is worthless. How paltry, awkward, and amateurish is his manner of “developing,” his attempt at combining incompatible parts.
There is much truth in this statement. Wagner’s control of inherited musical forms was shaky at best. His early piano sonatas are forgettable, and the “Centennial March,” written for the American birthday of 1876, feels mercenary, knocked out for the money. (As it was: Wagner had lifelong financial problems, and 1876 was the year of the first performance of the Ring cycle at Bayreuth, a particularly desperate time.) The fake counterpoint in the Meistersinger overture is perhaps the low point of Wagner’s mature technique; it’s really just ornamentation, made to feel structural, but we fall for it anyway. Aside from the music dramas, Wagner has little else to offer, and were it not for them and his overwhelming drive to succeed across all cultural fronts, he would probably be a minor or even forgotten figure today.
David Goldman (who often writes as “Spengler”) takes on Der Fall Wagner with characteristic perspicacity and eloquence in a long essay written for the magazine First Things in December 2010. He sees Wagner as a false Redeemer—the quintessential leftist—a magician who loses his luster once you catch on to his tricks. Goldman places Wagner squarely in a Faustian context:
Wagner had a gift, as well as an ideological purpose, for the intensification of the moment. If Goethe’s Faust bets the Devil that he can resist the impulse to hold on to the passing moment [Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen: / Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! / Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen / Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn! (Were I to say to the moment: / “Abide with me! You are so beautiful!” / Then you may clap me in irons, / Then may I wish to go to perdition!)], Wagner dives headfirst into its black well. And if Faust argues that life itself depends on transcending the moment, Wagner’s sensuous embrace of the musical moment conjures a dramatic trajectory toward death. . . .
Wagner was more than a musician. He was the prophet of a new artistic cult, a self-styled poet and dramatist who believed that his “totalizing work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) would replace Europe’s enervated religion. His new temporal aesthetic served a larger goal: the liberation of impulse from the bonds of convention.
In other words, a classic leftist: anti-religious, anti-Semitic, and obsessed with death. Nearly all of Wagner’s heroines meet their demise; as Goldman quips: “The opera’s not over ’til the fat lady dies.” The heroes fare little better. Wagner even provides us with his own version of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in Tannhäuser.
So is there a contradiction in praising Wagner within the context of our ur-Narrative? I think not. The solution lies in separating the man from his work. Most among us would find Wagner the man reprehensible; we would not want him for a friend or an ally or a son-in-law. However, he had what I term the “necessary selfishness of the artist,” the drive that pushes everything else before it, subsuming all life’s tragedies, triumphs, and experience into fuel for the larger mission—the creation of art, which is what brings us closer to God.
It is perfectly possible to think that Wagner was, “like the Nazis, a neo-pagan,” as Goldman puts it, adding: “Wagner provided much of the Third Reich’s background music, and not without an underlying affinity. . . . Very little distinguishes Siegfried, who is too impulsive to pay attention to rules, from Parsifal—the protagonist of Wagner’s last opera—who is too innocent to understand them. . . . If the Germans, in Franz Rosenzweig’s bon mot, could not tell Christ from Siegfried, it is because Wagner deliberately conflated the two.”
But Siegfried never feels Christlike; his sacrifice is pathetic but unmoving. He dies because he has made a cardinal error; fearing nothing but Brünnhilde’s sexual allure, he turns his back on the Nibelung’s bastard, a mortal enemy he cannot not recognize. Whereas Christ, in his sacrifice on the Cross, consciously picks up Satan’s gauntlet and accepts the mortal challenge posed by the Battle in Heaven, after the spawning of Sin and Death. On his visit to Hell, Christ not only defeats Satan but vanquishes Sin and Death as well, for all those who (in the Christian theology) believe.
Let us contrast for the moment, Wagner’s heroic Romanticism—like Beethoven, he shook his fists at the heavens—with that of a true believer, J.S. Bach, and specifically Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741). At first glance, no two works could be more unlike than this set of variations, which, according to legend, were written to cure the insomnia of one Count Kaiserling, the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, who brought along his attendant, Goldberg, to play the harpsichord for him during his sleepless hours and requested a piece from the great court composer.
Nothing could have prepared Kaiserling or Goldberg or posterity for what followed. At a single stroke, Bach established the variations form, daring all subsequent composers (including Beethoven, who tried with “Diabelli” Variations, and Brahms in the “Handel” Variations). But more: Putting the little theme through its paces in what is essentially an extended chaconne, Bach colors a canvas of unearthly proportions, each variation moving inevitably to the next, until the great “Thirtieth Variation,” which finally reveals the true harmonic and melodic possibilities inherent in the melody. The last variation is a magic trick worthy of Klingsor himself, a revelation of the immanence in all God’s works. At once sacred and profane, a combination of the harmonic structure of the initial theme and several German folk songs, it stunningly proclaims Bach’s musical command—“Look at what I have wrought!”—and then immediately self-effaces with a quiet recapitulation of the melody, which just might be the greatest humblebrag of all time.
(The playwright Peter Shaffer may well have had this effect in mind when he wrote the scene in Amadeus in which Mozart takes Antonio Salieri’s simple “March of Welcome” and turns it into the “Non più and-rai” march from the end of Act One of The Marriage of Figaro, humiliating his rival in front of the emperor and earning his undying enmity.)
And this is the distinction we must make when assaying the Western cultural canon. Like Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations, we must ask: “What is this thing in itself? What is its function in the world?” The answer is the same as Milton’s in Paradise Lost: to justify the ways of God to men.
The question of text, therefore, becomes subordinate to the question of meaning. The text of the Goldberg Variations, the “aria” that opens and closes the great keyboard work, is trivial, as is, for that matter, the theme of the “Diabelli” Variations. The poems of the four Ring cycle operas could not stand alone as poetry, although Wagner might have supposed they could. In fact, he wrote them in reverse order as he hammered out his massive masterpiece, waiting for his musical expertise to catch up to the demands of Siegfried’s third act and Götterdämmerung. (In between, on a break that lasted more than a decade, he wrote Tristan and Meistersinger.)
The error comes in putting text before subtext, which is to say misreading the purpose of both dramatic music and “absolute” music (music without a text or programmatic subject). Music was part of the medieval quadrivium, the four subjects, derived from the Greeks, along with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, which is to say that it was deemed to have its own independent meaning. Combined with the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), it was one of the foundations of a young man’s education.