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

by Michael Walsh

  Dogma creates its own reality. You do not have to think about it; it provides all the answers. It is easy to mock evangelical Protestants or Orthodox Jews who cite the book of Leviticus as the source of wisdom and instruction about food, health, or sexual morality; simply making an assertion from authority by citing scripture is no argument at all. So it is with the leftist catechism as it has evolved in the wake of Critical Theory and political correctness, which has the added advantages of being of recent vintage and widely disseminated by an enthusiastic media. It deserves to be questioned and mocked with every bit as much jollity as the atheists attack Southern Baptist preachers.

  What, after all, did “sexual liberation” accomplish? What positive good did it achieve? Other than providing men with greater, easier access to women, how did it improve anyone’s life? It promised us liberation from “sexual repression” (what teenaged boys used to call, sniggeringly, DSB), freedom from an old and tired sexual morality. It promised to tear down the Chesterton’s Fence that stood between our libidos and our responsibilities. It is easy to see why it was popular, since it partly leveled the sexual playing field for beta males, whose chances of sexual “conquest” vastly improved once “conquest” was taken out of the equation and a woman’s natural resistance to indiscriminate sex (or less discriminating sex) was broken down. In the guise of cooperative pleasure, it erected a new egalitarianism between the sexes, told women that their sex drives and their sexual responsibilities were exactly the same as a man’s. (It’s a mystery why no feminist of the time complained that, in effect, the new doctrine still portrayed women as lesser creatures who needed to raise—or lower—their sexual sights to the level of a man’s.) The newfound “liberation” led to a rapid increase in abortion, HIV and AIDS, and illegitimate children. Finally, wearing the masque of “progress,” it returned Westerners to primitive levels of sexuality, kicking out the moral underpinnings of the culture (even if the morals were often observed more in the breach than in practice). Who knew that the slogan “Every man a stud, every woman a slut” could be a winner? It is not for humanity to defeat Sin, but to be wary and canny in our interaction with it. And, in any case, the Ewig-Weibliche will never stoop to whoredom.

  Whoever thought turning women into men was a good idea needs his head examined. And turning men into women (the necessary corollary, as it turned out, although that bit was less advertised) was even worse. Hence the very real consequences of “no consequences.” Above all, the sheer charlatanism of it astounds, nearly a century on. What the hell were we thinking? How was it possible for the intelligentsia of the United States, having just participated in the great American victory in the Second World War, to embrace such an obviously cockamamie philosophy? The Greco-Roman medical theory of bodily humors, the selling of indulgences in the Middle Ages, and phrenology had more scientific bases than Reich’s twaddle.

  And what has been the effect? The “war between the sexes” has rarely been more hostile. The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases has soared; viruses once contracted only in a bordello can be found at the corner bar. What began as unconstrained sexual license—orgies, multiple sex partners, etc.—has turned into “yes means yes” affirmative consent for even a one-night stand. On campuses, young men and women now eye one another with suspicion: That attractive person you see might be not only a potential sex partner but also a future plaintiff in a lawsuit. The more sex, it seems, the more heartbreak; the less “repression,” the less romance. Public billboards in Los Angeles promote the use of condoms and AIDS hotlines. The promised Venusberg has turned venereal.

  Interestingly, it was right around the same time that the sexual-liberation movement got fully under way—the 1970s—that the thanatopic side of it arose in popular culture, in the movies. For this was also the heyday of horror and slasher films, movies about enraged, often immortal serial killers (Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street) who preyed upon nubile, often naked teens in various acts of sexual intercourse. Nearly every one of our perky protagonists wound up on the wrong side of the slasher’s weapon of choice, save one: a young woman known in the trade as the Final Girl.

  It’s as if Newton’s Third Law of Motion applied, setting off an equal and opposite reaction to Reich’s prescriptions and nostrums: The more sex we have, the less satisfying it is, and the more culturally destructive. In Japan, more and more young men are forgoing marriage and even dating in favor of staying home, watching porn, and playing video games; as a result, the country is now in a population death-spiral, with adult diapers outselling baby nappies. Elsewhere, nudity abounds as an example of female “empowerment,” and yet rabid feminists see rapists not only behind every bush but standing at the podium. A kind of insanity has gripped the West, a sexual hysteria far worse than anything Reich conveniently diagnosed in his attempt to get laid as often as possible.

  Get laid young men most certainly have, but what has been the upshot? The sexual proclivities of a pasha in his harem or a gangsta with his “ho’s,” however, have exactly the same deleterious effect on Western culture as they have had on the Mohammedans or the black underclass. What Reich and the other Frankfurters forgot was that “repression” (to use their word) is a good thing when it is called by its proper name: “tradition.”

  But for them to accept tradition—the very thing they battle—would be the end of them. Then they would finally have to face the worst kind of death—the Thanatos of their philosophy, which is the only possession, besides rage, that they ever really had. Their Pleasure Palace, like Schubert’s, would crumble into dust, and they, along with it, would be blown away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

  Faced with his imminent execution for having offended the emperor, the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, an imaginary dialogue between a condemned man and a beautiful woman representing the spirit of Philosophy, who suddenly appears to him in prison:

  “Could I desert thee, child,” said she, “and not lighten the burden that thou hast taken upon thee through the hatred of my name, by sharing this trouble? . . . Thinkest thou that now, for the first time in an evil age, Wisdom hath been assailed by peril? . . .

  So there is nothing thou shouldst wonder at if, on the seas of this life, we are tossed by storm-blasts . . . And if at times and seasons they set in array against us, and fall on in overwhelming strength, our leader draws off her forces into the citadel while they are busy plundering the useless baggage. But we from our vantage ground, safe from all this wild work, laugh to see them making prize of the most valueless of things, protected by a bulwark which aggressive folly may not aspire to reach.”

  To put her most important lines in plain English: “Do you think that only now, in an evil age, Wisdom is under attack for the first time? And if at times evil-doers fall upon us with overwhelming strength, we take refuge in our citadel while they are plundering useless baggage. And we laugh at them.”

  Although it did not spare the Roman nobleman the chop at the hands of the Ostrogothic emperor, Theodoric the Great, The Consolation of Philosophy turned out to be one of the great best-sellers of the medieval period, widely copied and distributed, a constant source of solace for those afflicted with the unfairness of the world. Profoundly Christian without being explicitly so, The Consolation of Philosophy comforted readers for more than a century before the arrival of movable type made it even more available. Essentially, the Consolation grapples with the age-old question of the role evil plays in the world and what our proper response to it should be: not abolition (for that is impossible) but acceptance of evil as both instructive and as an occasion of grace caused by suffering.

  Boethius’s spirit of Philosophy adds one more crucial element: mockery. As Martin Luther said: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” The most potent weapon the Right has a
gainst the Left—mockery of its sheer pretentious ridiculousness—is the one it most seldom employs.

  There is no consolation in the leftist philosophy, only anger and hatred. It is the expression of impotence, and not only of the intellectual variety; recall that “intellectuals” from Rousseau to Marx to Brecht to Sartre to the aptly named Lillian Hellman were beasts in their private lives, and most of them, on some level, knew it. Perhaps their antisocial, amoral, and even immoral behavior was a reflection of their hateful ideology; trying to save humanity while despising people is the very essence of cognitive dissonance. So their philosophies, naturally, had to trump their personalities.

  But to call them on it, to point out that the emperor is as naked as one of the doomed teens about to get sliced and diced by Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, or Freddy Krueger—and, furthermore, that he is a singularly unimpressive specimen of manhood—is to set their hair aflame. In retaliation, as proof of their superior intellects, they will hurl their academic credentials at you, the fruits of their long march through the institutions—degrees that prove, more than anything else, the worthlessness of much of our higher education today.

  Scorn drives the Unholy Left insane. They cannot bear to have their theories questioned, or the failed results of those theories laughed at. Dignity is one of the imaginary virtues—one of the last virtues, period—they possess, and to have that attacked along with their entire “belief system” (the jeering term they use for organized religion) is too much to bear. Mockery is the thing that brings them quickest to frothing, garmentrending rage, so wedded are they to the notion of their own goodness and infallibility when it comes to matters of impiety and immorals.

  The goal of Critical Theory was to make dissent from Marxist orthodoxy impossible. By establishing that there could be nothing beyond criticism except Critical Theory itself, the Frankfurt School rendered a guilty verdict against society before there had even been a trial. But this is simply crazy. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards,” as the Queen of Hearts says to Alice near the end of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

  “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

  “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

  “Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

  “Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

  “I won’t!” said Alice.

  “Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

  What once was satire is now conventional wisdom, as is the Queen’s choleric reaction to Alice’s impudence. The stifling of debate and the outlawing of basic concepts of right and wrong, of social propriety, is the purpose of political correctness; and dissent, once the highest form of patriotism, is no longer to be tolerated. Like “tolerance,” “dissent” was only a virtue when it was useful to the Left.

  Let us examine that phrase, “the highest form of patriotism.” Dissent doesn’t mean demurral, even passionate objection. Here, it means a fundamental, radical, irreconcilable objection to all time-honored verities, which is then followed by a frontal assault: Critical Theory in action. Tolerance, as we have seen from Marcuse’s redefinition of it as “repressive tolerance,” means intolerance. One suspects, for example, that “diversity” will no longer be deemed necessary once the white man has been knocked off his perch of “privilege” and effectively disinherited from his own cultural patrimony. Only “non-white” whites, the champions of the “diverse” masses, will be allowed to have power; and they will be selected by a nakedly political criterion, much like that the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger expressed when asked to justify his friendship with many Jews despite the anti-Semitic ideology he peddled for votes: “Wer a Jud ist, bestimm’ i.” (“I decide who is a Jew.”) At the real Ministry of Truth under the next Progressive regime, the words carved into the façade will read: DISSENT—TOLERANCE—DIVERSITY.

  As for “the highest form of patriotism,” all that ever meant was that the Left did not wish to have its patriotism questioned while it was busily going about the process of undermining the existing order (in order to create a better one, of course). Not only was its patriotism questionable, it was nonexistent. The patriotism the ’60s radicals praised was not the patriotism of the past (now dismissed as “jingoism”) but the patriotism of the America of the Future, the new State that would come into being once the old one had been destroyed and replaced with the Brave New World they were cooking up in poly-sci test tubes on campuses across the country.

  Any leftist will tell you, usually indirectly as he may not admit it to himself, that he does not admire the world as it is but esteems the world as he wishes it to be. That few agree with leftists when this proposition is so bluntly stated simply means they must conceal it for the time being, until it can be forced on an unwilling but sullen public. They see themselves as inheritors of a noble tradition, perhaps best summed up by the composer Gustav Mahler when he declared, “My time will yet come.” They look to the judgment of posterity, not history. The very fact of being against something—it doesn’t much matter what—contributes to their sense of moral superiority, without which they are nothing.

  This last is crucial to the understanding of the Unholy Left: that they consider themselves, like the Puritans they otherwise execrate, the party of the Elect, the Blessed. Likewise, they consider resistant conservatives—those who like things more or less they way they are, who trust the judgments of their ancestors and honor their wisdom and experience—to be the Damned who must be brought into the Light—that is to say, into the Darkness. (The resemblance to Mozart’s Queen of the Night is obvious.)

  The problem with their ideology, however, is that, after a few victories (the civil rights movement, for example, although even that was fiercely opposed by many of their fellow Democrats), it has nowhere to go. Once the perceived wrongs are righted, the revolution turns on itself, aiming its scorpion’s tail at ever-smaller targets and stinging them ever more viciously until it is thrashing at phantoms. A good example is the strange obsession with “white privilege” (racism always lurks just beneath the surface of the leftist project; it is their eternal bugbear) and the terrible whiteness of being, which has now pushed past slavery as America’s Original Sin. Overly fond of conspiracy theories as they are, “white privilege” affords the Unholy Left its best conspiracy yet, a conspiracy so vast that it took the combined efforts of multiple European countries to sail the Atlantic, discover America for themselves, found colonies, and populate the New World, all in an effort to deny People of Color what should have rightfully been theirs, had they only been able to cross the Atlantic from Africa or Asia and get there first. The United States, in other words, was not founded, somewhat haphazardly, in an attempt to flee the religious and economic strictures of the then-developed world, Europe (we can blame the Enlightenment for those strictures), but to deliberately offend “indigenous peoples” by effectively creating a political entity without them. Never mind that there were few People of Color in Europe at the time, and that the context in which the Voyages of Discovery were made was purely “white.” It must have been a plot. Or at least unfair, for daring to assume European technological “superiority.”

  The following sentiment is, alas, typical: “I am as white as white gets in this country.” So wrote Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, in the Baltimore Sun in 1998. The confession continues:

  I am of northern European heritage, and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn’t live near a reservation, I didn’t even have exposure to the state’s only numerically significant population, American Indians.

  I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip o
ver the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I “fix” myself, one thing never changes—I walk through the world with white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

  Substitute “sin” for the various racial buzzwords, and it’s clear that what Jensen is after is redemption. He’s giving testimony in a tent revival of that New Time Religion, Progressivism.

  One thing the Left has on its side in its war on American “whiteness” is demographics. At some point around midcentury, whites (however defined, as the Left uses a conveniently sliding scale) will decline to less than half the total population, and the U.S. will be a minority-majority country; Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Act of 1965 has seen to that. (When I was a boy growing up in San Diego, near the Mexican border, exactly nobody considered Mexicans “non-whites,” and the words “Latino” and “Hispanic” were hardly ever heard. Mexicans were, well, Mexicans, distinguished not by the color of their skin, but by the fact that they spoke Spanish and came from Mexico, that foreign country twenty miles to the south.)

  Between the last great waves of European immigration in the first two decades of the twentieth century and 1965, the nation took a long pause, absorbing the often fractious Irish, Italians, and Jews and smelting them into Americans. It wasn’t easy. For many Americans of the period, the newcomers were little more than criminals fleeing misery. (The Marxist historian Noel Ignatiev, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, even wrote a book on the often painful transformative process, How the Irish Became White.) It took decades or longer. In the case of the Catholic Famine Irish, it was a full century before they were accepted so fully into American society that one of them, John F. Kennedy, was elected president. That he came from the criminal family of Joseph P. Kennedy was politely ignored, especially by the Irish themselves. Not until some years after JFK’s election did the Irish begin to vote as anything other than a monolithic, alienated, immigrant bloc.