The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  The roots of the intractable political conflict that currently plagues Western societies lie almost entirely in our rejection of myth, legend, and religion as “unscientific” and in our embrace of barren “process” to deliver solutions to the world’s ills. Whether it goes by the name of “global warming” or “climate change” or “social science,” this worldview claims to be all-encompassing, eternal, and grounded in “settled science,” which boasts remarkable successes in empirical, experimental endeavors. With these technological achievements as cover and camouflage, this ideology brooks no rivals to its monopoly of knowledge; it dogmatically excommunicates all competing truth claims. Nulla salus extra scientiam, it thunders. Outside science, there is no salvation.

  Let us call this Lenin’s Wax Dummy Effect. During the Cold War, critics in the West remarked that the Soviet Union and its doctrine of Marxism-Leninism resembled nothing so much as a new religion, complete with scripture (the writings of Marx and Engels), charismatic prophets (Lenin and Stalin) with the aura of demigods, a Church Militant (the Party), a mother church (the Kremlin), and a clerical caste (the Politburo and Soviet apologists in the West). The religion also had, tellingly, a funerary temple to the mummified corpse of the Founder lying in eternal state just outside the Kremlin’s walls, where tourists and Soviet citizens alike would wait in the cold of a Russian winter to shuffle past the bier and gaze upon the embalmed body of the Leader, Teacher, Beacon, Helmsman, the Immortal Guide, V.I. Lenin (whose relics were gathered at the Lenin Institute and Lenin Museum immediately upon his death).

  Having officially outlawed religion in the name of state atheism—or, rather, mandated the replacement of the Deity with the State—the Soviets nevertheless needed to create a faux Christianity, a grotesque and parodic wax dummy, in order to make a successful transition from the Church (the opiate of the masses) to dialectical materialism. In the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the thesis was the Church, the antithesis was Lenin’s wax dummy, and the synthesis was to be the triumphant materialism of Marx. But if they truly believed in the principles of Marxism-Leninism (a modification of German Communism with Russian overtones), why did they need the wax dummy, the faux religion?

  Deception. Full fraught with mischievous revenge, the ghost of Karl Marx, via his vicar on earth, Lenin, demanded that his deeply anti-human prescriptions for human happiness be obscured with the trappings of old Mother Russia’s traditional culture. But this had things exactly backward: an attempt to create Marxism’s foundational myth both ex nihilo and as a false-flag operation. That Soviet Communism collapsed in a smoldering heap less than seventy years after its founding should have come as no surprise to anyone—it had not a leg to stand on—but the fact that its demise surprised so many in the West tells us a lot about the weakened state of Western culture as well.

  True, “deception” is a loaded word. It has a whiff of conspiracies, of lurkers behind the arras, of plots hatched in the dead of night in clandestine safe houses, of dead drops in pumpkin patches. The act of deception has two goals. The first is to confuse and mislead the enemy, while the second is to secretly communicate with one’s own side, safely passing along information so as not to raise suspicion and bring unwelcome attention and consequences.

  Deception, however, can work for good and ill. Many of our cultural narratives feature a hero in disguise: the undercover cop, bravely penetrating a criminal organization; the spy behind enemy lines; the codewriters and encryption experts, signaling to on-the-ground agents and triggering acts of sabotage. In Puccini’s Turandot, the hero Calàf arrives in Peking as the Unknown Prince in order to tackle the life-or-death riddles posed by the ice-maiden Princess Turandot and thus win her hand. Turandot’s recondite puzzles collide with Calaf’s hidden identity: In the often-unremarked twist at the heart of the opera, Calàf must turn his own heart to ice and reject the love of his faithful slave girl, Liù, in order to warm the heart of Turandot and win both her love and her kingdom—the hero as a cold bastard.

  For heroes can be morally compromised. Think of John le Carré’s world-weary spies, evolving into the very monsters they fight. Think of the nonviolent worm finally turning at the conclusion of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, when the nerdy mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) at last goes on a homicidal rampage. Recall Shane, who reluctantly resumes his past role as a gunslinger to save the family he loves, only to ride off at the end into the gathering darkness, knowing he has broken his compact with himself. Not even the pitiful cries of the boy who has adopted him as a surrogate father—“Come back, Shane!”—can make him change his mind.

  All these heroes embody what we might call the satanic in men, the flirtation with the dark side, by which so many of us are tempted. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this. The Fall freed man from the shackles of a deathless Paradise and allowed him to assist in his own salvation by facing up to evil, not by avoiding it. Eve unknowingly, innocently, confronted evil for the first time in human history—an evil that God has allowed to exist—and accepted its implicit invitation to begin the struggle anew, this time on the turf of human souls.

  But perhaps the first real hero of the creation ur-Narrative is not Eve but the angel Abdiel, who faces down the rebellious Lucifer in Book Five of Paradise Lost and warns his angelic cohort of the doom that is fast approaching:

  Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified

  His Loyalty he kept, his Love, his Zeal . . .

  And with retorted scorn his back he turn’d

  On those proud Towers to swift destruction doom’d.

  The “dreadless angel,” as Milton calls Abdiel, is one of the most fascinating minor characters in the poem, and were it a television series, he would no doubt eventually have had his own spin-off. For it is Abdiel, a seraph in Lucifer’s legion in Heaven, who first ponders Lucifer’s revolution—brought on by God’s announcement that he had begotten a Son—and then rejects it, returning to the divine fold, even though his former comrades reward his faithfulness with scorn and threats. He stands in for all thinking members of humanity, who must face, or flirt with, evil in order to know it, who must hear its siren song in order to resist it, and who must at least briefly contemplate or perhaps even embrace it before rejecting and destroying it. “Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified”—what better description of a true hero can there be?

  As readers have often remarked, Milton’s God—“Heaven’s awful Monarch”—is a morally complex character, more akin to the stern God of the Israelites in the Old Testament than to the loving God in the New; “Messiah,” his Son, is the Hero-to-Come. Love does not seem to be one of the prime attributes of Milton’s God. Indeed, one way to interpret his actions during the Fall of Man—given his omnipotence and omnipresence—is that he foresaw and willed the fate of Adam and Eve, created (or allowed) the test he at least knew they could fail, and issued the demand for obedience with the absolute knowledge that they would fail through his poisoned gift of free will.

  “The reason why the poem is so good is that it makes God so bad,” writes the English literary critic William Empson in Milton’s God. “[Milton] is struggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at the start, and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one, though, after all, owing to his loyalty to the sacred text and the penetration with which he makes its story real to us, his modern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badly wrong about it all. That his searching goes on in Paradise Lost, I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy.”

  For Abdiel, there is no Paradise to be lost, since he eventually returns to the side of God. He had a choice, and he made it. But humanity’s choice never ends. At multiple moments in our lives, we are forced to choose between good and evil—indeed, we are forced to define, or provisionally redefine, both terms, and then choose. But what are we to do with an example such as God? God frees Satan from his chains at the bottom of the Lake of Fire, God allow
s Satan’s unholy issue, Sin and Death, to emerge, and then he gives Sin the key to the gates of Hell. God stands idly by as Satan flings himself toward Earth, bent on humanity’s seduction and destruction. Does God therefore require evil for the working out of his plan? Small wonder that a third of God’s angels, as the story begins, hate him already and are very willing to heed Lucifer’s call to take up arms against him.

  In Milton, God seems to deny his own complicity. Of the first couple’s disobedience, God says in Book Three:

  They, therefore, as to right belonged

  So were created, nor can justly accuse

  Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,

  As if Predestination overruled

  Their will, disposed by absolute decree

  Or high foreknowledge. They themselves decreed

  Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew,

  Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,

  Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.

  Easy for him to say, one might observe, since he’s God—opening up the awful possibility that the buck stops nowhere.

  I have spent some time on the first few books of Milton’s great poem—books focused on Satan and his revenge plot—for several reasons. The first is the work’s cultural influence. Hard as it may be to believe in our post-literate age, Paradise Lost was once a fixture of the American household, not only a work of art but also a volume of moral instruction to be kept alongside the Bible as clarification, explication, and inspiration. Many could quote from it by heart, as they could from scripture and the works of Shakespeare.

  The second reason is to frame the moral argument for the political argument that is to come. I make no apologies for the explicitly Christian context of my analysis; as a Catholic, I would be foolish to try to tackle the subject from any other perspective. Nevertheless, I am not relying on the fine points of dogma or any particular set of teachings (other than right = good, wrong = bad). The moral principles from which I shall proceed are found across all cultural divides. Make no mistake: The crisis in which the United States of America currently finds itself enmeshed is a moral crisis, which has engendered a crisis of cultural confidence, which in turn has begotten a fiscal crisis that threatens—no, guarantees—the destruction of the nation should we fail to address it.

  Third, I focus on Milton because the archetypal biblical characters limned first in Genesis and expanded upon by Milton—we call them “God,” “Satan,” “Adam,” “Eve,” and the “Son” (Jesus)—are fundamental to the ur-Narrative and have served as templates and models for countless subsequent characters in the literature and drama that followed. Call them what you will: the stern father, the rebellious son and the good son, the hapless but oddly empowered bystanders caught up in the primal conflict of the first family. What, after all, is Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle but (as the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau famously described it) a “family tragedy” in which Wotan’s greed and arrogance force him to beget a morally uncompromised son (Siegfried) to wash away both Wotan’s sins and the entire ancien régime, redeeming humanity into the bargain.

  This is, I hope, a helpful and even novel way of looking at politics. Left to the wonks, political discussions are almost entirely program-and-process, the realm of lawyers, MBAs, and the parasite journalist class that feeds on both of them. It’s the reason that congressional bills and their attendant regulations now run to thousands of pages, as opposed to the terse, 4,543-word U.S. Constitution, whose meaning was plainly evident to an average literate citizen of the late eighteenth century. Contrast that with the inaptly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, whose word count, with regulations, is nearly twelve million and counting, with new regulations being added along the way. When it comes to lawmaking, brevity may be the soul of wit, but complexity is the very essence of “trickeration.”

  Who is to say which makes for the best political analysis? Rather than getting down in the weeds with the increasingly specialized schools of government (whose mission effectively is to churn out more policy wonks), perhaps it is better to pull back and look at our political history for what it really is: a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is yet to come. It may at times be a tale told by an idiot; as passions sweep away reason, bad laws are enacted and dire consequences ensue. At other times, it may be a story told by a master craftsman, with twists and turns and reversals and plot points that surprise, delight, enthrall, and appall.

  Most of all, it is a story with heroes and villains. And this brings us back full circle, to the foundational myth of our polity—Satan’s rebellion, which led to the Fall of Man, and to the Devil’s Pleasure Palace erected to seduce and beguile humanity while the war against God, as ever, continues, and with no material help from the Deity apparently in sight.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THESIS

  What is The Godfather about? Ask almost anyone and he or she will tell you it’s the story of a Mafia don, Vito Corleone, and his three sons who are battling other Italian crime families for control of rackets in post–WWII New York. But that is not what The Godfather is about. And therein lies the crucial distinction between plot and what screenwriters call story. Plot is the surface, story is the reality. Plot is the ordering of events: This happens and then that happens, and the next thing happens, and on to the end. Plot is what we tell each other when we describe what the movie or novel is about. Plot is what hangs on the narrative framework. Plot . . . doesn’t matter.

  What matters is story—the deeper, underlying significance of the events of the plot. This happens and then, because of that, something else happens; and because of that, the next thing happens: the force of destiny. Thus, The Godfather is about a man who loves his family so much and tries so hard to protect it that he ultimately destroys it.

  There are many plots, but few stories. Earlier I touched on what Joseph Campbell described as “the hero’s journey,” but here I should note that that journey need be neither successfully completed nor happily ended. Don Corleone’s all-American tale is the rise of a monster whose true face remains hidden until his very last moments, when he stuffs a piece of an orange (a symbol of imminent death) in his mouth and 31 grimaces at his grandson, terrifying the boy with the sudden revelation of his grandfather’s true nature.

  Still, we might tell the same story—about a man who loves his family so much that he destroys it—in many different ways and in many different times and places. In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, goes on a monomaniacal mission to rescue his niece who has been abducted by Comanches and turned into a squaw. He aims not to bring her home (most of her family was murdered by the Indians) but to kill her, though in the end he does not kill her but returns her to her remaining relatives. The movie’s last image—the cabin door slowly swinging shut on Ethan, condemning him to a lifetime of bitter loneliness—was later borrowed by Coppola for the final scene of The Godfather. In this, the door to Michael’s inner sanctum is closed against his wife, Kay—except that it is Michael who is being penned in to the life of crime to which his father has condemned him, and Kay who is being shut out. Stories about families are among our most primal, which is why they have such tremendous power.

  Therefore, it’s no accident that one of the chief targets of the Unholy Left is the family—just as the nascent family of Adam and Eve was Satan’s target. The family, in its most basic biological sense, represents everything that those who would wish “fundamental change” (to use a famous, curdling phrase) on society must first loathe. It is the cornerstone of society, the guarantor of future generations (thus obeying nature’s first principle of self-preservation via procreation), the building block of the state but superior to it, because the family is naturally ordained, whereas the state is not. Against the evidence of millennia, across all cultures, the Left hurls the argument that the family is nothing more than a “social construct” that we can reengineer if we choose.

  Like Sa
tan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s prerogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. If any group of two or more people, no matter how distant their biological relation, or even if they are entirely unrelated, can be called a “family,” then there is no such thing. But see how it has been accomplished: As lustful Satan (“involved in rising mist”) comes to Milton’s Eve in the body of a snake in order to appeal to her vanity and curiosity while at the same time calming her fears at his sudden apparition in the Garden, so does “change” cloak itself in euphemism, disguising its real intentions, appealing to the transgressive impulse in nearly everyone, and promising a better tomorrow if only we compromise on this one tiny little stricture.

  Soviet Communism (along with its evil twin, National Socialism, as pure an expression of the satanic in man as one can imagine) understood this well: Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents, mini-vipers in the bosom of the families that sheltered them. Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true—and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated—the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.