The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  And yet this most elemental force in human life, the Ewig-Weibliche, is routinely scorned and denigrated by the offspring of the Unholy Left, the increasingly deracinated “feminist” harpies whose anti-male rhetoric bespeaks not so much impotent rage as sexual jealousy.

  The attack on normative heterosexuality—led by male homosexuals and lesbians, and invariably disguised as a movement for “rights,” piggybacking on the civil rights movement of the 1960s—is fundamental to the success of Critical Theory, which went straight at the hardest target (and yet, in many ways, the softest) first. The reason was simple: If a wedge could be driven between men and women, if the nuclear family could be cracked, if women could be convinced to fear and hate men, to see them as unnecessary for their happiness or survival—if men could be made biologically redundant—then that political party that had adopted Critical Theory could make single women one of their strongest voting blocs.

  And so Eve was offered the apple: In exchange for rejecting a “traditional” sex role of supposed subservience and dependency (slavery, really), she would become more like a man in her sexual appetites and practices (this was called “freedom”), and she would be liberated from the burdens of motherhood via widespread contraception, abortion on demand, and the erasure of the “stigma” of single motherhood (should it come to that) or spinsterhood. Backed by the force of the government’s fist, she would compete with men for jobs, high salaries, and social status, all the while retaining all her rights of womanhood. The only thing she had to do was help destroy the old order.

  The result has been entirely predictable: masculinized women, feminized men, falling rates of childbirth in the Western world, and the creation of a technocratic political class that can type but do little real work in the traditional sense. Co-educational college campuses have quickly mutated from sexually segregated living quarters to co-ed dorms to the “hookup culture” depicted by novelist Tom Wolfe in I Am Charlotte Simmons to a newly puritanical and explicitly anti-male “rape culture” hysteria, in which sexual commissars promulgate step-by-step rules for sexual encounters and often dispense completely with due process when adjudicating complaints from female students.

  Crucially, at every step of the way, “change” from the old norms was being offered as “improvement” or “liberation”—more fulfillment, more pleasure, more experience. And yet, with each step, things got worse—for women. Eve’s bite of the apple sent humanity forth from the Garden, sadder but wiser. Today’s transgressive Western woman is merely sadder and often ends her life completely alone, a truly satanic outcome. G.K. Chesterton’s parable of the fence comes to mind, in “The Drift from Domesticity,” in The Thing (1929):

  In the manner of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which probably will be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this, let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you destroy it.”

  A splendid example of Chesterton’s Fence was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, championed by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area,” said the Massachusetts senator. “In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think. . . . The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Half a century on, those predictions have proven dramatically wrong; the question is whether Kennedy and his fellow leftists knew quite well at the time that their forecasts were bogus—although (as someone or other famously said) what difference, at this point, does it make?

  In the same way, much of contemporary “reform” is marked by impatience, ridicule, and haste, cloaked in “compassion” or bureaucratic “comprehensivity,” disguised as “rights” prised out of the Constitution with a crowbar and an ice pick, and delivered with a cocksure snort of derision against any who would demur.

  The last words of Faust, Part One, belong not to Faust or even Mephistopheles, but to Gretchen as her soul ascends to heaven, calling out to her lost lover: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” He has failed to rescue poor, mad Gretchen; now she must rescue him, if only beyond, in the next life. But the drama continues nonetheless.

  English readers may not at first appreciate the familiarity and intimacy of this last line. Goethe does not use Faust’s Christian name until Scene Sixteen, directly after the famous “Gretchen am Spinnrad” verses (also famously set to music by Schubert). Faust and Gretchen have exchanged their first kiss; her virgin world has been turned upside down; her body now aches for his, as suggested by her use of his Christian name, Heinrich, in the next scene. It’s an extraordinarily intimate moment—Germans of that period and well into the twentieth century did not easily move from the formal terms of address to the more intimate “duzen,” using the second-person familiar “thou” with each other. Even close friends and married couples might wait years before using the intimate form of address, if they ever did at all. Faust’s problem is that he can’t see the light until it’s too late for his love and almost too late for him.

  What is to awaken us from the long slumber of reason that has marked American culture since the end of World War II? The Frankfurt School intellectuals found the perfect moment to attack their host country, not when it was weak but when it was strong. In times of trouble, societies often coalesce around their core values, but when times are flush, people are more inclined to a little social experimentation, especially if it contains a basket of forbidden fruit. Prior to the American victory in the Second World War, men like Adorno, Horkheimer, Gramsci, Lukács, Reich, and Marcuse would probably have been shunned, their philosophy rightly considered the ravings of bitter, dangerous malcontents. But the very fact that America emerged with a high moral standing after its defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, whose crimes were inarguable, left the homeland open to the serpents who slithered in while nobody was looking and hissed, “Why not?”

  Why not question authority? Why not overturn your moral code? Why not do it if it feels good? The secure children of the 1950s had become the spoiled college students of the 1960s and ’70s; their natural inclination as youths was to regard their parents as fools and idiots. The civil unrest of the 1960s added racism to the mix; Vietnam contributed futility and, paradoxically (as things turned out), suspicion of government. (Can government save us from government?)

  The Unites States may have crushed Fascism, but what had it done for us lately? In for the long haul—fashioning the long march through the institutions in the same way that one of their icons, Mao, had effected his Long March to escape the Kuomintang in China and ultimately win control of the country—the leftists set about their business. It would take time, but the game was worth the candle. Besides, as Mephistopheles observes to an angry Faust, “There’s nothing more ridiculous in the whole world than a Devil who despairs.” They radiated confidence in their morals and their mission of cultural “liberation.”

  Gretchen’s cry of “Heinrich! Heinrich!” to Faust is a cry of despair, but it contains within it a seed of hope; he is her husband, and she the Ewig-Weibliche, his better half. Critical Theory’s purpose was to remove any shred of such emotion; purposelessness became an end in itself. The slightest glimmer of hope (in this case, doubt about the correctness of the leftist cause) would be the candle in the darkness, illuminating the universe. That could not be.

  When Gretchen, in extremis, calls out her lover’s
name, it is her final attempt to break through Mephisto’s darkness and send a ray of Heaven’s light stabbing down into the hollowness of Faust’s soul. She has long been suspicious of his strange companion; Mephisto gives her the willies. His appearances never lead to anything good. As the dawn breaks on the day of her death, Gretchen alone forces Faust to see the Devil for what he is: a vampire, the spawn from deepest darkness. “What does he want in this holy place?” she cries to Faust. “He wants me!” Just as, one might observe, the Serpent wanted Eve in the Garden.

  So, there it is. In the end, the Devil is interested not in Faust but in the woman, the Eternal Feminine, she who will eventually crush him under her feet. Faust’s soul, Mephistopheles believes, he already possesses. But the innocent, corruptible Gretchen—she is the one he really wants. In a sense, the entire poem (like Paradise Lost) has been a gigantic misdirection, and Mephisto’s (and the poet’s) true intentions are revealed only at the end. But then Faust steps forward and tells Gretchen, “You shall live.” She consigns her soul to God, confident in Eve’s revenge upon the Red Dragon.

  MEPHISTOPHELES

  Sie ist gerichtet! (She is damned!)

  A VOICE FROM ABOVE

  Ist gerettet! (Is saved!)

  Defeated, Mephisto claims the only prize left. He turns to Faust and, beckoning, says: “Here, to me!” And as they both vanish in brimstone, we hear the last lines of the first part of Goethe’s masterpiece, spoken by the ascendant Gretchen: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” Hers is the voice of hope in the wilderness, the light in the darkness of what otherwise would be eternal night, and the promise that, no matter what our sins, if only we have faith, this, too, shall pass. Even in death, the Eternal Feminine draws us ever onward, into the Light. And so it is to the Light that we now must turn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS

  God’s first words in Genesis are “Let there be light.” They are, in a very real sense, the beginning of our ur-Narrative, both in story and in physical reality. Whether you accept the existence of God as an article of faith or see him as merely a character in the longest-running story ever told, even the most ardent atheist must agree that the universe had some sort of beginning. We know the universe is expanding (expanding where?). The commonly accepted Big Bang theory, when played in reverse, must have an origination point, the moment when light combusted out of darkness and sent fiery suns and planets whirling on their merry celestial journey to somewhere.

  We use the word as metaphor—the “light” of knowledge, the “light” of reason, “seeing the light.” Things dawn on us, become clear. We have moments of clarity. The discovery and taming of fire brought our cave ancestors heat, but it also brought light. Life is impossible without it. So why, then, the rush to return to darkness?

  The struggle between light and darkness is, as the conservative commentator Bill Whittle has pointed out, unequal. For darkness—Satan’s realm—to triumph, it must be complete and total, infinite blackness. And yet the light of a single candle, somewhere in the universe, defeats it; there is now light where formerly there was none. Either there is Light or there is not; there can be no synthesis. The most important element for 93 our survival is ridiculously potent. No wonder Genesis begins with it, for God’s creation of Heaven and Earth cannot truly exist until it can be seen.

  It is therefore no accident that the path to destruction and darkness must be enforced by totalitarian means; and for the same reason, totalitarian states must inevitably fall, since it is impossible for them to maintain absolute control over 100 percent of their population all the time. As the collapse of the Soviet Union proved, the light of a single refusenik was enough to keep the flame of freedom burning until it eventually ignited the rotting structures of the corrupt government and brought it down.

  The notion of Light and Darkness runs throughout man’s storytelling, naturally. Light-Bringer, the gift of fire: The Titan, Prometheus, stole fire itself from Olympus to give it to humanity and was eternally punished by being chained to a rock and having his liver ripped out by an eagle daily. Similar stories appear across all cultures, including the Indian, Polynesian, and Amerindian. Fear of the darkness and the satanic creatures that might lurk within it is a staple of tales of terror and suspense, not to mention horror films. Indeed, the spooky attraction of the horror genre lies in its partial rejection of the light-defeating-darkness premise; a flick of a lighter can reveal eldritch horrors better left unseen, even at the cost of your life.

  This is the underlying premise of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos. Once dismissed as the pulp-fiction nightmares of a New England eccentric, the dark world of the Great Old Ones (ancient gods now imprisoned in deathlike slumbers who must not be awakened) has found new resonance in the slumbering unconscious of the post-Christian West. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” (“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”) is a phrase familiar to anyone who has a passing familiarity with this mythos. Lovecraft’s works feature a panoply of monsters. They’re not from the id, as are the creatures of Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science-fiction movie that introduced a wide audience not only to bits of Freudian psychiatry but also to Robbie the Robot, with an underlying plot inspired by Shakespeare’s Tempest. Lovecraft’s beasts are from beyond space and time itself (which, as Wagner posits in Parsifal, are one and the same thing).

  “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents,” reads the famous opening line of Lovecraft’s 1926 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published two years later in the pages of Weird Tales. But better to quote the first paragraph in its entirety as it continues:

  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  Thus speaks the voice of seductive nihilism. For Lovecraft’s tormented three-named mini-Fausts (Francis Wayland Thurston, George Gammell Angell, Charles Dexter Ward, et al.), nihilism is the only possible reaction to the overwhelming terrors of an unholy Creation. In Lovecraft, who set many of his most famous tales in the haunted environs of Massachusetts (generally, the fictional town of Arkham, wherein is located the equally fictional Miskatonic University), the seekers after the light of knowledge come to bitterly regret their inquiries, begging for a merciful death as the madness of their discoveries—the forbidden knowledge—overwhelms and overtakes them. Their scientific inquiries, like Faust’s, lead straight to Hell, this particular Hell consisting of the entire shell of the cosmos, save only poor pitiful Earth, where an insect-like humanity dwells in a fool’s paradise, to be lost at any moment.

  That such nihilism has a powerful hold on the human imagination is indisputable, especially among the young. For those for whom the very real physical and moral ailments of age lie off in a distant, unimaginable future, a flirtation with Sin and Death often proves irresistible. There is a certain frisson to be had from realizing, as in a Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie, that the murderer must be one of us, that guilt is collective, not personal. In the aftermath of the breakdown of the studio system in Hollywood in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a parade of movies with a nihilistic bent emerged from the generation of hot young writers and directors, often ending with the hero unable to break through the veil of evil as the bad guys get away.

  Foremost among these pictures is probably Robert Towne’s Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski, whose wife, the actress Sharon Tate, had been the most prominent victim of the Manson family’s butchery spree in 1969 Los Angeles. Set in the City of the Angels, Chinatown tackled L.A.’s very own creation myt
h, the bringing of the water of the Owens Valley to the nascent and very thirsty metropolis—here depicted as Tinseltown’s original sin. Caught up in a plot whose machinations he cannot begin to suspect, private dick J.J. Gittes is no match for the monstrous Noah Cross who, in the end, gets away with not only the money and the girl but also, literally, murder. The script’s famous last line (“Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown,” delivered in the noir darkness of a Los Angeles night) symbolizes the man’s inability to fully comprehend evil and his utter impotence in the face of its relentless, unsparing malevolence. Evil cannot be pleaded with or reasoned with, and sometimes it cannot even be defeated.

  Nihilism, however, comes with its solution: the heroic impulse, action. Satan may be able to destroy, but he cannot create. Beyond a young man’s fashionable flirtation with death, his testing of the boundaries, his sheer delight to be living on the edge, lies the desire to win, not lose. This is why soldiers are drawn from among the young; not only are they at their peak of physical fitness, but to them death is merely theoretical, even fascinating, and they have not yet had their idealism completely beaten out of them. The question for civilization is how to harness this bravery (for so, in war, does it appear) and make it useful. In the ongoing battle against the suicide warriors of Islam, the Western soldier might appear at first to be at a disadvantage. He desires to survive contact with the enemy. He does not dream of “martyrdom,” a word whose principal meaning (a principled, selfless death at the hands of the enemy, illustrating the superior moral quality of his faith) has been hideously corrupted and unthinkingly passed along by a media unmoored from our culture’s Christian roots. If the Western soldier does not wish to be a martyr to God, he has proven willing to sacrifice himself to save his comrades in arms, and this can inspire even greater feats of heroism. By contrast, the nihilistic fighters of Islam, as they constantly remind us, love death more than they love life.