The Devil's Pleasure Palace (27 page)

       
Then headlong plunged in misery's abyss

To the Left, there is something wrong with this state of affairs. It
ought
not to be. It is not fair that sometimes you're the windshield and sometimes you're the bug. That it is so is indisputable; therefore, what is
ought
to be outlawed or in some manner compensated for. (It is curious how often leftist solutions come down to simple financial extortion meant to ameliorate the perceived problem.) Such thinking is part of the Left's war on God and its war on the universe, which, when you stop to think about it, are completely contradictory. If there is no God, then the universe must be irrational and arbitrary, which is what leftists preach in metaphysics but rage against in society. If there is a God, and yet this is still the result, then what is the problem? That God is not as arbitrary as a random universe? That the Universe is too rational, too godlike?

The Occam-like simplicity of Right thought is, then, its greatest attribute. It requires no particular leap of faith beyond the initial buy-in (which Pascal's Wager also makes the rational buy-in). It presumes a belief in, but not necessarily a knowledge or proof of, a power greater than ourselves. It allows each individual to listen to his heart and follow the implanted heroic story he finds deep within himself. It frees Everyman to be a Hero, the leading character in his own movie, complete with dialogue and soundtrack. It unites all men into the ur-Narrative of stasis, sin, loss, change, conflict, redemption, and ultimate victory, even beyond death. It is the song of everyone. Why anyone should want to reject it is an enduring mystery.

By contrast, the philosophy of the Unholy Left, while ostensibly simple—Critical Theory, i.e.,
Us v. Them
—requires repeated mental contortions, which might be why they constantly congratulate themselves on how smart they are, how appreciative of complexity, compared with crude, simplistic, reductionist conservatives. As the White Queen brags to Alice in
Through the Looking-Glass
, “Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” In the next chapter of this
Wonderland
sequel, Alice also encounters Humpty Dumpty, who imperiously informs her how he operates: “When
I
use a word, it means
just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” The White Queen and Humpty must be two of the Left's favorite literary characters. They certainly are role models.

Easy for them to stay on the other side of the Looking-Glass, the fun-house mirror through which they see, confidently, the shape of things to come, while the Right continues to peer as best it can through faith's glass, darkly. When you can manipulate the language and convince an otherwise sane world that your mad version of events is the truth, you have a formidable, satanic weapon.

Which brings us back to the Garden, and to Milton. Stepping back for a moment from the particulars of the poems, it is sobering and refreshing to realize, especially at first reading, how optimistic Milton is about the future of humanity—which, having fallen, nevertheless is bathed in the light of God's love. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us. Even as we open the book, we know what's coming, that the apparently defeated Satan will break away from his chained bed on the Lake of Fire, slip the bonds of Hell, glimpse the now-lost Kingdom of Heaven, and set his basilisk gaze on God's newest playthings, Adam and Eve. We know that Eve will fail the test—not out of any innate female weakness, but from her sympathetic heart and insatiable curiosity, both quintessentially human traits; she is truly humanity's Mother. We know that Adam, her devoted spouse, will join his wife in the first biblical act of self-sacrifice (he cannot contemplate a life without her), immediately followed by the first biblical act of physical love, thus creating humanity itself. We know that Eve will suffer in childbirth for her transgression. We know that the firstborn of Eve's children will murder his brother and that God will mark him with a sign of divine protection. We know that humanity will start its long, slow, torturous journey back to the Light. We know that we, too, are part of that journey. We know, above all, that it is our story.

And we know that, ultimately, we will win. That God's sacrifice of his Son—the remarkable act of the Deity deigning to take on, and suffer from, the worst ills to which the flesh is heir, thus experiencing what it means to be fully human—brought us closer to him. We know there is a perfect circle out there: from Lucifer to Satan to Sin to Death to the Temptation in the Garden to the Fall of Man and Original Sin; from the instant in which humanity was truly born, and the long struggle to return not to Eden but to Heaven, this time as fully human creatures who have
surpassed the angels and who return home as living examples of the fallibility of an infallible God. We have a thing or two to teach God, and he'd better get used to the idea once we all get home. It is the uniting of opposites, the end result of Boy Meets Girl. It is completion.

Thus runs the ur-Narrative, in which all our stories point to one, and only one, conclusion. Theologians sometimes portray God as an innocent bystander, the guy who starts the chariot races but neither wagers nor determines their outcome. C.S. Lewis departs from the conventional view of God's omniscience, and the problem of predestination, by picturing God as a Presence, not on a closed circle but on an infinite straight line of Time, where he exists at every plottable point, thus negating time as a concept. (“Here time and space are one.”) Therefore, there can be no foreknowledge as God says to Moses, when asked his name, “I am who am.” There is only the present tense, no future, no past. There's a reason that the verb “to be” is the cornerstone of all human language, for without it, we are, literally, nothing. It's not that God doesn't care: It's that, in a sense, he
can't
care.

He is a God of opposites, not a being but Being itself—“I am who am”—which may explain the images and likenesses that lie at the heart of our ur-Narrative. Omniscient yet clueless. Omnipotent yet powerless. Omnipresent yet eternally absent from us, who dwell in a temporal dimension.

In Michael Mann's epic remake of
The Last of the Mohicans
with Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye (aka Natty Bumppo), a sneering British officer (who wishes to “make the world England”) upbraids the colonial sharpshooter for not joining the King's militia: “You call yourself a patriot and loyal subject of the Crown?” To which Hawkeye replies: “I do not call myself subject to much at all.” This is the voice of the true patriot, the difference between the Central European authoritarian and the American.

The goal of the Frankfurt School was, at root, to turn Americans into Central Europeans, to undermine the core self-perception of America—free individuals before God—and replace it with a Central European dependence on and worship of the God-State as embodiment of the General Will, History, Social Justice, Diversity, or whatever divinized chimera represents Utopia at the moment. For a man who never used to call himself subject to much at all to transform himself into a ward of the state—to become, in other words, less of a man—should be a leap
too far. To abandon the idea of heroism, of his own personal quest, and instead accept his newfound status as—if he's lucky—a clerk would be an enormity.

Hawkeye or a clerk? Sharpshooter or pencil-pusher? To which narrative do you wish to belong? Hero or schmuck? Good guy or a functionary in the Ministry of Love? Despite what both the Calvinists and the atheist Left say, we all are free to choose. There is no predestination. There is only free will—the essence of humanity. At the end, when all seems lost and the world is at its darkest, the hero is alone. As he must be, that we must also be.

Each of us must make the choice. Our inner narrative drives us one way; what we witness daily on television and in other media drives us another way. To dare or not to dare? To chase freedom or (in the odious phrase) to shelter in place for security? What did the Sirens whisper and sing to Ulysses, strapped to the mast of his ship (as curious as Eve) so he could hear the forbidden melodies? Just this, in the translation by Samuel Butler:

“Come here,” they sang, “renowned Ulysses, honor to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.”

The knowledge of the future. That—what Eve foresaw after tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—is what Ulysses gave up for his brief aural taste of the Sirens' delicious musical apples. Was it worth it? For him, to get home to Penelope, of course it was. And yet what might have been, had he stayed and survived. The motto of Britain's fabled Special Air Service (SAS) is “Who dares, wins.” Not to dare is, by definition, the philosophy of a loser; as the saying goes, you can't win if you don't play.

But “
Don't
play” is the modern motto; better safe than sorry. Better dependent than independent. Better red than dead. To say this is an unmanly ethos is to state what was once obvious, but it's less so in an age when a cocoa-sipping metrosexual in a onesie is held up as a masculine ideal by the government of the United States. But this is what we
should expect from an “elite” culture that prizes unmoored mental agility and snarky glibness over principle and purpose. The smart remark, the “transgressive” observation, the verbal poke in the eye—these are what occasion applause from the trained-seal class latterly. Above all, above everything, we must have peace. But world without conflict . . . is stasis . . . is tyranny . . . is Death.

For centuries, cowards, deserters, malingerers, and shirkers have been mocked, scorned, and shot. There is something greater, nobler, than the preservation of one's own skin: That is the consolation of our philosophy. Critical Theory, however, will have none of that.

The Frankfurt School's pernicious philosophy has corrupted an elite, educated segment of America; that is the bad news. The good news is that, given a stark choice between its wheedling defeatism, tricked out with scholarly pretension (the rise of the eternal graduate student followed closely in the Frankfurt School's Faustian wake) and nearly unreadable neo-Hegelian doublespeak, it has little popular appeal unless cloaked in deceitful appeals to the “better angels of our nature,” in Lincoln's words. What is does have, however, is modern sympathizers, who feed like dung beetles off its cultural resentment and overweening sense of entitlement. Indeed, the sympathizers elected a president, twice, based entirely on resentment disguised as progress.

Disguise is the key; that we sometimes fall for it speaks well of us, not ill. In the Garden, the Serpent preyed on Eve's curiosity, her
goodness
, and her vanity in order to bring her low, down to his level, and he did so in the guise of an animal that Adam had named, with no stigma yet attached to it. Had the fallen Lucifer come to her in full Devil regalia, snorting fire and farting brimstone, she would rightly have fled; but then Satan would have been not God's enemy but his reinforcement, discouraging Eve from sin. Evil can succeed only by mimicking good; in Milton, the Serpent goes down to crawl on his belly like a reptile only after his transgression, not before; priapically, a walking erection, he approaches Eve upright. Had she laughed at his inadequacy, how different history might have been.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MEPHISTO AT THE MINISTRY OF LOVE

S
peaking of the Devil, in his influential book
Rules for Radicals,
critical theorist Saul Alinsky famously invoked Satan—not as a dedicatee, as conservatives often mistakenly assert, but as someone to be admired and emulated:

Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.

Big deal. Pace Alinsky, Hell was not the kingdom Lucifer sought: It was Heaven itself. Nor could he bear to spend a minute longer there than God decreed.

The reason Alinsky has been so influential, and so dangerous, is that, in some respects at least, he is largely correct. He is right to acknowledge the relationship between mythos and history, and is he right again when he states that Lucifer is the first radical. What he does not mention, naturally, is that the “establishment” the proto-rebel rebelled against was God.
(A permanent Revolutionary Party always targets “the establishment,” with the aim of becoming “the establishment,” but never suffering any of its own consequences.) And unless you define “God” as “Evil”—a stretch even for the most dedicated atheist—you are stuck with the possibility that the first rebellion may not have been Lucifer's own idea, but God's.

This is how we first meet Satan early in Book One of Milton's poem:

       
So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay

       
Chained on the burning Lake, nor ever thence

       
Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will

       
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven