Читать книгу The Devil's Pleasure Palace - Michael Walsh - Страница 15
Оглавление“For Germany, the criticism of religion has essentially been completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism,” wrote Marx in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1844. “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call upon them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call upon them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” (Emphases are Marx’s.)
These are the demented ravings of a dangerous idiot, given a claim to legitimacy by the facile turns of phrase, the insistence on having it both ways (for the Unholy Left, something can be itself and its exact opposite at the same time), and the rage against reality, in this case the “vale of tears.”
Goethe’s Mephistopheles—a literary adumbration of Marx if ever there was one—could not have said it better, for it takes a Father of Lies to convince others to rebel against the evidence of their hearts and their senses, not to mention their own self-interest. If we simply analyze the words of Marx’s famous statement about the opium of the masses, what do we get? References to “protest,” of course—that would become a staple of leftist agitation for more than a century afterward—as well as “illusion.” This recalls the scene in Faust, Part One, outside the venerable Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig, in which Mephisto frees a group of students from a spell with these words: “Irrtum, laß los der Augen Band! Und merkt euch, wie der Teufel spaße.” (“O Error, let loose their eyes’ bond! / And heed how the Devil jokes.”)
Lying is the centerpiece of both the satanic and the leftist projects. Since few people would willingly consign themselves to Hell, the rebels (for so they always reflexively think of themselves) must mask their true intentions. Reviewing François Furet’s 2014 book, Lies, Passions, and Illusions, Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, wrote in National Review:
Communism’s power to seduce, Furet begins, was partly based on the mendacity of Marxist regimes and their followers. “Communism was certainly the object of a systematic lie,” he writes, “as testified to, for example, by the trips organized for naïve tourists and, more generally, by the extreme attention the Soviet regime and the Communist parties paid to propaganda and brainwashing.” Yet these lies were exposed quickly and often, almost from October 1917 on. They wouldn’t have remained so effective for so long without the emotional pull of the grand illusions that they served: that the Bolsheviks were the carriers of history’s true meaning, and that Communism in power would bring about true human emancipation. . . . Describing Communism as a secular religion isn’t an exaggeration.
Faust’s famous bargain with the Devil (made at Easter, let us recall), was not simply for perfect wisdom (he expresses his frustration with imperfect, earthly modes of study in the poem’s famous opening), but also for a brief moment of perfect happiness, a moment to which he can say, “tarry a while, thou art so fair”—something he believes to be impossible. To Faust, this seems like a good bet:
FAUST
Were I to lay me down, becalmed, on a idler’s bed,
It’d be over for me in a trice!
If you can fawningly lie to me,
Until I am pleased with myself,
If you can deceive me with gaiety,
Then that will be my last day!
This bet I offer you.
MEPHISTOPHELES
You’re on!
FAUST
And you’re on!
Were I to say to the moment:
“Abide with me! You are so beautiful!”
Then you may clap me in irons,
Then will I wish to go to perdition!
Faust, so very German, is also the perfect modern man: born in the nineteenth century, wreaking havoc in the twentieth, and still battling against both God and the Devil in the twenty-first, often while denying the existence of both. He is the essence of the daemonic, if not quite the satanic. After all, in Goethe’s telling, Faust is ultimately saved, in part by Gretchen’s sacrifice—saved, that is, by the Eternal Feminine, the sexual life force greater than the power of Hell, which pulls men ever onward and closer to the Godhead—and also by God’s infinite grace, which can even overcome a bargain with the Devil, if man only strives hard enough.
What would the Unholy Left do without illusion? It is the cornerstone of their philosophical and governing philosophy, a desperate desire to look at basic facts and plain meanings and see otherwise, to see, in fact, the very opposite. From this standpoint, nothing is ever what it seems (unless it comports with quotidian leftist dogma), and everything is subject to challenge. At the same time, the Left’s fondness for complexity over simplicity betrays its affection for obfuscation and misdirection. The reason the leftist program dares not show its true face in an American election is that it would be overwhelmingly rejected (even today, after a century of constant proselytism from its redoubts in academia and the media). But in an age when credentialism is disguised as supreme, practically Faustian knowledge, and when minutiae are elevated to the status of timeless universal principles (even as the existence of such principles is otherwise denied), Leftism masquerades as sophistication and expertise. But the mask conceals only intellectual juvenile delinquency gussied up in Hegelian drag. The coat might be too small and the shoes too big, but if you don’t look too closely and really wish to believe—as in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot—the illusion might pass for reality.
Which brings us back to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, the embodiment of the antithetical, whose adherents elevated this delinquent doublespeak into an art form, brought it to the U.S. via Switzerland after fleeing the Nazis, and—wittingly or unwittingly—injected into American intellectual society an angry, defeatist philosophy alien to the Anglo-American and Enlightenment traditions. The Frankfurt School thinkers were the cream of German philosophical society—which is to say the cream of the restive European intellectual society of the period—who had made international reputations for themselves at the University of Frankfurt and then received a warm welcome into the American Ivy League.
The work of the Frankfurt scholars—among them, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich—was grounded in an ideology that demanded (as Marx would say), for philosophical reasons, an unremitting assault on Western values and institutions, including Christianity, the family, conventional sexual morality, nationalistic patriotism, and adherence in general to any institution or set of beliefs that blocked the path of revolution. Literally nothing was sacred. Some representative samples:
Herbert Marcuse:
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization (The One-Dimensional Man, 1964).
Max Horkheimer:
Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity (Eclipse of Reason, 1947).
Theodor Adorno:
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself (Minima Moralia, 1951).
Who were these people? Marxists all, first and foremost, sent fleeing from their think-tank roost at the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (where else?). The Third Reich hounded them out in part because they were Jews and in part because they were Communists. Ambivalent regarding the achievements of the Enlightenment—in other words, the society that had given them birth, nurture, shelter, and prestige—they rejected the notion of the individual as all-important, preferring to see history as Marx did, as a dialectical battle of opposing historical forces from which a non-teleological perfection would somehow eventually emerge. Adorno and Horkheimer liked to imagine their works as “a kind of message in a bottle” to the future. Unfortunately for posterity, several of those bottles washed up on the eastern bank of the Hudson River near Columbia University in New York City, changing the course of American history.
Among the Frankfurt School’s members was the half-Russian Richard Sorge, who became a spy for the Soviet Union. While he contributed little in the way of cultural theory to Communism, his work as a traitor and double agent is worth remarking upon. After serving in World War I, Sorge—the name means “worry” in German—became a Communist in 1919, but he joined the Nazi Party in 1933 to burnish his German bona fides. Under journalistic cover, he was the first to report to Stalin that Hitler was planning Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1940, a report that Stalin disbelieved. While undercover in Japan as a reporter, Sorge informed the Soviets that the Japanese would not open up an eastern front with the Soviet Union, thus allowing Stalin to transfer military assets to the east to combat Hitler. Sorge was discovered by the Japanese in late 1941 and hanged three years later. In honor of his service to the Motherland, he was declared a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
The Frankfurt School included both Marxists and Freudians in its ranks, which was crucial to its later success in the United States (and a more toxic combination of nineteenth-century voodoo can hardly be imagined). As the website Marxists.org proudly puts it:
In 1931/32, a number of psychoanalysts from the Frankfurt Institute of Psychoanalysis and others who were acquainted with members of the Institut [für Sozialforschung] began to work systematically with the Institut. . . . In joining what was predominantly a “Hegelian-materialist” current of Marxists, these psychologists gave the development of Marxist theory an entirely new direction, which has left its imprint on social theory ever since. . . . The intellectuals who founded the Frankfurt Institut deliberatively cut out a space for the development of Marxist theory, inside the “academy” and independently of all kinds of political party [sic]. The result was a process in which Marxism merged with bourgeois ideology. A parallel process took place in post–World War Two France, also involving a merging with Freudian ideas. One of the results was undoubtedly an enrichment of bourgeois ideology.
Thanks a lot. To this day, we can chart the Institut’s baleful effects through the prisms of artistic narrative (including literature, poetry, music, and opera) and the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic, minus the illusory synthesis.
It was the Berlin-born Marcuse—who taught at Columbia, Harvard, Brandeis, and the University of California, San Diego—whose political influence was, on balance, the greatest of them all, owing to his voguish popularity among college students in the 1960s (he was the flip side of Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher,” who had nearly as great an influence on young conservatives of the period). Marcuse came up with the particularly nasty concept of “repressive tolerance,” a notion that has guided the Unholy Left since the publication of his essay by the same name in 1965 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, by Marcuse, Robert Paul Wolff, and Barrington Moore Jr. It might be best described as “tolerance for me, but not for thee.” But let Marcuse explain:
The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. . . . Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e., in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. . . . Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
This casuistry is deception in its purest form. In the half-century since Marcuse’s essay, “tolerance” has taken on the status of a virtue—albeit a bogus one—a protective coloration for the Left when it is weak and something to be dispensed with once it is no longer required. It is another example of the Left’s careful strategy of using the institutions of government as the means for its overthrow. Saul Alinsky precisely articulated this as Rule No. 4 in his famous Rules for Radicals: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.” By casting human frailty as hypocrisy, Alinsky and his fellow “community organizers” executed a nifty jujitsu against the larger culture, causing it to hesitate when it should have been forcefully defending itself. And the shot at Christianity (there is no one “Christian church”) is a characteristic touch as well.
Today, we can see the damage of such cheap sophistry all around us—in our weakening social institutions, the rise of the leviathan state, and the decline of primary, secondary, and college education. But destruction was always the end, not just the means. As Marcuse noted in “Reflections on the French Revolution,” a talk he gave in 1968 on the student protests in Paris: “One can indeed speak of a cultural revolution in the sense that the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of the existing society.”
In the same year, in a lecture titled “On the New Left,” he went into greater detail:
We are faced with a novelty in history, namely with the prospect of or with the need for radical change, revolution in and against a highly developed, technically advanced industrial society. This historical novelty demands a reexamination of one of our most cherished concepts. . . . First, the notion of the seizure of power. Here, the old model wouldn’t do anymore. That, for example, in a country like the United States, under the leadership of a centralized and authoritarian party, large masses concentrate on Washington, occupy the Pentagon, and set up a new government. Seems to be a slightly too unrealistic and utopian picture. (Laughter.) We will see that what we have to envisage is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.
Marcuse, by reason of both his longevity and residence in the U.S., spoke directly to the counterculture of the late ’60s, and his words fell on fertile ground, sprouting like the dragon’s teeth sewn by Cadmus to create a race of super warriors, the Spartoi. They still dwell among us.
Even more important, however, is the Frankfurt School’s literary role as antagonist to what we might characterize as heroic Judeo-Christian Western culture—which was formed from Greco-Roman civilization, the conservative impulse of the Thomistic Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (whose ultimate expression was the Constitution of the United States)—as well as Victorian and Edwardian high culture (perhaps the apogee of Western civilization). That civilization, in the classic literary fashion of the hero’s subconsciously pursuing his own destruction, gave birth to the resentful philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the destructive First World War, the various socialist revolutions (some, such as Russia’s, successful and others, as in Bavaria’s, unsuccessful), the Cold War, and the short interregnum of “the End of History” before the long-dormant Muslim assault on the West resumed in earnest on September 11, 2001. Obviously, this list of world-historical events is not exhaustive, no more so than a plot synopsis can stand in for, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).
It does, however, establish the framework for a discussion in which I seek to demonstrate that far from being a natural outgrowth of a strain of Western political philosophy that culminated in Marxism and, worse, in Marxism-Leninism, the cultural philosophy of the Frankfurt School was itself aberrational in that it was profoundly anti-religious as well as anti-human. While substituting its own rituals for religion and unleashing its murderous wrath on the notion of the individual, it masqueraded as a force both liberating and revolutionary, when in fact its genesis is as old as the Battle in Heaven.
