—P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!
—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.
—Leo Strauss, The City and Man
Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Preface: The Argument
Introduction: Of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace
Chapter One: Whose Paradise?
Chapter Two: Thesis
Chapter Three: Antithesis
Chapter Four: The Sleep of Pure Reason Produces Monsters
Chapter Five: The Descent into Hell
Chapter Six: The Eternal Feminine
Chapter Seven: Of Light and Darkness
Chapter Eight: Of Words and Music
Chapter Nine: The Venusberg of Death
Chapter Ten: World without God, Amen
Chapter Eleven: Of Eros and Thanatos
Chapter Twelve: The Consolation of Philosophy
Chapter Thirteen: Mephisto at the Ministry of Love
Chapter Fourteen: The Devil Is in the Details
Chapter Fifteen: Oikophobes and Xenophiles
Chapter Sixteen: Good-Bye to All That
Acknowledgments
Index
Illustration to Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” Moritz von Schwind, 1917. A dying child and a desperate father fleeing seductive Death.
Satan Cast Out of the Hill of Heaven, Gustave Doré, 1866. The Paradise that has been irrevocably lost is not ours but Satan’s. No wonder those who advocate the satanic position fight for it so fiercely.
Mephistopheles in Flight, Eugène Delacroix, 1828. The fallen angel, his wings still intact, flies impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy.
Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels, Francisco Goya, 1799.
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, William Blake, 1805. It is not for Jesus to defeat Satan. Instead, that task is given to a woman, the Woman: Mary, the Mother of Christ.
Gretchen im Kerker (Gretchen in Prison), Peter Cornelius, 1815. Sie ist gerichtet! (She is damned!) Ist gerettet! (Is saved!)
In the Venusberg, John Collier, 1901. Wagner provides us with his own version of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in Tannhäuser.
Lilith, John Collier, 1892. “She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold… / fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”
Preface to the Paperback Edition
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a book about Good and Evil, about the Fall of Man and our long journey home, and about how Art, not Science, is the medium best suited to steer us toward that beacon of magic fire which lights the path to redemption. Big themes, worthy of capitalization.
But rather than a single Virgil, conducting us back to the first principles of Western civilization from which our culture has sprung, the reader will encounter a score or more: Milton, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Goethe; Joseph Campbell; the philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Marxist intellectuals; Marcus Aurelius, Boethius; Hegel and Marx; Francis Ford Coppola and Walt Disney. Some are saintly, some diabolical—but all, in their fashion, have helped us understand the central questions of man’s existence: Why are we here, and where are we going? If it is not the Pilgrim’s Progress, it is at the very least the story of the Hero’s Journey, the hero in this case being all of us.
Please don’t be frightened by this ghostly parade of cultural icons; at heart, this is an adventure story, analyzed via the medium of the oldest of human activities, storytelling itself. Call it what you will—myth, legend, narrative fiction, faith—the human need for stories that help explain the human condition antedates organized religion by millennia. Tales of gods, monsters, and heroes extend back to Homer, the Celtic legends, and Nordic mythology. Each of them tells essentially the same tale, lays out a moral framework for life, and shows us how to achieve it.
And yet, too often we have ignored this most primal mechanism for self-understanding in favor of fashionable psychological twaddle, exacerbated by our perverse penchant to believe that each new generation casts off the antediluvian superstitions of the past and reinvents the world anew; the truth, therefore, must be the exact opposite of what hitherto we have all believed. Only in this way, goes the thinking, lies true enlightenment.
Balderdash. Innovation is always to be sought and admired, but the wanton destruction of the past in a fit of adolescent rebelliousness—fanned by those who would do the culture irreparable harm—must be rejected if the cultural-Marxist Left’s long march through the institutions is to be halted and reversed, as it must be if civilization is to survive.
The critical response to this meditation upon fundamental principles has been most gratifying. The book quickly found a place in the contemporary canon of conservative argument, was favorably compared to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, has stayed on various Amazon best-seller lists for nearly two years, and now appears in the paperback edition you hold in your hands.
This is a political book only in the largest possible sense, springing from my belief that culture produces politics, and not vice versa. You will not find a word herein about contemporary, and hence transient, political figures, or even specific issues. Rather, my attention was to directly challenge both our notions of public and foreign policy with this dagger at their heart: