The Devil's Pleasure Palace (14 page)

Faust, in short, has been bewitched, charmed, enraptured—in other words, he is going through the same thing he is currently experiencing with Mephistopheles, though in the physical realm. But the
Ewig-Weibliche
, the Eternal Feminine here instantiated by Faust's fantasy of the pure and innocent Gretchen (soon enough to be defiled) and ultimately the end point of the entire two-part poem, proves a far greater force than Mephistopheles's satanic temptations. Sex is, for Goethe and innumerable other artists, the greatest single force in creation—so powerful that in Milton, in Book Nine of
Paradise Lost
, the first thing Adam and Eve do after they both taste the forbidden fruit is to make love in what is one of Western literature's first sex scenes:

       
So said he, and forbore not glance or toy

       
Of amorous intent, well understood

       
Of Eve, whose eye darted contagious fire.

       
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank,

       
Thick overhead with verdant roof embow'red

       
He led her, nothing loath; flowers were the couch,

       
Pansies, and violets, and asphodel,

       
And hyacinth, Earth's freshest softest lap.

       
There they their fill of love and love's disport

       
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the seal,

       
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep

       
Oppressed them, weary with their amorous play.

After you disobey the only commandment God has given you, what else is there to do but have sex?

And so we have a twinning in the cultural mythos of forbidden fruit and Eros/Thanatos, for both Adam and Eve realize that now they must surely die, now that they have tasted both celestial knowledge and human love in its purest form, and have experienced for the first time
la petite mort
of orgasm. And the twinning is crucial to the formation
of humanity—another unsuspected benefit of the Fall. The heterosexual human sex act is unlike that of most mammals in that it can happen at any time, not only when the human animal is rutting (our species is always rutting, for good or ill).

Animals respond to the power of the sexual urge; they flock to its smell and its call; they indulge in it with ferocious, sometimes lethal abandon. Humans (and not just in the female's fertile months) are always on the lookout for the entire panoply of human sexual experience: the main chance, the quick score, the illicit affair, the eternal love, the one-night stand, and the enduring relationship that survives even death. At once unspoken and yet the subject of countless works of literature, poetry, theater, film, and the musical arts both high and low, this salient feature of the Fall is continually celebrated by mankind even as its primal power causes us so much pain and heartache.

At the first sight of Gretchen, Faust's lust for knowledge is alchemized into his lust for her. The embodiment of the Eternal Feminine, she is what drives him from this point in the poem—onward but not necessarily upward. Seduced and impregnated, Gretchen (saucy but pure) is the innocent Eve turned murderess. Awaiting Faust's arrival in her virgin bedchamber, she inadvertently kills her mother by administering a fatal dose of sleeping potion; later, she drowns her bastard child and is condemned to death. Upon seeing Mephisto appear alongside Faust in her dungeon, she calls Satan the spawn of darkness: “
Was steigt aus dem Boden herauf?
” (“What climbs out of the earth?”)

This is the elemental power of sex—that for all its complexity and difficulty, it nevertheless points the way to transcendence. Almost every religious cult is based around it (with the transient guru having unlimited access to the most nubile and desirable females). Those that aren't—say, the Shakers (the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)—rejected it as too powerful but still throw themselves into transports of quasi-sexual religious ecstasy, sublimating the erotic impulse while paying it religious homage.

Critical Theory attacked all of this, principally the idea of transcendence. Not every sex act has larger meaning, of course, but the goal of Critical Theory was to reduce human beings to the level of animals (“If it feels good, do it”) and to deny the transcendent component that had driven creative artists for centuries. Tellingly, the word “sex” came to
mean the same thing as “gender,” an impersonal grammatical term that includes masculine, feminine, and neuter. Primal notions of masculinity and femininity were redefined and “nuanced,” which in practice meant shattered and rendered meaningless. Herbert Marcuse, the author of
Eros and Civilization,
celebrated “polymorphous perversity,” advocating the liberating power of sex, but only in the narrowest sense: liberation from the (in his view) arbitrary and capricious strictures laid down by culture and civilization. By following the directive to “make love, not war,” the gullible individual might well have felt that he was striking a blow at the hierarchy; in reality, though, perhaps he was simply expending his creative, sexual energy in useless and unproductive ways. But Marcuse knew that a populace engaged in pointless sexual intercourse was a populace uninterested in much of anything else; thus “polymorphous perversity” weakens the foundations of the society he sought to undermine.

Again, we must use the word “satanic,” which, rightly defined, means the desire to tear down a longstanding, even elemental, order and replace it with . . . nothing. Critical Theory very effectively harnesses resentment, transmuting it into rage; it excuses solipsistic indolence, presenting it as “self-realization.” The Frankfurt School rejected Jung's collective unconscious—the only truly collective thing about humanity—describing it as an “obscurantist pseudo-mythology,” vastly preferring Freudianism. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who founded “socialist humanism,” in particular devoted a great deal of his attention to Freudian theory, and while he found “contradictions” within it, he described Freud as one of the “architects of the modern age,” placing him in the pantheon alongside Marx and Einstein.

In his most important work,
Escape from Freedom
(1941), Fromm explicitly rejected Western notions of personal freedom, preferring instead the ordered society of—of all things—feudal Europe. (There is no Progressive like a Regressive.) “In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt.” (“Structural” is a favorite word of the Marxists, believing as they do in a “scientific” basis for what is little more than a resentful nineteenth-century revenge fantasy.)

To take a step back from the Frankfurt School and its curious, culture-specific obsessions is to note what a stunningly self-referential
and limited world these intellectuals inhabited. They were a group of tiresome, quarrelsome, pedantic, mostly German- or Austrian-born intellectuals endlessly rehashing the theories and merits of an earlier generation of tiresome, pedantic, mostly German- or Austrian-born intellectuals, with the added layer of their largely shared (or rejected) Jewishness in common.

One is reminded of the historian Paul Johnson's memorable chapter on Marx in
Intellectuals
, with a title that recalls Satan himself: “Howling Gigantic Curses.” In it, Johnson describes the political devil of our narrative as he set about his war with God:

He never received any Jewish education or attempted to acquire any, or showed any interest in Jewish causes. But it must be said that he developed traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of half-assimilated materials and to plan encyclopedic works which were never completed; a withering contempt for all non-scholars, and extreme assertiveness and irascibility in dealing with other scholars. Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: It is essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in the field.

Perhaps that is ascribing too much to Marx's Jewish roots, which included prominent rabbis on both sides of the family; as Johnson notes, Marx's father was baptized in the wake of an 1816 Prussian edict that banned Jews from the legal and medical fields, and he had his six children baptized as well. Ascribing innate “racial” or cultural traits is a dangerous business in the aftermath of the Holocaust; still, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of the members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, as were many of the early Bolsheviks, including Trotsky, Sverdlov, and Zinoviev; like all Bolsheviks, they were fiercely anti-Jewish, banning teaching in Hebrew and religious instruction (not that it saved them from Stalin, whose own Georgian anti-Semitism rivaled Hitler's). Nevertheless, although Jews made up a high percentage of the German intellectuals of the period, well out of proportion to their small share of the population, the philosophical terms of the debate were German, not Jewish.

Another of Marx's traits was evident from his youth: his passion for destruction, expressed in the poetry he wrote as a young man, including “Savage Songs,” one of whose verses ran: “We are chained, shattered, empty, frightened / Eternally chained to this marble block of being / . . . We are the apes of a cold God.”
Faust
was one of his favorite poems, of course, but he took the side of Mephistopheles, quoting the Devil's aphorism “Everything that exists deserves to perish” in his essay
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Johnson concludes his study by remarking: “Marx is an eschatological writer from start to finish.”

In other words, not to put too fine a point on it: a madman. For Marx resembles nothing more than those monomaniacs convinced of the righteousness of their cause (or, in this case, an anti-cause dressed up as a cause), desperately scribbling upon acres of foolscap and furiously buttonholing just about everyone they meet, with a lecture or harangue always ready to hand. How anyone could have fallen for this load of quasi-scientific, pseudo-intellectual, anti-human codswallop remains a mystery, and yet in a world where even Charles Manson can find love behind prison bars, anything is possible. A selfish, ravaging monster in his personal life, Marx is the archetype of the modern leftist, an apotheosis of hypocrisy who makes others suffer and die for his sins.

Again, note the Christian allegory. Marxism is often compared to a religious cult in its outward trappings and external rituals, but a closer look at its founder and practitioners reveals even greater similarities. Marx's own self-identification with Mephistopheles might well be proof enough, but let us go further. The sense of having been wronged—by fate? the universe?—runs throughout the Left's list of grievances against a God they profess not to believe in. Their own lives bear little scrutiny, as they are too often revealed as duplicitous, deceitful, and treacherous toward even those they claim to love. The media today shriek in glee whenever a putative conservative is caught with some part of his body in a honey pot, yet they consistently turn a blind eye to those on their side in the same predicaments. Their lame explanation is always the same: Conservative (or better yet, religious fundamentalist) hypocrisy is news. After all, it is a violation of Alinsky's Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” Whereas the Left has no rules, only objectives, and since
“by any means necessary” is a perfectly acceptable moral code, there can be no hypocrisy among leftists, just as there can be no enemies.

Consider that much of leftists' enthusiasm for sexual freedom stems from their own, shall we say, irregular personal lives; for them, the love that dare not say its name instead shouts it from the rooftops. And, by extension, they have assumed that what works for people who are often engaged in creative and artistic pursuits (who tend to be highly sexed) ought to work for everybody else, even those whom they dismiss as plebeian. The Bloomsbury Circle was a hotbed of hot beds, both gay and straight; the rapaciously bisexual Simone de Beauvoir was an early advocate of women's adopting a masculine view of serial sexual conquest, passing along her often underage female conquests to her lifelong partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. Famously, the lascivious Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, became the butt of jokes in the Soviet Union, the most famous of which goes like this:

A Soviet filmmaker makes a film called “Lenin in Warsaw.” Everybody shows up for the premiere. The film opens—on Krupskaya, naked, having mad sex with another man. And then another. And another. And so on. The film goes on and on in the same vein for ninety minutes. Finally, the lights come up and the director takes questions from the audience. First question: “Very interesting movie, comrade, but—where was Lenin?” The director answers: “In Warsaw.” (Marx's own sex life, like Rousseau's, also bears little scrutiny.)

And yet the Judeo-Christian example is always reproachfully before the “transgressive” leftists, the thing they cannot avoid even when they try. In 1898, Debussy tried to rebel against the musically puritanical Wagnerism outlined in Wagner's seminal 1849 essay, “
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft
” (“The Artwork of the Future”), but that Wagner expressed most completely in
Das Rheingold
(with its lack of arias, choruses, etc.). As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the French master wound up writing the ineffable
Pelléas et Mélisande
, which conforms precisely—in a way that even
Rheingold
does not—to Wagner's theoretical strictures. Wagner's ideas themselves were a direct reaction to the “Franco-Jewishness” of the works of Giacomo Meyerbeer, then the darling of the Paris Opera and a man whose success Wagner fervently desired to emulate and, failing thereat, decided to resent.