And what, precisely, is the point of their twisted narrative? Simply this: It, like scripture, contains all the themes and clichés deemed necessary to sell a governing philosophy that no one in his right mind would actually vote for absent deception and illusion. No matter how evil, the leftist story must seem to have a positive outcome; it must appeal to the better angels of our nature; it must promise a greater good, a higher morality, a new and improved tomorrow. In short, it must do what Milton’s Tempter (“with show of zeal and love / To man, and indignation at his wrong”) does in the Garden: lie. Thus spake Lucifer to Eve, in the same words that come out of the culturally Marxist mouth of every cajoling leftist. We might well refer to this passage in Book Nine of Paradise Lost as the Left’s very own foundational myth:
Queen of this Universe! do not believe
Those rigid threats of Death. Ye shall not die.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . will God incense his ire
For such a petty Trespass, and not praise
Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain
Of Death denounced, whatever thing Death be...
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,
Why but to keep ye low and ignorant . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . ye shall be as Gods,
Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.
This speech by Satan is perhaps the most perfect embodiment of wheedling Leftism ever written, combining nearly all the tactics we still see in use today. The Tempter, in a nutshell, asks: Why not? Besides, what’s the big deal? God is lying to you. He wants to keep you naked and ignorant. Look at me: I ate the apple, and now I, a mere serpent, can speak human language with wisdom and compassion. And you—just one small “transgression” against a stupid and arbitrary edict, and you, too, shall be as God is.
Eve bites. In that instant, true, Paradise is lost to humanity (Adam’s loving acquiescence is at this point a fait accompli); but also in that instant, Eve becomes not godlike but fully human. The Fall is the central paradox of human existence and the root of all mankind’s misery and opportunity. How we react to it—or even if we react against the very notion of it and dismiss it as a fairy tale produced by a hegemonic culture—determines just about everything about us. Are we the independent heroes of our own stories, battling to make our way in the world? Or are we mere stick figures being pushed through a plot? Are we strong or are we weak? Destined for glory or already fallen and sure to be condemned? Is freedom a gift or an illusion?
For Milton—as it should be for us—the knowledge of good and evil is a fundamental aspect of our human nature. It is the basis of free will, and our (God-given) ability to freely choose between them. It can make us better or worse, lead us to salvation or damnation.
This is the argument for the felix culpa, the Fortunate Fall celebrated in the Catholic Easter proclamation: “O felix culpa . . . O happy fault that won for us so great a Savior.” The Fall, in this light, is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Of course, people argue about this endlessly, and there are compelling arguments on both sides: Since God is the Author of all, did he therefore engineer the Fall? (Milton’s God denies it.) If God created Lucifer, and the fallen Lucifer (Satan) then sired, directly or indirectly, both Sin and Death, is God therefore responsible for evil? Does God somehow require sin, as Calvin would have it? Can there ever be a true Hegelian-Marxist synthesis between Good and Evil, and if so, what would it be? As former president Herbert Hoover—to this day, one of the Unholy Left’s most useful cartoon villains—wrote in a posthumously published memoir of the New Deal: “The world is in the grip of a death struggle between the philosophy of Christ and that of Hegel and Marx.”
In stories of heroes, there is never a synthesis; indeed, there cannot be. The satanic Left understands this all too well, no matter what lip service they pay to “synthesis.” The hero must not—and ultimately cannot—cooperate with the villain. Even if it appears that he does so, it is merely deception on his part, allowing him to wield the villain’s weapon against him. (The hero very often does require sin—in some cases, he can win the day only at the cost of his soul.) Similarly, the antagonist (who, remember, is the hero of his own story) cannot compromise with the hero in any real sense. If he did, he would lose.
Which brings us back to the political argument at the heart of this book. We frequently hear terms such as “bipartisanship” and “compromise” in the halls of Congress, especially coming from the Unholy Left whenever it finds itself on the short end of an electoral decision. But, according to the dictates of narrative, such “compromise” cannot hold, except in the short term—and not even then, I would argue, since compromise, even in the smallest things, leads to synthesis, and there can be no synthesis between Good and Evil. As the crude metaphor goes, one part ice cream mixed with one part dog poop is dog poop, not ice cream.
The objection now will come that mine is a Manichaean view of the world: black and white, with no shade of gray between, much less fifty. Critics will label my notion—in a term much favored by adherents of the Left—“simplistic” and cry that it fails to allow for the subtleties and nuances of the human condition.
But so what? That is akin to observing that firearms are bad because they are designed to kill people—when no one would disagree that killing is precisely their object, which is, far more often than not, a force for good. There is no nuance in a handgun. It is either loaded or unloaded. Its safety, should it have one, is either on or off. It is either pointed at the target or it is not pointed at the target. The bullet is either fired or it is not.
A hero given to inaction while he studies the subtleties and nuances of a critical situation is not much of a hero. We remember Hamlet not for his heroism but for his inability to act. His most famous soliloquy is a paean to omphaloskepsis—navel-gazing. And yet, we can put even that—“to be or not to be”—within a Manichaean frame, because Hamlet’s inability to come down on one side or the other until it is too late gets a lot of people killed.
Far from being admirable, Hamlet is an archetype of the contemptible fence-sitter, and he pops up again and again in popular storytelling. Take for example, the character of the mapmaker Corporal Upham in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Hastily assigned to Captain Miller’s rescue operation after the carnage of the Normandy landing, Upham at first argues for the release of a captured German soldier (“Steamboat Willie”); later he fatally hesitates in a ruined stairwell while one of his comrades, Private Mellish, is overcome and stabbed through the heart with his own souvenir Hitler Youth dagger on the floor above. Near the end of the film, Steamboat Willie returns to kill Captain Miller in the final battle on the bridge and, after he surrenders, is shot in cold blood by Upham—freed at last of his nuances, Upham commits a war crime as a retributive act for his own earlier cowardice and foolishness. There is something to be said for recognizing good and evil after all.
And yet how often in real life we fail, including the statesmen among us. Neville Chamberlain botched Munich when he failed to take the measure of Hitler. George W. Bush failed with Vladimir Putin (“I looked the man in the eye. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul”). Collectively, the West is confounded by Islam because it fails to credit the plain words of Islamist animus against the West; how much interpretation, after all, does the slogan “Death to America” actually require?
We know this thanks to our
