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: What, exactly, are we fighting for? For, without a sense of what is worth preserving, no country can have a sense of national purpose or identity. And thus its entire prior history is rendered worthless.
Here lies the threat: Wave after wave of what I dub “satanic” leftism—in the sense that Satan cannot create, but only destroy—has gradually eroded and undermined our own belief in ourselves. This book, then, is explicitly and implicitly an argument against globalism, one-worldism, cultural relativism, and fatuous moral equivalence—not just made by me, but by Roman emperors, medieval philosophers, cavaliers of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century revolutionaries, and twentieth-century daemons. It is not for the squeamish, the dense, the dull, the ignorant, or the easily offended.
I hasten to add that, despite the theological issues treated within—inevitable in any discussion of both Paradise Lost and Faust—this is not a book about religion, except in the sense of narrative drama. Whatever your feelings about Christianity, it cannot be denied that the Jesus story, about a man learning first to understand and then embrace his destiny, is the story of just about every hero in Western literature, from Odysseus and Finn McCool to Tarzan of the Apes.
It is, however, a call for a new Counter Reformation, an engagement with the inimical intellectual and cultural trends that have some Western Europeans and Americans questioning their reason for existence—or, at the very least, making them feel guilty about it. It is at once a call to faith, and a call to arms.
In a companion volume—The Fiery Angel, which is forthcoming—I will lay out more specifically the nature of this restoration. For now, however, enjoy the story of man’s first disobedience, the fruit of that forbidden tree, and the Faustian bargain that has led us straight into the hell of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace.
In the aftermath of World War II, America—the new leader of the West—stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, a burgeoning transnational elite in New York City and Washington, D.C., embraced not only the war’s refugees but also many of their resolutely nineteenth-century “modern” ideas as well.
Few of these ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the so-called Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory—like Pandora’s Box—released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable Central European nihilism that was celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the new nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service. They have sown (as Cardinal Bergoglio—now Pope Francis—has written of Satan, who will play a large role in our story) “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny”—and all disguised as a search for truth that will lead to human happiness here on earth.
Of course, what has resulted is something far from that. Were any of the originators of Critical Theory sill among us, they might well say, quoting Sir Christopher Wren: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe, and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future.
The Frankfurt School sucker punched American culture right in its weak solar plexus. Americans have always been sympathetic to an alternative point of view, sympathetic to the underdog, solicitous of strangers, especially foreign refugees fleeing a monster like Hitler. Largely innocent of the European battles over various forms of socialism, and softened up to a certain extent by the Roosevelt administration’s early, frank admiration of Mussolini as it tried to solve the economic crisis of the Depression, the American public was open to self-criticism.
The problem with the Frankfurt School scholars was that they arrived with ideological blinders—men of the Left fighting other men of the Left back in the old Heimat—and were unable to see that there was another, different world welcoming them in the United States if only they would open their eyes. (How, for example, could they hate California?) They appear not so much scholarly as simple, viewing American capitalism as a vast, deliberate, conspiracy against their own socialist ideas, when, in fact, their ideas were simply wrong, their analysis flawed, and their animus ineradicable. They were creatures of their own time and place, with no more claim to absolute truth than the man on a soapbox in Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park or the lunatic staggering down Market Street in San Francisco talking to himself. Everybody’s got a beef.
One thing they did get right, though: Popular culture lay at the heart of the American experience. It was hugely influential in a way that surpassed the understanding of European academics; without official sanction, it spoke for the people in a way that state-sponsored Socialist Realist art never could. They knew pop culture was potent, very potent, but they had no idea how to create more of it, or control it. They were so obsessed with their crude and unsophisticated Marxism, so devoted to their paradigm of the class struggle, that they worried about pop culture’s destructive top-down effect on the gullible proletariat and viewed Hollywood and the mass media as, naturally, a capitalist plot to seduce the rubes. (Seduction, they believed, was their socialist birthright, not capitalism’s.) They desired self-improving, consciousness-raising art to be a matter for the State, and they disdained the profit motive, though they certainly had no objection to making money. But their successors had no such quibbles with mass culture. They grasped that the “long march through the institutions” (as the Marxists characterized it) would be the ticket to ideological hegemony and even greater wealth—evolution, not revolution.
This is a book about how we got here. It is also a book about good and evil; about creation and destruction; about capitalism and socialism; about
