The Devil's Pleasure Palace (16 page)

It is therefore no accident that the path to destruction and darkness must be enforced by totalitarian means; and for the same reason, totalitarian states must inevitably fall, since it is impossible for them to maintain absolute control over 100 percent of their population all the time. As the collapse of the Soviet Union proved, the light of a single refusenik was enough to keep the flame of freedom burning until it eventually ignited the rotting structures of the corrupt government and brought it down.

The notion of Light and Darkness runs throughout man's storytelling, naturally. Light-Bringer, the gift of fire: The Titan, Prometheus, stole fire itself from Olympus to give it to humanity and was eternally punished by being chained to a rock and having his liver ripped out by an eagle daily. Similar stories appear across all cultures, including the Indian, Polynesian, and Amerindian. Fear of the darkness and the satanic creatures that might lurk within it is a staple of tales of terror and suspense, not to mention horror films. Indeed, the spooky attraction of the horror genre lies in its partial rejection of the light-defeating-darkness premise; a flick of a lighter can reveal eldritch horrors better left unseen, even at the cost of your life.

This is the underlying premise of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos. Once dismissed as the pulp-fiction nightmares of a New England eccentric, the dark world of the Great Old Ones (ancient gods now imprisoned in deathlike slumbers who must not be awakened) has found new resonance in the slumbering unconscious of the post-Christian West. “
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn”
(“In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”) is a phrase familiar to anyone who has a passing familiarity with this mythos. Lovecraft's works feature a panoply of monsters. They're not from the id, as are the creatures of
Forbidden Planet
, the 1956 science-fiction movie that introduced a wide audience not only to bits of Freudian psychiatry but also to Robbie the Robot, with an underlying plot inspired by Shakespeare's
Tempest
. Lovecraft's beasts are from beyond space and time itself (which, as Wagner posits in
Parsifal
, are one and the same thing).

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents,” reads the famous opening line of Lovecraft's 1926 short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” first published
two years later in the pages of
Weird Tales
. But better to quote the first paragraph in its entirety as it continues:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Thus speaks the voice of seductive nihilism. For Lovecraft's tormented three-named mini-Fausts (Francis Wayland Thurston, George Gammell Angell, Charles Dexter Ward, et al.), nihilism is the only possible reaction to the overwhelming terrors of an unholy Creation. In Lovecraft, who set many of his most famous tales in the haunted environs of Massachusetts (generally, the fictional town of Arkham, wherein is located the equally fictional Miskatonic University), the seekers after the light of knowledge come to bitterly regret their inquiries, begging for a merciful death as the madness of their discoveries—the forbidden knowledge—overwhelms and overtakes them. Their scientific inquiries, like Faust's, lead straight to Hell, this particular Hell consisting of the entire shell of the cosmos, save only poor pitiful Earth, where an insect-like humanity dwells in a fool's paradise, to be lost at any moment.

That such nihilism has a powerful hold on the human imagination is indisputable, especially among the young. For those for whom the very real physical and moral ailments of age lie off in a distant, unimaginable future, a flirtation with Sin and Death often proves irresistible. There is a certain frisson to be had from realizing, as in a Hercule Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie, that the murderer must be
one of us
, that guilt is collective, not personal. In the aftermath of the breakdown of the studio system in Hollywood in the late 1960s and early '70s, a parade of movies with a nihilistic bent emerged from the generation of hot young writers and directors, often ending with the hero unable to break through the veil of evil as the bad guys get away.

Foremost among these pictures is probably Robert Towne's
Chinatown
(1974), directed by Roman Polanski, whose wife, the actress Sharon Tate,
had been the most prominent victim of the Manson family's butchery spree in 1969 Los Angeles. Set in the City of the Angels,
Chinatown
tackled L.A.'s very own creation myth, the bringing of the water of the Owens Valley to the nascent and very thirsty metropolis—here depicted as Tinseltown's original sin. Caught up in a plot whose machinations he cannot begin to suspect, private dick J.J. Gittes is no match for the monstrous Noah Cross who, in the end, gets away with not only the money and the girl but also, literally, murder. The script's famous last line (“Forget it, Jake—it's Chinatown,” delivered in the noir darkness of a Los Angeles night) symbolizes the man's inability to fully comprehend evil and his utter impotence in the face of its relentless, unsparing malevolence. Evil cannot be pleaded with or reasoned with, and sometimes it cannot even be defeated.

Nihilism, however, comes with its solution: the heroic impulse, action. Satan may be able to destroy, but he cannot create. Beyond a young man's fashionable flirtation with death, his testing of the boundaries, his sheer delight to be living on the edge, lies the desire to win, not lose. This is why soldiers are drawn from among the young; not only are they at their peak of physical fitness, but to them death is merely theoretical, even fascinating, and they have not yet had their idealism completely beaten out of them. The question for civilization is how to harness this bravery (for so, in war, does it appear) and make it useful. In the ongoing battle against the suicide warriors of Islam, the Western soldier might appear at first to be at a disadvantage. He desires to survive contact with the enemy. He does not dream of “martyrdom,” a word whose principal meaning (a principled, selfless death at the hands of the enemy, illustrating the superior moral quality of his faith) has been hideously corrupted and unthinkingly passed along by a media unmoored from our culture's Christian roots. If the Western soldier does not wish to be a martyr to God, he has proven willing to sacrifice himself to save his comrades in arms, and this can inspire even greater feats of heroism. By contrast, the nihilistic fighters of Islam, as they constantly remind us, love death more than they love life.

As tastes and times change, so do story endings. In the
Chanson de Roland
, Roland dies, but not in vain—his deaths rouses Charlemagne's Christian Franks to victory against the invading Muslims. It would be easy to recast the victory as the triumph of nihilism, to conclude that
Roland, led into a trap and too proud to call for reinforcements in a timely manner, ultimately dies for nothing. Looking at the quickening pace of the current Muslim
Reconquista—
this time of the entire
Dar al-Harb
(non-Islamic world of war) that must be brought to submission so that the peace of Allah might reign, via the infiltration disguised as “immigration” of the Crusader homelands (Islam has a long memory)—one could easily envision such an ending, depending on the outcome of the current struggle. Will that be the West's fate? Or are there still enough Rolands to fight, both morally and physically, for what used to be considered a superior way of life?

One of the seeming paradoxes in modern American political life is the alliance between the Unholy Left and recrudescent militant Islam. It does not seem to matter that a worldwide Muslim caliphate under barbarous sharia law would mean the executions of homosexuals, the removal of women from the public sphere, the extinction of art and musical culture—all things the Left professes to care about passionately. And yet they were silent when the Taliban, after it seized power in Afghanistan in 2001, dynamited to smithereens the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas on the grounds of idolatry. Nor has the destruction of priceless Mesopotamian artifacts in Iraq or Roman ruins in Syria bothered “progressives” overmuch.

And yet there is no real mystery. As the fighting emperor, Marcus Aurelius, wrote in his collection of battlefield musings known as the
Meditations
: “Ask yourself, what is this thing in itself, by its own special constitution? What is it in substance, and in form, and in matter? What is its function in the world? For how long does it subsist? Thus must you examine all things that present themselves to you.” What the Left and Islam have in common is the only thing that matters to either: a will to power and a desire for submission on the part of their enemies. Doctrinal differences (and there are many) between two innately totalitarian movements can be sorted out later. What matters is that the Principal Enemy first be defeated, since he—us—represents an immediate moral and mortal threat. The swiftest path to victory for both lies not in confrontation, but in our unilateral cultural disarmament.

The theoreticians of the Frankfurt School could offer aught but sweet utopian nothings in place of anything constructive; they preached freedom but brought only slavery (“freedom is slavery,” as in
1984
); they promised the self-actualization of all men but instead reduced the
populace of whole nations to the status of collaborators and clerks; they guaranteed peace but brought only the unending warfare that obtains when too much is never (and never can be) enough. The pursuit of earthly perfection, as Faust discovered, ends in misery, murder, and death. However tarted up in their often impenetrable German turns of phrase, at the root of their deceptive philosophy lie incitement and rage in the service of a quest for power over their fellow men. The Devil always wears the same mask, and yet each generation must penetrate the disguise for itself or perish.

But not until recently has cultural nihilism leapt the bounds of literature and, to a lesser extent, philosophy and found its expression as a full-rigged, democratically installed political system instead of merely savage tyranny, dispensed by conquering warlords. The injected poison of Critical Theory undermines at every step the kind of muscular cultural self-confidence that distinguished Western warriors and leaders through the end of World War II. A general such as George S. Patton Jr. would be nearly unthinkable today. Darkness descended upon Eastern Europe in the wake of the postwar political stalemate, and with no one to stop it, it was only partially dispersed by the fall of Communism in the East Bloc. The ethics of the Soviet Union were unhappily transplanted, like an airborne virus, to the child of the Enlightenment, the New World.

Not for nothing has the age of European artistic, scientific, philosophical, and geographic discovery been called the Enlightenment, which followed the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greco-Roman culture after a century of European feudalism (the period idealized by Erich Fromm, when the serfs and peasants knew their place). Scholars generally date the beginning of this extraordinary flowering of knowledge at around 1685, which just so happens to be the year of Johann Sebastian Bach's birth. Although a good deal of modern scholarship has been devoted to dispelling the notion of Europe's “Dark Ages” (a chauvinistic coinage of the Renaissance), there is no doubt that the liberating influence of the Italian Renaissance, paving the way to the breakthroughs of the Enlightenment, led Europeans into an age of unprecedented discovery.

Most of the commentary on the Enlightenment addresses the scientific and philosophical advances in Western European culture, but we should not overlook the role of music and opera, particularly one
of Mozart's last works, the German
Singspiel
(song cycle) known as
The Magic Flute.
No clearer representation of the conflict between the forces of light and darkness exists in the operatic canon, and it is worth spending some time with it.

In Milton, light and darkness symbolize the opposing forces of God and Satan. The poet opens Book Three with this invocation:

       
. . . since God is light,

       
And never but in unapproached light

       
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,

       
Bright effluence of bright essence increate

       
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

       
. . . thou, celestial light

       
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

       
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence

       
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

       
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Such imagery was and is particularly potent in northern Europe with its short winter days and long nights. There, the return of the light at Christmas, both literally and symbolically, is visible in a way that it is not in the more southerly climes of the United States. The sun's daily ascendancy can be measured in minutes, not seconds, and the solar orb's progression across the southwestern and western skies offers a daily reminder of the march of the seasons that is wholly absent at the equator.