Novelist and former Time editor Michael Walsh has published a new book entitled The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West
. It’s about how critical theory–the notion that all cultural and linguistic expressions are to be “deconstructed” as mere impositions of power–has brought Western thought to the point of nihilism. Kathryn Lopez interviews Walsh at National Review Online. Read the whole thing, but I excerpt after the jump an exchange about how the radical left has become “Satanic” and how the canons of “political correctness” are being used, in the Marxist way, to suppress thought. I especially like Walsh’s line about how the left has become “a totalitarianism masquerading as beneficence.”
From Michael Walsh on The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and Heroism in Modernity | National Review Online:
Lopez: How does Critical Theory choke “the life out of free-ranging rational discourse”?
Walsh: Via the medium of “political correctness,” a fascism of the mind that seeks to prevent thought by preventing discussion. If you can’t say it, the Leftist reasoning goes, after a while you can’t think it, either. One would have thought the sudden collapse of their beloved Soviet Union would have disabused them of this notion, but no.
Lopez: Why must you bring the Devil into it?
Walsh: For some time, I’d been thinking about writing a book about Satan in the modern world, and how we grapple with the problem of evil in a society increasingly hostile to, and devoid of, Christianity. The current existential crisis facing the West — a crisis entirely provoked by Critical Theory — provided the opportunity for a larger discussion of Western culture and civilization, using the tools of that culture itself (narrative story-telling, poetry, music) to explain the relationship between religion and civilization. Political correctness turns our most innermost thoughts hellish and bids fair to punish humanity for the crime of free thinking. What could be more satanic? Whether you believe in Satan literally or literarily, he certainly makes a compelling villain, as both Milton and Goethe demonstrated.
Lopez: Surely the Left isn’t satanic.
Walsh: Au contraire, today’s Left is the very embodiment of the small-s satanic. The term applies to the Left’s advocacy of things that our culture used to recognize as antithetical to a moral society, from the nature of American government down to the social issues — some of which weren’t even issues a few decades ago.
Further, the Left has cast aside much of the mufti it was forced to adopt in the United States — “tolerance” being its principal mask — and can finally be seen for what it is really is: a totalitarianism masquerading as beneficence. If that isn’t satanic, I don’t know what is.
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