The Struggle for the Soul of the West

Since the publication of my book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace in 2015, the necessity of restoring Western culture to its proper place in our understanding of ourselves has only become more urgent. The prolonged assault on our common culture — European-American, for want of a broader, more inclusive description — has intensified, propelled by a burning hatred for a civilization that extends from the ancient Greeks to modern Americans and has been responsible for most of the world’s artistic, technological, and moral progress for three millennia. Indeed, even to rise to its defense at this imperiled moment has become controversial — a measure of just how deep the animosity in civilization’s enemies runs.

Whence comes this hatred for the West? The simple but sorry answer is: from ourselves — or at least from a significant segment of the population that has fallen under the spell of what I have termed the “satanic,” or cultural-Marxist, Left. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, Marxists have waged a battle for the soul of the West, not merely through politics, but through artistic and political philosophy. Sprung from the high brows of Rousseau and Hegel, these demon Athenas were made flesh in the forms of Karl Marx and, later, the Marxist collective known as the Frankfurt School.

The eternal battle between good and evil — symbolized by and given both literary and religious form in the figures of “God” and “Satan” — involves all aspects of the human experience, including our laws, mores, sexual relationships, our interactions with one another, and the body politic itself. It’s a battle that rages still.

As tools of analysis I chose two principal touchstones of our shared artistic heritage, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Faust, in order to illustrate my thesis that the arts most potently embody this struggle, and it is through an understanding of them — an understanding of the human soul — that we can best address the political issues that plague us.  more here