The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Page B

history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.
    What evidence is there that there is an arc of history and that it bends in any particular direction? One would think that the Unholy Left would be the last to assert such a grand pattern, given their disbelief in the Deity. Whence comes this “arc”? Who created it? Where did its moral impulse toward “justice” come from? What is “justice” anyway, and who decides? And if the word “justice” bears a bien-pensant modifier (as in “environmental justice”), the only “justice” is likely to be the “justice” of revenge. The word “justice,” in the hands of the Left, has come to mean pretty much any policy goal they desire.
    None of this matters, however, when the purpose of the assertion is not to offer an argument but to shut down the opposition via the timely employment of unimpeachable buzzwords and to advance a political agenda that has little or nothing to do with the terms deployed for its advancement. Indeed, martial metaphors, not moralistic catchphrases, are the key to understanding the modern Left and its “scientific” dogma of Critical Theory: Theirs is a Hobbesian war of all against all ( bellum omnum contra omnes ), of every man’s hand against every other man’s. As Orwell, who knew a thing or two about the intellectual fascism of the Left, wrote in 1984 : “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” These three aphorisms are the official slogans of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 , and the truth is whatever the Ministry says it is. Truth is malleable and fungible, a function of day and date. The Devil will say what he has to say and will quote such scripture as he requires in order to achieve the sole objective remaining to him: the ruination of Man and his consignment to Hell.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE SLEEP OF PURE REASON PRODUCES MONSTERS
    A t the end of the eighteenth century, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya produced a suite of etchings called “Los Caprichos,” the most famous of which was El sueño de la razón produce monstruos . The Age of Enlightenment was receding as Romanticism took hold, Kant had issued his Critique of Pure Reason, and the publication of Goethe’s Faust was less than ten years away. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the Romantic monsters had broken through the steel of the Enlightenment’s rational faculties, unleashed first by Goethe in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Weber in Der Freischütz (1821), Berlioz in the Symphonie Fantastique (1830), and, soon enough, in the music of Liszt and Wagner.
    Goya expanded upon the etching’s caption in some editions: “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” It is at once a statement and a warning: The Romantic spirit, in a kind of Newtonian equal-and-opposite reaction, would now impel men to probe the depths of their thoughts and hearts, to go deeper than even Enlightenment science (or the science of today, for that matter) had ever hoped to go. But what might be revealed was not