The Devil's Pleasure Palace (25 page)

Summarizing something every teenage boy knows after his first encounter with porn, Reich goes on to illustrate the “scientific”
principles behind his revolutionary new theory: “The orgasm formula which directs sex-economic research is as follows: MECHANICAL TENSION → BIOELECTRIC CHARGE → BIOELECTRIC DISCHARGE → MECHANICAL RELAXATION. . . . The immediate cause of many devastating diseases can be traced to the fact that man is the sole species which does not fulfill the natural law of sexuality.”

If it feels good, do it. Many artists and intellectuals, and not all of them teenage boys, found Reich's theories compelling. Among Reich's mature enthusiasts were Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Arthur Koestler, and William S. Burroughs. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his
New York Times
review of
Adventures in the Orgasmatron
, the book that the above-mentioned Christopher Turner wrote about Reich, “Is it too easy to simply speculate that men will make fools of themselves for the sake of sex?”

Hitchens characteristically ends his review of Turner's book with this arresting, contemptuous image:

Adventures in the Orgasmatron
has many fine and engaging passages, but I think my favorite must be this one, in which Alfred Kazin describes the pathetic trust in Reich shown by the writer Isaac Rosenfeld. Has there ever been a better description of the baffled naïveté of so many “New York intellectuals”?:

“Isaac's orgone box stood up in the midst of an enormous confusion of bedclothes, review copies, manuscripts, children, and the many people who went in and out of the room as if it were the bathroom. Belligerently sitting inside his orgone box, daring philistines to laugh, Isaac nevertheless looked lost, as if he were waiting in his telephone booth for a call that was not coming through.”

On the Unholy Left, there is no idea too stupid to try, no institution unworthy of attack, no theory not worth implementing without care for its results, no matter what the practical cost. Intentions are everything, results are nothing. Results are an illusion; theory is what counts, because theory can be debated endlessly within the safe harbors of academe. The key is to examine what those intentions really are. The answer lies in the Left's own sense of narrative or, rather, anti-Narrative.

The works of the Frankfurt School make up a contrarian manifesto, expressed as a political program. Individual words no longer have specific
meanings but stand as categorical imperatives. Women, blacks, gays, the environment, “choice,” and big government are all Good Things; their opposites are not. To use the word is to evoke the emotion associated with it, not the noun. (“Rape” has recently undergone a similar linguistic transformation, mutating from forcible sexual intercourse into acts of verbal aggression or “microagression,” or whatever the “victim” dislikes.) Thus language is used to silence discussion and criticism; it is “anti,” with “anti” now treated as an absolute good. To be “anti” almost anything is to be on the Right Side of History, surfing the Arc as it bends toward Justice. It requires no thought, only emotions. It requires no reflection upon the conundrum of Chesterton's Fence, only reflexes. It should be an embarrassment to anyone who cannot defend it intellectually, and yet it is not—because it is dogma.

Dogma creates its own reality. You do not have to think about it; it provides all the answers. It is easy to mock evangelical Protestants or Orthodox Jews who cite the book of Leviticus as the source of wisdom and instruction about food, health, or sexual morality; simply making an assertion from authority by citing scripture is no argument at all. So it is with the leftist catechism as it has evolved in the wake of Critical Theory and political correctness, which has the added advantages of being of recent vintage and widely disseminated by an enthusiastic media. It deserves to be questioned and mocked with every bit as much jollity as the atheists attack Southern Baptist preachers.

What, after all, did “sexual liberation” accomplish? What positive good did it achieve? Other than providing men with greater, easier access to women, how did it improve anyone's life? It promised us liberation from “sexual repression” (what teenaged boys used to call, sniggeringly, DSB), freedom from an old and tired sexual morality. It promised to tear down the Chesterton's Fence that stood between our libidos and our responsibilities. It is easy to see why it was popular, since it partly leveled the sexual playing field for beta males, whose chances of sexual “conquest” vastly improved once “conquest” was taken out of the equation and a woman's natural resistance to indiscriminate sex (or less discriminating sex) was broken down. In the guise of cooperative pleasure, it erected a new egalitarianism between the sexes, told women that their sex drives and their sexual responsibilities were exactly the same as a man's. (It's a mystery why no feminist of the time complained that, in
effect, the new doctrine still portrayed women as lesser creatures who needed to raise—or lower—their sexual sights to the level of a man's.) The newfound “liberation” led to a rapid increase in abortion, HIV and AIDS, and illegitimate children. Finally, wearing the masque of “progress,” it returned Westerners to primitive levels of sexuality, kicking out the moral underpinnings of the culture (even if the morals were often observed more in the breach than in practice). Who knew that the slogan “Every man a stud, every woman a slut” could be a winner? It is not for humanity to defeat Sin, but to be wary and canny in our interaction with it. And, in any case, the
Ewig-Weibliche
will never stoop to whoredom.

Whoever thought turning women into men was a good idea needs his head examined. And turning men into women (the necessary corollary, as it turned out, although that bit was less advertised) was even worse. Hence the very real consequences of “no consequences.” Above all, the sheer charlatanism of it astounds, nearly a century on. What the hell were we thinking? How was it possible for the intelligentsia of the United States, having just participated in the great American victory in the Second World War, to embrace such an obviously cockamamie philosophy? The Greco-Roman medical theory of bodily humors, the selling of indulgences in the Middle Ages, and phrenology had more scientific bases than Reich's twaddle.

And what has been the effect? The “war between the sexes” has rarely been more hostile. The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases has soared; viruses once contracted only in a bordello can be found at the corner bar. What began as unconstrained sexual license—orgies, multiple sex partners, etc.—has turned into “yes means yes” affirmative consent for even a one-night stand. On campuses, young men and women now eye one another with suspicion: That attractive person you see might be not only a potential sex partner but also a future plaintiff in a lawsuit. The more sex, it seems, the more heartbreak; the less “repression,” the less romance. Public billboards in Los Angeles promote the use of condoms and AIDS hotlines. The promised Venusberg has turned venereal.

Interestingly, it was right around the same time that the sexual-liberation movement got fully under way—the 1970s—that the thanatopic side of it arose in popular culture, in the movies. For this was also the heyday of horror and slasher films, movies about enraged, often immortal serial killers (
Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
A Nightmare on Elm Street
) who preyed upon nubile, often naked teens in various acts of sexual intercourse. Nearly every one of our perky protagonists wound up on the wrong side of the slasher's weapon of choice, save one: a young woman known in the trade as the Final Girl.

It's as if Newton's Third Law of Motion applied, setting off an equal and opposite reaction to Reich's prescriptions and nostrums: The more sex we have, the less satisfying it is, and the more culturally destructive. In Japan, more and more young men are forgoing marriage and even dating in favor of staying home, watching porn, and playing video games; as a result, the country is now in a population death-spiral, with adult diapers outselling baby nappies. Elsewhere, nudity abounds as an example of female “empowerment,” and yet rabid feminists see rapists not only behind every bush but standing at the podium. A kind of insanity has gripped the West, a sexual hysteria far worse than anything Reich conveniently diagnosed in his attempt to get laid as often as possible.

Get laid young men most certainly have, but what has been the upshot? The sexual proclivities of a pasha in his harem or a gangsta with his “ho's,” however, have exactly the same deleterious effect on Western culture as they have had on the Mohammedans or the black underclass. What Reich and the other Frankfurters forgot was that “repression” (to use their word) is a
good
thing when it is called by its proper name: “tradition.”

But for them to accept tradition—the very thing they battle—would be the end of them. Then they would finally have to face the worst kind of death—the Thanatos of their philosophy, which is the only possession, besides rage, that they ever really had. Their Pleasure Palace, like Schubert's, would crumble into dust, and they, along with it, would be blown away.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

F
aced with his imminent execution for having offended the emperor, the sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius wrote
The Consolation of Philosophy
, an imaginary dialogue between a condemned man and a beautiful woman representing the spirit of Philosophy, who suddenly appears to him in prison:

“Could I desert thee, child,” said she, “and not lighten the burden that thou hast taken upon thee through the hatred of my name, by sharing this trouble? . . . Thinkest thou that now, for the first time in an evil age, Wisdom hath been assailed by peril? . . .

So there is nothing thou shouldst wonder at if, on the seas of this life, we are tossed by storm-blasts . . . And if at times and seasons they set in array against us, and fall on in overwhelming strength, our leader draws off her forces into the citadel while they are busy plundering the useless baggage. But we from our vantage ground, safe from all this wild work, laugh to see them making prize of the most valueless of things, protected by a bulwark which aggressive folly may not aspire to reach.”

To put her most important lines in plain English: “Do you think that only now, in an evil age, Wisdom is under attack for the first time? And if at times evil-doers fall upon us with overwhelming strength, we take refuge in our citadel while they are plundering useless baggage. And we laugh at them.”

Although it did not spare the Roman nobleman the chop at the hands of the Ostrogothic emperor, Theodoric the Great,
The Consolation of Philosophy
turned out to be one of the great best-sellers of the medieval period, widely copied and distributed, a constant source of solace for those afflicted with the unfairness of the world. Profoundly Christian without being explicitly so,
The Consolation of Philosophy
comforted readers for more than a century before the arrival of movable type made it even more available. Essentially, the
Consolation
grapples with the age-old question of the role evil plays in the world and what our proper response to it should be: not abolition (for that is impossible) but acceptance of evil as both instructive and as an occasion of grace caused by suffering.

Boethius's spirit of Philosophy adds one more crucial element: mockery. As Martin Luther said: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” The most potent weapon the Right has against the Left—mockery of its sheer pretentious ridiculousness—is the one it most seldom employs.

There is no consolation in the leftist philosophy, only anger and hatred. It is the expression of impotence, and not only of the intellectual variety; recall that “intellectuals” from Rousseau to Marx to Brecht to Sartre to the aptly named Lillian Hellman were beasts in their private lives, and most of them, on some level, knew it. Perhaps their antisocial, amoral, and even immoral behavior was a reflection of their hateful ideology; trying to save humanity while despising people is the very essence of cognitive dissonance. So their philosophies, naturally, had to trump their personalities.

But to call them on it, to point out that the emperor is as naked as one of the doomed teens about to get sliced and diced by Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, or Freddy Krueger—and, furthermore, that he is a singularly unimpressive specimen of manhood—is to set their hair aflame. In retaliation, as proof of their superior intellects, they will hurl
their academic credentials at you, the fruits of their long march through the institutions—degrees that prove, more than anything else, the worthlessness of much of our higher education today.

Scorn drives the Unholy Left insane. They cannot bear to have their theories questioned, or the failed results of those theories laughed at. Dignity is one of the imaginary virtues—one of the last virtues, period—they possess, and to have that attacked along with their entire “belief system” (the jeering term they use for organized religion) is too much to bear. Mockery is the thing that brings them quickest to frothing, garmentrending rage, so wedded are they to the notion of their own goodness and infallibility when it comes to matters of impiety and immorals.

The goal of Critical Theory was to make dissent from Marxist orthodoxy impossible. By establishing that there could be nothing beyond criticism except Critical Theory itself, the Frankfurt School rendered a guilty verdict against society before there had even been a trial. But this is simply crazy. “Sentence first, verdict afterwards,” as the Queen of Hearts says to Alice near the end of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
: