Marcuse, Fromm, and All That

Another book worth reading has emerged.  (HT:  McCain via AOSHQ)

“The greatest difference in the universe . . . is the difference between nothing and something, between an infinity of darkness and a single point of light. . . . It is the difference between atheism and God.”  --Michael Walsh from his book The Devil's Pleasure Palace; The Cult of Critical Theory and The Subversion of The West.

One could (almost) stop at that quotation and meditate for a moment on the First Thing Created, which was "light."  Of the multiple references to 'light' found in the Bible, the most compelling is Christ's "I AM the Light of the world...." which combines that "I AM" (see the OT's "I AM WHO AM" with the notion of 'light' which defines the Judaeo-Christian weltanschauung.

While McCain emphasizes 'the godless Commies' in his essay, he could have stopped at 'godless' and sufficiently captured the 'critical theory' bunch, and curiously enough, the Mohammedan bunch whose God happens to be decisively less than the Judaeo-Christian Trinity.  That is to say, while Allah is "God', Allah is not the Trinity; thus the license to lie and murder found in the Mohammedan Heresy.

But we digress.

...Whatever it is called, this intellectual virus was brought to America in the 1940s by a group of left-wing refugees — including Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich — who are generally known as the Frankfurt School because of their former associations with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Embraced by the avant-garde of American academia, the ideas of the Frankfurt School has enormous influence after World War II. One of their key ideas, given a patina of “scientific” credibility by Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, was the belief that the traditional family was a breeding ground of fascism. This provided the Left with a trite pseudo-Freudian explanation of anti-Communism as rooted in neurotic insecurities....

One could go further than 'an attack on the family' by mentioning its corollaries:  the licensing of abortion and homosex 'marriage', not to mention chemical birth-control.  All of these together (and what is yet to come, such as the licensing of polygamy/andry and 'marriage' to animals) put the "P" of pleasure into its real context--the attack is on the Laws of Nature and Nature's God.

It is not chance, by the way, that Walsh includes art and beauty into his book ( Exposing the hostility of this crypto-Marxist ideology toward that which is spiritual in man’s nature, Walsh appeals to the finest traditions of Western culture, deriving his book’s title from Franz Schubert’s first opera, Des Teufels Lustschloss. Walsh’s book bristles with references to classical music (e.g., Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner) and philosophy (e.g., Aristotle, Rousseau, Nietzsche), as well as literature and films, including Casablanca, High Noon, The Wild One, The Godfather and Independence Day.)

If one cares to remember, Truth and Beauty are attributes of the Judaeo-Christian God.  You quite literally cannot have one without the other.  Conversely, when Beauty is diminished, so is Truth.  The third attribute, by the way, is Goodness.  Draw your own conclusions--but seeing the Planned Butcherhood videos will paint the picture quite well if you can't imagine it on your own.

So Kim Davis, for all her other faults, ain't just whistling Dixie as she passes the graveyard.  And yes, she's passing the graveyard of the West as we knew it.