Got to Get Us Back to the Garden...

Marcuse

What’s this madness we are now calling Critical Theory? I know something of it, since it attracted me too back in the 1970s. It is an attitude that has been with us throughout history, and no doubt before. 

Terence Corcoran’s recent article in the National Post mentions Herbert Marcuse. He was indeed a major voice for the tendency then, as was Norman O. Brown, and Aldous Huxley.

Marcuse’s thinking was encapsulated by a graffito said to have appeared during the Paris Uprising in 1968. “Beware—even the ears have walls.”

Cool. Very Sixties. We were born to bliss; but had all been trapped by mind-forged manacles. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” as William Blake had put it, “everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Aldous Huxley loved and used that quote, as he promoted the recreational use of LSD; it inspired the name of “The Doors.”

Norman O. Brown’s pitch was similar: we had somehow tricked ourselves into seeing only certain parts of our body as erogenous. We must recover the sexuality of it all, of all things, and live in a constant state of orgasm.

You can perhaps see the attraction. You can see how some people would get violent in the service of such a goal, and view anything that seemed to stand in the way of it as “fascism.”

What stands in the way of it, ultimately, is anything beyond the unknowing wonder of a newborn child. Civilization was a terrible blunder. Any assumptions about the nature of reality are oppressive. Thoughts of right and wrong, of morality, are only efforts to control. Logic itself is oppressive.

Hard to argue against that, because being illogical, nonsensical, or self-contradictory simply does not matter. In fact, the simple act of arguing against it is oppressive.

The image, in conventional terms, is of returning to the state of the Garden of Eden.

 

And the Judeo-Christian tradition has its response, for this is an eternal desire. The way back is barred; the goal, though it might seem infinitely desirable, is impossible. And it is impossible because of sin.

What sobered me up personally was the movie “A Man for All Seasons.” There is an exchange in it between St. Thomas More and the young hotblood, Will Roper:

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

 

We cannot go back, any more than we can crawl back into the womb. The only way is forward to something new, a city on a hill. 

And trying to knock down all the fences is, intentionally or not, doing the Devil’s work, and allowing him to range free.