And the 'terrible waters' they have wrought since 1968.
The activities of the Frankfurt School, the group of
intellectuals which spawned the New Left, the movement that from 1968 onwards
captured the cultural hegemony in the West, can be likened to the story of the
‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’.
This famous ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is known in the
English-speaking world primarily due to the cinematic rendering of it in Walt
Disney’s ‘Fantasia’, with Mickey Mouse in the title role. The creators of the
ten-minute cartoon episode remained fairly true to the original, with these
exceptions: Goethe’s apprentice does not fall asleep, and he hacks the
bewitched broom in two only, not in innumerable splinters. A third deviation
comes right at the end: In the original, the sorcerer doesn’t whack his wayward
assistant with the broom. Instead, the returning senior wizard simply puts
everything back in order. There is no mention of any sanction at all. Prompted
maybe by Paul Dukas’ compelling and in parts spooky music (a symphonic poem
composed 1897 specifically with Goethe’s ballad in mind), Disney’s filmmakers
may simply have assumed the punishment and the other changes.
In the German-speaking world, one line of the poem is often
cited when describing a development over which the instigator has lost control:
‘Die ich rief, die Geister, werd’ ich nun nicht los.’ Which translates into:
The spirits which I summoned, I now cannot get rid of.
What’s interesting in this context is that Goethe wrote the
ballad in the year 1797, according to Wikipedia as a warning to his
contemporaries in view of developments in France after the revolution.
Disney’s Fantasia makes no mention of Goethe, although their
version is quite obviously based on his poem. Possibly because, by the time the
film was being made in 1940, talk of looming war made it inexpedient to mention
the great German. Instead, the introduction simply says it is an ‘ancient
tale.’
So, how does this ballad relate to the Frankfurt School and
their doings in the real world? It is now half a century since the pivotal year
of 1968, when people – mostly young and impressionable – across the whole West,
inspired by the Frankfurt School, started their infamous ‘long march through
the institutions.’ These ‘68ers’ can be divided into two groups: Sorcerer’s
apprentices and hobgoblins.
The sorcerer’s apprentices are those who with their words change
– not a broom, but – other humans into the equivalent of hobgoblins and set
them in motion. The latter become the water carriers for the former, until a
few of the apprentices (by far not all), appalled at the ‘terrible waters’
(‘entsetzliches Gewässer’) thus rendered, desperately try to dispel the new
evil.
The representatives of the Frankfurt School, the intellectuals
of the so-called ‘critical theory,’ are, or were, real life sorcerer’s
apprentices. ‘Critical theory’ is not actually a theory but a school of
thought, or rather a project. According to its leading theorist, Max Horkheimer
(1895 – 1973), critical theory seeks “to liberate human beings from the
circumstances that enslave them.” According to the German Wikipedia page on the
subject, the aim of critical theory is to “reveal the ideologies of the
mechanisms of power and oppression” and to achieve a “rational society of
responsible human beings.”
On the face of it, this all sounds well and good. However, if
those really are the aims, why do we never hear anything from that group about
our monetary system? Maybe I’ve overlooked something, but I don’t think any
representative of the Frankfurt School has ever seriously grappled with, say,
the Austrian business cycle theory. Indeed, the words ‘rational society’
indicate a very different tradition from that of the Austrians, namely that of
Plato and his notion of philosopher kings, who were permitted unethical means,
such as the ‘noble lie,’ to attain the overarching aim.
The only person who was in any way close to the attitudes of the
Frankfurt School and who had seriously dealt with economics, was of a slightly
earlier generation, namely John Maynard Keynes (1883 – 1946). Leading Austrian
School economist Ludwig von Mises once wrote an article titled ‘Stones into
Bread: The Keynesian Miracle,’ in which he charges the British mathematician
turned economist with exactly that: bragging to be able to perform an economic
miracle akin to one of the demands with which Satan tempted Jesus Christ.
In other words, Keynes too was a sorcerer’s apprentice of the
kind Goethe described. Ethically and morally too, he was of the same corrosive
substance as the Frankfurt School thinkers. He was a serial philanderer and
described himself as an ‘immoralist.’ As such, the Platonist Keynes anticipated
what leading Frankfurt School representative Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) propagated
in his book ‘Eros and Civilization.’ Marcuse claimed that liberation of the
‘non-procreative Eros’ would lead to new, paradisiacal conditions, where
alienated labor would disappear and be replaced by non-alienated libidinal
work.
As Keynes despised principles, among others the principle of
solid financing, he was an early representative of the present relativism and
the modern sorcerer’s apprentice of magical money proliferation. Without this –
today pervasive – deliberate inflation, there would be much less money
illusion, much less loitering, much less financing of unproductive, dreamy, or
even destructive activities and organizations. His cynical adage, in the long
run we are all dead, is virtually the paragon of willful present-orientation and
dismissal of the future, which is characteristic of the basic attitude to life
among today’s representatives of the New Left, and of their followers,
conscious or otherwise.
Marcuse, in turn, was the creator of the term ‘repressive
tolerance.’ What he meant was that normal tolerance actually serves to
marginalise and suppress the truth about our immiseration (or impoverishment)
in the ruling system. Contrary to that, Marcuse established the term
‘liberating tolerance.’ He simply claimed that revolutionary minorities are in
possession of the truth and that it is therefore their duty to liberate the
majority from their fallacious views. Thus the revolutionary minorities have
the right to suppress rival and supposedly harmful opinions. In addition,
Marcuse also permitted the use of violence by this revolutionary minority. He
legitimised this use of force as ‘defensive.’ It isn’t the beginning of a new
chain of violence, he claimed, but the attempt to break an existing one.
This kind of misuse of language was typical of the Frankfurt
School. Another example is immiseration. Because the Marxist theory of
immiseration had been refuted by reality, the thinkers of the New Left switched
from economics to psychology. Now they claimed that while capitalism had lead
to material wealth, it had caused psychological and intellectual immiseration.
What is also striking, apart from the distortion of words and
meanings, is the predominance of negativity. As the name indicates, ‘critical
theory’ was always keen to criticise. Their utopia always remained very woolly.
The reason for this is simple: Otherwise they would have had to admit that
their vision was that of communism. Nevertheless, clear-sighted contemporaries
realised this even in 1968. In that year, Erwin K. Scheuch edited a book about
the ‘68ers and gave it the title ‘Die Wiedertäufer der Wohlstandsgesellschaft,’
meaning ‘The Anabaptists of the Affluent Society.’ In this book he wrote that
the New Left wanted an ‘undifferentiated society,’ without division of labor.
It seems that Marx’s vision that in future people would hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, farm livestock in the evening and criticise after
dinner, is still the vision of the New Left even today.
However, the Frankfurt School suggested a different road to the
communist paradise than that chosen by Lenin and Stalin in Soviet Russia. The
direct intellectual precursors of the Frankfurt School, the Italian Antonio
Gramsci (1891 – 1937) and the Hungarian Georg Lukács (1885 – 1971), had
recognized that further west in Europe there was an obstacle on this path which
could not be eliminated by physical violence and terror: the private, middle
class, classical liberal bourgeois culture based on Christian values. These,
they concluded, needed to be destroyed by infiltration of the institutions.
Their followers have succeeded in doing so. The sorcerer's apprentices of the
Frankfurt School conjured up an army of hobgoblins who empty their buckets over
us every day. Instead of water, the buckets are filled with what Lukács had
approvingly labelled ‘cultural terrorism.’
The hobgoblins of 1968 and the following years, mostly students,
later became lecturers, teachers, media employees, civil servants and of course
politicians. They and their later progeny are endowed with a sense of mission
and the illusion of being on the side of moral righteousness. In thousands of
more or less important, but always influential, positions of authority, they
succeed in injecting entire generations with a disgust for their own culture and
history, and a selective inability to think. With their allegedly liberating
tolerance, they have torn down natural or culturally nurtured inhibitions and
replaced them with state enforced prohibitions on thinking and acting. These in
turn have almost completely destroyed the natural workings and defense
mechanisms of a healthy society.
How could they have been so successful in such a short space of
time? The sorcerer's apprentices apparently managed to fill a psycho-spiritual
gap in the market; they supplied a demand keenly felt by those they turned into
hobgoblins. The market niche to fill was an apparent shortcut to paradise. The
sorcerer's apprentice in Goethe's ballad transforms the broom into a hobgoblin,
so that it can do the hard work of carrying water for him. Likewise, we are
always tempted to find a shortcut to paradise. Just as Keynes did with his
monetary policy, which would allegedly turn proverbial stones into bread.
The sorcerer's apprentices of the Frankfurt School dreamt of a
communist paradise on earth. Initially, among the hard left they were the only
ones aware of the fact that this brutal path to paradise would fail. With the
construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, however, this failure was obvious to
all. This was the New Left’s moment. It was only then that they got any
traction and noticeable response. At least in Western Europe. In the US, this
moment of truth may have come a little later. Gary North contends in his book
‘Unholy Spirits’ that John F. Kennedy’s death was “the death rattle of the
older rationalism.” A few weeks later, Beatlemania came to America. However,
the appearance of the book ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson in September 1962,
which heralded the start of environmentalism, points to the Berlin Wall as the
more fundamental game changer in the West. A few years later, the spellbound
hobgoblins began their long march through the institutions.
Half a century after 1968, we see the catastrophic effects of
this magic: a desire for instant gratification and a loss of meaning of life.
The desire for instant gratification can be seen in the destruction of
established institutions, especially the family, and in the countless number of
abortions. Or in unbounded sexuality and the supremacy of the pleasure
principle. Loss of meaning of life can be recognized in drug abuse, for
example. Other effects are the dulling of the mind, a lack of general,
all-round education, uncritical acceptance of claims that cannot be falsified,
such as that of a supposedly man-made climate change, the acceptance of
violence as a means of political debate and, of course, the cultural bursting
of the dam concerning migration.
The sorcerer’s apprentices have become very quiet lately. Maybe
some of them are shocked by what they have wrought. At least two of them could
see what was happening even in 1968 and tried to stop the unfolding
catastrophe. One of them was Theodor W. Adorno (1903 – 1969). The other was his
student Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929). In the face of disrupted lectures and rising
violence in general, they accused the radicals of ‘left-wing fascism.’ Like
Goethe’s apprentice, they realised they had created a ‘spawn on hell’
(‘Ausgeburt der Hölle’). They tried to stop the hobgoblins with a new spell,
but failed.
Currently, some people are trying to turn things around with
other spells. The spells of these new sorcerer’s apprentices use magic words
such as ‘nation’ and ‘the people.’ Like their predecessors, they believe that
they can use the state as a magic wand, e.g. to force children into schools to
learn certain world views, and everything will be all right again.
So far, none of them, neither the older nor the younger
apprentices, are calling for the ‘master’ to return, as Goethe’s apprentice
does in desperation near the end. However, the ‘cultural terrorism’ keeps
flowing, and the ‘terrible waters’ are rising alarmingly. The legacy of the
revolt of 1968 is a complete catastrophe for western civilization. This
civilization had already been suffering from the disease of statism, but
nevertheless had survived two world wars and one depression. Now, the culture
war is finishing it off. The result is a society that still harbours some
civilizing elements, but is no longer a civilization. It is merely a shaky
structure that has not yet collapsed completely, but only because the
hobgoblins have not yet managed to create a strong enough wave.
What can be done? First,
we need to stop using the state like a magic wand. We have to urgently defund
the hobgoblins. That means defunding, i.e. withdrawing the state from, the
universities, schools and media that keep them on the move. However, there is
something more fundamental we must do. We have to recognise that there’s no
short cut to paradise. We have to call the ‘master.’ In Goethe’s ballad, this is a
master sorcerer. Goethe himself seems to have been an agnostic. Nevertheless, I
interpret this figure as the Creator. Disney’s film makers seem to have had a
similar idea, consciously or not. The way they depict the master removing the
water, accompanied by Dukas’ dramatic music, reminds the viewer of Moses
parting the sea.
In his ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ C.S. Lewis has Aslan,
the Christ-like lion, talk of ‘deeper magic’ that is more powerful than that of
the White Witch. Mises’ Student Murray Rothbard spoke of ‘Egalitarianism as a
Revolt Against Nature.’ For those who believe, state-funded, forced
egalitarianism is a revolt against God. To successfully combat this illusory
magic, we ultimately need God’s ‘deeper magic.’
Soviet dissident
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said, in a speech entitled ‘Godlessness: the first
step to the Gulag’: ‘If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal
trait of the entire twentieth century, ... I would be unable to find anything
more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.’
In the face of the atrocities of the French Revolution, Goethe
predicted in his ballad that, in the end, only the ‘master’ would be able to
finally stop the march of the hobgoblins and make everything right again. We
would do well to remember that when we attempt to put a stop to the New Left’s
evil game.
The
above is a translation and adaptation of a speech given by Robert Grözinger at
the “eigentümlich frei” conference in Zinnowitz, Germany, on January 14, 2018.
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