Michael Walsh’s new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is pivotal in its explication of how poor and purely evil ideas have subverted America, and eaten away at the pillars of Western civilization.
While we often hear the refrain “ideas have consequences,” too frequently we attribute the decline of the American system to politics or particular political figures, while giving the power of ideas short thrift.
But as Walsh’s important work illustrates, ideas are everything, and if you lose the war of them you lose all of the other battles too.
One such idea that has trumped to date deals with “History” — which you would not dare be on the wrong side of — as if some metaphysical Berlin Wall.
Here is what Walsh has to say on the matter:
Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of 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.
Isn’t it interesting that there can be some form of moral judgment in a morally relativistic, largely if not entirely amoral secular progressive system?
Walsh has some questions for the arc-ists too:
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