I noticed an article in the National Review today — a rebuttal by Paul Kengor of a negative review also published in the National Review about his book The Devil and Karl Marx. You can already tell from the title that it is yet another element of conservative culture’s inevitable return to freaking out about “Satanism”.
Back when I was a kid, we had a lot of Satanic panic. I’ll just hit a few interesting examples. One narrative was about Dungeons and Dragons “turning you to Satan”. At the time, I had a group that I played D&D with that included two Evangelical Christians – both remained Christian and one grew up to become an Evangelical minister; if it was a gateway to Satanism, it didn’t work very well. I remember a girl I met my freshman year of college telling me that a Satanic cult had kidnapped her friend, tortured her, and then healed her wounds with the power of Satan (conveniently destroying the evidence of abuse) before returning her home. Candy and/or apples full of razor blades given out by Satanists at Halloween is something that never happened, but it took decades for me to learn that it had all been bullshit. Now, thanks to Bernie Sanders doing quite well in the last two elections, the people who lie awake at night worrying about Satanism have decided that the Devil is socialism.
The review by Cameron Hilditch did the smart thing, and dismissed the book entirely. That’s smart for conservatives because the more you look at it, the more insane conservatives look. I want you to look really closely at it. Get a copy and read it. Make Paul Kengor lots of money so he can write more unhinged books and bring these colorful delusions out into the light. But in the meantime, I feel compelled to make a half-hearted defense of these attacks on Marx and add a criticism of Kengor’s criticism to our national conversation.
First off, he says, “This is why our side loses.” (in reference to Hilditch failing to show enough conservative solidarity). But the thing is that Kengor’s side — that of using religion as an excuse for the exploitation of human beings — is winning and has a long history of winning. Yes, those who want justice and liberty have been losing a bit less in the modern era, but to suggest that Kengor’s side is involved in a pattern of losing is a paranoid delusion.
Next, we learn that the book’s perspective isn’t just that of a conservative, but a conservative Roman Catholic. Left-leaning Catholics have been among the most moral and courageous of proponents of freedom and justice not just in the US but in the world, while simultaneously, conservative Catholics have long had a tendency to see Satan in everything that makes them uncomfortable. It’s clear which one Kengor is.
Then, he starts to become unhinged. No surprise. He goes on at length about how Marxism is “obviously unworkable and astonishingly asinine” and an “evil” that “creates mass poverty, despair, and death”. (I disagree.) Just when you think he might cite a fact or a statistic, he regurgitates the 100 million figure. If you’re not familiar, there’s something called The Black Book of Communism that says communism has killed 100 million people. Not even the co-authors of that book agree with that figure, and accepting that figure requires you to blame various communist governments for natural disasters, economic warfare waged against them by capitalist nations, and wars against fascism and invaders. Nazis killed by the Russians are literally included in that figure. Taking a similar approach with capitalism would give it a much higher death toll – certainly higher than “communism”.
But let’s talk about whether Marxism is “workable”. The majority of the writings of Marx are criticisms of capitalism. Marx’s writings are boring, overly wordy, and highly hypothetical, yet no legitimate expert on politics or economics dismisses those criticisms; they may disagree about some details, or believe that capitalism can be reformed to work in a way that is beneficial, but they don’t dismiss those criticisms. Anyone who dismisses those criticisms of capitalism — which again are most of what Marxism is — is an ideologue and clearly up to something. So it isn’t about whether it is “workable”.
Regarding the last 10% or so — the part where Marx suggests solutions to capitalism — and whether it might be workable or not, I can tell you that even self-described Marxists are constantly debating solutions to the problems of capitalism. It’s just like how Sigmund Freud was a brilliant analyst of human minds and we all agree that he is the Father of Psychiatry, but no psychiatrist today would follow his advice for treating a patient. So what proposed solutions of Marxism is Kengor even criticizing? Marx himself famously said, “I am not a Marxist,” because he wasn’t a fan of the more violent approach to achieving communism that was popular in France (around 1880), so if it is soviet communism he is up in arms about, Kengor is barking up the wrong tree.
The critic of Kengor’s book (Hilditch) makes a good point, that the way to persuade people away from the left is to somehow convince them that an ideology based on unbridled selfishness (capitalism) is somehow more morally good and effective toward achieving morally-desirable ends than an ideology based on the concept of community good. No matter what type of Marxist ideology you choose, I don’t think it can be done – which is why Kengor would rather rave about Satanism than take that approach.
Finally, we get to the real meat of Kengor’s argument: That Marx was a Satanist! He says there are a bunch of poems and plays by Marx that are “rife with satanic elements”. To be clear, he’s not saying that Marx promotes Satan directly or that Marx claimed that his religion was Satanism — no, just that his more arty works were “rife with satanic elements”. From the perspective of American conservatives, a man choosing to sit to pee is a Satanic element, so pardon me if I don’t care.
During Marx’s time there was, in fact, a big uptick in the popularity of “the occult”; these were pseudo-recreations of older pagan religions that had long been destroyed by Christians beyond the potential for recovery. They aren’t Satanism, but some Christians like to conflate the two. Marx was an atheist and as such didn’t believe in Satanism; it’s Christians who believe Satan is real (and most Victorian era occultists were also Christians). If Marx’s artistic projects contained occult elements, it’s because all the artistic writing of the time (early 1900’s) contained them and it doesn’t indicate that he was promoting Satan; it was just the fashion of the time. Saying that Marx is Satanic because he used these kinds of ideas is the equivalent of saying that Cardi B, Trace Adkins, or Destiny’s Child are Satanic for talking about butts in their work — which is honestly something Kengor probably also does.
One of my pandemic masks is a reject from my wife’s collection because she doesn’t like how it fits. The fabric is a print with tiny little occult objects on it: a book, a chalice, magic wand, dagger, Ouija board pointer, and many others. My wife says it is “spoopy” which she tells me is a combination of “cute” and “spooky”. Are these “satanic elements”? Satanic panickers quite often cite child rape as a satanic element, and yet the institution that is associated with more of that than any other on this entire planet is the Roman Catholic Church that Kengor is so fond of. I find a few spoopy things on a mask or sprinkled through a poem to be a lot less serious than child rape. So which is the most Satanic: Marx’s poems and plays, my pandemic mask, or the Catholic church?
And which person is more Satanic? Marx, me, or Kengor? Before you answer, please consider that until May of this year, 60% of Catholics still supported Donald Trump, who is truly one of the most immoral leaders of the modern era, so there’s no relationship between identifying as any particular kind of Christian and being a moral person. Kengor undoubtedly still supports Trump because he’s under the false impression that Biden secretly has a (Satanic?) altar to Marx in his bedroom.
Please don’t think I am disparaging Catholics, though. As I said, Catholics have been some of the most moral and courageous fighters for liberty and justice. I think the answer here is that while it would be hard to find a better teacher to follow than Jesus, there are plenty of Hypocrites around, loudly announcing their faith, claiming that their specific faith is the most pious, and accusing others of heresy. If you want to identify the people whose ideas you should listen to, look at their actions. Who is actually doing something to make the world a better place? It isn’t Paul Kengor – he’s busy spewing bullshit about things he doesn’t understand and sewing the seeds of conflict. The Pope himself noted that it is better to be an atheist who does good works than a Christian who does not, even going so far as to say that atheists who do good are redeemed through Christ. I don’t know if that applies to Karl Marx or not, but I can say that he saw human suffering and wanted to do something to make the world a better place. The approach of Paul Kengor – to tell people that this is as good as the world can be, so you should just shut up and stop complaining – does not lead to good works.
This post is a response to It’s High Time We Tell the Truth about the Evils of Marx and Marxism by Paul Kengor.