Mare Of Easttown, My View Of It

Mare Of Easttown has gotten high reviews, the enthusiasm for it centred on Kate Winslett’s apparent career-topping performance as she transforms herself into a thick bodied, deeply troubled, dour small town Pennsylvania cop with wrenching issues up to her ears.

I beg to differ and by that join a minority of nay sayers so slender that if we turn sideways we disappear.

The whole thing is so relentlessly dark that everyone’s complexes have complexes. Unremitting dispiritedness may be the watchword for this series: depression, depression everywhere, not a drop of uplift to drink.

Generally, the totality of peoples’ lives in this Pennsylvanian small town is so immiserate as not even to let in a trace of smile, a ray of some light, a slice of some humour. The series projects a world so steeped in misery that a joke told is like a misdemeanour, or at a minimum a bylaw infraction.

Easttown is not Charles Murray’s Fishtown. People are gainfully employed. Many are educated. Families, while riven with problems, are somewhat in tact. People are church going. People know each other and are widely socially connected. Law and order is a norm such that the series’ crimes are unprecedented crises. 

So it’s not that terrible conditions blight people’s lives. Rather, a psychological pall, a pervasive inner torment, afflicts near to everyone. No one really is happy, let alone Mare, whose suffering over her son’s suicide is virtually uncontainable. 

He was of course a junkie, drug addicted to the point of beating the shit out of her in his desperation to get money to feed his habit. Anything less would have violated Easttown’s contract with itself that suffering and misery must predominate on pain of dramatic contradiction, a rending of the series’ seamless dark ethos. 

And how people speak to each other: nearly every conversation, and there are so many of them, is so lugubrious, so freighted and heavy, as though the worst result of a biopsy is being revealed. Stretches of frustrating tedium are the result.

One person I know put it:

“I hated it. Your review hit all the right notes. I stopped after two miserable episodes. My soul can only take so much benighted white trash.

Thanks for confirming that I am not the only one!”

“White trash” is overstated but this comment gets at something, something in this series is like the spirit of condescension informing Obama’s “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant.” It’s precisely people like this series’ small town Pennsylvanians whom Obama had in mind.

The unremitting dispiritedness overwhelms what artistic goods, Winslett’s acting, the underlying whodunit, the nods at the end to some resolution, Mare Of Easttown has on offer. 

It dramatizes to a fault the five As: anomie, agony, angst, anxiety and alienation. 

A Few Immediate Thoughts On An Exchange Between Roger Scruton And Terry Eagleton

 

Scruton v Eagleton https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=qOdMBDOj4ec

My note to a friend: 

I listened to their exchange till the questions started—first 42 minutes. Then I cut out happily as I had gotten restlessly impatient even before then. 

My impatience sprang from my feeling that each had his head in the clouds (and maybe a little up his derrière.) Both agreed that culture, circa 2012, has generally been degraded, cheapened and commodified. Both agreed that practical higher education—such as business schools, commerce departments, vocational schools, in a word “managerialism”—is a blight on the university’s mission. 

It for Scruton exists essentially to impart the greatness of the past and its wisdom that allows us to belong to a great tradition so as better to know ourselves and others so we can all live together competently. 

For Eagleton, the university ought be a liberal arts place for critique, for building down the powers that predominate and the economic order. They 1. make the quest for profit soul-destroying and energy-usurping such that no energy is left with which to engage the high arts and 2. form the vocational and business predominance in the modern university. 

Scruton’s answer to the dilemma of degraded mass culture is I’m not sure what, some kind of bottom up revolution that he says Burke called for, which is to say, people who respect each other freely associating in shared activities. Culture properly conceived can serve this and the university is vital to fostering it.

For Eagleton the answer *seems* nothing less than the transformation of society (by way of revolution?) into some kind of Marxist-conceived utopia where the quest for profit doesn’t dominate people’s lives. He doesn’t explicitly say this but I infer that’s what he has in mind. 

As between them in this, Eagleton’s head is  cloudier than Scruton’s. His strikes me as an attenuated view of modern life and the flourishing of which each of us is capable and so many of us manifest. For he says relentless profit seeking born of capitalism empties us of the capacity to flourish. 

I disagree with Scruton that great art makes us more competent human beings. And on this I agree more with Eagleton that great art is, as he says Marx said, “gloriously useless.” But he stops too short. We’re not made better morally or competently by great art. But we are enlarged by it. It’s axiomatic that we’re personally improved, made larger, by engaging the best that has ever been thought and created. Scruton perhaps doesn’t mean to, but the very instrumentality, everything for a purpose, that he rails against creeps into part of his defence of high culture: its wisdom makes us more competent to live together. He’s better when he’s explicit that when we engage the sublimity of great art, we engage the capacity for sublimity within each of us. 

For myself, I have no problem with the managerial side of universities. 

Doubtless, commodified, cheapened culture is everywhere around us because the means of its creation and conveyance to us are so pervasive and because, as Scruton notes precisely contra Eagleton, prosperity enables more people than ever to consume it. But the very same means and prosperity make possible more people’s greater exposure to great art as more people than ever in North America and the UK have available higher education.

Plus, I reject the rigid and static distinction they both make between the glory of great art and the crap in the popularly consumed rest. Greatness that they can’t see or concede exists in popular culture and it’s high falutin self-limiting snobbery that can’t see it. Too, it’s just not so that wanting to make a buck in creating art spells its necessary mediocrity.

Finally, on one huge point I am vigorously with Scruton and that is the impact of post modernism on the liberal arts. Eagleton defended post modernism, specifically deconstruction and Derrida as both valuably affirming and valuably negating. The horror show that college liberal arts and social science teaching have turned into is a direct consequence of the intellectual tradition that Eagleton defends. Scruton was emphatically correct to stand against it and decry it. 

An Amateur’s Amateur Shot At The “Hard Problem”

 On the issue of consciousness and free will, John Searle argues, numbered 1-6:

1. there are two irreconcilable, irreducible and irrefutable realities;

2. one being the materialist notion of cause and effect such that whatever we “decide” to do and whatever our thought have sequences of prior sufficient causes going back as far as anyone wishes to go; 

3. what we think and what we do could not have been otherwise;

4. the other being the undeniability and irreducibility of our subjective experience, herein choice, decisions, alternatives, options, persuasion, deliberation, rationality, blame, reward, punishment, intention, agency, and the whole cluster of language related to our free will; 

5. consciousness is real, however intangible, causing us to have further thoughts and to act as we direct ourselves to; and 

6. our consciousness is a natural fact about us, part of our nature, part of the natural world.

For Searle and others, put simply, the “hard problem” of consciousness is explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious.  

Some dismiss the hard problem by saying consciousness isn’t a real thing. It’s an illusion. 

I have a different view: assuming consciousness isn’t an illusion, why is our consciousness in broad or overarching contour a problem?

Why isn’t consciousness understandable simply, as Searle says, as a fundamental part of the way we are?

Taking that further, do we not see awareness as pan-species? Do we not see higher levels of awareness in different species? Why can’t we see that facet of the natural world as most highly evolved in humans, it in us being what it is?

As we increasingly understand the neural basis of consciousness, how mind arises from the brain, what will that do to our conception of mind itself, of consciousness? Will it fundamentally alter it? Perhaps not.

Maybe we’ll continue to see consciousness as real as it is intangible, as a discrete, non spatial zone, marked by certain axiomatic properties: 

it’s one thing not another: 

it is what it is; 

it’s integrated or unified; 

it’s a structure of parts that add up to one unified thing; and 

it’s intentional. 

Moreover, our own “qualia,” our own internal sense perceptions, are not, as some claim, necessarily impossible for anyone else to experience and hence to understand.  

For, by and large, when we experience what others experience, we can extrapolate and generalize, albeit necessarily and profoundly imperfectly, from our own experience what others’ similar experience is like. 

That ability is the ground of empathy, pity, sympathy, compassion, to, as is said, “feel another’s pain,” and, as well, the ground of shame, guilt and blame insofar, for these last three, as we can generalize from what we like and dislike about what’s done to us and held back from us. 

It is as well the ground of culture and social cohesion. 

The incapacity so to extrapolate and generalize is a ground of sociopathy and psychopathy. 

The relative incapacity to is a ground of cultural and social division and friction. 

I’d say, as does Searle, that consciousness is real, causing us to do things. I’d say by our minds we choose; we freely decide; we rationally deliberate; we weigh pros and cons, costs and benefits; we change our views; we reason; we are persuadable. 

I’d say the thought that we couldn’t have thought or done otherwise in any particular instance is to reason backwards (circularly?) from the thought or action to its necessity. 

There’s no warrant for concluding “otherwise” was an impossibility. No warrant, that is to say, if we see consciousness as real, with properties and content, with thought leading to thought, with thought leading to action, and not just a mirage, an illusion. 

To consider consciousnesses an illusion is to try to deny the undeniable, to try to refute the irrefutable, to try to reduce the irreducible, namely the overwhelming reality of our subjectivity. 

Why is our experience  of our own agency irreconcilable with materialist cause and effect? 

Are we misled by consciousness’ non spatial intangibility?

Why can’t mind be seen as caused by material processes but then its own phenomenon, being, in part, a zone of causation where, as noted, thought leads to thought and to specific action, often after deliberating over alternatives. 

This isn’t a compatibilist view, where that requires holding as compatible two opposed views, say mind as seen from the outside in or empirically as against mind as seen by us from the inside out, our subjectivity.

Mine is a holistic view that wants to reject  acknowledging an unbridgeable divide. 

My view might be seen as reviving mind body dualism. It does in a certain way. 

The idea of the soul or the ghost in the machine conceives mind as independent entity disconnected and separate from the body. 

As I see it, though, mind, while intangible and discrete, is inextricably connected to the body. It arises bodily to become what it is as manifest in consciousness, conditioned by the brain’s operations.

Digestion is to certain internal organs what mind is to the brain, just as real but with mind as opposed to digestion being conscious, self conscious, intangible and non spatial. 

In sum, understanding consciousness as real in itself with distinct properties and causing effects seems to me to resolve the  putative hard problem, the putative unbridgeability between our subjectivity and sufficient material causes of effects. 

Abortion, Note To A Friend

Thanks for your thoughts, F.

The basic question is when does human life begin from the perspective of the abortion issue? 

At the moment of conception, when it easiest *might* be said we’re dealing with a mass of cells?

What about the morning after pill, should it be allowed when it potentially could kill a life, if life begins at conception?

The way I think about it is the need to balance two opposed rights, the right of women to control their own bodies and the right to life of the unborn.

At each end of the spectrum, the answers aren’t troubled: life begins at conception; women’s say over their own bodies is paramount.

I can’t justify either absolute position. So in my view one has to do some Solomon-like balancing, when two rights go against each other, which is one definition of tragedy, right against right. 

Where the US case law has struck the balance is roughly somewhere in the second trimester, maybe understood as the theoretical point at which the baby is viable outside the womb. Some have suggested it should be when the baby can feel pain. I find myself increasingly wanting to shorten the time. 

I don’t know how anyone can look at the state of development of the baby at 15 weeks, almost 5 months in, and object to that as too soon to abort the right to abort.

Unlike you I wouldn’t rest my argument on “what nature wants.” Nature is mindless. Rational beings must decide by moral reasoning. 

And, unlike you, I wouldn’t be satisfied which ever way the court decides in the Mississippi case SCOTUS is taking up. If the issue is truly just whether 15 weeks is objectionable as a limit on the right to abort, then I’d be dissatisfied with a ruling that it’s too soon. 

At 15 weeks vindicating the right to life trumps women’s autonomy over their bodies.

Btw, these comments assume no exceptions are involved, rape, incest, danger to the health of the mother, or a severely damaged fetus. Those are the only ones I’m aware of and they each have their own agonizingly tragic considerations. 

Abortion

 My views on abortion have narrowed. SCOTUS just voted to take up a case involving a Mississippi law, as I broadly understand it, outlawing abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for health of the mother and a deformed fetus.

Broadly, I can’t think why this law is objectionable. Many European countries have earlier cut off dates. 

I mean there is a living human being in there.

Much earlier I can see, somewhere, maybe, in the early part of the 2nd trimester. But even that’s bugging me now as too late. 

BTW, I don’t think Roe v Wade is wrongly decided. To say the US Constitution doesn’t speak about abortion is a wretched literalism: if it protects privacy rights and liberty, then what could be more private and more a matter of one’s liberty than deciding what to do with your own body? 

It’s just that at a certain point, the issues involves more than women’s autonomy over their bodies. 

 

My Note On James Baldwin On Jews And On Whites

Baldwin:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html?_r=2

Me to who sent it to me, M:

Thanks M.

(M had written “ I'm not sure if this is a rational contesting view (it's from a long time ago, in any case) or even a sustainable one.  But as we were talking about Baldwin a short time ago”

Just read it. 

To see this long essay with any sympathy, I think you’d have to try to look at it through Baldwin’s 1967 eyes. The essay is so vitriolic, reverse-racist, overwrought, enraged, embittered and overly binary that I don’t see how it escapes that characterization by the concluding paragraphs that claim his bafflement by any racism and disclaim any hatred on his  part.

Some of his claims are bizarre: this one in particular struck me: 

“The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto was not described as a riot, nor were the participants maligned as hoodlums: the boys and girls in Watts and Harlem are thoroughly aware of this, and it certainly contributes to their attitude toward the Jews.

But, of course, my comparison of Watts and Harlem with the Warsaw ghetto will be immediately dismissed as outrageous. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is that while America loves white heroes, armed to the teeth, it cannot abide bad niggers.”

 Even when he assimilates what he claims are Jews’ evil actions to dominant Christian whiteness, Baldwin’s seething hatred for Jews jumps off the page throughout.

I don’t know Ta Nehisi Coates’ attitude towards Jews but in its larger terms this essay could be a template for his writing, especially his Letter To My Son, which has been compared to Baldwin’s essays. 

The “anti-protest novel” Baldwin wrote around mid century. He wrote that essay in 1955. You had noted his change, so to speak, from Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to the social protest position of Richard Wright and Irving Howe. He wrote The Fire Next Time even earlier than this NYT essay, in 1963. What caused the change and when exactly? 

In 1962-1963 I was in grade 11 and in 1966-1967 I was in third year University. In those years I was in the Young Communist League, only emerging from my misbegotten radicalism by 1968 and increasingly in the next few years. But before emerging I’d read a lot of Baldwin and was impressed, especially by The Fire Next Time—the unthinking, fired up sensibility of callow youth, I suppose. 

A neighbour down the hall from where I lived used to second my company on the weeknights when he did his laundry in our building’s laundry room. He was an exceptionally well read Arkansan doing his PhD in philosophy at UBC and was a tough minded social democrat. He still is. He wound up a philosophy prof at Simon Fraser. 

He’s the one who got me backing away from what I laughingly call my radicalism. 

Anyway, making a short story long, I told him of my admiration for Baldwin and he told me how much he disliked Baldwin, that he was overwrought, melodramatic, histrionic and a weak thinker. If this 1967 essay and The Fire Next Time are typical of the 1960s Baldwin, I can see why he thought that.

As I say, to read this NYT essay with any sympathy, you have to try to situate yourself in Baldwin’s shoes and try to see the world through his then eyes. And as I understand it his overly-binary analysis deepened in subsequent years. I’ve lost track of his post-sixties trajectory if after the sixties I ever kept track of it what with civil procedure, contracts, torts and family law preoccupying me. So it’s interesting to me how black intellectuals like Shelby Steele, whose name seems contrastingly prominent here, came over the years to such opposite analyses from Baldwin’s. 

Even trying to see this essay through Baldwin’s eyes at that time, basically mission impossible, and while understanding his anger, nay rage, bitterness, frustration and lashing out, his argument still seems to me hyperbolic, overwrought and overly dichotomous. And seeing it with my own today’s eyes, I’m hard put to entertain any characterization of it as, you say, possibly a “rational contesting view” or a “sustainable one.” 

I’m interested in why you might think it might be. 

Misreading Hamlet

 The misreading:

https://quillette.com/2021/05/06/identity-and-the-self-in-hamlet/

Me:

What a misconceived reading of this play! You’d think from reading Ms Simon’s essay that HAMLET has nothing to do with revenge, which is, after all, the moral axis on which it turns. Ms Simon is so eager to shoehorn the play into contemporary concerns about the nature and construction of the self that she treats the play essentially as a voyage of psychological self-discovery for Hamlet who near play’s end,

“moves from adolescence to adult maturity precisely by recognizing the artificiality—the constructedness—of his social role, and then playing it anyway, with heart and soul, because that was the role he was literally born to play.”

Her abiding interpretative misconception is to focus on the psychological at the expense of the moral. 

As autonomous creations manifest in a structure of language, works of literature are necessarily constituted by a progression of consciousness from unawareness or some awareness to new understanding. 

The metaphor "world" captures the coherence of that new understanding. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, in their classic text Theory Of Literature 

argue that "world" is closely related to, or even equivalent with, a work's attitude toward life or to the tone implicit in the world. 

They argue that form ultimately organizes a work’s aesthetic matter into a totality, the coherence of which—what makes its world—constitutes its metaphysical qualities. Northrop Frye, in his own classic Anatomy Of Criticism makes the same assertion when he describes form as meaning holding the work together in a simultaneous structure.

The world of Hamlet must be critically attended to for the play to be understood, and that attendance proceeds from an analysis of literature's properties such as language, metaphor, imagery, symbol, pattern and rhythm, which themselves resolve into character, dramatic action, paradox, tension and ultimately theme—form as meaning.

Understanding all this, we can see that the world of the play abounds in futility, itself deriving from the evil which some men spawn. Such evil predominates and drives out the good, itself marked by the human, by human bonds forming out of imaginative sympathy. Evil is manifest in the rapacity of the appetitive self, and where it exists in men it constitutes their fallenness, a secular notion in the play. 

Appetite makes the world in its own image, a place of roiling contention where might begets might and tooth and claw reign. Corruption--most generically captured in the imagery and metaphors of rottenness--invisibly infects social institutions at their base, spreads outwards and inverts them such that their appearance, social forms themselves, are gilded propriety covering their rot. 

And, so, power uses social forms to advance itself and to disguise itself, as appearances mask appetite. Social institutions as modes of inverted corruption reduce states to statelessness but wearing the cloth of state. Statelessness in Hamlet is a ground of the tragic.

Hamlet, himself of large and acute consciousness and overly sensitive and a relative innocent, is thrust into this world on learning from the Ghost of his father's murder at the hand of Claudius. The meaning of the world, moral impossibility itself, is concrete in the command from the Ghost that Hamlet kill Claudius in revenge: for revenge is bloodletting in the absence of due sovereignty. 

As Hamlet essays his task, his mind—he thinks, therefore he is—attempts to come to terms with revenge, but he cannot and his early struggles and inability to step to what he must do mark his own unwitting rebellion against his burden. 

His failed attempt is an essential constituent of the play's tragedy. Appetite for power prevails and Hamlet proves no match for the world. Lacking any possibility for moral action, he can only paint from a palette of extreme, unameliorating choices. He succumbs to them in his own step by step demise. Hamlet's tragedy is the inevitability of his fate, his necessary doom as he is vanquished by forces of evil, coincident with revenge, even while he see deeply into them.

At play's end, what is left is a bleak landscape, empty of meaning, except for the meanings of might and power and appetite, which, though clothed in ceremony, propriety and even solemnity, ever assert themselves.