First, something I forgot to post when it came in: another rejection for "Their Bright Future".
Thank you for your submission to The Georgia Review. We have considered your manuscript carefully and decided against publication. Best of luck in placing this work elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The editors of The Georgia Review
The only good thing I can see with this group therapy is that it gets me close to the westside Payless. That means I know I can get to the grocery once a week without much fuss. One guy is living down by the river because his probation officer will not let him move in with his girlfriend. Another is looking to get kicked out because he cannot make enough money to pay the fee plus his living expenses. He said he had spent 15 years in prison and was willing to go back. What most people do not understand is that prison living is rather simple: you get food, clothes, and shelter, and about all you do is sleep on your bunk. I suppose the counselor running this group needs to be positive-minded, else he would not have been trying to persuade this fellow not to go back to prison. In general, I do not see what is the therapeutic value of going in and telling the counselor what I did this week (anyone reading this will know how little I do, other than than sleep and write!).
Well, I got my groceries, and since it was on the #2 route, I got straight back home.
Then I started working on email, some online reading, and the law review article.
I wondered what happened to Griffin Dunne, and ‘I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing.
I need to see a movie, and this sounds good: The Dead Don’t Hurt review – love blossoms amid violence in Viggo Mortensen’s western. I like Viggo, and I am a fool for Westerns.
Why am I not surprised: Steve Bannon Prison Sentence Sparks MAGA Meltdown. Whiners. Law and order is what is what MAGA expects everyone else to obey.
I took a break when MW called, that last too long. Poor woman's ear was probably chewed off.
The law review article kept me busy until around 10. Chrome went down and I went to bed. I put off publishing this post until tomorrow.
Saturday
I did do a little more than just writing today, but not much.
Up before the alarm, around 5, and was writing around 5:30. Around 9:30, I got feeling woozy and took a 2 hour nap.
I ate here and there, a shower, a walk into the Downtown Food Stand for veggies.
When I came back, I cleaned up the place a little and started a pork loin in the slow cooker. Then it was to the email, and this post.
In the email was my newsletter from The Brisbane Times Book Review. I read Michael Richards on Kramer, Seinfeld and the truth about being ‘cancelled’ because for as little as I watched Seinfeld, I knew Michael Richards and I recalled his blow-up at the LA comedy club. I first saw Richards on Fridays, which I saw more of since I did not work as much on Friday nights. What I want to pass along from the interview is this:
“I think when I put stand-up down after the Laugh Factory, the quest was to find the person behind all this. And that’s the ultimate part to play because it’s the most real you can be.”
Yep, I can get behind that idea. We are all hustled along in this country to fit, to do, without any time for reflection. Check out the comments to the interview, if you read the original article.
I got my diagnosis from my counselor - major depressive disorder, which is a bit depressing - and no other mental health issues. That one has been enough.
A longer and deeper read was Gijs Kruijtzer review of Joshua Greene's Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them and Ryan Darr's The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, Moral Decisions and Desired Outcomes: The Diverse Histories of Consequentialism. I have one complaint against Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, that we do not know enough facts, have too many biases, and lack too much foresight to be certain that we are acting in a way that constitutes the most good for the greatest number. So, I had to read the review. Here are some points I found worth thinking about:
Somewhat reminiscent of the age-old debate among theologians of all faiths over the origin of evil, is the current debate among scholars over the origin of consequentialism. Joshua Greene’s 2011 Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them argues (among many other things) that consequentialism is a nearly universal and timeless rational approach. As an experimental psychologist he does not bring any historical evidence, however. In The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism (2023) Ryan Darr argues against the view expounded by Joshua Greene. Darr also argues against the related view that consequentialism is simply what is left when stripping away the religious and cultural prohibitions which long propped up a sense that certain acts are evil in themselves. He argues that we can pinpoint the origin of consequentialism very precisely and that the religious context was important to its invention. Two seventeenth-century English theologians, Henry More and Richard Cumberland, invented it in his view.
I never heard of More or Cumberland, not that that says much. I would have not been surprised if they had been economists, but theologians?
The review gives a lot of background, which I found fascinating because I knew none of it, and it also teaches lessons we could use.
In Darr’s definition, a view counts as consequentialist if it evaluates an act, rule, law, or character trait on the basis of the state of affairs resulting from it (so not on the basis of, for instance, the level of virtue or devotion it displays). More precisely, such a view assesses an outcome in terms of its value: good, bad, best, worst, or anything in between. The value of an outcome should also be applicable to everyone in a given situation. Darr therefore excludes purely egoistic goals but he does include variations of the view that an ultimate common good can be achieved through individual egoistic choices. The kind of good that a consequentialist view values remains variable in this and other definitions. This ultimate good can be happiness, neighborly love, avoiding harm, the welfare of the state, etcetera. The views expressed at the Mongol court fit this definition, as do many other views that came well before More and Cumberland.
A fundamental strand of consequentialism was developed by the Iranian theologian Fakhr al-Din Razi already around 1200. Razi’s reasoning in his later work is very much in line with More and Cumberland’s thinking five centuries later. He argued that God had made certain things pleasurable and others painful so that humans might pursue or abstain from them. For additional guidance towards the general goods of the world, God had imposed certain commands. For instance, God had made intercourse pleasurable so that people would procreate, but also proscribed one form of intercourse that did not lead to procreation. A man wanting to engage in such intercourse would have to calculate the immediate benefit against the afterlife harm to himself, while God had precalculated the benefits for this world. A reflection of this sort of thinking we saw in the debate over interest at the court of Ghazan Khan.
What is more, people tied consequentialist reasoning to the golden rule well before the emergence of utilitarianism in eighteenth-century England. The golden rule is found in many cultures. It says: do as you would be done by, or, in a negative formulation: don’t do to others what you would not want done to you. Greene and others identify the link between the golden rule and consequentialist reasoning as a hallmark of utilitarianism and an important factor in utilitarianism’s universal appeal.
That the ban against usury under Islam and Christianity prompted much thinking on good and evil does not surprise me. I had not thought on it directly, but having read The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta, it seems very clear. Christians long have tried to make a buck that would have been frowned upon by Jesus.
I laughed and I learned and I laughed some more reading The Grit That Makes the Pearl: An Interview With Paul Theroux.
GS: You’ve written 30 novels and around 20 books of nonfiction, not to mention seven collections of short fiction. Stephen King once defended his prolific back catalog by citing Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth. Have you ever felt a need to defend the quantity of your output? What’s the secret to your impressive productivity?
PT: No secret. I just turned 83 and I believe Joyce is even older. You keep at it, try to stay healthy, nothing else gives an equal amount of pleasure or stimulation, and you need to remind yourself that George Simenon wrote even more books than the writers you mention. And consider: Orwell died at 46, Fitzgerald even younger, Hemingway and Conrad and Faulkner in their sixties. They are geniuses but speaking strictly of years, I have decades on them.
Now, I wish I had read Paul Theroux.
I should put my comments on Breaking the Revenge Cycle? into a separate post. This one is getting rather long, but I am being lazy. In one of the Psalms - I cannot recall which one - there is a declaration against the cycle of violence. Reading it had an impact on me - I did not find it until prison - because it made me think of what profit had been my anger. My depression begins when I get angry and cannot "fix" whatever it was that angered me. When it finally came down to me being angry at the universe, my "fix" was to kill myself, I was tired of the game and wanted out. Yeah, my anger did me little good, did it?
Well, Philip Boobbyer, who wrote the above-refenced essay, makes this same point as I did about anger and violence, only in much better written and reasoned essay. However, what I want to point out, to save for future reference, is what he says about the remedy - repentance.
Fifty years ago, in a famous multi-authored volume, From Under the Rubble (1974), Alexander Solzhenitsyn touched on the power of hatred in his essay, “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations.” Solzhenitsyn observed that historically human beings have tended to censure and hate others rather than themselves, but they would be much better served if they denounced their own errors and sins instead. “Repentance” was the answer: “Repentance is the first bit of firm ground underfoot, the only one from which we can go forward not to fresh hatreds but to concord.”
I like to think my problem is that I tend to over-censor myself, I find blaming others for my troubles is spinelessness. This puts me in the minority. Thing is, that with others, I think that I can beat them, or, at least, give them a good run for their money. If they do beat me, then that is what happens when you play - bring on another game. Hard to do that with the universe.
In another contribution to In the Face of Catastrophe, philosopher Anna Vinkelman explores the nature of hatred and how to conquer it. Hatred is characterized by “closedness, disharmony and egotism,” she declares. Breaking with it requires people to overcome egotism inside themselves and others as well as search for the motivation to improve their relationships with others, sometimes in unfavorable circumstances. She calls totalitarianism hatred in the political sphere, suggesting that it cannot be conquered by other manifestations of hatred, but only by love in its various forms. Love, which is made up of different elements—the future, light, perspective, movement—will “save the world.”
These thoughts suggest that hatred diminishes the personality, whereas love expands it. This echoes the thinking of the Soviet dissident poet, Irina Ratushinskaya. Ratushinskaya, who was imprisoned in the mid-1980s for “anti-Soviet agitation,” wrote in her memoirs (Grey is the Colour of Hope) that avoiding hatred was essential for personal integrity: “You must not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to hate! Not because your tormentors have not earned it. But if you allow hatred to take root, it will flourish and spread during your years in the camps, driving out everything else, and ultimately corrode and warp your soul.”
Well, it does not help thinking you cannot be loved. I am still not sure that I can be loved. My status as a moral leper shields me from even trying to find out if I can be loved.
Although the essay is about Russia, I can see it applied to Trumpism and its attraction for America. That possibility came to me while reading this paragraph:
The Bolsheviks were adept at weaponizing grievances: the mobilization of anger against enemies was an enduring feature of Soviet propaganda. The Russian philosopher, Semyon Frank, who was involved in underground circles as a student, thought this tendency had its roots in the mentality of the revolutionary movement. In Landmarks (1909)—a precursor to books like From Under the Rubble and In the Face of Catastrophe—he warned that “hatred for enemies of the people” was the primary motivation for many revolutionaries, and that although hatred might in some circumstances be morally or socially useful—if driven by ethical motives, for example—people’s lives get morally distorted when it is not subordinated to an “active feeling of love.”
Much of Trump's support comes from angry, hateful people feeling themselves as being victims. I do not feel a victim of a system or of people who do not look like me or people from a different country. I made my choices, tossed the dice, and whatever losses I have had are part and parcel of this game called life. This makes those who identify as only victims beyond my understanding, especially when their reaction is to hate whoever won a particular round. See, everyone loses sometimes, we all get hurt passing through this life, pain flows all of us, and no one is getting out of this world alive. Take a look at Trump’s rhetoric after his felony conviction is designed to distract, stoke fear and ease the way for an anti-democratic strongman.
Repentance is where we start. We acknowledge what we have done wrong, and then we start atoning for those wrongs. We see that we are no better than anyone else, but we can help others by undoing the harms we unleashed on the world.
Putin is a kind of “realist”—albeit a brutal and authoritarian one. But the forces he has unleashed in the Ukraine war, sadly backed by the Moscow Patriarchate, are hard to control. Frank’s ideas represent a different kind of realism, which is ethical rather than cynical in character, and which identifies the human heart as the place where the main moral struggles of life are played out. In this he and the other thinkers cited in this article have something in common, even if they do not all see the world in the same way. They share a belief that conflicts are best addressed when people take personal responsibility for their lives and countries, rather than blaming others or historical forces for what is wrong. This is surely a constructive approach. Russian intellectual history is full of figures who would endorse this. There is a tradition of thought here which could be a resource for people seeking to break cycles of violence and revenge and find ways of overcoming hatred.
I know it is not easy because I am living through it right now. All I can say is that I like my life as it is now than I did before my arrest.
Red Lobster adds to list of Indiana restaurant closings: there goes the first Red Lobster I ever ate (Shadeland in Indy), the one in Anderson (long considered the best restaurant in Anderson; which may say all you need to know about Anderson's dining scene), and the Muncie store.Ursa Story Company makes podcasts celebrating great writers, artists, and stories.
Well, this is probably way too long, and it is now 10:23. Signing off with a very stiff right shoulder.
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