No End in Sight

"Although ideals held for hundreds of years have in our time come near to being realized, men are far from happy.

This is an era outwardly of fulfilment but inwardly of despair.  In a number of Western nations freedom for every man has been made relatively secure; the common people have gained command over the main centers of political and economic power; comparatively few are destitute and none are slaves. Something approaching the mastery of nature and the liberation of all men is being attained.

But with the looming of these accomplishments, the shadows of despondency seem to have lengthened. Alcoholism and suicide are massive social realities; countless works of fiction express mood of melancholy and terror; and the whole phenomenon of modern psychology, both in its discoveries and in its popular repute, testifies to the anguish of the men today."

― Glenn Tinder, "The Crisis of Political Imagination" (1964)

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Dear Kate,

SPOLIER ALERT!

I know you have yet to watch "The Queen's Gambit," but here I am going to talk about its ending.

But it is not what you think.

What I mean is I would like to argue that I am not spoiling anything for you.  I will let you choose.  If you know the answer to the following three questions, then I am not spoiling anything for you:

1) In a sports movie, what is usually the last scene (or second last), the denouement to resolve the story's conflict?  If your answer is: A showdown between the protagonist and her archenemy, then you can try the second question.

2) What usually happens?  If your answer is: The protagonist wins, and thus conflict resolves, then you can move on to the third.

3) A Netflix series in which you are asked to invest 7 hours of your life, do you think the makers would have the audacity to deviate from the above formula and deny the mass audience of what they are looking for?

And it's a shame.

How I wish I had stopped watching after 4 to 5 hours and the mystery of Beth Harmon shall stay with me forever.  Up to then the series was created by perceptive artists with narrative inventiveness and cinematic flourish to offer, after that snapped together by producers with numbers, the mass audience in mind.

Today's quote came from a book I have to call from the library of the University of Keele (you can hardly Google anything more out of it).  It's an old book newer than most I've read on politics.  It speaks about our modern despondency and the escapes available then in the 50s, alcohol and suicide, and today we can add so many more to these two items.  With the pandemic ongoing, the list grows.

The most colorful character in the first half of "The Queen's Gambit" is not Beth, but the mass society, the "earth" to which Beth fell.  She couldn't "find" herself without being somehow getting lost in it.  If the series is to stay with that perceptiveness of the milieu, the pent-up (often sexual) frustration that drives a stake through the heart of everyone reaching out to Beth as she does that to us the audience, the series could have landed herself in "The Hustler" territory.  The writers obviously have the aspiration and ability to pull off an endgame that is finally denied us.

OK, no more spoilers.

I want to end with two longer paragraphs from the writer of today's quote, Glenn Tinder, a great teacher to me and many.  Here he talks about the "mass society":

"The term is used to designate one of the strangest and most unsettling conditions affecting Western societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Numerous nations today are in some ways ideal societies; most people within them enjoy reasonable economic security, stable freedom, and multiple opportunities to participate in public affairs. What more can we ask? Many of the major aspirations of the modern age have been in fair measure fulfilled. In this sense, as Francis Fukuyama has argued, we have reached the end of history? Yet many perceptive people contemplate life within these societies and find it repellent. Economic plenty seems to impose materialistic limits on imagination and people devote themselves to recreation, entertainment, and physical pleasure. Freedom consequently becomes trivial; the most dramatic alternatives before an individual may be in the nature of those faced in a supermarket. Freedom may be subtly nullified in another way as well. Even though legally one can live in any of a great variety of ways, in fact everyone lives in about the same way, and it may be difficult even to think of a different way, and this is to say nothing of of the problem of carrying on a distinctive life under the surprised or censorious regard of one’s neighbors. And not only is personal freedom thus palsied. Public freedom likewise, in a mass society, suffers from unforeseen illnesses. Election campaigns may come to consist largely in expensive and professionally organized marketing campaigns for candidates for office. And politicians may be so disabled by the pressures put on them by monied interests and unreasoning voters as to lose the dignity essential to a legitimate government...

Mass society is discouraging not just because the conditions defining it are undesirable. Perhaps more important is the fact that it is hard to know how to deal with those conditions. Humans can sometimes act rationally and effectively in order to create just economic and political forms. But there seems to be little they can do when the life that fills those forms turns out to be spiritually worthless. We know how to resist poverty and enslavement; but a spiritual decline leaves us bemused. Hence, although modem constitutional government and social democracy marks the end of a long journey, the event of arrival has been surprisingly unhappy, and no one knows quite what we can do about it. There is little doubt that this situation reinforces modern despondency. Mass society seems at once to fulfill and to foreclose hope."

What is hope?  Where is it?  What if we do have Christmas, like we usually do this time of the year.  Would hope be making an appearance when we arrive at the endgame of December 25?

This year we have something more glaring to blame than ourselves.

Yours, Alex