I ONLY watched a little of the 1970s series of TV plays The Glittering Prizes based on a novel by Frederic Raphael. It was about the school days and lives in years later of a group of Cambridge University graduates, that was something that was already getting old for me back then. As the gorgeous Tom Conti played Adam Morris, the moral center of the stories, it's kind of funny that I didn't watch the whole thing. As it is, other than finding just about every character but him and Morris's wife repugnant to one extent or another, it didn't make that much of an impression on me. I couldn't stand the mandatory gay character, I felt like shooting him when the stupid queen got himself arrested through entrapment. I never felt much sympathy for people who got into trouble looking for anonymous sex. I was also a bit tired of that tired old plot device by then, too, probably.
I do, though, remember the last of the six shows in the series, A Double Life, which I think might the the only one I watched in its entirety, in which the stupidity and selfishness of many of the characters was coming home to roost and Adam Morris and his wife were trying to hold onto their idealism as the liberal assumptions of the 1960s were crashing all around them. What I remember most is the opening in which Morris is addressing a tiny crowd of elderly Jews on why he didn't support Zionism or, at least, opposed the policies of the Israeli government against the Arab population.
What you said about the moral responsibility of "monotheist religion" for all atrocities in response to what I said reminded me of a scene from that to lead me to see if it was Youtubed and, guess what, it is. Here it is.
If you listen to the whole thing you will, I hope, notice a complete disconnect between the conclusions of Morris as to who was ultimately to blame and the quote from Bertrand Russell, given as,
If we could be certain that eternal bliss could be obtained for all mankind by exterminating the Jews then there could be no reason for not exterminating the Jews.
A quote which I can't place in the Russell canon, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he said something like that, the old fart loved to get the kind of attention that saying such things would have gotten him.
And also notice the requisite Russell style condemnation of God and so religion as being the most depraved thing of all, which was part of the general denigration of monotheistic religion, a requirement to be intellectually and socially respectable in the milieu that would have watched the shows. The fact is that without God Adam Morris is quite at a loss to explain his morality, its validity, why he has any right to assert to other people he has a right to advocate that they be governed by it. That's a central and fatal problem with all such assertions of morality.
As it's been about 45 years since I saw it and I don't have a script, I think I'm right in remembering Morris has a discussion with his cynical teenage son, almost the same age he was in the first of the series as he tells his old Jewish aristocratic father why he thought giving up a millenia old tradition was a good thing. In the discussion it's apparently news to the middle-aged idealist that his son has become a devotee of the nihilism of Nietzsche, though it would be interesting to go into that in light of the assertions made to the tiny audience of unconvinced elderly Jews and the rancorous discussion he has with them, his rejection of Russell's utilitarian assertion of what it would take to make it morally justified to murder all of the Jews (utilitarianism as well as other atheist ersatz replacements for morality always seem to devolve into writing up lists and schedules of who to kill) and his son's further rejection of the Jewish tradition of morality of which his father* who also died in the last show was an already faded representative of. Perhaps someone who has the script or the whole show might want to send me some ideas on that.
I seem to recall that the series end in Morris saying that he can only cope by carving out an imaginary refuge from the essential contradictions between his various stands, the disappointments of life, the failing idealistic yearnings he has had. I seem to remember that's how it ended, though it has been more than forty years and I'm sure I only saw it once.
Lost in the whole thing was the fact that literally every sin that can be asserted against the Children of Israel in Scripture is known to us by their own confession of guilt and that every sin that can be laid against Christians allegedly acting out of Christianity is a sin against the Gospel, too. You can't say that if the utilitarians came up with what would satisfy them as "certainty" that killing all the Jews would result in their genocide against Jews they would not have a logical justification of that in their own phony substitution for morality. It is one of the recurring topics on this blog how one, after another, after another iteration of atheist-materialistic ideology has come up with a reason for the most appalling evil up to and including genocide. I have infuriated many by pointing out that a belief in natural selection, the quintessential ideology of the atheist-materialist-modernist educated class and even of religious types who want to be respectable with that realm of existence is rife with assertions of the salubrious effects on the future of one genocide or another. I would wonder if Raphael ever dealt with that fact in his many published works.
* Eric Porter, whose acting style seemed to clash with that of the younger actor, though maybe that was intentional given the context.
Update: Ha, ha, on me. Reading this through I realized I'd misremembered four decades out. Eric Porter didn't play Morris's father, he played the Brit-fascist who Adam Morris goes to interview. It was Leonard Sachs who played the father.
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