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How do you square this assertion, with, well, the entire edifice of modernity built upon the shoulders of giants, given that many of those giants were absolute shitheads in their personal lives? Normally this kind of thing comes up in a "Oh no Isaac Newton used the bad word" or a "cinema is built on Woody Allen and what about MeToo?" type context, I'm curious how you handle it. Because for every founding father who was a slaveholder, I can point to many more who had mistresses.
As for Molly and modernity, this argument tends to make me think the idea of free will is probably overstated. Butler's backwards rationalizations for the behavior of his wife might smack of modernity, the story itself seems more along the lines of Carmen or Anna Karennina or Madame Bovary.
Compared to Mia Farrow, who does appear to have a serious personality disorder, Woody Allen is just a neurotic weirdo. He also didn't live with Farrow at the time and wasn't raising his future wife as a daughter, so, I fail to see what his misdeeds were. Apart from failing to have biological children, that is. His sole purported one is actually Frank Sinatra's.
Orson Welles hated Woody, but, compared to Farrow, he's really not that crazy.
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This time last year I was on a bus explaining to my girlfriend that I thought the accusations levelled against Allen were unfounded. A woman sitting a few seats in front of me turned around in her seat and stared at me, appalled, like I'd just said I didn't think the Holocaust had really happened. I went bright red.
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I don’t get it. What’s the deal with the last picture?
I accidentally posted a low-res copy of it.
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I think there's a lot of romanticization of individual geniuses, especially when those geniuses were purported to (or actually had) turbulent personal lives. In both the purely creative pursuits (fine art, literature, dance, film, whatever...) and in hard sciences, economics, politics, etc. I think there's a difference between a vision and its realization. Let's say Isaac Newton was just a real son-of-a-bitch 24/7. Yes, his contributions are immense, but the realization of his ideas and concepts was born on the backs of hundreds of thousands of anonymous individuals who had to be far less rotten. Woody Allen's cinematic brilliance is super, but didn't it take the existence of Hollywood production teams and a corps of actors to make it "real"?
The internet is pretty good at showing that a lot of people have really damn good ideas, but lack the ability to execute on them. If you're an asshole with an idea, you're an asshole. If you're an asshole who execute (@FiveHourMarathon might say) .... should you be forgiven or, at least, tolerated? I think this is a red herring - nobody really executes on their own save for some pure creative types (authors, painters, etc.) and even these folks are "executing" in a realm that almost completely abstract ideas anyway.
I'm not sure if this helps - as off the top of my head as my own posts are, my comments are even more half baked. I'll admit that @FiveHourMarathon's inquiry did make me stop and think. I hope the screed above repays you in kind.
Well, my view is that when we have certain representative varieties of sin which are extraordinarily common among the capital-G Carlyle-esque Great, one faces a choice: to beatify the sin itself as part and parcel of greatness, to minimize it as unrelated to greatness and irrelevant, or to reject the greatness of the individual to achieve moral purity. Each is appropriate in certain cases.
It's not that mainstream to see people say "All my heroes cheated on their spouses, so I should cheat on my spouse" or "all the founding fathers were racist so guess I am too" though I suppose it happens on the margins. But we certainly see it in hustle culture and capitalism: my heroes don't sleep enough so I don't sleep enough, my heroes ignore their personal lives so I ignore my family. And we see it with artists, especially art-student poseurs: all the great artists were drug addicts so I'll take drugs irresponsibly, all the great artists had messy personal lives so I will mistreat my romantic partners, all the great artists were vague and inscrutable so I will be unfriendly and weird.
Minimizing it used to be the mainstream position, but has been decried in recent years, when no man is a hero to his valet but we all must read the valet's tell-all. I tend to think this is the best option, that it creates myths is good, myths give us something to live up to. I think the apocryphal stories of Robert E Lee giving up his seat on the train to a poor elderly negress are good for anti-racism, they allow for those who idolize Lee to be rehabilitated into the mainstream of society, they allow for the mainstream of society to embrace a brilliant general, they create a narrative in which hatred of Blacks is not the core of American identity etc. The progressive urge to tar Lee as a racist is a net negative for the cause of anti-racism, it drives off as many as it brings in.
The third is the common progressive metoo battle cry. I find it lacking. There are simply too many monsters in history, to remove them leaves our literature and our myths gap-toothed. It is too Stalinist to un-person someone for any sin. We can acknowledge the sins and still watch the film.
This is the one my original post attempted to zero in on.
Bingo.
I don't think I can add anything more, so I'll leave you with this excellent additional example - "Until you can win 20 in the show, it means your a slob". "Until you've written Ulysses you're just a drunk, masturbating Irishman."
That is truly one of the greatest films of all time, yet it is so unrelentingly weird. I remember that every time I watch it.
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I'm not sure what difference this makes. If you don't tolerate the asshole with the ideas and concepts (and Newton had rather more than that), there's nothing for your well-behaved anonymous executors to execute on. One could argue that if we didn't tolerate the sons-of-bitches we'd get the same thing a little slower when a nicer genius came along, but honestly there's too many sons-of-a-bitch geniuses for me to believe that. There are some exceptions (both the lesser and greater Curie, for instance, seem to have been reasonable people), but not all that many. This could be because geniuses tend to be sons-of-bitches or maybe because there's just a preponderance of sons-of-bitches overall, but either way, you're greatly restricting yourself if you don't tolerate the SOB geniuses.
Hmm....we might be leaning in the direction of a top post update from me. Credit to @The_Nybbler and @FiveHourMarathon. Guess it was a good thing it was a semi-rant post ("I just lost a dollar, to MYSELF")
I'm thinking now of Mr. Musk. Absolute SOB .... but he's paving the way for a lot of other good work to be done in the physical engineering realms.
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