Missing You (Netflix)

My only prior exposure to the oeuvre of Harlan Coben had been Guillaume Canet's rather decent adaptation of Tell No One (2006), which led me towards the otherwise avoidable error of attempting to read the source novel.

This five episode show is oddly entertaining, yet unlike any British cop show I have ever seen before. In the book the action apparently takes place in NYC, but has been transferred here to Manchester...a Manchester almost exclusively inhabited by Londoners, leaving the impression that this is some sort of experimental remake of Coronation Street using the cast of Eastenders.

It is basically a soap opera. Characters deliver hackneyed lines of dialogue as the 'dramatic' music swells and the camera is concentrated on the recipient's straining features.

There are two streams of plot, one ludicrous and the other predictable, and a mysterious character with more than a passing resemblance to Lionel Richie who may or may not be the link between the two. (There's also an IT-specialising DI whose narratively non-relevant creepiness seems to belong in a more open-ended format.)

Stop reading here if you abhor spoilers, but this story ultimately hinges on a non-credible cover up by multiple members of the secondary cast, who have spent ages protecting the protagonist from the supposedly destructive consequences of a certain piece of knowledge. It seems that for 11 years she has been more or less happy in her ignorance but suddenly starts pulling the loose thread, but when the dark secret is finally out, she's like 'whatevs', making you think everyone, including the makers of this show, could have saved themselves a whole load of bother.

 

Essence vs Experience

The dawn of Europe’s long day of rational inquiry began with the presumption, upheld by Spinoza et al, that essences precede experiences, so it is perhaps fitting, as dusk approaches, that the opposite notion is now starting to gain the upper hand.

A day or so ago I encountered an exchange on X in which JK Rowling was trolled as a “biological essentialist” and her response was simply to observe that all forms of zealotry tend to rest on an obstinate defence of fraudulent ideas.

I am about to make an argument in order to make a point — about a certain kind of argument — and I would ask Trans activists, especially the zealous kind, to bear with me, and thus forbear marching upon my house with torches and pitchforks until I have proceeded to at least partially (and tentatively) debunk the content of this argument myself. 

Here we go...

In any human society at any time, in any place, one would be likely to come across homosexuality. How this manifests might vary, but it would be hard to argue with the statement that it represents a human universal. Trans-sexuality or trans-genderism on the other hand, is rather less ubiquitous and it seems reasonable to therefore conclude that any underlying biological or psychological factors are often significantly amplified by cultural factors. And therefore Trans rights must be seen to differ innately from Lesbian and Gay rights, requiring an additional layer of collective negotiation and buy-in.

I think the above paragraph sounds perfectly reasonable...but in fact I have grounded it in one of those dichotomies which may either be imperfect or even fallacious, at least in certain contexts: Nature vs Nurture.

Now, I am not going to speak for everyone who had the same education as myself, but as my years of study progressed I began to see everything in less granular terms. Meanwhile, the NATSCIs around me were probably becoming more and more reductive in their reasoning and I am well aware of Richard Dawkins’s snide “Holistier than thou” characterisation of some of the arguments which most irk him.

When one starts studying history one tends to imagine that all one has to do with any large scale event is something akin to examining the dish as it comes out of the oven and reasoning back to the original recipe. 

Gradually however, one starts to comprehend that parts of the mix only really become operative in the process when exposed to each other, often in highly complex ways (Physicists are probably more on board with that intuition these days than biologists like Dawkins).

I was pondering this (occasional) fallacy of the clear distinction recently when I recalled one of the central contributions made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to twentieth century philosophy: speech is the accomplishment of thought. 

This existentialist thinker had begun his career by taking aim at the duality which had dominated French thought for centuries: the Cartesian notion that Mind and Body are fundamentally different in essence — and soon determined that any attempt to prise apart thinking and speaking was likely a fools errand.

So, if we're looking for a resemblance to today’s trigger-fingery Twittersphere, Merleau-Ponty was trolling the "thought essentialists".

We are kind of stuck now with this world that is at once mechanical and relative, where we still imagine we have certainties, but the truth is that these only really make sense in relation to others, and a degree of uncertainty is necessarily baked into the whole dish. 

The postmodern tendency to give precedence to the uncertain and/or wholly subjective should probably be resisted, for this leads to a discourse where either nothing matters or what certain very shouty individuals say matters, absolutely.

But choosing to die on the hill of an apparent certainty threatened by the flood waters unleashed by these forces may also not be the most productive approach to argument right now.

Mind boggles at DNA goggles…

As antisemitism flourished in Germany during the first few decades of the last century it became increasingly 'scientific', which in practice meant that the underlying prejudice was coated with a growing corpus of bogus academic interpretations.

In today's America, where ignorance has gained the same kind of prestige that science and medicine once had in early twentieth century Germany, the requirement to appear knowledgeable whilst being openly bigoted has been softened, to say the least. 

To wit, this report of a 'visible' DNA test with the finding that Israel's PM is Polish.

Some time ago Benjamin Netanyahu had an actual ancestry test, which uncovered that his genes reveal a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, which is completely unsurprising as his father emigrated from Poland to the Mandate and there met his mother, who had been born in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.

Netanyahu's father was Polish in the way that South Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda were Ugandan i.e. a member of a deeply resented and persecuted ethnic minority.

So yes, technically he was indeed a Polish national, but the way that this antisemitic podcaster and Xcreter uses the term is rather like referring to a Mayan family living in Boston as 'Irish'.

Would these same a simple vista DNA tests determine that Obama is a native Polynesian from Hawaii?

This is all racist and stupid in equal measure, and unfortunately, unashamedly so. (Let's not even begin to wrangle with the notion of assessing people's territorial rights by relative pigmentation.) 

And this is the problem we now have with ideologically-driven discourse emanating from the US on a range of different topics, especially those referencing other parts of the world, for this toxic emulsion of ignorance and thin, low-grade information is steadily seeping out into the wider world and affecting the thinking of everybody who comes into contact with it.

Archetypal Pole?

As a boy I read and enjoyed Arthur Koestler's provocative book The Thirteenth Tribe in which the author speculated that Ashkenazis may have descended from the Khazars of the Northern Caucasus — who had mass converted to Judaism in the early medieval period — a notion since debunked by both historians and geneticists. 

It remains one of those immensely stimulating yet patently wrong hypotheticals, like Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind: worth reading if you are not the sort of person who systematically believes the last thing you read.

Ironically, Koestler seems to have imagined that by throwing doubt on the semitic origins of European jews he could take the sting out of antisemitism, yet today his theory has been appropriated by numbskull antisemites and used to make out that Israelis are on some fundamental level European settler-colonisers within a territory that has — as any broader historical analysis informs us — been under brutal and restrictive Arab and Turk colonial rule for around 1500 years.

And this when not even half of Jewish-Israeli citizens today have this Ashkenazi heritage which seems to set off the fanatical and chauvinistic simpletons.

Rabbit Hole Contours

The 'Free Palestine' fixation bears comparison with similar ideological rabbit holes. 

Take the Anti-Vax dissension. Adherents can point to certain verifiable facts that might appear to support their case, just as long as everyone agrees to avoid zooming out to the perspective at which it is reasonable to properly consider them.

At the same time they often insist on highlighting handpicked, sometimes brutal truths, even as their overall disposition speaks rather clearly of a tendency to dispense with information which could prove inconvenient. 

Crucially, at the far less granular level, their outlook is typically inundated by a raging stream of less focused sentiment, invariably a more diffuse, anti kind of animus.

Thus the Anti-Vaxers are virulently anti-science and anti-expert in much the same way that the Pro-Pals are virulently anti-western...and anti-semitic — though they are usually at pains to disguise that particular pathology by assuming exclusive responsibility for the public interpretation of this rather hoary form of bigotry. 

 

 

Adolescence...and Apaches

If there are any positives to be intuited from the past three months of Trumpian chaos is that they appear to be at least partially inoculating the developed ROW outside America against what was becoming a pronounced populist drift.

This appears to be especially the case in Canada. Keir Starmer too seems to have been a beneficiary, recovering from what had been an appalling first six months in No10. In Germany however, the ‘extreme right’ continues to make gains, at least in terms of background opinion.

One is also led to conclude that the centrists and the otherwise sensible have come up with their own formula for fighting project fear: fabricating somewhat spurious alternative spectres with which to distract the population from their traditional favourites, like immigration.*

The basic option has been “oh no, the 1930s”, but they are starting to craft a whole menu of new-fangled anxieties which might work to take the sting out of traditional conservative fear-mongering, even if they leave everyone feeling stung one way or another.

We have seen how this is going to work in the UK recently where a prestige Netflix series had been deployed as a policy instrument by the sitting government, elevating a diversionary tactic almost up to the level of one of those ‘moral panics’ a certain type of commentator revels in flagging up.

Now, I see absolutely no reason why British school-kids should not watch Adolescence in the classroom, but the government’s apparent determination to refer to this excellent show as a ‘documentary’ reminds me of one particular ‘public information’ film we were shown in our own primary school (below), which promoted the idea that an ordinary farmyard was a place where untold opportunities existed for fairly gruesome ends.

Being in the majority city kids, born and bred, almost none of us had been anywhere near a farm at that stage of our lives, so the relevance of these determinedly grim dramatised warnings was questionable, and the statistics currently available in the UK tend not to support the notion that the country’s young white males are being turned into an army of misogynistic murderers after watching Andrew Tate videos.

Stephen Graham has stated that he was inspired to co-author Adolescence after learning of two incidents in the UK where schoolboys had stabbed schoolgirls, but in neither case had the offender apparently disappeared down the ‘red pill’ rabbit hole.

That part was almost entirely fictional, yet the Labour government appears determined to insist that this narrative reflects and represents a very real threat to the core of British society in its formative phase, and one has to wonder if they are doing this because they would perhaps rather Brits weren't fretting about any of the actual threats to social cohesion which appear almost daily in the inboxes of say, MI5 and Prevent.

Anyway, if there is indeed an underlying, ‘useful’ truth in this superb series, it is that the online world can become a place of overwhelming obsession, sucking both the perspective and restraint out of just about any kind of vulnerable mind, no matter how loved and protected they might otherwise appear to be.

And this does strike me as a useful topic for a conversation with teenagers today, and as a phenomenon with the power to distort and ultimately degenerate just about any worldview, nascent or otherwise.

 

 * Whatever happened to Freemasons?