What is morality?

In good part it is a form of taxonomy: identifying and classifying differences.

Hence my objection to Pinterism. This anti-morality takes the fact that gold and excrement are equally made of atoms, and proclaims no difference between them.

Thus the USA is up there with the all-time mass murderers of history, namely Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Although even H Pinter seemed to think that he needed not to overdo it, so he duly found some Differences:

Of course there is a difference. Hitler, Stalin and Mao, in one way or another, intended the death of millions. The US has, I suggest, accepted that the death of millions is inevitable if its "national interests" are to be protected—in other words, if its power is to be maintained.

In 1954 in Guatemala and in 1965 in Indonesia the US Embassies "fingered" those to be killed and recorded those deaths as efficiently as the Nazis. Where, I wonder, is the "moral" distinction between killing and "fingering" those to be killed? I can’t see that it exists myself…

The great difference between the ruthless foreign policy of the United States and other equally ruthless policies is that US propaganda is infinitely cleverer and the Western media wonderfully compliant.

Pinter’s tragic Nobel Prize lecture starts off as if he is proud of the fact that he has defined morality out of existence:

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Good questions. Pinter proceeded to answer them in a sustained banal anti-American rant, deftly nailed by Christopher Hitchens: sinister mediocrity.

The contrast between this tragic self-indulgent burbling and the famous Harvard speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the difference between Nothing and Something.

One interesting question in all this remains. How to judge the work of people whose lives and pronouncements are deeply flawed if not downright malevolent, yet who produce some powerful works of art or other achievements?

Paul Johnson’s fine book Intellectuals did a lively job in exposing the private odiousness, cheating, lying and other failings in a number of leading ‘intellectuals’ from Rousseau through Marx and Tolstoy to the present day. He attempted to discredit their thinking by pointing out the vast gap betweeen their idealist writings and their personal behaviour.

Was he right? Do Ideas and works of Art stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the private failings of those who proposed them?

On the whole, yes they do.

Hence eg this gracious look at the contrast between Pinter’s substantive creative achievement and his political blather.

It exemplifies a generous liberal-mindedness which makes civilisation, of a sort Harold Pinter for all his peevish, silly, sinister eloquence seemed unable to contemplate himself.