So, Pinter was simultaneously a gifted writer and a morally and politically reprehensible person. How does this make him any different from his 20th century artistic colleagues, the vast majority of whom were also fellow-traveling, useful idiots?
Poetic talent is, as Plato warned us long ago, not only not synonymous with wisdom, it is in (perhaps) the majority of cases, antithetical to it. And if Plato was right (as I’m sure he was) about the artists in his day–the Golden Age of classical genius–how much more so would his insight obtain during an age of conspicuous degeneracy like our own; one in which the philosophical corrosives of modernity have greatly eroded the guiding norms of aesthetic and moral sensibility?