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Barry Lyndon and the Sins of the Father

A God compassionate and gracious, Slow to anger, Abounding in loyal love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal love for thousands, Forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sins. But he won’t declare innocent the guilty. He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the third and the fourth.

Exodus 34:6-7

By what means Redmond Barry acquired the style and title of Barry Lyndon

Opening Title Card of Barry Lyndon

It was in the reign of George III that the aforementioned personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now

Closing Title Card of Barry Lyndon

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MINOR SPOILERS

The sins of the father live on with the son.

Recently I watched Barry Lyndon written by Stanley Kubrick. It came up on my recommended, I didn't realize it was a Kubrick film immediately, and I decided to watch it because I have always been intrigued by the ways of life of Old Europe.

There seem to be some "unwritten rules" of what to do in life. Things that I do not know whether they are taught and handed down through the generations, or are instinctively encoded in the genomes of each person. I suspect these things are not things that are easily "called forth" or spoken directly, and to do so requires much study and self reflection. I am not going to try and mention them here in hopes that the reader can read the subtext of what I could be talking about. But Stanley Kubrick, if any director, was one who could "call forth" these things.

Barry Lyndon was merely a story written my Stanley Kubrick. And are these patterns of karma written into these stories because the author genuinely believes that these patterns happen in life, and these stories serve to be a warning of it? Are these patterns written into the stories because the author genuinely believe these happen, and they are trying to make their art true to life? Or is it but a chaotic process of it all, and ascribing these patterns to it is a human way of making sense of processes too complicated to really be understood? Where is the substrate where it was written?

Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.

Aristotle, "Poetics" Section 1 Part II

The movie does not need to be watched for this piece to be understood. The very first shot of the film is Barry's father getting killed in a duel, and throughout the film Barry gets in several duels, marking his fortune for better and for worse, ultimately for the worse. Without saying how it happens, in the movie, the losses of Barry's father and Barry perpetuate to Barry's son. Because of course "karma" would come to Barry Lyndon's son, because his father amassed his fortune in dishonorable ways, and the general upward social mobility of Barry's line would stop there.

This is purely anecdotal but there have been several instances of me learning about characteristics of grandparents that I never really met that I had exhibited so strongly before I had realized it. I honestly do not know how such specific things can be encoded purely in genetics, perhaps it is on some odd substrate on top of that like epigenetics or this strange thing where DNA "vibrates", but really my first initial instinct is to say this stuff from the father to the son exists on some non-physical substrate. Blood memory.

Consider the way cultural patterns persist even when transplanted to new soil: of course a Pole who doesn't believe in Catholicism would still go to church because he believes it is a very important social function even when you take him out of Poland and put him in the midwest. Of course an Indian who leaves India and goes to the United States would think that arranged marriages are way to go. How could such things be possibly encoded in genetics, especially considering that those practices have been around for only a couple thousand years instead of millions on the evolutionary scale!

The way wealth moves through generations follows similar patterns. In the case of upwards social mobility through families, how a family makes its fortune will usually be held against the descendants by their peers. So justice for these things comes, it seems, not through some divine process, or divine karma but instead through other humans.

In the movie, Barry's efforts to climb the social ladder are stopped when he is refused a peerage by King George III on account of how he attained his wealth and maintained it afterwards:

The King is exceedingly averse to make peers, as you know. Your claim, as you call them, have been laid before him, and His Majesty's gracious reply was, that you were the most impudent man in his dominions, and merited a halter, rather than a coronet.

The point about social mobility here can be explored through two parallel real life examples, the Sackler family and the Russell family, both who got rich off of opioids. The Sackler family has been attacked for their fortune coming off the suffering of people in the opioid epidemic¹ they helped create with Oxycontin.² Notably, the people suffering from this epidemic were fellow countrymen, other Americans.³ Their contributions to many institutions have been wiped or renamed since.⁴ In comparison, the Russell family got rich off of the opoid trade in China in the 1800s, but since their crimes were against non-countrymen halfway around the world, their contributions to institutions like Yale have remained titled after them and they have faced no backlash about how they got their wealth.⁵

I wonder what Stanley Kubrick would have to say about overgrowth and competition within families having to divide up resources, but seeing as that was not his lived experience, that theme was not touched on in any of his films.