How do you like your story?

Last week Ross Douthat posted a comparison of The Sopranos and The Wire. He sees the two shows in terms of psychology v. sociology, the former being the more insightful because it presents flesh and blood human beings while the latter reduces its characters to their surrounding culture in order to critique it.

He is rehashing an argument he made when comparing Mad Men’s Don Draper to Breaking Bad’s Walter White: White is the more interesting character because his motives are complex while Draper’s soul appears flat because Mad Men is first and foremost a show about 1960’s America.

Switching genres, Tom Wolfe famously argued the death of the novel is upon us because novelists since the 1960’s have retreated from realism. His essay ”Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” critiques the absurdist novels of Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Wolfe’s call was for contemporary writers to create ‘social novels’ in the tradition of Charles Dickens: The novelist should report on the cultural movements of his time.

What would Wolfe think of psychological novels like Dostoevsky’s? Does his call for more reporter-novelists apply to television’s storytellers as well? More importantly, aren’t the really great books timeless because they are not primarily about a particular time? And don’t they do that by presenting us with a person so particular, so real, it encourages us to reflect on what longings all human beings share or don’t share in common?

What we have in common

Front Porcher Patrick Deneen criticizes the critics of the HHS mandate for using the “dominant privatistic language of liberalism.” He agrees this is the prudent strategy, but believes it masks the deeper divide between Catholic and Modern political thought in general. Such a tactic will allow the critics to win the battle, but lose the war because it concedes the Modern outlook. For example, to talk about religious liberty is to presuppose Modern concepts such as the public v. private sectors and individualism.

Deneen’s discussion resembles Leo Strauss’s distinction between the Ancients and Moderns on how society should be organized: “Regime means that whole, which we today are in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form…” The Ancients portrayed society as organic, while Moderns artificially divided it into parts like public v. private, church v. state, and individual v. society. Deneen takes this quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns and replaces the Classical view with the Catholic view: “Liberalism [Modernism] was fundamentally animated by a deep philosophical and theological objection to Catholicism – and, until recent times, vice-versa.”

Yet the Catholic view might have more in common with the Modern view than Deneen suggests. For example, the fragmentation Strauss attributes to the Moderns can be traced back to a pre-modern thinker, Augustine. He taught Christians are citizens of two kingdoms, the City of God and the City of Man. Such a teaching conflicts with the holism of the Classical Regime and underlies the current tension between religious liberty and the HHS Mandate. Augustine writes, “This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adopts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced. [emphasis mine]” If a citizen’s duties to his state come into conflict with his duties to God, then he cannot obey both masters but will have to choose one.

Another idea which brings Catholics and Moderns together is the person or individual. The Ancients saw the individual as a part of a whole, or as Peter likes to say, city fodder. Catholics and Moderns, on the other hand, agree that every human being is unique and irreplaceable. The disagreement between the two is over sovereignty. The Modern believes in ‘sovereign selves’ while the Catholic locates sovereignty in God. The Modern notion of individual autonomy is an attenuated or thinner version of the Christian conception of the dignity of the human person. It is an attempt to safeguard individual rights without making any grand claims about his place in the Cosmos. Thus both sides believe in religious liberty, but disagree about its purpose. Regardless, it shows the critics’ adoption of religious liberty language is not simply a prudential move, but a principled one as well.

Honor and Humility in the life of Jeremy Lin

Jeremy Lin, the Harvard educated, Asian-American, basketball phenom who makes public proclamations about his Christian faith, is all the rage right now. There are a variety of questions his success raises, yet surely the most unique (or esoteric) analysis must go to David Brooks who takes a Straussian spin on the New York Knicks point guard. In yesterday’s Op-Ed, Brooks uses Lin’s sudden fame as an opportunity to discuss the possible tension between Greek Magnanimity and Biblical humility:

“The modern sports hero is competitive and ambitious. (Let’s say he’s a man, though these traits apply to female athletes as well). He is theatrical. He puts himself on display. He is assertive, proud and intimidating. He makes himself the center of attention when the game is on the line. His identity is built around his prowess. His achievement is measured by how much he can elicit the admiration of other people — the roar of the crowd and the respect of ESPN….The religious ethos is about redemption, self-abnegation and surrender to God...The odds are that Lin will never figure it out because the two moral universes are not reconcilable.”

Brooks doesn’t buy Lin’s argument that he is motivated to excel for the sake of God’s glory, but the Christian synthesis of magnanimity and humility has a long pedigree which goes back as far as Aquinas. Either way, it should be a good topic for conversation when you’re having friends over for the Knicks game.

Expanding the Secular Square

There has been a lot of thoughtful commentary on the HHS Mandate the last couple of weeks. Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin argue that Obama levels the ‘little platoons’ of civil society in favor of expanding the power of the state. Here is Levin:

“In this arena, as in a great many others, the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state, and to clear out civil society—clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state—when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president’s agenda. The idea is to leave as few non-individual players as possible in the private sphere, and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government.”

Our Tea Party and Libertarian friends will see this as further evidence of Big Gov’t getting bigger, and they’re right, but it important to note the President thinks of himself as the true champion of individualism. The mandate is in the service of freeing the individual from her biological bonds. The proper distinction here is not individual v. state, but the state v. intermediary institutions.

David Brooks says the plurality of the little platoons is being replaced by the uniformity of technocratic administration, a topic dear to our Ivan the K.

On a different note, Carson Holloway says the HHS mandate reveals the logic of liberalism as a creeping and creepy secularism: “…for an older generation of liberals religion had to be kept private in the sense that it could not try to control the government for its own distinctively religious purposes. A more ambitious set of liberals then came to claim that religion had to be private in the sense that religious believers should not bring their moral convictions to the political and legislative process. Now, much more ambitious liberals hold that religion must be private in the extreme sense that it must not be allowed to engage, in its own way, with the society at large. Religious institutions may enter into and interact with society, but only if they leave their religiosity behind in doing so.”

Jefferson’s famous “Wall of Separation between Church and State” has been used to prevent the influence of religious belief on public policy. Now that wall is being further expanded to separate belief from action. Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and instructing the ignorant were once considered Works of Mercy and thus matters for the private sphere. In the latest stage of liberalism, such actions must conform to secular standards of morality as dictated by the state. The next step in the privatization of religion is to make it a matter of the mind and nothing more. And in this particular case that means keeping Catholics in the closet.