“A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

Fortunately, Jane Austen did not heed her own advice, and six stunning novels are the result. As part of its new Sunday drama series, premiering tomorrow at 9 pm (EST), PBS’ Masterpiece Theater will present “The Complete Jane Austen”: four new renditions (Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility), two A&E classics (Pride and Prejudice and Emma), and a dramatization of Austen’s own life.

“She opened her mouth with wisdom and in her tongue is the law of kindness,” intones the inscription over her tomb in Winchester Cathedral. To which the ever-witty authoress might have countered, “I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.”

Whatever one’s taste, it’s hard not to like Jane Austen!

I agree, Jody, that there is an interesting and important connection between the division in the Church over liturgy and the division in the Church over moral issues, and that it’s no accident that those who support traditional morality also support the traditional liturgy while those who support moral innovations also support liturgical innovations.

The connection is not, in my view, the one Professor Stith points out. I have not read the paper to which he refers, and so perhaps I’m getting him quite wrong, but I think Professor Stith misreads the situation when explains it by saying that there is a “common lack of perception for dignity of sacredness and with it the loss of respect or reverence for life, on the one hand, and for the Host on the other.” It’s much more complicated than that.

“Dignity,” without more, is an entirely empty moral concept—it’s no better than “goodness” or “moral rectitude” until you explain what you mean by it.

Such an explanation has to include either some deep meta-ethical premises that spell out what it means to say that human beings have dignity and in what that dignity consists (e.g., as in Kant, a human being is a morally autonomous subject and so should act only on those maxims that he or she can consistently will everyone act on, etc.), or else, at the very least, a set of particular moral norms that spell out what “treating a person in a way that respects his dignity” actually means in practice (e.g., that you shouldn’t kill innocent human beings, etc.). Ideally, an account of dignity should include both. If we have neither, then dignity (or any other supposedly foundational moral concept) is just an empty placeholder into which we pour our antecedently held and as yet unjustified moral beliefs.

Hence, if I were on the other side of the debate here, I would be quite offended at the notion that I lacked respect for dignity or the sacred. I would say that I have great respect for the dignity of the human person—so much so that I don’t think I’m entitled to coerce their beliefs and behavior when, for instance, it comes to making choices like those related to abortion.

In fact, this is exactly what many abortion-rights advocates do say. And they’re perfectly right to say this—given their concept of dignity but not the one usually employed in the Catholic tradition. We can’t win an argument with such people by saying that they have an inadequate perception of dignity. We have to get beyond that word, dig down into the meta-ethical premises being used to define it, and argue over which such premises are true or justified.

One of my favorite intellectual puzzles is figuring out what deep conceptual presuppositions cause some people to be conservatives, other people to be liberals. That is, on a range of issues that would seem largely unrelated—say, abortion, affirmative action, and gun control—it turns that people’s positions are highly correlated. For instance, people who are pro-life tend also to be against affirmative action and against gun control, whereas people who are pro-choice tend also to be in favor of affirmative action and in favor of gun control. Why is this?

I’m still working on a general solution, but one thing is pretty clear. Conservatives tend to think that demand curves are elastic, liberals that they’re inelastic. Economists talk about demand for a product or service as being elastic if a 1 percent increase in price produces more than 1 percent decrease in quantity sold, inelastic if a 1 percent increase in price produces less than a 1 percent decrease in quantity sold. Elasticity is a precisely defined concept, but the basic idea is easy enough to understand: Roughly, demand is elastic if, when you raise the price, people just pay the higher price regardless, but inelastic if, when you raise price, people stop buying the product and do something else with their money.

So, for example, conservatives think the demand for crime is elastic: if you raise the price of crime to the criminal by increasing prison sentences, you’ll get a lot less crime. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to think that increasing prison sentences will have little effect on crime rates. In other words, they think the demand for crime is inelastic relative to prison sentences. Similarly for taxes. Conservatives tend to think that if you raise income taxes, people will work a lot less, whereas liberals tend to think that you can raise income taxes and not much affect how much people will work.

A fascinating role-reversal is thus at work in the voting rights cases that the United States Supreme Court heard earlier this week. As this story in the Legal Times explains, the Court is considering a constitutional challenge to an Indiana statute that requires citizens who want to vote to produce a state-issued photo identification such as a drivers license.

Conservatives generally favor the law, and liberals generally oppose it. In particular, the Indiana Democratic Party and the ACLU say that the law is unconstitutional because it will deter people—especially old people, the poor, and minorities—from voting. They are thus in effect saying that the demand for voting is very elastic: Make it even a little more difficult for people to vote, and they’ll stay away from the polls. The conservative supporters of the law, on the other hand, are saying just the opposite: raising the effective cost of voting will not affect how many people vote because the demand for voting is inelastic.

Where does the truth lie? I’m a conservative, and so I usually think that demand curves are pretty elastic. Nevertheless, I also think that the Indiana statute would not deter many people from voting and so ought to be held constitutional. If I ask myself why I think this, however, and if I’m being completely honest, I would have to say that I don’t really know.

So the Coen Brothers, currently responsible for one of the most overrated films in release today, are working on a spaghetti western.

For those unfamiliar with this subgenre, it is composed of “westerns” made by Italian directors, mostly in the 1960s, that have some fun with the American western’s genre conventions. Sergio Leone’s contributions are definitely the best of the bunch, and it was he who gave Clint Eastwood his biggest big-screen boost.

In fact, for a while there Eastwood would usually include at least one “Sergio Leone shot” in films he directed himself: an extreme close-up with the background, usually a landscape, in sharp focus. (See the underappreciated A Perfect World with Kevin Costner.) Leone used to do this a lot: He’d set up a typical western prairie longshot, and suddenly zump!—some cowboy’s dirt-defiled mug would pop into the frame. Leone liked to play with expectations of how the new technologies that expanded film aspect ratios—Cinemascope, Panavision, etc.—were being used by other directors, such as Anthony Mann.

What I don’t understand about the Coens’ proposal is this: “There’s scalping and hanging . . . it’s good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off.”

Excuse me? That would be “Native Americans using natural resources—in which they were rooted and to which they were wedded—to fend off the depredations of manifest destiny” THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Sheesh. Some people . . .