On Nature:

“If it can be argued that homosexual marriage is not reproductive and is therefore unnatural and should be forbidden on that account, must we not argue that childless marriages are unnatural and should be annulled?” he asked.

His understanding of nature seems no different from mainstream liberal views here.  Patrick Deneen, who no one would accuse of having a simplistic view of nature, has cited Berry’s work as having influenced his own outlook.  Does Berry’s comment above coincide with the notions of nature implicit in his non-fiction and Port William novels?

On Marriage’s decline:

“Heterosexual marriage does not need defending,” Berry said. “It only needs to be practiced, which is pretty hard to do just now.”

“But the difficulty is not assigned to any group of scapegoats,” he said. “It is rooted mainly in the values and priorities of our industrial capitalist system in which every one of us is complicit.”

Berry is correct that capitalism’s primacy on productivity puts pressure on families today in a way that previous generations did not have to endure.  But ‘mainly’?  How does the Sexual Revolution figure into Berry’s account of family breakdown?

On Social Conservatives:

“The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals is to propose that homosexual marriage is opposed to and a threat to heterosexual marriage, as if the marriage market is about to be cornered and monopolized by homosexuals,” Berry said. “If this is not industrial capitalist paranoia, it at least follows the pattern of industrial capitalist competitiveness. We must destroy the competition. If somebody else wants what you’ve got, from money to marriage, you must not hesitate to use the government – small of course – to keep them from getting it.”

Berry appears to think Social Conservatives are under some sort of false consciousness.  Whatever arguments Social Conservatives purport to make, says Berry, their motives are a product of the capitalist system they support.  Like the previous quote, Berry attributes economics as the underlying cause.

If he sees industrial capitalism as being unnatural, then what does he envision as a more ‘natural’ community?  Until his recent comments, I would have thought it was some sort of marriage between social conservatism and environmentalism. How should we interpret his work now or is this a rant not meant to be taken seriously?

George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novel Game of Thrones is the first novel in a seven book series titled The Song of Ice and Fire which has been turned into a hit HBO show.  This post is confined to the first book and will not address the show’s sleaziness, but those interested in reading about that should check out Douthat’s critique here.

Instead, I’ll focus on this article’s comparison of Martin and Tolkien.  Martin has been described as the anti-Tolkien because his work is realistic while Tolkien is idealistic or fantastic.  One example of Martin’s apparent hardheadedness is his portrayal of Eddard ‘Ned’ Stark.  Ned’s storyline presents the reader with the political problem of dirty hands: the desire to stay out of politics and war in order to remain morally pure.

At the same time, he also thinks the origins of this European project are Catholic, not secular: “It was thus not by chance that the first and decisive impulses for the European project came from Catholic statesmen.  Robert Shuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide De Gasperi”  Moreover, Manent is not against international institutions altogether.  He believes they can be useful instruments for the sake of cooperation between nations.

The stronger version of the Internationalist argument is still being made in Catholic circles today. Our current Philosopher-Pope, as Peter likes to call him, famously said in Caritas in Veritate that there is an “urgent need of a true world political authority” and the UN should be reformed in such a way that it had “real teeth.”   Pope Benedict does not seem as critical as Manent about European or even International unity.

It would be interesting to read Manent’s take on this encyclical, especially since it was these very passages which generated a lot of discussion.   Anyone know if he has written about it?

“A different trajectory does not require a change in institutions; it requires a change in how we understand the human person in relationship to other persons, to nature, and the source of creation.”

What comes under attack in Deneen’s piece is the underlying philosophy, Liberalism, not institutions usually linked to it:

“The strictly political arrangements of modern constitutionalism do not per se constitute a liberal regime.  Rather, liberalism is constituted by a pair of deeper anthropological assumptions that give liberal institutions a particular orientation and cast: 1) anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and 2) human separation from and opposition to nature.”

Mahoney recognizes this point of agreement too when he says, “But even he grudgingly acknowledges that liberalism is often better in practice than in theory.”  Mahoney is here echoing John Courtney Murray’s line (often cited by Peter) that the Founders ‘built better than they knew.’  What Mahoney says we need today is to replace the philosophy supporting the institutions put in place by the Founders:

“Liberalism is not exhausted by Hobbes materialism and anthropological individualism.  This is John Courtney Murray’s project in We Hold These Truths, a project that in my view has not yet exhausted its promise.”

In this case, is there still a fundamental disagreement between Dr. Pat Deneen and the Pomo Cons?

The writer goes on to say this religious notion is detached from the idea of a Personal God who judges and forgives his creatures.  Instead, God is impersonal like the Greek Logos or Hindu Brahman.  This impersonal God made it easier to pacify the scientific materialist crowd which was a subset of the show’s fan base.  Divine judgment and mercy is replaced with Modern Autonomy:  The LOST characters forgive and find themselves.  The show is a synthesis of catholic and secular ideas, which is probably due to the writers trying to please different fans or factions.  It has been said all synthesis is a miracle and so one element must be watered down for the sake of the other.  In this case, the pre-modern elements seem stronger.

The denial of an external authority is only in regards to a person’s vertical duties (God); it does not apply to his horizontal duties to other people.  Early in the show, Jack Sheppard says they must either “live together or die alone.”  The series finale reveals the characters must enter Heaven together.  The Writers believe Heaven, not Hell, is other people.  A person’s worth is measured by his fulfillment or failure to live up to his social duties.

The role of memory is another example of how the LOST characters are not ‘unencumbered individuals’; on the contrary, they past weighs them down. Their previous misdeeds haunt them and form the material for their current dilemmas.  However, their prior experiences do not determine their current actions; the crux of every episode focuses upon whether a character will use his freedom to break from his past or remain mired in it.

There were plenty of problems with the show e.g. unanswered questions and a six season run when five would do; nevertheless, its vision of the human person is what made this drama work.

Gay Marriage advocates retort the cause of instability among gay parents is not ‘kin altruism’ or natural bonds, but gay marriage.  Once gay parents receive public approval, their stability rates will go up.  This could be true, but it still means the ‘no difference’ thesis has to be put on hold until then.

Slate’s William Saletan has a different spin on it.  He concedes nature is a roadblock for gay parents, but believes modern reproductive technology can remove it.  Gay parents could increase their stability rates by imitating the biological/natural model by using the eggs or sperm of the non-biological parent. Again, this could be true, but it still means the jury is still out on heterosexual v. gay parenting.  And until it convenes, History’s forward march will have to slow down a little.

The artificial aspect of the Games makes it a state of nature where life is “nasty, brutish, and short.”  There are no rules except ‘kill or be killed.’  For this reason the story’s teenage narrator, Katniss Everdeen, views the games simply in terms of self-preservation.  Her perspective is contrasted to the other teen selected from her district, Peeta Mellark.  Peeta sees the outlook in terms of Autonomy; he does not want the Games to change him and wishes the Capitol to know they do not own him.  Katniss believes such thinking is a luxury she cannot afford to indulge in.

Yet it is clear Katniss does not subscribe completely to the Hobbesian outlook either.  It is self-sacrifice, not self-preservation, that led her to the Games in the first place.  At the Reaping, the district’s lottery selection, she courageously volunteered to take the place of her sister whose name had been drawn as the female tribute for their district.  It is the Capitol’s despotism that has forced her to withdraw her affections to her private circle, her immediate family, to the exclusion of everyone else.

As the plot unfolds, it is revealed that Peeta intends to protect Katniss throughout the Hunger Games, even if it costs him his own life.  Katniss cannot fathom such self-sacrifice, and so for most of the story misreads his actions in light of her own narrow worldview.  When they are the final two remaining contestants, Katniss realizes it would be better to suffer injustice rather than commit it. She and Peeta threaten the Game Makers with suicide rather than kill each other.  This rebellious act will have political consequences since Panem citizens are watching it live on television.

By the end of the first novel, Katniss’ heart has expanded to include Peeta, but it has yet to include all of Panem.  In the story’s opening, Katniss claims not to be interested in politics and simply accepts Panem’s political predicament.  Whether her duties to her private circle of family and friends will grow into civic duties to the community as a whole will be the subject matter for the rest of the trilogy.

He says Nihilism has been the reigning philosophy in Hollywood since the 1960’s.  By Nihilism, he means a state of meaninglessness in which there is no objective standard for distinguishing actions as true or false, noble or base.   Despite Nihilism’s current reign over television and film, he says there has been a reemergence of the classical notion of Quest in a lot of the popular films of the last decade e.g. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Batman films.  In Quest stories, the hero has extraordinary duties of cosmic significance imposed upon him.  The pursuit for justice and goodness do not necessarily mean the quest will be accomplished; instead the quest points to the existence of such goods.  It also does not mean the heroes are perfect, but they are trying to overcome their flaws.

Hibbs believes these films are an encouraging sign, though he concedes there are plenty of counterexamples e.g. torture porn in films, music videos, and games.  One issue he only briefly mentions is recent Quest films are all from the fantasy or comic book genres.  Does the absence of realistic Quest films suggest things are even worse than Hibbs hopes?

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 motivations all human beings share or don’t share in common?

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.