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‘Downton’ Nostalgia

Well, friends, we have only one more episode of “Downton Abbey” left in this season. Argh! Not that you asked, but I think this season is only now beginning to hit its stride, which I measure pretty much by how often the Dowager Countess gets to be piquant in a given episode. Last night’s episode […]

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Well, friends, we have only one more episode of “Downton Abbey” left in this season. Argh! Not that you asked, but I think this season is only now beginning to hit its stride, which I measure pretty much by how often the Dowager Countess gets to be piquant in a given episode. Last night’s episode raises the possibility — a likelihood, frankly — that Mr. Bates killed his wife’s rapist, and made it look like an accident. Lady Mary believes that if Bates did it, he was not wrong to have done so, but she wonders if she ought to go to the police with her suspicions. When she puts the question to Mr. Blake in a hypothetical, he advises her to stay mum. I hope she does. But that does raise an interesting question about the difference between justice and the law, doesn’t it?

Peter Augustine Lawler has a smart reflection on what he calls the show’s “astute nostalgia.” Excerpt:

Downton Abbey shows us what’s best and what’s ridiculous—if not necessarily much of what’s worst—about being aristocratic. It also cele­brates the decent business sense of the middle class, the realistic love of the American woman, the nobility of living in service to a lord, the humane achieve­ments of modern medical sci­ence, the struggle of both aristo­cratic and servant young women to become somewhat displaced in a world that has their whole lives figured out, and even what’s admirable about the progressive idealism that liberates women and the Irish. Downtonhighlights the tension between aristocratic tradition­alism and modern progress, and forces conservatives to confront the good and bad in both.

Let’s be satisfied with three takeaways: First, to be personal is to be relational—to find a place in the world with others. Second, all nostalgia is selective, because the world is always getting better and worse. The “best regime” would find a place for both aristocratic and modern ways of life, and Downton Abbey endures as a relational place because it’s open—but not too open—to change. And third, what aristocracy offers us at its best is a proud but measured acceptance of the unchangeable relationship between privileges and responsibilities in the service of those whom we know and love.

That’s true, I think. Often when I watch the show I get frustrated by Lord Grantham’s incompetence and snobbishness. He thinks his exalted social position equips him to run the estate, though this has been a near-catastrophic illusion. But then he will fall back on the old paternalistic way of seeing things, and it will introduce an element of humanity into affairs. The efficient and business-like thing to do this season would have been to have liquidated a tenant farm on the estate. But Lord Grantham could not bring himself to treat a relationship between his family and a tenant farm family that has gone back unbroken for generations as a mere business relationship. He insisted that the inefficiency of that relationship be preserved, for the sake of loyalty. Only the hardest-hearted capitalist could fault him for that, though only a Romantic with more heart than brains could think that Lord Grantham’s way of running things is sustainable in the modern world.

Lawler identifies what I find most enjoyable about the show from a philosophical perspective. It doesn’t make fools of its aristocrats. Though the show’s sympathies are clearly with the modernizers, there is at times great wisdom in the old way of doing things. The art of successful living depends on changing those things that must be changed, and retaining the things that ought to be retained. We had an election not long ago in our parish in which change and its necessity (or not) was at issue. The change candidate won, happily, not because people are necessarily thrilled about change (this is a temperamentally conservative place), but because most people understood that if we didn’t make some big changes, we were going to lose the things we want to hold on to most of all.

An astute nostalgia is one that neither romanticizes nor demonizes the past and its ways. Alas for us, we often don’t know what from our tradition would have been worth conserving until it has already slipped through our fingers.

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