So I was in Newport News, Va., the last couple of days for a conference on religion in America. It featured first-rate and genuinely intellectually diverse speakers. I was moved, at one point, to say that Christopher Newport has emerged as a genuinely “safe space” to argue over the fundamental issues surrounding the future of freedom and the human person.  Thanks to the organizational skills of Elizabeth Kaufer Busch (who used to teach at my Berry College), the large and appreciative audiences included plenty of deans and provosts and such. The “institution” actually stands for academic freedom, even if that turns “academic justice” into more of a question than a dogma. One of the big issues these days, it turns out, is whether religion still should have much to do with God.

Representing one point of view (although not in exactly the  same way) were our friend Ross Douthat and ME. I probably didn’t say anything you haven’t already read (or even tell any jokes haven’t already heard), but I am getting better at reducing my message to slogans that could appear on PowerPoint slides or be highlighted as TED-talk takeaways: The threat to religious liberty is libertarian securitarianism. One indispensable means for countering it is the highly self-conscious or intentional deployment of libertarian means for non-libertarian ends. Even those, such as our friend Rod Dreher, who, following Alasdair MacIntyre, want to experiment with the “Benedict option,” need the support of said means.

Still, I added (and would have been more insistent had I had the time), we “reform conservatives” don’t agree with complacent Kochian or WSJ Republicans that all that we need to do is cut taxes and deregulate our guts out.  It’s far from clear these days that the resulting activity of “job creators” will stimulate economic growth in a way that will put struggling Americans back to work and take care of all those pesky relational issues, beginning with increasingly pathological families, single moms, and superfluous men. Our libertarianism needs to be selective, even on the economic front.

At dinner, it goes without saying, Ross and I (with Liz and our Carl) mainly talked TV. Ross certainly did well in defending his love of Girls from those who are repulsed by the various forms of ugliness prominently displayed on the show. I told him of our Ralph’s choice of Ray Donovan over Girls for both moral and artistic reasons. Ross, it turns out, has seen very little of Ray. Why? ”Nobody likes the show.” Ross isn’t simply succumbing to peer pressure.  It turns out that many fairly sophisticated and unpuritanical people are repulsed by Showtime’s pushing the envelope when it comes to both violence and sex. The people we get to see naked and doing stuff on Ray, beginning with finely sculpted Ray himself, might be understood to more reliably arouse viewers than those, beginning with Hannah herself, that we get to see naked on Girls.

It is true that I was joking when I said that Lena Dunham had an esoteric teaching. But still: What esoteric writing does is to make prose like good poetry. Poets (including novelists and so forth) never say what they think, they show it. So the key to “evaluating” Girls is its moral and psychological realism. Does it sentimentalize the pathologies that flow from the moral cluelessness of our inauthentic sophisticates? Does it deny that said pathologies are sort of the inevitable “collateral damage” of the unfolding of individualism? Does it show truthfully the psychological damage caused by “the culture of narcissism?”  In my view, a good criticism of Girls might be that it goes overboard in its display of relational cluelessness, not to mention the vapidness of someone graduating from Oberlin with a “studies” major. But good poetry (see Aristophanes or Tom Wolfe) often teaches through instructive exaggeration. The cost of that “teaching method” can be turning fully fleshed-out characters into caricatures. I actually think that “Girls” is pretty successful in not having to pay that cost.

I too prefer Ray Donovan and even Shameless. One reason is that the acting is so much better (Jon Voight! William C. Macy! — they play two really memorable pretty [although not perfectly] sociopathological dads). Another is that the characters are from Irish, working-class, rather post-Catholic families. One theme is the collapse of the institutional-relational context in which such families used to flourish in America.  Both shows feature admirable people — especially smart and promising kids — doing the best they can in tough circumstances. A big difference, of course, is that the kids are rich on Ray and almost desperately poor on Shameless. Voight and Macy treat us time and again with the eloquence of the Irish, especially in their rationalizations for criminal behavior.

I will say more about Shameless another time. For now, I will say that the most “Catholic” part of the show is that it’s so insistently pro-life. Another is the way it shows the irreducible longing for family as the place where unique and irreplaceable beings flourish just as they are and find responsible personal significance.

I will agree with Ralph that Ray has a basically conservative message in showing that the Catholic understanding of sin is true, and that various “liberal” or “libertine” excesses of the church failed ordinary believers most of all.

Having said that:  Ralph’s question of whether Ray is a better person than Hannah may not be a profitable one. Hannah is very weak and self-absorbed in every way. She doesn’t take care of herself or others. Ray has incredible self-control. His brilliant mind is constantly calculating, and his physical strength is, as they say, both awesome and of indispensable service to his mind. He makes a lot of delicate moral judgments, and he does what he can to save innocents, even if it means he goes to prison.  He doesn’t kill out of rage (well, with the exception of shooting the priest who raped him as a kid).  He is also very loyal to every member of his family (except his dad, who deserves, if any one does, to be an exception), and he does everything he can to protect them from the consequences of his “work.”  Certainly they all benefit from his great wealth.

Ray’s job, as he puts it, is to use [two expletives deleted] for their money.  His job is to save slimy celebrities from the consequences of their criminal — even murderous – behavior again, for huge, huge bucks. That means that there’s no one around who matches Ray for lying or the manipulation of “the social construction of reality.” He hires an infamous psychopath hit man to kill his father. It doesn’t work out, but plenty there’s plenty of killing of innocents along the way. Ray shoots the criminal he works for who thinks he has no choice but to shoot Ray’s daughter. It is sort of Ray’s fault that she was in that situation, but it’s also true that only Ray could have figured out how to save her. Telling the truth to the police would have been her death warrant.

Ray, we can say, doesn’t feel as bad as he should about all that, operating, in his own mind, in a kind of a state of nature of his own choosing. He does know he’s screwed up and a moment away from a breakdown. He even chose prison as a way out, as well as a way of saving his genuinely Catholic brother. That choice hasn’t worked out for him so far. The show, as Ralph says, has been so riveting because it’s been so “off the rails.” 

Hannah does the world and other people a lot less harm. Nobody gets shot because she screws up, and she doesn’t include enabling and committing felonies among her marketable skills and competencies.

Nobody is happy on Girls, nobody is happy on Ray Donovan. Ray may want to make his family happy, but he fails rather miserably. His wife is one of the most unpleasant characters on TV, but even she finds a man who promises to be her ticket out of the hellish world constructed by Ray.

If you want a fine (and astute) portrayal of a realistically (and so unevenly) happy family, watch Parenthood, which appears on neither HBO nor Showtime.

All TV analysis on blogs and such depends on decaying personal memory and is probably rife with errors of detail.