I’m grateful to have the chance to respond to the deep and generous comments from three writers who have more justification for being here in the first place than I. Lee Oser, James Matthew Wilson, and Kat Rosenfield have humbled and delighted me with their responses, above all by the very way their words exemplify everything I hope for in a conversation—wit, warmth, and wisdom.

Lee Oser states my own position better and more poetically than I could have. I’m especially enthralled by his images of the “tragic gravity of earth” and the “lunar battlefields of melodrama.” He’s probably right that American tragedy is Shakespearean more than Aristotelian—though my image of American Shakespeare is above all the “To be or Not to be” scene from Ford’s My Darling Clementine when a traveling actor recites Shakespeare to a smoky bar filled with drunken gunfighters. And Oser has already sent me in search of Kathy Eden’s book and his own fiction. I’m especially grateful for the way he (and James Matthew Wilson about whose deep response is more anon) zeroed in on my allusions to the nexus of Comedy alongside Tragedy as its other face and not its opposite. I can only agree most heartily that satire (like Mr. Oser’s) is itself as important a tool as sacrifice and compromise themselves. Oser implicitly and explicitly raises the most important unanswered question in my essay. Which, crudely put, is this: but what of real evil?

There are clearly times in history when societies have had to confront real and unquestionable evils—slavery, Auschwitz, the Gulag—to name a few. There is no easy answer except to say that humans do seem to know real evil when they see it and react accordingly. And yes, sometimes we do find ourselves in a melodramatic world of good and evil. And these examples are precisely why we so often, in our most melodramatic mode, assign these historical evils to present problems making Hitlers or Stalins of our opponents.

Yes, Man is Wolf to Man as I believe the proverb has it and we must always be vigilant and prepared for such a reality. But such vigilance has to be paired with the patience to distinguish. Oser raises the most difficult example of abortion. It’s worth reminding ourselves there are societies that are fundamentally more respectful of life than ours yet have embraced the necessity of finding a way of living with this. There is, for example, a traditional Buddhist ceremony to grieve miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions. The mizuko kuyō, literally “water child memorial service,” is practiced in temples across Japan and privately in people’s homes. It is possible, in a tragic frame of mind, to acknowledge the life at stake in an abortion and yet not avoid the possibility that it might yet be necessary and that the woman in whose body another life is growing must within limits be trusted. In short, with truly the deepest respect for Oser’s faith, and with no desire to limit his or others’ work or actions to advocate, abortion seems to me one of the most difficult and yet clearest cases where we simply must find a way to see and act tragically and not melodramatically.

I couldn’t agree more with James Matthew Wilson when he says that we need a “Capraesque politics of comedy.” But I would urge him to read more on Riskin (there are good biographies as well as an excellent memoir by his and Fay Wray’s daughter Victoria Riskin). I also recommend some more recent work on Capra like Joseph McBride’s magisterial life where I am confident he will find that I am in fact right about Riskin’s role in forming the ”Capraesque” and that the other view is a myth borne of Capra’s important but utterly untrustworthy autobiography and the excesses of the “auteur” theory. 

I am deeply grateful for his citations of Burke who this dilettante needs to engage much more deeply with. And he’s right that there seems a fundamental disagreement between us as to the nature and necessity of pluralism in the American context. It just seems to me self-evident that the human world is composed of unavoidable philosophic/ethical and actual/material conflict. And that we are fortunate to live in a republic (if we can keep it) that structures and contains that conflict.

I do not believe with Wilson or Burke (in so far as I understand them) that we must choose between a politics of “natural orders” (if such ever existed) or one where the state uses the force of its power to coerce people into unity. Perhaps naively, I’ve thought avoiding that particular Scylla and Charybdis is everything we aspire to in America. And that our very federalist system is predicated precisely on this. Why enshrine the arbitrary borders of states and give them rights if not for the distinct possibility that they embody real cultural and political differences with the goal of gently turning such conflicts into a competition to the benefit of all? But it’s more than possible—through no fault of his own—that I have not properly understood Wilson’s argument. In either case, I’m grateful for his deep response and for the further reading and thinking to which it inspires me.

Kat Rosenfield also inspired and delighted me as I reveled in her examples, her insights, and her sharp wit. A wonderful writer, she captures so much of the lived texture of our mad and maddening contemporary world. And she has ample reason to question my optimism and fear that it simply may be too late. But I do believe we have been through worse—not just obviously on the material level, but also at the level of our discourse. I think it is likely that it is in fact the uncharacteristically long period of relative consensus from the mid-twentieth century until early in the twenty-first that makes our present state of things feel so apocalyptic. And Rosenfield is so right to point especially to all that “strips us of our agency, training us to see ourselves as victims.” But I fervently do want to inspire her to remain empowered and excited by the thought that novelists like her and Oser, film and TV writers and producers like me, and professors like both Oser and Wilson have a real part to play in this.

Our voices seem quiet or simply unheard compared to the noise all around us. But what we say, what we teach, and what we write is at minimum the necessary fleet of embottled messages floating on that raucous sea. We simply never know how many souls find those bottles washed ashore on their islands of belief. In fact, I would claim even more for us than just being the scrawlers of messages in bottles (though I am pretty happy being that). I have to risk exposing again my dilettante’s sense of philosophy to articulate what I believe our mission is and turn to Xenophon’s Socrates.

He ends his Oeconomicus with this pearl: “For it seems to me that this good—to rule over willing subjects—is clearly given only to those who have been genuinely initiated into the mysteries of moderation.” I’m taking a liberty here (and where better to take a little liberty than in the virtual pages of Law & Liberty) not least by thinking that a “rule over willing subjects” is more or less what we mean by democracy. What astonishes and inspires me here is the notion that something like “moderation” might in fact be a mystery, and that like all mysteries, access is granted through initiation.

Where is that initiation to be found? Maybe that’s our job. Maybe the work we do—as writers, as teachers, as participants in the great conversation of culture—is precisely to create little initiations into the mysteries of moderation. I do believe that’s what Capra and Riskin achieved and every viewing of one of those films—or a thousand other films, TV shows or novels, short stories, poems, or essays I could have cited—is another little initiation into those mysteries. As is the very conversation we are having. The simple act of having to internalize the words and images of the other enlarges us, changes us.

The alternative is to believe that we are doomed to live in Carl Schmitt’s world where the political is defined only as the distinction between friend and enemy. We know where that can lead—as it led the brilliant Schmitt straight into the Nazi party. I prefer to believe—or at least hope—that instead the political is the means by which we bridge our inevitable conflicts by resisting the twin temptations of a nostalgic trip back to the imagined unity of a golden past or a utopian drive forward towards the imagined unity of a golden future. Instead, let’s practice the unsettling joy of an endless conversation among us as equals in the here and now.