If I had written the final season of Downton Abbey

Montclere Castle: location of the fictional Downton Abbey

More than 200 mansions of the type featured in Downton Abbey were destroyed between the two World Wars.  Wouldn’t you have loved to know how Downton might have survived it?

Our household never missed a minute of the recently concluded BBC drama; and, like many, we were disappointed in the final episode, indeed in the entire final season.

Why?

The appeal of this soap opera springs from its adherence to the mores of the day and the history of the British estates, a history that goes back to the Tudors. By the time of Downton Abbey, a saga that straddled World War I, the British aristocracy had survived economic decline, onerous taxes and war.  At the outset of the first season, Downton’s survival had depended upon a strategic marriage by the Earl to a Jewish American heiress.  That was the reality of the time. 

That theme -- preserving a way of life and the duty felt by the Earl to do so -- was lost in the final season.  Julian Fellowes is a great writer.  However, if he had bothered to ask me (not that I thought he might), I would have advised him to keep that ball in play. 

In a wonderful recounting of the history of the British estates in Vanity Fair, Charles Spencer (the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales) captures the culture of the British aristocracy which, for centuries, lived according to a certain tradition centered on the idea that it was their solemn duty to preserve their estate along with its property, its decor and art collections.

The early seasons portrayed the Crawley family against a backdrop of modernizing the farming operations, selling parcels of land to real estate developers and (as I wrote about in “How DowntonAbbey destroyed England”) the loss of significant capital in a stock swindle. 

 

Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary

In Spencer’s Vanity Fair piece, he summarizes the context thusly:  

“… [T]he British aristocracy [was] forced to morph and contract from its final peak, in the late 1870s. Then 80 percent of the country’s acreage was owned by 7,000 families, principally those of the 431 hereditary members of the House of Lords—the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons of the United Kingdom. Beginning in the 1880s, the export of grain from the Americas, followed by the arrival in Europe of refrigerated meat, halved agricultural income in Britain. What had been the lifeblood of the great estates for hundreds of years was cut off suddenly, and unexpectedly, with devastating effect, in both the short and the long term: agricultural rents were the same in 1936 as they had been in 1800.

“In a grim pincer movement, taxation increased at the same time. Death duties were introduced in 1894 at 8 percent. By 1939 these had reached 60 percent. In 1948 they were levied at 75 percent on estates worth more than £1 million (an equivalent, at the time, of $4 million). The British aristocracy drew in its horns. The most prominent families sold around seven million acres, or a quarter of England itself, in the years on either side of the war’s conclusion...” 

How would Lady Mary have dealt with these macroeconomic conditions?  I would have loved to know. 

Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith

I’m all for happy endings.  After all, I grew up in a time when full length Disney animations of Snow White and Cinderella were Sunday evening prime-time entertainment.

However, were I writing it, the Earl, deep into his 70’s by the mid-1920’s, would have met his demise in the final season, shortly after his bleeding ulcer burst so unceremoniously during one of Downton’s famous formal dinners.  And, so long as I am fiddling with the fortunes of the Crawley’s, I would have left Lady Mary refusing to marry beneath her station and the sister she despised, Lady Edith, as a fellow spinster and estate-mate, having ruined her prospects of marriage by having a child out of wedlock.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane

Imagine, if you will, a final scene with Mary standing astride this fading empire, her sourpuss sister skulking in the background.  That would have begged for a sequel, wouldn’t it? 

Would the Crawley sisters survive the socioeconomic ordeal?

Or…

Would the sequel be kind of like “WhateverHappened to Baby Jane?”

Lessons in Depolarization: let’s start now!

I have a friend who thinks the candidates from the other political party are “crazy”.  She sometimes starts a conversation that way.  “They’re all crazy!” she’ll say.  My response is that it depends on where you’re standing.

If you’re an Evangelical Christian who thinks the government should enforce your moral code, Ted Cruz doesn’t sound crazy.  If you think capitalism is evil and corporate greed is at the root of our nation’s problems, Bernie Sanders doesn’t sound crazy.  If you lost your factory job because your employer outsourced it to China, Donald Trump doesn’t sound crazy. 

Another friend – a self-proclaimed libertarian -- describes the hypocrisy of Republicans who espouse limited government by saying of the party’s candidates, “they think the only problem with government is they’re not running it”.  That one resonates with me, which is why the faux campaign button displayed here caught my attention.  They all indeed suck!

So, where do we go from here?

In an article titled “The 7 Habits of Highly DepolarizingPeople”, David Blankenhorn points out “[w]e Americans didn’t necessarily think our way into political polarization, but we’ll likely have to think our way out.”  Among the habits he counsels we develop is Habit #4:

“Doubt—the concern that my views may not be entirely correct—is the true friend of wisdom and (along with empathy, to which it’s related) the greatest enemy of polarization.” 

Do you ever doubt that your political positions are correct?

Here’s another thought…

Ever notice how people put you in a category based on one of your opinions.  In an online discussion, someone I’ve never met referred to me as a “right-wing tea bagger” because I challenged the wisdom of Bernie Sanders policy proposals.  Just because I hold one opinion embraced by many Republicans doesn’t mean I agree with them all. Again, Mr. Blankenhorn:

“Of all the mental habits that encourage polarization, the most dangerous is probably binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories.”

“Categories are abstractions,” he reminds us when describing Habit #5:  Specify.  When we fall into the “sloppy habit of categorical thinking,” he reminds us, “the result is personally and socially harmful.”

Blankenhorn got me thinking about my own polarizing behavior.  Had I not used the tactic of categorization when I body slammed Bernie Sanders in last year’s most-read post? (Let’s Understand Just What Socialism Means to Us)

Sanders would model our government after Scandinavian countries.  An examination of the economic models of Scandinavia would suggest that socialism is an inaccurate label.  Their highly globalized, free trading, free market capitalist economic systems would very much appeal to American conservatives. They’re not socialist at all.

Denmark, for example, ranks number 3 on the World Bank’s list of countries in which it’s easy to do business.  The rankings are a measure of the degree to which regulations hamper businesses.  The U.S. is 7th followed in order by Sweden, Norway and Finland.  CEOWorld magazine ranks Sweden and Denmark sixth and seventh respectively in their ranking of globalized countries.  The U.S. is number 34. 

In addition to free trade, Scandinavian countries have embraced policies that would be anathema to American progressives.  There is no minimum wage in these countries.  Wages are set through collective bargaining and vary by industry. 

Sweden has introduced a school voucher system to increase competition among primary and secondary schools.

They depart from the agenda of American conservatives as well.  Their social benefit programs are expensive and are supported by high taxes. 

So, in what category do we place the Scandinavian model?

Better question: how do we depolarize?   

In describing Habit #1 -- “criticize from within” -- Blankenhorn quotes Lincoln’s first inaugural in which he calls upon us to “find the better angels of our nature”.  He suggests we start by finding some common ground. 

We might find common ground in the writing of Hunter Lewis, thusly: 

“Politics, economics, morals, and manners all fit closely together. The kind of crony capitalist society in which we live encourages, indeed glorifies deceiving, cheating, taking advantage of the weak, putting yourself first. This kind of behavior always has and always will exist, but in past eras it has not often been extolled, as it is today, or covered up with a bare wink…”

Can we start there?

WHO WILL LEAD?