The paragraphs I’m talking about (all emphases mine):

For some time now, Julie and I have been talking with our friends — other couples with young kids, mostly — about how our lives need to change, and change radically. We talk about what I call the “Benedict Option,” after the famous final paragraph of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1982 book After Virtue. MacIntyre wrote about how Western civilization is largely played out, and how the future will bring young people who have no longer vested themselves in the continuation of a bankrupt imperial order, as in the last days of Ancient Rome. “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. We are waiting…for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Benedict of Nursia was a well-off young man who saw that the Roman world was falling to pieces, and lit out for the forest to pray and seek God. Eventually he gathered communities around him, and in time these would become monasteries. Throughout the dark ages, the monasteries were repositories of faith, learning and light.

. . . [SrdjaTrifkovic] is right to point out that material comfort has despoiled us spiritually and morally in many ways. But there’s not a lot to be said for poor, nasty, brutish and short, if you ask me, and we who despair of modernity must be careful not to overly romanticize the past, nor long for another Depression, however much our profligate, spendthrift living has set us up for a painful fall.

From phrases like “lit out for the forest to pray and seek God” and “gathered communities around him [that] would become monasteries,” the reader gets the impression that Benedict was Western monasticism’s unselfconscious prophet around whom structured communities grew organically; that Benedictine monasticism was radical but not intentionally so; that, mostly, it was the natural consequence of a sincere desire to know God.*

It’s important to acknowledge the extent to which Benedict developed his rule deliberately. It isn’t that he started gaining followers, built a house for everybody, and then wrote down how their community worked. He’d seen the rule of Pachomius and the rule of the Master, and designed his own variation. It isn’t that he went looking for God and happened to find him in the ascetic life. He set out to be a monk, because monasticism was something he’d heard of and he thought radical action was called for.

Dreher likes radical action, too, but is careful to clarify that “there’s not a lot to be said for poor, nasty, brutish and short.” (Those adjectives describe the ascetic life pretty neatly, I think.) The real revolution will take place in our hearts and mind, he seems to be saying, and whatever material changes follow from that will follow in due course. However, in describing Benedict as a man whose radical lifestyle proceeded from his heroic piety, he gets the monastic prescription backwards.

As for romanticizing the past, the Christian monastic ideal was built on a lot of self-mythology. Even leaving aside the influential and inaccurate** Life of Anthony—you know how hagiographers are—there is still the generation of monks that wrote down the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: they regarded the monks of fifty years prior as legends and believed that the current generation would “struggle to achieve half their works.” Similarly, Western monks took very seriously the exaggerated stories of Egyptian piety that reached them through men like Athanasius and John Cassian.

Each new generation of monasticism expressed a desire (real or rhetorical, it doesn’t really matter which) to recapture a romanticized past—this is even true of generations that went on to be romanticized in turn—and then made real, concrete decisions about how to run their own communities based on these false-but-inspiring pictures. Such willingness to mythologize the past would be embarrassing if it hadn’t worked so well for them.

If Dreher is simply saying that not everyone needs to be a Benedictine monk he’ll get no argument from me, but he seems to be making the stronger claim that McIntyre’s new monasticism can be as easy as living in suburbia with the right attitudes and values, and, moreover, that romanticizing the past and being self-consciously radical are things to be avoided. Those claims would make sense if history bore out the idea that Benedict had and pure and searching heart and rest followed naturally, but that wasn’t the case. Changes in material circumstances are necessary, even if they seem affected. (This, incidentally, is why I won’t be surprised if we find our new Benedict among the deliberately under-achieving hipsters.) I hope Dreher’s right that the change in circumstances shouldn’t have to look like another Great Depression. I have equal hope for the “laymen” of crunchy conservatism who can only express solidarity with the lifestyles of its more decisively radical leaders. Still, I would caution Dreher against going to the opposite extreme and making the whole thing too easy.

*I don’t necessarily mean that this is the picture of monasticism Dreher has in his mind, only that his description—and the conclusion he draws from it at the end of the column—make it read that way.

**I say inaccurate based on what we know about the real St. Anthony from the historical record, which includes some of Anthony’s letters. He was as holy a man as Athanasius describes, but far more in touch with the real world and far less a hermit. The accuracy of flying demons I will not dispute.

I wonder what Hazlitt would have made of last week’s convention. I was among those who found it slightly chilling to see America’s Mayor get his William Wordsworth on, and only slightly less chilling when the sentiment was expressed by speakers whose cosmopolitan credentials were less obvious. Has the Republican party really drifted so far towards ruralism? Assuming that conservatives want to frame this election as a question of us versus them, does it have to be that us and them?

The second most obvious irony of Giuliani’s remarks was that, for someone claiming to represent the political ideology most comfortable with elitism in theory, he was remarkably angry with the current elite’s awareness of itself as one. Contrary to what was said in Minneapolis last week, there is nothing contradictory about cosmopolitan conservatism. Anyone who says that city-dwellers are rootless has never met a New Yorker, or seen a Woody Allen film. There are plenty of people who could sing “I love L.A.” without sarcasm, and their love of the city has a great deal to do with a tradition (I invoke the concept to prove how well it works in an urban context) that stretches back in time through the hard-boiled fifties and to the roots of Californian optimism and opportunism. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are all places with histories; a tradition of cosmopolitanism is no contradiction, because cosmopolitanism is never all there is to it.

There’s even an argument to be made that America’s urban elites have more of a claim to conservatism than Red Staters do. Edmund Burke mistrusted an overly abstract mind, but he mistrusted a narrow mind just as much. Consider his remarks on a colleague who from his late twenties had made Parliament his profession: “Persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give.” Narrowness of experience is no less limiting for the provincial than for the career politician. As much as I value the humility that small-town residents display, leadership demands a willingness to transcend narrow habits and concerns as much as it demands Burkean modesty.

There is a new kind of cosmopolitan conservatism on the rise in America (and on display in the blogosphere) that the Republican party should stop doing its best to alienate. James Poulos describes these “unclassifiable” social conservatives here (disregard the embarrassing graphic). Those who are skeptical that these urbanites have any genuine sympathy for Sarah Palin-type conservatism should see this Reason interviewee’s remarks on Palin’s own Matanuska-Susitna Valley, which he calls “Upper Wingnuttia” with all fondness. This is not to say that Reason magazine libertarianism is the wave of the future and the old guard should get out of the way. Certainly paleoconservatives should do their best to capitalize on Palin’s prominence by dragging the coalition’s center of gravity rightward. But they should also warm to the idea that such a coalition might put them next to conservative members of the urban elite that the Republican Party spent Wednesday night denigrating.

Not that I need one, but the release of Diane English’s remake of The Women is a good excuse to revisit the George Cukor original.  It dates from 1939, that year when someone—maybe the Communists, although it doesn’t really sound like them—put soluble genius in Southern California’s drinking water and ended up giving us Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Dark Victory. It was a tough year to be an Oscar judge.

I haven’t seen the new remake, but I’m happy to read that English has kept the conceit of never showing a man onscreen and sticking instead to the ladies’ vivid descriptions. (Of a cowboy ranch-hand: “He could crack a coconut with those knees, if he could get them together.”)  I’m even more pleased to hear that the remake preserves the original’s best scene: homewrecker Crystal Allen pays another girl three dollars to go to her apartment and cook dinner so that Crystal’s married date, Stephen Haines, will think she has domestic skills. (She doesn’t.) The girl asks, “Will I find anything in that icebox of yours?” “Yeah,” says a coworker. “Cobwebs and a bottle of gin.”  In the new version, the line is “The big white square thing with the fire coming out of it? That’s the stove.”  I thought it had gone out of fashion to expect the definition of “marriageable” to include “handy in the kitchen” as much as “female,” “single,” and “not going to frighten the horses.” I’m happy to be mistaken.

I suspect that The Women: 2008 got a studio greenlight because someone pitched it as another Sex and the City, but The Women has always been a movie that cried out for an update, because it’s about the way that women change from generation to generation: twenty-somethings who don’t blink at breaking up a home, the middle generation that suffers at their hands, and the middle generation’s mothers who counsel their daughters that it’s better to put up with an occasional dalliance than to destroy a stable home.  The definitive quotes from each are, in order: “Thanks for the fashion tip, Mrs. Haines, but when something I wear doesn’t please Stephen, I take it off”; “Mother, it’s alright for you to talk of another generation when women were chattel and did as men told them to, but this is today!”; and “It’s about the only sacrifice spoiled women like us ever have to make to keep our men.”

The movie throws its barbs in just about every direction, taking socialites, shopgirls, and sob sisters all out for a ride. (“Don’t start calling me names, you Park Avenue playgirl. I know a lot more words than you do.”) But nobody takes it worse than the feminists. Power, like money, is only an instrumental good, the film argues; if all empowerment does is put you on the train to Reno, what’s the use?  This isn’t to say that the film is an unequivocal endorsement of the barefoot-in-the-kitchen brand of femininity. After all, I read somewhere that Clare Boothe Luce, who wrote the original play, absolutely loved a all-male production that the Army did in the 1940’s; we’re obviously dealing with a woman who could handle a little camp. Still, for those seeking a middle ground between feminism on the one hand and the straw-man of traditionalism that feminism has so successfully propagated on the other, The Women is a helpful touchstone.

When it comes to man’s inhumanity to man, gossipy women have been first across the tape since time began. It’s hell, but a hell of a good time, and The Women shows us both. One can only hope the remake doesn’t stray too far from it.

Symmetry aside, there is every reason to think that ICC involvement in Georgia would only make matters worse.  To begin with the most simple reasons, the ICC has yet to succeed in convicting a single war criminal.  The case against Thomas Lubanga, the first ICC case to come to trial, was halted in June after Ocampo violated ICC regulations by failing to share evidence with the defense. 

Also, the ICC only has jurisdiction in countries where the state in question is “unwilling or unable genuinely to carry out the investigation or prosecution” in its own court system.  To get a sense of Ocampo’s standards for “willing and able”: the Colombian judiciary counts.

Even leaving aside Ocampo’s own shortcomings as a prosecutor, there are more important reasons to oppose ICC involvement in Georgia that have to do with the nature of the court itself.  The motivating idea behind the ICC’s creation was the hope that punishment for war crimes might be isolated from political concerns.  Ideally, neither an individual’s high position nor his country’s international entanglements would ever again prevent justice from being done.  Where had once been wrangling, compromise, and eventual impunity would now be plain statues, impartial investigation, and legal finding of fact.

Ocampo has embraced this vision of the ICC as a way to bring the impartiality of law to the problem of crimes against humanity.  “It is the prosecutor’s job to follow the evidence wherever it leads,” he has said.  “With the International Criminal Court, there is a new law under which impunity is no longer an option.”

But reality has proved to be more complicated.  Consider the situation in Sudan, one of four countries currently under active investigation.  Three years after the UN Security council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC, matters stood at an impasse.  The court had indicted Sudanese state officials Ahmed Heroun and Ali Kushayb, and President Omar al-Bashir had refused to turn them over.  Ocampo then, in a surprising move, asked the court to issue an indictment for genocide against Bashir himself. Bashir has declared that he is unwilling to turn over either himself or his subordinates to Ocampo’s prosecution. Without his cooperation, the ICC will be unable to arrest any of its indictees unless they leave Sudan.

It was bold for Ocampo to go after a sitting head of state, but his ambitious decision has created a situation in which it may be possible for Bashir to have his own prosecution put on hold in exchange for surrendering Haroun and Kushayb.  Reuters reports one diplomat as saying that, were Bashir to cooperate, ‘the prosecutor’s attitude might change.” Another indication that a compromise with Bashir is on the table is the fact that Ocampo has made his desire to arrest the sitting president very public.  When the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Jean-Pierre Bemba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it did so under seal; Bemba’s indictment was not made public until he was in custody.  Making his intentions public won’t help Ocampo achieve Bashir’s actual arrest—quite the opposite—suggesting that his motivations are political.

Using an indictment as leverage might help to achieve a successful resolution, but it fundamentally undermines the thing that makes the ICC different from other international organizations. In a situation as complicated as the current conflict in Georgia, it is likely that the ICC would end up once again mixing the rhetoric of impartial legalism with the reality of political maneuvering.  This could only work to everyone’s disadvantage, or, rather, to the advantage of those who prefer an ICC without credibility.

The motivation behind the bill, which passed both houses of Congress today, is to expand access to higher education by making it more affordable.  When it comes to tuition prices, the effect is likely to be exactly the opposite.  Neal McCluskey’s Washington Times editorial puts it in a single elegant sentence: “The more money students get from others, the more they’re willing to pay and the more universities are happy to charge.”  Tuition at four-year universities has gone up by almost half since 1999, but what does that matter when nobody pays sticker price?

Even with the changing labor market and the growing importance of human capital, there are still a number of careers for which a degree gives no real leg up and many more careers where it does but shouldn’t.  The fact that businesses can afford to hire only applicants with bachelor’s degrees—or, to put it more bluntly, those candidates who have had enough spare time and money to get one—doesn’t mean that a college degree bears any relationship to the skills a position requires.

There are arguments against degree inflation that focus on the way that it lowers college’s standards and dumbs down the meaning of a liberal arts education, but the real problem is more prosaic: the more people have college degrees, the more difficult it is to get along without one.  Getting a college degree used to be only one of many ways a young person might advance within his field; apprenticeships, vocational training in high school, and working up from an entry-evel position were others, all with lower price tags.  Now, there are many career paths for which a college degree is, inexplicably, a prerequisite.

Ted Kennedy puts the number of students for whom the cost of four-year college is a deal-breaker at 780,000 per year.  The more interesting statistic would be the percentage of these 780,000 for whom putting four years into a degree would or should be worth it, given the career paths they want to pursue.

On a cheerier note, the final version of the bill mandates that, in order to receive funding, teacher training programs must include specialized instruction in gifted and talented education.  This provision is thanks to the efforts of Chuck Grassley and is a refreshing change from education policy’s usual preoccupation with remedial programs and achieving mere adequacy.  Read more about the bill’s specific provisions here.

The Dark Knight is a successful expression of complex ideas, held upside-down.  Without betraying too many plot details (Jeff Michaels of Akron, OH: you are the last person in America not to have seen this movie; please do so at your earliest convenience), the film gets a lot of mileage out of the distinction between Batman, the outcast who fights crime from behind a mask, and DA Harvey Dent, the fight’s public face.  Batman is an outcast and a vigilante rather than a hero, which leaves him free to “make the choice that no one else will face—the right choice.”

Americans have regarded printing the legend as a national sport ever since George Washington didn’t chop down a cherry tree. We can be brutal to our celebrities, but public figures who have been dead long enough to lapse into legend get the royal treatment, their shortcomings papered over for the sake of giving us something to believe in.

If it sounds like I object to this kind of dishonesty, I don’t.  Batman and Commissioner Gordon lie, Dent comes out looking like a saint, and everyone in Gotham is better off.  The perversity of Dark Knight‘s moral is in not in its endorsement of deception but in its insistence that we deceive only in order to sanitize.

To put it in more concrete terms: Gotham needed a face to put on the fight for justice, and Batman and Dent were the city’s only two options.  The film seems to take it for granted that Batman’s outlaw tactics and unwillingness to reveal his identity make him ineligible.  But why should this be so?  There as many outlaws as saints in the American canon of heroes.  To pretend that the Gothamite rank-and-file will only accept a whitewashed hero suggests that Christopher Nolan deeply misunderstands how this country goes about its myth-making, or at least that he’s never heard of Pretty Boy Floyd.

The movie begins with two henchmen discussing the Joker’s make-up (“To scare people, you know? War paint”), and the first conversation we see between Bruce Wayne and Alfred begins with Bruce’s scars: “Every time you stitch yourself up you do make a bloody mess.”  “It forces me to learn from my mistakes.”  This is clearly a film interested in the strange alchemy by which outward signs don’t just symbolize invisible truths but make them real.  For Nolan to turn around and suggest that all good masks make heroes look like choir boys is a betrayal of everything about masks and myths that the rest of the movie suggests he should understand better.  Why is Abe Lincoln’s honesty de facto more legitimate than Davy Crockett’s bear-killing precocity?  (To put it another, less prudent way, do we really like it better when Obama trades on his personal myth than when McCain does?)

About an hour into the film, Alfred says something that the film’s ending ratifies: “They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point with Batman.”  With all due respect to Michael Caine’s confidence-inspiring British accent, that’s the coward’s way out.  Far better that the honest outlaws of the world should feel a responsibility to inspire their public’s confidence, and far better that the public should be willing to accept a hero who is something less than harmless.

The parade organizers are, incredibly, not the crazies in this story.  It only took twenty-four hours for their antics to be one-upped by Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk, as quoted in a Boston Herald editorial.  “I believe in accountability, but,” she said, “I don’t think there is a place for shame.”

I sympathize with those who have complained that the Beverly parade was tasteless, although complaining about the tastelessness of a parade of horribles is like saying the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is “fun, but too noisy.”  But Kirk’s quote raises a different complaint, and an important question: if we find no shame in becoming pregnant at fifteen, then for Pete’s sake, where could we possibly find it?

The blog Feministing recently featured a horror story about a fifteen-year-old’s attempt to buy a pregnancy test.  The problem was not that she was unable to find one, nor that having found one she was unable to buy it, but simply that the woman at the counter gave her a hard time, saying things like “You shouldn’t be having sex in the first place.”  Reflecting back on the situation, the fifteen-year-old came to the conclusion that “We’re teenage girls, not the spawn of Satan, and we deserve just as much respect as a thirty-year old woman buying a pregnancy test.”

Kirk’s quote and the story from Feministing are part of a trend on the Left to add a fifth freedom: freedom from shame.  Usually, their efforts to eliminate shame are veiled in euphemism.  For instance, when Kirk says that the city of Gloucester’s response to the pregnancy spike should be to have “a constructive and useful dialogue that will benefit our community,” she means a dialogue in which no one feels bad about herself.  The price of doing something bad should be to feel bad about it, just as the price of acting like a fool is looking like one.

Shame culture—or, as the idea was known in better times, honor—is appealing to conservatives.  It squares nicely with a certain affinity for hierarchy. (There is a certain romance associated with behavior that is “immoral,” but none with behavior that is “beneath you.”)  It runs up against the liberal idea that to understand all is to forgive all and subverts the natural human tendency to construct narratives in which all of our actions, however stupid or wicked, make sense in context.  It holds men and women to a standard far stricter than conscience, which is subject to all of the philosophical gymnastics we use to justify our transgressions.

Having fought for the legal right of sixteen-year-old girls to procure abortions, feminists find that there are still many people who will look down their noses at girls who have decided to live up to their “PORN STAR” t-shirts.  It is unpleasant to have a confrontation with a store clerk who is willing to criticize a high school sophomore for buying a pregnancy test kit.  It is meant to be.  I understand the desire to extend sympathy and charitable understanding to a young woman who has found herself in a difficult situation, but it is important to remember that, if we acknowledge a woman’s right to believe that it is immoral for fifteen-year-old girls to be having sex, we must acknowledge her right to enforce that belief through whatever legitimate means she has available, including her right to look a girl in the eye and say, “What you did was wrong.”

Opponents of shame often use the slogan “Don’t judge.” I am sure that Carolyn Kirk and I would disagree about what our culture’s standards of sexual behavior should be, but to say that shame is an inappropriate tool is to throw moral judgment out the window altogether.

A new ruling of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission has given the city of New Haven further leeway to continue the policies that have made it a flagship “sanctuary city.”  The government of New Haven, in an effort to make the city more hospitable to illegal immigrants, began issuing municipal ID cards that allow residents to open bank accounts and interact with local law enforcement without presenting federal identification.  (There was, among others, a concern that forcing illegal immigrants to deal exclusively in cash made them targets for robbery.)  Anti-immigration groups sued for the names of residents who applied for ID cards, but the state FOIC has issued a preliminary ruling denying their request.  While New Haven is rolling out a carpet, towns in Rhode Island and New Jersey are slamming their doors, cracking down on illegal immigrants and businesses that employ them, and police officers in Prince William Country, VA, are now required to check the immigration status of everyone they arrest.

Hard-liners on both sides have reason to hope that drastic local action may pressure the federal government to respond. Illegal immigration is a matter of national citizenship, and so its ultimate solution will necessarily be federal. Until such a solution materializes, however, local solutions have their own advantages.

Certain parts of the country view the influx of illegal immigrants into their communities as a threat. These fears may be primarily economic, cultural, or simply reactionary, but it remains that, so long as these immigrants lack the privileges of citizenship, communities are within their rights to expel them.  The state of Arizona has had success in doing so through the adjustment of incentives (eliminating job opportunities through the prosecution of firms that employ illegal immigrants, etc.), and the replacement of illegal labor with legal.  If Congress remains at an impasse on the issue of illegal immigration and McCain’s leadership remains ambiguous, those who oppose the eventual extension of citizenship to illegal aliens would do well to begin with their cities and states.

If cities wishing to drive illegal immigrants from their communities have the freedom to do so, then it follows that those cities wishing to draw illegal immigrants into theirs must have that freedom, too, within the bounds of the law.  This may not be such a bitter pill for immigration opponents to swallow.  Advocates for illegal immigrants have had to answer the charge that the current wave of immigration is different from others insofar as it is illegal.  Some have answered with the slogan “No human being is illegal”—an obvious falsehood, and especially irritating when it is draped in Christian rhetoric.  There are others who accept the argument that residency should not be divorced from citizenship, and who for this reason want citizenship granted to the illegal aliens who clearly desire permanent residence in the United States.  It is unclear whether any kind of “path to citizenship” plan will succeed on the national level, and I will leave aside the question of whether or not such a plan to be advisable.  However, insofar as programs like the New Haven ID card are meant to reinforce the idea that participation in a community must mean participation in its politics, they are a first step towards breeding the respect for law and government that illegal immigration undermines.

A permanent solution must either grant national citizenship to illegal immigrants or decisively refuse to grant it, but, given that some cities have decided to welcome illegal immigrants into their communities, better that they should do so in a way that doesn’t erode the importance of citizenship.  “Sanctuary cities” isolate the cultural impact (and the government services drain Richard cites) of immigration to those areas that have decided to welcome it, while places like Arizona and Prince William County have the consolation of knowing that they are writing the book from which the federal government may soon be taking a page.

If a national solution is not in the offing, these local policies may be the next best thing, both as stop-gap solutions and as data points for the national discussion.  After all, both sides can agree that nothing succeeds like success.

The question of whether or not to see “Sex and the City” is easy to answer: if you are a man, no. There is nothing here for you. If you are a woman, still no. The sugary cocktail of glamour and sentimentality may prove addictive; those DVD box sets aren’t cheap, and watching them will make you dumber. For sensible people, the real question is not “Should I see this movie?” but “How much of what kind of disdain should I feel for it?”

The time to be offended at “Sex and the City”’s frank discussion of intimate matters was 1998, when the series premiered. At the present moment, American culture has so outpaced Carrie Bradshaw that even her single entendres seem tame. Nor does the movie push anything like a feminist agenda.  More progressive reviewers have picked up on the fact that, for all their scandalous chatter, the girls’ lives revolve around men as much as June Cleaver’s ever did.  Fernando Croce calls it “infuriating stuff to anybody who remembers bra-burning as something more than a “Shrek the Third” gag.” I can only imagine. 

But don’t let the liberal reaction to “Sex and the City” fool you. The film isn’t reactionary, just harmless and clichéd. Never let the minutiae of the wedding overshadow your marriage. Your family is more important than your career. Forgiveness is a part of every real relationship. What’s the deal with airline food?

Schmaltz and a lack of imagination make “Sex and the City” bad cinema, but if that were the only problem I would simply wait for the satisfaction of seeing it in the Blockbuster bargain bin next to “The Butterfly Effect” and leave it at that. Unfortunately, there is a lot more wrong with this cotton candy fantasy than trite sentimentality and galloping materialism.

Watch Sarah Jessica Parker flounce around Manhattan and try asking a basic question: what’s her motivation? It’s hard to wring anything like a philosophy of life from what essentially amounts to an overgrown soap opera, but it seems to have a lot to do with Self: self-discovery, self-respect, self-esteem. Self-absorption.

Having decided that marriage is not the right lifestyle choice for her, Carrie ends the movie with a question: “Why is it that we’re willing to write our own vows but not our own rules?” That’s right, girlfriend! Marriage is just a bunch of rules that other people made up, and buying into it will only obscure the Inner You. Never mind whether those other people might have been wiser than you are, or whether the transformation might be an improvement.

Or take Samantha, whose life philosophy is summed up in the line “I love you, but I love me more.” She abandons a man who loves her and whom she loves because she can’t stand not to be the center of her own universe. Even the ladies’ four-way friendship, supposedly the show’s moral center, involves so much confessional self-reflection that one is tempted to conclude that relationships with other people are only interesting insofar as they enable self-discovery. Strange—I always thought it was the other way around.

It would be one thing if “Sex and the City” simply shouted from the rooftops things better discussed in private; such crassness would spoil our decorum, but not much else. It is something else again for Carrie’s voice-over platitudes to be so plainly immoral.  Most people don’t have the luxury of making their own rules—visit a crisis pregnancy center if you don’t believe me—and the ones who do soon find that the quickest way to make your life small and pathetic isn’t to make it revolve around a man, but to make it revolve around yourself.