VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Return of Traditional Values.

True, both Downton Abbey and American Sniper are well crafted, nicely produced, and have fine actors. But dozens of other movies and television shows meet those criteria too. So why would postmodern Westerners stay glued to their televisions on Sunday nights to enjoy the daily lives of the prewar English manorial class and their hordes of obedient and often well-adjusted and patriotic servants? Stranger yet, why are the Granthams for the most part portrayed as decent people, their servants relatively happy—and, in this age of cynicism, sarcasm, and nihilism, why is the reactionary idea of noblesse oblige taken seriously?

In a very different vein, why would Americans identify with a combat veteran who—as Michael Moore reminded us— blew apart indigenous people with a sniper rifle, in a war that for a decade Hollywood, the media, and most of the Democratic Party insisted was unwise, unwarranted, and unethical? The public senses something in these two vastly different works that it silently, and in the guilt-free privacy of the movie theater or living room, appreciates.

Each in its own way resonates with a public’s nostalgic sense of loss. They are like Virgil’s Aeneid—finished in 19 BC in the final death throes of the rural Italian Roman Republic as it transmogrified into a vast Mediterranean globalized empire—which sought to remind Romans of who they had been, where they had come from, and what was lost and not coming back. Both Downton Abbey and American Sniper bring to mind Hesiod’s age-old theme of the ethical regress that accompanies material progress.

For this generation of contemporary Westerners, is there is a fascination in watching people, even rich lords and ladies, sit and speak as they dine together rather than eat on couches in sweat pants in front of the television each evening? Amid Facebook and Twitter, do cocooned Westerners miss things like attending clubs, socials, and community councils? In an age when most Americans cannot name their great-grandparents, is the public curious about a lost age when one measured his worth in terms of not dishonoring his ancestors and ensuring that whatever he inherited he added to rather than consumed? How can a poor Irishman like the widowed Tom Branson admire his in-law English aristocrats, as if they were fellow decent humans rather than class oppressors? Are formalities that we now write off as minor or irrelevant—how one shakes hands, the lost arts like etiquette and pleasant diction, a rich vocabulary, the avoidance of slang and profanity—not that really minor after all?

Hmm. Read the whole thing.