"I'm a Girls Watcher..."

NYT columnist Ross Douthat channels conservative professor Peter Lawler* in today's column about the HBO show.

Like most television shows about young urbanites making their way in the world, “Girls” is a depiction of a culture whose controlling philosophy is what the late Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism” — the view that the key to the good life lies almost exclusively in self-discovery, self-actualization, the cultivation of the unique and holy You.

This is a perspective with religious and political corollaries: It implies a God-as-life-coach theology, the kind that pulses through Oprah Winfrey’s current revival tour, and a politics in which the state is effectively a therapeutic agent, protecting the questing self from shocks and deprivation.

And to be a cultural conservative today means, above all, regarding expressive individualism as an idea desperately in need of correction and critique.

Often the roots of this kind of conservatism are religious, since biblical faith takes a rather dimmer view of human nature’s inner workings, a rather darker view of the unfettered self. But the conservative argument is also a practical one: We don’t think expressive individualism actually makes people very happy.

We have some sociological evidence for this contention, in the disintegration that has proceeded apace in poorer communities as American society has become more individualistic.

Yada, yada, yada...
(Talk about assuming your conclusion and ignoring any economic evidence that might more call for further investigation of causation...  John Maynard Keynes on all fours is just not that sexxy?)

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 * Specifically, Lawler's article The Secret Moral Message of Girls published last year in the Intercollegiate Review.