Heroes of the Fourth Turning

Yesterday I read Will Arbery's new play (currently at Playwrights Horizons in NYC), Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Rod Dreher at The American Conservative blogged about it a few times, giving it high praise for its empathetic portrayal of white Catholic conservatives.

Empathetic is a loaded descriptor here, for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

The play, set in 2017 Wyoming (just before the total solar eclipse, just after Charlottesville), features the troubled, mostly twenty-something alumni of Transfiguration College (a real place where the playwright's parents work and where he lives). We see a few hours from the ending of a party celebrating the inauguration of the College's new president, beloved president Gina, who doesn't appear until the final scenes.

The other characters represent representative cross-sections of white conservatism. Teresa, aptly described by Dreher as an "Ann Coulter type," is in many ways the standout, Gina's former star pupil now blogging merrily as an intellectual powerhouse of the Right. She adores Steve Bannon, argues that Trump represents the next, necessary face for conservatives. Kevin is lost soul, desperately lonely, desperately horny, pathetically self-aware of how pathetic he is. He's a bit of an incel, though he never uses that term. Emily, Gina's daughter, is a deep-feeling soul questioning some of the harsher sides of modern-day conservatism. Justin is the oldest of the alumi at 38; he entered college after a stint in the Marines. His perspective aligns with Dreher's own Benedict Option (which gets name-checked here, as do a range of other theological and political works). A war is coming, he's convinced. The best Christians can do is batten down the hatches until it passes.

Most characters are convinced that some kind of conflict is happening. Teresa is eager for it. She wants warriors and castigates Kevin as a "soy boy," too weak-willed to stand for anything. Emily recoils at the thought of making war. So too does Gina, once she comes. She and Teresa have at it, former star pupil versus former favored professor.

Arbery gives every character some grand monologues. As Dreher notes, Teresa in particular sings well the tune of Sohrab Ahmari (from the recent Ahmari-French debates). Reacting to Gina's castigating Trump and his ilk as no true conservatives, Teresa lashes back:

Not being measured. Not being polite. I don’t want to be polite anymore. We can’t lie to ourselves. We’re past that. We’re in Crisis. They’re coming for our tabernacle. They want to burn it down. They want to destroy the legacy of heroes like you. So I propose leveling up. I propose looking at the truth in the face. Knowing what it looks like. Knowing what we look like to them. It’s not going anywhere. I propose not taking any shit. Not ignoring all the hypocritical bullshit. Going blow for blow. And being ready for the war, if it happens. When it happens. You call us racist, we’ll call you racist. You call us white, we’ll call you black. You call us Nazis, we’ll call you abortionists and eugenicists. You call us ignorant Christians, we’ll call you spineless hedonistic soulless bloviating bloodbags. But you stop doing that, and give this thing space and time to work itself out, we’ll stop too. You focus your efforts on making this a better nation, an American nation, a republic of ideas, we will too.

Challenged by Emily about the Christian precepts of love and empathy, Teresa slaps her down:

Oh don’t with the empathy. Liberals are empathy addicts. Empathy empathy empathy. Empathy is empty. Hannah Arendt says we don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling – first of all that’s impossible, second of all it’s self-righteous and breeds complacency, third of all it’s politically irresponsible. Empathize with someone and suddenly you’re erasing the boundaries of your own conscience, suddenly you’re living under the tyranny of their desires. We need to know how to think how they’re thinking. From a distance.

Gina's response is devastating, at least in my own star-pupil-who-loves-getting-accolades-from-professors eyes. She essentially declares that the school's great works curriculum has failed with Teresa, who's twisted it into a Machiavellian warfare strategy. Teresa's character spouts a viewpoint I find dangerous and repulsive, but the moment where Gina practically disowns her just stings.

I'm fascinated how and why this play has caught the fancy of New Yorkers. I tend to distrust it when NYC seizes upon a play as a "real" or "respectful" portrayal of a non-left/progressive demographic. Generally, when I scratch the surface of such accolades I find the same old "aren't they awful/fascinating/scary" stereotyping and "aren't we so much better" back-patting. I imagine the play would be very different, and very differently received, were it about white evangelicals. (Of course, I must admit that the characters' conversations would probably be a bit less erudite; Catholic higher ed institutions score better at intellectual rigor and cultural literacy on average.)

Part of the interest, however, seems to be that reaction against empathy. The dramaturg's intro to the printed edition of the play (and kudos to Playwrights Horizons for making such editions available immediately) cites a recent Invisibilia episode, "The End of Empathy," which I listened to while running today.

Both it and the play require me to chew on them a bit more.