Downton Abbey and Modernization

If you, like me, have been enjoying the ups and downs of the Crawley family for the last couple of years, then this humble abode and its well-manicured grounds have become somewhat familiar to you. 

Many people out there are mourning the loss of Matthew Crawley who died in the very last minutes at the end of Season 3 so that his actor (Dan Stevens) might live on to explore other adventures in his career (can’t blame him…his character was a bit of a goody two shoes).  But before his death, Matthew had started in motion the modernization of Downton to save the family home and fortune.  It all seems good and fine, doesn’t it?  They weren’t generating enough money with their management of the land—we loyal viewers heard that it was being “improperly managed” more than once.  Weren’t we all on Matthew’s side?  Modernization…it is so…modern, who can resist?  Poor Lord Grantham with his grand ways and his lack of proper management skills; it did take him a while to see sense.  He certainly could not articulate any reason for his past management and he did not try to argue that he properly managed at all, although I think he could have. 

                Perhaps if Lord Grantham had been friends with a youngish Aldo Leopold, together they could have made an argument for improper management, which might have even included letting the grass grow or some native vegetation.  The modernization that Matthew spoke of included greater efficiencies in farming with machinery and working more of the land to generate profits great enough to keep Downton solvent in the near future.  Solvency is good, but is the cost always paid by natural things?  Leopold talks of Kublai Khan planting millet and other grains so that the cranes would not want, and then of the farmers who drained marshes so that their farms might not only surround, but invade the marsh.  This too in the name of modernization and efficiency (if only a short-term efficiency). 

                Maybe our future modernization will involve minimizing impact and maximizing wildness.  Leopold says that “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.  It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.  The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.”  Maybe in Season four, modernization will collide with nature and Lord Grantham will find a voice for the improperly managed, who do quite well in managing themselves.