John Lasseter’s Disney – the Pixar he founded and the Walt Disney Animation Studios he has reformed – are becoming the new source and center of a renewed, and in some ways simply new, American culture. They are the only major institution in the American public square that 1) teaches people the meaning of life, and 2) has the ear of virtually everyone. And the lessons they teach are entirely edifying.

They are slowly but surely turning our dying culture inside out.

They teach us the meaning of death (Toy Story 2) and love (Frozen) and the heroic (The Incredibles) and manhood (UP) and womanhood (Brave) and parenthood (Finding Nemo) and brotherhood (Toy Story) and politics (Toy Story 3) and commerce (WALL-E) and art (Ratatouille) and science (Big Hero 6). No one else teaches these things and is listened to receptively by all sectors of society.

What else do you want? They are becoming the source and center of a new, and renewed, American culture.

As I’ve said before, these people are playing to win.

I am aware that you cannot build a culture only on movies. Questions of authority, and hence of the role of religion, cannot be avoided forever. It remains an open question what will happen when the renewed America of John Lasseter’s Disney clashes with the dying America of Obergefell and Burwell – those cases being as good a couple of proxies as any for the roles of Keymaster and Gatekeeper to our forthcoming Gozer the Gozerian (featuring special guest star Donald Trump as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man).

I hope and expect that diligent work by the church in the coming decade, work to love America with a holy love and convict America with a loving holiness, will position us for a positive outcome. That positive outcome is not a cultural victory of Christians over non-Christians; what does that idea even mean? A positive outcome would be a new moral consensus between Americans of goodwill and different faiths.

It’s interesting that I’m hearing a lot of people talk about this article, which boils down to “Pixar is a tool of the capitalist oppressor.” The apostles of materialism are right to be mad at the New Disney. People today feel a deep moral disconnect in their daily lives. The materialists, whether in or out of power, rely on that. Those in power rely on it to keep our energies sapped and our minds sluggish; revolutionaries know that it’s the only thing that makes their call for an overthrow of the political and economic system seem either plausible or legitimate. Anything that helps people redraw moral connections in their daily lives without either merely going with the flow or overthrowing democratic capitalism is a deadly poison to them both. We should anticipate that all efforts at moral edification in the public square will be opposed by them, revolutionary and reactionary alike.

But they will be supported by all the non-materialists, which is to say, the overwhelming majority; and, just as important, they are already finding a home in centers of cultural power like Disney.

Now to the business at hand. If you liked my 21 word review of Inside Out, you’re going to love the next 4,000.

(Spoilers ahead!)

I have now seen Inside Out four times, and at last I am beginning to feel like I am getting my head around everything that’s going on below the surface. But rest assured, we are going to be unpacking this movie for years to come.

Of everything I might say to praise this movie, let me start with this: I have seen it four times in less than a month, and I cried more at the fourth showing than at the first one. This movie is not getting older but newer as I return to it; it grows not staler but fresher.

As that fourth showing began, I made an interesting discovery about how Pixar crafts the viewer experience for maximum effect. I now know why Pixar puts a short in front of each of its movies, and John Lasseter is now extending that strategy to some other Disney films. I used to think it was just because the Pixar team was so creative, they came up with more good ideas than they could fully use. Well, no doubt that’s part of it. But as vapid previews of vapid summer blockbusters rolled before my eyes, I sat there wondering if Inside Out would still affect me emotionally on the fourth viewing. And then on came “Lava,” the strange and quirkily charming short Pixar has appended to the front end of Inside Out. I hadn’t noticed this before, but this time, because I was paying attention to my own state of mind, I noticed that within seconds I was shifting gears internally. I was connecting with the story on the screen. Not in a huge way, because “Lava” is just a silly little morsel of a short, nothing profound. The point is the way it teed me up to experience Inside Out. The noise and static was cleared out of my system. I was more fully receptive to Inside Out, Take Four than I would have thought possible, and I now see that it’s the shorts that do this.

Most of what’s going on in Inside Out is below the surface. Every person has a lead emotion; Riley is led by her Joy, her mother by her Sadness, her father by his Anger. The cool girl – wonderful touch! – is led by her Fear.

Further below the surface: Our emotions learn to cooperate as we mature. A child’s brain is a battleground, with emotions constantly wrestling for dominance. Adults have learned how the pieces fit together. They know what each emotion’s job is; they know who’s supposed to do what.

Even further below the surface: Our emotions also converge as we mature. Riley’s five emotions have five very distinct personalities. The mother and father’s five emotions have very similar personalities, and are only subtly distinguishable from one another. At the end of the movie we know Riley has matured, not only because she has more islands and more buttons on her mental console, but because her emotions collaborate seamlessly during the hockey game.

But the most important things below the surface are the emotions and the islands.

Joy has innovative ideas, is physically brave in the face of danger, and keeps trying in the face of impossible odds. It’s not just the crazy idea at the end to jump off a tower of boyfriends onto a trampoline, as cool as that was. You can see this in a thousand ways. Sadness asks if it’s possible to get back to headquarters; Joy hesitates, then says, “we have to try.” That is the kind of person joy makes us into.

Sadness, on the other hand, absorbs and retains large amounts of information, and is able to make sense of complex systems. Sadness helps those around them to grow and learn. And Sadness brings endurance – perseverance through suffering.

Sadness knows the darkness. She knows nightmares. She knows that terrible things lurk in the subterranean depths beneath the consciousness, waiting to emerge and wreak havoc.

Do you think there’s no darkness in this movie? In the Subconscious, Joy and Sadness follow a trail of candy wrappers to find Bing Bong, who cries candy rather than tears, held prisoner.

“Do you still have the core memories?” asks Joy. “Yeah,” says Bing Bong. “He only cared about the candy.”

He only cared about the candy.

The giant clown was torturing Bing Bong. Keeping him in a cage and torturing him.

For the candy.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Sadness.

And Sadness is romantic. She smiles adoringly at the imaginary boyfriend, while Joy and Bing Bong are repelled. At the end, she’s the one who likes Tragic Vampire Romance Island.

Like her ability to retain information and her knowledge of darkness, Sadness’s romanticism is connected to maturity. Joy, simply by itself, is of childhood and likes the things of childhood. Her delights are intense, but ephemeral. It is as we grow up – as we come to know Sadness – that we begin to long for delights that lead us into the eternal.

Left to herself, Joy would jump into puddles forever. Only when she has come to know Sadness will she learn to find greater exhilaration by jumping into a person.

Consider the moment when Joy is standing on top of the tower of boyfriends. We know that she’s learned from Sadness because she says to herself, “This is crazy! No, think positive . . . I’m positive this is crazy!” She’d never have stopped and had this kind of self-awareness before. Sadness has taught Joy to know herself.

But then we find out she’s still Joy, because she jumps anyway. Only she would.

Joy discovers, Sadness remembers.

Joy creates, Sadness yearns.

Joy accomplishes, Sadness endures.

Joy is Life. Sadness is Wisdom.

Elsewhere I have described this movie as a “devastating attack on Romantic individualism,” one that’s on par with Frozen. That requires some unpacking.

I was unsure about this at first because the movie appears to reduce the business of being human to merely the emotions. But that’s actually not what it does. This movie actually challenges the view that the emotions are what life is really all about.

Before we get to the attack on Romanticism, let’s start with two important places where this movie intersects with both Romanticism and Christianity.

One is the very low place it gives to Fear. Fear has no important effect on the plot. When Anger asks Fear he’s in or out for the Happy Core Memory Development Program, he flinches and has no answer. Anger and Disgust both have interesting roles to play. They change our behavior in ways that affect the story – ways that are more important than they might at first appear, as we will see below. But after four viewings I am unable to detect anything profound going on, either on or below the surface, with Fear.

Fear has no effect on anything we care about for the sake of the story – which is to say, Fear has no effect on the things that matter most in human life. He’s simply there to keep our heads attached to our bodies. “We did not die today, I call that an unqualified success!” Hence he is used by the filmmakers simply as comic relief.

There is a long materialist tradition of social thought, stretching from Thrasymachus to Hobbes to John Rawls, in which Fear plays the decisive role in life. Christianity and Romanticism agree in rejecting this. A materialistic movie would have had Fear stop Riley from running away. But as powerful as Fear may seem, when the real crunch time comes, Anger and Disgust – both of which involve the transcendent – are more important.

(Interestingly, Machiavelli understood this in a way Hobbes did not. Machiavelli did say that it is better to be feared than loved. But he added that it is paramount not to be hated, for men will overcome even their fear of death to fight what they hate. For this and other reasons I don’t consider Machiavelli a materialist; he has “the splendid pagan virtues.”)

A more important point of overlap between Christianity and Romanticism is the importance of compassion. “They came to help because of Sadness” is a line that could have come straight out of Rousseau. His account of the soul followed Plato’s fairly closely, with one large exception: as the part of the soul that mediates between reason and appetite he replaced Plato’s thymos – “spiritedness,” or, more simply, Anger – with pitié – “pity” or compassion – which he defined as a person’s “innate repugnance to see his fellow suffer.”

Christianity and Romantics agree that compassion for the suffering should be a central concern in both personal and social ethics. Indeed, this agreement has been one of the great driving forces in modern politics; it has been one of the most important ingredients in the glue that has held together the great alliance between these two religions – an alliance that founded America and defeated totalitarianism.

But pity is not enough. As Inside Out makes clear, Anger and Disgust are also concerned with injustice. The Romantic approach to injustice is truncated; Rousseau’s Emile is moved by pity to take action to correct injustice, but he is taught to have sufficient contempt for the perpetrators that he feels pity for them as well as for their victims. Poor souls, they are corrupt and their corruption makes them miserable; we pity them, but we have too much contempt for their lack of virtue to be really angry at them.

(Fascinating side note: the filmmakers chose the five emotions for this movie from a list of seven emotions that science has found produce facial expressions that are the same and instantly recognizable worldwide, across all boundaries of culture. The other two were surprise and contempt. Obviously seven emotions would have been too many characters to make a good movie out of. It’s easy to think that they lost nothing by not having a character called Surprise; it’s hard to think they lost nothing by not having a character called Contempt.)

It is the Christians who are able to bring in Sadness at injustice (an element wholly lacking in pre-Christian philosophy) without losing Anger. And another ingredient in the glue that has held together the alliance between Christianity and Romanticism was an essentially Christian approach to Anger and injustice.

Last fall, at a symposium on Locke I made the statement that Locke’s whole career could almost be summarized as a great effort to correct a vast misdirection of the anger produced by injustice in the Europe of his day. People were directing their anger indiscriminately against all people who belonged to other religions; Locke taught them to direct the anger produced by injustice only at the individuals who commit the injustice, not at their co-religionists or even at their religion per se (except in special cases where the religion per se formally teaches injustice). The success of this great redirection of Anger created religious freedom and, in many ways, the modern world.

Disgust is also involved in injustice, and here we come to an area where the modern world has (I admit) failed comprehensively. Modern thought has neglected intrinsic repugnance at injustice – repugnance at its inherent wrongness as distinct from repugnance at the offence against God’s holiness it represents (important as that is) or the damage it does to others (important as that also is). Our inability to relate Disgust to injustice leaves us vacillating between Anger and Sadness, between going to war against injustice or stooping to heal its victims – both very worthy activities, but insufficient. To some extent (not comprehensively) we must have a public, shared understanding of what is intrinsically repugnant.

As Inside Out shows, Sadness takes us outside ourselves, moves us toward the needs of others. To that extent, as I said, the movie is working within a Christian/Romantic consensus. But Romanticism has been unable to sustain that outward movement. Again and again it collapses back into the inner world, into the subjective, into the self – disconnecting us once again from the needs of others.

It does this because it has nothing over and above the self, to which the self must conform. The feelings, in Rousseau’s scheme, must conform to reason; reason, in turn, conforms to Nature and to God – with Nature having been designed by God, such that the two produce no conflict. But conformity to Nature and God is judged solely by reason. There is no revealed religion, nor is there much of a social nature in humanity beyond the family, and for Rousseau the family is wholly guided by the husband’s reason. Thus, at least for a man, while his reason must in theory conform to higher things, in practice it conforms only to its own perception of those higher things. There is, practically if not theoretically, nothing higher.

And here we come to the really devastating attack on Romanticism in the movie: the islands.

The second most subversive thing in Inside Out is Honesty Island. To make honesty a fundamental trait of the human personality is itself a victory. But Inside Out not only does this, it does it in a way that makes honesty transcend the emotions. Honesty Island is a standing (well, floating) rebuke to Romanticism.

It is a radical defect in the ethics of Plato that justice is subordinated to the psychology of the individual. The just man, Plato said, is the man whose soul is in harmony; the just man is the supremely happy man, and his motive to pursue justice is his own personal happiness. This defect is mitigated in Plato, however, because he is religious. He thinks this inner harmony is only well achieved by those who devote themselves fully to the contemplation of Truth, and his understanding of “contemplating Truth” is sufficiently religious in nature to convey a palpable sense of getting out of oneself and seeking that which is really transcendent. If that is where inner harmony and personal happiness is found, the subjectivity of “inner harmony” as a definition of justice and personal happiness as a motive for pursuing it, while not ideal, are less of a problem.

Rousseau picks up the defective ethical subjectivity from Plato, but not the mitigating religiosity. Rousseau does have a teaching about religion, a teaching about the truth of God – one he sincerely believes – but he is not a religious man. Philosophy is not, for him, a quest for Truth that produces inner harmony and personal happiness; it is a quest for inner harmony and personal happiness that happens to involve Truth. He does not bring in reason and pity because his devotion to God demands it; he brings in God because his devotion to reason and pity demand it. Logic demands that reason and pity must have a transcendent source if they are to be morally authoritative; hence, God is brought in. But the worshipful devotion is to reason and pity, not God.

As a result, for Rousseau, the self is all, and justice means simply that which produces inner harmony and personal happiness. Rousseau wants the inner harmony of soul promised by Plato, but without the real abandoning of the soul to the transcendent demanded by Plato.

Now, what does all this have to do with Honesty Island? In this movie, the emotions are dependent on the islands, not the islands on the emotions. The islands are dependent on memories, not emotions; the core memories produce the islands regardless of what color they are – that is, regardless of what emotions are associated with them. The “honesty” core memory produces Honesty Island whether it’s yellow (joyful) or blue (sad) or some combination. The islands are what they are, because the memories are what they are, however we feel about them. But while the islands do not depend on the emotions, the emotions do depend on the islands. Their job is to keep the islands running. When the islands shut down, they can’t function. In the end, if the islands remain shut down the emotions themselves shut down (“we can’t make Riley feel anything”).

Honesty is not there to maintain Joy; Joy is there to maintain Honesty.

And notice that when Honesty Island falls, the Train of Thought is catastrophically derailed.

But the most subversive thing in Inside Out is Family Island. The difference between Plato and Rousseau that I have sketched above in terms of religion also plays itself out in terms of family. And here we see how Inside Out not only attacks Rousseau, but Plato.

Plato demands that the philosopher withdraw from the family and the city, which for him are so intimately connected as to be almost inseparable. To have a family invests us in the city, and both the family and the city keep us focused on what were for him the lower rather than the higher parts of the soul. In the Republic, the philosopher who escapes the cave refuses to go back into it unless forced. The philosopher-kings in the Just City likewise rule because they have no choice – if they don’t rule they will be subject to inferior, unphilosophical rulers. The family and the city are the opponents of justice and true happiness.

Now the interesting thing about Rousseau is that while Romantic Individualism is currently dismantling the “traditional family,” Rousseau did not set out to undermine the traditional family. Quite the contrary, he idolized it. His movement is rightly called Romanticism, for in Rousseau’s eyes romantic love between emphatically masculine men and emphatically feminine women is the solution to the problem of modernity. Without requiring a return to revealed religion, which Rousseau was not interested in, Romance would sustain the family and thus keep us connected to Nature, reconcile the individual to the city, and create a middle ground between crass utilitarianism and Platonic otherworldliness.

This project had an impressive run in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but ultimately failed. It failed because, again, there was nothing above the self. Natural desires turned out not to be as fixed and reliable as Rousseau had hoped; hence we were not really reconnected with Nature, and the family could not stand firm against either the demands of politics (Tocqueville warned that democratic ideas about justice would undermine the traditional sex roles upon which the family depended) on the one hand, or the demands of utilitarian personal satisfaction on the other.

Here, as elsewhere, Romanticism collapsed back into the self because it was essentially concerned with inner harmony and personal happiness rather than with the transcendent. I don’t believe that modernity is inherently antireligious or antirealist, because I think a (correct) Christian critique of ancient and medieval practices was one of the essential elements of its emergence. But I do think modernity nonetheless creates problems to which a transcendent answer is needed.

Against Rousseau and even against Plato, Inside Out makes family transcendent. We cannot escape the family because the family produces us. It is central to who we are. We do not invest in our families because we seek inner harmony and personal happiness; rather, we must take family for granted and adjust our inner harmony and personal happiness to it.

Family is not there to maintain Joy; Joy is there to maintain Family.

I have described Honesty Island and Family Island as subversive. They are certainly subversive of the cultural status quo. I wonder, however, if that is the only lens to look at this through. Is there not an emerging moral consensus for a stable two-parent family (though not a consensus on who the two parents are) and an ethic that transcends personal happiness?

The climax of the movie is not when Riley comes home. The climax of the movie is when Joy hands the five original core memories to Sadness.

She doesn’t need to do it. Riley is already home. Crisis averted. There’s no external constraint.

But Joy understands now that the goal of life is not to maximize happiness. We do not have to give up our desire to be happy, but we do have to give up making it our top priority.

Joy must die to herself.

Fortunately, she met someone who showed her what that looks like. “Take her to the moon for me.” Looking at the pictures available online, I can’t tell if one of the new islands at the end of the movie is Astronomy Island, but I choose to believe that it’s there.

And then Sadness takes Joy by the hand and pulls her over to the console.

Because he who seeks to save his happiness will lose it, but he who gives up his happiness will save it.