An Economy is Not a Society by Glover Dennis;

Author:Glover, Dennis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

On the death of Robin Williams, a friend of mine, Emily, sent me a link to a YouTube clip of the best scene from Dead Poets Society. I am what you would call very pro-Williams – many people aren’t – and mainly because of this movie, which I saw with a girlfriend I was very fond of when it was released in 1989. At twenty-five and about to head off to Cambridge, I was still young enough to put myself in the shoes of the movie’s students; arriving there still infected by Peter Weir’s great story, in which the heroes are the romantic poets Whitman, Thoreau, Byron and Tennyson, I was determined not to spend all my time conducting some dry-as-dust academic research but to be the sort of student the Williams character – who was named (for us perhaps ironically) Mr Keating – would have wanted me to be. I would try to read everything – the classics, philosophy, literature, poetry – and breathe deeply the romance of the great university town. My PhD thesis would be a meal ticket and no more. If I didn’t fully succeed in this, I did at least try.

I’m now older than Mr Keating was in the film, and seeing the YouTube clip affected me in a different way. The teacher’s message still seemed subversive, but for different reasons. You may recall the scene. Mr Keating, who has just taken the job of English master at the exclusive male boarding school where he himself was once a student, asks his class to open their poetry textbook, written by one Dr J. Evans Pritchard, at the introduction. He tells one student, Neil, to read the opening paragraph. It says that the greatness of a poem can be determined in a relatively simple way, by gauging first how artfully the objective of the poem has been rendered (through the use of meter, rhyme and figures of speech) and then how important that objective is. And the simplest way to do this is to plot these qualities on a graph, with the poem’s artistic perfection (‘P’) plotted horizontally and its importance (‘I’) plotted vertically: ‘Calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.’ As Neil is reading this, Mr Keating draws such a graph on the blackboard, and next to it the formula ‘P × I = G’. He then turns to the class and says, ‘Excrement!’ before instructing his pupils to take Dr J. Evans Pritchard’s introductory chapter in their hands and ‘Rip it out!’

In 1989 the culture wars were just beginning, and this scene became one of its early battles. It fitted the template perfectly: Keating’s instruction to his class to rip out the text as a metaphor for the corrupting of the young, who were being incited by their irresponsible teachers to reject authority and take up a romantic variant of nihilism. Writing in 1990, the Australian sociologist John Carroll – whose work I admire, even though I suspect

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