First, I want to apologize for failing to respond to the very thoughtful comments in the threads. When I post a comment there, it mysteriously disappears. Why don’t I get that fixed? Well, I guess I’m getting around to it. As my wife can can tell you, when a light goes out in the bathroom, I usually give it a couple of weeks to fix itself.
Because it’s been made available for free on Showtime, I actually watched the first 20 minutes of Dead Poets Society again. I now refuse to believe that the prep school portrayed is realistic. Its “four pillars” are “honor, tradition, discipline, and excellence.” Give me a break. And all the teachers are old and boring men, who are pretty much about the discipline. What’s interesting is the school’s atheism: There’s prayer before a meal, but not in the chapel; the pillars are godless, etc. So when the RW character (Mr. Keating, or “captain, my captain”) tells the boys that in the long run you’re worm food, and that’s why you have to “gather ye rosebuds” and “seize the day” while you can, that makes perfectly good sense to them. Keating goes on to tell them that the only thing we know is that we’re here; life is a play that has no point beyond itself, and all anyone can do is contribute a verse. The truth the headmaster tells Keating is even tougher; the boys will hate you later for getting them to believe they can be poets or verse contributors, much less “free thinkers.” Most of them aren’t up to that. Keating’s response is a bit of his own poetry romantically obliterating the distinction between real life and dreams. The next step of my report about my “close watching” would be about Keating’s own solitary sadness, lack of real life, inability to contribute a significant verse, etc.
The allegedly evil suicide-inducing dad in the film is played by Kurtwood Smith, quite a distinguished sci-fi actor and, of course, the manly, lovable (by me), cranky, friendless dad Red Forman on That Seventies Show. Red, of course, was much more self-indulgent and arbitrary in his parenting, and his son Eric never got anywhere near either suicide or success. What’s unrealistic about the DPS character is his thinking that it’s good for his son to go light on the extracurriculars. Doesn’t he know about the résumé-building required to display yourself as a well-rounded or “interesting” person to those Ivies? (Well, you might respond, admissions criteria have evolved since the Fifties.) Mainly, though, he’s not a bad dad. His tough love is about helping his kid get a lucrative and dignified profession, and then he can let him do what he wants. And the truth he sees maybe too well is that his son is not at a verse-contributing pay grade. He should have, especially in retrospect (of course), done more to indulge his dreams.
So I go to Real Clear Politics this morning to be rattled by how screwed up the world is. I have to admit I’m less concerned with the president’s coming calculated act of tyranny on immigration described well by Carl below than by his general cluelessness when it comes to the various threats facing us throughout the world. In the midst of all the doom and gloom, there’s a point of light in the article by my friend Peter Berkowitz vindicating Leo Strauss.
Why Strauss is front-page news today is unclear. But I certainly agree with Peter that trendy anti-Straussians — while claiming to take courageous moral or intellectual stands – really display willful ignorance. There’s a huge amount to be learned from Strauss, and I can’t take seriously anyone who thinks he’s too good to learn, especially those self-righteous creeps who really aren’t so good or so smart.
The most controversial or misunderstood part of Strauss’s writing is his talking up of the secret or esoteric teachings of philosophers. He made the fact that philosophers and other great writers didn’t say straight out what they really knew to be true less of a secret than ever. Strauss made a big deal of the fact that philosophers — who are really atheists or at least nonbelievers — made a show of agreeing with what the people of their time and place believed about religion and morality and all that. By saying that straight out, Strauss opened himself to the charge of atheism. Anyone who accuses Strauss of injustice is making that allegation. Strauss corrupted the youth by refusing to believe or pretend he believes in the sacred human rights of democracy or something along those lines. Why was Strauss, to use his own words, so “exoteric” (or obvious) about being “esoteric?”
Atheism used to be a “brand” that would reduce “free thinkers” to impotence or worse. These days, however, most of the preppies are atheists, and what they think the truth really is (when they think at all) isn’t more comforting than what the philosophers of old thought. So almost screaming, in effect, that the philosophers of old were atheists may be the best way to get sophisticates — atheistic conformists who pride themselves in their free thought — these days to take them seriously. Certainly Strauss has been the inspiration of many a Dead Philosophers Society, although they, unlike the Dead Poets Society, imagine themselves meeting outside the cave. And Strauss’s “teaching method” was, in fact, oriented toward inspiring real verse creators and only rarely the genuinely free thinker. He was short on romanticism and shared some (far from all) of the “realism” of the headmaster.
We postmodern conservatives are about a realism that’s something other than Keating’s dreamy romanticism or Strauss’s classical rationalism, because we have a different view about what’s genuinely extraordinary about the life of each human person. But that’s a story for another post.
Here my final words on the DPS: Its filming began at the Ford buildings at my Berry College, which look more preppy/traditional than most prep schools. A bit of Berry made it on screen. But the “location” was moved to some school in Delaware once it was judged too costly to fill Berry with the fake snow required for the winter scenes. The new location, of course, also had the advantage of the scenic lake with all those geese conveniently located down the hill from the hollowed halls. Despite Berry’s look (in places), our college, thank God, isn’t dominated by preppies or atheists, although, due to our tradition of diversity, we have our share of each, including preppy atheists.