Today in class I discussed the primary conceptual "dimensions" of democracy, which I represented as axes on a plane. I will make frequent use of this kind of geometric or spatial representation of concepts or preferences over the course of the semester. However, you should be aware that there are many critiques of using a geometric model to represent abstract phenomena. Not least of which, many people believe that reducing complex concepts, like political ideologies, to points, lines, and planes, leaves out a lot of important information and nuance. Saying that Rick Santorum is a 9 on a social conservatism index, for example, doesn't tell us what social policy positions he holds exactly, why he holds them, why he has different views than Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, or whether his views are good or bad (or at least better than those of other candidates).
This is essentially the idea Robin Williams's character in Dead Poets Society shares with his students as he gleefully assaults an essay proposing a geometric representation of poetic "greatness" by J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.
The scene is great, and it appeals to an easy intuition that the social world--which is to say the world of people and our decisions and actions--is hopelessly subjective and disorganized.
If our goal is appreciation or self-discovery, the Dead Poets' intuition might be right on. If we are studying literature, history, politics, or philosophy for aesthetic purposes, to help us discover what we like or what we find inspiring in some way, then scaling poems or politicians on a Cartesian plane may not be so useful. In the movie, the Dead Poets read a lot of great poems and use them as inspiration to discover and pursue their hidden passions. Awesome.
They never really learn much, systematically, about poetry, though. They might have read Byron and Shakespeare, and they might appreciate the fact that they react more strongly to one than the other, but never stop to ask the question, why? Why is Shakespeare better than Byron? Even if we are able to recognize greatness, what makes a poem great and what does that tell us about ourselves?
Categorizing, ranking, scoring, and scaling are not obviously romantic or important things. And yet, making comparisons between things, differentiating between things of different quality and value, is a first step toward being able to understand what makes things and ideas valuable or not, good or bad.
The Dead Poets just want you to be able to say, "I like Shakespeare better than Byron," or, moving to politics, that, "I am a conservative, not a liberal."
This class asks more of you.
I, of course, want you to have opinions about the ideas described in assigned readings and lectures, and I definitely want you to have opinions about current events and contemporary debates. I also want you to know why you like the things you like and to understand why you believe the things that you do. These deeper goals of the class require us to do more than just feel our way through politics. We will have to think systematically about politics, and that means that we will have to describe, compare, and measure things that seem to defy easy description, apt comparison, or careful measurement--like democracy.
The process may not be as much fun as some of the alternatives, but the result will be a much more fulfilling for those of you who put the work in.
