>Date:  Thu, 2 Dec 1999 13:05:52 -1000
>From:  Jonathan Morse <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Getting things all mixed up
            >SNIP<
>It fits Pound in one obvious biographical way: he held to his political and
>economic beliefs no matter what, at great cost to himself. And yet I should
>think sincerity must entail some element of free choice, and in that
>respect we have to worry a little when we apply the term to Pound. No
>economist of any standing has ever paid the slightest attention to Pound's
>ideas about money, for instance, but that rejection had no effect whatever
>on the curriculum of the Ezuversity. By contrast, John Crowe Ransom
 
I think we can agree that Pound's ideas on government and economics
were for the most part foolish and superficial.  As I have said
before, I think of him as comparable to many science fiction
writers of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties.  Writers like
John Campbell and A.E. van Vogt.
 
And yet a lot of the criticism people like Morse make is equally
superficial, and all too ready to accept conventional wisdom and
attitudes at face value.
 
Things that seem obvious to us now were not nearly so obvious
in the context of the time when Pound first developed his
enthusiasms.  The ideas of Gesell and Douglas were never worthy
of being taken seriously by economists.  But they both perceived
something important which was not nearly as universally understood
in the Thirties as it is now, viz. the crucial role of the monetary
system in the functioning of capitalism and the fact that
an expanding economy requires an expanding money supply.
 
>Pound's other sincerities were equally durable in their defiance of
>reality. There's something to be said for punctual trains, for instance,
>but after 23 years of Fascism the Italians were happy enough to kick
>Mussolini's body to pieces. Fascism would seem not to have worked. No
>reflection of that little fact in Pound's oeuvre, though.
 
I would suggest Alastair Hamilton's book THE APPEAL OF FASCISM, which
I learned about via this list.  In the Thirties, there was a lot
more to recommend Fascism than punctual trains.
 
The Italians, in their attitude toward Mussolini at the end of the war,
showed mostly a lack of the sincerity which is at issue here.  It was
not that they had come to see him more realistically (although
certainly some of them did), but that they could not forgive him
for having led them into defeat.
 
If the United States had lost the war, I suspect that many Americans
would have had the same attitude toward Roosevelt.
 
>And whatever it accomplished 2500 years ago, Confucianism as of the
>twentieth century was doing a lot more harm than good. It too didn't work.
>(Ask me about the status of women in South Korea before and after it became
>a predominantly Christian society.)
 
Pound was always more interested in things that were hundreds of years
old than things in the contemporary world.  He had no understanding at
all of contemporary China or the way the Mandarin system actually works.
 
The Mandarin system, in terms of the basic idea, has a strong appeal to
those who, like Pound, simplistically rate intelligence as one of the
main virtues in the world.  (Again, I suggest the comparison to many
classic science fiction writers.)  In practice, though, the Mandarin
system rewarded intelligence only in its most base form: memorization
and rote learning.  (Oddly enough, in some respects it's not unlike
contemporary universities, and our world which often values academic
credentials over actual ability.)
 
However to say that Confucianism has no value at all because of the way
it has been implemented in the China of the past few hundred years, or
because it failed to champion certain values which we in the contemporary
Western world now regard highly....   This is simplistic.   I think that
there are parts of Pound's conception of Confucius which are indeed worth
paying attention to.
 
I find it rather dismaying that most of those who have made a profession
out of being interested in Pound take it for granted that they don't need
to learn about things like Confucius, Brooks Adams, John Adams, and the
like which Pound valued so highly.
 
>And Pound's antisemitism was an affront to his own language, because it
>consisted entirely of cliches. When Pound was a young man, the
>anti-Dreyfusards and eugenists included many intelligent people among their
>numbers, but by the time he was 50 he was alone with the Jason Compsons.
 
I think we can all agree in condemning Pound's anti-semitism.  For one
thing, to be anti-semitic today is to cut oneself off from some of the
most important parts of the contemporary intellectual world, i.e. from
the many major Jewish thinkers and creators.
 
However in your particular approach to anti-anti-semitism, Jonathan
Morse, you are as much a crank as Pound ever was.
 
Why be an idiot in this way?  If one wants to condemn Pound for his
anti-semitism, there's an abundance of things he said quite plainly in
black and white to use against him.  Why instead resort to reading
between the lines and attributing to him views which one only conjectures
that he held?
 
-------
It is a question not of being happy or fulfilled, but of being on fire.
 --- Anais Nin
 
Lee Lady        <Http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady>