>in your previous email you mentioned that someone said: "The fact that
>Confucianism is worthless is proved by the way the Chinese have
>treated women.". But I could not find the shit in all the posts I
>received. This is not a personal attack, it is even worse than that.
Professor Morse has already clarified this. I was paraphrasing part of
one of his messages, perhaps not completely fairly. He said that
Confucianism has little value and went on to add something like,
"Look at how the situation of women in Korea improved after they
[gave up Confucianism and] adopted Christianity."
>SNIP<
>Finally, I think we are still far away from making final call as which
>social system is the best or which economical model is the best.
>Whatever we are doing today will become history, definitely. So,
>in principle, it is nonsense in logic to use the current economical
>models or academic theories to disapprove Pound's (or any such) idea.
>The failure of the WTO meeting in Seattle is probably such a lession.
>
>I like your posts very much, especially, those toward "academic" :-).
>I was in the universities for about 20 years. I quitted it only
>recently.
I want to comment on this a little more, since I do think it has some
relevance to understanding Pound, and in particular I think is has some
bearing on the question of why so many academics who have made a
profession out of studying Pound dislike him (i.e. the man, not his
poetry) so intensely.
When speaking about academics, I often tend, as many of us do, to
overgeneralize and overstate my case. Partly, as I've mentioned, this is
a reflection of my disgust with the academic side of myself and the way
in which, in my opinion, I've wasted most of my life and talent by being
an academic.
I want to acknowledge, though, that there are academics who produce works
of value, and there are in particular some academics who are my own
heros. Some that come to mind are Harold Bloom, George Lakoff, a
linguistic whose work (METAPHORS WE LIVE BY, co-authored with Mark
Johnson, and WOMEN, FIRE, AND DANGEROUS OBJECTS) also has major relevance
to philosophy and cognitive psychology, Hugh Kenner, and A.S. Byatt.
My bedroom, in fact, usually contains several stacks of books by
academics which I think it very important to read.
Many of us remember that the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon
once said, "90% of science fiction is crap. But then 90% of anything is
crap." In the case of academic work, I think that that estimate is much
too low. Maybe as much as 98% of academic work is crap. But this is
because the very structure of the academic world and graduate programs
is set up to enable mediocre academics to succeed.
The nature of the academic world today, at least in the United States
(and I think in much of the rest of the world) demands that every major
department in a major university must have a graduate program and
must graduate doctoral students. The result is that whereas fifty
years ago, to be an academic was a calling that demanded a dedication
that included virtually a vow of poverty, in today's world it has
become merely a career choice. There are simply not that many students
around who have a true dedication to scholarly study and the ability to
excell in it. So graduate programs, especially in second-rate and
third-rate universities such as the University of Hawaii, have been
designed to give mediocre students a reasonable chance of success.
Furthermore, once one becomes part of the academic world, publication is
absolutely vital to one's survival. But there are simply not that many
scholarly articles and books that the world has a need of. So we wind up
with an enormous proliferation of journals full of articles whose sole
purpose is to add to the publication lists of their authors.
But on the other hand, the structure of the academic world at its best
also gives imaginative and insightful academics the opportunity to
follow their own path.
The fact is that the whole nature of the academic world has changed since
Pound's time. I was reading a very interesting book by Russell Jacobi a
few years ago called THE LAST INTELLECTUALS which makes this point very
well. There is simply no place anymore for the sort of intellectual that
Pound was. The academic world is the only refuge left.
But intellectuals like Pound, and most of the other persons who made
major contributions to the intellectual history of the first half of this
century, would not be very welcome in today's academic world. They would
be accused of poor scholarship and not playing the game.
Academics today devote their lives to studying these people, but they
don't want to foster any more of them.
I should to acknowledge that most of the faculty I have met here at the
University of Hawaii have not fit my own stereotyped paradigm of
academics. (Or perhaps what's actually true is that when I meet one
who does fit that paradigm, I usually quickly manage to avoid him/her,
so I'm not all that aware of them).
The reasons for my own deep antipathy to what I think of as typical
academics go deeper, I believe, than the mere culture of the academic
world and have to do with core attitudes toward life. And this is where
I think we find relevance to the question of Pound, and what so many
academics dislike about him (as a person) so intensely.
Let me requote a part of your message.
>Finally, I think we are still far away from making final call as which
>social system is the best or which economical model is the best.
>Whatever we are doing today will become history, definitely. So,
>in principle, it is nonsense in logic to use the current economical
>models or academic theories to disapprove Pound's (or any such) idea.
One of the things that annoys me about so many academics..... No, let me
re-state this, I'm being too wishy-washy. One of the things I despise
about many academics is their *smugness* about their values and attitudes
towards the world. And the most annoying thing is that they deserve no
credit at all for these values, for these values simply represent a
conformity to the attitudes of the educational system in which these
academics have been brought up. Maybe they are fine attitudes, and to a
large extent I share most of them myself, but I see no cause for
self-congratulation in simply having been willing to accept what one has
been taught (or indoctrinated in) at face value.
Most academics today have been taught to color inside the lines. The
referee system for journals is set up to guarantee that those who color
outside the lines will have little chance for success. The attitude is
very different from that of the magazines where Pound published his
critical pieces, where the success of the magazine depended on having an
editor with extremely good judgement whose decisions were made
subjectively and were final.
Some of the best academics overcome their indoctrination and the nature
of the system and eventually reach the point where they can dare to
stop playing it safe and take risks and produce work that will have
lasting value.
Most of the rest merely add to their publication lists.
And, while praising Pound's books and articles for their amazing insight,
they despise the man for his attitudes.
How could he have so stupid enough as to have thought well of Fascism and
Mussolini? Why wasn't he intelligent enough to see that Mussolini was
the devil incarnate, as we have all been taught in school, and that
Fascism was purely evil with no redeeming features? After all, we fought
a war against Fascism and we won. Certainly this is proof enough. How
could Pound not have known this.
And being anti-semitic! Didn't he learn anything at all in school?
Didn't he learn that prejudice is wrong that that good people are never
prejudiced? How could he not have known that saying bad things about
Jews leads to the gas ovens?
Pound was in fact incredibly foolish about a number of things, in the
way that only an extremely intelligent person is capable of being
foolish. He was wrong, wrong, wrong from the start about a lot of things.
Today's academics would never allow themselves to be wrong about anything
major in this way.
Nobody will ever remember them.
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