>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.