>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>