All academic departments and fields of study are guilty of using subjective judgement - in curriculum, in tenure decisions, in referee reports, and so on. No surprise that grant proposals are anything but immune.
Except that no one claimed they were ânot betterâ in any objective sense, because there is no objective âbetter.â That is the problem with your position and @marlowe1âs claimed contradiction. Like @Marlow1, you mistake the observation that your âstandardsâ are subjective with the claim that they are objectively wrong. They arenât, but the defense (which you offered) claiming a non-subjective higher ground fails. It becomes a matter to discuss, debate, and consider, which is, IMO, what @MWolf was offering. And he makes a good argument.
In other words, IMO @MWolf wasnât necessarily disputing whatever it is that you and others find compelling about Pound. It seems to me he was offering a well-reasoned alternative perspective suggesting why some figures are so abhorrent to our common sensibilities that they ought not be celebrated. I have to say, from the perspective of someone who knew very little about Pound the man, his arguments were far more compelling than those offered in Poundâs defense. The idea that we should overlook his despicable actions because he was supportive of other writers, or because a few Jewish intellectuals were apparently friendly with him? Not only absurd, but a strong argument for not ignoring the context when addressing the works.
As for the rest, you oversimplify the issue. @MWolf acknowledges that there arenât hard and fast rules for this sort of decision.
Whether you term it a representation of my views or an analysis of my position, you donât understand my argument, and you show little inclination to even try to understand it or honestly represent it. The more you write the clearer that becomes. I have âbetterâ things to do than try to continue to explain it.
Um - not sure which of my earlier commentary you are referring to - Iâm wondering if you jumped to conclusions. My comments regarding which type of literature is more popular at UChicago is data-based so an objective statement. My earlier comment about Pound being influential in his time period is also objective. Whether one thinks heâs âbetterâ than another author tends not to be the standard for choosing texts at UChicago; they are chosen for their influence on subsequent writers, on the arts, on the culture and/or the social system. (ETA: same as any other discipline; you usually study the work of whoever has had the largest impact on the field). Also, there has indeed been âobjectiveâ commentary that Old White Dudes are not relevant to the young people of today. Perhaps it was later clarified to be acknowledged as an assertion and I missed that?
Well, again . . . . âhe was an anti-Semiteâ isnât really literary criticism. Really, the decision whether to include any author in a course - at least at UChicago - will likely rest on the rationale pertinent to the discipline. Students can always avoid the course if their sensitivities prevent them from participating fully; as previously mentioned, UChicagoâs English curriculum is pretty flexible. Since Pound has indeed been included on the curriculum of a course or two in recent years, I can only conclude that those who are scholars in the field of English literature are using a different criteria for choosing their reading list than either you or MWolf. UChicago isnât really known for banning books - in fact, they are kind of into supporting complete academic freedom and freedom of expression.
Itâs important not to ignore context, as oftentimes this informs the authorâs writings. However, itâs a tad difficult to argue âcontextâ without doing the reading in the first place! 
âHeâs too despicable for me to readâ probably wonât get one very far in the academy, especially if the topic is something like American Ex-Pat Modernist Poets.
Thank you for the laugh. You could not have given a more radically wrong description of my background and education if you have taken my CV and written the opposite.
I grew up in Israel and did both my undergraduate and my MSc at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. In Biology and Environmental Biology. Since I had no gen-ed requirements, I didnât even take Hebrew Lit, much less English Lit.
My PhD was in Ecology at UIUC, not an âEliteâ expensive private college, like, say, The University of Chicago.
I grew up without the notion of class in the way that you envision class, since when I was growing up in Israel, it was a socialist country.
Anybody who has studied in Israel would laugh helplessly at your assumptions of how education looks there. Anybody who has done a PhD in my field would laugh at your assumptions regarding how my field is taught.
Repeat after me:
Israeli Universities are Not American Universities
Ecology is not English
None of the views that I have expressed here have come from any class that I have taken because I didnât take the classes you seem to assume that I have taken.
Well, not exactly. While I have not taken a single class in English Lit. I took a class in the Philosophy of Science with the late Great Dr Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and has some great discussions/arguments with him. Look him up.
I did take a whole bunch of courses in natural science and stuff like that, but they were focused on getting a handle on reality, not on Good Versus Evil, or Beauty Versus Ugliness. That is how natural and life science work. We have our ideas of Good and Evil, but usually donât look to what we study to inform them. There are exceptions, though.
There is nothing like the Natural Sciences to teach how insignificant humans are, how little we actually understand, how different reality is from what we see, and, consequently, how ridiculous it is for us to believe that concepts like âgoodâ and âbadâ have any reality outside of human society.
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Thank you for disclosing that you have never taken a literature class and that your perspective on topics such as the insignificance of humans or âgoodâ and âbadâ are confined to your understanding of the natural world.
If you were to, say, debate a theologian on some of these points, what arguments would you use to prove that âgood and badâ are no more than human/social constructs? Your statement is so confidently-delivered that Iâm concluding you presented it as fact. What facts would you rely on? Or am I misinterpreting and you have merely expressed your subjective opinion?
Since any claim that "good and âevilâ are universal is a claim that they exist in the natural world, my education and training is more than enough.
A. The universe is vast, and we are barely a scrap of organic material, and a speck of rock orbiting one of ten billion trillion stars in a billion galaxies. Yet you would have me believe that our concepts of âgoodâ and âevilâ, actually mean something for the rest of the universe?
B. When the concepts of good and evil that you use were developed, people did not understand what stars were, had no concept of galaxies, did not have more than the vaguest inkling of atoms, much less subatomic particles, thought that the âmaterialâ world was exactly what humans could see and touch, etc.
Yet you are claiming that they had an understanding that was s deep and fundamental, that they could perceive meaning and morality in the universe?
C. No species behaves in a way that does not have a long-term benefit for the spread of their particular genome. Ichneumon wasp continue to lay their eggs inside spider and caterpillars and their larvae continue to eat those poor critters alive. Is that evil? Do they get punished? They have existed for millions of years, yet they seem to be doing pretty well. Did non-avian dinosaurs commit sins, but the mammals were virtuous? What sins did the dodos commit that caused them to go extinct? When a Cooperâs hawk kills a sparrow, is the sparrow good, and the hawk evil?
D. If good and evil do not exist in the rest of the animals, that means that they are limited to humans alone. Did Homo erectus or Homo habilis have good and evil? Did their ancestors? What about the species which looked like a tree shrew, from which we all evolved? If these did, that means that animals have Good and Evil. If they didnât, that means that Good and Evil magically appeared in some human ancestor, suddenly and out of nowhere. That assumes the supernatural, which is an additional assumption that has no basis in reality.
Of course, I would like to hear what arguments the theologian has which do not assume the existence of a god.
That would make sense if the natural world were all there is. If there is also a realm outside the natural world, then your education and training may not be adequate. This is where your conversation with the theologian could get interesting.
A. and B. donât provide facts to prove your case - they do provide some thoughts to question the other side, and they also disclose a belief in intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (the evidence for that being what?). Most theologians probably are concerned less with that speculation and more with the idea that humans here on the speck of rock we call earth might have a relationship with a transcendent being who dwells outside the physical/chemical world and perhaps might even be setting the rules for âgood vs. evil.â (ie a god, as you stated). How does one go about disproving the existence of this being? And then, for B in particular: are you saying that a child canât pick up on their parentsâ rules for behavior unless they first acquire a more complex understanding of astronomy, physics and chemistry? My guess is that rules for âgood vs evilâ are probably a bit easier thing to impart to others! âDo this, donât do thatâ seems pretty simple to me.
C. reads more like a series of questions for the theologian. Canât speak for all, but most would probably be concerned more for those creatures with a higher-developed sense of introspection than the Ichneumon wasp or the dinosaur. The idea of understanding ârightâ from âwrongâ is key (same with âdignityâ and what that might mean for each creature). The question of how can bad things happen to good people is an easy one for most, although different traditions will vary in the specific response.
D. is an assertion, based on the assumption that ârealityâ doesnât transcend the natural world. The difference between you and the theologian is that the latter will clarify that they can reason, but not prove, the existence of a god. Reason would be the tool of their trade. However, those who are convinced that ârealityâ is confined to the natural world should be able to use the tools of their trade (scientific method, etc) to make their case. If they canât, perhaps that just means that natural science doesnât hold the answer to everything.
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Iâm going to hang my reply off this message, because it says something important.
In the sciences, there are trendy topics and I donât even think this is necessarily even a bad thing. We learn something interesting, and then we want to learn more about this interesting thing.
Does this cause problems? Sometimes. But science is not the straight shot from A to B that you read in textbooks. Itâs a messy enterprise.
There is also subjectivity in science. âThis is the way to think about the problemâ is an important part, and it can be ugly, contentious, and take decades to sort out. (I remember reading a report by a young person saying a certain approach was âobviousâ and thinking âit sure as heck wasnât obvious when I was the only person advocating it.â)
Thereâs subjectivity in science, sure. But there is also a reality behind it.
I believe that the same is true of literature. Sure thereâs subjectivity involved. But I would hold that there is a reality behind it - we have heard that Shakespeare has moved and inspired at least one person here, and we havenât heard the same for Harlequin Romances.
Itâs not just highbrow and lowbrow. Here are two poems:
She stands
In the quiet darkness,
This troubled woman,
Bowed by
Weariness and pain,
Like an
Autumn flower,
In the frozen rain.
Like a
Wind-blown autumn flower
That never lifts its head
Again.
and
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
Does anyone want to argue they are of equal quality?
One of these was written by a professor of English at Harvard. Not the better one.
Just because there is an element of subjectivity does not mean that there is only subjectivity.
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@MWolf , you write in a way thatâs comprehensible and your positions on these matters are perfectly tenable. You inhabit a world devoid of the concept of value, because you believe we are âinsignificant as humansâ, that our human insignificance renders the concepts of good and evil âridiculous.â You really arenât interested in works of the imagination. You donât seem much interested in the human sphere. That sphere really only exists for you in terms of the hegemony of class over class. Those are good old Marxist precepts, and they have been around in the academy a long time. However, they are antithetical to any close observer of the human comedy and to any celebrator of nobility or grace or beauty in the human spirit - the quintessential preoccupations of literature, an art based in the human world, not the cosmic one. Thus, though you and I are unlikely to be intellectual soul-mates, at least we can talk.
I canât say the same for another form of academic discourse, which employs a special language and esoteric concepts only comprehensible to the band of its true believers and retreats from any challenge into accusations of being misunderstood. George Orwell had choice words to describe that sort of obscurantism.
I speak for no one, of course, but my own tenderness is for the intelligent lay reader. Scholars were once the enablers and supporters of that reader - they taught the classics to the young who were struggling with the great questions of life and identity and world, and they did the research that created understanding of the books that most cogently dealt with these important matters. No two of them agreed on everything and critical standards were always up for debate. A lot of this debate concerned itself with value. Who was greater - Dante or Shakespeare, Donne or Shelley, Roth or Updike, Walt or Emily? It was not only a great parlour game but a way of stimulating engagement with all those wonderful writers. It made the world of thought - the world that intelligent people took away from their educations - vibrant and full. For many of us it was the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of the mysteries and beauties of the written word. Those pleasures and understandings occupied a place in working lives not otherwise notable for contemplative leisure. We of this band respected the band of scholars, even if their life was not our life.
But several decades ago something something began to change in that relation - the scholars of literature abandoned lay readers such as me, @teleia and @MITPhysicsAlum , in order to create their own cultish tribe where they talk only to themselves and hold nonsensical positions we cannot respect. There are no doubt economic and sociological reasons behind this retreat having to do with declining job markets and the search for novelty. There is also cultural decay, loss of confidence, and a simple dumbing down of the way we all live. However, this cultural malaise is not entirely new in the world. âThe Wastelandâ describes such a world approximately a century ago. Then, however, Eliot could find in the art of the past a way of âshoring these ruinsâ in his personal life and the life around him. Is that means still available to us today? Will it be in the future?
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I would posit that Hughes was writing for a more mature audience than Longfellow was. Whether that is delineated by age, by experience, or whatever, these two verses are distinct in their depth, even though both are similarly brief. In all fairness there are two more stanzas to the second poem, while the first is self-contained. But IMO this is a valid point to make - one wants to spend more time musing about the first. Personally I enjoy the efficiency of words - a lot is said in only a few. Thatâs difficult to do.
Can we analogize this example to one of, say, mathematics? A simple yet sophisticated theorem is best understood if one has a mathematical foundation in the first place. That will require going through elementary arithmetic before moving on to algebra, geometry, calculus, etc. Is Hughesâ work best understood and appreciated if one has some experience reading some poetry in the first place? Children tend to move through literature the way they move through mathematics - starting simply, but getting more complicated with age, experience and time. One sort of builds up a literary vocabulary and set of thinking skills the way one would build up the same for mathematics. Or is it more about enjoyment of the poetic work and forget taking the closer look? There are analogies to math in that framework, too. To enjoy either literature or math seems to require some inherent attraction to that way of thinking.
Oh no, there is no agreement to this statement above. Not in Philosophy. Not in Theology. Not in Science (there is a science to beauty though symmetry/asymmetry). Not in music (harmony). And yes, not in Literature. Yes, there is bad poetry. And no, good poetry does not only mean Shakespearean rhymes and couplets. Some of the best emerging poems are in hip hop, which include social commentary on inequality and vulgarity - and yes, hip hop artists are not necessarily advertised as paragons of virtue⊠but I agree with some posters that to be truly great, a poem should stand on its own, even independent from the non-literary characteristics of the author.
I wouldnât. But then I wouldnât argue they are of unequal quality either. Thatâs the point.
I could tell you which I prefer, and I might or might not be able to explain why, but I would never pretend that my preference aligned with some objective standard of quality.
Alternatively, if you explained what you mean by âquality,â then maybe I could offer up something. But as it is, I have no idea what you mean by âqualityâ other than your subjective preference. That you, I and others share the same subjective preference might reinforce our certainty and create the illusion of objectivity, but it is subjective nonetheless.
As much as I love the idea of Langston Hughes being offered up as objectively âbetterâ than Longfellow, Iâm afraid that those who usually feign authority to make such determinations would disagree. For those who pompously defend the Western Canon as objectively âbetter,â Longfellow is always included. In contrast, until very recently (and still in some circles) the likes of Langston Hughes were thought to be far more representative of âcultural decay, loss of confidence, and a simple dumbing down of the way we all live.â Fortunately, those perceptions have changed even though Hughesâ poetry hasnât changed. That said, there are still those who are dismissive of authors like Hughes, and use supposedly âobjectiveâ standards to make their case.
Take for example âHuman Accomplishment,â the absurd book by bigoted pseudoscientist Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame), in which Murray pretends to âobjectivelyâ rank all of human accomplishment across a variety of disciplines through 1950. In it, he supposedly determines the most significant figures in all of Western literature, and Longfellow easily makes the list, ranking of âequal qualityâ to John Steinbeck, Henry David Thoreau, and better than George Orwell. On the other hand, Hughes doesnât even make the list. Heâs in good company. Black intellectuals, artists, and music from the first half of the 20th century are almost completely shut out. But what else would one expect from Charles Murray?
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If you have read anything else that I have written here, you would see that, again, you are making assumptions without any basis.
I have extremely strong values. However, I do not live in a delusion that my values are a reflection of some absolute values of the universe, and that, if the world ended tomorrow, that these values would still exist.
My values are based on what I believe would be a world that I would like to have. The world that I would like to live in is egalitarian, biodiverse, culturally rich, and environmentally clean. I want this enough that I will fight for it.
However, I am not arrogant enough to invent Gods or Goddesses that have declared that my ideals are, in fact, a reflection of their commandments. I do not have an ego that is so inflated that I believe that my preferences and beliefs are universal facts.
Have we returned to the 1950âs Red Scare, when people used âthatâs communismâ to invalidate any opinion with which they didnât agree? I would also like to point out that random accusations of communism were most often used against Jews.
No, they were there only for a small percent of the population who had money, and who attended a small number of âeliteâ schools and colleges. Everybody else was taught enough reading and writing to perform menial labor and semi-skilled jobs.
The entire culture on which you are focused lived inside a bubble of wealth and privilege, even if not all of the writers which they read and quoted did.
Yet not one of them, or you, dared ask the basic questions âwhat value does this all have?â âdoes this benefit anybody except a small privileged minorityâ.
It was an echo chamber, inhabited by people who grew up privileged and isolated. Their experience was narrow and limited, as were their definition of âcultureâ. It was neither diverse, nor vibrant, it just seemed so to people for whom the experiences of the vast majority of the country will not important, nor worth considering.
What brought it down was not
It was the fact that other people, with other experiences believed that their lives and experiences were just as important as those of the âeliteâ. It was the fact that the people who started attending universities were not the products of the culture of the old elites (or those who wanted to belong to these elites).
The fact that you compare what is happening today to what Eliot was complaining about back in the USA of the 1920s is extremely interesting, which you consider the cultural background of the writing of The Wasteland. During that period, the barbarians at the gate were Jews and others who were not the descendants of people from Britain. Harvard and other âeliteâ colleges, the bastions of Eliotâs socioeconomic and cultural class was being âswampedâ by Jews. Jews were leaving their slums and tenements and becoming a financial power that was difficult for the Boston Brahmins to ignore. The worst thing - Jews refused to acknowledge the obvious superiority of the Anglo-Saxon culture that Elliot and his peers had put on a pedestal.
Almost every Literary figure of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s was antisemitic, used antisemitic imagery, and placed Jews as an easy scapegoat of whatever they thought was wrong with the world. The 1930s were wonderful years to be an antisemite in the English-Language literary world.
After all, the response that Eliot had was to leave the USA and go to live in England, where Anglo-Saxons were still in control of the literary world. That was the way that he âshored the ruinsâ of his personal life - he ran away to somewhere where the literary world wasnât being threatened by Jews and other threats to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
If you find yourself identifying with the literary figures of the 1920s and 1930s, and with their complaints about the decline of English Literature, you may want to take a closer look at what they were actually complaining about, who they blamed, and how that relates to what is happening today.
I will say, though, that it seems that T.S. Eliot abandoned his earlier antisemitism (or tried to), almost certainly as the result of seeing the end results of antisemitism in WWII. In general, WWII did see an end to most of the antisemitism of the 1930s in the USA.
So you are saying that there some âgoodâ religions, and some âbadâ religions? Pray tell me, what are the âgoodâ religions and who gets to decide?
As for science, are you telling me that a sea-quirt, which isnât symmetric, is âworseâ than a jellyfish, which is?
Who gets to decide, please, whether a piece of music is âgoodâ. As I wrote, when Europeans first heard Chinese classical music they declared that it was terrible racket. So are you saying that they were right, and therefore only European classical music is âbeautifulâ, and that the Chinese are all tone deaf or something?
I find snakes to be beautiful, while many others find them to be horrific, ugly creatures. Does that mean that some of us have perverted minds, and see beauty in awful ugly things?
Tell me, are parasites âbadâ? What about parasites of parasites, are they âbadâ. Are ants âbadâ? Are rats âbadâ?
Are supernovas âbadâ? Was the asteroid which caused the K-T boundary extinction âbadâ?
Again - who gets to decide what is âgoodâ and what is âbadâ?
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Yes, if I invent a religion today that requires virgin sacrifices so that the sun will shine tomorrow, then that would be a bad religion. I donât think that anyone would have to decide, it would be self-evident. Moral relativism has its limits.
Would black intellectuals and artists from the early 20th century have considered themselves to be contributors to âWestern Cultureâ?
As to Murrayâs book - havenât read it, but I understand his methodology was objective. He didnât come up with a personal-preference ranking but instead used citation count to rank these figures in terms of significance. This is a fairly common method of determining the influence of a member of the university academy, for instance, so not too surprising that Murray relied on a similar method. Now, did he exhaustively search for citations? Or is there a better, equally objective method to assess the contributions of those of the more recent years who might not have the history of citations as, say, those from several hundred years prior? Itâs worth considering. @mtmind apparently read the book, based on her comments, and clearly has issues with the methodology used. What suggestions can you make to improve the work, MT?
Not sure about this. In 1948 Eliot republished one of his most antisemitic poems, prompting the scathing response, âTo T.S. Eliot,â by Emanuel Litvinoff.
Personally, I love snakes. Symbolically they - along with the wolf and a few other creatures - have gotten a bad rap. The âserpentâ of the Old Testament was actually not a snake, but artistic depictions that went off the text understandably turned that cuddly creature into one (on your belly shall you crawl, etc. etc). Nor did Adam and Eve eat an âapple.â
There is data to back up the idea of âbeauty and symmetryâ when it comes to human faces. Is that because humans are conditioned to be attracted to symmetry, or is it because there is something inherently âattractiveâ in symmetry itself? This seems to be a sociobiological question. Most people donât seem to care for asymetrically-designed stuff - maybe a fashionable outfit, sure. But what about their homes, cars, laptops? There seem aesthetic as well as practical reasons to pursue a symmetric look. People donât seem to care for the alternative - perhaps it appears sloppy, crooked, or unnerving.
Thereâs a reason we start children on Dick and Jane and not Ulysses. 
I would not bring mathematics into it. It opens up the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered. If you think this thread is unproductiveâŠ
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Many women in my family suffer from horrid migraines (somehow I managed to escape this fate, thanks Dad) but my daughter did not. Itâs a horrid neurological disorder that leaves your nervous system prey to a number of seemingly innocuous triggers. Both my grandmother and my daughter can have a migraine triggered by asymmetry (among many other things). A floor pattern that doesnât match up, a shirt or jacket that is buttoned up wrong, a Picasso cubist portrait etc. Itâs wild, but their hypersensitive brain might be shedding light on our biological preference for symmetry.
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