From: wojdylo@maths.uwa.oz.au (INFIDEL)
Subject: Re: The Literary Canon
Organization: University of Western Australia
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 06:13:24 GMT

msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris) writes:


>I have met people, however, who claim to
>be able to tell Slavic from Gallic from English. 
>A good friend of mine,
>from Poland, claimed once that I have a ``Jewish nose''. This seemed
>bizarre to me, so we discussed it and, anyway, it seems to
>me that he had an eye much more sensitized than mine towards
>perceiving racial features (whether his eye was accurate or not is
>a whole nother question).

I wonder how much of your insensitivity to racial features is due to
an aversion to typecaste races; i.e., to ideology you have picked up
somewhere that amounts to: "to distinguish between races is to be a
racist". 

Your naivety in the first sentence above is striking.  Haven't you ever lived
abroad?




>(2) You must recognize that Clayton's comment
>was made within the political context of the, er, controversial
>claims of Martin Bernal. Bernal's thesis, as I understand it
>from reading Mary Lefkowitz's and Jasper Griffin's negative
>reviews of Bernal's _Black Athena_, is really much more sensible
>and limited than has been popularized, but the pop
>(caricature) version is that the Greeks didn't invent anything,
>only took it all from the Egyptians, who were black Africans.
>Knowing about this claim that Egyptian civilization was
>really black African certainly made me wonder at first if Michelle
>were not confuddling the Black Athena hypothesis.

>(3) OK, my artistic eye ain't very good, but I would say
>that I can detect Chinese racial features in Chinese painting,
>Mesoamerican Indian racial features in Mayan art, black African
>racial features in African statuary. 

When you get really good at it, try telling a Japanese face from a
Korean face. Or stock Polish from stock Czech or Russian.  


>Now, I'm well willing to
>consider that I'm wrong about this, and I well understand
>that classical Greek statuary originally was painted, that we don't
>have that visual guide now, but the statuary does not look to me
>like it is representative of the same race of people as modern
>Greeks. It doesn't look Scandinavian or English to me either, but
>it also doesn't look like modern Mediterraneans. This makes some sense
>to me, because the Greek city states may have been created in
>part by invasion from the north, and there have certainly been two 
>millenia of further mixing of Mediterranean peoples since classical
>times. I feel uneasy about this because, as I said, my own eye isn't
>good, and I would fear it's been too trained by Cecil B. DeMille when
>it comes to imagining Greeks and Romans.

>(4) In any event I'm willing to grant for the sake of argument that
>classical Greeks looked exactly like modern Turks. The subsequent
>flamage you and Clayton can work out for yourselves, but I still
>find no cause, even granting this, for you to have taken
>issue with Clayton.]

>We seem to be in agreement that modern racial categories are
>mostly inapplicable to how the ancients thought about it.

>  Clayton is of the Ronald Reagan school of color-blind greatness.  I.e.,
>  if there aren't very many blacks or women in Congress then they must not
>  be trying hard enough.  This negative freedom-thinking (equal and free
>  on paper = equal and free in actuality) conveniently ignores indirect
>  (e.g., socio-economic) repression/racism/etc.

>Well, I guess I don't know about Clayton, but I'm certainly of this
>school myself. At least I believe that I can do no more than not violate,
>and insist that government not violate, the absolute, inalienable,
>Creator-endowed Rights of other individual human beings. This is a far
>cry from offering economic equality to them or promising
>to them that no one is going to hurt their feelings, both of which I
>believe *are* quite up to them. (In fact I believe that doing anything
>positive to actualize equality---beyond insisting on equal opportunity
>before the law---would most probably lead to a criminal violation of some
>individual's Rights.) (Of course, since I think I loathe the politics of
>Ronald Reagan, I'm not sure I understood quite what you were saying.)

>  Well, there's the heart of our disagreement -- Mike, you believe that
>  there is such a thing as indisputably "great" works, and that said
>  greatness can be apprehended by all persons in all times in all places.
>  I don't.  
>  
>  I also think that the Tale of Genji is a "great" work of art, as well as
>  the Qu'ran and hundreds of other "non-white" (i.e., non-European/American)
>  works.  Yet, by and large, these works (as well as stuff like Phil Dick)
>  aren't in the canon.  What gives?

>I think you are quite mistaken as to my belief about greatness. I think
>canons of great works---say, specifically the Britannica Great Books
>set---invariably have *reasonable* reasons and criteria for inclusion
>and exclusion. The Great Books set incorporates a measure of merit
>(determined by 17-time readability, which I think is a pretty
>objective criterion), yes (I do not know if there is any measure
>for comparing the artistic merit of Joyce versus Proust versus Murasaki,
>but all of these simply *weigh* more than Hemingway, who, in turn, *weighs*
>more than Stephen King), but inclusion also measures centrality to the
>Great Conversation of Western Culture (which imposes a measure of
>time---why P.K. Dick is automagically not up for consideration).
>The list makes no claim to be all great books or all great books
>of importance or all great books of world culture.

>A canon of books of world importance would be different than a canon
>of Western great books. It also might be harder to come up with such
>a canon except by committee or opinion poll. In other words, it'd
>be hard to have expertise in the same one can have expertise about
>Western lit or Sci-fi or whatever.

>I have made *no* claim that _War and Peace_ is better than _Genji Monogatari_.
>I think such a claim would be dopey except as a expression of
>personal and informed taste.

>On the other hand, I do claim that the only place a prescriptive use
>for any canon comes in is in deciding about curricula. In that case,
>I *do* claim that Thucydides is much more relevant to teach to American
>high schoolers (assuming always my fantasy world in which these high schoolers
>would actually read) than Ssu-Ma Chien, even if these high schoolers
>were all of Chinese ancestry. The reason is that part of the purpose
>of compulsory education in a liberal democracy is preparation
>of citizens for the high office of democratically electoral citizenship,
>and Thucydides is much more relevant to understanding American citizenship
>(in particular, I think he offers criticism of certain pop notions of
>``democracy'') than Ssu-Ma Chien. 

>If I *really* could realize my educational fantasies, there'd be time
>for teaching the Koran and Genji, too. After, that is, the stuff more
>relevant to American citizenship were taught.

>              Mike Morris
>      (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)  
>      
>  
>  
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