Canto VII Inertia Quotes

Them's fightin' words, mister. Pound doesn't just blame the problems of modern people on ignorance. In fact, he feels like some of the worst offenses of modern life come from the dry, professorial talk of educated people. For Pound, the problem isn't the lower classes, but the middle classes, which are filled with people who know enough about the classical past to try to imitate it, but who are so lazy about it that they do a terrible job. Thus, everything they say is just boring and empty, and they end up saying a bunch of stuff that has no real meaning.

In case you haven't realized how much Pound doesn't like boring modern people, he gets a little bit repetitive the farther he goes into Canto VII. He really can't stress enough how big a problem it is that modern people have nothing valuable to say (according to him). These people just want to read stuff in books and repeat it without really thinking hard about it or studying it further. For these people, knowing what you're talking about isn't the important thing. You just need to appear as if you know stuff.

At first, it seemed like inertia was to blame for the problems with modern people. But here, Pound suggests that there's more to blame than just that. It turns out that modern people are dedicated to protecting their inertia at any cost. It's not as if they're just lazy. They will actually do almost anything to make sure no young people come along with new ideas and disturb the way things are.