Aesthetic Realism Explains the Cause of War

Ten years ago this month I linked from this blog to an important essay by Aesthetic Realism associate Lynette Abel. In it she describes a class given by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, about a play titled The Miracle at Verdun, by Hans Chlumberg. 

Chlumberg was a lieutenant in an Austrian cavalry regiment during World War I, and God knows what he must have witnessed. He wrote the play, which was banned by the Nazis, about French and German soldiers killed at Verdun, coming back to life twenty years after the outbreak of the war. They find they are not welcomed.   

Ms. Abel quotes Eli Siegel:

"I'm reading this so the cause can be tested. This play is all about contempt--with the living having contempt for the dead, and the dead for the living.  At the same time contempt as a universal presence is not seen.  I think Chlumberg couldn't have said that the purpose of the "mad pestilence" was to get to the quietude of contempt.  There wasn't a feeling that a quiet thing like contempt, which everyone enjoys, could be the cause of the Somme and Verdun."

Now, with the world in turmoil and war devastating the lives of millions of people, it is more urgent than ever that contempt as a force in every single person be studied. 

Contempt, I have learned, is the building up of oneself by making less of the world, including people. I have seen in my own life it's the thing in me that made me unkind, oblivious to the feelings and thoughts of others—as well as ashamed and cold. And I've seen it is a good thing that we can never get away with contempt, though we may seem to, and may not even know we are having it. Studying contempt, instead of having it, is both a national emergency and the most liberating, life-encouraging personal education one can experience. 

Aesthetic Realism Consultant Arnold Perey's Important Novel Against Racism

 There's a groundbreaking and very moving novel by Aesthetic Realism consultant and anthropologist Arnold Perey that everyone should know. It is Gwe: Young Man of New Guinea, subtitled "a novel against racism." And boy, is it. 

Dr. Perey did field work in New Guinea and knows his subject. But it is not just the knowledge but the feeling that makes this book important. He writes of how he came to see that the people whose society and lives he was studying were deeply akin to him. What he writes shows the need by the world for the new understanding of ethics and aesthetics that is in Aesthetic Realism, the education founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel. 

Gwe is also an exciting read, one that will have you turning pages in anticipation while meeting life in tropical highlands that can seem so different from middle America or middle Europe or middle other places, but which the author shows to be populated by individuals whose feelings, hopes, fears, daily annoyances, and daily pleasures and pains are as real as one's own.  

Liverpool FC players, united, take a knee for George Floyd and protesters

Liverpool players taking a knee

I salute Liverpool FC players for taking a knee yesterday at Anfield in solidarity with antiracism protesters in the US and elsewhere. They have a fine history of opposing racism in recent years and of working to help people in the community. This timely statement is right in keeping with that. 

There is so much to say about what has been happening in recent weeks. The brutal treatment of Black Americans has come to a head with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the midst of a pandemic and with forty million Americans unemployed there is an unstoppable fury across the nation that so many people are being treated as disposable, irrelevant, less than full human beings. I am grateful that so many people are saying this is unacceptable and I pray that justice and kindness will prevail. 

About the Liverpool players, it is moving that they arranged themselves on the centre-field circle. 

Liverpool FC players taking a knee at Anfield

A circle in its abstraction represents equality; there is no one higher or lower than anyone else. The players (other than the goalies who're in green) are in alternate red and black strips (uniforms).  This photograph and the reason for it brings to mind these words by Eli Siegel, from a lecture he gave in 1970: 

It will be found that Black and White [people] have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.  

Ken Kimmelman quotes this at the end of his powerful, Emmy-award winning PSA The Heart Knows Better. See it here. 

Ahmaud Arbery and the Root Cause of Racism

The savage murder of Ahmaud Arbery has rightly shocked America.  I just saw the video yesterday and found it very hard to watch.  And how many other racially-motivated acts of violence are committed that never stir the conscience of the public precisely because there is no video to record what happened?  

Ahmaud Arbery; Colin Kaepernick 

Despite all the calls for tolerance, for acceptance, despite the many anti-bullying and anti-racism classes in schools, the federal hate crime classification, and so much more, racism and race-based crime continues in America. 

The only, only thing that can end it is the understanding of where it begins, in the self, which Aesthetic Realism for the first time provides. That is what the following important article is about.
  
Read "It Is in Contempt that the Root of Racism Lies" by late maritime captain, photographer, and Aesthetic Realism Associate Allan Michael.  

Captain Allan Michael

#anti-prejudice
#philosophy
#worldview