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

Victory in Europe Day, 75 years on

VE Day being today, I am glad to say how proud I am of the many members of my family who fought for Britain against Nazism, and who supported the war effort in many ways including as soldiers, seamen, airmen, drivers, mechanics, nurses, engineers, telephonists, and more. 

RAF Spitfire 

Their lives were permanently altered by a second world war that killed millions, and that started just twenty years after the official end of the first. How could the world let this happen? 
As a history teacher for many years I am sure that the explanation lies in the study that is outlined below. And to commemorate the meaning of VE Day, with the fervent hope that the definitive cause of war be known everywhere, here is a short quotation from some of the most important writing I've ever seen:

It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism... In the unconscious, dear unknown friends, it is the other person who will have accomplished contempt for you unless you have first contempt for him. 
http://bit.ly/32cyx2k

In this essay, "What Caused the Wars," Eli Siegel has explained the force in self that can have one cold, unseeing, cruel - and the real alternative. The study of contempt, and of the opposing force - the desire to have honest respect for the world -- which are both in every person all the time, is the needed education for today. 

Nazi Party Gathering

    2nd Lt. William Robertson (U.S. Army) and Lt. Alexander Silvashko
(Red Army) after the meeting of the two armies at the Elbe River

#VEDay 
#WorldView

#Philosophy