Published in the UK
Aesthetic Realism Way Forward
It was shocking to read about the racist attack on Mohammed Hussain in his Peel Lane convenience store (Asian News, May 31).Recently a young man of Sri Lankan origin died from the injuries he had suffered in a racist attack by two young white men in my home town, Ashford, Kent.
As a white person myself, I deplore these acts, as well as the daily racist attitudes and comments that people have to endure.
It is urgent for everyone to know what Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, explained. He saw that there is a constant debate in the mind of every person between the desire to have respect for the world, see meaning in it--and the desire for contempt.“As soon as you have contempt, he wrote, “as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.”
No matter how considerate we judge ourselves, if we don’t see another person as having the depth of feeling, the reality we have, we are unkind and worse. Racist attitudes, let alone attacks, simply would not occur if people saw each other as having the same depth of feeling as themselves.
I know this from my own life. Growing up, I hated cruelty when I saw it, but I didn't see that the way I robbed other people of meaning made me cruel myself. When a young man from the Indian subcontinent started at the 99 per cent-white school I attended, I made fun of him and didn’t see him as having feelings like my own.
In the international journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss said: “What needs to replace (racism) is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful."
I know if I changed, anyone can!
Christopher Balchin, Grand Street , New York,
