"Ethics -- the Answer to Our Troubled Economy," will take place Saturday, May 17 at 8 PM at 141 Greene Street in SoHo. It will include a lecture "How Do People Want to See People, Or, It Has to Be Aesthetics!" by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism. In it he discusses, among other things, a moving, compassionate story by James Stephens, The Wolf at the Door, about how a man feels who loses his job while he has a family to support. It's the kind of story that you never forget. This lecture affects the way you think about the people you see every day and those we read about in the news as we hear about job cuts, foreclosures, extended hours, downsizing. It can make every one of us kinder and it helps us make sense of the turmoil in America today.
In this presentation there are songs from the musical "Goodbye, Profit System," and there is an excerpt from an Aesthetic Realism lesson in which Eli Siegel asked a man, "Which is more important to you -- to be all you can be, or to beat out other people?"
There is also an important commentary that editor Ellen Reiss wrote in the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known in which she takes up the ethical meaning underlying our economic problems today, which are afflicting so manyh people, including as to banks and mortgages.
The profit way of seeing people is really equivalent to racism, since in both cases you take the life out of a person and see them as existing simply in order to make you important. Both are contempt. Come and learn about the way of seeing that can end racism and have people of all racial and cultural backgrounds truly kinder to one another as we undergo these difficult economic times.
