Aesthetic Realism: the Teaching Method That Can Really END prejudice

Tonight in New York City, there will be a seminar about education, and the power of education to defeat prejudice through the subjects taught in school: 
"The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: Students Learn, Prejudice Is Defeated!' 

Seminar Participants 

I am very proud to be taking part along with my colleagues and teachers. For many years I've seen that this method works and yes, does what the title of the seminar says it does. 

Gwe performance this Sunday in New York City

Mountains & Rainbow, by Arnold Perey 

This coming Sunday, September 15, at 2:30 pm, there will be a dramatic reading of passages from the anti-racism novel Gwe, by Arnold Perey, PhD.  Dr. Perey will be joined in this deep, stirring, lively matinee by Bennett Cooperman and Devorah Tarrow of the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company. As the flyer (see below) says: 

You'll take a trip to the heart of Papua New Guinea, to the mountains, peaceful and turbulent, where Gwe lives. You'll experience, as close to you as your fingertips, an ancient culture, real people, and real events. The anthropology of this book is authentic.

You'll hear the explanation of the horrible racism that is in America and the world now -- and what can really end it.

Flyer for Gwe

I love this novel - both what it says as surprising ethical content, and the lyrical, passionate, thoughtful way it is written. Every person who attends this matinee or reads the book will leave a better, kinder, deeper, more educated person. 

Sexism, Egotism, Racism: the Unholy Trio

Last night I had the immense pleasure of attending a seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. It was titled "Today & Always: What Does a Woman Deserve from a Man?" 

The four men - all consultants -who answered that important question spoke about:  

• George Eliot's magnificent novel Adam Bede
• 'Kept in the Dark", a deep, critical work of Anthony Trollope 
• two contemporary self-help books on marriage 
• "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top", from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! 

Throughout, they spoke about what they've learned about their own lives studying Aesthetic Realism, how they've changed in ways they were always hoping for; and about what men are learning in consultations. They were self-critical, passionate about justice to women - including their own wives - and very funny. They made egotism (see below) look cruel, ridiculous, stupid, and weak. They also showed that real good will, which they defined (from my notes) as "the oneness of kindness and criticism in a person's mind," is what we most want to have in order to like the world honestly. They showed how Aesthetic Realism's principles are true about their own lives, about characters in literature, and about all humanity. I'm very grateful for and stirred by what I learned from them and it's already made me a kinder husband and man. 

Here is a definition of egotism that came up when I did a Google search: 

e·go·tism/ˈēɡəˌtizəm/
noun- the practice of talking and thinking about oneself excessively because of an undue sense of self-importance.
"in his arrogance and egotism, he underestimated Jill"

The reason I'm writing about this is that though the seminar was about how men need to think about women, I felt it was a guide as to how people need to see people, as such, and that takes in ethnicity. 

A major criticism women have of men is that we don't want to know them. That's particularly true of husbands as to our wives. But it's cruel to one's spouse, and it inevitably has a man feel ashamed, because our deepest desire is to like and be fair to the world. According to Aesthetic Realism, a person gets a cheap victory from seeing other people as two-dimensional and oneself as deep, sensitive, intelligent, ethical. The definition of egotism above is close to how Aesthetic Realism sees contempt, the "disposition in every person to think he will be for  himself by making less of the outside world." Aesthetic Realism, however, makes it clear that there is a desire to elevate oneself through lessening others. 

And this contempt is the central cause of racism. Whether we see the world with respect or contempt is key to how we see all other people; in fact, everything that exists. Without contempt there would have been no slavery, no KKK, no Nazism, no separating of little children from their mothers and fathers. The study of respect and contempt as taught by Aesthetic Realism is the study the world needs.  

Racism and economic brutality: cruelty has a cause in common

A head teacher from Morecambe (UK) recently said in a national TV interview that she's been seeing numerous children coming to school so hungry that they search through bins to try to find thrown-away apple cores. Racism and economic brutality have much in common. 

Morecambe head teacher Siobhan Collingwood

There is only one way that anyone in a position of power could allow this to happen - and I learned this from Aesthetic Realism.  You have to be willfully oblivious to the reality of those other people; see them as two-dimensional, as not having feelings or insides of the kind you have yourself. It's the only way. This is contempt, the desire to build oneself up by making less of other things and people. Eli Siegel wrote, in his masterful consideration of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don't want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person. (James and the Children, p 55)  

Contempt is ordinary. It's in a conversation when you fail to listen. It's behind every sneering look and every petulant outburst. And it makes a person cruel. Other people are cardboard cutouts and we are deep and sensitive. Contempt is easy to see in other people but it takes courage and real thought to see it in oneself. Meanwhile, looking at contempt in oneself is a personal and national emergency. When we have contempt we sunder our relation to the world that, according to Aesthetic Realism, we were born to like, to be moved by, excited by, even saddened by. We're born to have it do something to us, not to be stony replicas of sentient beings! 
We do not know how contempt works in us unless we ask, really ask.  

I'm sure that the people who created the austerity policies that have children so desperate that they go through bins for food, do not see themselves as brutes. They simply aren't asking, "Do I see other people, including those of a "lower" socio-economic class or a different race as having the depths I have? If I don't what does that mean?" They see the world as against themselves, and most other people as hostile representatives of that world, to be managed, fooled, used.  

Aesthetic Realism says that every person, of whatever race, background, religion, nationality, represents the world and has the world's opposites in him or her - surface and depth, thought and feeling; is one individual with so many aspects, relations, hopes and fears. See Eli Siegel's definitive work on the subject, "Aesthetic Realism: or, Is a Person an Aesthetic Situation?" part of an interview with Lewis Nichols of the New York Times Book Review.