Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the lecture What Was Going On, which Eli Siegel gave in 1975. It is great in its understanding of America, economics, and what the human self is looking for. He is discussing an article in the bicentennial issue of Fortune magazine: “Reshaping the American Dream,” by Thomas Griffith. And as he does, he is commenting too on what he began to explain five years earlier: that a way of economics based on contempt for human beings had reached the point at which it could no longer succeed.

Economics impelled by the profit motive—the looking upon one’s fellow humans as means for one’s fiscal aggrandizement—had been the way of the world for centuries; but, Mr. Siegel showed, by the 1970s it was no longer faring well and never would again. It might be forced to stagger on awhile, but would do so through making life increasingly painful. And that is what has happened these decades—with, for instance, more and more people becoming poorer, struggling to pay for food and a place to live.

Mr. Siegel showed that now the only way an economy can succeed is by having a basis different from anything that was before, a basis that is ethics and aesthetics—in keeping with this principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” That is: we need to be in process of learning that the opposites of care for self and justice to the world not ourselves are one. We need to learn about this for our personal happiness, but also for our nation to have a truly workable economy.

Patriotism & More

The article Mr. Siegel discusses is an attempt to present the America of then, as the article’s author sees it. Mr. Siegel disagrees fundamentally with that writer, though he speaks of the article and Thomas Griffith with respect. Here are some notes about subjects in this concluding section:

1) Mr. Siegel refers to “the beginning matter in ethics.” That beginning matter is: How should a person be seen? and How should the world be seen—and owned?

2) A term used often in the article is institutions, and so Mr. Siegel comments on it throughout the lecture. In this section he does so in relation to a subject present with much intensity now: immigration.

3) The subject of patriotism is in this final section too. And I love how Eli Siegel sees it and speaks about it: what he says is at once scientific and replete with feeling.

4) In the paragraph just above the subtitle “The Best Thing” and in the paragraph just after, and beginning with the phrase “The best thing about…,” Mr. Siegel speaks about this nation in a way I find thrilling—a way that makes for tears. He was the greatest of critics, and the purpose of a critic is to see not only what might be amiss but what is good, what is beautiful. He was a critic of America, as he was of a poem or person. And here, he sees something beautiful in America that the Fortune writer does not see, and he describes it with exactitude, tenderness, and pleasure that have become powerful prose style.

“Through Winds”

To introduce the final section of the lecture, I am going to quote a poem written by Mr. Siegel in 1926, when he was 23 or 24. It is published in his Hail, American Development; and, while being about humanity and reality, it also says something about what America is:

In this poem we have those tremendous opposites of self and world—which can be, in one of their forms, self and earth; a person, including a little child, and the nation in its expanse. These are opposites now insistent on being one: there is a growing insistence in America that this land, in its magnificent width and richness, should belong truly to the American people, including to every child. Something of this oneness is in the finest aspect of the settling of the American West. (Of course, there are other aspects of that settlement, not fine.)

There are two main characters in the poem: a tree and a little girl. In their difference, they’re made also alike: a tree, dealt with by wind, can make a sound that seems to have pain in it. A girl traveling across a continent, can also feel tossed about, confused, and can moan somewhat too.

This poem is important in literature. It is said importantly. The first line has a sound of wideness and mournfulness: “Oh, you would cry, tree in autumn.” Though the tree is single and rooted, the line seems to reach, in its sound, across space and earth, across a continent—as the little girl travels across that continent.

Are they made for each other—this tree and this child and this land? Is there an inter-belonging between the American people (each of us) and the land which is America? And should this inter-belonging be made real in daily life in terms of everyone’s getting what he or she deserves?

In line 6 there is a motion, a music, that has the girl’s feeling in it: “A child moaned a little, fidgeting.”

Does every child have something like the width of a continent in her? Aesthetic Realism says yes. Every person, every child, is related to the whole world, and is born to know that world as fully and accurately as possible.

The poem culminates with wide, thoughtful triumph: the last line says that, for all the difficulty and bewilderment, Oregon has been reached.

And today, though a big fight is going on, the American people are looking more than ever to have an America that’s theirs.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

America Is Itself & Changes

By Eli Siegel

Continuing to look at the Thomas Griffith article “Reshaping the American Dream” (Fortune, April 1975), we reach the following sentence:

A case can be made that business leaders have been the real energizers of this materialistic society.

That is untrue. The real energizers are inventors. For instance, there is James Watt, with the steam engine. He did as much for industry as any businessman. In fact, some businessmen got interested in Watt’s inquiries and helped him. But it’s likely that once the information was around, it would be used. The same thing goes for the coming to be of the railroad. There was somebody who felt steam could be used for a railroad: George Stephenson. In other words, industry depended on certain information about earth and motion, got by the scientific method. When one studies the observations year by year of James Watt, one sees how industry came to be.

Later in the same paragraph, there is this statement:

Even today, and even among the young, criticisms directed against materialism come up against a stronger demand for goods and services.

The trouble isn’t materialism. Matter has a right to be. But the ownership of matter—that has to do with ethics. If anybody said, “I own the Lincoln Highway,” it would be strange. But people have said that land almost as large as the Lincoln Highway is owned by them. So the criticism isn’t of materialism in the true sense. If you don’t like materialism, you’re stuck with idealism. Who wants that? Then, if you’re stuck with idealism, you get stuck later with mysticism. You can’t turn around without getting stuck, in this field.

Mr. Griffith has been speaking about the people he calls business leaders, and he says:

As for the business leadership itself, in these uneasy ten years of transition, it has done much to shore up its defenses. It has met, deflected, blunted, or accepted some of the charges that critics have brought against it.

We have the phrase in relation to business leaders “these uneasy ten years.” It isn’t a question of “uneasy.” In these years the business leadership has put out statements, and in them the disregard of the beginning matter in ethics has been very hurtful. Aesthetic Realism definitely says that using another person for your own profit is unethical. It always has been.

In that passage there’s also the phrase “the charges that critics have brought against it.” There is only one charge: Who’s going to own the world, bud? This has come up in indirect ways. Who owns Lake Superior—a factory on the shores of Lake Superior, or the people of Michigan? Or the people of the United States?

They Don’t Understand

Mr. Griffith says about “business leadership”:

But in general, it has moved in a manner—giving ground bit by bit—and in a direction it doesn’t want to go. Even more unsettling, it is not even clear about the direction, and is thus in no position to lead the way.

That’s an important statement. It means that business and its publications don’t know what’s occurring.

A little later, there’s the following:

Those who assault the citadels of the Establishment flaunt the banner of “accountability,” demanding a kind of democratic plebiscite on all institutions. They rarely assume responsibility for restoring what they tear down.

What’s happening is not people assaulting the citadels of the Establishment. (There are a few persons, of course, who do.) But the big thing is that the “Establishment” itself is like certain buildings which do not fit well with the ground they’re on—you don’t have to have people aiming things at them. As somebody would say about ships: they’re unseaworthy.

What Is Patriotism?

Now the next paragraph:

Yet out of this near-anarchic wrangling of the transition years, a new set of attitudes seems likely to emerge. The process can be seen at work in the case of one value—patriotism—that has traditionally been regarded as the very symbol of America’s faith in itself.

Patriotism is the liking of people in geographic terms. That is what it is: it’s a liking for a land and the people of it, and the desire to have that people strong and doing well, happy. But the way the word patriotism is used often has a certain stealthiness about it. Patriotism is like for part of the world because you associate it clearly with yourself.

Mr. Griffith says:

There has been a decided decline in Americans’ sense of their own uniqueness and superiority as a nation. Those who see this as a decline in patriotism (though it is really not that)—

That’s right. It’s not that.

—find abundant evidence in the “Hell No, I Won’t Go” attitudes about Vietnam, and the ways in skits, songs, and clothes that the once untouchable American flag has come to be derided.

The American flag is one of the best things of America, and people should live up to it. The American flag is a study in color and shape and waving. It is very commendable.

Now there is fairly broad agreement that Vietnam was a regrettable overextension of American power‍—

That’s putting it very nicely. And it took a long time for this agreement to be. Fortune was one of the laggards.

—and attitudes about Vietnam seem less an index of patriotism than they did.

That’s right. Now you can say it should not have occurred and people won’t look at you: Are you an agent?

Immigration

The writer continues:

The kind of patriotism many still sigh for…was really at its most intense a century ago….Patriotism then was…excluding and parochial. The immigrants of many tongues and cultures had to be quickly immersed in a melting pot if America was to survive in its own identity.

That is about another matter having to do with institutions. Very few countries have had something like an immigration institution. Australia is one, and there have been immigrants to Brazil and Argentina. But the United States is the chief one: immigration is a great part of its history.

In a way, the last ten years have changed every year of American history, because there’s been a feeling that some things were not being thought about in 1860 or 1855, or 1875. Ulysses S. Grant went on a world tour, and he saw many things—one can find his book in a sumptuous, rather fat edition—but there are things he didn’t see. And Theodore Roosevelt went to Africa, but he was looking for lions, not for people.

Mr. Griffith writes this:

Contemporary patriots must also come to terms with the fact that the U.S., while still widely respected abroad, is also the target of a great deal of criticism.

You said a mouthful. You said two mouthfuls.

One reason for this change is that where once the practical idealism of Jefferson, Thoreau, and Lincoln was our most familiar export, now Americans are a conspicuous economic presence in other countries.

What Mr. Griffith meant to say was that Gerald Ford superseded Henry David Thoreau, and he’s not sure that this was good.

America today appears at a point of intersecting complexities, but this is not the same as describing an America in decline.

America right now is in its best moment. Everybody should cheer America. The sense of ethics now is larger and keener than at any time since 1492, and that is tremendous. That is the one way to judge. It has happened somewhat reluctantly and unknowingly, but America now respects ethics more than it ever did. And I could show that by dealing with each year, not only from 1620 or 1607, but from 1492. Cortez had some bad ethics; Balboa did. Ferdinand and Isabella could be questioned. At this time, ethics has shown it wants to be included. And America has seen some of the indications. God bless America: it learns.

The Best Thing

Mr. Griffith says that America now

is not a society gone soft, unpatriotic, or indifferent, but thwarted and baffled.

The best thing about this society is: the American people are more interested in the real answer than they were a few years ago. That’s the best thing about America. They don’t want any of that pretended answer.

This writer says people now have

the awareness…that even the experts, with all their information, are not agreed on the solutions.

That’s putting it mildly. If all the statements by “experts” about whatever has been going on as to inflation and recession were put together, we’d have four menageries competing with each other, four zoos let loose on each other.

The awareness that…even the experts…are not agreed on the solutions, makes it harder for any leader to put forward a program with confidence and to amass support for it.

The reason it’s harder is that the leaders don’t believe in themselves and what they’re putting forward. The economists have had less conviction than they’ve ever had in history. And that goes for economists throughout the world.

The Future

So, what does the future of America consist of? Adjusting some of the disappointments and unhappy aspects of the old economic way? Or an ethical re-seeing of the economic way, and a seeing that the whole world now should be owned by all the people in it, consciously. This has to do with what kind of life people want to have in America.

The last sentence of this article is:

It may be that for a long time we will be unable to define the new kind of society we are making, but will simply discover ourselves living in it.

I think people will come to feel that there’s a new kind of society, but they have to be conscious of it. Something different is going on right now, and things can be seen.

This article in Fortune says things about America and its history. As one may gather, I disagree with it. Nonetheless, there are many useful sentences.