Dear Unknown Friends:

We conclude here our serialization of the 1970 lecture How Effective Are We?, by Eli Siegel. This talk, so important for nations, for literature, and for the understanding of the present economy, is also about the most personal and crucial thing in everyone’s life. Is there something in us, in ourselves, that hinders our being effective—that makes us unable to do what we most deeply want?

Certainly, things not ourselves can hinder us. And a massive one is economics. People have been stopped from being all they could be because of the way wealth has been had and not had in the world—and often this being hindered is devastating.

Take a child, just born in an American hospital. She, Jasmyn, will soon be brought home by parents who are very worried because they can’t pay the rent for their apartment. That apartment, which Jasmyn will see with her young eyes, has peeling paint, little in the refrigerator, and rats. It has, too, sounds that will come to her ears—including sounds of anger and weeping from her parents because they cannot get the money that they’ve needed and now need more than ever—after all, isn’t there now a child, that little one there in the corner, who’ll need food and clothing?

I give Jasmyn and her parents as examples of one’s effectiveness being thwarted by something outside oneself. Here, it’s by an economy based not on what people deserve, but based on some persons’ using others for private fiscal aggrandizement. (And I’ll say more on that subject soon.)

The Interference within Ourselves

Meanwhile, Aesthetic Realism shows, there is a huge interference from within each person to our being able to be what we most deeply desire to be, ache to be. That interference is contempt, the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

What we most desire, what each of us was born for, is to see and value truly the things and persons of the world, and the world itself. Therefore, the going instead for contempt—for the ability to look down on people, outclass them, manipulate them and the facts cleverly—makes a person feel ineffectual: agitated, empty, self-disgusted. That is so, even as he or she may seem to impress others.

How Effective Are We? is part of Mr. Siegel’s Goodbye Profit System lecture series. In the present talk he has been speaking on Christopher Marlowe’s powerful drama The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus—about the scholar who sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for being given whatever in the world he asks for. Mr. Siegel does this remarkable thing: he relates Faustus’s wanting to have the world, have it serve and aggrandize him, to the profit system way of economics.

Economics based on the seeing of people and things not in terms of knowing them, being just to them, but in terms of how much money one can make from them, how much one can advance oneself monetarily through them, is a form of contempt. And Mr. Siegel showed that economics based on contempt had become ineffectual—it couldn’t do what a well-working economy should do—and its ineffectualness would be increasingly felt by people.

Here I’ll mention, as evidence for what Mr. Siegel described, something very particular. It’s the going viral of a song written and performed by a man of Virginia, titled “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The writer of it, Oliver Anthony, is angry about money and work. Right wing politicians have used it; it was played some weeks ago at the first Republican debate. But Mr. Anthony said he didn’t mean it to be used that way—that he didn’t mean it to favor any political party. I can’t praise the way words are used in the song, and could object to some of its statements. But it has affected millions of people because it is a saying, Economics in America is not working—it’s not working for me and others. I’m being rooked. And politicians in Washington haven’t wanted to take this seriously and really change it.

The first lines are (and again, I’m not praising them as writing): “I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullsh— pay.” Later in the song there is this: “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground / ’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down.”

In an article on the song’s soaring popularity, Nicholas Kristof quotes Mr. Anthony as saying:

“People talk about epidemics in this country and the homelessness and the drug use and the lack of skilled labor and the suicide rates,” he said. “Those…are symptoms of a bigger universal problem….We don’t talk about it enough.” [NY Times, 8-30-23]

Eli Siegel is the philosopher, critic, historian who described that bigger problem. People, he explained, resent terrifically how they’re seen and used as to money and jobs; they want to be seen with good will, and are not! Good will means this: Through trying to be fair to you, strengthen you, I take care of myself.

Economics, Mr. Siegel showed, has to be based on an honest answer to the question “What does a person deserve by being a person?” Until it is, people will be increasingly angry, will feel correctly that they’re being rooked. They may sometimes be sloppily angry, may vent their anger at the wrong things and in the wrong way—and that of course is very bad. But the discontent in people is real, and it won’t end until American economics is also American ethics—that is, good will.

The word soul is in the Anthony song. In a lecture, Eli Siegel explained, “There is such a thing as the soul and it is in everybody who works, and…it doesn’t like being outraged” (TRO 931). Mr. Anthony and the millions so taken by his song feel outraged. Yet, though he says “this damned country…keep[s] on kickin’ them down”—it’s not America that’s kicking people down and outraging them. The culprits are 1) an economy based on seeing people contemptuously, as beings to use for one’s financial advantage; and 2) those who pretend this profit way is somehow equivalent to America.

Evidence, then, that our present economic mode is ineffective is in Mr. Anthony’s song and its popularity. For these show that the profit way cannot have Americans feel there is justice for them in how they work, earn, need to spend.

Power That’s True—& Effective

In this final section of How Effective Are We? Mr. Siegel quotes Hazlitt on Marlowe and Doctor Faustus. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) lived two centuries after Marlowe, yet he is the critic who at last saw, and described, a largeness, even greatness, in Marlowe. Hazlitt here stands for the true power everyone longs to have: the desire to know, to see, to value rightly. That is the power of an authentic critic. And no one had it more than Eli Siegel himself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Hazlitt Looks at Marlowe, & Sees
By Eli Siegel

I think it well to read, now, William Hazlitt on Marlowe. In 1818, when Hazlitt lectured on Elizabethan dramatists, Marlowe’s place was uncertain—just who was he anyway? Hazlitt was dealing with a subject hardly known. He gave these lectures at the Surrey Institution of London, and they were later published as Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. Hazlitt says of Marlowe:

His “Life and Death of Doctor Faustus,” though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity….

[Faustus is,] as it were, devoured by a tormenting desire to enlarge his knowledge to the utmost bounds of nature and art, and to extend his power with his knowledge. He would realise all the fictions of a lawless imagination…; and for this purpose, sets at defiance all mortal consequences, and leagues himself with demoniacal power….

The idea of witchcraft and necromancy…seems to have had its origin in the restless tendency of the human mind, to conceive of and aspire to more than it can achieve by natural means.

This is still going on. There is a desire to manage the world on one’s own terms. What are the terms on which the world can be beautifully managed? is a question that hasn’t been answered yet. And the restlessness about it is compounded somewhat of premature and not so handsome decisions—seeming decisions.

What We Have & What We Desire

I spoke of the word tension earlier. Something that is in a state of tension is our idea of how the world should be—our idea of the most beautiful world, the most pleasing to us—and what we’ve got. What we’ve got and what we can think about carry on a wonderful tormenting drama in us. Hazlitt says:

Faustus, in his impatience to fulfil at once and for a moment, for a few short years, all the desires and conceptions of his soul, is willing to give in exchange his soul and body to the great enemy of mankind. Whatever he fancies, becomes by this means present to his sense: whatever he commands, is done….All the projects of philosophers, or creations of the poet, pay tribute at his feet: all the delights of fortune, of ambition, of pleasure, and of learning are centered in his person; and from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and perdition.

This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful.

There is something abrupt about that play. I think Marlowe was wondering how many scenes it should have, how many things he should get from this Doctor Faustus folk book.

Hazlitt says, “It is time to give a few passages in illustration,” and the persons listening to Hazlitt heard passages from this play for the first time. It wasn’t part of a Cambridge or Oxford course, nor was it a part of a London University course soon to begin. Hazlitt says of Faustus, “He thus opens his mind at the beginning,” and quotes this:

We find that Faustus was interested in very good food—that’s what is meant by “princely delicates.” They say about the food in heaven: it lacks variety. I don’t know.

Here, Marlowe and Shakespeare meet—in their fondness for Wittenberg. It’s the university of both Faustus and Hamlet.

And Faustus says this about the wealth that the supernatural spirits will get for him:

The iambic galloping can be studied in the line “And chase the Prince of Parma from our land.”

In the passage Hazlitt is quoting, Faustus speaks to two people who have encouraged him to go after magic, Valdes and Cornelius. Faustus says:

Faustus feels that learning as such is not profitable enough.

Marlowe was pretty uncertain as to who lived in America—he calls them “Indian Moors.” And he felt that those Indians were obeying their “Spanish lords”! Well, history is still interested in the matter. —Valdes continues (and “Almain Rutters” are German cavalry):

The line “Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows” is not the orthodox iambic. It’s Marlowe letting himself be controlled by space and its possibilities.

Next, Hazlitt quotes lines that I read earlier, but I’ll read them again. In the first, “From Venice they shall drag whole argosies,” a dragging is to be felt, with the hard gs of dragging and argosies. Valdes is speaking:

Hazlitt says that Faustus, as he speaks later with Mephistophilis, shows “the fixedness of his determination.” I don’t think Hazlitt is wholly right there. I think Faustus was never sure about his choice.

Then, There Is Helen

There is the passage about Helen of Troy. She comes at Faustus’s desire, through the work of Mephistophilis. The greatness of that passage was in process—like that of the line from Lucretius I recently mentioned.* It took years for Rome, for Europe, to find out how good a line it had, but it found that out in time. So Hazlitt is saying in 1818 what others had not seen—that something very big is here:

There is one passage more of this kind, which is so striking and beautiful, so like a rapturous and deeply passionate dream, that I cannot help quoting it here: it is the address to the Apparition of Helen.

He quotes it, beginning with the stage direction “Enter Helen again, passing over between two Cupids”:

In those lines there is a desire to change Helen into the world itself. The purpose of the world as to a person is in them: to get one’s soul flying everywhere.

Two Kinds of Profit

As he quotes from the last part of the play, when Faustus is to be taken to Hell, Hazlitt says:

Perhaps the finest trait in the whole play, and that which softens and subdues the horror of it, is the interest taken by the two scholars in the fate of their master, and their unavailing attempts to dissuade him from his relentless career. The regard to learning is the ruling passion of this drama, and its indications are as mild and amiable in them as its ungoverned pursuit has been fatal to Faustus.

—Which says that knowledge can be of two kinds. And that has to do with what we’re discussing. The profit of knowledge is of two kinds, as profit in the world is, profit in the touchable world.

Hazlitt continues, saying of Faustus:

And still more affecting are his own conflicts of mind and agonizing doubts…, when he exclaims to his friends: “Oh, gentlemen!…Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years; oh! would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!” A finer compliment was never paid, nor a finer lesson ever read to the pride of learning.

As I have mentioned, the word pride has two meanings, one good and one bad. The bad one can be called, not pride, but vanity. Hazlitt, here, seems to say that this wrong “pride” of learning is not the same as honoring a book—which it isn’t.

Knowledge is very much related to how commerce should be. I shall talk more about this. But what I read tonight has a relation to what true profit is and what false profit is.