Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish here the first section of How Effective Are We?, a lecture Eli Siegel gave on July 24, 1970. It is part of his great Goodbye Profit System series, begun two months earlier. In that series, Mr. Siegel was showing that a certain point in history had been reached: economics based on the profit motive—on seeing human beings in terms of how much money one can make from them—had failed. And the evidence of that failure was ever-increasing. To have as a nation’s economic “engine” the seeing of people in terms of money for oneself and the use of them accordingly, had always been unethical. But now this unethical thing was terminally ailing, no matter how much longer it might be made to stagger on.

In his Goodbye Profit System series, Mr. Siegel gave wide-ranging and vivid evidence for that fact. He used instances of history, of culture, of current happenings and people’s feelings. The years since have shown he was right, as I have described in issues of this journal. For now, I’ll mention, swiftly, two things. 1) It’s well known that more and more of America’s wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And the middle class is much smaller than it was fifty years ago. 2) We know that while former generations felt they would lead better economic lives than their parents led, this is overwhelmingly not felt now by Millennials and Gen Zers. Today’s young and young-ish men and women are much tossed about as to jobs, are often in massive debt, and are very worried—and angry. —The facts just mentioned are obvious signs that the for-profit system has failed.

Ownership, Power: What Makes Them Good or Bad?

In the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about two big matters that are in economics, but are also in every aspect of people’s lives: ownership and power. Here, he looks at these mainly in relation to people’s thoughts, motives as to each other, ways of being, and self-dislike.

Aesthetic Realism has explained the distinction between power that is good and power that is bad. After all, we say that Beethoven’s Third Symphony is powerful, and also that a brutal dictator is powerful. The difference is obviously gigantic, utter—but just what is it, centrally? The crucial thing, Aesthetic Realism explains, about the quality of power is this: does the power one is after arise from respect for the world and people or contempt for these? (There is a tremendous respect for reality in the Third Symphony of Beethoven.)

In one’s particular, ever so personal life, people have been tormented because they didn’t know the distinction just stated. Take the field of love: as we affect a person—which means have a power over that person—what is the basis? Mr. Siegel explained that if the effect we want to have on someone is not something we respect the person for accepting, our power is bad.

And there is the matter of ownership. As we feel, in our relations with people, that a person is in some way of us, part of us, is “my husband,” “my wife,” “my love,” “my dear”—what would make such a feeling respectful, not possessive? The one true basis for seeing a person as of us deeply is this: that we want to know that person, profoundly and widely; that we’ll never tire of trying to understand him or her; and that we want to use our closeness to the person to know and value reality and humanity in their largeness and specificity.

A Story of 1941

In the first part of the lecture, Mr. Siegel discusses a short story of 1941. It’s about two people who had been married, and their children, and the woman’s present husband. Mr. Siegel shows it deals with the deep mix-up people have about owning. Later in the talk, he will discuss power and ownership in one of the most famous of English plays, a play that has, among other things, lines that are intense and mighty. But as to the story he begins with: he shows that much of its power is in its mutedness. It conveys, he explains, the characters’ bewildered feeling of self-dislike because one has seen people as quietly belonging to oneself while one doesn’t want sufficiently to understand them.

In the class, Mr. Siegel read the entire story. Here, we can only quote several passages of it. He does not—as he did with many works in the classes he taught—take up individual sentences and show the drama, meaning, and perhaps beauty within them. Here, I believe, he wants his listeners (or, now, readers) to feel the quiet ongoing ordinariness—which yet is drama too—as people don’t know how they want to affect each other and be affected. Neither the ex-husband nor the ex-wife is a villain. And they are, as Mr. Siegel says, polite. But they don’t know the reason they feel troubled is that they don’t have good will, with that central thing in good will—the desire to know.

The ex-wife, Jane, for example, wants the life she now has to impress her visiting former husband. But she is not interested in knowing what he has been affected by in these years—including, apparently, his working against fascism in different parts of the world.

The ex-husband, Dan, meeting his children after a long absence, wants to feel they belong to him. He is sensitive enough to know he shouldn’t think of them that way. But he does not see them as being in the whole world—related to everything.

As a prelude to what you’ll soon read—and on this 121st anniversary of Eli Siegel’s birth—I’ll quote two statements by him. I love them, and they’re ever so relevant to our present subject. The way of seeing knowledge in them is what Eli Siegel lived by. First, from Self and World, page 279:

We can own the world only by knowing it….We can possess the world only by having…knowledge of it. All other possession, both in love and economics, is false and hurtful.

And there is this—passionate and firm—in his poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana”: “The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it!” Yes, that too is about what a nation’s economy and the relations among people should honor.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

How Effective Are We?

By Eli Siegel

I call today’s talk How Effective Are We? And there will be a mingling in it of Goodbye Profit System and what is present in people’s lives in other ways.

The mistake that the profit system has made is akin to that usually made in marriage or in friendship. There is a desire to have a bad power over things in what is called the profit system, accompanied very often by statements about “service” and how much one loves one’s customer. Meanwhile, people are distressed by their desire for power and their feeling that the way they go after it is not good. This wrong kind of power is present in economics and, more or less simultaneously, in social life and married life.

The story I’m going to discuss now is about power. It’s “The Visit,” by Andy Logan, published in 1941. The outline is this: Two people who were divorced in New York have not seen each other for some time. The man has been in Ethiopia, Spain, and, most recently, China. The woman has married someone else—a farmer, likely in Iowa. The story is given to the quiet visit of the first husband to his former wife and their children (he’s been sending money for the children), and his meeting the new husband. It’s all very polite. But the refrain is God, we don’t know how to own each other!—which is something everyone can say.

The utmost in power is ownership. The purpose of ownership most often is to have a convenient beginning place for power in various forms. Ownership is the ascription of power to oneself. You own a book: you can tear out all its pages, or you can splash ink over it.

A Short Story Begins

This story was more or less discovered by Somerset Maugham in 1943, though it had been chosen as an O. Henry Memorial Award story and published in Prize Stories of 1941, which is where Maugham saw it. “The Visit” begins:

“Ned’s people live there,” said Jane, suddenly lifting her hand from the wheel and waving widely at two figures moving about one of the fields they passed. “It’s a big farm. I don’t know anybody who’s got more land or who’s better thought of around here than Mr. Kleith.”

Jane, who was Dan’s wife, is very careful: she calls a person who is one of her present in-laws “Mr. Kleith.” She is pointing out things in the neighborhood to her first husband.

“Really?” said Dan. He crooked his elbow in the air and groped about in his pocket for cigarettes. “Have one?”

Just how much is Jane Dan’s at this time? How much ownership is there? What are the fadings and discounts and also lessenings, even annulments, of ownership?

Dan has offered Jane a cigarette:

“Oh no!” She looked at him quickly and turned away. He liked the look of her hands as they drove. They were small and brown and full of strength. Funny, he thought, she used to smoke.

From things said later in the story, one can gather that Jane was a New York girl and given to some of the more daring life for which Manhattan is noted. But she has gone more rural, and is not given to the high jinks of the 1930s.

“Did you have an interesting time in China?” asked Jane politely.

You might call it that, thought Dan. His best friend had had his head blown off. And one day when he came home from a walk around the block, his trouser-cuffs were reddish brown around the edges. He remembered sending the suit to the cleaner’s.

“Rather interesting,” he said.

The story is muted. It’s like the sound of the galoshes of well-bred people in a hall on a winter’s day. The plot is one of those modern plots where nothing happens; but really something does happen, because not-happening is also narrative. And the not-happening here is a superior not-happening. The non-doing here is high class. They don’t know what to do, so they don’t do anything.

They were quiet for a while, driving through the autumn sunshine, past a church and some gray farmhouses and a big, raw brick school building which Jane proudly called to his attention.

“The county’s had to work hard for that,” she said. “Ned’s father made speeches, and Ned, too, and we finally got it. It’s only been finished since August.”

The implication is that there’s some kind of ownership in that raw brick school building.

The question of what is ownership has been in the human self and has affected people very much. Ownership is the static form of power. It’s a beginning form of power.

Dan…looked back at the ugly building with its red clay front yard. Probably Jane belonged to the Parents’ Association. He imagined her presiding at meetings: “I think Mrs. Thatcher is quite right. I think the third-grade room needs curtains very badly.”

And this is Jane thought of by her first husband, at one of the meetings of the Parents’ Association.

“Are the children  How old are they now, Jane?”

She glanced at him briefly, disapproval hovering around her mouth.

“Margaret was seven in July, Dan, and Hugh will be six next March.”

“Oh.” He had thought of them as older….He seemed to have been away so long.

“You never call them Maggie and the General any more?” he asked, after a moment.

“Oh no,” said Jane, “just Hugh and Margaret. Ned doesn’t care much for nicknames,” she added as she turned into the driveway.

So it seems that the new husband, Ned, the rural Ned, is more stodgy, sober, pious, than the first husband.

Are They His?

The low bulk of the house lay awkwardly among the brown autumn leaves….It was an undistinguished old place, but Dan saw nothing pathetic about it, as he had half-expected. “I wouldn’t be ashamed to point it out to anyone,” he thought; and he had a sudden picture of himself driving along with a carful of men in top hats, and saying casually: “Oh, by the way, that white house there is where my wife and children live. My former wife, I mean,” he would have to add, and that would be awkward. He was glad it was only a silly idea.

Dan has brought presents for the children. And he will meet them after many years.

Dan went out into the garden where his son and daughter were playing….Their clothes were rather nicer now, he suspected, than everyday; there was something odd about a little boy playing around a farmyard garden in pleated linen. “I’d put you in khaki shorts if you were mine,” thought Dan, and then stopped suddenly, because it was such a strange thing to say.

…The two children stood there before him in the late-afternoon sun—a little girl with bows in her hair and a thin-nosed boy; and they kicked the garden dirt with their shining shoes and called him “Father,” but there was no conviction in their voices.

So these children, boy and girl, don’t know where they are, and they don’t know to whom they belong.

He tried to tell them about China and Spain and Ethiopia, but they were too young to be very interested.

It seems that Dan is left. If you mentioned China and Spain and Ethiopia in the late 1930s or early ’40s, that showed where you stood. In every country, the history of ownership is different.

“Did you come on a boat?” Margaret wanted to know, and he told them about that for a while, but soon they were making little bored jabs at each other and quarreling sharply. He stood watching them uncomfortably, like a stage father who couldn’t remember his lines.

When children quarrel and make jabs at each other, they are going for power too. Every quarrel among children is like a quarrel among empires for power.

“Are you really our papa?” Hugh asked him when the dinner bell had rung at last….

“Of course,” said Dan, but he had a quick, guilty feeling that he was lying.

What does it mean to be a “papa,” to be a father?

Not at Ease

It was just before dinner that Dan met Jane’s husband. As he climbed up the steps to the back porch he saw Ned and Jane standing there together, talking in low voices. Jane was running the dark opal ring up and down her finger, and Dan knew she was upset about something.

Nobody is really at ease, because these relationships get the whole human race daffy and disturbed.

Ned…was in overalls. Dan saw the way the children were dressed, and how careful they had been in the garden about how they played and where they sat….He understood why Jane’s face was flushed. She had wanted him to see them all at their best, and here was Ned in dirty, manure-green overalls.

Ned likely is showing off, showing he can wear these overalls. You can show off while you seem to show humility. The spirit of Dostoyevsky is in Iowa.

“How do you do,” said Ned. “…Sorry I’m dressed this way, but my prize mare just foaled, and I had to see to her.”…

The children, who had been standing shyly in the background, ran forward now and threw their arms around Ned….“Is’t a big colt, Ned?” “Is’t black, Ned?”

…Dinner was good, although the hired girl served it awkwardly and a little resentfully….

Ned smacked Hugh’s hand lightly as it darted out for a second chicken leg. “Wait till you’re asked, son!”…

“Margaret,” said Jane, “please don’t dunk your bread.”

“But Ned does, Mother.”

So we have a good study in arrested and dim ownership.

It Is Present Now

There’s a likeness in the situation the story tells about and what’s going on in America now. Deep in the minds of people in all the counties of America, this matter of ownership is being thought about as it never was before. It has always been thought about, because ownership is a mighty test of what kind of person one is. The five people in this story are uncertain, the three adults and the two non-voters. —Here, Dan is about to leave, and he and Jane are speaking:

“I’m glad you could come down and see the children,” she said.

“I’m glad too,” said Dan, looking at Ned. He hesitated a moment. “I don’t know how long I’ll be in New York, but when I come back or when they’re a little older I’d like to have them on a visit some time.”

“That would be lovely,” said Jane vaguely.

So this story is about the ineffectual. It’s richly about the undecided. And there’s much of that now.