Dear Unknown Friends:

In What Was Going On, the important 1975 lecture we are serializing, Eli Siegel discusses an article in the bicentennial issue of Fortune magazine. The article’s author is describing what he considers the atmosphere, the changed ways of seeing, and the future of the America of then. Though Mr. Siegel values the article, he disagrees with it centrally, fundamentally. And discussing it, he is explaining so much that we, of today, need to know.

As I have described: five years earlier Mr. Siegel began to show, in his Goodbye Profit System lectures, that a way of economics based on contempt no longer worked, and never would again. For thousands of years, economics had been impelled by the profit motive, by the seeing and using of people not with the purpose of being just to them, but with the purpose of financially aggrandizing oneself through their labor and needs. He showed that now, while persons with power might force profit-motivated economics to limp along for some additional decades, its condition was terminal. Ethics, he showed, is a force working through history, and we’ve reached the point at which the only way economics can succeed is by having a basis that is justice to every man, woman, and child.

So in 1975 Mr. Siegel is looking at an article in as big a proponent of the profit system as any: Fortune magazine. He is commenting in a leisurely, immediate, humorous way, with that beautiful oneness of scholarship and kindness that was always his. Throughout the lecture he comments on a matter mentioned often in the article: institutions. Mr. Siegel explains what an institution is: “something present in a country or in the world in a recurrent way.” And he mentions many, including one I’ll speak about here: he says, in 1975, “The elective system, or elections, is seen as an institution. And that is in question now.”

The Individual & the General

This principle of Aesthetic Realism is true of any time, place, person, subject: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Opposites you’ll see Mr. Siegel speaking about in the part of his lecture published here are the individual and the general, each person and all people, oneself and the whole nation. These opposites have to do with every aspect of America, including elections.

The idea behind elections, behind casting a ballot in a democracy, is: “I am one person, myself; but I have to do with something larger, more general, more inclusive—my city, county, state, my whole country. Each of those inclusive entities stands for me, is of me, and I stand for it as much as any other person does. I have the right to say what should happen to it.”

The history of suffrage (in America and elsewhere) is a long history. It has always been about whether the vote should be had only by certain people—or by more—and more—and more. I’m not dealing closely with that history now. But every time the electorate was expanded, every time a new group of people was permitted to vote, it came through a battle that was intense. This battle about voting has always been based on a mainly unspoken question, which Mr. Siegel saw as the most important question for humanity: Who should own the nation, the world?

For instance, there was a long battle to do away with property qualifications: only people who owned property, or a certain amount of money, had been legally permitted to vote. There was the fight about whether women should be allowed to vote. And there has certainly been the long, vicious effort to stop Black people from voting. The effort to restrict the voting of citizens—whether through laws or intimidation or making it difficult to cast a ballot—the attempt to suppress the vote has always come from the contemptuous feeling The nation should belong only to some people, not all.

Americans need to be clear about this: the right to vote, and the battle about it, is not about political parties; it’s about To whom does this nation belong? That question includes, To whom should the opportunities, advantages, wealth of this nation belong?

At the heart of these questions are the opposites Mr. Siegel speaks of here: the individual, each particular person, and the general, the nation as a whole. They are opposites which, by the very nature of reality, are demanding to be seen as one.

Ethics as a Force, & Voting

A large aspect of ethics as a force in reality has to do with the vote. As the decades have proceeded, the courage, work, increased awareness, and determination of ever so many people have resulted in the ability of more and more Americans to vote. The continuing of this fact, trend, force, does go toward putting an end to our nation’s being used for the profit of a few. It goes toward defeating contempt, both as to ethnicity and economics.

So there is a big feeling in many people that the trend so tied up with the ballot—the trend toward really having America owned by all its people—must be reversed. Today, no one dares say aloud that millions of citizens should simply not be permitted to vote. But persons are trying hard to make this sleazy disenfranchisement of millions happen, through intensive and widespread voter suppression. And they claim that their suppressive measures are not in order to restrict suffrage, but to overcome a situation of vast “voter fraud” (which doesn’t exist).

Eli Siegel was clear and passionate always about the biggest matter concerning people and nations. He wrote in the 1940s: “The world should be owned by the people living in it….All persons should be seen as living in a world truly theirs.” The great fact in those beautiful sentences is what our nation is in the midst of now. And all Americans deserve to know it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Always—Individual & General

By Eli Siegel

We come to these sentences in the Thomas Griffith article “Reshaping the American Dream”:

People feel that the vast and impersonal technology that brings them their comforts and satisfies their needs has somehow diminished them as individuals….[They feel] less singular.

That is getting at something important, because the history of the world is a series of opposites. And two things have been in history all the time: the fact that a person is an individual, and that he or she is related to what is called society, the collective, to something general. Those opposites have been from the very beginning. They are present now.

Aesthetic Realism says there are two desires that seem very different, and deeply they’re the same. There’s the desire of everybody to belong as much as possible to the outside world and to other people, to be aware of them and have them aware of oneself. And there’s a desire to be nothing but an individual. This has been, and it’s part of history. In every aspect of history, every field of people’s doing anything, the two things are there: what do other people think of this, and what do I really feel?

To Have Something

Then Mr. Griffith says of Americans today, “They take the wonders of their possessions for granted.”

One of the things needed by people is to feel that if you have something, it won’t be taken away from you. The desire is in the human self: the wanting to have something. But everybody knows that having a string of beads is different from having a factory.

He also says of Americans:

They can be well fed, well clothed, and well sheltered, but live in a pattern indistinguishable from their neighbors.

That statement begins with the three big needs throughout history: food, clothing, and shelter. Everybody needs to be fed, clothed, and sheltered. So far the satisfying of these needs has been in largely private hands.

And there is this sentence:

The newest dent in the American dream of affluence comes from the discovery that our resources (and the world’s) are more finite than we thought.

That is keen. People didn’t worry five years ago about how much oil had been taken from the ground. There was a feeling, If you need oil, we’ll get it. Right now, people are oppressed by the finite. Even in America, the notion of the finite has got one by the neck.

Mr. Griffith continues: “This challenges that delicious American freedom, the right to be prodigal and uncaring.” Freedom has been called various things: a right; a privilege; an inherent human situation; something constantly in danger.

What I’ve been saying is that the relation between the general, the external, the world itself, and the individual, has been changing all through history. And in the world now, there is a relation between the world itself, or the general, and the individual that is different from anything that has been; and it concerns, very much, property and money and the way a commodity comes into existence—that is, work. The purpose of work is to have a new commodity come into existence.

There’s Feeling about the Future

Mr. Griffith writes:

Many Americans have lost confidence in what they once regarded as their natural ally, the future.

That is true. And he continues:

The transitional period we are now in has been going on for at least a decade….The postwar 1945-65 years are now a recognizable historical era, and a radical change in attitudes has taken place since then.

Mr. Griffith says we’re in a “transitional period.” It can be shown that any period is a transitional period. The purpose of time is to get from one moment to another. And the difference between one moment and another, from one situation to another, is sometimes hard to see.

He says there’s been a “radical change” in these ten years—and yet our time is “transitional.” What does he mean by “radical change”? Something is taking place which will go on, and that a change has taken place will be seen by everyone. What people feel now is that something is changing, but they don’t feel clearly what change is taking place.

Another sentence:

But if the future shape of society is far from clear, one prediction is already possible: those parents who fear for the future may find that their children are better prepared to live in it than the parents are.

The children are not entirely honest, but they take something more for granted. And that is: that you can make a lot of money and still not be a likable person or, for that matter, like yourself; and you can go high in politics and still unconsciously make a very fine case against yourself.

Individuals & Institutions

Then the writer speaks again of institutions, and says about young people:

Their loyalties are…not given to institutions. Their rejection of hierarchy in society is deep-seated; their scorn of institutions is often cited as proof of honesty and freedom from cant, which it often is, but it also sanctions in some of them the right to “rip off” institutions.

Institutions are the result of the way individuals felt, and are managed by individuals. And if an individual doesn’t like the world, it will be shown in how the person manages an institution or works for it.

To judge by the books they favor and the films they see, they feel empathy only toward the rootless….Open to new ideas and experiences, they remain opaquely unopen to established values.

There are values that are established, and they will always be established. The chief of those values are honesty, justice, fairness, seeing what other people feel, trying to see things accurately. These are still good. But they have rivals. One reason Aesthetic Realism exists is in order for people to understand those rivals.

Mr. Griffith is writing about “the young”:

They have managed to discredit, in some measure, the country’s leadership elites in many fields, but are not yet in position to become leaders themselves, and besides have an in-built resistance to the exercise of authority by anyone, including one another.

It is quite true that public officials aren’t seen in the same way they were. Also, the leaders of business aren’t, because everybody knows that the leaders of business could not cope with the economic upset that happened some years ago. The first half of the 1970s has been the boulevard of broken prophecies, and shattered insights.

“The Establishment”

In the next paragraph, this writer says:

When “the Establishment” came under attack in the violent Sixties, it proved more vulnerable than anyone expected—perhaps because (contrary to the image conjured up by the young) it never really had all that much authority.

Well, it didn’t have all authority, but it’s very clear, to people who go about, who the persons in charge are. A definition of establishment is: the people who are in charge, at any one time, about anything, and who are able to sustain their being in charge through strength.

There is an establishment in every field. If you go into any town in New England, you’ll find that some people are in charge. And if you go to the public library in a town, you’ll find that the librarian thinks she or he has the library. —Then the next sentence:

In any event, successful men in the prime of life found both their authority and their motives challenged. The challenging still goes on.

Mr. Griffith doesn’t deal with the large subject of what does an “authority” deeply feel about his own authority?—Am I really authoritative?

There’s the Presidency

The article continues:

It can be said of a number of American institutions—as the British political scientist Harold Laski said of the American presidency—that they are surprisingly elastic. These institutions can expand quickly to meet new challenges, but they can also shrink.

The presidency is mentioned, and there have been various books on the presidency, including one by Harold Laski. A question is: is the presidency an institution; is Congress an institution; and the governorship of states? We’d better put it all under government, because government is the largest institution, and is the rival of nature coming from the earth’s unconscious. You can’t call nature an institution. It just is. But government is an institution. For hundreds of years, it has gone on—while people knew each other. There was government in Assyria. Institutions sometimes are related to superstitions, like the rituals at Buckingham Palace. And some people would say that Shakespeare was an institution as important in England as the first Queen Elizabeth.

But Mr. Griffith could be more precise. What is he saying? The greatest thing that is in peril is not strictly an institution; it is the private ownership of the wealth of the world and of the producing of wealth. That is a way. And it has been the way in the world now for hundreds of years. The relation of institutions which can be called political or sociological, to that large thing which arises out of the structure of the world and how an individual sees his or her own life—that should be talked of more definitely.

Then, about the presidency, there’s this statement:

As Laski has said, truly strong presidencies grow not so much from magnetic leadership as from a strong sense in the citizenry of urgent and shared goals.

The presidency has been looked at and nearly every president has been found wanting here and there, including, I must say, Lincoln. He has been studied lately. And if you look at the First Inaugural, from which I quoted earlier, you’ll find that Lincoln is very uncertain about the Fugitive Slave Law and the feeling of many people in the North that if a fugitive slave comes their way, Constitution or not, they’re not going to send him back. Lincoln’s trepidation is to be seen in that Inaugural. But still, Lincoln—well, my thoughts about Lincoln are in a certain poem.

[Editor’s Note. Mr. Siegel wrote about Lincoln in several poems. One is the following, published in his book Hail, American Development:

In 2002, this poem was read into the U.S. Congressional Record by Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who cared for it deeply. —ER]