Dear Editor:
On September 11, from the window of our lower Manhattan apartment, we watched in horror as the first tower of the World Trade Center burst into flames, and then, when the second tower was attacked, and became an inferno of flame and black smoke, we knew the world had changed.
We were lucky. We were not in those buildings, nor were our loved ones. But like everyone in America we have to ask, now that our peaceful lives are threatened, what should we do? What will make our country really safe?
The answer is not in revenge and retaliation. If innocent lives are lost as we attack Afghanistan or elsewhere, it will only create more terrorists.
We are students of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded in 1941 by the great American historian and educator Eli Siegel. In the editor’s commentary to the current Issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, headlined, “Urgent: How Should We See People?” Ellen Reiss writes:
“The first crucial issue for the United States now is the issue every individual person faces when he or she is hurt: Do you want to think more deeply at this time, or do you want to feel that you don’t need to think and that since you’ve been hurt, you have a right to do anything? The latter choice has been so frequent; but it is the ugliest, most dangerous choice in the world…The persons who attacked this nation in September of 2001 were monumentally vicious. But we need to ask: Is there a discontent, an anger at the United States, which others, who are not necessarily vicious, have? And did the anger at the US which millions of people throughout the world have, enable those attackers to thrive, to be not adequately opposed?”
It is a plain fact, which we have to face courageously, that for decades people in the Islamic world have felt that our country was more interested in exerting our power and making profit from them than in respecting them and asking what is fair to them. That state of mind — that we have the right to make less of the reality of other people and have our way with them — we learned from Aesthetic Realism is contempt. Ellen Reiss writes:
“We need to…be sure we are against contempt, including in us. Otherwise we will meet contempt and ill will with contempt and ill will of our own, and that will be met with more contempt and ill will — and there will be a horrible, deadly, unending contempt cycle. Evil should be punished, of course. But no punishment will succeed unless it is in keeping with what Mr. Siegel describes in issue 165 of this journal, titled ‘What Caused the Wars.’ The next war has to be against ugliness in self. And the greatest ugliness in self is the seeing of contempt as personal achievement. Contempt must be had for contempt before squabbles grow less, terror diminishes. Respect for what is real must be seen as the great success of man.”
The world is changed now, but there is still a world. Devastation on a massive scale is not at all unimaginable unless we see differently. We learned from Aesthetic Realism that self-questioning is strength and pride — for a person, also for a nation. And we agree with Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, when she writes: “The big thing that the horrible occurrences of September 11, 2001 should tell us is, there is a way of seeing people by people which has to be in this world, or everyone will suffer.”
Edward Green and Carrie Wilson
(The entire commentary by Ellen Reiss can be read at: www.Aesthetic-Realism.org)