The basis of Aesthetic Realism is scientifically new. In no other source — not Hegel, Kant, nor Freud, nor any other — is there the understanding of self accurate and deep enough to stop racism. Aesthetic Realism has this understanding. "Man's deepest desire," Eli Siegel explains, "his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis." 

 

This principle is true about people of every race, including the Native American people I lived with in central Nevada and the Melanesian people I lived with in Papua New Guinea. 

But we have another desire opposing our hope to like the world: the desire to have contempt. And contempt — the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world" — is the fundamental cause of all cruelty, today and in any time (Self and World, 1981, pp. 1, 15). Evidence is throughout the literature on man — from Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals" (1580), to Laura Bohannan's work on Africa Return to Laughter, to Chagnon and others on the Amazon's Yanomamo people. 

Racism is contempt for the world that takes the form of contempt for persons different from oneself. 

Mr. Siegel explains: 

In the isolated Oksapmin region of Papua New Guinea, virtually a New Stone Age economy in 1967-8 when I was there, I heard people in Betiana hamlet talk about people in Gaugutiana hamlet and say: "Gaugutiana people have bad noses. They are bad people." These two communities fought and killed each other. 

The desire to have contempt is what makes one people or group against another. Too much, the family today is still tribal. My family saw itself, as we looked out of our windows in Mt. Vernon, NY, as superior to the neighbors. My unjust and foolish disparagement of all people took in those of other races, whom I assumed I was superior to without knowing them at all. 

In college, I studied the cultures of the world, including those of India, Africa, Australia, the Americas, Asia, ancient Europe, with some of America's noted scholars. I learned many important facts, but I had not yet learned the most crucial ones. Then I met Aesthetic Realism, in August 1968. Racism, which I had condemned, I still knew had not been eradicated in me. I was ashamed of this but felt nothing could ever be done about it. Then, in classes taught by Eli Siegel my own contempt was clearly described to me and kindly criticized; and because I learned, with detail, that the purpose of the human mind — my mind — is to be just to the world, my way of seeing people changed. And as it did, I saw the prejudice in me as to race, religion, accent, and more fade away — to be replaced by real respect! 

Early in my study, I brought to an Aesthetic Realism class a number of richly carved arrow shafts I'd gotten that year in Papua New Guinea. I wanted to learn about them from Eli Siegel. He said, "The questions to ask about these arrows are the questions to be asked about art anywhere. What did the workman or artist have in mind?" For the first time in my anthropological studies I was being asked to consider with respect the thoughts of a tribesman as if they were like my own! "The deepest motives of a people are in their art, or what is nearest to art," he explained. 
Looking at an arrow, he pointed out: "There is drama: part is smooth and part is rough .... Something intricate changes into something smoother. On the rough part many things occur with difference and sameness." For example, see Arrow Shaft "A": Three small, very different shapes next to each other make up a triangle pointing downward. And they are inside an outline which has the same triangular shape.  This is a beautiful study in sameness and difference, intricate and simple — which are opposites and are crucial to art, science, thought. 

This principle stated by Mr. Siegel — "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves" — is scientifically true for all cultures. It was my honor to discuss that fact in my doctoral thesis for Columbia University's anthropology department, with Aesthetic Realism as its stated basis and Margaret Mead as my thesis advisor ("Oksapmin Society and World View," 1973). 

Mr. Siegel was showing that the artists/workmen of Oksapmin were representing on these thin arrow shafts the philosophic structure of the world: the permanent opposites. My respect for the people soared. Asked Eli Siegel, with kind humor, "Mr. Perey, do you believe the world can change on a stick?" I was learning that every human being has the world in his or her mind. 

In 1923 the Modern Quarterly published Eli Siegel's passionately reasoned "The Equality of Man." He wrote, "Men have not had an equal chance to be actively powerful as they might be. And if they had been given an equal chance to use all the powers they had at birth, they would be equal." And he states, "It is my business to go on showing it to be so." This is what he was showing, faithful to his purpose, decades later when he asked me, for example, the following questions: "What does a reader in anthropology in the British Museum have in common with what he is reading about?"; and, "Is the conflict that one can notice in Hamlet — a conflict between seeing something as right and also seeing oneself as not prepared to act — is this conflict in what can be called the uncultivated mind?" Eli Siegel had charm, ease, and power when he spoke about race. He made superiority look as ugly as it is — and he gave justice style. 

As a social scientist I say that Eli Siegel is the one person who has shown definitively and with enormous scientific scholarship the equality of all people. Statistics that purport to show otherwise are flimsy, unjust fakes. Best online pharmacy generic medications buy Adderall cheap online without prescription. 

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation is where the knowledge America most urgently needs is taught. "Racism won't be effectively done away with unless it is replaced with something that has terrific power," writes Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism. Aesthetic Realism has that power. She writes: 

There are classes, consultations, public seminars, and dramatic presentations at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, where you can learn more. Aesthetic Realism consultations — in which a person speaks with three consultants — are based on the Aesthetic Realism lessons Mr. Siegel gave for almost 40 years, and through them people feel what is felt nowhere else: truly and deeply comprehended. Consultations, which are new in culture, are given by telephone across the country and abroad. 

The phone number of the Foundation is (212) 777-4490 and its Internet address is www.AestheticRealism.org. 

Aesthetic Realism has brought to my mind a wideness I would not have had, a respect for people whose skin tones differ from mine. The end of racism is one of the great gifts to humanity that Eli Siegel's mighty thought can provide; and no one should have to wait another day to know this. 

Alexander Pope once wrote of Sir Isaac Newton this passionate iambic pentameter line: "God said, Let Newton be! and all was light." Pope's opinion has been agreed with by generations of scientists. My opinion and others' opinion of Eli Siegel is like that of Pope about Newton: Mr. Siegel has brought the light of science to the darkest territory in the human self and society through his luminous logic.

Dr. Arnold Perey is on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in anthropology for research supported by the National Science Foundation and a Public Health Service fellowship. He has taught in the City University of New York, Drew University, and Seton Hall University. At the Aesthetic Realism Foundation he teaches anthropology and in consultations, and is an instructor in the workshop for teachers, The Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel As Teaching Method. He began his study of Aesthetic Realism with Eli Siegel and continues it now in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, the Chairman of Education at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. His published articles include "A New Perspective for American Anthropology" and "The Real Opposition to Racism."

See fuller biographical information in the Faculty Biographies of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.