EDWARD GREEN 
COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR / NEW YORK CITY  
 
The Urgent Question for Men and Women: How Do We Want to Affect People? 
BY EDWARD GREEN
Part 1

The question--"How do we want to affect people?--is, along with being urgent, one of the kindest questions in the world. Like other people, I didn't know this question existed as something consciously to be thought about. What I did, was to ask--as people do: "What's good for me? How can I take care of myself and get ahead?" 

Those questions, just so, aren't wrong. We have a right, even an obligation, to be good to ourselves. But what does it mean? Aesthetic Realism explains that the one way to truly take care of ourselves--to have a good opinion of ourselves--is by wanting to have a good effect on the world and other people: wanting them to be as strong as they can be. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson in l970, speaking to a man and a woman who were in pain about each other, Eli Siegel explained: 

There are certain things that...are either/or. When we see clearly that we don't want...to do all we can to have a good effect--I say definitely, anybody who looks at that for half an hour and doesn't hide, can't stand it. It's almost physical: you just can't stand it. The only thing you can do is rephrase it and hide...This is obligatory on the part of everyone who is close: How can I do all I can to have the best effect on a person I know and also avoid a bad effect? If a person doesn't think that way, or doesn't want to think that way, we are in a constant state of running away from what we are. I. We Have to Think About It 

It can be usefully shocking--it has been for me--to realize how little thought we give to what will strengthen other people. I remember when my father lost his business in the mid l960's, and our family had difficult times financially--with my mother working hard to keep us afloat--I never once offered to get a weekend or after-school job. It just didn't occur to me. And though my mother, Dorothy Green, was often very tired, I resisted doing any housework to help her out; resenting it, seeing it as beneath me, as "women's work." One day, exhausted, and rightly furious at my selfishness, she called me by the curse word she reserved for the worst people she knew: Nixon! 

I am so grateful, that beginning in l972, as I studied Aesthetic Realism in consultations, I met the explanation of why I could be so cold. One of the most important questions I heard in my first consultation, was: 

Have you seen your individuality as coming from where you are the same as other people or different? I said, "different," and my consultants began to show me what that answer--seemingly so quiet and innocent--could lead to. After I had spoken, at some length, about how, in my relations with the people I was close to--family and friends, I was always disappointed and hurt, they asked me:  Have you used your mother to say that all women were out to make you weaker? "That's what I've felt," I answered. They continued:  Did you also want to feel that about all people--that they weaken you? Did you feel, "Since the world is not my friend, I have the right to hide from it and have my way with it?" The logic of this amazed me; it made such sense of my life! "Yes," I said. My consultants then explained the ethics of the matter: that we don't have a right to see other people as enemies unless we've done all we can to know them, and also hope honestly to like them. Had I tried to understand people, or had I used the weaknesses I saw in them to puff myself up and feel superior? "Superior," I said. 

"That is contempt," they explained, described by Eli Siegel in "Four Statements of Aesthetic Realism": 

There is a disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world. If a person, unconsciously, associates strength for himself with weakness in others, they asked: "Could there then be a hope to find weaknesses?" "I never thought of that," I answered; "Yes, there would be." 

Growing up, I had wanted very much to see myself as sensitive and kind. I loved music and wanted to be able to do beautiful things as a pianist and as a composer. I prided myself on trying to be a friend to people others made fun of at school. And once, watching a Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, I was so moved, I sent all the money I had saved up for two years to fund their research for a cure. 

But I also remember how during a junior high election for student council, I spread cruel and untrue rumors about the candidates on the other side. Our party won, but I rightfully despised myself--and felt so bad, I thought about writing a confession and having people see it. 

Having this double way--wanting to be kind, but also wanting people to be weak and contemptible--I was terrifically unsure of myself. When my consultants asked me what troubled me most, I told them that for two years I had been unable to write any music; I was frightened I never would again. "Do you think," they asked: 

    that your whole self wants to be at one with other people and the world?--which Aesthetic Realism says is everyone's deepest desire. If there's a division in your purposes--a going for respect but also for contempt, would you have to feel you haven't lived up to your art, that you are not being honest with yourself?
"That's exactly what I feel," I said. And as I continued to study Aesthetic Realism, what I hoped for came to be: I began to write music again. 

Recently I had the honor to be asked by Ken Kimmelman, Emmy Award-Winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant, to write music for his new short documentary public service film "What Does a Person Deserve?"--a film against hunger and homelessness. It is based on Eli Siegel's great question: "What does a person deserve by being alive?" As I wrote this music, I wanted consciously to strengthen people. I wanted, as Mr. Kimmelman did, for audiences to be moved by the suffering of men, women and children, but also to see their dignity; and to do all we can to end this terrible injustice. "What Does a Person Deserve?" is now being shown in theaters and on television across America. With all my heart, I am grateful to Aesthetic Realism--to Eli Siegel and to Class Chairman Ellen Reiss--that my life has changed so profoundly that my work can be part of this kind and powerful film. This is music I wrote for the film: 

[Play tape--example 1] 

II. The Appeal of Contempt 

I speak now about about a man whose life shows how urgent it is that we ask: What effect do we want to have on other people? That man is Adolf Hitler. Born in Austria in l889, he is the person who unleashed upon humanity what Mr. Siegel called "the most organized form of physical evil"--the Nazi army. With that army, and its associates--the SS, the SA, the Gestapo--Hitler came close to conquering the world. He was stopped only by the raw courage of the army of the Soviet Union at Stalingrad in l942, and the world was saved for civilization. But before he ended his life in l945, committing suicide in a Berlin bunker, Hitler had left tens of millions of casualties--including the 6 million Jews of Europe who perished agonizingly in the hideous concentration camps. 

What drove such evil? And why did people--both in Germany and around the world--allow Hitler to come to power in the first place? These are questions that cry out for answers; yet even some of the finest scholars on the subject have despaired of them. Alan Bullock, author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, is quoted in Ron Rosenbaum's 1998 book, Explaining Hitler, as saying: "The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain." 

I say carefully, and with much feeling--as a human being, and as a Jewish American who would not be alive today had Hitler won--that the explanation people are looking for is in Aesthetic Realism, and that Eli Siegel, with unparalleled intellectual courage and love for humanity, has given it. Contempt can appeal to people, and "Hitler," he explained, "was perhaps the greatest evoker of human contempt in history." 

There was, I learned from Mr. Siegel, a historical wrong done to Germany which Hitler exploited for his own evil purposes--to encourage Germans to have contempt for the rest of humanity. That wrong was the vengeful Versailles Treaty of l9l9--which punished Germany mercilessly for World War One, as if it alone, of all the nations involved, bore the only guilt for causing that war. 

As a result of this treaty, Germany was stripped of many of its most productive provinces; others were occupied by foreign forces; and it was called upon to pay enormous reparations--which were impossible to meet without beggaring the entire population. As a result, Germany was crippled. There were, writes Ron Rosenbaum in Explaining Hitler , "starvation, humiliation, inflation, followed--after an all-too-brief interval--by a crushing depression." Of the treaty which had all this pain come to be, Eli Siegel wrote in l976: 

The revenge looked for by Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson made for the revenge looked for by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Hess....If there had not been ill will in the spring and summer of l9l9, that greatest example of ill will, Adolf Hitler, would not have been. [TRO 160] And in a lecture he gave in l970 entitled "Is Democracy Good Will?" Mr. Siegel explained that fascism:  appealed to the Germans...because it made them feel they could respect themselves. Here they were--seen as an inferior country, because of lack of money--and Hitler says, 'You weren't defeated!' Who doesn't want to hear that?" There was no defeat, Hitler told Germany: You were "stabbed in the back" by the Jews, who secretly conspired to force our generals to give up the war by denying them financial support. 

This, of course, is a lie with no basis in historical fact. But the lie resonated in Munich, in Nurnberg, in Berlin because, as Eli Siegel has explained about all humanity--Germans included: "Contempt, it seems to us, is the foundation we need for our desire to be somebody; to matter." You don't need to live in Berlin to try to convince yourself all your troubles are caused by other people--people inferior to you. Terribly, for the Jews of Germany, they stood historically for that otherness--and so were a convenient target. 

 

To Continue: Part 2
 
 
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