The tremendous lesson that arises from the anguish and brutality now going on in the land of Israel/Palestine, is that humanity, all of us, must learn from Aesthetic Realism what contempt is. We must learn how contempt works in our own selves and how to criticize it.

     There is certainly brutality coming from both sides in the conflict. Yet the happenings in that land near the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea should make for these big questions: How could people whose relatives were tormented by the Nazis, were imprisoned in concentration camps, humiliated, worked to death, murdered in gas chambers — how could Jews now destroy the homes of Palestinians, shut off their water supply, kill women and children and keep ambulances from reaching them so that they bleed to death?

     I present these questions as a person who is Jewish, who cares very much for the state of Israel and wants her to flourish — to flourish authentically. Another question, which cries out to be asked by all humanity, is: If Jews, who have been so victimized, so brutalized, can become brutes themselves, who is not capable of large cruelty? Everyone is.

     The source of that cruelty in the human self, the self of each of us, has been explained, for the first time, by Eli Siegel. The following principle describes it: "The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt." The study of that Aesthetic Realism principle is the only thing that will stop — on both sides — the violence in the Middle East. The fact that this study must be if human beings are to be civilized, is the most important upshot of the Israeli-Palestinian agony.

     In issue 165 of this journal, under the title "What Caused the Wars," Mr. Siegel writes, plainly and mightily:

It is necessary to see that while the contempt which is in every one of us may make ordinary life more painful than it should be, this contempt is also the main cause of wars. It was contempt that made for the trenches of France in 1915; it was contempt which made for the labor camps of the Second World War. It was contempt which made for that awful mode of retaliation called Nazism .... Contempt causes terror in the Middle East.

     2) You like feeling that what’s not you is less than you; you want to diminish someone, look down on someone, as a means of feeling you’re more. This goes on as people in one college fraternity make less of those in another. It goes on as a family gloats at dinner about how stupid and crude the neighbors are — and therefore how superior we are. The desire to lessen another as a means of heightening oneself, has become the desire of Jew and Palestinian to humiliate each other and demolish each other. The same contempt had a German, in 1940, like lessening a Jew.

     It is a horrible thing that a Jewish soldier with a weapon in his hand can have a pleasure humiliating a Palestinian like the pleasure an SS officer had humiliating a Jew. Yet the seeing of this fact can be profoundly instructive — because it is a means of seeing how much contempt needs to be understood. One of the biggest tragedies of these decades is that while Jews have been against the Holocaust, they have not been against the emotion which caused the Holocaust: contempt. This is not because they are Jews but because they are human; they are like persons of every religion and land. While people do not see what contempt is, our earth is not safe. That is why the Aesthetic Realism study of contempt is the most necessary thing in this world, even as it is a beautiful study and a magnificently pleasurable one.

The International Committee of the Red Cross today branded the Israeli Army’s behavior "totally unacceptable" for attacking its [the Red Cross’s] vehicles and buildings .... Other international organizations and the United Nations [complained] that the Israeli Army was blocking their ability to feed and provide medical care to Palestinian civilians .... Said Pierre Salignon, program director for Médecins sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders[,] "We have had direct attacks [by the Israeli Army] against our ambulances."

     The Lord, in the Old Testament, is for the Jews, but is also terrifically, fiercely critical of them. And the criticisms show that people had contempt on the earth of Israel years ago, and the Lord hated it. For example, there is this in Jeremiah (2:5,7):

Thus saith the Lord, What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain? ... 

     I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

     In the Bible, a large criticism the Lord gives the people of Israel, and he gives it often, is that they are worshiping false gods. Whenever anyone worships a god of one’s own choosing, one is having contempt for the God who made the world in all its largeness; one is choosing something narrower, lesser, something one can manage in some way, something that does not command so much respect. The false god people worship (and we all do in some fashion) is always our own ego, our own contempt.

     But the question is, are the criticisms to be found in Jeremiah, and Isaiah, and elsewhere in the Old Testament valid in any way now — of people, including people in power in Israel?

      Later in Jeremiah (7:5-7), the Lord says:

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.

— Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

Note. Mr. Siegel is discussing statements in The International Thesaurus of Quotations, comp. R.T. Tripp (1970).

There are some jocose remarks in this book. One can imagine the Brothers Goncourt about 1866 thinking of various learned people at the Sorbonne, and saying, "Well, archeology was invented so that M. Tremlin could make a living and teach it"; or, "The Latin meters were invented so that M. Levonne could try to explain them to his students and in this way make a living and please his wife."

Antiquity was perhaps created to provide professors with their bread and butter. [Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, Jan. 6, 1866]

     The next statement related to self and economics is this, from Brooks Atkinson:

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living. [Brooks Atkinson, March 12, Once around the Sun (1951)]

     The next quotation is by someone current. I call it "Possession Seen As a Substitute":

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. [Anthony Burgess, "The Book Is Not for Reading," New York Times Book Review, Dec. 4, 1966]

     Whom should we meet next, but Euripides. I never liked Richmond Lattimore as translator better than in the short pieces included here. He has quite a few of them. This is from Euripides’ Helen. The date is given as 412 BC.

There is the sky, which is all men’s together, there / is the world to live in, fill with houses of our own / nor hold another’s, nor tear it from his hands by force.