Friday, December 31, 2004

The Mixup in Men about Coldness and Warmth

On a November day over thirty years ago, I had my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, and began to understand one of the most important things I needed to know: where a painful coldness I had felt most of my life began. “Do you think you’ve made a considerable practice of not having too much feeling about anybody or anything?” my consultants asked me. Though I was just eighteen years old, my answer was a bitter, “Yes.”

That consultation was the beginning of a very large change in my life. I learned a way of seeing the world and people that has enabled me to have deep, true emotion and a kinder heart, a warmer heart.

I. Coldness and Warmth in a Family of Brooklyn


Among my warmest memories as I grew up were reading about children who lived in other times such as Johnny Tremaine, a boy who grew up during the Revolutionary War; and playing with our erector set with my twin brother, Paul.

But the atmosphere in the Weiner home could not be described as warm. Individually, my father and mother could show affection to us, but it seemed as soon as they were in the same room, the feeling in the air changed to a tense chilliness, punctuated by heated arguments. I was aware too that even as I got a lot of approval, especially from my mother, I didn’t think anyone wanted to know what I felt. My consultants asked: “Do you think you felt hurt by people quite early?

SW: Yes.

C: Could that have something to do with deciding not to get too close to them?

I began to learn that I had turned disappointment into something unjust and detrimental to my whole life. In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel explains:

In this world, men and women often find refuge in coldness. Coldness, quite clearly, is allied to contempt; and contempt has been seen often as a protector of the distressed or uncertain self.

By the time I was in school, I had decided the world was not my friend. Often, when other children went to the playground in the afternoon, I would go home, change into pajamas, go under the covers, and get away from everyone who I felt had hurt me. It never occurred to me that other people could feel wounded by me because I wasn’t interested in them.

There were times I had genuine feeling. I remember watching news reports of Southern police turning high-pressured fire hoses and vicious dogs on people, including women and children, courageously fighting for their civil rights. And I remember the fury that swept over me at this barbaric injustice.

But I didn’t know, as many men don’t, that I felt I was betraying myself to have so much feeling about something not me; so mostly, I cultivated being cold and disdainful. I scornfully thought other people, especially women, got too emotional, let things get to them, while I prided myself on my level-headedness. My motto was one Mr. Siegel had said was exceedingly popular: “Keep your cool and everybody’s a fool.”

But even as I thought I was so smart and superior in my contempt, I had the tormenting feeling there was something big missing in my life. I cursed myself, asking “Why are you such a goddamned cold fish?” Often, I had a fear I would die young from a heart attack because my heart was so cold.

In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss explains the dilemma I was in:

We feel we have ourselves in a kingly or queenly fashion if nothing can move us; we are above the turmoil; we are unbothered; we are too good to be tossed about by the crude world. Coldness, Aesthetic Realism shows, is a triumph. But with that triumph is a sinking, a fearfulness, a shame.

At a time I was seeing a woman, I asked in a class about the way I could go from warm affection to aloof coolness--she once called me a “Chilly Willy”—which pained both of us very much. What Miss Reiss explained took in my whole life. She asked, “What would it mean for there to be a oneness of coldness and warmth in [you], or any person?”

SW: I’m not sure.

ER: People think warmth is good and coldness is bad. What you should go for, Mr. Weiner, is 98.6—to have coldness and warmth in an aesthetic relation.
I began to see I had been very warm but to something ugly in myself—my ego, my false sense of superiority; in fact, I had been a “hot bed of self-love”.

Ellen Reiss was describing a big mistake men have made: we caress the very thing in ourselves, our contempt, which makes us cold, and has us dislike ourselves. What I needed to have, she explained, “is the beautiful coolness that is exactitude in knowing yourself.”

Because Aesthetic Realism has enabled me to know myself better, I have seen, and my education continues every happy day of my life, that to be accurately warm to the world and people is equivalent to liking and respecting oneself. I am thankful that today I have deep feeling about friends, members of my family, about literature and art. As a union shop steward of my local, it matters so much to me that economic and social justice come to the workers I represent and to the people of America.

II. A Man Important in US History


In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss writes:

Good will is the oneness of heat and cold: for when you have good will, you passionately want a person to be all he or she can be, and you are passionately against what is not beautiful in the person…Good will is the great eternal coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling.

I speak now about aspects of the life of Henry Agard Wallace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Vice President in his third term from 1940 until 1944.

To a large degree, Wallace had good will for America at a time it was desperately needed as it is so much today: he wanted to see what the American people needed and deserved, and he was a critic, often fiercely, of the forces in our country against this. His life brings up a crucial question for every person: what is the relation of working for justice to many people, and being interested in the selves of individuals?

In the biography American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace, John C. Culver and John Hyde describe incidents in Wallace’s childhood showing that early he had a fight between warmly knowing and respecting the world and being coolly superior to it.

He was born in 1888 in Iowa to Harry and Mae Wallace; his first years were spent living on an isolated farm with his parents where he came to care intensely for plants and gardening, an interest that continued his whole life.

At the age of seven, his family moved to Des Moines where he had an opportunity to make friends with other children; but it seems he preferred his own company. In school, he thought the other boys rowdy; later, he would describe himself critically as “puffed up” for using his high grades to feel smarter than they. As to his five younger siblings whom he felt his mother indulged, Wallace appointed himself their disciplinarian; they were not appreciative.

But there was something very good in Henry Wallace that wanted to be encouraged. His biographers write that the person who affected him most was his grandfather, after whom he was named. In this description, we can see what the young boy was hoping to have brought out and strengthened in him, a relation of the “coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling” Ellen Reiss described:

There was a gravity about his grandfather, seriousness leavened by tolerance, which imbedded itself in the boy’s soul. His grandfather knew what was important—God and agriculture—and Young Henry made that vision his own.

On graduating from college in 1909, Wallace first became a writer and then editor for his grandfather’s farm publication, highly esteemed by Iowan farmers. Though his family was Republican, they were furious at the party’s economic policies, in which farmers were at the mercy of high railroad and interest rates. Wallace used some of his columns to criticize the leadership of Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of Agriculture.

In those years, Henry Wallace studied everything available about soil conditions, the effect of tariffs, weather trends, animal husbandry, and he came to be widely known as one of America’s leading agricultural authorities. Through years of experimentation, he helped make one of the most important discoveries in farming history—how the cross-breeding of corn dramatically increased its yield.

In 1929, when the stock market collapsed, and millions of people lost their jobs, and thousands of farms were foreclosed, Wallace showed warmth in an area in which men have hurt themselves terrifically by being cold—economics. He wrote that the “cure for hard times” was very simple: “a greater percentage of the income of the nation [must] be turned back to the mass of people.”

And he pointed to what Mr. Siegel was to explain so clearly years later: economics has centrally to do with warmth and coldness: should people be seen in terms of what they are hoping for and need, or be used for one’s own advantage? About how to prevent another Great Depression, Wallace wrote:

Finally the problem becomes a spiritual one. Do we believe in the abundant life or in the narrow contracted life? The forces pulling towards narrow, national selfishness are combating those working in the direction of international understanding.

It is Mr. Siegel who showed definitively how an economy can flourish and be just to all people, stating in 1970:

There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, and he appointed Wallace his Secretary of Agriculture. I believe that FDR was affected by the relation of “coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling” in Wallace. His biographers write:

Few men knew more about agriculture than Wallace, and no man anywhere burned with greater zeal to rescue farmers from their cruel misfortune.

In his new post, Wallace was key in formulating President Roosevelt’s New Deal farm program which was revolutionary; and despite fierce opposition from entrenched agribusiness interests, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed, giving Wallace the power he needed to effect change. Immediately, he established the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, which distributed surplus food to the hungry people of America. The AAA subsequently enabled many farmers to stay on their land.

Every man has the question of how much we want to be, as I learned in the class I quoted from earlier, “cold to the ugliest thing” in ourselves and others for the purpose of true warmth. To a significant extent, I think Wallace succeeded here. When a lobbyist tried to win a favor from him for a special business interest, he replied “No. Unless we learn to treat each other fairly this country is going to smash.”

But sometimes, under enormous political pressure, he was forced to give in. Once, he could have come to the aid of mercilessly exploited Southern sharecroppers but succumbed to what he called “sinister forces” in Congress. To his credit, he felt terrible about his decision, and worked to make up for it.

Many historians feel that Wallace was the most effective Agricultural Secretary the US ever had. He began many innovative initiatives on behalf of warmth to the American people and the earth itself: land-use planning, soil conservation policies, food stamp and school lunch programs.

As admirable as he was, I think Henry Wallace was in a mix-up about coldness and warmth he never understood. In his marriage of many years to Ilo Browne, it seems that his wife was uncomfortable with her husband’s activist colleagues of different backgrounds and races, and kept to a small circle of her wealthy friends. Perhaps this appealed to something in Wallace himself. His biographers hint at this:

High-minded and cerebral, reserved to the point of shyness, Wallace did not make conversation freely…It was said of him that he loved mankind but was not particularly interested in individuals.

Henry Wallace would have benefited enormously if he been able to hear useful, kind questions as I have. At a time I was becoming more active in the Labor movement, I felt agitated in a way I didn’t understand, and Miss Reiss asked me: Do you feel you're warm enough to people?

SW: I can’t say that I just feel I have a warm heart, yet.

ER: [The question you have] is really about how to see people. I think as you have this new interest, you want to be warmer to people and you're also afraid of it. People have worked to have others get justice but haven’t wanted to see how another person sees himself. There is such a thing as the depths of people and they matter.

This is major! For a man to be truly warm and effective as he works for justice, it’s crucial for him to be interested in the selves of individual people. This is as important as anything I’ve learned as I endeavor to be a force for good.

III. Should We Use Ourselves and Our Country, to be Colder or Warmer?


One of the great things Aesthetic Realism explains is that the choices a man makes are like the ones a nation makes.

By 1940, Wallace was the most popular and respected member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, and so when Roosevelt ran for a third term, he chose Wallace whom he called “Old Man Common Sense” to be his running mate. They won easily.

One of the most famous speeches Wallace gave was in response to an early 1941 editorial by Time Magazine publisher, Henry Luce, titled “The American Century.” Luce advocated America’s entry into the war against Germany, seeing it as an opportunity for America to become economically dominant worldwide after the war was over. Wallace’s speech, the “Century of the Common Man,” refuted Luce, stating that the purpose of a second world war had to be to end economic slavery and colonialism. He explained what he felt was necessary for enduring world peace:

No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.

The speech was translated into 20 languages, and in visits to other countries, he was cheered by millions. About this time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began an insidious campaign to show Wallace was under the influence of Communists.

IV. A Choice for Coldness Has a Terrible Effect on the World


When Roosevelt ran for a fourth term, there was fierce and ugly opposition from right-wing elements--Wall Street businessmen, Southern conservatives, and many political bosses—who saw Wallace as dangerous. They were furious at his strong stands against war profiteering, racism, and his advocacy for the rights of labor and cooperation with the USSR.

Through a series of backroom deals, which Roosevelt was too ill to combat, Wallace was shut out of the vice-presidency, the nomination going to Harry S. Truman, who then became President upon the death of Roosevelt six months later.

It needs to be asked: Since that time, has America’s foreign policy been one of good will, warm to the needs of other nations, or something very other: to enrich US corporations, at the expense of causing pain to millions of people?

In 1948, Wallace ran unsuccessfully for president on the Progressive Party ticket. When the press wasn’t boycotting his campaign, they were writing articles besmirching his character. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people came to hear him speak in cities across the country.

After the ill will shown to him, it would have been so easy for Wallace to have found “refuge in coldness.” But for the rest of his life--he died in 1965--Wallace continued to be a force “against what [was] not beautiful” in America, including the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee for which he was subpoenaed to testify.

Henry Wallace shows that the very goodness and usefulness of a man’s life depends on the choices he makes about coldness and warmth. It is more necessary then ever that men understand this mix-up in themselves, for the sake of their own lives, and for the future of our world. This, Aesthetic Realism makes beautifully possible.
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