In Part One, Ms. Driscoll wrote about what she learned from Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by the poet and educator Eli Siegel, about the big fight in humanity—and in her own life—between being superior to other people or being just to them. She began discussing the life of Helen Joseph (1905-1992), the courageous ,  anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, and commented on this quote by Eli Siegel in the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (TRO) #274:

The most beautiful thing a person can do is to be interested in justice so much that his care is a deep cause of his happiness. However idealistic it may sound, a person not caring enough for justice cannot be definitely happy.

“Criticism of our hope to be superior,” wrote Ms. Driscoll, “is the most liberating thing in life. I am grateful that I am able to say with confidence, that what every woman wants most is to be just—to see meaning in the whole world as the one authentic means of taking care of herself. This is what I now teach to women in consultations at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City.”[Visit www.AestheticRealism.org to learn more]

The Debate in a Child

Aesthetic Realism explains the debate in every child between wanting to see her kinship to people, and wanting to feel she is better than others. This was true of Helen Beatrice May Fennell born in Sussex, England in 1905 to May and Samuel Fennell, an officer in the Customs and Excise office. In her 1986 autobiography, Side by Side, she writes that her early life, was “unremarkable, ordinary, [and] middle class.”   However, I think she felt, as many girls have, that her family was superior—and her mother encouraged this. In Tomorrow’s Sun (1966), she wrote:  

It was very important to my mother that we should be above our neighbors, and we were not even permitted to play in the street. Perhaps this was narrow snobbery.   But I think it may have been this cherishing of an aristocratic family tradition which sustained [her].

          Emily Foster, a young woman having Aesthetic Realism consultations, heard questions that explained and opposed the snobbishness that interfered with her happiness. She told her consultants about her father, whom she saw as very impressive and who called her the “smart one” in the family. We asked: “Do you think you used your father as a standard for judging other people? You saw them as friendly in proportion to how much they praised you?” Emily Foster: “I certainly did.” Consultants: “But do you think, as he encouraged you to feel you were better than other people, he was accurate and fair to you or to himself?   EF: “No, I think it hurt me and him.”  

          At 21, Helen Joseph went to India where she taught English at a school for daughters of wealthy Indian families. Like other girls, she wanted to get away from her own family. In India, then part of the British Empire, a girl could live an aristocratic life, and this appealed to her. "I had been among those at the top" she wrote, "I simply accepted, without comment or question, that there were people living in destitution." In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel writes: "It happens that injustice begins, often, with the feeling that you have a right to see what you want to see and disregard what you don't want to see; or anything which makes you uncomfortable."  

          This feeling, that we can see what we want and disregard the rest, is the beginning of all cruelty including prejudice and racism. It is also the cause of pain in love. After a riding accident, she had to give up teaching. Helen emigrated to South Africa in 1931, where she met Billie Joseph, a dentist, whom she describes as "sophisticated and charming."   Though they were married for 17 years, she writes   little about her husband and it appears he was unfaithful. "Our marriage gradually sank to a very low level,” she wrote, “and Billie and I...went each his own way."

A New World Was Opening Up

          Aesthetic Realism teaches that unless two people use caring for each other to want justice to come to others, there will be hell in a marriage. I think that Helen Joseph came to be deeply disgusted with the basis of her marriage, including her choice to lead a life of bridge parties, tennis matches, and country clubs--in the midst of so much appalling suffering. South Africa was a country which brutally suppressed the black majority. It is a tremendous tribute to the ethical nature of the self that though we may appear to settle for less than complete justice from ourselves, we can’t respect ourselves. And justice is what we want brought out of us by a person we are close to. After separating from her husband during World War II, Helen Joseph in 1948 asked that it be permanent. By then, she wrote: "[I did not] wish to resume the...life I had known before":    

“A new world was opening up for me, a new vision and new knowledge.... As I studied the conditions in which black children struggled for education and opportunity, and compared them to how most whites lived, I began to feel ashamed of my own position as white....How could I help but come...to a realization of the inequalities of this land?”

What Will Stop Injustice?

Ms. Joseph wanted the world to know about the cruel injustice of apartheid. Though the government tried to silence her, including by banning her--she could not speak in public, nor be quoted─she wouldn’t submit. "I should never ban myself by keeping silent,” she said, “for that would be to do the government's dirty work for it."

          By 1962, she had endured a four-year trial for treason for which she and others, including Nelson Mandela, were finally acquitted. With two friends, Joe Morolong, also accused at the trial, and Amina Cachalia, she began an 8,000 mile journey to interview and financially aid the "banished people"─African men and women, who because of their opposition to apartheid, were forcibly separated from their spouses, given a pittance to survive on, and sent to live far away. After describing the heartbreaking story of one woman, banished with her five children to a barren area of Transvaal, she asks: "[W]hat had been the thoughts of those men who had brought her to this place...? Did they feel nothing, no shame, no pity?"   I wish Helen Joseph, one of the bravest women, could have known what Mr. Siegel explained in TRO:

The only way...that injustice can stop, that hurting people can stop, is to have people sure that injustice is not good for one....Aesthetic Realism has made injustice look ugly.

          I learned that because every person stands for the world, it is our greatest obligation and joy to be fair to them. We cannot be unjust to another and be able to bear ourselves. Aesthetic Realism makes this plain for the first time in civilization.  

          In 1962, Helen Joseph was the first South African to be put under house arrest─allowed to leave her home only to work and report daily to the police. For nine years, interrupted once, she had no visitors, and couldn't speak to any friends who were under a "banning order”-─which meant most of the people she knew. “The horrors of house arrest,” she wrote, “at first overwhelmed me. Would I be able to cope with the cruel, lonely years that lay ahead?” It is hard to imagine the enormous courage it took to live alone year after year. Yet, I do not think Helen Joseph was ever able to make sense of wanting to be of people’s lives, and also having a sense of herself as not needing anyone, even liking forced isolation. “I sometimes think,” she wrote, “I am...in danger of becoming too attached to solitude."   Though the government would have permitted someone to live with her while under "house arrest," she was not for this. “I doubt,” she wrote, “I could have shared my house. I bought it because I wanted to live alone.”

          “We all desire not to be interfered with or tainted by company inferior to ours,” writes Eli Siegel in TRO: “If superiority has its way completely, a feeling of unmitigated all-victorious loneliness ensues.” I wish so much that Helen Joseph had learned what women, like Emily Foster are learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations, enabling their lives to flourish.  

A Woman Today Learns What She Really Wants

In the life of Emily Foster, a notion of herself as “superior,” to others had resulted in loneliness and self-dislike. Ms. Foster, a computer programmer who grew up in a comfortable home in a Westchester suburb, and had gone to a prestigious college, told us: “I see myself as too separate from people...I don't give them the same intelligence or see them as deeply interesting [as I see myself.]"   We asked:

Consultants: This is the beginning question--how do you see what is not yourself: as adding to you or lessening you?   If something outside of yourself is good or beautiful, or interesting, does it make you more or less?

          Ms. Foster was thoughtful. Like other women, she saw herself as "different" from most people. We asked: "Do you think this tendency comes from a hope to feel superior?" “I think so," she said. “Do you think it’s accurate?” we asked, and continued:

     "What only Aesthetic Realism shows is that we have the structure of the whole world─the opposites─in us. If you want to feel: ‘What I'm made of is different from what other things are made of,’ you'll be unsure, against yourself and lonely.   Your greatest desire is to feel that you are more of an individual through seeing your relation to other things, not less.

          To encourage this, we gave Ms. Foster assignments, for instance, to write every day on the question: “If Something Outside Myself Is Strong and Beautiful, Is This Strength for Me?”   Emily Foster's life is changing. “I [am learning]” she wrote recently, “that when I really ask [this question], I...always [feel] stronger and proud...I write feeling a happiness that is new that I am very grateful for.”

The Most Beautiful Thing

"The most beautiful thing a person can do,” Eli Siegel wrote "is to be interested in justice so much that his care is a deep cause of his happiness.”  

          In 1971 Helen Joseph underwent surgery. The government, afraid of public opinion, released her from her 9 year torment. Her friends, worried about her safety, wanted her to leave South Africa, but she refused. “When the time comes," she wrote, "and I know it will come─when this country is free, I want to be here, ...to know I have earned my place in it.”

          I am so glad she lived to see Nelson Mandela freed from jail after 27 years, and South Africa begin the process of becoming a democratic nation.

          In 1992 the African National Congress bestowed their highest award on Helen Joseph, and when she died that year at 87, they stated: “The African National Congress salutes Comrade Helen Joseph: the tireless Freedom Fighter, deeply spiritual and religious person and daughter of Africa.”

          It is emergent that the world’s leaders and citizens study Aesthetic Realism which stands for the justice that all people and nations deserve.       

Carol Driscoll is a consultant on the faculty of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. She is also Fund Administrator for Teamsters Local 1205 Benefit Funds in Farmingdale, NY where she administers pension and medical benefits to union members and their families. She is a member of the International Foundation of Employee Benefits. Her published articles include: “Health Insurance Is a Right,” “Justice Through Unions for Farm Workers,” “Contempt for Garment Workers,” “The Ethical Economy People Want and Deserve.”  

Originally from Boston, in 1971 Ms. Driscoll was a member of the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and contributed to Our Bodies, Ourselves [Simon and Schuster, NY]. She is a public speaker at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and gives seminars on matters affecting women’s lives, including, Can a Woman be Assertive and Yielding Too?; What Should a Woman Do About Her Sureness and Unsureness?; Can a Woman Be Independent and Still Love? Ms. Driscoll is also Fund Administrator for Teamsters Local 1 205 Benefit Funds in Farmingdale, New York where she administers pension and medical benefits to union members and their families. She is a member of the International Foundation of Employee Benefits. She is married to Harvey Spears, Art Director, Aesthetic Realism Associate, and one of the authors of Aesthetic Realism and the Answer to Racism, [Orange Angle Press, 2004].