"The steep fight in Rev. John Newton between kindness and the coldness of contempt, and the large way his life changed, can give hope to every person."
In his book Definitions and Comment, Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel defines kindness as "that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased," and he shows that kindness is a oneness of opposites. Kindness is based on the feeling that being fair to others is the same as being fair to ourselves. Mr. Siegel writes:
A person is kind who feels a sense of likeness to other things; who accepts accurately his relation to other things.
Growing up in Little Falls, New Jersey, I told myself I was trying to be kind. I was on the Caring Committee of my church where I helped elderly people with their shopping, repaired toys for children in a nearby orphanage, and organized puppet shows at a local nursing home. But I associated kindness with making donations and being sacrificial. I didn't know that while I wanted to have a good effect on people, without knowing it, I felt more important looking down on them. As the years passed I felt I was growing colder and more selfish and this worried me very much. I wanted to be a minister, but I felt like a fraud. I didn’t know what I was later to learn from Aesthetic Realism, that it is the desire for contempt, the hope to be superior, that makes a person cold. "Contempt," Mr. Siegel writes in Self and World, "must be defeated if man is to be kind."
There was a student in my dorm at college who had one leg shorter than the other. We nicknamed him "Wobbles,” and made fun of him. His feelings were not real to me and my friends. He played the piano, was interested in architecture and botany, and I could have learned many things from him that would have made my life better. But I preferred using what I saw as his weakness to be mean.
As a prank, and at my suggestion we leaned a garbage can full of trash and water against the door to his room. When he opened it both he and his room were drenched with wet garbage. We laughed but I later felt terrifically ashamed. Some weeks after he left school. Speaking with my minister one day I suddenly began to sob. "I've never done anybody's life any good," I told him.
How grateful I am that I met Aesthetic Realism and heard criticism of my contempt. In a class Eli Siegel began to teach me the basis for true kindness. "The first thing you have to ask." he said "is: How do you use the insufficiencies of other people? That is the first ethical question. What do you do when you see weakness in another, use it for yourself, exploit it, or try to make it less?"
WP: I use it for myself.
ES: When that happens there is hell. You have gone through hell Mr. Plumstead. Hell has a map.
As I saw that contempt is what made me dislike myself, and that I had a new sense of self-respect as I wanted consciously to be fair to other people, I felt for the first time that I had a basis through which I could be really kind.
And what I learned has enabled me to have a useful effect on others as an Aesthetic Realism consultant and a Methodist minister, and as a husband in my marriage that I treasure with Rosemary Plumstead, who is herself an Aesthetic Realism consultant and a respected educator.
As a means of understanding the fight in a person about kindness I want to describe aspects of the life of Rev. John Newton, who wrote the words of the popular, beloved hymn Amazing Grace. Born in London, England, he lived from 1725-1807. The steep fight in Newton between kindness and the coldness of contempt, and the large way his life changed, can give hope to every person.
I. Our Attitude to the World Begins Early
Like every child, John Newton had the two possibilities Aesthetic Realism describes: the hope to like the world and the hope to have contempt for it.
His mother, Elizabeth, taught him poetry, mathematics and Latin, and through her enthusiasm he developed a care for nature which was with him his entire life. He saw his father, on the other hand, the captain of an English merchant ship, as a severe a disciplinarian. In his biography of Newton, titled Amazing Grace, John Pollock, writes:
[Young] John lived almost in terror whenever his father returned from a voyage...
But along with his disappointment in his father, the young man did not want to see what his father felt. Captain Newton later rescued his son from perilous situations numerous times and sought ways to have him able to work. When he was seven, his mother died of tuberculosis and his father sent him to a boarding school where, Pollock writes, the "headmaster was a tyrant of the cane and birch-rod."
I believe that John Newton used his mother's death and what he regarded as his banishment to a school he detested to be angry at the whole world and retaliate against it. People do not know that they use the things they meet to make a choice for contempt that weakens their whole lives. Aesthetic Realism asks this tremendous, urgently needed question: "Are you using your suffering to be a meaner person or a kinder one?"
In An Ancient Mariner: the Life of John Newton, biographer Bernard Martin says that Newton came to feel "the wider world into which he had been thrust ... was a cruel place where the strong seldom showed mercy to the weak."
At age 17, Newton was forced into the British navy against his will where he was rapidly promoted in rank because of the knowledge his father had given him about the sea. But it seems he used his new authority to have power and degrade his shipmates. For the slightest provocation he had seamen shackled and whipped.
In Self and World, Eli Siegel explains the source of the cruelty in John Newton and every person when he writes:
Contempt is our soothing revenge for a world not sufficiently interested, as we see it, in what we are hoping for. Contempt is not an incident, it is an unintermitting counteroffensive to an uncaring world.
But even as contempt made him feel powerful, it also made him restless and against himself. Pollock says that Newton had a "gnawing anguish of conscience," and writes:
On night watch he disliked being alone with his thoughts. When off watch he would wake suddenly in the small hours, tortured by remorse, worried for the future...
Aesthetic Realism explains that when we go against the largest and best thing in ourselves--the desire to like the world and be kind--we inevitably despise ourselves.
It is my great privilege to teach men in Aesthetic Realism consultations what John Newton ached to know. When Dennis Thurston [name changed] told us he felt angry at his co-worker, Bob Buxton, who had just gotten married and was happy, we asked him if he was proud of thinking about Mr. Buxton that way. He said no, he wasn't. We asked if he liked seeing other people happy. He said, "No, not all the time. I don't like myself for this."
We asked, "Do you have a need to be fair to the world that is as basic as the human need for food and air? When you aren't fair do you dislike yourself?" We saw the expression on Mr. Thurston's face change from a troubled frown to relief as he heard this question. Smiling, he said, "Yes."
It seems John Newton was happiest when he was in the company of his distant cousin Polly Catlett, whom he first met at age 7. "Polly held his heart," writes Pollock, "...her kindness...drew him." He wrote her long letters when he was at sea. They married in 1750 and were together 40 years until her death.
It was to see Polly that Newton deserted the navy in 1743. But he was caught and so humiliated by his punishment that he begged to be transferred to a passing slave ship. There he met a slave trader named Clow and, upon landing in Africa, became his apprentice. He hoped to make a fortune dealing in slaves so he could marry Polly, but instead Clow turned Newton into a slave himself. He was worked to the bone all day and left chained and nearly starving at night.
Yet even here it seems he met kindness. The other men and women who were enslaved, at risk of their own lives, shared food with Newton from their meager rations. One even smuggled him paper on which he wrote a letter to his father pleading for help, and saw that it was posted. It was as a result of their efforts that Newton was rescued. But instead of being grateful, when he later returned to Africa as the captain of a slaving vessel, Pollock tells how "he treated Clow with [friendliness] and the slaves [who were kind to him] with disdain." He didn’t want to feel a kinship to these men and women who were so cruelly treated. In his lecture Mind and Kindness, Mr. Siegel explains:
There are many persons who feel humiliated if anything kind happens to them. They want to think they are independent. If anything kind is done which they must see as having a source not exactly their intimate selves ... that thing puts them in a dilemma.
II. Kindness Depends on our Relation to the Whole of Things
On Newton's voyage back from Africa the ship nearly sank in a storm. The man who had ridiculed God now manned the pumps for nine hours, calling out: "If this will not do, the Lord have mercy on us." After four weeks land was spotted just as the badly damaged vessel finally sank.
Grateful that his life was spared, Newton became a professing Christian, but not a kinder person. He accepted command of his own slave ship and began earning a living from what he later referred to with revulsion as "this vile traffic" in human flesh. At sea Newton conducted prayer services for his crew while below the decks hundreds of groaning human beings lay shackled together.
One of the things I love Mr. Siegel for most is his passionate feeling for the true meaning of religion. I once heard him say: "Any person who thinks he is a Christian but isn't interested in respecting the world God made or the people in it is still a pagan." That sentence explains why, for all my avowed Christianity, I had detested myself.
Newton tried to evade his own self-criticism, but he despised himself. Just before sailing on his fourth slave journey, without warning, he had a severe seizure. Physically unfit for further sailing, he left the sea, and slave trading, forever.
John Newton was in a steep ethical debate, and as time went on he got clearer—finding it increasingly repulsive to be the agent through whom men, women, even little children, were consigned to lifetimes of suffering and servitude.
After resigning from his ship Newton renewed his study of the Bible with real seriousness, and after 10 years he was ordained an Anglican priest. He and Polly were sent to the poverty-stricken parish of Olney where men farmed their fields twelve hours a day while their wives toiled inside flimsy straw homes sewing pillow lace. In Mind and Kindness Mr. Siegel writes:
...to be kind, we must have the imagination arising from the knowledge of feelings had by others. This knowledge comes from the seeing of ourselves as like other people, while humbly recognizing that there is otherness, too.
Living among the people in that remote village Newton became even kinder. He was interested in the children, whose behavior had been terrorizing the town. He told them sea stories, helped them build ship models, and held weekly devotional meetings. His purpose changed, and as he wanted people to be stronger instead of weaker, Newton grew happier. When he was offered a more substantial parish, he declined, saying: "What will happen to the Olney folk?"
In 1767 the important English poet William Cowper moved to Olney and Newton and he became close friends writing hymns together. When The Olney Hymnal was published in 1779 it became the most widely used hymnal in the English-speaking world. Newton's "Amazing Grace" is one of these hymns.
III. Kindness is Both Tender and Tough
A crucial word in Mr. Siegel's definition of kindness is “rightly." "Kindness is that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased." I have learned that all kindness includes criticism, and I respect Newton for the way he wanted people to know about the brutality of the slave trade and criticized himself for his part in it.
[I have] a conviction [he wrote] that silence...would, in me, be criminal. I am bound in conscience to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent or repair the misery and mischief to which I have, formerly, been accessory.
One day a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce came to see Newton, told him he felt he had been wasting his life and that he was searching for a way to be a useful Christian. Newton's harrowing descriptions of the slave trade and his deep remorse stirred Wilberforce so much that he began a parliamentary crusade which eventually resulted in the abolition not only of the slave trade but of slavery itself throughout the British Empire. Wilberforce was grateful for Newton's effect on him at a crucial time—saying that he was never a half-hour in Newton's company without hearing some allusion to the slave trade and how it made Newton’s heart shudder to think it was ever his occupation.
John Newton was pivotal in the campaign against slavery until his death in 1807, supplying the detailed information used by the abolitionists to rally public opinion. He testified before the Privy Council, telling of a baby, weeks old, torn from its slave mother and thrown into the sea; he spoke of how he had seen slaves "agonizing...for days...under the torture of the thumb-screws."
That Newton wrote the words of "Amazing Grace" shows something of the power of honest regret and the depth of ethics in a person. About the word "grace," used in theology, Mr. Siegel once wrote these lines:
Grace is the disposition of God
to be on your side
And to be shy about it.
Through the principles of Aesthetic Realism people can learn that kindness is the greatest strength and self-expression and can have a person proudly feel that they add to the beauty of the world. This is what all religions aim for, and certainly it was Christ's teaching and what his whole life so passionately shows to be true.
Judy Collins' 1970 version of "Amazing Grace" became a hit single despite her never releasing it as such. Her version is considered one of the most notable recordings of the song for its spontaneous popularity. [Wikipedia, File:Amazing Grace - Judy Collins 1970.ogg]
...Following Judy Collins' 1970 version of "Amazing Grace", the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards released their Pipe and Drum instrumental version, which technically, without the lyrics, is more accurately titled "New Britain". The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' version mirrors Collins' in that a lone bagpipe, like her voice, starts and then is followed by a chorus of pipes and drums, instead of voices. This version of "Amazing Grace" is, as of 2011, the best-selling instrumental song in the history of recorded music in the U.K. and as such represents a uniquely notable version of the song out of about 7,000 recorded renditions. [Wikipedia, File:Amazing Grace-The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards 1972.ogg]
Amazing Grace | John Newton
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures;
He will my Shield and Portion be,
As long as life endures.
Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
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