Absolutism and the Age of Enlightenment: What Do They Mean to Young People Today?

--Continued--

II. WHY SHOULD WE KNOW ABOUT IVAN THE TERRIBLE?

In an important lecture Eli Siegel gave on H.G. Wells' Outline of History, he said:

People resist history, because they think history is everything that has happened. [H]istory is also everything that is going on, not only everything that has happened. The reason for seeing the world in terms of the past is that it can be looked on more as an object....There is not an emotion that anyone can have that does not have something to do with the whole world of space and time.

Next, in our study of absolute rulers, we looked at the czar who ruled Russia from 1533 to 1581--who is known as "Ivan the Terrible." As I introduced the passage we would study from our textbook World History, Patterns of Interaction, I told the class we would be also learning more about the debate that Aesthetic Realism shows is in every person at every moment, including ourselves in this classroom: Does the world exist to be used and treated any way we please; or does it exist for us to know and have a good effect on?

Ivan IV, called Ivan the Terrible, came to the throne when he was only three years old. His young life was disrupted by struggles for power among Russia's landowning nobles, known as boyars. The boyars fought to control young Ivan. When he was 16, Ivan seized power. He also married the beautiful Anastasia....The years from 1547 to 1560 are often called Ivan's "good period." He won great victories, added land to Russia, gave Russia a code of laws.

But then, under the heading "Rule of Terror," we learned:

Ivan's "bad period" began in 1560 after Anastasia died. Accusing the boyars of poisoning his wife, Ivan turned against them. He organized his own police force, (the oprichniki) whose chief duty was to hunt down and murder people Ivan considered traitors. ...Using these secret police, Ivan executed many boyars, their families, and the peasants who worked their lands. Thousands of people died.

Hearing this Stephanie said "That was wrong--killing all those people!" But other students disagreed. Jay shrugged and said "You've got to take care of your family. They poisoned his wife so he was right to do it."

I told the class I have learned from Aesthetic Realism that contempt is the cause of all the cruelty in history as well as in our own daily lives. Students were shocked to learn that Ivan had little children and babies killed as well. "Were they responsible for his wife's death?" I asked. No! they said--it wasn't their fault at all. "The first victory of contempt," Mr. Siegel wrote, "is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please." "Is that what Ivan was doing?" I asked. "Yes," they said emphatically.

And William pointed out, "It was contempt for the truth too. It didn't say that the boyars did poison his wife, but only that Ivan thought they did." The class saw that Ivan's contempt--the way he made his own self and his hurts supreme, not caring at all what was fair to the people, had a devastating effect on Russia. He passed laws that institutionalized serfdom, by which millions of men, women, and children were condemned to lives of virtual slavery, at a time when serfdom was dying out in Western Europe. In a fit of rage, he even killed his own son and heir.

We spoke about Ivan, too, in relation to the events of September 11, and students saw that, like him, the persons who flew the planes into the Twin Towers felt they had been hurt and had the right to make other people's feeling unreal and take brutal revenge.

I told my students that though I am different from Ivan the Terrible, I too have been self-centered and angry. When I began teaching, I felt I was in front of a group of teenagers who were rude, not listening to me, and who frankly didn't seem to care whether I was there or not; and I was very hurt. At that time I was so fortunate to begin studying Aesthetic Realism in consultations; and when I spoke about my anger and difficulty in the classroom, my consultants asked: "Do your students feel you want to know why they're angry, or do they see you being resentful and wanting to hide under the desk?" It was the latter, and they said, "Do you think they are desperate to like the world, and they feel things are against them? What do you think you could do to have that change?" These are questions every teacher needs to hear, and I'm so grateful I heard them. As the lesson continued, we saw that Ivan's contempt for people also had a devastating effect on him. He was intensely against himself, tormented, and is seen as becoming insane as his life went on. Whenever we have contempt, I have learned, we hurt our minds.

I believe one of the big things that changed my students--and they talked and wrote about it even months later--was learning about how Ivan used pain that came to him to feel he had the right to be brutal. They saw that while it took a particu­larly cruel and dramatic form in him, this was like what people do all the time: something goes wrong in our lives, as we see it, and we will use it to feel angry at everything--be nasty to the next person we meet. I think that seeing a relation between the terrible things Ivan did hundreds of years ago, and thousands of miles away, to what can go on in their own thoughts, and in the halls of Norman Thomas, had a large effect on them. They hadn't been expecting to learn about themselves from the facts of history.

III . SELFISHNESS IS OPPOSED

After learning about the injustice of absolutism, and the way millions of people were forced to live or die according to the whim of monarchs like Ivan IV and Louis XIV, the class learned about the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. This was the time when opposition to the tyranny of absolute monarchs grew and was expressed in the immortal writings of courageous men like Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, Francois‑Marie Arouet Voltaire--and earlier John Locke: 1632-1704, whose thought greatly encouraged this new seeing of the rights of people.

We read this from Locke's Two Treatises on Government, written in 1690:

Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent....To protect natural rights governments are established. When legislators try to destroy or take away the property of the people, or try to reduce them to slavery, they put themselves into a state of war with the people who can then refuse to obey the laws.

"How does this compare to absolutism?" I asked. Johnny Mercado said excitedly, "He's saying all those kings can't take people's rights!" "Consent--that means you have to agree to be ruled by the government," Michael said thoughtfully.

They were thrilled to learn about the passionate desire for justice to people, the beautiful anger had by John Locke and other thinkers and to know that their ideas inspired the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. And through the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, they saw that the Enlightenment represents the ethical desire in every person to have our sense of ourselves as royal, superior, seen for the ugly, mean, really stupid thing it is, and overthrown, so that we can see the world with justice.

By the end of the semester there was a different atmosphere in the classroom--which has continued this semester. They are much more serious about learning, and are helping each other study for the Regents. I respect the way they are critical of unjust anger both in themselves and others. For instance, Jay Robles who had come into class so disrespectfully, and had even justified Ivan's brutality, has changed very much; he is a much kinder person, and is achieving 90s on exams! Thomas no longer comes 20 minutes late. And Johnny Mercado, who once acted like the class clown, has been writing essays with great care. In one discussion, he burst out saying "I can't take the way some people rag on the Chinese kids. They're just minding their own business and people start to pick on them. That's not right!" And the whole class agreed. Viviana, who had lost her aunt on September 11, is now taking part in class discussions, doing her work very regularly.

These young people feel increasingly that the world itself is not something they should try to grab or get away from, and that justice is real and is worth fighting for.

William Vega said one day "I used to hate history. Now it's my favourite subject!" Carlos Pichardo wrote about how he had stopped teasing his little brother and acting like Louis XIV with him. And I was very affected when Ahmed Hasan, a young Islamic man from Yemen, wrote that he was grateful to understand himself better, and very glad that we learned in relation to Ivan the Terrible that it is wrong to be angry at all Moslems for what some people did on September 11.

The Aesthetic Realism teaching method is kind and practical. It meets the hopes of students and teachers, and it's needed in schools everywhere.

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