by Andrea Loomis
Ruth Young was not only Arthur Young’s partner and collaborator for nearly 50 years, but she was also a woman of remarkable accomplishments in her own right. She was born in 1903, a great-granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Transcendentalist, and of John Murray Forbes, a railroad magnate and philanthropist.
As a young woman, she helped her uncle, diplomat and banker Cameron Forbes, to host notable figures such as General Pershing and President Taft at the family’s private island, Naushon, off the coast of Massachusetts. She studied painting at the Art Students League and had one-woman shows of her landscapes and still lifes in New York and Philadelphia. With her first husband, the architect George Lyman Paine, Jr., she bore two sons, Michael and Cameron. Following their divorce, she moved with her children to Santa Barbara, where she produced ballets, designing sets and costumes for the performances. Her second marriage, to Giles Thomas, ended with his death in 1944.
Ruth first met Arthur Young in 1939, when a mutual friend invited Arthur and his then wife, Priscilla, to visit Naushon. Ruth’s friendship with Arthur deepened over subsequent visits, and they were married in 1948, following Arthur’s divorce from Priscilla.
Arthur’s work on the helicopter was winding down, and before their marriage, he warned Ruth that his new career would be devoted to “the hunting of the psyche.” Ruth was agreeable to his quest, and they traveled extensively in the U.S. and abroad, researching such subjects as radionics and ESP.
Ruth also shared Arthur’s concern about the dangers of nuclear war. The use of the atom bomb in 1945 had been a wake-up call for both of them, inspiring Arthur to pursue his theory of process, and Ruth to work to avoid future wars. She became active in the World Federalist Society in the 1950s and helped to mobilize support for the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In 1967 she met with then UN Secretary General U Thant, to explore how individuals could work to promote peace. After exploratory work by an International Peace Academy Committee, in 1970 she founded the International Peace Academy, a training and research organization devoted to mediation and negotiation to resolve regional conflicts. In 1987 the Academy held a ball in Ruth’s honor at the Plaza Hotel in New York. The Secretary-General of the United Nations was the master of ceremonies. According to their tribute to Ruth, the Academy’s alumni “include a global network of more than 4,000 diplomats, military officers, policy-makers, scholars, and businesspeople from 140 nations. Conducting training seminars and off-the-record meetings of participants in conflicts in major trouble spots around the globe, the IPA has no counterpart anywhere in the world today.”
In 1972 Arthur and Ruth purchased a home in Berkeley, California, where they founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, which hosted seminars on Arthur’s theory of process and presentations by guest speakers. To help encourage the study of the theory, Ruth wrote “A Guide to the Reflexive Universe” (published in Theory of Process 1, RBA, 1991), which introduces Arthur’s ideas in plain language for lay readers. Following Arthur’s death in 1995, she continued to promote and preserve Arthur’s work until her death in 1998.
