Communicating Anthroposophy: The Social Question

by John Beck, editor

“Communicating anthroposophy” is my phrase for a primary goal of this publication. Every initiative out of anthroposophy that performs visible service in the world is well accepted and highly regarded, but anthroposophy itself still evades any adequate yet simple description or explanation. To change that situation is a challenge I hope we can engage together.

We’ve become anthroposophists by way of a threefold inner gesture; according to Steiner, who developed extraordinary insight into the processes of human consciousness, this inner gesture is not simply our own activity. In it we can recognize anthroposophy moving as a being through our consciousnesses; it is her gestures which manifest as shifts in our consciousness! The three gestures, briefly stated, are the heart’s recognition that things are wrong in the world, the mind’s search for higher and deeper understandings, and the will’s impulse to bring these new understandings as healing deeds into the world.

Anthroposophists are not alone in experiencing these gestures or shifts in consciousness. Stated in Awakening to Community in 1923 by Rudolf Steiner, they were recognized and described again in 1999 in the extensively researched book The Cultural Creatives. On that basis it seems we may have a deep connection with others who seek a healthier society.

Time to be heard?

Anthroposophists have elaborated many profound insights into the nature of community and human society; a few are pictured below.

“The social question” was an ongoing issue throughout Steiner’s lifetime. By 1850, thinking people in Europe recognized that monarchy and aristocracy were finished. The old order—where social roles and opportunities were determined by blood relationships—was morally bankrupt and inept. At the same time, liberalism in Europe had become a mere class impulse of the merchants, seeking “freedom of the markets” rather than embracing the liberation of all human beings. Socialism became, symmetrically, a resentful class movement for laborers only. And so humanity set up the bloodbaths of the 20th century.

Now we face the failure of “capitalism” just as twenty years ago the proponents of “socialism” faced the failure of the great, brutal and disastrous Russian experiment. Together these two failures should suggest to feeling and thinking human beings everywhere that humanity’s most widespread understandings of “society” and economy have been inadequate. Is there space now for something newer and truer in the global consciousness?

Steiner’s phrase is “the three-membering of the social organism.” Organic sociology was a hot topic at that time, with a tradition going back to Plato; but the individual was generally overlooked. Older thinkers saw the human individual woven into society by group forces; more recent ones see us locked in behavior patterns and social psychology. Caste or class, conditions or ambitions, group patterns are still seen to rule us.

Steiner’s vision allows for co-equality of individual and society. Society’s three organic members meet the different needs of the individual, and are in turn harmonized in and by the individual—a new kind of organism! No dogmas apply: a social organism lives by balancing gestures, like homeostasis in biological organisms. What works today may not work tomorrow.

Of all the now-discredited -isms of the last century, none of them could foster a true organism, only social mechanisms for raising up new “power elites.” Not even free market corporate capitalism really allowed the individual, and the full range of individual needs, to be the organizing principle of society.

The membering of a truly organic society where human freedom can find its full and proper scope is an immense discovery. Its essence can be stated in simple human terms, as I remember someone doing years ago at a Social Science Section gathering:

I wish to unfold myself (cultural life).

You are my fellow human being (political, rights life).

We can provide for each other (economic life).

The thought of my own identity; the feeling for your some anthroposophical social perspectivesholism: reality equality; the impulse to meet our needs: each is a deep reality in every human being who is not poisoned by fear, greed, desire, or untruth.through multiple perspectives

Meeting needs is particularly at issue in our present circumstances. We can provide for each other; it is manipulations of the financial system that have failed, not human social productive capacity. Yet millions now will organism sit at home reading the help-wanted ads, or standing in unemployment lines.

Just talk?

Steiner’s vision of the ultimate, healthy economy—where we each give away the products of our work, and no one is charged for the necessities of life—sounds a lot like the socialist slogan: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” But note how the latter phrase with its “from each...” and “to each...” has an unstated point of reference outside the individual. Is that the state taking and giving? And so in practice it turned easily into Lenin’s “who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.” Steiner’s vision rests only in the individual, as if to say, with Gandhi, that we must become the change we’re looking for. Such a vision is also truly organic. The kidneys give their activity to the body unstintingly, and receive what they need from the other organs. All organs give their gifts freely, and the blood stream has no toll booths!

Anthroposophists are great talkers and writers, even if we struggle to explain anthroposophy itself. Yet we walk our talk in amazing ways. We create communities around all kinds of human needs. We educate children to become who they are seeking to be. We work with the sick to empower their own healing. We embed ourselves and our consciousness in farms that heal the earth and provide good food. We commit lives to arts that awaken, teach and heal. May it all be known in this new century!