Money, Credit: Christopher Houghton Budd

Money: Old & New Mysteries

Kim Chotzen invited Dr. Christopher Houghton Budd from Canterbury, England to hold a “town square”-style economic workshop in Viroqua, WI in October 2008. The economic crisis had already brought bank failures, record job losses, plummeting real estate prices, and dire financial bottom lines for three major US auto manufacturers.

Over the course of the weekend, Christopher gave two workshops with practical and timely details regarding the inner and outer aspects of associative economics. He covered a wide range of topics that pictorially described the journey of money from the old to the new mysteries and explored Rudolf Steiner’s place in economic and monetary history and in wider social evolution. Particular consideration was given to the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society and the inauguration of the School of Spiritual Science.

Christopher characterized the current economic situation as a result of a change in consciousness. Citing Rudolf Steiner’s “shell to its nut” analogy, Christopher described economic life as the shell of our inner life, just as the human body reflects an individual’s spirit. As general human consciousness has become abstract, so too has our economic life.

In ancient times economic transactions were sacred, and for long ages money in principle reflected essentially the “goods” side of economic life. There was little in the way of “credit,” which was confined to those with a greater consciousness of social life, such as priests and elders. Today, with electronic money and credit, our economy is 97% “money,” 3% goods. Money has gone from the realm of the visible to the realm of the invisible. If we are to become the masters of money rather than money mastering us, we need the will to engage with money and economics as a transparent bookkeeping process for which we are all now responsible. What we do with each economic transaction has impacts around the world and consequences for ourselves. We now have a one-world economy, which Steiner foresaw and addressed in his 1922 lectures.

Christopher says, “To this day, money links the inner and outer life of the human being, a characteristic which in our times needs to be placed in the foreground, not only so that monetary affairs become ‘soul sized,’ but also that the world of finance can be mastered by everyone.”

A Michaelic View of the “Credit Crunch”

by Christopher Houghton Budd

Michael stares taciturnly at humanity, awaiting deeds that are born of the spiritual world by human beings who tread the fine line between Lucifer and Ahriman. Anthroposophists know this as a spiritual quest and, especially today, as a battle for the soul - a seemingly permanent struggle to avoid inflammation and sclerosis. It is the same “event” that stands behind humanity’s recent experience of cheap money coupled with the idea that the value of assets can rise out of nothing and supposedly without constraint, on the one hand, and the sudden cramping of economic life and the intensification of state regulation, on the other. The combined effect on the soul is to disorient it, to make human beings disbelieve in themselves. More precisely, to refute by their deeds the fact that they are spiritual beings.

Undoubtedly, occult forces and manipulative actions are at work in today’s situation, but one should beware of locating the cause of the crisis in such things. That would be to mistake the sail for the ship. A Michaelic response would be to steer a course between extremes, and also to take seriously Rudolf Steiner’s concept of history as symptomatology.

For example, does the so-called credit crunch betoken a quickening in the unfolding of the Michaelic period, now in its 130th year? Is Michael trying to speak to humanity? And what is his message? It is very important not to underestimate this possibility; and not to focus overmuch on Ahriman’s role. For it is almost a platitude to see his signature in the current tightening of finance. The challenge, clearly, is not to respond in kind.

Seen as a phenomenon of the spiritual world, finance is a Guardian-like experience. It both reflects the human soul and one’s spiritual state, but also provides support for any change consequent on addressing the issues by which one finds oneself confronted. In such matters it is crucial not to locate the cause and the cure of the problem “out there.” It is also important not to forget that all human action is allied, as it were, to one god or another, so that it serves little real purpose to attribute today’s money problems to bankers, the rich, or other “agents.” What matters is whether our own financial behavior is Michaelic. Take care not to look at the dragon by seeking to attribute cause beyond ourselves.

The human being should stand firm on the fact that his home is on the other side of the threshold; the laws of that world have the power to order human existence (ergo, the caricaturing of this fact by what is known as “the market”).

To give expression to this, however, human beings need to ground their actions in the kind of economics that Rudolf Steiner describes. They need to be properly remunerated for their contribution but also properly capitalized. This will give expression to a new paradigm, the very absence of which is arguably the “cause” of today’s travails.

For example, when we sell or buy do we give thought to “true prices”?  *1 It is persistent underpricing * 2 that removes purchase money from the world, requiring people to borrow the difference and thus become party to the phenomenon of too much capital or loan money in the world.

1 See lecture 6, Economics – The World as One Economy, Rudolf Steiner. New Economy Publications, Canterbury 1996.

2 See explanation of exploitation in Anthroposophy and the Social Question, 1905.

Concerning the latter problem, Rudolf Steiner (among others, of course) gave clear warning. But we do not appreciate the full incisiveness of Steiner’s comments until we question what we are doing when we “save” money by putting it in banks on condition that it is not lost, that is, not put at risk. We thereby, albeit unwittingly, give the foundation – savings supposedly not at risk – for modern credit creation, which could not be there otherwise. If we do not like undue credit expansion, therefore, we need to step beyond the cult of savings (for such it is) and begin to develop two distinct but related habits instead. On the one hand, we need to practice lending at risk. But that means to stop hiding behind the banks and begin direct investing – in the real-estate side of a biodynamic farm or a Waldorf school, for instance.

On the other, we need to learn to give money freely. Generally, of course, but in our movement specifically for work done by the sections of the School of Spiritual Science, provided, however, that this activity is evidently bona fide public benefit in character. A clear example of this is the Goetheanum Fund (Fonds Goetheanum) *3 recently launched in Switzerland by the Swiss Anthroposophical Society, the genesis of which lies in a question put to Rudolf Steiner by Mr. Van Leer at the Christmas Conference.

3 See www.fondsgoetheanum.ch/en/home.html

Thereby also our actions will become more aligned with Rudolf Steiner’s monetary analysis, which remains, for the most part, unknown both in the world at large and in our own movement. A key part of this is his insight that, nowadays, money is synonymous with accounting – an evolutionary step that Rudolf Steiner clearly points to at the end of his lectures on economics. *4 This step we will not take, however, until we really act as if money is accounting and accounting is money. Then humanity will stand free of the so-called financial “system,” which in reality is a reflection of the way we behave, which in turn is an expression of the way we think. If ever thoughts were things it was in modern economic life.

4 Economics, op.cit.

Crucial to this process is the need to overcome too strong a focus on the idea of three kinds of money when, arguably, we should be paying attention to two: purchase money and loan money, income and capital. The “third” one – gift money – is not so much money as awareness of the need to maintain the balance between the other two, along with the technique for doing so. More precisely stated, just as hearing is a function of having two ears, so gift money works through the other two. And just as the closing entries in accounting are effected through the income statement and balance sheet, so gift money is of a higher order than and works through purchase money and loan money, which, it is important to notice, are also not of the same kind. In all examples, the lower two are explicit, the higher one present by implication.

If we gave thought to these ideas two things would result, and may indeed already be in the offing. Firstly, our own understanding of big economic issues, as also our day-to-day conduct, would become more precise (and therefore less vulnerable to Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences). Secondly, we would thereby help provide the ground for the key change needed in humanity’s general monetary understanding – namely, the need to perceive such pairings as cash and credit, income and capital, purchase money and loan money, as identities that belong to contrasting realities, each with its own logic. It is this fact –that cash and credit are not of the same kind – that is calling for our attention today. In a word, two kinds of money, not one, as is the convention. But not three, either.

To revisit the idea of three kinds of money in this way has a further, double consequence. On the one hand, it calls on the entire anthroposophical movement to review its monetary understanding of itself, while on the other, it renders Rudolf Steiner’s work understandable and tractable for academics and policy makers in the financial world, with whom detailed dialogues are currently underway concerning the contribution Rudolf Steiner’s ideas could make to the very specific technical problems that modern finance faces, especially today.

It is the signature of Michael that human beings separate things in their minds so that the I of man can make the world whole again. Michaelic finance is not therefore about the market versus the state, or liberalized or regulated banking; but whether humanity can take the step from one to two kinds of money.

A Michaelic act, however, has one other key feature: it is accomplished while incarnate. This means that someone, somewhere needs to enact Michaelic finance if it is to play its part in human history. And not just someone, but many. Would that our movement as a whole became a first mover in this respect.