Anthroposophy & the “Cultural Creatives”

by John Beck

In 2000 a book was published by two social researchers, Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, entitled, The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the World. Based on more than a decade of “psychographic” research— into individuals’ values and beliefs—and dozens of interview with noted persons, The Cultural Creatives identified a “subculture that cannot yet see itself” and caused a wave of recognition. One of its most evocative assertions is that, beyond a few close friends, most “cultural creatives” feel largely alone with their worldview, even though tens of millions of people share a very similar set of goals and values.

Meanwhile, looking back to Rudolf Steiner’s “horrible year” of 1923—following the burning of the Goetheanum and the intensification of difference among members, especially older and younger ones—one finds him speaking of how a person becomes an anthroposophist. In a lecture in Stuttgart on February 13th (published in Awakening to Community and translated by Marjorie Spock), Dr. Steiner described a regular sequence of three gestures of the inner life, in feeling, thought, and intention, which he places alongside the thought that the being Anthroposophia can be recognized as a movement in human consciousness.

Ray and Anderson were not students of Rudolf Steiner’s work, so it is all the more striking that their description of the steps which they observed in how individuals became “cultural creatives” exactly matches Steiner’s steps for becoming an anthroposophist as described more than a lifetime earlier. As anthroposophists consider the vast goals of our movement, and feel the loneliness of being relatively few and relatively alone, we also echo the loneliness described in the situation of the cultural creatives.

What follows is all verbatim quotations from the two books, Steiner marked {RS}, Ray-Anderson marked {CC}. Parts in quotation marks in the (CC) parts are quotations from interviews conducted by the authors. “Willis” is Willis Harmon, first president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, one of the interviewees.

How it starts — “what millions will be feeling” — humanness

{RS}: Awakening to Community – Rudolf Steiner, February 13, 1923, Stuttgart

{RS} What I have been describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical Society into being. The Society wasn’t really founded; it just came about. You cannot carry on a pre - conceived campaign to found a thing that is developing out of some genuine inner reality.

{CC}: Becoming a Cultural Creative – Ray & Anderson, 2000, Harmony Books

{CC} In the end, there can be no step-by-step description of how to become a Cultural Creative. It is a process of culture-making with tens of millions of people doing it in their own ways. Since they are part of a subculture that cannot yet see itself, these millions of Cultural Creatives do not know what a potential they carry for our common future.

{RS} For those who became anthroposophists were the first people to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down into the present from by- gone days in which they were not only fully justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no longer provide what modern man’s inner life requires and the dignity of full humanness demands.

{CC} Finally, Willis [Harman] was immersed in the topic he’d been searching for all those years – the critical aspects of being human.

A matter of consciousness

{RS} The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full - fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one’s humanity” [Bewusstsein seines Menschentums]. In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one’s participation in the time’s destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”

{CC} Again, it is a matter of consciousness: a conscious change of mind and heart, a shift in the collective identity of a people.

{CC} In the 1950s there was no cultural support for exploring what Willis called “that wealth within us.”

Stage 1: Separating from the given culture, turning inward

{RS} The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature.

{CC}…[A]t some point the previously accepted explanation of how things came to be the way they are doesn’t satisfy you anymore. So although it is difficult to leave the old story, eventually everyone who becomes a Cultural Creative finds it impossible to stay.

{RS} Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.

{CC} When you wake up to the fact that the path you are following is not the one you believe in your heart, you’ve taken the first step to becoming a Cultural Creative.

{RS} What otherwise lives itself out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted from the life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical, moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one’s growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one’s ethical‑moral and religious being a full inner reality

{CC} But whether it’s a joy or a trial, the departure from the old worldview and values is funda mentally an inner departure … The change is above all a change in consciousness…

Stage 2: Seeking a new basis

{RS} The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries.

{CC} One middle-aged woman explained, “… after all is said and done, what is left – or lost – is not a relationship or a place or even a context. What is left is a consciousness that once felt secure, had categories to fit things into, and knew who it was. And what replaces this sureness is not knowing. And openness. And something unspeakably, and sometimes almost unbearably, new.”

{RS} But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man’s moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking.

{CC} “In high school, when I threw the Catholic version of reality out, it left a hole. I didn’t recognize that hole until I finally heard a description of God, religion, and life that made rational sense… The books I read from then on were all about psychology and religion – Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man. A whole world opened up that I didn’t know I was interested in.”

{RS} After the first act in the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral - religious act, there comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It consists in a compulsion to seek supersensible knowledge.

{CC} He joined the Indian mystic Paramahansa Yogananda’s organization and did all its studies, delved into Buddhism and Taoism, and then turned to the new sciences of quantum physics and chaos theory and evolution biology. “I was an addict, reading everything I could find that would help me understand who I was and where I was going.” He was “becoming sane again,” he said.

Stage 2b: Meeting criticism

{RS} But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice.

{CC} A second source of vulnerability is the fact that Cultural Creatives are challenging the social codes of the dominant culture.

{RS} He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life’s outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke.

{CC} Sooner or later they are bound to bump up against some very unhappy representatives of that culture...

{RS} So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society.

{CC} Worse yet, you’ll repeatedly meet an internalized version of the old culture, the Inner Critic. If your external critics seize upon the same complaints as your Inner Critic, it can be a real stopper.

{RS} A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual.

{CC} When the person creating a new life path is a widely admired scion of mainstream culture, the public media are likely to react with disdain and cynicism.

{RS} We are dealing with enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander…

{CC} “We are allowed to talk about the wrong things in our culture. We’re silent about the things that matter the deepest to us. We’re public about our hairdos, clothing, cars, and that stuff. I think it ought to be reversed. I think people should shut up about their clothing, cars, houses, and how much they make, and be public about the things that matter to them.” Like what? we asked him. Hopes and dreams, he told us. Values.

{CC} Distorted mirrors, silence about what matters, denial –all of these are barriers to honest discussion about what doesn’t work in our modern world.

Stage 3: Engaging the destiny of our times

{RS} Each individual split himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely different kind of life.

{CC} In bringing the fragments of his own life into relationship, he extends his understanding to all Americans. “Somehow we have this separation in the West,” he says. “We have body and soul, self and nature, and a mythology based on an ego that is individual, that is not connected with anything else.”

{RS} But when a number of anthroposophically thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts that broke out.

{CC} How do Cultural Creatives turn their values into a new way of life? There’s no single way to do this, no party line or dogma, no formula for success…. To outside observers, the territory that lies before Cultural Creatives must seem like a cliff thousands of miles long fronting on absolutely nothing —empty space.

{RS} It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activity that matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one’s having thus exerted one’s humanness.

{CC} Yet at tens of thousands of points on the edge of that frontier, innovators are creating solid new ground, extending the known world into the unknown. A key element in such innovation is the ability to think outside the box.

Summary of the path

{RS} The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one’s will [from outward to inward]; secondly, in experiencing supersensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one’s time to a point where it becomes one’s personal destiny.

{CC} By the time they reach the fourth step, most Cultural Creatives are not only looking for the big picture, they’re tracing underlying interconnections and relationships. This process inevitably leads to developing an ardent concern for the living system that holds us all – planet Earth.

{RS} One feels oneself sharing mankind’s evolution in the act of reversing one’s will and experiencing the supersensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time’s true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness

{CC} Ecological concerns inform most Cultural Creatives’ choices, including what products they buy, the movements they support, and the life choices they make.

…people who become Cultural Creatives look for the big picture

The Problem and … the Opportunity

{RS} People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world. But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and practice. That means making one single whole again of the person hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man.

{CC} Cultural Creatives especially need a picture of what they are doing and what it means. To bring a new kind of culture to life, they need to be able to stay the course. And they need to know where they have come from and where, as a collective body, they can go.

{RS} But this cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world—as though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over—is mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the right will impulses.

Perhaps it is true, as Vaclav Havel observes, that the modern age has already ended. But if it has, how could we tell? Will new maps be sold on every street corner?

“Awakening to Community” – 1923/2010: the challenge of meeting the other person

Finally, if anthroposophists and “cultural creatives” are part of one larger community, it is important that we meet each other with real interest and openness. In 1923 a new generation was coming toward anthroposophy, and being met, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out in this same lecture, with a lack of understanding that, as he later said, anthroposophy “arises as a need of the heart...” –Ed.

{RS} It is natural, too, that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the Society’s leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co‑existing phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories, whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation.

{RS} What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing a crotchety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly wrinkled and bald - headed, losing all feeling for recalling one’s young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the Movement’s first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one’s relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one’s efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be.