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A READER'S JOURNAL
Understanding Society, GA#191
Through Spiritual-Scientific Knowledge
Social Threefolding, Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman
by
Rudolf Steiner
ARJ2 Chapter: Spiritual Science
Published by Rudolf Steiner Press/UK in 2017
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2018
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In the Norwegian Boy Scout's Handbook in the chapter on Map Reading, it says, "When the terrain differs from the map, believe the terrain!" Ten years after my boss told me that piece of advice, I spent a year reading the classic work of Alfred Korzybski who said the same thing this way, "The Map is not the Territory," but he added something very important, "It does not represent all the Territory." In addition Korzybski created a Structural Differential(1) in which he displayed the various levels of abstractions we use when we talk, mostly out of our awareness. If our sole source of understanding comes from verbal maps, we would soon be lost in an imaginary land with no hope of finding any truth or reality in the abstract terrain we have wandered into.
Notice for yourself how often you and others mean intellectual understanding when you talk about understanding something. Intellectual reasoning is an important part of understanding "What Is Going On" in the modern world, but, rightly understood, we can never reach a full living human understanding solely through dead abstractions of thought. Every word was once a living metaphor and has now been flatten into a dead shell, a token which has replaced the living, burning, moving, vibrating reality it is taken to represent, namely, a map.
Matthew Barton explains it this way in his marvelous Introduction:
[page xii, Barton] An education that prioritizes the child's understanding over the development of all other capacities, embracing the scientific paradigm as unquestioned, universal standard, will, (Steiner) thinks, inevitably become shallow and superficial.
Steiner deemed this kind of full education so important for the human race that he devoted much of his last six years to creating and fostering it in Waldorf Schools. From 1919 on, his speaking and lecturing on Waldorf education expanded to fill twenty-five volumes(2). He envisioned that Waldorf education could balance the one-sided intellectual training of our children and thereby help them to live as full human beings.
[page xii, Barton] Education for life, if it is to have real meaning, creates warmth, love, and enthusiasm in the child's soul, out of which deeper understanding can later be born.
In learning something new, it's best to learn all about it before you start. That is why Barton's Introduction is so important to study and absorb fully before we dig into the rest of this book. He pinpoints Steiner's insight of how our intellect comes from the past and our will carries us into the future, explaining how we merge with others in an often unconscious and yet meaning-full way.
[page xii, Barton] At the other pole from the intellect, which is past-related in Steiner's view of the human being, lies the will, a faculty, that carries us into the future, is born in warmth, and is by definition much less easily accessible to our conscious perceptions. It is through the will that we relate in moral intuition to others in society, that we actually 'engage with life', changing and shaping it for the future. Thus social interaction between two or more people, as the core and essence of all society, involves an unconscious element: in a continual alternation, we only perceive others by momentarily 'dreaming into and falling asleep' in them, then waking up to ourselves again. To be alive to the reality of this process is to allow others' reality to inform us, is to honor the gifts that each one brings and to incorporate them into a living weft of mutuality, an awareness of reciprocal dependence that enlarges us, as opposed to the construct of an 'agenda' or 'program' for social reform pursued or imposed (inevitably in a top-down manner) without this awareness.
What is an agenda or program? Rightly understood, it is an intellectual construct which requires coercion to implement. Steiner's attempts to install a three-fold society foundered on the reefs of a society which only understood using coercion to implement its programs. One hundred years later, coercion is still the main tool of every form of so-called government, some to a greater or lesser extent.
Each of the three spheres of society, the citadel, the market, and the altar, depend upon coercion to exist. Spencer Heath coined these names in his eponymous 1957 book, meaning by them:
[From my review of Heath's Citadel, Market, and Altar] The citadel is the regulatory, law enforcement, defense organization of the society. The market is the economic sphere and all that it entails in every kind of production and service enterprise. The altar is the cultural sphere that encompasses all the areas of human endeavor outside of regulation and economic activities.
If you study Steiner's threefold society, you will find he divided society into those three activities. The problem in a nutshell was how to keep these three folds from interfering with each other? The citadel as the enforcement arm will want to control the market (economic arm) and the altar (cultural arm). True government will regulate without coercion, but until that day arrives, we are stuck with so-called government which coerces to achieve its programs and goals for the economy and culture. Even Steiner with his amazing insight and ingenuity could not work out a way of achieving independence of the three folds of society because of the overweening power wielded by the so-called government bodies which were simply coercive tyrannies masquerading as governments.
Steiner was right in saying that his three-fold ideas were "not abstract ideas but contain the seeds of true development which, like any reality, might assume very varied and diverse forms in actual and always different conditions." (Page xiii)
[page xiii, Barton] Steiner warns us against nationalism, utilitarianism and any other 'ism'. Like Dickens before him in his humorous and ironic depiction of the bureaucratic 'Circumlocution Office', he pours gentle scorn on the exponentially increasing 'data' (Lecture 11) in which we can have such misguided faith, in the numerical or quantitative mass of proofs and evidence that clog our shallower minds. He warns, somewhat prophetically, against our failure to think or create for ourselves because of all that is 'given' to us on a plate, without any need for us to process it ourselves (using only our thinking).
In achieving a three-fold society, we must first arrive at a government which operates completely without coercion. Forget for a moment that you imagine this is impossible — that is after all only a thinking process. Every great idea was once an impossibility, was it not? Without coercion, the citadel, market, and altar will operate independently, will they not? Perhaps there is a way to create a government that governs and does not coerce, and if so, a three-fold society will be created as a natural result.
Until 1981 or so, I did not consider it possible for there to be a society without coercion; I always assumed some coercion would be necessary. That was before I took Dr. Andrew Joseph Galambos's course in Volitional Science. Slowly it dawned on me that when a majority of people understand Galambos's amazing definition of freedom, we will be on a one-way path to a government absent all coercion. It took almost twenty years before a book appeared containing his amazing concepts and I was able to review it. Galambos's work provides us each a way "to progress from morality based on authority to conduct based on moral insight." (Rudolf Steiner, page 102 of Philosophy of Freedom)
Galambos gives us the moral insight.
What is Galambos's definition of freedom and how can it have anything to do with morality in the sense that Steiner means it? Succinctly put, Galambos posits: "freedom is the societal condition that exists when one has 100% control over one's life and all non-procreative derivatives of one's life." Below is a short excerpt from my review of his book which explains the connection between freedom and moral insight.
[Adapted from my Sic Itur Ad Astra Review] Galambos gives us an operational definition of morality that is simple, easy to understand and to explain, "any action is moral that does not involve coercion." In other words, any action taken in freedom, is moral, by the definition of freedom. "To live in the love of action and to let live in the understanding of the other person's volition is the maxim of free human beings," as Steiner said. A moral person is one who lives in freedom and uses the 100% control of one's property in harmonious synchronism with other moral persons and all persons remain free human beings thereby.
If this sounds impossible, it's not, as it violates no fundamental law of nature. If this sounds like it's never existed before, it hasn't. For a short time following the founding of the United States of America, when the forces of coercion had not yet organized, enough ability to have 100% control over one's property existed to foster an enormous increase of prosperity. By the mid-1800s the coercion of King George had been replaced the coercion of a bureaucracy and the United States began its slide down from the 100% Freedom end of the Ideological Spectrum to something much lower.Galambos was a materialistic scientist, a rocket scientist, who found that he could not do his work in freedom, so he worked on creating the conditions of freedom for himself and others. He was criticized by some who claimed that his basic principle of freedom was "obscurely mystical and lacking in clarity". Steiner encountered a similar criticism in his time.
[page 1, italics added] Anthroposophists often say that our movement ought not to have burdened itself with what is implicit in the movement for a threefold social organism. And on the other hand, some of those whose interest has been awoken for this social movement find it troubling that this idea began with an anthroposophic outlook which they may often feel to be obscurely mystical and lacking in clarity.
What can one learn from Galambos? For me it was to avoid dancing with the forces of coercion. If I get a speeding ticket, I pay. Tax bill, pay it. If you resist the forces of coercion, it's like wrestling with pigs: you both get dirty and the pigs love it. Respect everyone's freedom at every level and avoid those who don't.
In Lecture 2, Steiner reveals the connection between memorizing and digesting. When you memorize some data or digest some food, you use the same power for both.
[page 17] One very important faculty in ordinary life, as we have frequently discussed, is the power of memory, which we use inwardly whenever we recall something we once experienced. But as you all know, this memory faculty has a curious quality: we both do and yet do not entirely control it. Many struggle to remember something but can't. This desire to remember accompanied by a failure to fully remember is due to the fact that the same power we use inwardly as faculty of memory also serves to transform the food we digest into substances that our body can use. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is converted inside you into a substance that serves your life processes, this appears to be a physical occurrence. Yet this physical process is governed by supersensible powers — and these are the same that you use when you remember things. The same kind of forces are used for memory on the one hand and for assimilation of nutrients on the other.
When you are hungry it becomes very difficult to memorize something. You may have never noticed this because you likely have interrupted any memorization work yourself to get something to eat or drink. We swing back and forth from soul to body when doing memory and digesting work. Digesting is body work and takes energy away from the soul work of memorizing. A good rule is to alternate the two processes: "Remember, then Eat; Eat, then Remember." This avoids a battle between the two.
[page 17, 18] When you try to remember something, you always have to wage an inner battle — which occurs in the unconscious — between a soul process and a bodily one. If you consider the faculty of memory in these terms, this is the best way to recognize the foolishness, from a higher vantage point, of seeing some people as idealists and others as materialists. Digestion and assimilation of nutrients in the human body is without doubt a material process. The forces governing it are the same, though, as are active in a process of ideation: the powers at work in our memory faculty. We only have a true view of the world when we see it neither materialistically nor idealistically but instead are able to recognize the ideal nature of material phenomena, and equally to trace the entirely material processes underlying ideal ones.
Do you imagine the sensory world closely surrounding us and the supersensible world as spreading out indefinitely all around us? Such a commonplace view will not help you to understand the reality of a human being. Instead Steiner suggests we imagine the sensory world of the human as a straight horizontal line with the supersensible world of cognition impinging on it from above and the subsensible world of will from below.
[page 19] The human being is the result, the outcome, of the combination of supersensible and subsensible forces. So now, which forces in human nature are supersensible and which are subsensible? The supersensible ones are all those connected with cognition; everything we employ for cognition is supersensible. And these same powers also form our head.
What are the subsensible forces that also play into us, what kind of forces are these? They are will forces. All will forces in us, everything of the nature of human will, is subsensible.The supersensible forces of cognition from outside the Earth and the subsensible forces of will come to us from inside the Earth from the moment of our birth.(3) We undergo a progression from forces within the Earth from birth to age 7, then we move to forces of the atmosphere from 7 to 14, and then to forces of the planets from 14 to 21. In the last phase the human passes from the subsensible to the supersensible, and "The forces of the whole solar system . . . now exert an organizing effect upon the young person." (Page 20)
From age 21, wisely considered as the age of majority, "we must draw from ourselves what we need to live."
[page 21] We must slowly draw up again the forces of the earth and the planetary system that we previously led downward into our organism.
To ensure this always happened in the past, the forces of human blood were active. The human being was able to draw forth the earth's forces from himself without having learned to do so. He did this as an unconscious process; it lay within his blood. He had been configured and organized in a way that enabled him to do so. In our own time — though this of course encompasses a long period of centuries — a significant change is that human blood is losing the power to draw forth what has been configured into the organism in this way up to the age of 21.The waning forces of our human blood can no longer do consciously what earlier they did for us unconsciously. We need a practical way of dealing with this change of humanity's evolution.
[page 22] In practical terms we must become aware that the whole education system needs to change. We have to enable a child to develop the conscious power to re-experience at a later age, as if in vivid memory, what the person assimilated as a youth.