Glad to hear your perspectives on this, and that you make it available in audio form and over the global communications network.
I want to add some points:
1) demands for working remotely for jobs that do not need to be done in person help us in overall, collective, ecological efficiency, not just in segmented selfish ways. In the long run, decentralization of the means of production, localization of food production, medicine, and culture, serve social threefolding aims as well as the resigners' self-interest for more convenience (and additionally a more meaningful life and balance.)
2) Many businesses make useless, unwanted things that no one will miss. The heads of these business do their work because they see an obligation to make money, or have a desire to find inner freedom, and are perhaps somewhat cynical about what is really wanted by the market, but they can meet these needs with more useful businesses that will actually give the worker-consumers what we need (good food, sustainable shelter, communications technologies, health) and want (conveniences, gifts to express love, true beauty and truly stimulating entertainment). There is plenty of excess to trim from our economy and especially our entertainment industry. This isn't 1920, much of the economy is dispensible, and even in necessary fields such as agriculture, a good proportion of the "value" as measured monetarily is in proprietary seed ownership and other non-productive holdings. These companies could go away and no one would be any the poorer in the longterm, not even their owners whose profit is only conceptual. Many companies' innovations are suspect, and have not proven themselves in real comparisons with sustainable agricultures/means of production. "Farm smarter not harder" will be the direction of food production in the coming decades. It will not drive prices up, rather the worker who stays home more and tends their garden will find that food can be produced much more easily than it can be bought. So, the great resignation is more than simply a bargaining for wages, but a call for more thoughtful stewardship of limited resources and more visionary investment in local value and beauty.
In addition, leaving jobs that are without value opens up space for people to think, to pay attention to their homes, and to ask what they really need to consume. From there they can have a hope to be of true service, rather than merely reacting to what the job listings offer them.
3) We have the internet now. That wasn't there in 1920, and it changes the cultural sphere vastly from what it was, and facilitates the negotiating of rights and even of hurt feelings in the political sphere. This may be a strange claim, given the famous information wars and the havoc wreaked by the algorithms, but the potential for communication is greater now than ever. Before, we had no way to carry on a conversation with Great Britain from the American shores, and representation was not even a practical possibility.
Additionally, what can be received from afar informationally can be discussed and investigated locally to great economic benefit. New ideas can be circulated to save decades or centuries of error or loss due to limited beliefs in the gardens of localities. (Without the internet, I would not have learned of the chestnut canopies of Corsica which could feed the whole island's population in a temperate climate.) The cultural sphere is free to a large extent from its two companions, and yet most thinkers do not seem to remember that the global communications network exists when discussing national quarrels, policies, or trends. Yet we use it every day, and it is in plain view. The Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the elections of populist candidates, these are only the tip of the iceberg. The impact the internet has facilitated is inestimable, we are so used to it by now as the air we breathe that we do not sense it nor remember what our lives were before. And the impact that it can have is mostly unrealized, since we haven't thought to try.
Much of what is valued today in money is service, not commodity (even setting aside time-wasters). Therapy, personal growth workshops, spirituality retreats, social support for fasts or attention from social media followers (which meets a valid social need, if messily), all of these things have dollar values put on them directly or indirectly. These needs can be met without money too, and are being met: time trade circles, parallel work sessions, intentional communities, conversations on the audio application "Clubhouse," to name a few. These services can often be carried out without the structures of money or government, because communicating about them to coordinate efforts is so much easier with internet platforms. The desire to be of service can be gratified in a broader set of ways than simply brewing or baking, and in ways that are more effective than simply giving someone cheaper bread and booze.
Granted, our thinking about the global communications network needs to evolve past simply using it to remake political forms and organize for higher wages, or for mindless wasting of time, but its potential for facilitating a threefold social order is vast. Imagine if Steiner and the others working on threefolding in the 1920's had been able to reach thousands of people with livestreams, adjusting even for the differences in total population numbers. They could have drawn many into the appeal of the message simply by showing an appealing example, no need for politicians to agree. At the least, it is a false comparison to talk about changing the social body of 1920 to a threefold model and changing the social body of 2020.
I appreciate that I got to hear your article thanks to the internet, and that you're willing to use this tool. I would hope that anthroposophists make more use of it. And even if they don't, others who are not anthroposophists will eventually find the Steiner archive and grab onto the valuable resources they find there (rsarchive.org).
I would really like to hear your thoughts on threefolding and the internet as a general topic. It is so vast an issue that I think I have barely scratched the surface, but it seems like a key missing piece in all of the discussions of this issue, and in the question of how to live up to the ideals today.
Thanks for your thoughts. The internet is definitely a significant part of the present day, and something we need to wrestle with on a lot of different levels. I haven't made it too much of a central theme in my work, but I have focused on various aspects of it at different times and have a few thoughts I could add.
On the most basic level, I increasingly find myself thinking about it like any public utility (roads, energy, and other communication networks) and wonder what would be the healthiest way to structure and facilitate its use. It's obviously essential to global commerce, politics, and culture - it's the main way so many of us maintain our relationships, it's the way that we relate in general - so I don't think its significance can be overstated. And I personally think that anyone who cares about social change has to work to make their ideas accessible, findable, by the people who might take them up in some way - which means that they have to be publicly available online, there can't be too many geographical or financial constraints.
And yet, living with the internet for the last decade or two, I'm definitely not enamored of it. The medium is terrible - sitting in front of a screen and mechanically moving from box to box (site to site) with your eyes and the tip of your finger (we used to call it "surfing" the internet, but it's more like "hopscotching" the internet, and even that is far too lively...). It's incredibly deadening, and the relationships maintained and formed online are incredibly thin. Not that they're not also necessary, but the more time we spend online then the less we spend in person and online relationships are an incredibly poor substitute for real ones. (And this isn't so particular to the internet, I think we find it with every advance in technology. Neil Postman wrote a great book a few decades ago - "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" - that beautifully documented the loss that came with every advance in technology. And even though Steiner was an avid reader and writer, he says the same thing time and time again. I was just reading "Education as a Force for Social Change" where he says "You can, at best, get from a well-written book a tenth of what you can get directly from a teacher whose teaching creates a connection between the souls of the teacher and the student..." (p 174) So we're losing a lot.
But I think that's also one of the tragic virtues of the internet - it points us to real life by pointing us away from it. When we get the newest app that does something for us that we used to have to do ourselves (read a map, organize a hike, speak a different language, identify a plant, etc, etc...) it takes the place of some skill that we once had to develop, and so it diminishes us inwardly. We don't grab hold of ourselves and we don't grab hold of the world in the same way - we don't "master" it, or maybe better, we don't make a home of it anymore - because we've got an assistant in our pocket that can do all of it for us. I think that's potentially useful because, in the process, we can also wake up to what we've lost. We can now choose our development and relationship and connection more consciously.
Of course, a lot of people won't make that choice but will just be pulled along by technology and will increasingly lose themselves, which is a true tragedy, but I don't think it means we should outlaw new technologies, instead we should do our best to educate and try to wake people up.
Anyways, those are the immediate thoughts that come, the ones I've perhaps turned over the most. If other things come to me I'll reply back with more :)
Thanks for the conversation (and I agree, it's nice that the internet has made it possible). All the best,
Thanks for responding. I agree that the tool can be distracting and distancing, but it can be used for accessibility in ways that are freeing.
For myself, I have only read Steiner's books on the computer screen, in solitude, yet at my grandmother's funeral (she was an anthroposophist) I cried not because she had left Earth but because of the beauty of Steiner's vision, which I have taken in at that computer screen in solitude. I thought of how badly I wanted to be able to share that expansive vision with everyone else in the room. There was no way I could truly do it. I couldn't even read the part of a chapter of "Occult Science" that I'd brought to read, because of tears. The minister read it for me. The group of people heard the words. I don't know what they understood, I don't know what the minister even understood. But the thoughts themselves are alive, in me, and I communicated them through my tears as best I could. Nothing I've got is more eloquent.
Anyone can learn things that they choose, from innate curiosity, to learn, and can then begin to teach to others in person in their local area. Most of the people I know who I connect with over the internet use it, as I do, to get information that can be applied in our gardens, and there nature is the teacher. The soul connection can be made locally without the institution of a school (badgered by the political sphere, and then dogged by the PTA who want to ban one theory or another or force the curriculum to change for everyone).
In clubhouse there is an opportunity for a more embodied, soul-to-soul connection.
And in an "anti-technology" of the "drL instrument" there is something like the reversal of spoken language (itself a technology, and one that is a step removed from direct communication). That can be done over the internet; better in person, but the few willing to do it on this planet currently live in far-flung places and don't want to catch covid or burn the fossil fuels needed to gather together.
And that brings up another point, which is that we have (myself included) blinded ourselves to how much technology underpins our communications where the automobile is involved.
--
Again, for the political realm, compared to war, discussing issues over a the internet is a vast improvement. If states desire war so that they can continue having a reason for existing, there's an obvious conflict of interest. It seems to me that having a possibility of real communication at a distance, even with crude translation software, makes states obsolete.
James Fallow's "Can America Rebuild Itself?" speaks to this shift to independent action also, I believe, even though the internet isn't overtly involved. Maybe the similarity of local actions at a distance are contrived by the zeitgeist rather than the internet, but the internet is a tool that allows this information to be spread. (In fact, the largest obstacle I think is the nastiness that change-makers encounter on the internet--and I believe that's owing to economics and politics, to paid trolls.)
Unlike many other advances in technology (the printing press, the radio), the internet the means of production of cultural offerings. So, while it can be used for entertaining ourselves to death, we also can use it for entertaining others--and for educating them when they're interested. And curiosity is the basis of the cultural sphere as far as I understand threefolding.
Lastly, we do use our whole selves (body-minds) in reading things on the internet or typing on it. We may be unconscious of the fact, but it is still a fact. I want to point this out not apropos of the rest of the discussion but because I think it is important. Maybe it's related in some way I haven't thought through yet.
Thanks again for engaging in this conversation, I am understanding a bit more where you're coming from and I hope what I have to share is beneficial as well.
In thinking it over further I think there's a need for clarifying terms. What I hear in your image of the internet is blogs and social media sites like Facebook--boxes and moving only fingers. As I understand it the internet is more than just what's on a computer screen, it includes the conference calls, with video or without, that people can use interactively, free or nearly-free, group or one-on-one, throughout the world; and ways of finding some people with common interests; a free library of many writings (for example the Rudolf Steiner archive, the Mollison permaculture lectures from Barking Frogs Permaculture); and translation software for a number of world languages. (There is further the potential of what it can be made into, but even in its present form it includes these things.) There may be more I'm leaving out. But this is the internet that makes these phonecalls possible.
Hey Joshua - yeah, there are definitely some good uses to the internet, especially perhaps the means of communication you describe. I have a number of online study groups happening over zoom that would otherwise be impossible, so I'm certainly appreciative in that respect. But I'm also aware of how much is lost in these forms of communication, how much takes place in face-to-face relationship that doesn't translate to the screen or the phone or the book. And also how much time we all lose that could be spent outside experiencing and working in nature (I'm itching to get outside and work on some fruit trees right now!).
But yes, in terms of forming community over vast distances, it's the best that most of us can access at this point. And in terms of making culture more widely available - especially the writings that you mention, like the RS archives - it does a pretty wondrous job.
I personally don't have any hopes for the internet making the state obsolete. I think the only way of transforming society and the state is by going through it; we'll have to change it through greater participation by all and through creating a system of greater participation. I don't mean everyone voting, but everyone being far more deeply involved - culturally, politically, and economically. And in terms of creating a world without war - I've written about that a little (my article on Ukraine "To end all wars"), but perhaps one of the most significant things that I didn't mention is that I think it will require actually coming to know and understand different cultures. Not just greater or more direct communication, but real study and social understanding. At this point I don't think we really even have the context for understanding the differences in culture... we just gloss over them and think that people are all the same. But actually we have to concretely see the differences (that which is generic in us - inherited by both nature and nurture) in order to move beyond those differences and see what is truly individual (which is also the level of spirit where we're ultimately all united). If we don't truly see the differences but just assume we're all united, then we'll always be snagged and frustrated by those differences.
Thanks for sharing the pictures around your grandmother's funeral. It's good to catch a glimpse of the very real ways that these pictures and ideas live in us, and also to catch a glimpse of each other in the process. Conversation can often be so abstract.
(And just to mention about Clubhouse - I've heard a number of people say positive things about it in the past year or so, but I'm still unsure whether I'll ever get involved in that space. But if there are people who are reading these articles and wrestling with these ideas that are interested, I would definitely encourage people to find each other and have such conversations)
Thanks Seth. I hope we can make a Clubhouse room soon.
I wouldn't say there are people on Clubhouse currently reading your articles, but there are people listening to new ideas and who, I think, would benefit from reading them and Steiner.
I may be wrong. There seems to be a blood-brain barrier around everything Steiner touched, and for myself it took years of scratching my head and wanting to throw his books across the room before I finally got past it--in other words, I wouldn't expect a crowd, but it sounded like you do have a way to command a crowd, when you spoke of putting the responsibility squarely on yourselves in the podcast.
And in the permaculture group on Clubhouse and the permaculture community generally there are people who listen to new ideas that can transform things fundamentally especially if it takes a living thing as metaphor or as model (the body social, the social organism) rather than something mechanical and dead (artificial intelligence, the factory, the materialist economics models even). I would say even that the idea of the Christ Spirit reemerging in the Earth is relevant here, and that everyone who is feeling called to ecology and to gardening is moving toward something evolutionary, not just material security (even if a garden helps with this too). Living plants are different from dead commodities such as those mined or assembled in factories. Even communications technologies are more living, since you use it with another person rather than, frequently, alone, like an automobile.
Where I see the state being made obsolete is especially in its role in supporting the cultural sphere--the public education system. As almost every adult I know will say, the most important things they learned in life they learned after formal schooling. We ought to do better, but we haven't, in terms of public education systems, but we have been sharing information freely and at a distance on the internet. And the kids these days aren't paying attention in class, or taking what the curriculum contains seriously, nearly as much as they are paying attention to tiktok and instagram. Thomas Leonard wrote that the education system needed to realize it was in the entertainment industry or it would go defunct.
As for learning about other cultures, it takes real listening, and in-the-present, emotionally attentive. This can't be done through reading a history book, written by the conquerors, that leaves out important information. Nationwide in the USA, there are four companies (economically driven or at least bound) that create all the textbooks for all the public education system, I have heard from a teacher in the system. That is almost the same as a state monopoly on textbooks, a few steps away from state-controlled propaganda. (So it is fortunate people are learning more from their friends on tiktok than from the textbooks). Meanwhile, on the audio app, on worldwide conference calls, people are able to speak directly with those in other countries in other cultures. I agree that body language is missing--and the meaning, for positive or negative, that body presence creates such as the possibility of violence or sensual contact. But the bar is pretty low as far as what the State has provided; the internet is already serving the rights sphere and relationship.
Uncle Roger, the youtube comedic character, shares a vastly different perspective on food from. what is normal for Americans and points out blinds spots in British cooking shows. It would be great to be able to taste food from Malaysian chefs or street food vendors, but if we consider the vast energy footprint of bringing that about for 300 million Americans, seven billion people in countries that are not Malaysia, we have an impossible standard. If we can make something similar with local ingredients, attempting to follow the spirit of how Uncle Roger's friends cook, we can have a new experience. It may not be identical to a Malaysian's experience, certainly it is not, but it is more of a bridge. It is expanding the knowing what one does not know--which is all we can do, in our individual consciousness, given the true limits of knowledge, isn't it?
It is challenging to put my thoughts through this way in written form for a number of reasons, but I think the audio app would be viable. More later if i have time, my dog is calling.
Glad to hear your perspectives on this, and that you make it available in audio form and over the global communications network.
I want to add some points:
1) demands for working remotely for jobs that do not need to be done in person help us in overall, collective, ecological efficiency, not just in segmented selfish ways. In the long run, decentralization of the means of production, localization of food production, medicine, and culture, serve social threefolding aims as well as the resigners' self-interest for more convenience (and additionally a more meaningful life and balance.)
2) Many businesses make useless, unwanted things that no one will miss. The heads of these business do their work because they see an obligation to make money, or have a desire to find inner freedom, and are perhaps somewhat cynical about what is really wanted by the market, but they can meet these needs with more useful businesses that will actually give the worker-consumers what we need (good food, sustainable shelter, communications technologies, health) and want (conveniences, gifts to express love, true beauty and truly stimulating entertainment). There is plenty of excess to trim from our economy and especially our entertainment industry. This isn't 1920, much of the economy is dispensible, and even in necessary fields such as agriculture, a good proportion of the "value" as measured monetarily is in proprietary seed ownership and other non-productive holdings. These companies could go away and no one would be any the poorer in the longterm, not even their owners whose profit is only conceptual. Many companies' innovations are suspect, and have not proven themselves in real comparisons with sustainable agricultures/means of production. "Farm smarter not harder" will be the direction of food production in the coming decades. It will not drive prices up, rather the worker who stays home more and tends their garden will find that food can be produced much more easily than it can be bought. So, the great resignation is more than simply a bargaining for wages, but a call for more thoughtful stewardship of limited resources and more visionary investment in local value and beauty.
In addition, leaving jobs that are without value opens up space for people to think, to pay attention to their homes, and to ask what they really need to consume. From there they can have a hope to be of true service, rather than merely reacting to what the job listings offer them.
3) We have the internet now. That wasn't there in 1920, and it changes the cultural sphere vastly from what it was, and facilitates the negotiating of rights and even of hurt feelings in the political sphere. This may be a strange claim, given the famous information wars and the havoc wreaked by the algorithms, but the potential for communication is greater now than ever. Before, we had no way to carry on a conversation with Great Britain from the American shores, and representation was not even a practical possibility.
Additionally, what can be received from afar informationally can be discussed and investigated locally to great economic benefit. New ideas can be circulated to save decades or centuries of error or loss due to limited beliefs in the gardens of localities. (Without the internet, I would not have learned of the chestnut canopies of Corsica which could feed the whole island's population in a temperate climate.) The cultural sphere is free to a large extent from its two companions, and yet most thinkers do not seem to remember that the global communications network exists when discussing national quarrels, policies, or trends. Yet we use it every day, and it is in plain view. The Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the elections of populist candidates, these are only the tip of the iceberg. The impact the internet has facilitated is inestimable, we are so used to it by now as the air we breathe that we do not sense it nor remember what our lives were before. And the impact that it can have is mostly unrealized, since we haven't thought to try.
Much of what is valued today in money is service, not commodity (even setting aside time-wasters). Therapy, personal growth workshops, spirituality retreats, social support for fasts or attention from social media followers (which meets a valid social need, if messily), all of these things have dollar values put on them directly or indirectly. These needs can be met without money too, and are being met: time trade circles, parallel work sessions, intentional communities, conversations on the audio application "Clubhouse," to name a few. These services can often be carried out without the structures of money or government, because communicating about them to coordinate efforts is so much easier with internet platforms. The desire to be of service can be gratified in a broader set of ways than simply brewing or baking, and in ways that are more effective than simply giving someone cheaper bread and booze.
Granted, our thinking about the global communications network needs to evolve past simply using it to remake political forms and organize for higher wages, or for mindless wasting of time, but its potential for facilitating a threefold social order is vast. Imagine if Steiner and the others working on threefolding in the 1920's had been able to reach thousands of people with livestreams, adjusting even for the differences in total population numbers. They could have drawn many into the appeal of the message simply by showing an appealing example, no need for politicians to agree. At the least, it is a false comparison to talk about changing the social body of 1920 to a threefold model and changing the social body of 2020.
I appreciate that I got to hear your article thanks to the internet, and that you're willing to use this tool. I would hope that anthroposophists make more use of it. And even if they don't, others who are not anthroposophists will eventually find the Steiner archive and grab onto the valuable resources they find there (rsarchive.org).
I would really like to hear your thoughts on threefolding and the internet as a general topic. It is so vast an issue that I think I have barely scratched the surface, but it seems like a key missing piece in all of the discussions of this issue, and in the question of how to live up to the ideals today.
Thank you for your scholarship and service.
in unity,
Joshua
Hey Joshua,
Thanks for your thoughts. The internet is definitely a significant part of the present day, and something we need to wrestle with on a lot of different levels. I haven't made it too much of a central theme in my work, but I have focused on various aspects of it at different times and have a few thoughts I could add.
On the most basic level, I increasingly find myself thinking about it like any public utility (roads, energy, and other communication networks) and wonder what would be the healthiest way to structure and facilitate its use. It's obviously essential to global commerce, politics, and culture - it's the main way so many of us maintain our relationships, it's the way that we relate in general - so I don't think its significance can be overstated. And I personally think that anyone who cares about social change has to work to make their ideas accessible, findable, by the people who might take them up in some way - which means that they have to be publicly available online, there can't be too many geographical or financial constraints.
And yet, living with the internet for the last decade or two, I'm definitely not enamored of it. The medium is terrible - sitting in front of a screen and mechanically moving from box to box (site to site) with your eyes and the tip of your finger (we used to call it "surfing" the internet, but it's more like "hopscotching" the internet, and even that is far too lively...). It's incredibly deadening, and the relationships maintained and formed online are incredibly thin. Not that they're not also necessary, but the more time we spend online then the less we spend in person and online relationships are an incredibly poor substitute for real ones. (And this isn't so particular to the internet, I think we find it with every advance in technology. Neil Postman wrote a great book a few decades ago - "Entertaining Ourselves to Death" - that beautifully documented the loss that came with every advance in technology. And even though Steiner was an avid reader and writer, he says the same thing time and time again. I was just reading "Education as a Force for Social Change" where he says "You can, at best, get from a well-written book a tenth of what you can get directly from a teacher whose teaching creates a connection between the souls of the teacher and the student..." (p 174) So we're losing a lot.
But I think that's also one of the tragic virtues of the internet - it points us to real life by pointing us away from it. When we get the newest app that does something for us that we used to have to do ourselves (read a map, organize a hike, speak a different language, identify a plant, etc, etc...) it takes the place of some skill that we once had to develop, and so it diminishes us inwardly. We don't grab hold of ourselves and we don't grab hold of the world in the same way - we don't "master" it, or maybe better, we don't make a home of it anymore - because we've got an assistant in our pocket that can do all of it for us. I think that's potentially useful because, in the process, we can also wake up to what we've lost. We can now choose our development and relationship and connection more consciously.
Of course, a lot of people won't make that choice but will just be pulled along by technology and will increasingly lose themselves, which is a true tragedy, but I don't think it means we should outlaw new technologies, instead we should do our best to educate and try to wake people up.
Anyways, those are the immediate thoughts that come, the ones I've perhaps turned over the most. If other things come to me I'll reply back with more :)
Thanks for the conversation (and I agree, it's nice that the internet has made it possible). All the best,
Seth
Thanks for responding. I agree that the tool can be distracting and distancing, but it can be used for accessibility in ways that are freeing.
For myself, I have only read Steiner's books on the computer screen, in solitude, yet at my grandmother's funeral (she was an anthroposophist) I cried not because she had left Earth but because of the beauty of Steiner's vision, which I have taken in at that computer screen in solitude. I thought of how badly I wanted to be able to share that expansive vision with everyone else in the room. There was no way I could truly do it. I couldn't even read the part of a chapter of "Occult Science" that I'd brought to read, because of tears. The minister read it for me. The group of people heard the words. I don't know what they understood, I don't know what the minister even understood. But the thoughts themselves are alive, in me, and I communicated them through my tears as best I could. Nothing I've got is more eloquent.
Anyone can learn things that they choose, from innate curiosity, to learn, and can then begin to teach to others in person in their local area. Most of the people I know who I connect with over the internet use it, as I do, to get information that can be applied in our gardens, and there nature is the teacher. The soul connection can be made locally without the institution of a school (badgered by the political sphere, and then dogged by the PTA who want to ban one theory or another or force the curriculum to change for everyone).
In clubhouse there is an opportunity for a more embodied, soul-to-soul connection.
And in an "anti-technology" of the "drL instrument" there is something like the reversal of spoken language (itself a technology, and one that is a step removed from direct communication). That can be done over the internet; better in person, but the few willing to do it on this planet currently live in far-flung places and don't want to catch covid or burn the fossil fuels needed to gather together.
And that brings up another point, which is that we have (myself included) blinded ourselves to how much technology underpins our communications where the automobile is involved.
--
Again, for the political realm, compared to war, discussing issues over a the internet is a vast improvement. If states desire war so that they can continue having a reason for existing, there's an obvious conflict of interest. It seems to me that having a possibility of real communication at a distance, even with crude translation software, makes states obsolete.
James Fallow's "Can America Rebuild Itself?" speaks to this shift to independent action also, I believe, even though the internet isn't overtly involved. Maybe the similarity of local actions at a distance are contrived by the zeitgeist rather than the internet, but the internet is a tool that allows this information to be spread. (In fact, the largest obstacle I think is the nastiness that change-makers encounter on the internet--and I believe that's owing to economics and politics, to paid trolls.)
Unlike many other advances in technology (the printing press, the radio), the internet the means of production of cultural offerings. So, while it can be used for entertaining ourselves to death, we also can use it for entertaining others--and for educating them when they're interested. And curiosity is the basis of the cultural sphere as far as I understand threefolding.
Lastly, we do use our whole selves (body-minds) in reading things on the internet or typing on it. We may be unconscious of the fact, but it is still a fact. I want to point this out not apropos of the rest of the discussion but because I think it is important. Maybe it's related in some way I haven't thought through yet.
Thanks again for engaging in this conversation, I am understanding a bit more where you're coming from and I hope what I have to share is beneficial as well.
In community,
Joshua
In thinking it over further I think there's a need for clarifying terms. What I hear in your image of the internet is blogs and social media sites like Facebook--boxes and moving only fingers. As I understand it the internet is more than just what's on a computer screen, it includes the conference calls, with video or without, that people can use interactively, free or nearly-free, group or one-on-one, throughout the world; and ways of finding some people with common interests; a free library of many writings (for example the Rudolf Steiner archive, the Mollison permaculture lectures from Barking Frogs Permaculture); and translation software for a number of world languages. (There is further the potential of what it can be made into, but even in its present form it includes these things.) There may be more I'm leaving out. But this is the internet that makes these phonecalls possible.
Hey Joshua - yeah, there are definitely some good uses to the internet, especially perhaps the means of communication you describe. I have a number of online study groups happening over zoom that would otherwise be impossible, so I'm certainly appreciative in that respect. But I'm also aware of how much is lost in these forms of communication, how much takes place in face-to-face relationship that doesn't translate to the screen or the phone or the book. And also how much time we all lose that could be spent outside experiencing and working in nature (I'm itching to get outside and work on some fruit trees right now!).
But yes, in terms of forming community over vast distances, it's the best that most of us can access at this point. And in terms of making culture more widely available - especially the writings that you mention, like the RS archives - it does a pretty wondrous job.
I personally don't have any hopes for the internet making the state obsolete. I think the only way of transforming society and the state is by going through it; we'll have to change it through greater participation by all and through creating a system of greater participation. I don't mean everyone voting, but everyone being far more deeply involved - culturally, politically, and economically. And in terms of creating a world without war - I've written about that a little (my article on Ukraine "To end all wars"), but perhaps one of the most significant things that I didn't mention is that I think it will require actually coming to know and understand different cultures. Not just greater or more direct communication, but real study and social understanding. At this point I don't think we really even have the context for understanding the differences in culture... we just gloss over them and think that people are all the same. But actually we have to concretely see the differences (that which is generic in us - inherited by both nature and nurture) in order to move beyond those differences and see what is truly individual (which is also the level of spirit where we're ultimately all united). If we don't truly see the differences but just assume we're all united, then we'll always be snagged and frustrated by those differences.
Thanks for sharing the pictures around your grandmother's funeral. It's good to catch a glimpse of the very real ways that these pictures and ideas live in us, and also to catch a glimpse of each other in the process. Conversation can often be so abstract.
(And just to mention about Clubhouse - I've heard a number of people say positive things about it in the past year or so, but I'm still unsure whether I'll ever get involved in that space. But if there are people who are reading these articles and wrestling with these ideas that are interested, I would definitely encourage people to find each other and have such conversations)
Thanks for your thoughts. All the best,
Seth
Thanks Seth. I hope we can make a Clubhouse room soon.
I wouldn't say there are people on Clubhouse currently reading your articles, but there are people listening to new ideas and who, I think, would benefit from reading them and Steiner.
I may be wrong. There seems to be a blood-brain barrier around everything Steiner touched, and for myself it took years of scratching my head and wanting to throw his books across the room before I finally got past it--in other words, I wouldn't expect a crowd, but it sounded like you do have a way to command a crowd, when you spoke of putting the responsibility squarely on yourselves in the podcast.
And in the permaculture group on Clubhouse and the permaculture community generally there are people who listen to new ideas that can transform things fundamentally especially if it takes a living thing as metaphor or as model (the body social, the social organism) rather than something mechanical and dead (artificial intelligence, the factory, the materialist economics models even). I would say even that the idea of the Christ Spirit reemerging in the Earth is relevant here, and that everyone who is feeling called to ecology and to gardening is moving toward something evolutionary, not just material security (even if a garden helps with this too). Living plants are different from dead commodities such as those mined or assembled in factories. Even communications technologies are more living, since you use it with another person rather than, frequently, alone, like an automobile.
Where I see the state being made obsolete is especially in its role in supporting the cultural sphere--the public education system. As almost every adult I know will say, the most important things they learned in life they learned after formal schooling. We ought to do better, but we haven't, in terms of public education systems, but we have been sharing information freely and at a distance on the internet. And the kids these days aren't paying attention in class, or taking what the curriculum contains seriously, nearly as much as they are paying attention to tiktok and instagram. Thomas Leonard wrote that the education system needed to realize it was in the entertainment industry or it would go defunct.
As for learning about other cultures, it takes real listening, and in-the-present, emotionally attentive. This can't be done through reading a history book, written by the conquerors, that leaves out important information. Nationwide in the USA, there are four companies (economically driven or at least bound) that create all the textbooks for all the public education system, I have heard from a teacher in the system. That is almost the same as a state monopoly on textbooks, a few steps away from state-controlled propaganda. (So it is fortunate people are learning more from their friends on tiktok than from the textbooks). Meanwhile, on the audio app, on worldwide conference calls, people are able to speak directly with those in other countries in other cultures. I agree that body language is missing--and the meaning, for positive or negative, that body presence creates such as the possibility of violence or sensual contact. But the bar is pretty low as far as what the State has provided; the internet is already serving the rights sphere and relationship.
Uncle Roger, the youtube comedic character, shares a vastly different perspective on food from. what is normal for Americans and points out blinds spots in British cooking shows. It would be great to be able to taste food from Malaysian chefs or street food vendors, but if we consider the vast energy footprint of bringing that about for 300 million Americans, seven billion people in countries that are not Malaysia, we have an impossible standard. If we can make something similar with local ingredients, attempting to follow the spirit of how Uncle Roger's friends cook, we can have a new experience. It may not be identical to a Malaysian's experience, certainly it is not, but it is more of a bridge. It is expanding the knowing what one does not know--which is all we can do, in our individual consciousness, given the true limits of knowledge, isn't it?
It is challenging to put my thoughts through this way in written form for a number of reasons, but I think the audio app would be viable. More later if i have time, my dog is calling.