Well distinguished: separation of nation(culture) and state (government). This is a hard one. In conversations about freeing the educational system for state-mandated standardized testing, for example, people argue that the state must have some form of accountability - however imperfect - for the sake of "equality and equity". Taking a kind of "tragedy of the commons" stance, they assert that without the state, individuals would be too ignorant or greedy to work for the common good. Didn't the economist Elinor Ostrom show that when local people manage their own fisheries they take greater care and interest than if the fisheries are managed for them from a distance? That brings us to Steiner's other idea of "moral individual action" (is that the right term?) which supports Ostrom's values. "No social justice without mindfulness. No mindfulness without social justice" is how they put it at a Mind and Life conference about social justice in education. It's a big leap that you describe and we must make it in ourselves so we can stick together better.
...and lastly, it's always good to hear "we must make it in ourselves so we can stick together better." Everything depends on every person doing what they can, and boy is it hard to stick together :) Maybe we'll get better at it... we can hope!
Yeah, I think a lot depends on how a person sees the purpose of education. If it's to make sure everyone learns A, B, and C, then it's easy to standardize it, and by standardizing you make sure everyone's given the same information - they get an "equal" education, or equal educational opportunities. But if the point of education is to draw out the slumbering capacities, the potential gifts that live in each child, how do you standardize that? The second is obviously much more holistic and, I would argue, grounded in reality. (Does anyone really think the child is a completely empty vessel that they can fill up however they want? Have they ever met a child, each with their own particular soul mood and approach to the world?) If you think every human being is different, unique, never-before-seen-under-the-sun, then I'd say the only way to ensure equal educational opportunities is to work with parents to make sure they've got everything they need in order to be able to send their child to the school of their own choosing. Vouchers, at least in concept, were a pretty straightforward way of doing this. I never read much about how they worked out in practice.
And yes, I never read too much of Ostrom's work directly, but I think you've got it right. In the actual lived experience of working within a commons, local people generally manage their own resources far better than some bureaucrat managing them for them. I don't know if that's particular to commons-management that's existed for generations, and therefore has a tradition to fall back on, or if that's the case for new commons being managed by a community as well. I would imagine there is some necessary learning curve when a community is first taking it up... (One does have to unlearn selfishness if you've always done things one way - exploit, exploit - and also the community ties probably have to have a certain strength to them.)
One of our fundamental problems is the overpowering of big money / corporations over the state. Our US constitution which originally is one of the best, (Switzerland has more successfully adopted it) has over the years been perverted by big money, and corrupted government and its institutions, as well as the cultural sphere (the main media in the hands of a few corporations). Fundamental changes in our capitalist economy have to happen: 1. Restoring the commons which are land, water, air and minerals which are not a commodity. 2. Eliminate the stock market, businesses are not a commodity. 3. Labor is not a commodity, instead of wages the result of production should be shared by all workers and management. As long as we do not tackle these fundamental issues changes towards 3 foldness will be nearly impossible, money is just to powerfull. So also the war in Ukraine should be seen not just as a ethnical problem, but as a proxi war since a very longtime instigated by the anglo-american empire against russia.
Hey Christoph - thanks for commenting and I found your list of needed changes thought-provoking. I was most interested, though, in your comment about how Switzerland has adopted, and further developed, some of the positive aspects of the US constitution. I don't know that much about Switzerland... could you say more? Thanks. Hope you're well.
The political crisis of the Regeneration period culminated in the Sonderbund War of November 1847. As a result of the Sonderbund War, Switzerland was transformed into a federal state, with a constitution promulgated on 12 September 1848. This constitution provided for the cantons' sovereignty, as long as this did not impinge on the Federal Constitution. The creation of a bicameral assembly was consciously inspired by the United States Constitution, the National Council and Council of States corresponding to the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively.[6]
The interesting aspect is that there is a direct democracy and considerable souvrainity of town and canton. For example you can only become a Swiss citizen by becoming first a citizen of your town of residence, which makes you a citizen of the Canton and only then a Federal citizen. However increasingly direct democracy is eroding towards centralisation in the federal government, similar as what happens in the US.
Steiner felt that Switzerland had the best conditions of introducing threefoldness which regrettably was not taken up.
Steiner also emphasised that Democracy will lead to its demise unless citizens fight continuously to restore it.
"ensuring complete sovereignty of the individual in their own national and cultural self-determination". Yes! This is my conclusion as well.
Note that it is not the bodies that Steiner asks to separate, but rather... I don't have a correct word for it - power? force? Impulse?
Imagine bisecting the human body into three bodies, one including all the blood vessels and lungs, one including the brain and all the nerve system, and one including all the digestion organs. Will that make a healthier body? Or a dead body?
It is not the government that needs to be separated. A government is a body, an organ. It is the political activity that needs to be separated.
Political activity is not something done only in governments. It is everywhere, passing through every cell of the social body - every individual.
As such, the separation must start, not out there in the outside world (governments, churches, schools and such), but within us. Exactly as you called for sovereignty of the individual over his self-determination, it is us, the individuals, that should learn to separate between our cultural impulses, economic impulses and governmental impulse, or, as I prefer to call it, our moral impulses, which guide us how to interact with other individuals without hurting them.
Just yesterday I posted a talk that ends by alluding to the insights of Steiner and threefolding in relation to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. See below. But one thing I emphasize is the need also for the development of a shared identity within a nation, because while the state should not overtly favor one culture over another, it is inevitable that laws will align with certain value structures, and the perspectives of groups will not always align with the perspective of the state/laws. So I think we need both - separation, a la threefolding, and movement toward ever more inclusive and integrated identities as humans, as entailed in the evolution of consciousness.
Nice timing to find this, so much in alignment with my own work!
Great to hear from you, Brad, and thanks for sharing your talk, I'll take a look. Could you give an example of what kind of laws you're thinking of - laws that might align with certain cultures and not others? One of the main points Steiner makes is that many of our laws are over-reaching into matters of culture and economy, matters that should really be left within those realms. I know there are so many tricky places here - abortion for instance - but I wonder what kind of laws you're thinking of.
Also, I definitely agree with the need for more inclusive and integrated identities, but I also see it as the responsibility of individuals on their own path. It's hard to tell anyone else they need to open beyond their own culture. And these cultures still do have so much to offer in themselves, though we've almost entirely lost the sensitivity to what lives in them because we've been inundated with the relativism of modernity and the monoculture of Hollywood. The two main tasks I see: on the one hand, really being able to appreciate all that's come through the different cultures - the incredible gifts they've all brought and are still bringing; and on the other, seeing beyond an individual's culture to the individual themselves (Steiner lays this second task out most powerfully in chapter 14 of Philosophy of Freedom).
Lots of work to do! Glad to meet you and thanks for your work.
Happy to find your work, and thanks for responding. I am not thinking so much of particular laws, though your example of abortion is a good one. But I think that in a fundamental way, laws and the people who make them will embody a culture and a perspective/ideology (similar the point you made about CRT elsewhere; there is no way to avoid ideology at some level). And what we are talking about is really some degree of taken for granted values that would imply or argue for or demand things like free speech, and the separation of different spheres of society. These are values we can associate with modernity, i.e. modern values. (And not exclusively European values - they are cross cultural; see The Dawn of Everything, or my recent talk).
So subcultures in any society may or may not agree with or resonate with those minimal modern values that are perhaps presupposed by social threefolding and the viability of a multicultural society. And therefore, in some way, we want/need subcultures to actually grow together and invite all beings to grow through and beyond some form of modern values, on their way to postmodern values and beyond. And groups can do this in different ways with different ethnic lineages, etc, but if we are to have a functioning society, we may need some viable coherent pluralism, as opposed to a fractured and polarized pluralism.
I agree with your two main tasks, but also with the caveat that no culture is ever static, and every culture has been shaped by others. So there is a third task - honor and integrate cultures and individuals, AND allow cultures and individuals to grow and change through BOTH self-determination and the interdependent forces of mutual obligations...
Hey Brad - I had a chance to listen to your talk and found it super interesting. There was much food for thought there. Glad to be engaging on these topics - here are some my thoughts on what you shared there, as well as what you shared above.
First off, I feel like there's a tension in what you're sharing between wanting to respect differences, but also wanting folks to get on board with a healthier, more multicultural, and complex framework. You say above:
"Subcultures in any society may or may not agree with or resonate with those minimal modern values that are perhaps presupposed by social threefolding and the viability of a multicultural society. And therefore, in some way, we want/need subcultures to actually grow together and invite all beings to grow through and beyond some form of modern values, on their way to postmodern values and beyond."
I'm not sure how you're squaring those two exactly. It seems like you're saying that on the one hand people might not resonate with the minimal values found in threefolding (freedom, equality, and solidarity), but on the other hand, we need them to grow together through and beyond both modern and post-modern values (of which I'm assuming there are many more values they'd have to resonate with than the above three…). The idea of freedom found in threefolding is that people shouldn't be forced to change their values at all, but should be free to be themselves. It’s hard to imagine that not resonating. Of course, the dominant culture in any society might not like such freedom and might prefer to have their culture, their national-ethnic group, be the only culture, and also the sole determinant of laws (as we find with Israel's controversial 2018 "Jewish nation-state law" which in effect institutionalizes Jewish values in the government and denies any other values), but of course every minority culture in a society will want such freedom, they’ll want to be able to practice and pass on their culture freely. Without this, there will inevitably be violence, so eventually the dominant culture will likely come around…
I hear your concern that it will lead to a "fractured and polarized pluralism." That will indeed be the case, unless we're able to realize the other values of equality and solidarity. Perhaps most important of these two (in terms of obtaining some measure of social cohesion) is the experience of equality. But today this is just a concept - we almost never actually experience it because the realm where we could most strongly experience it - in the making of actual agreements together, in self-governance - isn’t actually open to us. Nonetheless people the world over have reached the point of feeling a need for equality and democracy, for self-governance, but it has to be real. And it would then be through the actual participation in democracy that all the different people in a political community could begin to meet each other and form true social cohesion. (I touch on this in a couple places - my article on children voting and my article on Gandhi). This is how we could form a “viable coherent pluralism” as you describe it.
(As an aside: It's been awhile since I read any of the spiral dynamics work you refer to in your talk, but if I remember that framework correctly, it's a picture of different groups being at different stages or tiers, all moving in the same direction. But there, too, I remember Wilbur saying that you can't ask any group to skip the stages ahead of them and leap to a further tier... the most help you can give is to encourage them to the next step on the journey. Do I remember that correctly?)
The third value, that of solidarity, just means cultivating togetherness, selflessness, love for one another. This can be cultivated especially through our work for one another - in the economic realm. That’s where it can become a real experience in society and not just a concept.
These are quite universal values really, though I imagine some countries would still prefer to form something else, perhaps a religious theocracy, and that should be up to them. In that case, they don’t yet want democracy or cultural freedom strongly enough and they shouldn’t be forced to want those things.
Perhaps most important to this whole question is the fact that people experience culture and ethnicity as a kind of home - it's where many experience meaning most profoundly - and to take them out of that home and into another home (or no home at all) is a quite risky affair. You talked in your presentation about depression and suicide... I think many would agree that the rising rates of depression and suicide are deeply connected to the lack of meaning in people's lives. We’ve been thrown into a world of Netflix and video games, without any shared cultural values and with no real task. Society doesn’t need us, eventually everything will be automated and we’ll have a UBI and we can waste away in front of the screen. But that’s not why we’ve come to the earth, and I think everyone knows that in their heart of hearts. They want to realize themselves, give the gifts that they have to give. And they are needed.
So I think the future is the one you’re describing - one where every human being creates meaning out of themselves - but I would never kick people out of their spiritual homes, the places where they find meaning, because creating it out of yourself is not an easy affair. The easiest example of this, from a progressive perspective, is to imagine a Native American school where they were teaching Native American culture. Imagine that they weren’t teaching any modern Western ideas, but were trying to pass on their spiritual-cultural tradition to their children intact. So a “science” class wouldn’t bring in any evolutionary biology, but instead would bring the children out in the landscape and into a more direct experience of the spirit in nature. I don’t if such schools exists (I once heard of one that started on one of the reservations and rejected federal funding because it had too many strings attached, but I can’t remember where it was). Regardless, though, it’s not hard to imagine. Would you go into such a school and tell them to change their curriculum because it’s too ethnocentric, that they should be offering their children a larger more multi-cultural perspective? And if you did, how would you imagine their own cultural tradition staying intact? (Waldorf schools in different parts of the world actually do a pretty good job of doing this, of teaching the worlds history through story and myth, though they also focus in on the cultures of the children in their care - but people shouldn’t have to even accept something that gentle. They should be able to teach their own culture, pure and untouched, if they want.)
Ultimately, this all connects to one of the basic pictures in your talk - that more complex identities are healthier identities (you give an example of your friend who has a number of cross-cutting identities and so, in that way, is anti-fragile). Is it true though? For millennia, and still today in certain parts of the world, people have had completely unified identities - they were Italian, or Ethiopian, or Chilean through and through. There was no influence yet from other cultures, they had their own stories, foods, dances, traditions, etc. This was, and still is in certain places, healthy - it gives life a certain meaning and creates a certain real direction in one’s work - one works for the community and one knows the meaning of the community. One can find a version of that vitality also in minority groups today who are reclaiming their own spiritual tradition. There is a kind of hunger and deep enthusiasm for what they find. That said, though I think it’s probably important and right for today, I don’t actually think it’s the future.
I think the future is to try and tap into the same spiritual potency that led to the creation of such cultures in the first place. Imagine the power that infused and informed and created all the remarkable aspects of Japanese culture - their architecture and gardens, the carful eye for detail, the exquisite cuisine, the customs, the religious beliefs - and then imagine if we could bring through such new spiritual-cultural impulses today. To consciously develop such spiritual vitality - that’s the task that awaits all of us.
Steiner’s work is really a pure expression of this - his insights into architecture, agriculture, medicine, education, and society - they have that kind of spiritual potency. He consciously recognized the deepest levels of meaning in the world and he created in all of those fields out of those spiritual sources. But it’s also something that all of us can do. But for that we need freedom. We need a healthy education where things come at their right time, so that we can then go through all the stages in their right order and arrive, in adulthood, at the point of taking up our development in our own hands.
Well, I think I’ve said enough for now :) I would be interested in your thoughts on all (or any) of this if you want to share more. Thanks for the discussion and thanks for your work wrestling with all of these (what I think are most important) matters.
Yes I mostly agree with all of that, and hope I didn't imply anywhere that anyone should be forced to do anything. But the tensions are real, and not easily resolvable. And we can learn a lot from the past, and from all cultures, hence my notion of the Great Integration, but we do need to keep moving forward together somehow, and ALL cultures do need to keep changing. That is something like a law or deep truth, so the question is how, not if.
I think it is important and helpful to integrate Steiner's insights with more detailed maps like Integral Theory and different developmental frames, and with the now emerging metamodern theory (eg Hanzi Freinacht). We have to keep updating our maps to find our way in this evolving kosmos.
A fuller account of my view can be found in the essay I'll post below. I've read several of your essays/blogs here in the past couple days, and I appreciate you listening to my talk. If you read the essay, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. And I'd be open to scheduling a zoom call if you like. We could dive deeper into some of this if you are interested. No worries if not.
Thanks for passing along the essay. I'll take a look and be back in touch about it. In the meantime I just wanted to touch on what you said above. I completely agree with your point that all cultures need to change, but the key issue is the question of pace. Harm is done both when things come too early and too late, the need is to find the right timing.
This makes sense, for instance, when we think that for things to come in a healthy way, the ground has to be laid for them, the conditions have to be right. This has to do with the proper order, or sequence, of things - you can’t learn calculus until you’ve learned algebra - but it also just has to do more broadly with human development. In almost all cases, you wouldn’t want to try to cram algebra and calculus into the young child, because on other levels the order isn’t right, it doesn’t align with where they are inwardly (it takes years and years for their souls to become ready for abstract thinking, etc, - we can’t rush these things without harming them). And it’s also just an important experience in one’s own life - certain opportunities appear at certain moments and it takes a certain awareness to grab hold of them. If you’re leaning back in yourself and miss the opportunity, then it might never come again, or else only come when you have rightly prepared yourself to recognize and receive it this time.
So, yes, everything is moving forward, and it’s right and healthy to try to see what’s wanting to come out of the future and help prepare its way (the true impulse of progressivism), but it’s also healthy to keep at bay that which is trying to come too soon - so that there’s space for what’s right to unfold (the true impulse of conservatism). Those of us on the left, know the former well, but are less connected to the latter. An obvious example is technology. A parent can give their child a phone or tablet when they’re toddlers and justify it by saying “Well, it’s the world they’re going to have to live in, there’s no point in trying to deny it,” but there is a point in denying it, in holding it back, until the proper time comes. They need to be protected so that they can build up the strength and capacity to work with technology in a potentially more conscious and free way. So I agree that all cultures will eventually move on, that in a few thousand years many, if not all, of the world’s traditions and religions will look quite different, and necessarily so, because human beings will be quite different. But it’s essential that we allow and encourage that evolution to unfold in the healthiest way possible - a kind of balance between holding things back and bringing new things in - otherwise we will have more and more stranded, untethered, unmoored souls, and more and more depression, suicide, and violence. Thanks again for your engagement on this topic, it’s an important one. All the best,
Yes, brother. So much yes. It is such an inherent tension in the educational process - for each individual and each group, to know right timing. It is relatively simple for children, since there is such a quasi-universal sequence (though even that is not acknowledged in schooling enough). But once we get to adulthood, there is such a spectrum of possibility, from deep dysfunction and pathology to benevolent sage, not to mention non-developmental and non-hierarchical diversity! It is what Hanzi calls the Great Stretching Out - the ever increasing span of where people are at as new structures emerge and coexist with pervious structures, which inevitably causes more confusion and conflict between structures. Also why it is hard to put things out there, to a group or on the internet, knowing that it can and will be interpreted in so many different ways, and most will not be ready for or appreciate it... And all the more reason why it feels good to find our memetic tribes online - to find those who do understand and resonate with our perspective (which our family and local friends may or may not, due in part to the Great Stretching Out...) :-)
Hey Brad - thanks for your reply. I've got some thoughts on what you shared, but I'd like to watch your talk first, so I'll be back in touch tomorrow. Till then.
Well distinguished: separation of nation(culture) and state (government). This is a hard one. In conversations about freeing the educational system for state-mandated standardized testing, for example, people argue that the state must have some form of accountability - however imperfect - for the sake of "equality and equity". Taking a kind of "tragedy of the commons" stance, they assert that without the state, individuals would be too ignorant or greedy to work for the common good. Didn't the economist Elinor Ostrom show that when local people manage their own fisheries they take greater care and interest than if the fisheries are managed for them from a distance? That brings us to Steiner's other idea of "moral individual action" (is that the right term?) which supports Ostrom's values. "No social justice without mindfulness. No mindfulness without social justice" is how they put it at a Mind and Life conference about social justice in education. It's a big leap that you describe and we must make it in ourselves so we can stick together better.
...and lastly, it's always good to hear "we must make it in ourselves so we can stick together better." Everything depends on every person doing what they can, and boy is it hard to stick together :) Maybe we'll get better at it... we can hope!
Yeah, I think a lot depends on how a person sees the purpose of education. If it's to make sure everyone learns A, B, and C, then it's easy to standardize it, and by standardizing you make sure everyone's given the same information - they get an "equal" education, or equal educational opportunities. But if the point of education is to draw out the slumbering capacities, the potential gifts that live in each child, how do you standardize that? The second is obviously much more holistic and, I would argue, grounded in reality. (Does anyone really think the child is a completely empty vessel that they can fill up however they want? Have they ever met a child, each with their own particular soul mood and approach to the world?) If you think every human being is different, unique, never-before-seen-under-the-sun, then I'd say the only way to ensure equal educational opportunities is to work with parents to make sure they've got everything they need in order to be able to send their child to the school of their own choosing. Vouchers, at least in concept, were a pretty straightforward way of doing this. I never read much about how they worked out in practice.
And yes, I never read too much of Ostrom's work directly, but I think you've got it right. In the actual lived experience of working within a commons, local people generally manage their own resources far better than some bureaucrat managing them for them. I don't know if that's particular to commons-management that's existed for generations, and therefore has a tradition to fall back on, or if that's the case for new commons being managed by a community as well. I would imagine there is some necessary learning curve when a community is first taking it up... (One does have to unlearn selfishness if you've always done things one way - exploit, exploit - and also the community ties probably have to have a certain strength to them.)
One of our fundamental problems is the overpowering of big money / corporations over the state. Our US constitution which originally is one of the best, (Switzerland has more successfully adopted it) has over the years been perverted by big money, and corrupted government and its institutions, as well as the cultural sphere (the main media in the hands of a few corporations). Fundamental changes in our capitalist economy have to happen: 1. Restoring the commons which are land, water, air and minerals which are not a commodity. 2. Eliminate the stock market, businesses are not a commodity. 3. Labor is not a commodity, instead of wages the result of production should be shared by all workers and management. As long as we do not tackle these fundamental issues changes towards 3 foldness will be nearly impossible, money is just to powerfull. So also the war in Ukraine should be seen not just as a ethnical problem, but as a proxi war since a very longtime instigated by the anglo-american empire against russia.
Hey Christoph - thanks for commenting and I found your list of needed changes thought-provoking. I was most interested, though, in your comment about how Switzerland has adopted, and further developed, some of the positive aspects of the US constitution. I don't know that much about Switzerland... could you say more? Thanks. Hope you're well.
Hi Seth,
here a extract from Wikipedia :
The political crisis of the Regeneration period culminated in the Sonderbund War of November 1847. As a result of the Sonderbund War, Switzerland was transformed into a federal state, with a constitution promulgated on 12 September 1848. This constitution provided for the cantons' sovereignty, as long as this did not impinge on the Federal Constitution. The creation of a bicameral assembly was consciously inspired by the United States Constitution, the National Council and Council of States corresponding to the House of Representatives and Senate, respectively.[6]
The interesting aspect is that there is a direct democracy and considerable souvrainity of town and canton. For example you can only become a Swiss citizen by becoming first a citizen of your town of residence, which makes you a citizen of the Canton and only then a Federal citizen. However increasingly direct democracy is eroding towards centralisation in the federal government, similar as what happens in the US.
Steiner felt that Switzerland had the best conditions of introducing threefoldness which regrettably was not taken up.
Steiner also emphasised that Democracy will lead to its demise unless citizens fight continuously to restore it.
"ensuring complete sovereignty of the individual in their own national and cultural self-determination". Yes! This is my conclusion as well.
Note that it is not the bodies that Steiner asks to separate, but rather... I don't have a correct word for it - power? force? Impulse?
Imagine bisecting the human body into three bodies, one including all the blood vessels and lungs, one including the brain and all the nerve system, and one including all the digestion organs. Will that make a healthier body? Or a dead body?
It is not the government that needs to be separated. A government is a body, an organ. It is the political activity that needs to be separated.
Political activity is not something done only in governments. It is everywhere, passing through every cell of the social body - every individual.
As such, the separation must start, not out there in the outside world (governments, churches, schools and such), but within us. Exactly as you called for sovereignty of the individual over his self-determination, it is us, the individuals, that should learn to separate between our cultural impulses, economic impulses and governmental impulse, or, as I prefer to call it, our moral impulses, which guide us how to interact with other individuals without hurting them.
Just yesterday I posted a talk that ends by alluding to the insights of Steiner and threefolding in relation to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. See below. But one thing I emphasize is the need also for the development of a shared identity within a nation, because while the state should not overtly favor one culture over another, it is inevitable that laws will align with certain value structures, and the perspectives of groups will not always align with the perspective of the state/laws. So I think we need both - separation, a la threefolding, and movement toward ever more inclusive and integrated identities as humans, as entailed in the evolution of consciousness.
Nice timing to find this, so much in alignment with my own work!
https://youtu.be/e8Ocd-7_nKI
Great to hear from you, Brad, and thanks for sharing your talk, I'll take a look. Could you give an example of what kind of laws you're thinking of - laws that might align with certain cultures and not others? One of the main points Steiner makes is that many of our laws are over-reaching into matters of culture and economy, matters that should really be left within those realms. I know there are so many tricky places here - abortion for instance - but I wonder what kind of laws you're thinking of.
Also, I definitely agree with the need for more inclusive and integrated identities, but I also see it as the responsibility of individuals on their own path. It's hard to tell anyone else they need to open beyond their own culture. And these cultures still do have so much to offer in themselves, though we've almost entirely lost the sensitivity to what lives in them because we've been inundated with the relativism of modernity and the monoculture of Hollywood. The two main tasks I see: on the one hand, really being able to appreciate all that's come through the different cultures - the incredible gifts they've all brought and are still bringing; and on the other, seeing beyond an individual's culture to the individual themselves (Steiner lays this second task out most powerfully in chapter 14 of Philosophy of Freedom).
Lots of work to do! Glad to meet you and thanks for your work.
Hi Seth,
Happy to find your work, and thanks for responding. I am not thinking so much of particular laws, though your example of abortion is a good one. But I think that in a fundamental way, laws and the people who make them will embody a culture and a perspective/ideology (similar the point you made about CRT elsewhere; there is no way to avoid ideology at some level). And what we are talking about is really some degree of taken for granted values that would imply or argue for or demand things like free speech, and the separation of different spheres of society. These are values we can associate with modernity, i.e. modern values. (And not exclusively European values - they are cross cultural; see The Dawn of Everything, or my recent talk).
So subcultures in any society may or may not agree with or resonate with those minimal modern values that are perhaps presupposed by social threefolding and the viability of a multicultural society. And therefore, in some way, we want/need subcultures to actually grow together and invite all beings to grow through and beyond some form of modern values, on their way to postmodern values and beyond. And groups can do this in different ways with different ethnic lineages, etc, but if we are to have a functioning society, we may need some viable coherent pluralism, as opposed to a fractured and polarized pluralism.
I agree with your two main tasks, but also with the caveat that no culture is ever static, and every culture has been shaped by others. So there is a third task - honor and integrate cultures and individuals, AND allow cultures and individuals to grow and change through BOTH self-determination and the interdependent forces of mutual obligations...
Hey Brad - I had a chance to listen to your talk and found it super interesting. There was much food for thought there. Glad to be engaging on these topics - here are some my thoughts on what you shared there, as well as what you shared above.
First off, I feel like there's a tension in what you're sharing between wanting to respect differences, but also wanting folks to get on board with a healthier, more multicultural, and complex framework. You say above:
"Subcultures in any society may or may not agree with or resonate with those minimal modern values that are perhaps presupposed by social threefolding and the viability of a multicultural society. And therefore, in some way, we want/need subcultures to actually grow together and invite all beings to grow through and beyond some form of modern values, on their way to postmodern values and beyond."
I'm not sure how you're squaring those two exactly. It seems like you're saying that on the one hand people might not resonate with the minimal values found in threefolding (freedom, equality, and solidarity), but on the other hand, we need them to grow together through and beyond both modern and post-modern values (of which I'm assuming there are many more values they'd have to resonate with than the above three…). The idea of freedom found in threefolding is that people shouldn't be forced to change their values at all, but should be free to be themselves. It’s hard to imagine that not resonating. Of course, the dominant culture in any society might not like such freedom and might prefer to have their culture, their national-ethnic group, be the only culture, and also the sole determinant of laws (as we find with Israel's controversial 2018 "Jewish nation-state law" which in effect institutionalizes Jewish values in the government and denies any other values), but of course every minority culture in a society will want such freedom, they’ll want to be able to practice and pass on their culture freely. Without this, there will inevitably be violence, so eventually the dominant culture will likely come around…
I hear your concern that it will lead to a "fractured and polarized pluralism." That will indeed be the case, unless we're able to realize the other values of equality and solidarity. Perhaps most important of these two (in terms of obtaining some measure of social cohesion) is the experience of equality. But today this is just a concept - we almost never actually experience it because the realm where we could most strongly experience it - in the making of actual agreements together, in self-governance - isn’t actually open to us. Nonetheless people the world over have reached the point of feeling a need for equality and democracy, for self-governance, but it has to be real. And it would then be through the actual participation in democracy that all the different people in a political community could begin to meet each other and form true social cohesion. (I touch on this in a couple places - my article on children voting and my article on Gandhi). This is how we could form a “viable coherent pluralism” as you describe it.
(As an aside: It's been awhile since I read any of the spiral dynamics work you refer to in your talk, but if I remember that framework correctly, it's a picture of different groups being at different stages or tiers, all moving in the same direction. But there, too, I remember Wilbur saying that you can't ask any group to skip the stages ahead of them and leap to a further tier... the most help you can give is to encourage them to the next step on the journey. Do I remember that correctly?)
The third value, that of solidarity, just means cultivating togetherness, selflessness, love for one another. This can be cultivated especially through our work for one another - in the economic realm. That’s where it can become a real experience in society and not just a concept.
These are quite universal values really, though I imagine some countries would still prefer to form something else, perhaps a religious theocracy, and that should be up to them. In that case, they don’t yet want democracy or cultural freedom strongly enough and they shouldn’t be forced to want those things.
Perhaps most important to this whole question is the fact that people experience culture and ethnicity as a kind of home - it's where many experience meaning most profoundly - and to take them out of that home and into another home (or no home at all) is a quite risky affair. You talked in your presentation about depression and suicide... I think many would agree that the rising rates of depression and suicide are deeply connected to the lack of meaning in people's lives. We’ve been thrown into a world of Netflix and video games, without any shared cultural values and with no real task. Society doesn’t need us, eventually everything will be automated and we’ll have a UBI and we can waste away in front of the screen. But that’s not why we’ve come to the earth, and I think everyone knows that in their heart of hearts. They want to realize themselves, give the gifts that they have to give. And they are needed.
So I think the future is the one you’re describing - one where every human being creates meaning out of themselves - but I would never kick people out of their spiritual homes, the places where they find meaning, because creating it out of yourself is not an easy affair. The easiest example of this, from a progressive perspective, is to imagine a Native American school where they were teaching Native American culture. Imagine that they weren’t teaching any modern Western ideas, but were trying to pass on their spiritual-cultural tradition to their children intact. So a “science” class wouldn’t bring in any evolutionary biology, but instead would bring the children out in the landscape and into a more direct experience of the spirit in nature. I don’t if such schools exists (I once heard of one that started on one of the reservations and rejected federal funding because it had too many strings attached, but I can’t remember where it was). Regardless, though, it’s not hard to imagine. Would you go into such a school and tell them to change their curriculum because it’s too ethnocentric, that they should be offering their children a larger more multi-cultural perspective? And if you did, how would you imagine their own cultural tradition staying intact? (Waldorf schools in different parts of the world actually do a pretty good job of doing this, of teaching the worlds history through story and myth, though they also focus in on the cultures of the children in their care - but people shouldn’t have to even accept something that gentle. They should be able to teach their own culture, pure and untouched, if they want.)
Ultimately, this all connects to one of the basic pictures in your talk - that more complex identities are healthier identities (you give an example of your friend who has a number of cross-cutting identities and so, in that way, is anti-fragile). Is it true though? For millennia, and still today in certain parts of the world, people have had completely unified identities - they were Italian, or Ethiopian, or Chilean through and through. There was no influence yet from other cultures, they had their own stories, foods, dances, traditions, etc. This was, and still is in certain places, healthy - it gives life a certain meaning and creates a certain real direction in one’s work - one works for the community and one knows the meaning of the community. One can find a version of that vitality also in minority groups today who are reclaiming their own spiritual tradition. There is a kind of hunger and deep enthusiasm for what they find. That said, though I think it’s probably important and right for today, I don’t actually think it’s the future.
I think the future is to try and tap into the same spiritual potency that led to the creation of such cultures in the first place. Imagine the power that infused and informed and created all the remarkable aspects of Japanese culture - their architecture and gardens, the carful eye for detail, the exquisite cuisine, the customs, the religious beliefs - and then imagine if we could bring through such new spiritual-cultural impulses today. To consciously develop such spiritual vitality - that’s the task that awaits all of us.
Steiner’s work is really a pure expression of this - his insights into architecture, agriculture, medicine, education, and society - they have that kind of spiritual potency. He consciously recognized the deepest levels of meaning in the world and he created in all of those fields out of those spiritual sources. But it’s also something that all of us can do. But for that we need freedom. We need a healthy education where things come at their right time, so that we can then go through all the stages in their right order and arrive, in adulthood, at the point of taking up our development in our own hands.
Well, I think I’ve said enough for now :) I would be interested in your thoughts on all (or any) of this if you want to share more. Thanks for the discussion and thanks for your work wrestling with all of these (what I think are most important) matters.
Hey Seth,
Yes I mostly agree with all of that, and hope I didn't imply anywhere that anyone should be forced to do anything. But the tensions are real, and not easily resolvable. And we can learn a lot from the past, and from all cultures, hence my notion of the Great Integration, but we do need to keep moving forward together somehow, and ALL cultures do need to keep changing. That is something like a law or deep truth, so the question is how, not if.
I think it is important and helpful to integrate Steiner's insights with more detailed maps like Integral Theory and different developmental frames, and with the now emerging metamodern theory (eg Hanzi Freinacht). We have to keep updating our maps to find our way in this evolving kosmos.
A fuller account of my view can be found in the essay I'll post below. I've read several of your essays/blogs here in the past couple days, and I appreciate you listening to my talk. If you read the essay, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. And I'd be open to scheduling a zoom call if you like. We could dive deeper into some of this if you are interested. No worries if not.
https://integrallife.com/hope-as-process-being-and-becoming-in-the-great-integration/
Hey Brad,
Thanks for passing along the essay. I'll take a look and be back in touch about it. In the meantime I just wanted to touch on what you said above. I completely agree with your point that all cultures need to change, but the key issue is the question of pace. Harm is done both when things come too early and too late, the need is to find the right timing.
This makes sense, for instance, when we think that for things to come in a healthy way, the ground has to be laid for them, the conditions have to be right. This has to do with the proper order, or sequence, of things - you can’t learn calculus until you’ve learned algebra - but it also just has to do more broadly with human development. In almost all cases, you wouldn’t want to try to cram algebra and calculus into the young child, because on other levels the order isn’t right, it doesn’t align with where they are inwardly (it takes years and years for their souls to become ready for abstract thinking, etc, - we can’t rush these things without harming them). And it’s also just an important experience in one’s own life - certain opportunities appear at certain moments and it takes a certain awareness to grab hold of them. If you’re leaning back in yourself and miss the opportunity, then it might never come again, or else only come when you have rightly prepared yourself to recognize and receive it this time.
So, yes, everything is moving forward, and it’s right and healthy to try to see what’s wanting to come out of the future and help prepare its way (the true impulse of progressivism), but it’s also healthy to keep at bay that which is trying to come too soon - so that there’s space for what’s right to unfold (the true impulse of conservatism). Those of us on the left, know the former well, but are less connected to the latter. An obvious example is technology. A parent can give their child a phone or tablet when they’re toddlers and justify it by saying “Well, it’s the world they’re going to have to live in, there’s no point in trying to deny it,” but there is a point in denying it, in holding it back, until the proper time comes. They need to be protected so that they can build up the strength and capacity to work with technology in a potentially more conscious and free way. So I agree that all cultures will eventually move on, that in a few thousand years many, if not all, of the world’s traditions and religions will look quite different, and necessarily so, because human beings will be quite different. But it’s essential that we allow and encourage that evolution to unfold in the healthiest way possible - a kind of balance between holding things back and bringing new things in - otherwise we will have more and more stranded, untethered, unmoored souls, and more and more depression, suicide, and violence. Thanks again for your engagement on this topic, it’s an important one. All the best,
Seth
Yes, brother. So much yes. It is such an inherent tension in the educational process - for each individual and each group, to know right timing. It is relatively simple for children, since there is such a quasi-universal sequence (though even that is not acknowledged in schooling enough). But once we get to adulthood, there is such a spectrum of possibility, from deep dysfunction and pathology to benevolent sage, not to mention non-developmental and non-hierarchical diversity! It is what Hanzi calls the Great Stretching Out - the ever increasing span of where people are at as new structures emerge and coexist with pervious structures, which inevitably causes more confusion and conflict between structures. Also why it is hard to put things out there, to a group or on the internet, knowing that it can and will be interpreted in so many different ways, and most will not be ready for or appreciate it... And all the more reason why it feels good to find our memetic tribes online - to find those who do understand and resonate with our perspective (which our family and local friends may or may not, due in part to the Great Stretching Out...) :-)
Brad
Hey Brad - thanks for your reply. I've got some thoughts on what you shared, but I'd like to watch your talk first, so I'll be back in touch tomorrow. Till then.