CHAPTER II
MEETING
SOCIAL NEEDS
Our
technically-based industrial economy, together with modern
capitalism, has dictated the form in which the social problem
presents itself today. Acting like a force of nature, it
has given our social life its peculiar internal structure
and ways of working. While men's attention was absorbed by what
technical industry and capitalism brought with them, it
became diverted from other spheres of the social life. Yet
these also need direction by conscious human intelligence
if the body social is to be healthy.
I
may, perhaps, be allowed at this point to draw a comparison
that will help in picturing what health in the body social
implies. But keep in mind that this is a comparison only.
The
human organism, that most complex of all natural
organisms, can be described as consisting of three
systems, working side by side. To a certain extent each
functions separately and independently of the others. One
of these consists of the life of the nerves and senses. It may
be named, after the part where it is more or less centered, the
head organism. Second, comes what we need to recognize as
another branch if we really want to understand the human
organism, the rhythmic system. This includes the breathing and
the circulation of the blood, everything that finds expression
in rhythmic processes in the human organism. The third must be
recognized as consisting of all those organs that have to
do with the actual transformation of matter — the
metabolic process. These three systems comprise everything
that, duly coordinated, keeps the whole human complex in
healthy working order.
I
have already attempted to give a brief description of this
threefold character of the natural human organism in my
book, Riddles of the Soul. The approach tallies with
what scientific research is on its way to telling us on this
subject. It seems clear that biology, physiology and
natural science in general, as it deals with man, are
rapidly tending to a point of view that will show that
what keeps the complex human organism in working order is just
this comparatively separate functioning of its three
separate systems. It follows that there is no such thing as
absolute centralization in the human organism. Besides, each of
these systems has its own special and distinct relation to the
outer world; the head system through the senses, the rhythmic
or circulatory system through the breathing, the metabolic
system through the organs of nourishment and the organs of
movement.
People may say that science can afford to wait until views such
as these gain recognition all in good time, but the body social
cannot afford to wait, either for right views or right
practices. An understanding, even if only an instinctive
one, of what the body social needs, is essential here. It
cannot just be confined to a handful of experts, since every
human soul has a share in the working of the body social. Sane
thinking, feeling and willing as to the form to be given it can
only be developed when one recognizes the fact that to thrive,
the social organism, like the natural one, needs to be
threefold.
There have been many attempts lately to trace analogies between
the organic structure of natural creatures and the structure of
human society. What is said here has no connection with such
approaches. Its object is simply to train human thought and
feeling — using the human body as an object lesson
— to a sense of what organic life requires. Such a
perceptive sense can then be applied to the body social,
which has its own laws.
The
present crisis in human history demands the development of
certain faculties of perception in every single human being.
The first rudiments of these must be started by the schools and
educational systems. The unconscious force in the soul
that gave the body social its forms in the past will from now
on cease to be active. Every individual is going to need to
have these above-mentioned faculties of social perception. From
now on the individual must be trained to have a healthy sense
of how the forces of the body social have to work in order for
it to live.
One
hears much talk today about “socialization” as the
thing that this age needs. This socialization, however, will
prove to be no true cure, but rather, a quack remedy and
possibly even a fatal one, unless there dawns in men's hearts
and souls at least an instinctive perception of the necessity
for the three-folding of the body social. If it is to function
in a healthy way it must develop three organic members.
One
of these three members is the economic life. It is the
best one for us to begin considering here, because it has,
through modern industry and modern capitalism, worked its
way into the whole structure of human society to the
subordination of everything else.
This economic life needs to form an independent, organic branch
by itself within the body social. It must be relatively as
independent as the nerves-and-senses system is within the
human body. It is concerned with everything in the nature of
the production of commodities, circulation of commodities
and consumption of commodities.
Next comes the life of public rights (das Leben des
öffentlichen Rechtes) — political life in the proper
sense. This must be recognized as forming a second branch
of the body social. To this branch belongs what one might term
the true life of the state — taking Rights State in the
sense in which the word was formerly applied to a community
possessing common rights.
Economic life is concerned with all that a man needs from
nature, and what he himself produces from nature, i.e.,
commodities, and their circulation and consumption. The second
branch of the body social can have no other concern than with
what is involved in purely human relations. It deals with what
comes up from the deep recesses of the inner life and affects
man's relations towards man. It is essential that one should
clearly recognize the difference between the system of public
rights and the economic system. The former can only deal, on an
inner and purely human basis, with man-to-man relations.
The economic system is concerned solely with the production,
circulation and consumption of commodities. People must acquire
an instinctive sense that enables them to distinguish between
these two in life. This is essential so that in practice they
will be kept as distinct as the work of the lungs is distinct,
in the body, from what goes on in the nerves and sensory
life.
The
third division, alongside of the other two and equally
independent, includes all those things in the social
organism that are connected with the mental and spiritual life.
The term, “spiritual culture,” or,
“everything that is connected with mental and spiritual
life,” hardly describes it accurately. Perhaps one might
express it better as, “everything that rests on the
natural endowments, both spiritual and physical, of each single
human being.”
The
first system, the economic one, has to do with everything that
must exist in order that man may regulate his material
relationships to the world around him. The second, with
whatever must exist in the body social because of the
relationship of man to man. The third relates to all that
springs from the personal individuality of each human being and
that must be incorporated, from out of the personal
individuality, in the body social.
Just as it is true that our social life has taken its imprint
from modern industry and capitalism, so is it equally necessary
that the injury thus unavoidably done to the body social should
be healed. This can be done by bringing man, and the life of
men with one another, into a correct relation to these
three members of social life.
Economic life has recently, simply of its own accord, taken on
quite new forms. Through one-sided activity it has asserted
undue power and weight in human life. Meanwhile the other two
branches have, up to now, not been in a position to work
themselves into the social organism in a similarly
matter-of-course way and to become incorporated with it
according to their own proper laws. For them it is necessary
that man step in, with the perception of which I have spoken,
and set to work to evolve the social order. To attempt to solve
the social problem in the way meant here will leave not one
single individual without his task (working at the spot where
he happens to be).
The
first division of the body social, the economic life, is based
primarily on conditions of nature. It is the same as with the
individual man, the extent and scope of whose education
and development rest on his individual qualities of mind
and body. This nature-basis puts a unique stamp on economic
life and, through it, on the whole social order. This
nature-basis is inescapably there, and no methods of social
organization, no manner of socializing measures can
affect it. One must accept it as the groundwork of life for the
body social. Every attempt at giving men's life in groups an
economic form, must take it into account.
This is most obvious in extreme cases. Take for instance those
parts of the earth where the banana affords man an easily
accessible form of food. Here the question will be one of the
amount and kind of labor to be expended to bring the banana
from its place of origin to a convenient spot and deliver it
ready for consumption. This will enter all considerations of
men's life together. If one compares the human labor that
must be exerted to make the banana ready for human consumption
with that, for instance, which must be exerted in Central
Europe to get wheat ready for consumption, the former is at
least three hundred times less.
Of
course that is an extreme case, but similar differences as to
the necessary amounts of labor in relation to the nature-basis
exist in the other branches of production represented in the
various social communities of Europe. While they are not so
marked, still they exist. So it is a basic factor in the body
economic that the amount of labor-power that man has to put
into the economic process is proportionate to the nature-basis
on which he has to work. Take just for example the wheat yields
in various countries of the world: in Germany, in districts of
average fertility, the returns on wheat represent about a
sevenfold to eightfold crop on the seed sown, in Chile it is
twelve-fold, in Northern Mexico seventeen-fold, in Peru,
twenty-fold. (Jentsch, Volkswirtschaftslehre, p.
64).
The
whole of this living complex of processes that begin with man's
relation to nature and continue down to the point where
nature's products are ready for consumption — these
processes and these alone comprise, for a healthy social
organism, its economic system. It occupies there somewhat the
same place as that taken in the human organism by the
head-system, which conditions the individual's abilities.
But the head-system is dependent on the lung-and-heart system,
and in the same way the economic system is dependent on
the services of human labor. The head, however, cannot by
itself regulate the breathing, and neither should the system of
human labor-power be regulated by the forces that operate
within the economic life itself.
It
is through his interests that man is engaged in economic life,
and the foundation of these is in the needs of his soul and
spirit. In what way can a social organism most satisfactorily
incorporate men's interests so that on the one hand the
individual man finds in this social organism the best possible
means of satisfying his personal interests, while at the
same time he is economically employed to the best advantage?
This is the question that has to be solved in a practical way
in the institutions of the body economic. It can only be solved
if these individual interests of men are given really free
scope, and if at the same time there exist the will and the
possibility of doing what is necessary to satisfy them.
These interests arise in a region outside the limits of the
economic system. They develop as man's own inner and
physical being unfolds. It is the business of economic life to
make arrangements for their satisfaction. These
arrangements, however, can only be concerned with the
production and exchange of commodities — of goods which
acquire their value from men's wants. The value of a commodity
comes from the person consuming it. Because its value comes
from the consumer, a commodity fills quite a different
position in the social organism from other things that
have a value for man as part of that organism. If one studies
— without preconceptions — the whole circle
of economic life, the production, circulation and consumption
of commodities, one will see at once the difference in
essential character between the relation that arises when one
man makes commodities for another, and the human relation that
must have its foundation on a rights relationship.
One
will not stop with merely observing this difference. One will
follow it up in a practical way and insist that economic life
and the life of rights should be kept completely separate
within the body social. Institutions for the production and
exchange of commodities make men develop forms of
activity not immediately productive of the best impulses
for their mutual relations in rights. Man turns to his fellow
man in the economic sphere because it suits their reciprocal
interests. Radically different is the link between man and man
in the rights life.
One
might perhaps think that the distinction between the two
branches is adequately recognized if the institutions of the
economic life also make provisions for the rights involved in
the mutual relations of the people engaged in it, but
such an idea has no root in reality. The relation in
rights that necessarily exists between a man and his fellows
can only be felt and lived outside the economic sphere, on
totally different soil, not inside it. So there must be, in the
healthy social organism, another system of life alongside and
independent of the economic life, where human rights can
develop and find suitable administration.
The
rights life is, strictly speaking, the political sphere, the
true sphere of the state. If the interests men have to serve in
their economic life are carried over into the legislation
and administration of the rights state, then these rights will
merely be an expression of economic interests. At the same
time, if the rights state takes on the management of economic
affairs, it is no longer fitted to rule men's life of rights.
All that it does and establishes will be forced to serve man's
need for commodities, and as a result, be diverted from those
impulses that make for the life of rights.
That is why a healthy social organism requires the independent
political life of the state as a second branch alongside the
economic sphere. In the economic complex, men will be guided by
the forces of economic life itself in the production and
interchange of commodities. In the state, institutions
will arise where dealings between individuals and groups
will be settled on lines that satisfy men's sense of right.
This demand for a complete separation of the rights state from
the economic sphere is based on life as it actually is. Those
who seek to combine the two are not proceeding realistically.
Of course people engaged in economic life possess the sense of
right, but they will only be able to legislate and administrate
from a sense of right alone (without mixing economic interests
in) when they come to consider questions of right independently
in a rights state. Such a state takes no part in economic
life.
This rights state, with its legislature and administration,
will be built up on those human impulses which nowadays go by
the name “democratic.” The legislative and
administrative bodies in the economic domain will arise
out of the forces of economic life. Transactions between
the executive heads of the two spheres will be carried on much
as those between governments of sovereign states are handled
today. They will influence each other in a healthy way that is
impossible when their functions are intermingled.
So
just as, on the one hand, the economic life is subjected to the
conditions of the nature-basis, it is, on the other hand,
dependent on those relations in right that the state
establishes between individuals and groups engaged in economic
work. In this way the boundaries are designated for the proper
and possible activities of economic life.
In
the present social organism as developed in the course of
historical evolution, economic life occupies an unduly
large place. It sets upon the whole social movement the
peculiar stamp it has acquired from the machine age and
modern capitalism. It has come to include more than it should
include in any healthy society. In present-day economic
trading, where only commodities should be dealt in, we find
also human labor and human rights. At present one can trade,
within the economic sphere that rests on the division of labor,
not only commodities for commodities but commodities for human
labor — and for human rights as well.
By
“commodity” I mean everything that, through human
activity, has acquired the form in which it is finally
brought by man to its place of destination for consumption.
Economists may perhaps find this definition objectionable or
inadequate, but it may be serviceable towards an
understanding of what properly belongs to economic life.
[Author's Note: For the purposes of life, what is wanted
in an explanation is not definitions drawn from theory
but ideas that give a picture of a real, live process. As used
in this sense, “commodity” denotes something that
plays an actual part in man's life and experience. Any other
concept of it either omits or adds to this and so fails to
tally exactly with what really and truly goes on in
life.]
When anyone acquires a plot of land by purchase, one must
regard it as an exchange of the land for commodities for
which the purchase money stands as the proxy. The plot of land,
however, does not act as a commodity in the economic life. It
holds its position in the body social through the right
the owner has to use it. There is an essential difference
between this right-of-use and the relation of a producer
to the commodity he produces.
From the very nature of the producer's relation to his product,
it cannot enter the totally different, man-to-man relation
created by somebody's having been granted the sole right to use
a certain piece of land. Other men are obliged to live on this
land, or the owner sets them to work on it for their living.
Thus he brings them into a state of dependence upon himself. On
the other hand, the fact of mutually exchanging genuine
commodities that one produces or consumes, does not establish a
dependence that affects the man-to-man relation in the
same kind of way.
To
an unprejudiced mind it is clear that a fact of actual life
such as this, must, in a healthy society, find due expression
in its social institutions. So long as there is simply an
interchange of commodities for commodities in economic
life, the value of these is determined independently of
relations-of-right. As soon as commodities are interchanged for
rights, the rights relation is itself affected.
The
exchange in itself is not the question here. Such an
exchange is inevitable in the modern social organism,
which rests on division of labor. The point is that through
this interchange of rights and commodities rights themselves
are turned into a commodity when the source of right lies
within the economic life. The only way of preventing this is by
having two sets of institutions in the body social. The sole
object of the one is to conduct commodities most
efficiently along its circuit. The other regulates those rights
involved in commodity exchange — rights that arise
between individuals engaged in producing, trading and
consuming. These are not distinct in their nature from any
other rights, because they deal with the relationship from man
to man. They fall in the same category as any other injury or
benefit caused by some action or negligence in which the
exchange of commodities is not involved.
In
the life of the individual the effects of the rights
establishment merge with those of purely economic activity. In
the healthy social organism they must come from two different
directions. What matters in the economic sphere is the
proper education and training of the leading personalities, as
well as their competence and experience. In the rights
organization laws and administration will give expression to
the general sense of what is right in men's dealings with each
other.
The
economic organization will assist the formation of
Associations among people who, from their occupation or
as consumers, have the same interests or similar requirements.
This network of Associations, working together, will build up
the whole fabric of the industrial economy. The economic
organization will grow up on an associative basis and out of
the links between the Associations. Their work will be
purely economic in character, and will be carried out on the
basis of rights provided by the rights organization.
These Associations, being able to get their economic interests
recognized in the representative and administrative bodies of
the economic organization, will not feel any need to force
themselves into the legislature or the executive branch of the
rights state — as for instance a Landowners' League, a
Manufacturers' Party or an economically oriented
Socialist Party. They will not try to effect in the rights
state what they have no power to achieve within the limits of
the economic life.
Then again, if the rights state takes no part whatever in any
branch of industrial economy, the institutions it establishes
will only be such as spring from a sense of right among its
members. Although those sitting in its representative body may,
and of course will, be the same people who are taking an active
part in economic life, nevertheless, owing to the division of
the economic and rights life, the health of the body social
will not be undermined. Economic life will not be able to
exert such an influence on the rights life as can happen when
the state itself organizes branches of economic life. In
that case, representatives of the economic world sit as
political legislators, making laws to suit economic
interests.
A
person in public life today usually turns his attention to
secondary considerations. This is because his habits of
thought lead him to regard the body social as uniform in
structure. As such, however, there is no form of suffrage he
can devise that will fit it. The economic interests and the
impulses of human rights will come into conflict in the
legislature, no matter how it is elected. This conflict will
affect social life in a way that is bound to bring severe
shocks to the whole organism of society.
The
first and indispensable thing to be worked for in public life
today must be the complete and thorough separation of economic
life from the rights organization. As the separation becomes
gradually established and people grow into it, something
else will happen. The two organizations will, in the
course of this process, each discover its own most appropriate
method of selecting its legislators and administration.
Where the old conditions still exist, these can be taken as the
basis from which to work towards the new separation of
functions. Where the old order has already melted away or is in
process of dissolution, individuals and small groups of
people must find the initiative to start reconstructing
along the new lines of growth. To try in twenty-four hours to
bring about a transformation in public life is recognized by
thoughtful socialists themselves as midsummer madness.
They look to gradual, opportune changes to bring about what
they regard as social welfare. The light of facts, however,
must make it plain to any impartial observer that a reasoning
will and purpose are needed to make a new social order. These
are imperatively demanded by the forces at work in
mankind's historical evolution.
Those who regard such remarks as “impractical” are
the very people whose way of thinking helped to bring about the
present state of affairs.
There must be a reversal of the movement in leading circles
that has already brought various departments of economic life
— the postal and railway services, etc. — into
state ownership. There must be a movement towards eliminating
all economic activity from the domain of politics and state
organization. Thinkers whose aim, as they believe, is the
welfare of society, take the movement towards state control
that was started by the previously governing circles, and push
it to its logical extreme. They propose to socialize all
institutions of economic life insofar as they are means
of production.
A
healthy course of development, however, will give economic life
its independence. At the same time it will give the political
state a system of right through which it can bring its
influence to bear on the body economic. This influence will be
such that the individual shall not feel that his function
within the body social violates his sense of right.
When one considers the work that a man does for the body
social by means of his physical labor, it is plain that
the above remarks are grounded in the actual life of men.
The position that labor has come to occupy in the social order
under the capitalistic form of economy is such that it is
purchased by the employer (from the employed) as a commodity.
An exchange is effected between money (as representing
commodities) and labor. In reality no such exchange can take
place. It only appears to do so. [Author's note. It is
quite possible in life for a transaction not only to be
interpreted un-realistically but also to take place
unrealistically. Money and labor are not interchangeable
values, but only money and the products of labor. Accordingly,
if I give money for labor, I am doing something that is unreal.
I am making a sham transaction, for in reality I can only give
money for the product of labor.] What really happens is that
the employer receives in return from the worker commodities
that cannot exist unless the latter devotes his labor-power to
creating them. The worker receives one part, the employer
the other part of the value of the commodity so created. The
production of the commodity is the result of a cooperation
between employer and employed. The product of their joint
action is what first passes into the circuit of economic
life.
For
the product to come into existence there must be a relation in
rights between worker and enterpriser. But the capitalist type
of economy is able to convert this rights relation into one
determined by the employer's superiority in economic power over
the employed. In a healthy social order it will be
obvious that labor cannot be paid for, for one cannot set
an economic value upon it comparable to the value of a
commodity. The commodity produced by this labor first acquires
an economic value by comparison with other commodities. The
kind of work a man must do for the maintenance of the
body social, how he does it, and the amount, must be settled
according to his abilities and the conditions of a decent human
existence. This is only possible when such questions are
settled by the political state, quite independently of the
provisions and regulations made in the economic life.
This definition of labor as being independent of the economic
life establishes a new basis of values comparable to the one
already established by the conditions of nature. The
value of one commodity as measured by another is increased by
the fact that its raw material is more difficult to procure.
Similarly the value of a commodity must be made dependent on
the kind and amount of labor that the rights system allows to
be expended on its production. [Authors Note. This
relationship of labor to the rights system will have to be
accepted by the Associations as a given premise in economic
life. What this does, however, is to make the economic system
dependent on man instead of man being dependent on the system
of economics.]
So
the economic life has its conditions fixed on two sides. There
is the nature-basis, which man must take as he finds it. On the
other side there will be the rights-basis, which should be
created on the free and independent ground of the political
state. This activity will be detached from economic life and
come up out of the common sense of right.
It
is obvious that in such a social organism the standard of
living (economic well-being) will rise and fall with the amount
of labor that the sense of right, felt by all in common,
expends on it, but this must be so in a healthy society. The
subordination of the general economic prosperity to the
common sense of right is the only thing that can prevent man
from being so used up and consumed by economic life that his
existence no longer seems to him worthy of a human being. It is
this sense of an existence unworthy of human beings that is
really at the bottom of social convulsions.
If
the general standard of economic well-being should become too
much lowered on the rights side, there is a way of preventing
this. It is the same as with the nature-basis, where technical
means can be used to make a less productive soil more
productive. So, if prosperity declines too much, the methods
and amount of work can be changed. Only it should be realized
that such changes must not be a direct consequence of processes
in the economic life. They should be the outcome of insight
arrived at on the free ground of rights, independent of
economic life.
There is, however, still another element that enters into
everything contributed towards the organization of social
life, whether by the economic side or the rights-consciousness.
This comes from a third source, the personal abilities of the
individual. It includes everything from the loftiest
achievements of the mind to the products of bodily
activity. A healthy social organism must necessarily take up
and assimilate what it gets from this source differently than
what comes to it from the life of the state or all that is
expressed in the interchange of commodities.
The
only healthy way this element can be absorbed into social life
is by depending upon the receptivity of people, and on the
impulses that go with personal ability. If the deeds
resulting from such human faculties are subjected to the
artificial influence of the economic sphere and rights system
they will lose their true foundation. The foundation for
this kind of activity lies in that force in man that develops
through the human performance itself. A free, spontaneous
receptivity on the part of the public is the only sound and
wholesome channel for the reception of such creative work. If
its acceptance depends on the economic life or on the state,
there is a check on such independent public reaction.
There is only one possible line of healthy evolution for the
spiritual-cultural life of the body social. What it does
must come out of its own impulses, and those served by it must
be connected with it by close ties of sympathy and
understanding. Parenthetically, we must point out the need of
remembering by what countless, fine threads this spiritual life
is connected with the evolution of all other human
potentialities.
Here we have sketched the necessary conditions for a sound
evolution of the spiritual life of the body social.
People do not see this clearly because they are used to seeing
the spiritual life fused and confused with the state system.
This fusing process has been going on for several hundred years
and people have become used to it. They talk about
“freedom of knowledge” and “freedom of
education,” but consider it a matter of course that
the political state should have control of this
“free” knowledge and “free” education.
They neither see nor feel how, in this way, the state is
bringing all spiritual life into a dependence on state
requirements.
The
notion is that the state provides the educational posts and the
spiritual life then unfolds “freely” under the
hands of the people who fill these state posts. People come to
forget the intimate connection between the innermost
nature of man and the content of the spiritual life growing up
within him. They do not realize that it is impossible for the
growth of this spiritual content to be really free if it owes
its place in the body social to any other impulses than those
that proceed from the spiritual life itself.
Science has received its whole mold and form from its being
under state management in recent centuries, and with it all
that part of the spiritual life that it affects. This fusion
with the state has affected its content, its inner substance,
as well. Of course, the results of mathematics or physics
cannot be directly influenced by the state, but have not
history and other subjects of general culture come to be an
obedient mirror of state requirements?
The
peculiar stamp that our mental conceptions, which are
predominantly scientific, have acquired in this way is
just what makes them a mere ideology as far as the workers are
concerned. They see how the character of men's thoughts rises
out of the requirements of a state life that suits the
interests of the ruling classes. They saw a reflection of
interests and the war of interests. So they developed a feeling
that all spiritual life was ideology, a mirror image of the
economic order.
Such a view works havoc with men's spiritual life, but the
blight will cease when men can feel that in the spiritual
sphere there rules a reality of its own. It is one that
transcends outer material life and carries its own inner
substance in itself. No such sense of a spiritual reality can
possibly arise, however, unless the spiritual life is free
within the body social to expand and govern [Translator's
Note: References in this book to the governing of
the spiritual-cultural sphere, or to the spiritual-cultural
organization are most definitely not to be understood as
anything like the “government” or
“organizing” of personal cultural activity, as a
present-day reader might think. The author's concept of an
organization of this branch of the body social simply
means a group of representatives of the free institutions of
the spiritual sphere, such as universities, schools, museums,
religious bodies, etc. etc., with delegated authority to handle
problems arising in this sphere and to deal with the other two
branches of the Threefold Social Order.] itself according
to its own impulses.
An
independent position in society is an absolute necessity for
art, science and a philosophy of life — along with all
that goes with them. For in spiritual life everything is
interrelated. State requirements cannot directly
influence the substance of mathematics, for instance, or
physics, but state requirements do influence the way such
things are applied and the estimation put on them, whenever
some branches of spiritual life are under state control.
It
is quite a different thing when the teacher in the lowest grade
in school follows the state line than when he takes his line
from a spiritual life that rests on its own, independent
footing. Here again the Social Democrats have simply taken over
a habit of thought from the ruling classes when they have the
ideal of incorporating the spiritual life into a social
structure based on a system of industrial economy. If
they accomplished this it would simply be a further step
along the road that has led to the present depreciation of
spiritual life.
The
socialist maxim, “Religion is a man's private
affair,” expressed what is a right perception, but
in a one-sided way. In a healthy society all spiritual life
must in this sense be a private affair as far as the state and
economic life are concerned. But their idea was not to give
religion a better chance to develop, rather that religion
should not be fostered by the body social because it is not
anything it needs.
When teachers, artists and others have no direct connection
with any legislature or government they will find they have an
altogether different influence. They will be able to awaken an
understanding for what they are creating. Also, things will be
different when they are appealing to people who are not simply
under compulsion to labor, but for whom an independent,
autonomous political state also insures the right to leisure.
Leisure awakens the mind to an appreciation of spiritual
values.
At
this point somebody will probably tell you, out of
“practical experience,” that if the state made
definite provision for people to have leisure hours, and at the
same time school attendance were left to their own common
sense, they would simply spend all their leisure in bars
and taverns and would relapse into illiteracy. Let such
pessimists wait and see what will happen when the world is no
longer under their influence. Too often, their approach is
inspired by a feeling of how they themselves like to spend
their leisure hours, and memory of what they had to do to get a
little “education.” Naturally, they take no
account of the free spiritual life and its power to enkindle.
They only know the spiritual life in bondage, and it has
no power to light any sparks in them.
When the body-spiritual of society is administering itself,
both the state and the economic system will get from it that
steady inflow from the spiritual life of which they are in
need. Also, when the economic and spiritual bodies can
cooperate in freedom it will be found that practical training
for the economic life will, for the first time, be able to
develop its full possibilities. People will come, suitably
trained, into the economic field, and put life into everything
they meet there, with the strength they derive from the
liberated treasures of the spiritual, and people with economic
experience will find their way into the spiritual organization
and help fructify what needs fructifying there.
Within the political state, the effect of spiritual abilities
being left free, will be the growth of sane and sound views
— which are needed in this field. As a result of such
abilities, the man who works with his hands will find a place
in the body social that will give him satisfaction. He will get
a sense of the inter-connection of his own labor with those
organizing forces that he can trace to the development of
individual human talents. The political state will give him a
basis on which he can establish the rights that secure to him
his share of the returns from the commodities he produces. He
will also freely allot to the spiritual property, from which he
benefits, a sufficient portion to keep it productive.
There will be a possibility for producers in the
spiritual-cultural field to live on the proceeds of their work.
What anyone chooses to do in the matter of such work will be
nobody's affair but his own. For any service he may render to
the body social, he will be able to count on willing recompense
from people to whom spiritual goods are a necessity. Anyone who
cannot find what he requires through the recompense he gets
under the spiritual organization, will have to go over to one
of the other fields, either the political state or the economic
life.
Into the economic life there flow the technical ideas which
originate in the spiritual life. Their origin is in that
realm even though they come directly from people belonging to
the state sphere or to the economic world. For all those ideas
and organizing capacities that enrich the life of the state and
of industrial economy originate in the spiritual life. The
recompense for everything supplied to these fields from the
spiritual will either be raised voluntarily by the
beneficiaries, or else be regulated by the rights that are
developed in the political sphere.
What the political state itself needs for its own maintenance
will be raised by a system of taxation. This will be the
outcome of a harmonious coordination of the claims of economic
life and of the rights-consciousness.
It
must be reiterated that in a healthy society there must,
alongside the political and the economic, be the
spiritual sphere functioning independently on its own
footing. The whole trend of the evolutionary force of
modern mankind is in the direction of this three-folding of the
social organism. As long as the social life could be guided in
all its essentials by the instinctive forces at work in the
mass of mankind, there was no urgent tendency towards this
definite membering into three functions. Basically, there
were always these three, but in a still dim, and dully
conscious, social life they worked together as one. Our modern
age demands of man that he place himself consciously into the
social organism. This new social consciousness, however, must
be orientated from three sides if it is to shape men's life and
conduct in a healthy way. It is this threefold line of
evolution that modern humanity is striving towards in the
soul's unconscious depths. What finds an outlet in the social
movement is simply a dulled reflection of this striving.
At
the end of the Eighteenth Century, under different
circumstances from ours today, there went up a cry from
the hidden depths of human nature for a re-formation of social
relations. One could hear, like a motto of this reorganization,
the three words, “Fraternity, Equality,
Liberty.” While normal human feelings for the
realities cannot fail to sympathize with all that these
three words imply, there were keen thinkers during the
Nineteenth Century who took pains to point out the
impossibility of realizing these three ideas in any homogeneous
and uniform society. It seemed clear to them that they must
contradict one another if actually carried into practice.
For instance, it was cleverly demonstrated that if the impulse
towards equality were realized there would be no possible room
for the freedom that is inherent in every human being.
These three ideals appear contradictory until one perceives the
necessity of establishing a threefold order of society. Then
their real meaning for social life first becomes apparent. The
three divisions must not be artificially dovetailed and
centralized under some theoretical scheme of unity. They must
be one living reality. Each of the three branches of the body
social must center in itself. The unity of the whole social
organism will first come about through the workings of the
three, side by side and in combination. For in actual life it
is the apparent contradictions that make up a unity.
One
will come to comprehend what the life of the body social is
when one perceives fully the part played by these three
principles of brotherhood, equality and freedom in a real,
workable form of society. Then it will be recognized that
men's cooperation in economic life must rest on the brotherhood
that springs up out of the Associations.
The
second system is that of common rights, where one is
dealing with purely human relations between one person
and another. Here one must strive to realize the idea of
equality.
In
the spiritual field, which stands in comparative independence
in the body social, it is the idea of freedom that needs to be
realized.
Seen in this way, these three ideals reveal their value for
real existence. They can find realization neither in a
chaotic social life nor in a social state constructed on an
abstract, centralized scheme, but only in the threefold working
of a healthy social organism. There, each of the three branches
can derive its strength from one of these ideal impulses, and
all three branches will work fruitfully in
conjunction.
Those people at the end of the Eighteenth Century who first
demanded recognition of these three ideas, freedom,
equality, brotherhood, already had a dim sense of where
the forces of human evolution were tending. So also did
those who took up the cry again later on. They still believed
in the One-fold State, where these ideas involve a
contradiction. They nevertheless pinned their faith to this
contradiction because in their subconscious depths there was
this striving towards the Threefold Order of Society, in which
their triad can achieve a higher unity.
To
lay hold of these evolutionary forces that are working towards
the Threefold Order, and to make of them a conscious social
will and purpose, is what is demanded of us at the present
time. It is demanded in unmistakable language by the hard
facts of the social situation.
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