Four Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Social Future
Culture, Law and Economics
In the present social movement
there is a great deal of talk about social institutions, but very little
talk about social and antisocial human beings. Very little regard is paid
to the “social question” that arises when one considers that
institutions in a community take their social or antisocial stamp from the
people who run them. Socialist thinkers expect to see in the community's
control of the means of production something that will satisfy the demands
of a wide range of people. They take for granted that, under communal
control of the economy, human relations will necessarily assume a social
form as well. They have seen that the economic system along the lines of
private capitalism has led to antisocial conditions. They believe that
when this industrial system has disappeared, the antisocial tendencies
at work within it will also necessarily come to an end.
Undoubtedly,
along with the modern private capitalist form of industrial economy
there have arisen social evils — evils that embrace the widest
range of social life; but is this in any way a proof that they are a
necessary consequence of this industrial system? An industrial system
can, in and of itself, do nothing beyond putting men into life situations
that enable them to produce goods for themselves or for others in a
more or less efficient manner. The modern industrial system has brought
the means of production under the power of individual persons or groups.
The achievements of technology were such that the best use could be
made of them by a concentration of industrial and economic power. So
long as this power is employed in the one field — the production
of goods alone — its social effect is essentially different from
what it is when this power oversteps its bounds and trespasses into
the fields of law or culture. It is this trespassing into the other
fields that, in the course of the last few centuries, has led to the
social evils that the modern social movement is striving to abolish.
He who possesses the means of production acquires economic power
over others. This economic power has resulted in the capitalist allying
himself with the powers of government, whereby he is able to procure
other advantages in society, opposing those who were economically dependent
on him — advantages which, even in a democratically constituted
state, are in practice of a legal nature. This economic domination has
led to a similar monopolization of the cultural life by those who held
economic power.
The simplest
thing would seem to be to get rid of this economic predominance of individuals,
and thereby do away with their dominance in the spheres of rights and
spiritual culture as well. One arrives at this “simplicity”
of social thought when one fails to remember that the combination of
technological and economic activity afforded by modern life necessitates
allowing the most fruitful possible development of individual initiative
and personal talent within the business community. The form production
must take under modern conditions makes this a necessity. The individual
cannot bring his abilities to bear in business if in his work and decision-making
he is tied down to the will of the community. However dazzling is the
thought of the individual producing not for himself but collectively
for society, its justice within certain bounds should not hinder one
from also recognizing the other truth — collectively, society
is incapable of giving birth to economic schemes that can be realized
through individuals in the most desirable way. Really practical thought,
therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping
of economic life that would substitute communal production for private
management of the means of production. Rather, the endeavor should be
to forestall evils that may spring up along with management by individual
initiative and personal talent, without impairing this management itself.
This is possible only if neither the legal relationship among those
engaged in industry, nor that which the spiritual-cultural sphere must
contribute, are influenced by the interests of industrial and economic
life.
It cannot
be said that those who manage the business of economic life can, while
occupied by economic interests, preserve sound judgment on legal affairs
and that, because their experience and work have made them well acquainted
with the requirements of economic life, they will therefore be best
able to settle legal matters that may arise within the workings of the
economy. To hold such an opinion is to overlook the fact that a sphere
of life calls forth interests arising only within that sphere. Out of
the economic sphere one can develop only economic interests. If one
is called out of this sphere to produce legal judgements as well, then
these will merely be economic interests in disguise. Genuine political
interests can only grow upon the field of political life, where the
only consideration will be what are the rights of a matter. And if people
proceed from such considerations to frame legal regulations, then the
law thus made will have an effect upon economic life. It will then be
unnecessary to place restrictions on the individual in respect to acquiring
economic power; for such economic power will only result in his rendering
economic services proportionate to his abilities — not in his
using it to obtain special rights and privileges in social life.
An obvious
objection is that political and legal questions do after all arise in
people's dealing with one another in business, so it is quite impossible
to conceive of them as something distinct from economic life. Theoretically
this is right enough, but it does not necessarily follow that in practice
economic interests should be paramount in determining these legal relations.
The manager who directs a business must necessarily have a legal relationship
to manual workers in the same business; but this does not mean that
he, as a business manager, is to have a say in determining what that
relationship is to be. Yet he will have a say in it, and he will throw
his economic predominance into the scales if economic cooperation and
legal administration are conjoined. Only when laws are made in a field
where business considerations cannot in any way come into question,
and where business cannot gain any power over this legal system, will
the two be able to work together in such a way that our sense of justice
will not be violated, nor business acumen be turned into a curse instead
of a blessing for the whole community.
When the economically powerful are in a position to use that power
to wrest legal privileges for themselves, among the economically weak
will grow a corresponding opposition to these privileges. As soon as
it has become strong enough, such opposition will lead to revolutionary
disturbances. If the existence of a separate political and legal province
makes it impossible for such privileges to arise, then disturbances
of this sort cannot occur. What this special legal province does is
to give constant orderly scope to those forces which, in its absence,
accumulate until at last they vent themselves violently. Whoever wants
to avoid revolutions should learn to establish a social order that shall
accomplish in the steady flow of time what will otherwise try to realize
itself in one historical moment.
It will
be said that the immediate concern of the modern social movement is
not legal relations, but rather the removal of economic inequalities.
One must reply to such an objection that our conscious thoughts are
not always the true expression of the real demands stirring within us.
Our conscious thoughts are the outcome of immediate experience; but
the demands themselves originate in far deeper strata that are not experienced
immediately. And if one aims at bringing about conditions that can satisfy
these demands, one must attempt to penetrate to these deeper strata.
A consideration of the relations that have come about in modern times
between industrial economy and law shows that the legal sphere has become
dependent upon the economic. If one were to try superficially, by means
of a one-sided alteration in the forms of economic life, to abolish
those economic inequalities that the law's dependence on the economy
has brought about, then in a very short while similar inequalities would
inevitably result as long as the new economic order were again allowed
to build up the system of rights out of itself. One will never really
touch what is working its way up through the social movement to the
surface of modern life until one brings about social conditions in which,
alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of politics
and law can be realized and satisfied upon their own independent basis.
It is
in a similar manner, again, that one must approach the question of the
cultural life and its bearings on that of law and the economy. In the
last few centuries the cultural life has been cultivated under conditions
that allowed it to exercise only the smallest independent influence
upon politics or the economy. One of the most important aspects of culture,
education, was shaped by governmental interests. People were trained
and taught according to the requirements of the state. And the power
of the state was reinforced by economic power. If anyone were to develop
his or her human capacities within the existing educational institutions,
this depended directly on his or her economic station in life. Accordingly,
the spiritual forces that were able to find scope within the political
or economic spheres bore the stamp of these economic factors. Free cultural
life had to forego any attempt to make itself useful within the political
state. And it could influence the economic sphere only to the extent
that economics had remained independent of state control. For a vibrant
economy demands that competent people be given full scope; economic
matters cannot be left to just anyone whom circumstances may have left
in control. If, however, the typical socialist program were to be carried
out, and economic life were to be administered on the model of politics
and the law, the cultivation of the free spiritual life would be forced
to withdraw from the public sector altogether. However, a cultural life
that has to develop apart from civil and economic realities loses touch
with real life. It is forced to draw its substance from sources not
vitally linked to those realities. Over the course of time the cultural
life makes of this substance a sort of animated abstraction that runs
alongside real events without having any concrete effect upon them.
In this way, two different currents arise within cultural life. One
of them draws its waters from political rights and economics, and is
occupied with their daily requirements, trying to devise systems to
meet these requirements — without, however, penetrating to the
needs of our spiritual nature. All it does is devise external systems
and harness men into them, ignoring what their inner nature has to say
about it. The other current of cultural life proceeds from the inner
striving for knowledge and from ideals of the will. These it shapes
to suit our inner nature. However, such knowledge is derived from contemplation:
it is not the precipitate of practical experience. These ideals have
arisen from concepts of what is true and good and beautiful, but they
do not have the strength to shape the conduct of life. Consider what
concepts, what religious ideals, what artistic interests, form the inner
life of the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, or the government official,
outside and apart from his daily practical life; and then consider what
ideas are contained in those activities that find expression in his
bookkeeping, or for which he is trained by the education that prepared
him for his profession. A gulf lies between these two currents of cultural
life. The gulf has grown all the wider in recent years because the kind
of thinking that is quite justified in natural science has become the
measure of our relationship to reality as a whole. This way of thinking
seeks to understand the lawfulness of phenomena that lie beyond human
activity and human influence, so that the human being is a mere spectator
of what he comprehends in a scheme of natural law. And although he sets
these laws of nature into motion in technology, he himself does no more
than allow the forces that lie outside his own being and nature to be
active. The knowledge he employs in this kind of activity has a character
that is quite different from his own nature. It reveals to him nothing
of what lies in cosmic processes with which human nature is interwoven.
For such knowledge as this he needs a world view that unites both the
human world and the world outside him.
Anthroposophy
strives for such knowledge. While fully recognizing all that scientific
thinking means for the progress of modern humanity, anthroposophy sees
that the scientific method framed for the study of nature is able to
convey only that which comprehends the outer human being. It also recognizes
the essential nature of the religious world views, but is aware that
in the modern age these concepts of the world have become an internal
concern of the soul, and not something applied in any way to the transformation
of external life, which runs on separately alongside.
In order
to arrive at its insights, spiritual science makes demands to which
people are still little inclined, because in the last few centuries
they have become used to carrying on their outer and inner lives as
two separate and distinct existences. Thus the incredulity that meets
every endeavor to bring spiritual insight to bear upon social questions.
People remember past attempts that were born of a spirit estranged from
life. When there is any talk of such things, they recall St. Simon,
Fourier and others. The opinion is justified insofar as such ideas stem
not from living experience, but rather from an artificial thought-construct.
Thus they conclude that spiritual thinking is generally unable to produce
ideas that can be realized in practical life. From this general theory
come the various views that in their modern form are all more or less
attributable to Marx. Those who hold them have no use for ideas as active
agents in bringing about satisfactory social conditions. Rather, they
maintain that the evolution of economic realities is tending inevitably
toward a goal from which such conditions will result. They are inclined
to let practical life more or less take its own course because in actual
practice ideas are powerless. They have lost faith in the strength of
spiritual life. They do not believe that there can be any kind of spiritual
life able to overcome the remoteness and unreality that has characterized
it during the last few centuries.
It is
a kind of spiritual life such as this, nevertheless, that is the goal
of anthroposophy. The sources it would draw from are the sources of
reality itself. Those forces that hold sway in our innermost being are
the same forces that are at work in external reality. Scientific thinking
cannot penetrate down to these forces when it merely elaborates natural
law intellectually out of external experience. Yet the world views that
are founded on a more religious basis are no longer in touch with these
forces either. They accept the traditions that have been handed down
without penetrating to their fountainhead in the depths of human nature.
The spiritual science of anthroposophy, however, seeks to penetrate
to this fountainhead. It develops epistemological methods that lead
down into those regions of our inner nature where the processes external
to us find their continuation within human nature itself. The insights
of spiritual science represent a reality actually experienced within
our inmost self. These insights shape themselves into ideas that are
not mere mental constructs, but rather something saturated with the
forces of reality. Hence such ideas are able to carry within them the
force of reality when they offer themselves as guides to social action.
One can well understand that, at first, a spiritual science such as
this should meet with mistrust. Such mistrust will not last when people
come to recognize the essential difference that exists between this
spiritual science and modern natural science, which is assumed today
to be the only kind of science possible. If one can struggle through
to a recognition of the difference, then one will cease to believe that
one must avoid social ideas when one is intent upon the practical work
of shaping social reality. One will begin to see, instead, that practical
social ideas can be had only from a spiritual life that can find its
way to the roots of human nature. One will see clearly that in modern
times social events have fallen into disorder because people have tried
to master them with thoughts from which reality constantly struggled
free.
Spiritual
insight that penetrates to the essence of human-nature finds there motives
for action that are immediately good in the ethical sense as well. The
impulse toward evil arises in us only because in our thoughts and feelings
we silence the depths of our own nature. Accordingly, social ideas that
are arrived at through the sort of spiritual concepts indicated here
must, by their very nature, he ethical ideas as well. Since they are
drawn not from thought alone, but from life, they possess the strength
to take hold of the will and to live on in action. In true spiritual
insight, social thought and ethical thought become one. And the life
that grows out of such spiritual insight is intimately linked with every
form of activity in human life — even in our practical dealings
with the most insignificant matters. Thus as a consequence of social
awareness, ethical impulse and practical conduct become so closely interwoven
that they form a unity.
This kind
of spirituality can thrive, however, only when its growth is completely
independent of all authority except that derived directly from cultural
life itself. Political and legal measures for the nurturance of the
spirit sap the strength of cultural life, while a cultural life that
is left entirely to its own inherent interests and impulses will
strengthen every aspect of social life. It is frequently objected that
humanity would need to be completely transformed before one could found
social behavior upon ethical impulses. Such an objection does not take
into account that human ethical impulses wither away if they are not
allowed to arise within a free cultural life, but are instead forced
to take the particular turn that the political-legal structure of society
finds necessary for carrying on work in the spheres it has previously
mapped out. A person brought up and educated within a free cultural
life will certainly, through his very initiative, bring along into his
calling much of the stamp of his or her own personality. Such a person
will not allow himself to be fitted into the social works like a cog
into a machine. In the end, however, what he brings into it will not
disturb the harmony of the whole, but rather increase it. What goes
on in each particular part of the communal life will be the outcome
of what lives in the spirits of the people at work there.
People
whose souls breathe the atmosphere created by a spirit such as this
will vitalize the institutions needed for practical economic purposes
in such a way that social needs, too, will be satisfied. Institutions
devised to satisfy these social needs will never work so long as people
feel their inner nature to be out of harmony with their outward
occupation. For institutions of themselves cannot work socially. To
work socially requires socially attuned human beings working within
an ordered legal system created by a living interest in this legal
system, and with an economic life that produces in the most efficient
fashion the goods required for actual needs.
If the life of culture is a free one, evolved only from those impulses
that reside within itself, then legal institutions will thrive to the
degree that people are educated intelligently in the ordering of their
legal relations and rights; the basis of this intelligence must be a
living experience of the spirit. Then economic life will be fruitful
as well to the degree that cultivation of the spirit has developed
new capacities within us.
Every
institution that has arisen within communal life had its origin in the
will that shaped it; the life of the spirit has contributed to its growth.
Only when life becomes complicated, as it has under modern technical
methods of production, does the will that dwells in thought lose touch
with social reality. The latter then pursues its own course mechanically.
We withdraw in spirit, and seek in some remote corner the spiritual
substance needed to satisfy our souls.
It is
this mechanical course of events, over which the individual will had
no control, that gave rise to conditions which the modern social movement
aims at changing. It is because the spirit that is at work within the
legal sphere and the economy is no longer one through which the individual
spiritual life can flow, that the individual sees himself in a social
order which gives him, as an individual, no legal or economic scope
for self-development.
People
who do not see through this will always object to viewing the social
organism as consisting of three systems, each requiring its own distinct
basis — cultural life, political institutions, and the economy.
They will protest that such a differentiation will destroy the necessary
unity of communal life. To this one must reply that right now this unity
is destroying itself in the effort to maintain itself intact. Legal
institutions based upon economic power actually work to undermine that
economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to
be a foreign body within the social organism. And when the spirit that
reigns within legal and economic life tries to regulate the activity
of the organism as a whole, it condemns the living spirit (which works
its way up from the depths of each individual soul) to powerlessness
in the face of practical life. If, however, the legal system grows up
on independent ground out of the consciousness of rights, and if the
will of the individual dwelling in the spirit is developed in a free
cultural life, then the legal system, strength of spirit and economic
activity work together as a unity. They will be able to do so when they
can develop, each according to its own proper nature, in distinct fields
of life. It is just in separation that they will turn to unity; when
an artificial unity is imposed, they become estranged.
Many socialist
thinkers will thus dismiss such a view: “It is impossible to bring
about satisfactory conditions through this organic formation of society.
It can be done only through a suitable economic organization.”
They overlook the fact that those who work in their economic organization
are endowed with wills. If one tells them this, they will smile, for
they regard it as self-evident. Yet their thoughts are busy constructing
a social edifice in which this “self-evident fact” is ignored.
Their economic organization is to be controlled by a communal will.
However, this must after all be the result of the individual wills of
the people united in the organization. These individual wills can never
take effect if the communal will is derived entirely from the idea of
economic organization. Individual wills can expand unfettered if,
alongside the economic sphere, there is a legal sphere where the standard
is set, not by any economic point of view, but only by the consciousness
of rights, and if, alongside both the economic and legal spheres, a
free cultural life can find place, following only the impulses of the
spirit. Then we shall not have a social order running like clockwork,
in which individual wills could never find a lasting place. Then human
beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent and to
bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances.
Under the free cultural life the individual will shall become social.
When legal institutions are self-subsisting, these socially attuned
individual wills shall yield a communal will that works justly. The
individual wills, socially oriented and organized by the independent
legal system, will exert themselves within the economic system, producing
and distributing goods as social needs demand.
Most people
today still lack faith in the possibility of establishing a social order
based on individual wills. They have no faith in it because such a faith
cannot come from a cultural life that has developed in dependence on
the state and the economy. The kind of spirit that does not develop
in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself but rather out of an
external organization simply does not know what are the spirit's potentials.
It looks about for something to guide and manage it, not knowing how
the spirit guides and manages itself if it can but draw its strength
from its own sources. It would like to have a board of management for
the spirit — a branch of the economic and legal organizations
— totally disregarding the fact that the economy and the legal
system can thrive only when permeated with the spirit that is self-subsistent.
It is not good will that is needed in order to transform the social
order; what is needed is a courage to oppose this lack of faith in the
spirit's power. A truly spiritual view can inspire this courage, for
such a spiritual view feels able to bring forth ideas that serve not
only the inner needs of the soul, but also the needs of outer, practical
life. The will to enter the depths of the spirit can become a will so
strong as to suffuse every deed that one performs.
When one
speaks of a spiritual view having its roots in life itself, many people
take one to mean the sum total of those instincts that become a refuge
when one travels along the familiar paths of life and holds every intervention
from, spiritual spheres to be a piece of eccentric idealism. The spiritual
view intended here, however, must not be confused with that abstract
spirituality incapable of extending its interests to practical
life, nor with that spiritual tendency which actually denies the spirit
flatly when it considers the guidelines of practical life. Both these
views ignore the way in which the spirit rules in the facts of external
life, and therefore feel no urgent need to penetrate to its foundations.
Yet only such a sense of urgency brings forth that knowledge which sees
the “social question” in its true light. The experiments now
being made to resolve this issue yield such unsatisfactory results because
many people have not yet become able to see the true nature of the
question. They see this question arise in economic spheres, and they
look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they
will find the solution in economic transformation. They fail to recognize
that these transformations can only come about through forces that are
released from within human nature itself in the revival of independent
cultural and legal life.
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