And about Rudolph Steiner …
Who knew Rudolph Steiner – I didn’t – before Tin started Waldorf, but since he’s been there it seems that Steiner is all around me – he is speaking about finance, he is speaking about agriculture, he is speaking about education, he is speaking about the spirit, he is speaking about community, he is speaking about compassion, he is speaking about our inner most selves – and he keeps on speaking – the man would be 150 years old today, and yet as one person said in the film clip we watched tonight of The Challenge of Ruldoph Steiner, he was not only ahead of his time, he is ahead of our time.
A four member tag-team of Steiner experts on social finance, biodiversity, education, and Anthroposophy spoke tonight at Tulane about social transformation as conceived by Steiner and its applicability in modernity. Each gave his/her view of Steiner’s three-fold concept of Spiritual/Cultural, Rights/Agreements, and Economics and while they were steeped in the silos of each of their disciplines it was most remarkable about how the three sectors overlapped and interwove and created a whole that connected them to a larger picture.
John Bloom distilled the sectors into Spiritual/Cultural being the principles of freedom, Economics that of brotherhood, sisterhood and mutuality, and Rights/Agreement that of Equality. His perspective was financial and he drew a picture from the three-fold concept of how the Western world has gone too far into its meet my needs mentality and why in awakening to other’s needs our needs are met (here in New Orleans we call this service).
Robert Karp described the three-fold concept via anecdote – Rights/Agreement, look no further than the recent Supreme Court’s decision to allow corporations to fund political campaigns as a right of free speech, which ends up further eroding equality rather than engendering it. Or rather if a patient were admitted to a hospital and doctors drew straws to see who would administer rather than who among them were the most capable – this is Spiritual/Cultural. Perhaps the most poignant example he cited came from his own camp and that is the budget of a farm, which is developed with the consumer and the consumer understands what it takes to run the farm and therefore the price is set between the farmer and the consumer – Economics – meeting one another’s needs. Biodiversity asks the question what does a farm look like? Is it what the industrial world has defined it as – a food factory – or is it a place of reciprocity between farmer, consumer and land?
John Bloom said if we get food right, everything else would fall into place – possibly my favorite take away from the evening.
Perhaps my other favorite take away was from Patrice Maynard who said we must trust human destiny – her message conveyed hope in its reverence for children all the way to our own society.
And Torin Finser told of a dream he had that reminded me of how my mother always recited a nursery rhyme for me when I was young, which went like this:
I see the moon
The moon sees me
God bless the moon
And God bless me.
Only after Tin arrived, I read a version of the poem that went like this:
I see the moon
The moon sees me
The moon sees the boy I hope to be
God bless the moon
And God bless me
And God bless the boy I hope to be
And in those last stanzas reside all that Steiner set out to accomplish when he moved away from trying to united his comrades into a vision of a new world order after WWI and instead began to plant the seed of tomorrow in the children by creating a platform where they (and we) could be all they hope to be.