Threefolding

Below is a good quick overview* of Rudolf Steiner's social ideas and their results.  
(-- Edward)

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Steiner distinguished three domains of society:

• the economic realm;
• the political realm (government, law, and human rights);
• the cultural realm (education, science, religion, art, and the media).

Steiner held that it is socially destructive when any one of these three realms dominates the other two. For example:

• theocracy means the cultural realm (in the form of a religious impulse) dominates the political and economic realms;
• Communism and state socialism mean the political realm dominates the economic and cultural realms; and
• traditional forms of capitalism mean the economic realm dominates the political and cultural realms.  

Steiner suggested that the three domains of society would only become mutually corrective and function together in a healthy way when each was granted sufficient independence.^[1][5][6] This has become known as "social threefolding".  It is furthered by liberty in the cultural realm, equality and democracy in the political realm, and freely self-organizing cooperative businesses in the economic realm.

Actual progress toward cooperative economic life is exemplified by the Rudolf Steiner Foundation's involvement in the U.S. (and international) movement in support of legislation permitting the creation of B-corporations, a new, socially responsible kind of business model. The B-corporation will be further discussed below. 

Independence of the cultural and political realms from each other

Examples: A government should not be able to control culture; i.e., how people think, learn, or worship. A particular religion or ideology should not control the levers of the State. Steiner held that pluralism and freedom were the ideal for education and cultural life.¹ Concerning children, Steiner held that all families, not just those with economic means, should be enabled to choose freely among and set up a wide variety of independent, non-government schools from kindergarten through high school. Steiner was a supporter of educational freedom, but was flexible, and understood that a few legal restrictions on schools (such as health and safety laws), provided they were kept to an absolute minimum, would be necessary and justified. Neither the content nor the form of education should be administered or controlled by the State.⁷

Independence of the cultural and economic realms from each other

Examples: The fact that places of worship do not make the ability to enter and participate depend on the ability to pay, and that libraries and some museums are open to all free of charge, is in tune with Steiner’s notion of a separation between the cultural and economic realms. In the same spirit, Steiner held that all families, not just those with the economic means, should have freedom of choice in education and access to independent, non-government schools for their children.⁷

Independence of the political and economic realms from each other

Examples: People and businesses should be prevented from buying politicians and laws. A politician shouldn’t be able to parlay his political position into riches earned by doing favors for businessmen. Slavery is unjust, because it takes something political, a person’s inalienable rights, and absorbs them into the economic process of buying and selling. Steiner said, "In the old days, there were slaves. The entire man was sold as commodity... Today, capitalism is the power through which still a remnant of the human being—his labor power—is stamped with the character of a commodity." ⁶  Yet Steiner held that the solution that state socialism gives to this problem only makes it worse.

Cooperative economic life

Steiner advocated cooperative forms of capitalism, or what might today be called stakeholder capitalism. He thought that conventional shareholder capitalism and state socialism, though in different ways, tend to absorb the State and human rights into the economic process and transform laws into mere commodities.¹¹ Steiner rejected state socialism because of that, but also because he believed it reduces the vitality of the economic process.¹²

Yet Steiner disagrees with the kind of libertarian view that holds that the State and the economy are kept apart when there is absolute economic competition. According to Steiner's view, under absolute competition, the most dominant economic forces tend to corrupt and take over the State,¹³ in that respect merging State and economy. Second, the State tends to fight back counter-productively under such circumstances by increasingly taking over the economy and merging with it, in a mostly doomed attempt to ameliorate the sense of injustice that emerges when special economic interests take over the State.¹⁴

By contrast, Steiner held that uncoerced, freely self-organizing¹⁵ forms of cooperative economic life, in a society where there is freedom of speech, of culture, and of religion,¹⁶ will 1) make State intervention in the economy less necessary or called for,¹⁷ and 2) will tend to permit economic interests of a broader, more public-spirited sort to play a greater role in relations extending from the economy to the State. Those two changes would keep State and economy apart more than could absolute economic competition in which economic special interests corrupt the State and make it too often resemble a mere appendage of the economy.¹³ In Steiner's view, the latter corruption leads in turn to a pendulum swing in the opposite direction: government forces, sometimes with the best of intentions, seek to turn the economy increasingly into a mere appendage of the State. State and economy thus merge through an endless iteration of pendulum swings from one to the other, increasingly becoming corrupt appendages of each other.

Steiner held that State and economy, given increased separateness through a self-organizing and voluntarily more cooperative economic life, can increasingly check, balance, and correct each other for the sake of continual human progress. In Steiner’s view, the place of the State, vis-a-vis the self-organizing, cooperative economy, is not to own the economy or run it, but to regulate/deregulate it, enforce laws, and protect human rights as determined by the state's open democratic process.¹⁸ Steiner emphasized that none of these proposals would be successful unless the cultural sphere of society maintained and increased its own freedom and autonomy vis-a-vis economic and State power.¹⁹ Nothing would work without spiritual, cultural, and educational freedom.

A new kind of corporation: the B-corp or benefit corp

An example of Steiner’s students working toward cooperative capitalism is the RSF Social Finance organization. Among other things, RSF Social Finance has been a supporter of B Lab,²⁰ a company that is helping drive the national movement in the U.S. for legislation permitting the creation of B-corporations.²¹ Such legislation has been passed so far in a dozen or more U.S. states, and is being worked on in many more.

The B-corporation, or benefit corporation, is a new corporate form designed for for-profit entities that want to consider the good of the society and the environment in addition to profit in their decision making process. Benefit corporations are legally protected from lawsuits charging a failure to consider only the maximization of shareholder value. The additional accountability provisions found in a benefit corporation require the director and officers to consider the impact of their decisions not only on shareholders but also on society and the environment. The benefit corporation seeks to merge the idealism of non-profits with the economic productivity of the profit motive, and is intended to further "stakeholder capitalism” – capitalism concerned with a broader set of interests than are pursued by the traditional shareholder-value-maximizing corporation.

When Ben & Jerrys sold their socially responsible ice cream company, the law on maximizing shareholder value left them little other choice than to sell to whoever came along as the highest bidder.²² By contrast, the benefit corporation's legal form, if Ben and Jerry's could have adopted it at the time, would have permitted and required them to consider a broader set of concerns as well as shareholder value.

Economic support for culture

A central idea in social threefolding is that the economic sphere should donate funds to support cultural and educational institutions that are independent of the State. As businesses become profitable through the exercise of creativity and inspiration, and a society's culture is a key source of its creativity and inspiration, returning a portion of the profits made by business to independent cultural initiatives can act as a kind of seed money to stimulate further creative growth.

In this view, taxes sometimes serve as an unhealthy form of forced donation which artificially redirect businesses' profits. Since taxes are controlled by the state, cultural initiatives supported by taxes readily fall under government control, rather than retaining their independence.²³ Steiner believed in educational freedom and choice, and one of his ideals was that the economic sector might eventually create scholarship funds that would permit all families to choose freely from (and set up) a wide variety of independent, non-government schools for their children.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Rudolf Steiner held that the French Revolution's slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, expressed in an unconscious way the distinct needs of the three social spheres at the present time:^[1][6]

• Liberty in cultural life (education, science, art, religion, media),
• Equality in a democratic political life, and
• Uncoerced solidarity in economic life.

According to Steiner, these values, each one applied to its proper social realm, would tend to keep the cultural, economic and political realms from merging unjustly, and allow these realms and their respective values to check, balance and correct one another. The result would be a society-wide separation of powers. In the past, according to Steiner, lack of autonomy had tended to make each sphere merge in a domineering or servile way with the others. Steiner points toward social conditions where domination by any of the three spheres is increasingly reduced, so that theocracy, state socialism, and traditional forms of capitalism might all be gradually transcended.

The threefold nature of the human being

Steiner taught that threefold social order arises from the threefold nature of the human being:  1) nerves/senses system centered in the head, 2) rhythmic heart-lungs system centered in the chest, and 3) metabolic/limb system centered in the viscera. Though centered differently, these three systems are not spatially divided.  They are different but intermingling forms of activity, and are present everywhere within each other and in the body. For a fuller explanation of the threefoldness of the human organism, one might read relevant parts of Steiner's Riddles of the Soul.  Steiner spent decades developing an extremely rich image of the spiritual and physical threefold human being.

A reform process

For Steiner, social threefolding was not a social recipe or blueprint. It could not be "implemented" like some utopian program in a day, a decade, or even a century. It was a complex open process that began thousands of years ago and that he thought was likely to continue for thousands more.

References, Notes, and Some Relevant Works

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*I distilled the above overview from the September 24, 2013 version of an article (of which I wrote about 90%) titled "Social Threefolding" at Wikipedia. For a fuller explanation, one can read Toward Social Renewal, Steiner's first work devoted to questions about social order.

Eurythmeum

The above is a view of Steiner's Eurythmeum, in Dornach, Switzerland.  Where or when before has a group of steps been made to appear as the confluence of two streams flowing from opposite directions?  The outermost step (which actually is about level with the ground and, from our point of view, forms a sort of ‘2’ shape that snakes around its brother steps) streams from the left side of the building and appears to sweep underneath all the others, which flow from the right.  Steps, as usually designed, have a monolithic unity about them and are frequently either a graceful or clumsy assemblage of inert blocks, plus ornamentation; whereas here steps image forth the interpenetration of opposites so that in some sense mind or spirit overcomes matter, which left to itself decrees the mutual impenetrability of things.

The steps, moreover, seem to overflow generously and liquidly from the building, and form a sort of analog of two welcoming and supporting hands, one of which cradles the other so that both can then extend themselves with visible loving care to people entering the building, who in effect walk up the gentle fingers.  However I do not wish to insist on a manual metaphor.  What seems essential here is a liquid, welcoming, self-sacrificing gesture.

Even more essential is that the forms of these steps, by seeming to the inner eye to take shape out of a liquid matrix, visually suggest their (the forms’) gradual differentiation out of an originally undifferentiated oneness.  These forms thus subtly depict for us their own process of emergence into being, their mysterious transition from potential to actual; their form allows them to work as a threshold of transition between those two regions.

And thus these steps lead us toward moments of birth or creation, experiences of which are the only thing that can teach us what words like ‘sacred,’ ‘divine,’ and ‘god’ mean when put their truest usages.  This is not intended as some kind of soaring rhetoric.  Either ‘creation’ means nothing at all, or it means the emergence of something that in some sense is truly new during the moments of transition from potentiality to actuality.  And that which is truly new, to the extent it is so, has specific characteristics that have often been ascribed to the ‘sacred’ or to the ‘divine,’ by Christian thinkers as much as by Zen monks, by Aristotle as well as by history’s mystics.  To what characteristics do I refer? 

The new, while it is coming into being and not yet fully present, must, in some sense, or to some degree, be giving birth to itself. To the extent it is new, it has no true precedents, no prior causes that fully explain it.  Somewhat like God as described by some Christian theologians, or like the First Cause of Aristotle, the new thus seems to have a hand in its own process of creation.  That is why when we participate thoroughly enough in the creative process, we get the feeling of seeing to the very bottom of our existence: the First Cause is not at some distant dark remove.  We begin to participate directly and consciously in the living core of the ultimate cause. 

If we really experience how there is no hidden distant cause that provides ‘the explanation’ for the creative process, or that is a precedent for what is emerging in that process, we experience a kind of Zen moment, when appearance becomes one with reality, when in a sense all is made visible, when that which presents itself to us is utterly self-contained and presents all that it contains.  This intimation of a kind of divine immediacy in the new is fairly alien from everyday awareness, which is concerned mostly with already-formed ideas rather than with the process of thinking, and with material things rather than with the immaterial processes out of which all matter, I would argue, was gradually born.  To feel ourselves at the core or foundation of matter and of ideas, we must experience, or somehow recreate, the process of foundation:  we must create, re-create, co-create.  Steps like those above are a distinct aid in this effort.  And the apparent emergence of form out of a liquid or quasi-liquid matrix is a central characteristic of Steiner’s fields of architectural transformation with their interpenetrating opposites.

Escape from Jargon

Systems of thought sometimes form fixed, almost sacralized terminologies that paralyze rethinking. But Rudolf Steiner had ways of avoiding such jargon, keeping his use of language alive, and preventing people from turning his work into a closed system. One of his preventive methods was to make the meanings of many words vary depending on the context. Thus only by diving into the space of relations between words can one think what Steiner is saying at any particular point.  In Steiner thinking thus often becomes more independent of language and words than is the case with other authors. Words start to function as cross-sections of a thinking process that in itself is inherently in movement and never quite confinable within words.

When one works hard enough with Steiner's thinking at its best (and here I'm not referring to Steiner's five "basic" books, as essential as they are), one often finds that through it, one or another clearly non-physical reality bursts upon one's spirit in a quite non-abstract way.  One spiritual reality might come upon one somewhat as does the blush that bursts upon the face of an embarrassed child; another spiritual reality seems like a sword suddenly sliding free of a close-fitting scabbard; yet another like the sun emerging from behind a cloud over a beach; still another manifests within oneself like a small, non-physical motor spinning within itself at what seems ten-thousand revolutions per second so incredibly smoothly it only emits the quietest hum; and so on.  The spiritual world that manifests through some of Steiner's thinking is qualitatively as rich and real as nature, and manifests as a non-physically concrete process.

True, an expression like "non-physically concrete" is today generally felt to be something like a "circular square," that is, an oxymoron, a non-sensical expression.  But that is part of why Steiner, at his best, represents something new in the history of thought: he demonstrates, experientially through a new kind of thinking, that "non-physically concrete" is not an oxymoron -- that spirit is not merely some grey abstract quasi-real epiphenomenon of the electro-chemical processes of the brain, but is, rather, at least as real, alive, and qualitatively rich as the physical world -- but in a non-physical way.

And just as exposure to Nature's elements after a while can make one feel tired all over, raw and chafed by wind, burned by sun, etc., so also if one engages in a certain amount and intensity of thinking through of the right passages in Steiner's work, one does not feel afterward as though one has merely been thinking in the ordinary abstract sense.  Rather it is as if the skin of one's non-physical being or "body" had been rubbed raw by exposure to the spiritual elements in a spiritual world. Steiner's thinking at its most powerful is a discovery by Western mind of concrete spirit.  It turns out the spirit is real, it does exist, and there is a real spiritual world filled with real non-physical beings.

Of course, if a student is really determined, anything can be turned into a dead jargon, even those passages where Steiner bodies forth subtle new beauties of perception and imagination.

An artist in the realm of thinking, Steiner frequently saw things in ways no one had ever quite seen them before. Some of his books and lectures are more revealing of that brilliance than others, so beware of first impressions.  One might fail to notice the man's genius, because he sometimes clothed his new insights in one or another pre-existing garb.  But what he dresses up in that old garb can be remarkable.

At times he sounds as though his belief in science's applicability to the spiritual world is unjustifiably strong, and too influenced by the late 19th century's naive optimism that science could one day know everything with absolute precision.  But don't be fooled.  Steiner turns out to be way beyond the 19th century's scientific naivete.

In some future blog post I'll try to develop the above themes further.