Spiritual and Social Changes in the Development of Humanity

GA 196 — 9 January 1920, Dornach

First Lecture

From the reflections that were made here before my departure, and even from the, I would like to say, basic text of the public lectures, it can be seen that the science of initiation is, so to speak, “read” from the meaning of human developmental history, how one must intervene, absolutely must intervene in outer life, in all that is to be known and undertaken in outer life. If we are not able to fully absorb ourselves in this truth today, then we are asleep to the real demands of the time. This sleep with regard to the real demands of the time is indeed the case with most people of the present. We must be clear about the fact that the present poses questions to humanity that cannot be answered otherwise than from the science of initiation. It is not merely a matter of the fact that a Science of Initiation has always existed in the evolution of humanity, that at all times there have been initiates, as it were, into the events and the forces of existence. the point is that there are also such initiates today into the reasons for events and into the forces of existence; but only very few people have a proper idea of how this matter stands in more detail. And actually, people of the present would not want that at all. They actually shrink back from what can be called the necessity of the intervention of initiated science into the consciousness of the time. One can only get an idea of the seriousness of the situation by observing the differentiation of this matter throughout the civilized world. Because things are quite different in the East, they are quite different in the West. And anyone today who believes that they can get by with absolute judgments that are supposed to apply to everything is not living in reality, but is actually living in an abstract world. But it is necessary that things be looked at again and again from different points of view, so that at least some people may be impelled to realize the seriousness of the times.

If we first look at the West, preferably at the world of the English-speaking population, then today public opinion and what flows from public opinion for external events, for events within this English-speaking population is not merely dependent on what - I want to express myself quite decidedly today - the uninitiated dream and hold up as ideals in life. Particularly in the English-speaking population, there is a huge contrast between what appears in public consciousness as ideas and what those who are truly initiated into the events of world history mean behind the scenes of world history.

For if we take the general consciousness as it expresses itself in these parts of the civilized world, in the best endeavors, in the best public publications, we can say that there is a kind of ideal of a certain humanity, of humanity working towards a certain humanity, towards uniting human endeavors under the aspect of humanity, of the establishment of institutions that place themselves in the service of humanity. We want to disregard all the murky, lying waters that abound; we want to see what is best in public life that comes from the uninitiated. This is a certain striving to bring people together from the point of view of humanity. Behind this external striving stands the knowledge of the initiates, the knowledge of the leading initiates. And without the public knowing this, without the public having the opportunity to gain sufficient knowledge of the facts, the judgments and the guiding forces of certain initiated circles flow into public opinion and into the course of events that depends on it, into external action.

Here and there some society or other may arise with fine programs and beautiful ideals. People may be dripping with idealism. But they live with it without knowing it, not only in what they talk about, but there are ways and means of allowing all these things to be penetrated by what one wants to penetrate from a certain side, from the side of the initiates. And so it came about that in the last third of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century – we will stop at these things for the time being and not go back further – well-meaning people who were uninitiated but dreamed of all kinds of beautiful ideals joined together to in societies, but that behind this hustle and bustle are initiates, those initiates who in the eighties - as I said, we don't want to go back further - of the 19th century spoke of the fact that a world war had to come, which above all had to give the southern and eastern European states a completely different face.

If you are able to follow what has been taught and spoken within the circles of initiates in this field, then you know that the things that have poured over the civilized world in the last five years as terrible, dreadful things have been predicted with great certainty. All these things were no secret to the initiates of the English-speaking population, and the following discrepancy runs through all the discussions: on the one hand, beautiful exoteric ideals, the ideal of humanity with the real belief in this ideal of humanity in the most diverse forms on the part of the uninitiated uninitiated; on the other hand, the doctrine, the conscious, strictly held doctrine that everything that is Romanesque, everything that is Central European culture, must disappear from modern civilization, and that what the culture of the English-speaking population is must predominate and achieve world domination.

When these things are said now, they carry much more weight than if they had been said twenty years ago, for the simple reason that twenty years ago one could say to the people who said it: Well, you hear the grass growing. Today one can point out that a large part of what has been said within the circles of the initiated has actually been realized.

I speak as cautiously as possible so as not to deviate in any way from the presentation of the purely factual. But this presentation of the purely factual is something that is extremely uncomfortable for the majority of people in the present day. They would like to cast it off, they do not want to let it approach them. In the present time, there is something so very soul-satisfying about cultivating nationalism in this or that way, about speaking of the League of Nations, about the re-establishment of ancient sacred national institutions, and so on. The fact that we are currently in the midst of a terrible human crisis is something that people today absolutely do not want to know.

Now, with a few words, we have pointed out the discrepancy between what the uninitiated in the West know and what, unbeknownst to them, is throbbing in their decisions. One can only really know how one is integrated as a human being into what is happening if one makes an effort to get to know what is there in the world, if one does not let oneself be driven and pushed, but if one tries to find ways and means that really make freedom of will possible.

And if we look towards the East: throughout the whole of the East there is also this dichotomy between the initiated and the uninitiated. What do the uninitiated say? — These uninitiated people in the East speak in a way similar to Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath Tagore is a wonderful idealist of the East, a person who has extraordinarily far-reaching ideals. Everything he expresses outwardly is beautiful. But everything that comes from Tagore is the speech of an uninitiated person. Those who are initiated in the Orient speak differently, or rather, according to the old custom of the Orient: they do not speak at all. They have other ways of bringing what they actually want into effect, into social effect. They want to ensure that world domination is not sought from any particular side, because they are clear about it – they believe they are clear about it – that if there is still any kind of domination on earth, it can only be that of English-American humanity. But they do not want that. Therefore, they actually want to make civilization disappear from the earth. They are, after all, very familiar with the spiritual world and are convinced that humanity will be better off if it withdraws from subsequent earthly incarnations. They therefore want to work to ensure that people avoid the following incarnations. For these initiates of the Orient, the results of Leninism will have nothing frightening about them, because these initiates of the Orient say to themselves: If these institutions of Leninism spread more and more over the earth, it is the surest way to destroy earthly civilization. But this will be to the advantage of precisely those people who, through their previous incarnation, have provided themselves with the opportunity to continue living without the earth.

When such things are spoken of to Europeans, they consider them to be paradoxical. Within the circles of Oriental initiates, these things are spoken of in the same way that a European speaks without understanding of the fact that pea soup tastes different from rice soup; for them, these are realities that need not lie outside the realm of everyday discussion. If we consider the state of the present-day civilized world and really want to understand it, we must not forget that these things, from East and West, have an effect on our present civilization. And in the present time, one can only work for human progress with a complete sense of these influences on the course of human evolution. The outer life as it presents itself, is it an imprint of what people believe exoterically, what people think, who allow themselves to be controlled only by the science of the uninitiated?

For anyone who seriously wants to study this question, I recommend simply choosing a period of eight days in May or June of the year 1914 and reading newspaper articles and books from May or June 1914, and ask himself how much spirit of reality he finds in them, that is, how much knowledge he finds that what sprouted within civilized humanity in August then broke out in this civilized humanity. The uninitiated had never dreamed of such things! Nor do the uninitiated today dream of what is actually going on. But the events of external life are not a reflection of the knowledge of the uninitiated. There is a great discrepancy between what people think and what really happens in life. This discrepancy should be brought home to oneself and the question should be answered appropriately: How much do the uninitiated really know today about life, about what dominates life?

People talk about life. They create theories and ideals and programs, but without knowing life. And when something arises that is shaped out of life, people do not recognize it, they consider it to be a theory or an absurdity or something of the sort. The influences of the West and the East have a completely different meaning for life. This different meaning plays a blatant role in our lives for those who can observe such things. If what is considered theory, program, or social belief in the West were to rule life, nothing would come of it, absolutely nothing. That there is a Western civilization, that Western life can develop institutions at all, does not stem from the fact that Western life has such ideas as Spencer or Darwin or others, more socially minded people have; because in reality nothing can be done with all these exoteric theories and views. That life goes on, that life does not stand still, is due solely to the fact that old traditional instincts live in the English-speaking population and that life is guided by these instincts, not by theories. The theories are only a decoration, through which one speaks fine words about life. What governs life are the instincts that are driven from the unconscious of the soul to the surface. This is something that must be observed and recognized in all seriousness.

And if we go to the East, let us start this East at the Rhine, because very soon life from the Rhine eastwards will become more and more similar to the East. Let us take a look at what is present in the East. First consider it historically: through Germany, through Russia, even through the Near East. If you look at it historically in Germany, you will find something extraordinarily strange. You will find that these Germans had minds like Goethe, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, like Herder, but that in reality they know nothing about it, that they have had such minds. Within Germany, civilization was the property of a small intellectual aristocracy. This civilization never took root in the broader circles. Goethe remained an unknown figure to broader German circles, even after 1862. I say 1862 because before that, it was very difficult to find Goethe's works in Germany. They were not yet free, and the Cottas made sure that they could not be easily found. Since then they have been free to print. They are read, but they have never penetrated into the real spiritual life of something like a German nation. Therefore, it already begins with the Germans having an instinctive insecurity to the highest degree. Those intensely intervening spiritual powers, which radiate from a Herder, a Goethe, a Fichte, these certain life instincts are confronted by an insecurity of instinct that can be called in the highest degree such, an insecurity of instinct for the reason that in these areas the instincts have not remained conservative. In the West they have remained more conservative. Here they have not remained conservative, but they have not been renewed either, they have not been imbued with what the spiritual substance could have given them.

This is even more noticeable in the actual European East. Just think of the role played by the so-called Orthodox religion in this European East, how it has influenced public institutions, how it has lived an external life and how it has meant nothing, absolutely nothing, to souls. The preservation of this Eastern Orthodoxy, which has long since exhausted its content, means that human souls have been pushed into the uncertainty of life. Anyone who has met Russians in Western Europe was, of course, deeply touched by the peculiar relationship that these people had, on the one hand, to the general human condition and, on the other, to this Orthodox religion. Like souls who fled from the Orthodox religion many centuries ago, who still wore the trappings and memories of this Orthodox religion and who believed that this Orthodox religion could still be something for them, so these people, who could not even imagine how much they had fled from this Orthodox religion, appear to one. This is what characterizes the Russian soul. And so the uncertainty of instinct, of not being inwardly held by instincts, has been poured out on the European East. The peculiarly soft nature that has been poured out on the Russian people is ultimately connected to this uncertainty of instinct.

The whole of Asian humanity can become prey to the European conquerors today, or in the next few decades, because those who are initiated there do not care at all that the general humanity will become prey to the conquerors. For the members of this general humanity will all the more likely acquire a taste for withdrawing from earthly life and leaving the earth for the next incarnation.

We are caught up in these forces. And today it only makes sense to talk about life if one's words are imbued with the awareness that it is precisely the case in life today that one must assume that those forces must be released from human souls that do not go in one direction or the other, but that go towards a real renewal of science and initiation. Therefore, it must be pointed out again and again how the modern human being must steer a course between extreme intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

Our life passes in this conflict between an ever more and more intensifying and overwhelming intellectualism and an emotionalism that seeks the impulses of existence by plunging into the wildest, most animalistic drives of human life. Intellectualism is that aspect of spiritual life that has developed out of what has grown since the 15th century. But this intellectual life is shadowy, this intellectual life is thin, this intellectual life is full of empty phrases. Because this intellectual life is thin and shadowy, the forces that work in this intellectual life are determined not by the truly spiritual, but by the instincts, the drives, the animal in humanity. Today, humanity does not have the strength to use its shadowy intellectual ideas to impel the instincts and thereby spiritualize them. And so, in every moment of his life, the modern man is fundamentally divided with regard to his soul.

Just suppose you are judgmental of your fellow human beings. In that case, you are being intellectualistic. Whenever a person today criticizes his fellow human beings in the present, he becomes intellectualistic. If he is to work together with them in a social community, he becomes emotional; then he becomes so that he lets himself be controlled by animal instincts. Everything that we seek in our life's work, we gradually immerse in the animalistic-instinctive; everything that we seek in our life's judgments, even if it extends to our fellow human beings, we immerse in the intellectualistic. People of the present are not at all aware of this dichotomy in their souls. They do not even notice how they are quite different when they judge their fellow human beings, and then when they are supposed to act together with their fellow human beings.

But the intellectual life is going overboard. The intellectual life strives beyond all realities. The intellectual life is one that, as such, does not really attach any particular importance to earthly conditions. With the intellectual life, it is the case that one works out beautiful moral principles in the midst of a social order in which people are servants, in which they are enslaved. I have mentioned this here several times in the past. Today, I would also like to remind you once again of the inquiry that was launched in England in the mid-19th century into the conditions of coal mine workers, which revealed, among many other problems, that children as young as nine, 11, and 13 were sent down the coal shafts before sunrise were sent down into the coal shafts before sunrise every week, and then were brought up after sunset, so that the poor children never saw sunlight except on Sundays, and so had to develop underground, under conditions that I will spare you the description of; because there too, strange things would be told. But with the coals that were brought to light in this way, people then entertained themselves in mirrored rooms about charity, about universal love of one's fellow man without distinction of race, nation, class, and so on.

This is the extreme of intellectual life. Nowhere do the doors to reality open. One floats with one's intellect beyond humanity. A spirit of reality is only that which, in everything one thinks, knows how what one thinks is connected with what is happening in the world outside. It is the task of spiritual science to awaken this sense of reality in humanity again. It is from such a background that what I recently said in Basel must be publicly repeated more often today: over the centuries, the religious denominations have established a monopoly on everything that can be said about soul and spirit (spirit was abolished in the year 869, after all). People who researched nature externally were not allowed to seek the spirit in nature. And it must be said that, from this point of view, the extremely clever Jesuits, for example, have created the most perfect picture of a world view; when natural scientists become naturalists, there is nothing of spirit in their natural science! If someone takes what a Jesuit writes about nature seriously, then of course he becomes a materialist under the present-day spirit of the age. Today one must distinguish between what is theoretically correct and what is really essential. Theoretically correct is that the Jesuits advocate a spiritual world view. What is really essential is that the Jesuits spread materialism! — It was theoretically correct that Newton, in addition to his mechanistic world view, always doffed his hat when he uttered the word “God”. What is really essential is that the mechanistic materialism of a later time emerged from Newton's mechanistic world view. For it is not what one means theoretically that is decisive, but what lies in the laws of reality. And the intellectualistic world view never provides laws of the world. This intellectualistic world view ultimately leads to complete Luciferianism. It actually Luciferianizes the world.

Alongside this intellectualism, we have emotionalism in the present day, life from the instincts, from the animalistic, in the way I have described it. This instinctual life, this animalistic life, actually dominates public life at the moment when man is inclined to live, when he no longer needs only to judge. One can judge that it is shameful, for example, to treat the people in the mines in such and such a way. One can judge that. But one has mining shares! By cutting the coupons, it is oneself who tortures people in this way, one just does not notice it. This is more than a symbol of life, because that is how our life goes. People think on the one hand and act on the other. But they do not realize the huge discrepancy between the one and the other.

This situation is largely due to people's complacency towards all opportunities that provide us with insights into life. Today, people want to be a “good person” in life without striving to really get to know this life. But you can't really live today without getting to know life.

This world war arose from the fact that the people who were, and in some cases still are, the so-called “rulers” were very far removed from life. Some are still in their places, namely.

But what could more clearly show the complete lack of understanding of people for life, on which so much depends, has arrived in the last decades than those of our culture, of our civilization so clearly speaking “memoirs”, which are now piling up. Every week one, initially from the defeated powers, the others will follow, publishes his memoirs. This shows quite clearly how right was the judgment of the one who said: One would not believe with how little understanding the world is ruled. But the consequences of such assumptions are not readily drawn by the people of the present. For these people of the present, for example, do not want to see that there can be no social feeling and social knowledge without a real knowledge of the world. It is still possible to establish zoology without knowledge of the world, because animals are organized by their physical organization for a specific activity, for a specific functioning. What is characteristic of man is precisely that his organization is open to what he is to take up from knowledge of the world. And so there can be no social knowledge without it being based on knowledge of the world. You can never build a real social science without knowing that everything that man has to strive for through his inner being is a result of the whole evolution, which you can find in my “Occult Science in Outline , up to the present development of the earth, and that everything that the man of the present day absorbs through the social community is a germ for that which is to happen further with the development of the earth.

One cannot understand social life without understanding the world in general. It is impossible for people today to intervene in public life with programs or ideas or ideals without laying a spiritual foundation for this intervention; for what is lacking everywhere is a soul that is moved by what really matters.

We are experiencing strange things. The outstanding German socialist theorist Karl Kautsky has now also written a book: “How the World War Came About”. He begins by discussing the question of guilt. On the first pages, Kautsky makes a remarkable confession. I would like to preface the following. I would like to say that Kautsky is one of those who, in the last few decades, have used every means at their disposal to hammer party doctrine and party discipline into the proletariat, to hammer the doctrine into people's heads that it is not individuals who are responsible for world events, but, for example, capitalism. And so you will not find the word 'capitalists' everywhere, but the word 'capitalism'. With such party doctrines one can agitate, one can found parties, one can find effective hammers for the minds of men, so that such doctrines become creeds. As soon as one is compelled to intervene, I will not say in the work at all, but only to judge reality, the whole doctrine goes out of the window! Now, when Kautsky writes about the guilty parties, what does he do? He would have to leave his whole book unwritten if he wanted to continue his old litanies of capitalism. So what does he do? On the first page, he makes a confession, a strange confession, which I will only quote to you with a few words from his book: “You cannot present capitalism as the only culprit. For capitalism is nothing but an abstraction, which is derived from the observation of numerous individual phenomena and which is an indispensable tool in the quest to explore these in their lawful contexts. But you can't fight an abstraction, except theoretically; but not practically. In practice, we can only fight individual phenomena... certain institutions and persons as the bearers of certain social functions.

Now the socialist theorist is only faced with the fact that he is not even supposed to intervene constructively in social life, but only to judge social life in one respect, and now capitalism is suddenly an abstraction. He only just comes up with it! At the moment when the same Karl Kautsky would take it as an occasion to discuss the realistic idea of threefolding, capitalism would again march up in military organization, not as an abstraction but as something highly real! One does not even notice the difference between what is derived from a real observation of life as a social concept and what is derived from general abstract thinking or even abstract feeling.

Insight is what the modern man must seek as a means of protection against the illusionism into which he must fall through the extreme intellectualism. So today I approached you from a certain side to draw your attention to important things of the present. I will continue to develop and expand these things tomorrow and the day after.