Network Nation

Hi Lawry,

Steiner's main contribution is World Economy. Other writings on the Threefold Social Order are also applicable and helpful, as the economic sphere is one of the three. You may be aware that Steiner applied the values (from the French revolution) of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the three spheres, as follows: Liberty is the guiding principle of the cultural (arts, religion, education, etc.) sphere (since we all freely choose our individual pursuits, elective affinities, etc.); Equality is the guiding principle of the rights (or political/government) sphere (as in, we're all equal under the law, etc.); and Brotherhood or Fraternity is the guiding principle of the economic sphere.

So it's interesting that, while Steiner strongly valued freedom, in economic matters he emphasized our (voluntary) service to one another. He turned the whole idea of why we work on its head. Rather than working to sustain ourselves, he said, we should work in order to make the products of our work available to others. Thus, work is (or should be) an act of giving rather than a means of receiving.

So, in case I was unclear, for Steiner economic transactions were inherently value-laden rather than value-free. It takes some getting used to. . . . (It also seems tremendously impractical and idealistic, and I have for many years lived and worked in organizations that attempted to live in this way and can attest that it's not easy---but I still think his key insight is valid). All the best!

John Miller
(952) 887-2763
Green Tea Party Movement

-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Chickering
Sent: May 23, 2014 11:20 AM
To: millershed@earthlink.net
Cc: TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG
Subject: Re: [TRANSPARTISAN] A focus on empowerment vs. a focus on inequality

Hi John,

Although I have read more than twenty of his books, I think, I don't know
much about Steiner's view of money. It does not surprise me, however --
given his strong emphasis on freedom -- that he regards money (I would say,
like the market) as value-free -- to do with them as our freedom leads us.

Critics of capitalism tend to regard materialistic values as inherent in
capitalism. Their belief in governments to humanize markets comes from
their belief in governments run not by politicians and bureaucrats, but by
people like them. When you see capitalism in instrumental rather than
substantive terms -- as a process of free exchange -- then it becomes clear
that 'capitalism' and 'socialism' operate in different dimensions that can
(even) overlap and integrate. Milton Friedman regarded the Israeli kibbutzim
as a triumph of capitalism because they are freely chosen at the same time
that many people regard them as representing the best of socialism.

I believe EGG, for the same reasons, represents the best of capitalism,
integrating all major stakeholders with 'ownership' in the schools to work
together and make them better. I would say that is also the best of
socialism, bringing people together for the public good, especially for the
poorest people (tribal girls, who are afraid to speak up in front of boys, show
greatest gains in learning from our program).

Lawry

A. Lawrence Chickering
Educate Girls Globally

A. Lawrence Chickering
Founder and President, Educate Girls Globally (EGG)
Author: Beyond Left and Right (1993) and co-author (with James
S. Turner) Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative
in American Life (2008)

On May 22, 2014, at 09:12, millershed@earthlink.net wrote:

Hi Lawry,

Thanks for your very thoughtful response. You are obviously much more educated in economic matters than I am, so I readily confess to a good deal of naivete. And yes, I did know that you were also influenced by Steiner. We may well be the only two in the conversation who are, so I'll say a little bit at the risk of boring or losing others. What strikes me most about Steiner's ideas about money--what seems utterly counter-intuitive to my progressive instincts--is that he considers it a highly spiritual process (not a thing)--at least when allowed to flow optimally.

Two conditions strike me as applicable to the optimal flow of money. One is that the whole danger of the flow of money (I believe, and I believe Steiner says) is that it can operate in a way that is "value-free" (in quotes, because I believe the value that this phrase assumes is materialism, which considers itself the only true value because it is empirical). Yet every monetary transaction is also a spiritual transaction. I find this in Steiner's meditation on, for example, a paper clip. A paper clip is not (just, or even mostly) a material object. It carries with it the natural and human processes that have accompanied every step in its extraction, production, and distribution. That is, it has a spiritual fingerprint and--so to speak--a spiritual value (which may have positive as well as negative aspects). Steiner asks us to do the impossible--because following the trail of even a simple paper clip is impossible, due to the world's complexity--yet it's a useful exercise (and one that is applicable when we consider the Congolese rare minerals in our smartphones, etc.). So I am encouraged when I see economists such as Eisenstein trying to view money and the economy in spiritual terms. I think Steiner's main thrust was that economic matters needed to be considered in spiritual terms as well as material ones and that economic transactions should be viewed as opportunities for highly positive spiritual deeds. So the context of my distinction between making and maximizing profits is something like this: Not too many decades ago, highly successful companies paid a lot of attention not only to profits but also to the wellbeing of their workers and that of the wider communities in which they were located. Thus, some profitability was sacrificed in order to improve conditions for their workers and to work positively within their local communities. I fear those days are long gone, because maximizing profits has become the only value that the market rewards.

The second condition of the optimal flow of money, to me, is that it needs to be somewhere between stagnant and chaotic--that is, dynamic and life-giving. Steiner spoke of the dangers of stagnation--accumulating capital rather than using it in productive manners. I don't recall him speaking much of the other extreme, which is chaos (though I may well be wrong on this). But Fritjof Capra speaks very presciently (2002) of the dangers of the "global casino," citing the work of Manuel Castells. While I think Capra gets it very laregely right, again I fear that we are much farther down that road then when Capra wrote The Hidden Connections. The rate of investment and exchange is so feverish that it has shifted from a powerfully flowing river to a tumultously pounding waterfall--very much skirting the edge of chaos and hence flirting with collapse. I think the issues behind the 2008 recession are pertinent--how the collapse of Bear Stearns (one investment firm, and far from the biggest) triggered events that were very hard to contain (similar to Greece and the Euro, etc.). And I would also note that the word "trust" was very widely used after that recession, as the factor that kept people from buying houses and spending in general, which would have improved the economy much more rapidly. To me, this confirms Steiner's description of money as a covenant, not an artifact, involving spiritual qualities such as trust, responsibility, and even altruism (as Steiner makes clear when he speaks of gifts vs. loans or purchases). Which brings us around again to the need for economic concepts and policies that will incorporate ethical and--dare I say it--spiritual values.

And again, I think a truly free market economy (one that is genuinely self-organizing) can function to bring this about--though it will take a maturing of our worldview from one of fragmented scientific reductionism and materialism to one of interconnectedness and wholeness, including the span from physical to psychic to noetic (body, soul, and spirit). So I would guess that there is a great deal more that we agree on than that we differ on. But I do take to heart your warning about language and your ideas on effective communication. And, again, I plead guilty to a considerable degree of hubris in daring to speak on topics about which my knowledge and understanding are severely limited (including, I'm sure, Steiner's ideas on economics!).

I hope that, in expalining to you--in terms of some of the concepts that we both treasure--where I was coming from, I haven't lost everybody else! With warmest regards,

John

John Miller
(952) 797-2302
Green Tea Party Movement
-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Chickering
Sent: May 22, 2014 1:49 AM
To: millershed@earthlink.net
Cc: TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG
Subject: Re: [TRANSPARTISAN] A focus on empowerment vs. a focus on inequality

Dear John,

Your response has me spinning about, trying to think how to respond in a way
that will be useful. First, I think you know that Rudolf Steiner, for more than
forty years, has been the great intellectual and spiritual influence on my
thinking on almost every subject. I had the good fortune to have an extraordinary
disciple of Steiner's (a psychiatrist and also an Austrian) mentor me in his theories
and especially his spiritual practices at the end of the 1960s, when I lived briefly
in New York. The path he set me on has guided me ever since.

One area on which Steiner influenced me only implicitly was in communication -- in
the uses of language especially to communicate thoughts 'for which we have no
[universally accepted] language'. Language is a challenge, of course, because
people code their messages differently; and the challenge of communicating
(as opposed to mere emoting) is to communicate not in one's own code, but
in the listener's code -- thus to be understood in the spirit the communicator
intends. When I responded to your statements about scarcity and profits, I was
assuming -- perhaps incorrectly -- that this community is committed to coding
messages in accord with the mainstream economic and political idiom. You
wrote what you wrote based on very different assumptions.

Part of me now wants to caution you to be careful in using words and phrases
commonly used (and with widely agreed meanings) in the mainstream debate
when you intend very different meanings. But perhaps it is I who needs to be
cautious because I realize it is possible that our unusual transpartisan community
may be much more aligned linguistically with you than with me.

Although I regard my worldview as epistemologically very different than the
worldview that dominates meanstream thought, all of my formal professional
work has been undertaken in terms of the mainstream idiom. I want to influence
that idiom, and I see more opportunity to accomplish that from inside the
mainstream debate than from outside.

To touch on your points about scarcity and profit, one reason I believe 'capitalism'
has been as associated as it has with materialism is that economists have been
unwilling to open their inquiry into economic issues to include powerful non-
material things that are valued in powerful ways by all human beings. This is
the idea underlying the extraordinary success of the program I founded and run,
Educate Girls Globally, which is institutionalizing the spirit of private rights into
public spaces such as schools, with results on all major stakeholders in schools --
including government bureaucrats -- that are considered impossible by the
mainstream debate. I will not repeat the 'lessons' learned from this work other
than to say that the lessons are precisely the lessons that James Dierke and I
are writing a book about public school reform, integrating my work in India with
his in a middle school in the most dangerous neighborhood in San Francisco. His
results in Visitacion Valley Middle School, for which he was given an award as the
outstanding principal of a middle school in the entire country, are so powerful
that at a time when teachers are straining to leave schools like his, no one
wanted to leave his school while he was principal (he retired a year or two ago).

These are all things that he and I are writing about using a mainstream vocabulary,
and Dierke's own success -- in winning his award -- has been achieved in the
most mainstream institution of an inner-city public school.

I feel I have written far more than will interest most people here on this subject.
I wanted to be completely transparent about the assumptions that I bring to
all of these subjects, which have preoccupied me for more than forty years.

Lawry Chickering
Educate Girls Globally
Author Beyond Left and Right (1993) and co-author (with James S. Turner)
Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life, 2008.

On May 21, 2014, at 18:41, <millershed@earthlink.net> <millershed@earthlink.net> wrote:

Hi Lawry and all,

Here is Charles Eisenstein on scarcity:

http://charleseisenstein.net/books/the-more-beautiful-world-our-hearts-know-is-possible/scarcity/

I don't pretend to capture what he said, but I am influenced by ideas on spiritual economics, including Rudolf Steiner and E. F. Schumacher. All the best!

John
-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Chickering
Sent: May 21, 2014 12:26 PM
To: millershed@earthlink.net
Cc: TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG
Subject: Re: [TRANSPARTISAN] A focus on empowerment vs. a focus on inequality

I would like to hear Michael Strong's thoughts on this because he knows
more about it than I do. John, your discussion of scarcity and profits deviates
so much from my understanding of economists' traditional view of both that
you need to say a lot more than this to make a convincing case that the
traditional economist's view needs a major overhaul.

In the mainstream perspective, scarcity is not caused by anything; it is the
defining characteristic of economic life. The challenge is how to distribute
the scarcity. My natural instinct here is to start taking about capitalism and
how it approaches these issues. My own perspective on capitalism, however,
is broader -- more expansive -- than the traditional view, and I can't avoid
saying something about this here.

My first thought here is that in an important respect all economic systems are
'capitalist'. My friend the late economist Milton Friedman captured an important
part of the point when he said one reason he favored 'capitalism' (narrow sense)
is that it is 'the only system that doesn't give all property rights to the ruling
("capitalist") class.' The essence of capitalism, that is, is a system of free
exchange within whatever constraints are imposed on it. The Soviet Union
was not 'capitalist'; yet anyone who actually went there and watched people
interact, they would see frenzies of entrepreneurial, capitalist activities. In
my own, personal experience, every taxi cab was a super market. It was the
purest form of capitalism I have ever seen.

My second wish to broaden the meaning of 'capitalism' is beyond private
spaces to public spaces. This is too large a subject to treat here; I encourage
anyone wanting to know more to read Anjula Tyagi's and my article on EGG
from Policy Review, which I have sent more than once (won't send again
except to people who can't unearth it). EGG empowers people in a marketplace
of social goods to do what they care about. The program sets off an explosion
of entrepreneurial activity, people working together to common purpose.
Creating private rights in public space like schools creates strong incentives
to cooperation that highlight the impulse toward public spirit that is
powerful in everyone in our connected world.

Now to your point emphasizing the distinction between 'making' and 'maximizing'
profits. This point implies that profit is something wrongfully extracted from
people in exchanges. (The alternative, conventional view is that people want to
pay profits to get what they want [are willing to pay for].)

Let me focus on people you might see as the most extreme (reprehensible)
profit-maximizeers. The common economist's generalization is that all profits,
past the short-term, are the same, discounted for risk. 'Capitalism' (in the
narrow view) is an allocative system -- not a distributive system -- that allocates
resources to their highest valued uses. Who determines 'highest valued
use'? Consumers, communicating through the price system. All investors seek
to 'maximize profits'; that is why they hire financial advisors -- to advise them
on where above-market profits are creating market signals for more capital.
Profits tend to be 'maximized' only in the short term