A third action on behalf of social threefolding, this time in support of the independence and freedom of the moral-cultural system: support CSF or RSF

If you want to go right to action without reading further, scroll down to the orange paragraph near the bottom of this post.

‘Social threefolding’ is one name for a process that has developed over thousands of years. To get an idea of how far we’ve come in this process, imagine seeing a single person who combines in himself the functions, powers and prestige of the U.S. President, Howard Hughes, Christ and Shakespeare. Then you’ll have a rough analogy for the way early ancient Egyptians saw the pharaoh. The pharaohs at their Fourth Dynasty peak of power fused immense political, economic and moral-cultural authority. Over the course of the history of civilizations these three basic forms of authority have been increasingly disentangled. That’s ‘social threefolding’. Progress of course has not been in a straight line, but has come as a ‘two-steps forward, one step backward’ kind of thing.

A small example of this historical trend: As architecture became less pyramidal and societies less hierarchical, political power increasingly separated from moral-cultural-spiritual power. One can glimpse this within Egyptian history itself, when during the end of the Fourth Dynasty, successive pharaohs’ titles indicated decreasing identity with divinity, and successive pyramids built by them and by later dynasties shrank from their early immensity and used shoddier materials.

One can also see the slow divergence of moral-cultural life from political life in the way sacred funerary texts – the Pyramid texts -- were at first used only in the pharaohs’ giant tombs, but as centuries went by, appeared in new editions painted into nobles’ coffins – the so-called Coffin Texts – and then later still, were often buried with commoners in the edition we now refer to as the Book of the Dead. In each historical stage of these texts, the afterlife weighing of the deceased’s soul and conscience is described. If heavier than a feather, the soul would be devoured by a rather fearsome god/animal standing by.

Thus through the wider and wider dissemination of funerary texts, conscience, a moral-cultural factor, slowly became disentangled, first from the ruler, then from the ruling class, and finally became a matter for everyone, and therefore something comparatively distinct from the political center of power.

If one then moves ahead in time to the ancient Roman Republic, there one finds embryonic egalitarianism in politics leading to early stages of the horizontal rule of law. The Roman mentality no longer so readily felt that moral-cultural hierarchy -- spiritual and intellectual superiority – was evocative of the kind of awe that translates without pause into political worship and abject submission to a political hierarchy. Romans living over two thousand years after the building of the Great Pyramid were not capable of the degree of naïve awe and worshipful obedience by which Egyptians millennia before had been moved. The deification of Roman emperors might seem to contradict me, but it was a corrupt and decadent throwback, and the Romans in general clearly did not respond to the ‘divinity’ of their emperors with the kind of wonder that had stirred Fourth Dynasty Egyptians to build the Great Pyramid with such collective care that on its north side, for example, its stones do not gap more than one-fiftieth of an inch, by one estimate. Roman moral-cultural life had grown irresistibly more independent of Roman political life than had been the case in early Egypt, and no emperor could force Roman consciousness back into the mindset of early Egyptians.

Thus you have examples of a couple of facets of the social threefolding process in history. Many other examples are ready to hand if one looks a bit, and I’ll be describing some in future posts.

In two earlier posts, I suggested why liberals and conservatives should be able to agree on supporting further the mutual independence of the political and economic systems – because through that independence, the two systems can check, balance and reform each other continually -- and I suggested two specific actions to that end: to support (1) the Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act of 2005 and 2) the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders. Three paragraphs down from the one you are now reading you will find yet another action you can take, this time to enhance the independence of the moral-cultural system. The importance of an independent moral-cultural system today – one that allows free human creativity, and that can freely critique the political and economic systems, is something about which increasing numbers of people around the world are coming to agree.

This however brings us to another case where liberals and conservatives often dispute, but perhaps to little purpose. Liberals are strong supporters of many kinds of cultural freedom. Think ACLU. Liberals are often prompt to come out against anything that has the slightest scent of censorship, and quick to support new kinds of art or media that cross conformist and other boundaries. Yet some liberals have opposed school choice and consider that sort of cultural freedom anathema. As for liberals who do support educational freedom, often they do so out of a recognition that in the U.S. the only people who currently don’t have school choice are the poor and lower classes. After all, everyone else can afford to move to a new school district or else pay for an independent school. Prof. Stephen Arons of U. Mass at Amherst is an example of a liberal believer in school choice, though actually he doesn’t quite fit any mold, liberal or otherwise, and that’s one reason his book Short Route to Chaos is advertised in the sidebar of this website – another reason is that the book contains a brilliant discussion of the need for educational freedom, especially for the poor. In any event, it’s unfortunate and seems somewhat nonsensical that school choice has occasionally become a partisan question associated with liberal opposition.

So maybe liberals and conservatives could consider a truce. Liberals surely should want to drop opposition to educational freedom for the poor, partly because such freedom is integral to moral-cultural freedom, which latter value liberals stoutly defend. Education, like religion, is a matter of conscience, involving fundamental values, and every family, not just well-off ones, should be able to afford school choice.

So here are two actions you can take to support the cultural freedom aspect of social threefolding: (1) Give a donation of any amount to the Children’s Scholarship Fund. The CS Fund makes it possible for poor and lower income families to have scholarships so their children can attend any legally operating independent school of the family’s choice. Or (2) contact the Rudolf Steiner Foundation, and tell them you’d like to donate to a scholarship fund for Waldorf schools or other independent schools. Or donate to another scholarship fund that supports independent schools.

In a future post I’ll compare the pros and cons of different ways of moving toward educational freedom: charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, independent scholarship funds, homeschooling, and the right to transfer between school districts.