Social Threefolding (& Young Women for Democracy), Two Bills in the House and Senate (S516 and HR1133), and Students for Global Democracy (SGD)

Students for Global Democracy (SGD) has excellent photos on its website – young women in Nepal and Kuwait protesting for democracy, for example.

If you want to take action now for democracy, in Belarus and globally, and don’t need to read more about it (and social threefolding), scroll down to the olive text near the end of this post.

One key aspect of social threefolding (see “What is Social Threefolding?” and other posts on this blog) is the spread of democratic governments worldwide. If someone now says that such a thing as ‘real’ democracy doesn’t exist, ok. Let’s use a different label. Call it X, as R.J. Rummel sometimes does, but whatever it’s to be called, we need a way to refer to the political system that has now been established in about ninety nations (and lately the number seems to grow by the month) – with freedom of assembly, of religion, of speech, multiple political parties, an independent judiciary, and periodic, open elections with secret ballots.

A very substantial body of social science research, conducted over the last forty years, including statistical studies covering every single one of the hundreds of documented wars fought throughout history, has shown that democracies have either never, or almost never, gone to war against each other.

Physicist-historian Spencer Weart is the researcher who has done perhaps the most exhaustive study of the relatively few apparent historical exceptions to the democratic peace, and he concluded that they didn't really constitute clear exceptions to the rule, and that the 'democratic peace,' as social scientists call it, has in fact perhaps never really yet been broken. I find him persuasive. But even if he and those social scientists who agree with him are mistaken and there have been some small number of historical exceptions, it remains an important discovery of social science that democracies almost never have gone to war with each other. Nobel Peace Prize finalist R.J. Rummel is one of the social scientists most responsible for solidifying this discovery. For decades he has researched the historical evidence and statistically tested the democratic peace proposition, written a couple of dozen books about it, and has concluded that (assuming the whole of the past is any guide to the future) a world made up only of democracies could be expected to be a world essentially without war. For non-scholars who simply survey their own experience of recent decades, the pacific behavior of European states toward one another and toward non-European democracies since the end of World War II can seem to give strong support to the democratic peace thesis.

And recall what Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel for economics, pointed out about functioning democracies: they don’t have famines. Famines, as it turns out, are closely linked to the kind of mismanagement autocratic rulers bring about.

Two Actions You Can Take Now

1) Students for Global Democracy (SGD) is helping the democratic underground in Belarus (a nation often called ‘the last dictatorship of Europe’). Here’s the SGD webpage where one can donate or learn more about SGD.

2) Also, click here to easily find your senators’ and representative’s email addresses and phone numbers, and tell them you strongly support passage of the bipartisan Advance Democracy Act. This bill was inspired in part by Ambassador Mark Palmer’s book, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025. Arizona Republican John McCain and Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman have sponsored the bill (S516) in the Senate, and in the House the bill (as HR 1133) has been sponsored by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Virginia Republican Frank Wolf.

Here’s a summary of what the Advance Democracy Act would do:

· Establish a new office of Democracy Movements and Transitions at the State Department and create Regional Democracy Hubs at several embassies abroad;
· Create a Democracy Promotion Advisory Board to provide outside expertise to the U.S. Government;
· Authorize $250 million in increased funding for democracy promotion over two years [perhaps we should tell Congress to up the $250 million to at least $1 billion, which would still be equal to only about 1/5th of 1 percent of current defense spending annually];
· Require an annual report on democracy to include action plans to promote democracy in nondemocratic countries; and
· Provide training and, significantly, incentives, for State Department personnel to promote democracy.

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.

More Action You Can Take on behalf of 'Social Threefolding': support the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders

If you want to go right to action on social threefolding, and don't want to read more about it, scroll down to the blue paragraph in this post.

One of the puzzles in striving for a creative society – one in which culture, economy and state are relatively independent of one another and thus able to check, balance and reform each other continually (see my first post, What is Social Threefolding) – is how best to restrain the tendency of economic life to merge corruptly with the processes of government.

One important aspect of a solution to this puzzle has been developed by Ralph Estes, who is director of the Stakeholder Alliance, an organization representing various groups with a combined membership, the Alliance says, of over five million persons. Estes was a senior accountant with Arthur Anderson & Co., and is an emeritus professor of accounting at American University. According to the Common Dreams News Center he was some years ago “on a short list to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission,” the federal agency that, among other things, requires public companies to disclose corporate financial and other information to the public, so that buyers of stocks, bonds and other securities have a trustworthy factual basis for their buying decisions. Estes is the author of a dictionary of accounting and numerous other books on such subjects as enterprise zones, taxes, and corporate reform possibilities. This September will see publication of his latest book, Taking Back the Corporation.

Estes and the Stakeholder Alliance have been working to get legislatures to impose and corporations to adopt the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders. The Sunshine Standards were developed over many years through the efforts of many groups, and incorporate and improve upon numerous earlier efforts working in the same direction. The point of the Sunshine Standards is to greatly increase transparancy and information available to the public about behavior of mid-sized to large corporations. Estes is particularly concerned that information (much more than just financial information) relevant to all the ‘stakeholders’ -- employees, consumers and the community -- be required of companies. The idea is that such info, regularly and reliably produced by independent auditors, would embarrass companies into more socially responsible behavior that would serve significantly broader interests than those of shareholders alone.

If you want to take action on this right now,

1. You could propose this Stakeholder Alliance draft ordinance to your city council, or send a copy to your senators and representative (get their email addresses and phone numbers by clicking here) and tell them you support it and the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders.

2. Or support the Stakeholder Alliance in other ways.

Why will such actions further the ‘social threefolding’ process?

1) There seems little doubt that the additional transparency Estes is working for would reduce the frequency and depth of corrupt fusions between big business and government. And 2) the somewhat more cooperative economic life that would emerge through applying the Sunshine Standards would produce somewhat fewer economic agents competing aggressively to fuse corruptly with the political process in order to obtain illegitimate economic advantages.

It’s true that Estes speaks of how the increased accountability and transparency imposed by the Sunshine Standards would enhance the competitiveness of economic life, but when transparency embarrasses corporations into serving all their stakeholders, rather than just the ‘bottomline’ of shareholder profits, by definition that will give corporations a significantly more cooperative profile in the world. Corporations will take a big step toward serving the broad public interest.

The greatly increased transparency that will induce corporations to be far more accountable to workers, customers, communities, and the environment -- the more cooperative corporate behavior that would come into being through embarrassment caused by the Sunshine Standards -- would not be like the counterfeit sort of ‘brotherliness’ found in state-run centralized command economies, where ‘cooperation’ really means a dead and passive collectivism in which nobody is responsible for anything. Under the Sunshine Standards individual accountability would of course still rule economic life, and enhanced cooperation would emerge in that context and would therefore be authentic, unlike what happens under bureaucratic state centralism.

And although Estes speaks affirmatively of markets, the stakeholder ethos could in fact be a step toward the longer term possibility of finding ways of non-coercively transcending markets without depriving consumers of multiple sources for products or reducing prosperity or quality.

So for reasons 1) and 2) mentioned four paragraphs above, a cooperative, transparent, non-centralized economy might turn out to be the sort most compatible with maintaining the relative independence of society’s economic and political systems, which independence is one of the key goals of social threefolding. The opposite is often taken for granted – namely that the more competitive an economic system, the more it will be independent vis-à-vis the state. But as explained above, some kinds of economic competition clearly lead to corrupt fusions of economic interests with the political process.

How and Why to Take Quick Action Now to Protect the Autonomy of the Economic and Political Realms: The Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act of 2005

If you want to take action now to support social threefolding, and do not need more information, scroll down to the yellow text in this post.

Conservatives and liberals have some common ground when it comes to keeping government distinct from economic life. They just come at the problem from opposite sides. Conservatives tend to be more wary of government power merging with and dominating economic life. Liberals tend to be more wary of economic power merging with and dominating processes of government. Both sides in the debate too often fail to realize that both sorts of merging and dominance mirror each other rather closely and can be about equally destructive.

The worst political nightmare of a conservative is perhaps an all-powerful, tyrannizing state that in effect becomes the sole capitalist, horribly inefficient and corrupt. The worst nightmare of the liberal is the all-powerful capitalist who manages to take over the state as his own personal property and tyrannize on behalf of his narrow self-interest, impoverishing, exploiting and enslaving others. These two opposed phantasms, like many other opposites, meet in a kind of peculiarly close mirror resemblance to each other, somewhat as Hitler and Stalin met in their pact.

So in theory liberals and conservatives should be able to work together in this area, since both in their different ways are seeking the same thing: to insure that the economic and political spheres retain some autonomy vis-à-vis each other and are able to check, balance and correct each other ongoingly.

In that spirit, conservatives might agree to support new lobbying laws (in a moment, specific info on how persons of any political persuasion can take quick action on that) that liberals favor to create more of a barrier between monied special interests and government. And in exchange liberals might cease from reflexively treating privatization as a dirty word, and instead consider each case of potential privatization a little more open-mindedly on the merits.

So now to what you can do about new lobbying laws. On May 4, two representatives (Meehan and Emanuel) announced the Lobbying and Ethics Reform Act of 2005. You could find out your own representative’s phone number and email address very easily by clicking this link: My Representative. Consider asking your representative to support passage of this bill. If passed, it would require that professional lobbyists -- people paid to try to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation desirable to the lobbyists’ clients -- submit quarterly spending disclosures to an electronic system open to public view. The bill would also bar lobbyists from organizing junkets for lawmakers – junkets basically being pleasure trips members of Congress take to gather supposedly necessary information. The problem with junkets is that they sometimes amount to a kind of bribe given by the lobbyist in exchange for desired legislation. Passage of this bill, furthermore, would mean members of Congress would be required to know who is paying for an overseas trip. Congressmen could no longer pretend ignorance when lobbyists set up a dummy sponsor whose purpose is to conceal from the public just who is paying the congressional piper. More important, the bill if enacted would forbid members of Congress from being hired by lobbying firms until two years after the member retired from Congress. At present, only a one year hiatus is required. The result is that too often laws and lawmakers are in effect bought by lobbyists, insofar as lawmakers know that if they satisfy the lobbyist legislatively, the lobbying firm may well hire the lawmaker at a high salary when he or she leaves Congress. The newly required two year hiatus would however make the former lawmaker less valuable as a lobbyist, since he would be less an ‘insider’ to Congress than someone retired only a year. Thus it would become somewhat harder for members of Congress to in effect trade legislation in exchange for a lucrative career down the road.

And the bill closes off other forms of corruption. If you want to help keep the economic and political systems relatively distinct, then whether you are conservative or liberal, you could do worse than to contact your representative and ask him or her to help pass this bill. If you desire more info on this, try googling “Meehan Emanuel”.

Estate Tax? Death Tax? Or A New Kind of Will?

In the last post I sketched an overview of social threefolding. This post tries to apply the threefold outlook to one particular current debate: estate taxes.

Is there a better response to this debate than those offered currently by liberals or conservatives?

Conservatives speak of ending the 'death tax' because it amounts to an additional tax on wealth already taxed during the decedent’s lifetime. They argue that if you can't pass on wealth to your children, you are perhaps disincentivized to create wealth in the first place. And they believe that as a result society as a whole becomes less prosperous.

Liberals like the estate tax because of an egalitarian impulse: they believe it somewhat levels the economic playing field for the next generation, and narrows the gap between rich and poor.

A threefold outlook seeks to see what is, and to make that more visible and transparent, and would seem to point in this particular case to a solution that, in some respects, agrees with both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives are right that those who create wealth – not the IRS or state bureaucrats -- are in the best position to judge how that wealth can be applied most productively. Yet liberals are right who would argue that such judgment loses its objectivity when it comes to one’s own children.

So, what if anti-nepotism laws were applied to wills bequeathing more than some particular amount? With regard to such surpluses, instead of taking them as estate taxes, the law could permit one to designate as one’s heirs any charities, enterprises, artists or scientists, provided the legacy did not directly benefit immediate and extended family. Anti-nepotistic inheritance laws would thus constitute a sort of middle way approach, bringing together the egalitarian impulse of liberals with the anti-big-government impulse professed by conservatives. This solution, by comparison with estate taxes, would also help keep economic and state power relatively distinct, one of the goals of social threefolding – the check and balance of separated powers.

Isn’t passing along wealth to one’s own children, at least beyond some moderate amount or other, a vestige of the divine right of kings? Isn’t it a vestige of noble privilege and aristocracy? Doesn’t the well-known decadence of aristocracies tend to show up in our own society among those children guaranteed luxury from birth? Don’t current inheritance laws allow some children, through no virtue, work or accomplishment of their own, to command the work of others in society? Wouldn’t it be more in accord with our meritocratic, individualistic and egalitarian ideals as a nation to change that situation? Shouldn’t everyone in society be required to stand on his or her own feet to the extent possible?

In a society with anti-nepotistic inheritance laws, people would know that wealth possessed meant wealth earned – at least this would presumably be truer than it is currently. And such a society would have greater solidarity among its members yet be more individualistic.

Anti-nepotistic inheritance laws would also bring wealth creation in line with the law around expiration of patents and copyrights. Part of the idea behind the expiration of a patent or copyright is that the inventor of the new machine or product or idea was partly enabled to create that new something through the support and education provided by society or by portions of society. At some point then, it makes sense that the exclusive right to the profits from inventions should revert to society, and that patents should expire – as indeed they do. Some kind of time limitation on exclusive rights to material wealth would seem sensible for the same reasons. Anti-nepotistic laws applied to some portion of what is bequeathed in wills could accomplish that very effect.

What Is Social Threefolding?

Libertarianism, Socialism, Anarchism, Conservatism, Liberalism -- many a reader could probably come up with a whole zoo of additional political isms, but is there a harmonious equilibrium point where all perspectives are resolved into a unified view that accords each single perspective its due?

That ultimate synthesis is probably always destined to be out of reach. But a relatively new and little known social change paradigm that arguably makes progress in that direction has been a stimulus for much creative activism in recent years by Nicanor Perlas, winner of the 'alternative Nobel' prize, and was decades ago elaborated and put into practice by the philosopher and educator Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).

Threefold Social Order and Rudolf Steiner

For a period after World War I, Rudolf Steiner was extremely active and well-known in Germany in part because in many places he gave lectures on social questions. A petition expressing his basic social ideas (signed by Herman Hesse, among others) was very widely circulated. His main book on social questions, Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage (available in English today as Toward Social Renewal) sold tens of thousands of copies. Today around the world there are a number of innovative banks, companies, charitable institutions, and schools for developing new cooperative forms of business, all working partly out of Steiner’s social ideas. One example is The Rudolf Steiner Foundation, incorporated in 1984, and as of 2004 with estmated assets of $70 million. RSF provides "charitable innovative financial services". According to the independent organizations Co-op America and the Social Investment Forum Foundation, RSF is "one of the top 10 best organizations exemplifying the building of economic opportunity and hope for individuals through community investing."

Steiner's Outlook on Social History

In Steiner's various writings and lectures on social questions, he held that there were three main spheres of power comprising human society: the cultural, the economic and the political. In ancient times, those who had political power were also generally those with the greatest cultural/religious power and the greatest economic power. Culture, State and Economy were fused (for example in ancient Egypt). With the emergence of classical Greece and Rome, the three spheres began to become more autonomous. This autonomy went on increasing over the centuries, and with the slow rise of egalitarianism and individualism, the failure adequately to separate economics, politics and culture was felt increasingly as a source of injustice.

The Three Kinds of Separations Steiner Wanted Strengthened

1) Increased separation between the State and the economy

Examples:
A rich man 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 also advocated more cooperatively organized forms of capitalism (what might today be called stakeholder capitalism) precisely because conventional shareholder capitalism too often absorbs the State and human rights into the economic process and transforms them into mere commodities. Further, when the State fuses with the economy, the latter withers.

2) Increased separation between the State and cultural life

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.

3) Increased separation between the economy and cultural life

Examples:
A corporation should not be able to control the cultural sphere, for example by using economic power to bribe schools into accepting ‘educational’ programs larded with advertising, or by secretly paying scientists to produce research results favorable to the business’s economic interests. The fact that churches, temples and mosques do not make the ability to pay a criterion of the ability to enter and participate, and that libraries and museums are open to all free of charge, is in tune with Steiner’s notion of a separation between cultural and economic life. In a similar spirit, Steiner held that all families, not just rich ones, should have access to independent schools for their children and freedom of choice in education.

Education's Relation to the State and the Economy

Steiner’s view of education’s social position calls for special comment. For Steiner, separation of the cultural sphere from the political and economic spheres meant education should be available to all children regardless of the ability of families to pay for it and, on the elementary and secondary level, should be provided for by private andor state scholarships that a family would direct to the school of its choice. 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 a minimum, would be necessary and justified.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and Three Examples of Macrosocial Imbalance: 1) Theocracy, 2) Communism/State Socialism, 3) Conventional Capitalism

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: liberty in cultural life, equality in a democratic political life, and (uncoerced) fraternity/sorority 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 to check, balance and correct one another. The result would be a society-wide separation of powers. Steiner argued that increased autonomy for the three spheres would not eliminate their mutual influence, but would cause that influence to be exerted in a more healthy and legitimate manner, because the increased separation would prevent any one of the three spheres from dominating. In the past, according to Steiner, lack of autonomy had tended to make each sphere merge in a servile or domineering way with the others.

For example, under theocracy, the cultural sphere (in the form of a religious impulse) fuses with and dominates the economic and political spheres. Under communism, the political sphere fuses with and dominates the other two spheres. And under the typical sort of capitalist conditions, the economic sphere tends to dominate the other two spheres. Steiner points toward social conditions where domination by any one sphere is increasingly reduced, so that theocracy, communism, and the standard kind of capitalism might all be gradually transcended.

For Steiner, 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.

Apart from his central book on social questions, Toward Social Renewal, there are at least two others available in English: World Economy (14 lectures from 1922) and The Social Future (revised edition 1972).