Moving Through History to the Other Side of Complexity & Inspiration in a Time Between Stories

Welcome to Steiner Voices, a podcast series hosted by Steiner Education Australia. We're a forum for some of the very voices from Steiner School communities around the country of teachers, parents and students. Follow our Steiner Voices podcast series and you'll meet some of the many people who make Australian Steiner schools such vibrant learning communities. Welcome to Steiner X, Y and Z. Dr. Brad Kurshner is head of school at the Kimberton Waldorf School, Pennsylvania and was the keynote speaker at our recent Glam conference at Santa Valley Steiner School. Brad has a fascinating background as an early childhood teacher, religious studies scholar, meditation practitioner, administrator, and now a school leader working with Steiner Education and Anthroposophy. We will explore Brad's personal story in a coming podcast episode. His keynote addresses were powerful statements on the importance of Steiner Education at this moment in world history and they received universally positive, indeed a fusive feedback, so much so they deserve to be heard widely. Here then is Dr. Brad Kurshner in his first keynote where he explores the increasing complexity of the times in which we live, this time between stories and the role Steiner schools can play in helping to move us to a positive vision of the future. Good morning. What a blessing to be here. It's been really wonderful to get to know the folks that I've gotten to meet over the past couple of days. Andrew, especially, it's been really wonderful to get to know you and spend some time with you and I've already had some amazing conversations in the past 48 hours. My intention here this morning is to help us consider and appreciate the significance of Steiner Education at a very important time in world history. So we're going to be trying to step back and think about the big picture and the epic story that we are all a part of. I feel like we're all in our own way. We're trying to weave together at our personal narrative with our community narrative with the story of our school, the story of our country, the story of the whole planet. We have to find a way to weave the meaning of our lives together with a bigger story. So this morning we'll be looking at the complexity of school leadership in the context of that wider world. You know, where are we? How did we get here? When are we in history? What is our shared story? And tomorrow we'll be focusing more on the level of the self and the school and thinking about how do we create conditions for an educational culture that is itself a response to the complexity of the world that we find ourselves in. And along the way, we'll be thinking about, you know, how do Rudolph Steiner's insights and perspectives contribute to all of that, right? What is the role of Steiner Education in the world and in the story of our collective growth and development? And today we'll really be thinking more about trying to deepen our understanding of the problems that we're facing, right? I like to think of Steiner Education as a potential solution to some of the world's biggest problems. Actually, I'll be trying to explain why I think that, but in order for us to understand why that's the case, we really have to understand the nature of the problem, right? If Steiner Education is the medicine, then what is the sickness and not only the symptoms, but what are the deep root causes of the cultural and social illness that we're facing? So today is really going to be sort of a deep dive into peeling back the layers of complexity around what is this pickle that we find ourselves in? How do we understand what's happening in the world? And from there, we can have a better appreciation for how Steiner Education actually can serve humanity and serve future generations to help to resolve those root crises. The US Supreme Court former US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendorf Holmes Jr. said, "I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity." And to me, that points to an intuition that I think many of us have, if not all of us, that there is a potential resolution, right? We can get to the other side of the complexity of the world. We can actually come to a place of what some people think of as a second simplicity, right? We're not naive, we're not oblivious to the complexities and problems and suffering of the world, but we're able to move through that into a post-traged sensibility where we actually find that fresh awareness and aliveness and presence and groundedness and simplicity, again, where we can meet each other and create the kind of communities that we need to create together. And that's sort of our intention is to move through the complexity to find our way to sort of refresh those simple things that we all know to be true, and that we all are already grounded in, but to sort of enliven them and clarify them and feel like we're grounded in them. So what we're going to be doing now is trying to come to terms with some of the features of our modern lives that are actually creating problems for us. So one thing we have to deal with is the fact that we are completely overwhelmed by information, right? There's just too much information. John Bodgerlard said we live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning, right? There's so much information that the coherence of our ability to interpret it is collapsing, right? And we're losing our sense of what frameworks can help us to filter and evaluate and understand all the information that we're inundated by, and we're experiencing a loss of coherence in a sense of overwhelm. The flow of information is so fast that it's disrupting the psychological and cultural processes that actually hold our social systems together, right? So that's one source of the breakdown is just the overwhelm of information. And it's important to note that schools historically are a source of information filters, right? That's one of our key functions is how do we take all the information available to us and filter to young people in a digestible and understandable and comprehensible way? And I think that schools are struggling with that task right now because the children are overwhelmed by what's happening in the world, the adults are overwhelmed by what's happening in the world. And we need to clarify how do we, what is the development and the appropriate age appropriate way to filter information to children, right? About what's going on in the world and just about who they are and who we are as a people. Another way of thinking about one of the root issues, I'll borrow from a German sociologist named Hartmut Rossa, who talks about resonance and a loss of a feeling of resonance with the world. So resonant relationships are really in a deep way what humans desire most, but resonance itself is not controllable or engineerable, right? You can't force resonance with somebody. You have to tune into a certain way of being to find resonance. But because of the sort of underlying anxiety of the modern world that we're living in, we're sort of trying to control this uncontrollable world, right? We're trying to make life calculable and manageable and predictable and controllable. And ironically that creates a contradiction because the drive to calculate and predict and manage and control does not offer us the kind of resonant relationship that we're actually seeking, right? We're seeking a different kind of relationship with each other. And with the world that we cannot micromanage, you can't plan it out in a very rational linear way. It's a different kind of sensibility. So in a way we're overwhelmed and we're trying to control the chaos of the world, we're trying to sort of manage our anxiety, but that movement itself is keeping us from actually being able to relax into the kind of resonant that we're actually all seeking, right? So we have to be able to see that. And again, think about how do we find that second simplicity? How do we stay grounded and relaxed in the face of that overwhelm and that anxiety? We're also all experiencing a sense of acceleration, right? At least a few different kinds of acceleration. There's a technological acceleration that's pretty obvious right now with the emergence of AI. There's acceleration of social change and just how fast society and cultures are changing. And just the pace of life itself, right? We always feel like we're running out of time. There's never enough time. Even everyday activities like cooking, eating, child raising, exercising, sleeping, these things are becoming problems for us, right? The things that our ancestors did quite naturally and simply are for us. It's like we don't even have time for them. We don't know how to do them anymore. The rate of change is happening so fast that what used to be a disconnect between generations, right? One generation, living a way of life very different from a prior generation, which is unusual. It's accelerating so much that even within a generation, we feel like people are living differently than we are. So we have to find a way to, again, slow down, come to terms with the rate of acceleration of the world that we're facing because a way of thinking about the crisis of the age that we're in is a crisis of resonance, right? We're feeling overwhelmed. We're feeling anxious. And there's a drive in our society that we just have to keep going. We have to keep innovating. We have to keep doing more and more and more. And it just intensifies and accelerates the process. So we have to find a way to sort of step sideways and step back and think more clearly about what we're doing and what's happening. And schools, in this frame of resonance, we can think of schools as creating spheres of resonance, right? So what we need is these micro communities, these small places of being together where we can have resonance with each other and be practicing and experiencing a different way of life, right? Not caught up in the acceleration of the world around us, but how do we slow down in a small community so that we can create those relationships of residents that everyone is actually seeking. So what I'm talking about here, I'm trying to find different ways to describe is really the feeling of complexity, right? We can talk about complexity, everything's getting more complex. But we have to really tune into the feeling quality of it, right? The interior of it. How are we feeling and how do we deal with that feeling? And in order to be settled and grounded and able to face the complexity of the world. We have to be able to resolve the existential questions and the deep existential problems that we have as human beings. We cannot understand the complexity out in the world if we don't understand what's happening with us internally in our own humanity. We can't solve the problems in crisis of the world without addressing our own self-understanding. And we can only answer the question, what can we do or what should we do if we can first answer the question of what story do I find myself a part of, right? We have to have a meaningful story to place ourselves in an order to know how to direct ourselves. And this lack of a common story is going to be a theme for me. I think it's a big part of the underlying problem as we've sort of lost a coherent shared story that helps us situate ourselves historically. So this feeling of complexity and this lack of a coherent story is what lends itself to what many people are referring to as a sense of crisis, right? And there's many different kinds of crises that people are referring to out in the world of social commentary. So one way of thinking about it is the fact that there are so many interrelated problems, right? We have economic problems, technological problems, geopolitical problems, problems with health and medicine. There's so many systems overlapping and they're all interrelated, right? And when we think about the complexity of the world, that's one of the things that we're grappling with is how everything is connected, everything is becoming globally connected. And many people are referring to this sense of a poly crisis, right? A poly crisis is the sense of all these crisis overlapping and influencing each other. And it just seems so hyper complex. Nobody really knows how to resolve it, right? One thing is connected to the other. But at the same time, culturally, there's what people are referring to as a meaning crisis, which is this lack of clarity of what is the human role and purpose in the world? Who are we as a people? Why are we here? Like what does it mean to be a human being? And our answers to those questions have really broken down over time. So that means itself to a meaning crisis. And when you put those two things together, you have what some people refer to as a meta crisis, right? It's meta crisis. It's the combination of all the sum total of problems in the world combined with the fact that we're responsible for them. And we don't know how to extricate ourselves from those problems. We don't know how to take responsibility for them. We don't know how to adequately respond to them. And yet, we're left with the weight of caring the fact that we know we're responsible for the problem. They're not problems out there happening in the world. We are doing this. We're creating the economic crisis. We're creating the ecological crisis, right? We're creating crises of health care and medicine. So we're talking about a self-awareness. We're coming into an awareness of how we're responsible. Yet we don't know how to take responsibility. So ultimately, this is the task of education, right? Education has to help children face these crises of complexity. And we're not talking about a technical change where we can easily see what the solution is and all we have to do is teach people how to do it. We're not even really talking about an adaptive change where we just have to adapt to the world as it is. We actually have to transform our self-understanding of what we even think it means to be a human being to become the people who can be responsible for the world and respond to and change the systems that we are embedded in. We have to cultivate the kinds of relationships that will enable us to work together to find emergent solutions. We have to cultivate the presence and capacity to foster those kinds of relationships and create educational environments and enable young people to realize that potential, right? So the metacrisis is not reducible to climate change, technological overreach, or political polarization, but it encompasses all of them. And at its root, it can be described as almost a crisis of mood, like what is our feel? Again, what's our feeling about our place in the world? And our breakdown of our ability to really feel into that adequately. It's what David J. Temple, who's an author who's writing some interesting books right now, calls a global intimacy disorder, right? We don't have the right kind of intimacy with each other and what the world around us to be able to become the kind of people and have the kind of relationships that will actually solve the problems that we're facing. So in a sense, again, this theme of our collective story of who we are as a people, I think, does no longer fit the reality that we're living in. The world has changed and our worldview has not kept pace with the rate of change of the world. So we need to be reflecting on our worldview and reflecting on our understanding of what it means to be a human being. And we have to find a way to understand the complexity of the world without reinforcing our alienation from the world, right? Nora Bateson says that the opposite of complexity is not simplicity, the opposite of complexity is reductionism. And this is another theme we need to grapple with. How are we reducing our thinking, reducing our understanding of what it means to be a human being and misunderstanding our relationship with the world because we've lost sight of what it means to be a human? For instance, when we reduce ecology to concerns about carbon and CO2 emissions, we're reducing a living ecology of dynamic relationships as something utilitarian and measurable, right? That's a radical reduction of complexity and we're not gonna solve the ecological crisis by focusing on carbon and CO2 emissions. It's just not possible. And in education, it's a very prevalent and common problem when we reduce qualitative learning experiences and the actual experience of children in schools to quantifiable outcomes, right? Like grades and test scores were radically reducing the reality of what education is. And it's a way to try to deal with complexity to make that kind of reduction, but we have to see that that's not the way forward. We can't do that. We have to find a way to be with and live with the living relationships of experience in schools, the living relationships of humans relationship to ecology and not get caught in the trap of reducing things to things like CO2 or test scores or grades. And complexity theory is an interesting approach to understanding the complexity of the world because in a sense, there's a whole body of work out there, complexity theory, chaos theory, systems theory, there's lots of people who are trying to grapple with some of these things, seeing how things are related. But what I have found is that the way that people are trying to talk about and think about the complexity of the world often reinforces the problem. It's an intention to not reduce reality to its parts and to see how everything's interdependent. But the problem is we are not just parts in a system, right? We're individual and unique and conscious being. So we can't just talk about humans as though we're part of systems. And I actually saw this when I was in graduate school, I was working with a professor who was very interested in complexity in trying to understand complex systems. And we were doing case studies of different schools in Boston. And we were trying to talk about and think about and describe these schools as complex systems. But I kept bumping up against this feeling that we weren't really seeing very clearly or understanding these schools very clearly because we were leaving out one of the most essential aspects of what I was experiencing in these schools, which was the human psychology of the people in the schools, right? And the importance of leadership and really abstract sort of complex theories like complex systems and systems thinking, they don't really adequately understand the human, right? They don't have a way of really clarifying what does it mean to be human being? How do you understand different kinds of human psychology? How do you really get at the qualitative relationships between people? So we can't be stuck in these abstract ways of thinking. We have to really tune in to the lived, qualitative experience of people. So there's a fundamental mind shift I'm trying to point toward here in some different ways, right? We have to find a way to really acknowledge that there's an internal reality to everything. And we have to attend to those interior relationships. And the problem with a lot of thinking in the world and a lot of ways of trying to understand complexity is that we don't have a way to really adjudicate and make judgments about good and bad, right? We have to make value judgments as people in communities, in schools, there's a normative to mention to life. You can't just judge something is good or bad with how it fits within a system, right? We have to be able to make value judgments. And in some ways, as a global culture, we've lost the ability to be grounded in a shared framework for how to make value judgments. And that's really at the root of our problem. One philosopher who tries to really address this, he'd actually just passed away last month, you're going to Habermas. He talked a lot about the tension between the life world and systems, right? So there's this tension between the life world is the inside of society, right? It's the culture of experienced values and norms and selves. And systems are external, right? Markets, bureaucracy, policies, technology. And one of the things that we see in the modern world is that systems are colonizing the life world. Here's how he described it, right? The sort of logic and incentives and drives of these systems are sort of influencing us as such a degree that it actually influences how we even understand ourselves and why we're doing what we're doing. It translates the problems of the life world into the vocabulary of systems. And we end up being driven towards things like maintenance and efficiency and output, right? Output of quantitative things as opposed to the values that the life world of humans themselves feel that they actually care about. So one of the biggest problems in education is just this, actually. And one thing I've seen in my journey around the world to different schools is that we've allowed in many ways the bureaucracy of administration to take attention away from the lived experience of people. And that's something we have to be ever vigilant about, especially as administrators. Right? Are we getting too caught up in the logic of the quantitative outcomes that we need? Right? Are we driving things along in terms of the logic of the systems that we're embedded in? Or are we really rooted in and grounded in the qualitative relationships of the people around us and making decisions? And actually enacting practices in response to that very lived quality. One way that Habermas described modernity as control over external nature and alienation from internal nature. Right? So there's this move in the modern world where we're alienated from ourselves and our relationships while we try to control the world around us. And we're alienated from ourselves because we're relating to each other through the systems that we've created. We can also see this and how we think about science nowadays. So even just many of the language and concepts from science are having a big impact on how we think about ourselves as human beings. You know, there are many well-known people like Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. Very popular, well-known, well-regarded scientists in some cases philosophers who really have very radically reductionist views of what it means to be a human being. Right? Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for identifying the structure of DNA, said that human beings are nothing but a pack of neurons. Right? Richard Dawkins said that human beings and animals are machines created by our genes. That this is literally their world. Many well-regarded scientists do not believe in free will. They see the world in a strictly purely materialistic way. We are literally just selfish genes. We're merely biochemical creations of molecules. We are maybe just atoms colliding against each other randomly. Whatever level of physical reality you want to try to explain us through reducing what we are to that. And once you adopt that worldview, where's agency? Where's responsibility? Where's freedom? How can we respond to the world that we're living? And if we don't even believe that we have that ability, literally, metaphysically, if we don't have freedom. If we're not more than just our genes, or our molecules, or our DNA, or atoms, then it's literally meaningless. There's literally no meaning to life. And that is the default view of many human beings right now. We have to face that and really be clear that that is incoherent, and it's not going to allow us to address the problems of the world. And actually, in one of my searching, for examples of this, I found a study from Australia actually that showed that 88% of people in Australia think that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance. Meaning that when you're feeling depressed, it's completely explained simply by the chemicals in your body. There's no account for what has happened to you, to your experience, to the way that you're thinking about and processing your experience. It's just a radical reduction of your human experience to a chemical physical material explanation. And again, it's so disempowering, but then there's nothing you can do about it, right? The way you feel is completely an outcome of some physical chemical imbalance. There's nothing you can do but take drugs, literally. But that's a worldview. That's not an objective truth. That is a worldview that I'm arguing is very confused, and we have to be able to see that it's confused and find our way out of it. Because this reduced view of humanity that is very prevalent in our society reduces our agency and responsibility. It makes us unable to respond to the complexity of the world, right? We have to make these connections and get ourselves out of those sort of scientific traces that are being woven in popular culture all around us. We have to be able to explain the function and the role and the purpose of humanity in evolving universe because our choices are made in terms of our worldviews and our values and our ideas about ourselves, right? We make choices based on our stories. We act according to who we think we are and our frameworks and our worldviews are embodied and lived even if we're not thinking these kinds of thoughts every day. Many people are acting them out unconsciously and subconsciously in their behavior. Another phrase that David Temple uses is that the global crisis is an identity crisis, right? The root of the crises that we're facing has to do with how we understand our own identity because if we don't have clear vision of who we are and what our role is in the world, we can't possibly take responsibility for problems. To the point at which many people, and I'll talk a lot about this this afternoon in my AI workshop, we have such a radically reduced view of humanity and such a feeling of lack of agency and responsibility. We're basically preparing the ground to give our agency over to machines, right? We want AI to make our decisions for us and that's a deep, deep mistake and it's something that we need to avoid but we need to understand why and get to the root of the confusion about why people are moving in that direction. So part of facing the complexity of the world is growing beyond these doglands of science and materialism and this is what Steiner was trying to point us to in his own way over a hundred years ago, right? We need to appreciate that and make that connection. His notion of spiritual science was a way of trying to understand what was happening in the modern world, the trends toward materialism and even relativism and really get at the root of what the problem is there and point in another direction. We have to find a way to get from what is to what ought to be and we have to update our understanding of evolution so that we still have a meaningful role to play in it and I think a key thing for us to consider here and appreciate is an understanding of developmental psychology. Actually, geniuses like John P.A.J., John Kebser and many developmentalists are trying to actually help us understand that the way that we grow and evolve as human beings is also in alignment with the evolution of what's happening around us, right? Our own growth and development and evolution is one with the growth and evolution of the whole world. So there is this developmental evolutionary journey that we're on and that was also part of the genius of Rudolf Steiner to see humanity as part of a larger evolution that is inherently meaningful and purposeful, right? We have to reclaim that vision of the humanity that is meaningful and purposeful and growing and evolving and growing somewhere. There's a story that we're part of and there is a directionality to it. We need a better story. We're not stuck in a story of randomness or meaninglessness. We're in a story of inherent value and increasing consciousness and complexity. One way to think about this is the big sort of revolutionary evolutionary changes that have happened throughout history, right? So Steiner talks about minerals, plants, animals, and humans, right? That's an evolutionary story, right? And in other people like Merle and Donald talk about four big bangs. You have three big bangs or four big bangs, right? You have the emergence of matter, then you have the emergence of life, then you have the emergence of animals, then you have the emergence of humans, right? Those are all something like a big bang. They're miracles. They're emergence of new radically different qualitative experiences of reality, right? Over time. So we're a part of that story. So we have to think about the implications of that. Where is that going, right? What is next in that story? The sense is that something important is going on and we have a role to play. And that is part of our planetary story of humanity. So how do we situate ourselves historically and think about how we resolve the meaning crisis and the metacrisis and what role signer education can play in that? And how do we do that by maybe clarifying and improving our understanding of the story of evolution and humanities role to play? I guess those are those are my big questions that I'm trying to weave some thoughts around. As Pierre Deschardin said, evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow, right? It's something we have to find a way to account for. And Steiner was tuned into this. Steiner was trying to point us toward an evolutionary journey and a sort of hierarchy of being in some ways, right? From minerals to plants to animals to humans. And many different frameworks that we can draw from to help us understand what's going on here, right? We can think about things in terms of human development from ego centered to group centered right to whole world centered. We can think about it in terms of self centered ethnocentric world centric and then including all being. So there's a there's a development happening within the human that we can talk about. We can think about cultural evolution, I've even just from pre modern to modern to post modern to whatever's next right there's all these different frames for seeing cultural unfolding social unfolding human unfolding that's part of a bigger story of cosmic unfolding, right? And we have to feel the meaningfulness of that and the potential for that. John Gebster was somebody who did some really important work in that regard. He talks about the evolution from the magic to the mythic to the mental to the integral. And that's important because the way that he described the mental stage when he calls the mental is a very lucid description of the sort of modern post modern world that we're living in right now. What kind of qualities have emerged in the way that people think and the way that people think about themselves, the way that people relate to the world. How has that shifted right over the over recent centuries and how has that really led to many of the crises that we're facing and in his view what we're really witnessing over the past few hundred years. Is that the mental structure is reaching a point of exhaustion right so we've come out of the magic and out of the mythic into the hyper rational mental. But there's a breakdown of one structure before you get to the next one, so if you look at the patterns of all these evolution. You'll see the sort of emergence of something, the flowering of it, and then the breakdown of it before you sort of can emerge to the next stage. So if we think about our world in that way, we can start to think about the chaos we're experiencing, the disruption we're experiencing, our inability to really understand the world around us. It's like the mental structure that most of us are sort of perceiving the world through. It's not up to the task, right? It's starting to break down, but it begs the question of what's next, right? What is the structure of consciousness and culture that can actually absorb and understand the world that is emerging? Another lens we can think about is again, so we're tuning in now to like the world we're living in now, the breakdown of sense making. The the forms of life that have come about since modernity, right, the modern world and many, again, many people have tried to explain this and talk about it in different ways. So Owen Barfield talks about with the movement from original participation to abstraction to final participation, right? So we have a sort of unconscious participation with the world, then the development of an abstract sort of conceptualization of the world, and then the potential for a final participation that includes thinking, right? And that was just very similar to Steiner's view of seeing the emergence of certain kinds of thinking, the problems that that creates within the potential for a future. Max Weber talks about disenchantment, right? The sense of like coming into the modern world that has the world become disenchanted, it's become dead, it's become like this, it's become godless, right? The loss of religion and God and the emergence of the secular is something that we have to grapple with and the implications of that. And in Geppner's language, you know, when we think about that mental world we're living in, the secular, mental, rational sort of post-religious world where we've lost our sense of coherent story, we've lost our sense of meaning, we lost our sense of inherent value, it's this growing capacity for abstraction that makes possible the perception of proportion and depth, but it also increases our sense of separation, right? So we're going through a kind of process where we're, we're feeling more separate from the world and no longer embedded in it, but that's not an all bad thing is the thing that it's not just that things are getting worse. It's not just that it's, we made a mistake and we have to go back, it's just part of this process that we're a part of, so we have to see and embrace the process, it's not, we can't catastrophize or think that we've made a mistake or that it's just all wrong, either. You know, on the upside, we have tremendous powers of abstraction, synthesis and mastery, on the downside, objectification, alienation from the whole, and that chronic background anxiety that's caused by having removed oneself from the world in order to perceive it, right? So again, back to like control and loss of resonance, we're, we're trying to control the world, but we've lost resonance with the world and we're alienated from the world in ourselves, but this is part of the developmental process we have to move through. As Richard Tarnas said, the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation, it's just a lot of people saying similar things, just trying to tune into like many people are trying to get us to think about and grapple with our place in this historical narrative. Another way to think about this, again, is the evolution from traditional modern and postmodern, such as think culturally, what's happening culturally in terms of the last few hundred years and the pre-modern world, most people around the world had very set world views, right, based on myths and stories and a sense of inherent value, theocentric value structures, right, having a sense that life is meaningful because it's connected to some, some, um, theocracy or divine presence or at least cosmic story that makes sense, and the modern world was a disembedding from that, right, it was a critique of that, it was a distancing from that, but, and it was also striving for universal ideals, right, one of the problems is, well, this culture thinks that, this culture thinks that, and then we get conflict, so we're seeking and searching for a way of having a universal story that includes everyone. And part of the modern impulse was just that, right, trying to, like, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men, all people are created equal, right, there's a, there's an impulse there that actually is good and true and beautiful, but we haven't quite figured out how do we make that apply to everyone without sort of being homogenizing or colonizing, telling other people what to think, right, it's not a simple question to resolve, but it's part of the process that we're a part of, but what, one way to understand the culture we've moved into, the postmodern response to that, universalizing impulse is to critique that, right, to critique that impulse to have a universal story, right, because that's, it's not right to just say, oh, well, my story is true, and this is going to be true for all people, we've become conscious enough to see that that's also problematic, but then what's left is a void. What's left is a void of people like Yuval Harari, who is a very popular author, the author of Sapiens, and many other books that millions of people have read, including many very powerful people. Yuval Harari's fundamental worldview is that any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is a delusion. That's a quote from Yuval Harari. His worldview is that all meaning is just made up. It's just stories, all we have is stories, just meaningless stories, you have your story, I have my story, there's no real truth. We have to be able to see that that's not coherent. We cannot have a coherent planetary relationships between human beings, if that's our default worldview, but that's the default worldview of the postmodern world that we're in right now. That's a problem, that's part of the metacrisis that we're a part of, and you can't, it's actually, it's a deep opposition to the very thing we need to pull us together, right, we have to find a way to have a shared story for all humans. So that we can coordinate and collaborate, right, and work together to solve our global problems and to have a worldview where you say that's literally impossible. You're taking away the very possibility of us collaborating working together. We cannot collaborate if we don't have a shared story and shared value, and we experience that in the Waller Steiner movement, right, it's so beautiful to go to the other side of the planet and feel shared resonance, shared value, shared story, shared meaning with people. There's already a deep connection between us. We can work together. We can solve problems. We can actually create environments for children that are beautiful and true and good because we have shared values without that. So we have to see that and it's sort of what's thought of as living in a post truth world, right, so that's another phrase. Again, many people are saying the same things, trying to help us understand what we're working with here. Ken Wilbert says it has become the defining issue of our century because not a single other issue can be directly and effectively addressed if there is no compass point of accessible truth to guide action in the first place, right, the post living in a post truth world, having that as a sort of default cultural idea is in some ways our biggest problem. We have to see that philosophically. We all have to become philosophers to the point where we can see that, see that that's in coherent and find a way to reclaim a sense of truth and value because underneath all the things that I'm talking about, I would argue and some other people are arguing as well, it's a crisis of value. It's a crisis of feeling like we live in a world that's inherently valuable and meaningful. We cannot address the complexity and crises of the world without a shared story of value as the context for our diversity, right, that's the way that David Jay Temple talks about it, shared value and as a context for diversity. We acknowledge our diversity, we acknowledge different perspectives, but if we don't have a shared value underneath that, a shared sense of living in a reality that's valuable, we can't connect across those diverse worldviews. You can't run a civilization on the idea that all values are arbitrary, it cannot work, it won't work. So again, how have we got to this point in our story, how have we sort of lost the plot where we actually have evolved to the point where we feel like there's no point to our own evolutions, right, it's sort of mind-blowing that that's actually the world that we're living in. But it's important to see that this, again, there is a way to understand it as a result of our own development evolution, we're in a stage, it's all in process, it's in motion, right, we're going somewhere. But the leading edge of this global culture right now, the sort of postmodern intelligentsia, scientific worldview that's sort of dominating around the planet, is self-defeating. And we have to find a way to get beyond that, and we need microcommunities of thoughtful people who are rooted in value to sort of be grounded in something on the other side of that. We're conscious enough to see many perspectives and to believe in equality, but we haven't yet learned how to weave those different perspectives together into a developmental tapestry, and that is the task of 21st century education, that's what I'm arguing. And again, Steiner was way ahead on all of this. He was seeing glimmers of all of it. He was seeing the root problems of modernity and materialism, and the way that it would lead to nihilism and cynicism. He was trying to find, he was aware of the problems of Newtonian science and Kantian metaphysics. He was trying to find a way through to integrate those things, to understand those things, but to not be locked into those worldviews, right. He was trying to take people like Gerta and more embodied embedded ways of being in the world and understanding science and spirituality, sort of get us on to the other side of these very limited and limited worldviews. And people like Owen Barfield were able to see Steiner in that way, and to see that he was actually the embodiment of how to resolve some of these problems. And by weaving together thought and feeling and will and character in an embodied way in community is the resolution that it is the answer to the metacrisis itself. and that spiritual understanding. understanding of thinking that was lost in the 16th and 17th centuries, which something Steiner was talking about a lot. He was the relationship of making thinking spiritual again, right? Thinking through the issues of the world with a spiritual connection to the cosmos is what Steiner was trying to do and embody. And what he was pointing to was what he called the consciousness soul age, right? And he had the sense that the mechanical civilization that we're living through that accelerated since his time is what will give birth to the consciousness soul. So his sense of trajectory was from the sentient soul to the intellectual soul to the consciousness soul, right? So he had his own map of this evolution. So all the different sort of terms that I'm using they're all similar. They all overlap. They're all saying the same thing in different ways. Many, many people are trying to convey to us this evolutionary developmental story. The language that he used was sentient soul to intellectual soul to consciousness soul, right? But it's pointing in the same direction of where we have to go to get to the other side of materialist modernist complexity, which is disconnected from our sense of value and resonance. He explained that this process leads to increasing individuation less magical and participatory experience, a growth from senses to drives to emotions to thinking, is more independent in selfless. The self gains clarity as it grows as it grows into rationality. And he also was, he also talked about the kinds of qualities that you have to engage to move through these stages, right? So in the sentient soul, part of your work is overcoming anger and like brute impulses and emotions. As you move into the rational intellectual soul, you wake up to a striving for truth and you can see that even in the modernist movement. Much of modernity is striving for truth, right? It's striving for those universal truths but not in a way that is still connected to sort of the source value of the world that we're living in. But the consciousness soul depends on reverence, right? He's one of his key insights is in order for us to enact the consciousness soul we have to be rooted in reverence for the world and understand that there's a feeling that we have to have in order to grow into that capacity. Steiner says that our idea of evolution must not stop at what has happened up to this point. We have to realize that human beings must themselves undergo further evolution. They have to go beyond the stage they have now reached and continue to develop new forces and make themselves more and more perfect and whole. So that's the basic story I want to tell, right? We're facing increasing complexity, we're facing many crises of complexity, we're experiencing a sense of alienation, a loss of meaning, a loss of value, and the way to reclaim that I'm arguing is to embody and understand a sort of evolutionary developmental story like the one that Steiner was trying to point toward that enables us to reclaim human meaning and human purpose in the world. There's another tangent I could go on and I think I'm going to cut it a little bit short but it's really fascinating and beautiful to see how many avenues there are into the truth and how many different people are trying to point toward the same thing and one of the bodies that work that I've been tracking recently is Ian McGilchrist and his understanding of the brain and thinking about the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain and I highly recommend his work and he's pointing into a lot of the same places and really explaining how this world of duality that we live in composed of unity and duality holds and parts our nervous system itself reflects that sort of tension and that understanding the brain can help us to understand our consciousness and our experience and how we sort of attend to the world affects how the world reveals itself to us and our sort of right hemisphere orientation to the world is wide open. It's directly in touch with reality itself and value and truth. The left hemisphere cannot do that. The left hemisphere is very narrow being very focused right at the attention of the predator, not the attention of the open, open-minded prey and in many ways we've sort of become like people with right hemisphere deficits. So over time, over these past 300 years we've become more and more oriented to a left hemisphere view of reality where the left hemisphere, if you do studies, if someone thinks he looks at is like if you lose access to your right hemisphere and you only are operating through your left hemisphere, your world view radically shifts and becomes very, very rigid. You become overly confident, you can write thinking, you jump to conclusions, you only see linear relationships the left hemisphere's job is to build a model of the world and basically defend it at all costs. You lose contact with reality itself and you're only relating to this internal mental model that you have. The left hemisphere ignores and denies and dismisses anything that it can't pin down and measure and quantify. It suppresses sensory information that can fix with its own ideas and it actually cannot understand. It's incapable of understanding the experience of life that we can access through the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is what gives us direct access to reality. The left hemisphere creates models and maps of that experience and there's a disconnect between them. As a society, we are becoming very much people who are overly oriented to one of those ways of experiencing the world and we have to rebalance our hemispheres and rebalance our experience of life. We're explaining a lot of the things that I've already explained but in another way that just reveals the truthfulness of it, I think. Another thing that's interesting is that if you're stuck in a left hemisphere if you have the world, you start to see everything as dead. You start to see everything as mechanical. There's no direct access to the living quality of things. And McGilchris says that a virtual world is the conclusion of that process of focusing your attention on the left hemisphere. That is where the evolution of the left hemisphere leads to a virtual world. So one of ways of understanding history is that since the industrial revolution and since the emergence of modern technology, it's really had a huge impact on our psyche on the way we relate to the world, the way that we think. And now the digital is really a manifestation and expression of a very left hemisphere oriented approach to the world. We need to pull back from that and we need to realize that things like Steiner education are very simple and natural ways of helping humans grow with balanced hemispheres. There's a lot that could be said. I'll say a little bit tomorrow about Steiner education and the ways that it helps us to have balance. We're actually, we are keeping our children balanced. We're keeping them tuned in with their right hemisphere contact with the reality through the things that we do in the Steiner schools every day. And I'm just trying to convey the significance of that. The cultural, historical, evolutionary significance of that is actually quite beautiful and quite extreme. So in some, you know, starting to wrap this together, I think, you know, I've obviously laid out a law. They're giving this sense that we're in this time between worlds and a time between stories, right? So I think that is an important phrase. My friend Zach Stein wrote a book called Education in a Time Between Worlds. And that phrase has kind of caught on a little bit. And I think the reason is because it's true in a deep and profound way that some of us are just starting to understand the implications of these big historical changes that have happened, right? When we move from foraging to agriculture, to the industrial revolution, to the digital, right? These are major world historical changes, right? When we move from the magic to the mythic, to the mental, these are huge changes. We move from pre-modern to modern, to post-modern culture. These are big epochs of human history. We are in the midst of a big transition right now. We don't yet have the language or the concepts necessarily to describe what the next stage will be called. We don't even necessarily know all the details of what it's going to be of what it's going to feel like. But we can start to intuit the trajectory and the direction that we're on. And many people use words like integral or integrated to try to describe what could be next, right? Because we're coming to an awareness of the historical process. We're coming to an awareness of being able to think about these prior stages. And how would we weave them together? How would we sort of be more whole, more healthy, more healed and healing, more integrated in terms of all these different structures that have emerged? How do we hold them in our own experience? One of the last thoughts I'll share too is thinking of borrowing from complexity theory. Another way to think about what's happening right now is that we're at a bifurcation point in systems, right? And right now, so thinking about systems, we think of the whole planet as a living system. One of the key ideas from thinking about complex systems, that you need an attractor point. So typically there's something called an attractor and the system orients toward that thing, right? So a lot of these different epochs that I've been talking about, you can sort of think about what were the defining characteristics of that stage that serve as sort of the attractor for that stage. And right now, one of the ways of thinking about the crisis that we're facing, there's two really bad attractors we're going toward, right? One is sort of chaos and disruption and fragmentation, right? Andrew talked about fragmentation, and we can see concerns about like runaway and I, climate collapse, we have this sense that just everything could fall apart, right? And it's like we have this sort of dystopian sense that that's one attractor removing toward. And in response to that, the other thought, right, totalitarianism, right? A sort of regress, like we need to just lock everything down. We need to sort of regress to a sort of pre-modern sense of value and control and fundamentalism and extremism, right? We see both of those really prevalent in the world today on one sense, technologically Acceleration in chaos and fragmentation and then the other kind of totalitarianism in search for control and What we need to do is find the third path right we need to find the third attractor and my sense is that what Steiner was trying to point to With this with the sensibility of going into the consciousness soul What other people just called the unique self like having a sense of being a unique Self that's in tune with reality that has access to truth and beauty and goodness That is aware of its own evolutionary story the way of being an individual a free evolutionary conscious Individual who has some sense an historical unfolding some sense of their own meaning and purpose in the world and Some sense of what has to happen to have a shared story of value to pull everyone together That's the attractor point right that is the thing that we can grow toward and visualize and into it and think about This is what we need to become right? This is what we need to become this is why we're raising our children the way that we're raising so that they can become those unique beautiful Selves who are in touch with truth and value and are not pulled into an overly controlling sensibility and are not falling prey to the Overwhelming and anxiety of of chaos So that's really that's really the vision and Our work now I think is to find our way into that to live into that to breathe into that and to find ways to sort of enact Steiner's vision for relating to a more than material reality and There's many people who are doing that good work Actually one person I found is here in Australia. There's a woman named Freya Matthews He's a professor at the Trobe University in Melbourne and she's written some beautiful things talking about How we weave together indigenous practices and rituals to create a more integrated sense of self and identity and To reclaim the subjectivity of the world, which is what she calls it, right? Taking from these Australian indigenous lineages And how people used to be more able to experience the world from within Right as a field of meaning not as a world of objects And that's part of what we have to reintegrate and relearn as humans, right? It's a bar field called final participation we move through abstract thinking in the mental into a participatory Aliveness it's a new kind of animism, right? It's a thinking animism a post rational animism and we can learn From our ancestors here. We can learn from indigenous people here We can learn from our religious traditions here and find a way into a new sort of spiritual sensibility that allows us To weave these things together so that we can recognize that there There is a fully distributed intelligence in the world what people used to call the logos and it is operative in the living community that we call the earth and we can't control it and We're not outside of it and we can't adequately map or model it as the left hemisphere wants to do But we can resonate with it and we can come into a deeper attunement with it and with each other So I think that's what's happening. I think that's what we're doing. I think that's actually Underneath and inside and behind and all around us all the time. I think it's what's animating Steiner education Whether we know it or not, but it's better to know it so that we can consciously act on it So my sense is that Steiner education actually does give us a way to do this in an embodied way So that's what I'll talk about more tomorrow morning Is one of the more concrete practical ways that we in Steiner schools can embody this new sensibility and this new story and this new world view Because we are the answer to the metacrisons believe it or not. So we may as well wake up to it and do our best. Thank you so much Find out more about Steiner education visit our website Steiner education dot edu dot are you Here you'll learn about every Steiner school in Australia and their exciting work in delivering the Australian Steiner curriculum framework If you're a teacher you'll learn about Steiner teacher training pathways and about finding a position in an Australian Steiner school If you're a parent, there may be a Steiner school near you for your child. Thank you for listening This is a piccolo podcast production