Dear Friends,
Tom and I are contemplating some courses to be run out of his home, and one that I want to offer would be called: American Anthroposophy. Tom has rightly pointed out that many people believe there is something nationalistic in such a concept, which has also been my experience over the years on the Internet. As soon as I would say something in a discussion group about America, many (even American's) would react as if what America was was this out of control Nation State wandering around the world being stupid, greedy and generally (culturally) deficient.
The funny thing would be that if I was to say on one of these lists something equally superficial and thoughtless about Germans or Germany, or England and the English, I'd be severely chastised, with some justification. For a lot of liberals, free spirits and progressive minded non-American's, America is what our government does and what the corporations who hold power here do. This is so false, it makes me want to gag and throw up.
No people is their government or what their business people do. It is charactertic of the time, that any thoughtful person can discover (with hardly any effort), that the world is sought to be ruled from above by those addicted to power and wealth. This is a timeless story, by the way - a fundamental lesson of history. What is unique in our time, is that the people living down below, in the social commons, are waking up and getting involved in transforming society on a massive scale.
Little of this is on the news, and anyone, who thinks they get a glimps of America or Americans from the news, needs a knock upside the head.
America, according to Steiner, is where races and civlizations go to die. (The Mission of the Folk Souls, lecture 6). Americans are being built up, as the first iteration of a People of Peoples, out of that which remains as a kind of social compost from the the dying into America of world races and cultures. Americans are slowly being born as an instinctive Michael Community. (Americans develop Anthroposophy in a natural way - Steiner, lectures to the workman 3/3/1923; and, English speaking peoples are instinctively in the Consciousness Soul in their Life of Rights - Steiner, The Challenge of the Times).
The American Spirit (as against the corrupt govenment, which has stolen democracy from Americans) is a universally human spirit (a force of will out of the I), best given expression in the 1990's by a man standing in front of a tank in China).
I could write a great deal more, but here I just want to express that I am going to use the terms "American Anthroposopy" and mean by that expression something very real and important for the future of Anthroposphy. And, anyone who wants to be so superficial and thoughtless as to think this has anything to do with nationalism will just have to stew in the soup such acts make in their own souls. I will not enable their weakness, by trying to phrase this differently, as if the truth needs to be watered down for people who aren't really interested in the truth in the first place.
Where does that impulse in me come from - from the 12 Steps, another of those remarkable inventions of Americans. Don't bullshit yourself, don't bullshit others and don't tolerate other's bullshitting you. Not very cultured speech, but there you have it. Can't mistake its meaning.
peace,
joel