Henk Bak

In ‘News from the Goetheanum’, Jan/Feb 1998, Paul Mackay characterizes the third stage of development in the anthroposophical Society as a move into society at large, acting as a ‘stranger’ who ‘perceives the tasks arising from contemporary events’.

This sums up the very thing I had in mind when at the Victorian Branch Annual General Meeting 1996 I suggested to Anita Sharpe that the Anthroposophical Society in Australia contribute to the constitutional debate. Anita referred me to the Council.

Preparation and support

The Council endorsed the idea and asked me to work something out with the assistance of some interested members. The result was a 19 page discussion paper: Functional Differentiation. From Welfare State to Well Tempered Society. When it came to the final text, the Council asked me to present it as a private research project, supported by the Society rather than on its behalf. Apparently at this stage the Society would not (yet) move into society at large....

Considering subsequent responses to this project the Council’s decision may have been a wise one. A letter by Alois Tromp in response to the paper expressed doubt as to the wisdom of any explicit connection with the Anthroposophical Society Publications in our own Journal and reports from the recent conference in Manila (2) seem to suggest that internally we are not yet ready to present a view in the sense in which Steiner insists on expressing what Anthroposophy needs to express.(1)

Without a substantial critical input from within the Society, the text can indeed hardly be seen as representative of the Society’s understanding and commitment to a functional differentiation of society at large in three domains. So support was a cautious second best. And support is what I got.

Alduino Mazzone wrote an accompanying letter, and Guenter Zimmerman made money available. Of the near to $300 of expenses, members and friends contributed $75 by ordering copies of the discussion paper and by donation.

Distribution and response

One hundred and fifty copies were printed, Graeme Harvey photocopied ten extra to send around, and Sarah Benson sent a copy to David Heaf (UK) who has put the text on the Internet (http://www.threefolding.freeuk.com/). The project was publicised in the Journal of the Anthroposophical Society in Australia, and in one or two Branch newsletters.

Copies were sent to politicians of the different political parties (36), to the Constitutional Centenary Foundation (13), ‘Civil Society’ groups (7), members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society (35), columnists and academics (20), authors I had referred to in my paper (12) and a circle of friends, professionals and family members with whom I have shared interests over the years in a variety of life situations.(18)

Each copy sent by mail was accompanied by a personal letter, stating why I thought the addressee might be interested and expressing my interest in receiving feedback. As those letters were personal I haven’t made photocopies of them. I feel there is more freedom this way. The first 45 copies were accompanied by the Council Coordinators letter as well.

In total I received 26 responses. Most of them were acknowledgements of receipt of the letter. Sometimes expressing a sense of eagerness in anticipation of reading it. Politicians like Cheryl Kernot and Mark Latham sent their own messages in response. Tony Staley of the Liberal Party and old friend of the Melbourne Steiner School responded with a philosophical note of appreciation. From the Governor General, Sir William Deane’s office, I got an acknowledgement of receipt.

Pamela Bone of The Age was the only columnist to answer. Amongst academics Prof. Don Edgar of RMIT University responded and suggested the names of two colleagues to send the paper to. His own response and that of other people involved with the ‘Civil Society’ concept, expressed full sympathy with the values, but difficulty in seeing how to differentiate where there is so much crossing of boundaries and overlapping of areas going on.

As the discussion paper had been conceived as a response to Sir Ninian Stephen’s call for debate on the constitution and for contributions from the public (1 Jan 1996), the paper was sent to the executive director of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, some members of the Board and to the different Chapters in States and Territories. The only responses from this I got were from Sir Ninian Stephens himself ( who is no longer chairman) and from Prof. Peter Boyce, Tasmania, who passed the paper on to a group of colleagues, sociologists, studying issues of citizenship.

Of the authors I had referred to in my paper, John Ralston Saul of Canada responded with a warm acknowledgement, and Prof. John Quiggin, of James Cook University, with an expression of sympathy with the ‘point - that the economic, cultural and political spheres are each independently important and that no one should dominate the others as, arguably, the economic sphere has done in recent years.’ He expressed a reservation about his own expertise in the area of ‘functionalist sociology’.

Another academic, Prof Winton Higgins, of Macquarie University, responded to Graeme Harvey, who had sent him a copy of the paper. He expressed his reservation about the approach of people like Parsons, Luhmann and Habermas, I had referred to, and suggested other reading: Strange Multiplicity, by James Tully, an authoritative, beautifully argued case for the self-determination of Canada’s indigenous peoples on the basis of English law; and: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, written during W.W.II and a case against domination by the economy of society and of the market over the economy. Both books were real eye-openers for me and both were helpful for the articulation of threefoldness in different ways. I wrote back to express my appreciation of this response and to clarify some misunderstandings of my paper. This did not lead to any further correspondence.

The same happened with some other respondents, where I felt I could clarify and show how their questions or doubts could be answered and resolved. To a respondent of the Victorian People Together Project I suggested that if people cannot be together in the economy as distinct from politics they won’t be able to be together in society as a whole. In response to someone who preferred a holistic approach, I pointed out that differentiation is complementary to wholeness: without differentiation ‘wholes’ degenerate to either monoliths or heaps. As regards the notion of ‘Civil Society’ I would suggest that civil society requires a civil economy, etc. One respondent wondered about the cost of implementing functional differentiation. Which in my understanding makes sense only if one is prepared to wonder about the current cost of not implementing it. The same respondent ended by expressing his appreciation that at least there was another who argued that the economy should be seen as a servant of society. To which I felt I had to reply, that the principle of non domination means that all and none of the three functions are servants of society, the economy being of equal status as politics and culture etc...

With Mark Latham I went one step further. When he received the discussion paper it was election time and he sent a lecture expressing the hope that it would be useful to my work. He would follow the paper up later. When this didn’t happen I wrote to him saying that for politicians to send their own message in reply is generally not such a good idea, especially when the message could have been improved by taking note of the content of the letter they are replying to. But that in his case his lecture made a lot of sense and could be very useful to me in clarifying my ideas. So I annotated it with the intention of showing how one could make even more sense of it.

Some of these exchanges took place via email. On all those occasions no further correspondence followed.

Closer to home, Sean Burke, then a first year student of the Melbourne Steiner Teacher Training Seminar annotated my paper thoroughly, not only on readability but also on possible misunderstandings. If there had been a new edition of this paper I would have taken many of his suggestions on board. He also provided me with a list of politicians I should send the paper to.

Learning from feedback

Through the responses I received I learnt. First of all about the limitations of the project. My limitations, e.g. my tendency to write in a very condensed style. And there is a limit to active involvement, e.g. in meetings of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation, Victorian Chapter. Then I learnt not only about new books and Civil Society Groups, including CADI in the Philippines (2), I also got a sense for the difference between two ways of thinking: one that merely manages our perceptions of the world, and one that penetrates through our perceptions to reach the world, its being........ The former sees the world as a collection of items, things, issues, rights, responsibilities, etc.: only individuals, no society; the latter sees the being of humanity struggling to embody itself in the three domains as in its constitutive functions. (3) The former sees economics, politics and culture merely as one of many ways of arranging social phenomena, the latter sees them as vital functions, just as essential for a human society to come about as roots, stem and flowering bough are essential for a seed to grow into a decent tree.(4)

Steiner insisted that the threefold formation of a plant represented a true analogy for the formation of present day society. Barfield, quoting Soloviev, suggests ‘organic solidarity’ between the three functions (5). Parsons avoided the organic metaphor altogether for fear that his sociology would not be accepted as a science.(6)

I don’t think the organic metaphor can be forever banned from scientific attempts to understand and renew society, but for the purpose of this paper I took care to not get distracted from its main theme. And yet, even the word ‘constitution’ refers to something organic....

Thinking, representing and developing a conversation or discourse on social renewal in terms of the three spheres and their continuous interrelatedness require a kind of thinking that is mobile, versatile and flexible. Two years after publishing his book on social renewal Rudolf Steiner observed that it was already dated.(7) One needs to find continuously new ways of clarifying the concepts and terminology involved. Situations change, and ways of speaking do not always change with them, and vice versa. Steiner devoted a whole lecture course on training people how to present ideas on social renewal in public.(8)

Part of this project was to practise, not only writing, but also speaking. I became a member of the Constitutional Centenary Foundation and spoke in question time at the launch of Constitution Week, Victoria, Sept ‘98. Then I became a local convenor for The Purple Sage Project, a Victoria wide process of consultation and research, involving ca 500 communities (5000 participants), to formulate a new vision and alternative policies to the current community breakdown. And in December I contributed to the discussion on corporate citizenship, organized by Amnesty International and the Ethical Enterprise Network.

What I attempted to address on these occasion was the need to take the economy seriously as a third function of societal life; of public concern and with a status equal to that of the state and culture. At present there is no place at all, for instance, in the constitutional debate for the constitutional status of the economy.

At the launch of Constitution Week none of the panel responded, but afterwards two people came up to me: a man telling me that I made a lot of sense, a woman asking me: had I heard of the Purple Sage Project?

As a convenor in The Purple Sage Project I had the opportunity to differentiate issues and values as they show up differently in the three domains, which made good sense, as long as I was careful not to apply a theory or system. And rightly so! This process is still ongoing and my contribution may still have some bearing on the project’s final position on what the organizers pertinently identified as a need to ‘redefine the people’s contract, or social compact’.(9)

When it was said at the Human Rights debate on Corporate Citizenship, that a new political culture would be needed (to include corporations as ‘citizens’), I suggested a shift from political to economic culture: as we are all citizens of the economy, we should all be involved in economic decision making, not only businesses. John Simpson, External Affairs Manager of Shell Australia, responded with a sense of recognition: ’we are right now sitting around with people and organisations we would never have even 5 years ago’. Privately he later added: ‘it might take twenty years or more for it to really happen’. Somehow this response made what I have been saying for a while now quite real

One place in which I have been saying those things is in letters to the editor of The Age and The Australian. Not that they are ever placed. For me those letters are still a kind of exercise and a way of ’getting things out of my system’ whether I get a response or not.

On 17 February I attended the launch of the Macedon Ranges Shire Council Economic Development Strategy. Although it had been publicized in the local paper, it seemed very much an in house affair of the local business forum. Many black suits, and very few women. I was obviously recognized as a stranger, explained that I came as an interested citizen from the neighbouring Hepburn Shire and was made welcome. Main speakers were Lindsay Fox and Neil O’Keefe(10), member for Burke in the Federal Parliament. The audience was not at all representative of the economic constituency of the Shire,(e.g. obviously none of the participants was unemployed or otherwise on social benefits) but could well - on future occasions - be extended to become so.....

Neil O’Keefe spoke about the investment potential created by the accumulation of superannuation funds and the reluctance of governments to dictate how those funds should be used. After the meeting I suggested to him that parliament could perhaps agree on a differentiation in economic, political and cultural uses of the funds, which would still leave people free within a framework that would provide a healthy balance between the three. I elaborated on this suggestion in a letter, when I sent him a copy of my paper.

He acknowledged receipt of the paper straight away, and now, when I am finalising this report, writes to me to say that he had read the paper and now sees where I am coming from He passed copies on to Barry Jones, the Parliamentary Library and the Prime Ministers Department, ‘who will have responsibility for preparing (a) charter for future government.’ He also suggested sending the paper to the "think tanks" working in these areas. Which I certainly will do.

Conclusion

Considering the limited scope of the project, my failure to generate much correspondence or discourse on the basis of it, and the need to keep the concepts and terminology moving, I suggest that with this report the project in this form is finished. I will have another set of copies printed but I won’t volunteer to send it out to people. I will only send it on request, except those to the think tanks on Neil O’Keefe’s suggestion. It is now on the Internet anyhow.(11)

The next step, as I see it, is conversation. First of all within the Anthroposophical Society, if she ever wants to equip herself to present those ideas to a wider public in response to the pressing needs of our time. And secondly, outside the Society, where and when there is an expressed interest. Amongst other material I would hope that this discussion paper could still serve a purpose as a background for such conversations.

Via Edith Hart I have come in contact with a group that meets in Melbourne under the name of Frontier Learning. Its president, Dr Rob de Caen has invited me to speak to my paper. This is scheduled to happen 16 June. Either the end of the project, or the beginning of a new stage. Time will tell......

Henk Bak, Trentham, 16 May 1999

-Presentation of the paper, Melbourne 16 June, was well received and lead to a request for a copy from Western Australia.

-Copies have been sent to four think tanks, with only one acknowledgement of receipt. Clive Hamilton of The Australia institute, Canberra, wrote, that the story in the discussion paper intrigued him.

-When the Prime Minister and Les Murray started working together on a preamble, I sent both of them a copy of the paper plus a draft example of how a preamble could look when functional differentiation would be put into practice. An extended version of this draft is attached to this report as an appendix.(13)

-A presentation of the discussion paper was well received and discussed lively at a local meeting together with Tim Petherbridge of the Hope Party, at an ecological centre in Croydon, Melbourne

-Most importantly: Julian Rickert-Kersten and Myles Watson have started a Centre for Social Futures,(12)., to carry the work for this project further, facilitating research and study and creating a forum for a wider public. I am only too happy to be of any assistance to their initiative and work, and they provide me with a helpful sounding board to improve my ways in getting messages across.

1. "In the style of other sciences one would say: spiritual science wills something. She herself however says: As she should will or must will -And I say: As I must express myself-and not: As I express myself." These are the last sentences of a paragraph that started thus: "What Spiritual Science now specifically has to will, that is, that the human being doesn’t go sleeping and dreaming through what World Karma ordains for him/her." Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom Dornach First lecture. 28 Dec 1914. It is interesting to note that at this stage and in line with this point of view R. Steiner connects the notion of equality to the spiritual realm, freedom to the world of soul, and brotherhood to bodily existence. Lecture IV. 31 Dec 1914.

2. CADI Center for Alternative Development Initiatives, instrumental in putting the principles of threefolding society on the Philippines Governments agenda. Nicanor Perlas, chairman of CADI is also Chairman of the Anthroposophical Group, that organised the "Shaping the Future" conference , October ‘98. See Pacifica Journal., numbers 9 and 10 with an extensive report by Terry M. Boardman. Ben Cherry and Siegfried Gutbrot, who attended the conference, explained to me how the civil society groups represented the cultural sphere providing the economic sphere with principles, concepts and practices as an alternative and counter weight to the unhealthy trend of ‘elite’ globalisation.......

3. In his Give Judas a Chance Pietro Archiati makes it clear that threefoldness of society can only be fully achieved at the level of the individual and of the level of humanity as a whole.

4. For the differences in ways of thinking, see e.g. R. Steiner. Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms. Especially lecture VII, Dornach , August 21, 1920.

5. Owen Barfield. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. Form in Art and Society.

6. Conversation with Dr Bruce Wearne, author of The Theory and Scholarship of Talcot Parsons to 1951. A critical commentary. Cambridge University press, Melbourne etc 1989. For a discussion of how keenly Parsons was aware of the difference between organic and mechanic entities see Paul C. Creelan. Social Theory as confession: Parsonian sociology and the symbolism of evil. In Structure, Consciousness and History. edited by R.H. Brown and S.M. Lyman.Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 978.

7. Oxford Lectures ,1922

8. The Art of Lecturing, Dornach, October 1921

9. At one of the Purple Sage ‘think tank’ sessions on redefining the social contract, Michael Mweyo presented my story about a transformed Hepburn Shire, as published in the discussion paper, as a source of inspiration for the discussion. It was certainly remembered as I found out afterwards.

10. Lindsay Fox and Bill Kelty pioneered together a campaign to generate jobs in regional Victoria: for the purpose of functional differentiation it is important to note that their action involved an effort in identifying an economic audience or constituency for their meetings, not a political or cultural one. Neil O’Keefe initiated the Buy Australian Made campaign and was involved in the moves toward compulsory superannuation savings.

11. Social Threefolding on the Internet, Website address: http://www.threefolding.freeuk.com/

12. Centre for Social Futures. c/o Myles Watson. 14 Brysons Street. Canterbury. Vic 3126.

13. For Preamble version see overleaf.

I consider this as an exercise in applying functional differentiation in the same way as I tried my hand on a draft text for the oath of citizenship in the discussion paper itself. The draft might be useful for further reference in the ongoing debate on the "broader issues" regarding the constitution. I would not go for less, nor pretend more.

Henk Bak, Trentham, Australia
Email: hbak (at) westnet.com.au