(From Center & Periphery, the online newsletter of the Center for Anthroposophy)
Dateline Amherst, MA: At the Taproot of Terrorism
by Douglas Gerwin
Why are so many young people around the world becoming radicalized?
For answers to this question, it is tempting to invoke the tenets of political ideologies or the findings of popular sociology. Recently, though, I came across a passage from a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in 1920––on 9/11, as it happens––in which a quite different light is cast on this vexed issue.[1]
In the closing talk of a lecture series offered at the Goetheanum less than a year after the first Waldorf school was founded, Steiner addressed the root of dissatisfaction that young people may feel if their education has failed them.
Specifically, he related how children come into the world carrying, unconsciously, in the depths of their souls profound imaginations implanted before birth, or even before conception. These imaginations––which Steiner describes as “forces of pictorialized representation, which have been received before birth or conception”––need to find their outlet in the children’s consciousness during the course of their education.
If they are suppressed, for instance by an abstract form of teaching that replaces living pictures with dry intellectual concepts, these forces “will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface [of consciousness] in pictorial representation.” He singles out the teaching of the alphabet via abstract symbols (rather than via living pictures in which these symbols are buried) as an example of abstract instruction that inhibits the child’s spontaneous powers of imagination.
And what is the consequence of such a displacement? “Rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want because they want something that one cannot know,” is Steiner’s response. “They want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something . . . that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead it entered into their agitated social activities.” In brief, forces intended to arise in the realm of imaginative thinking erupt instead at the level of brute will.
Put differently, children come into the world with image-making forces arising from their pre-birth existence in the spiritual world. Because these creative forces belong to the heavens, they cannot find their rightful expression in the physical world and must remain in the realm of heavenly imaginations, a realm to which children are still directly connected. But if for some reason (abstract education is perhaps only one) the activity of these heavenly imaginations is staunched in the children at the level of their conscious thought-pictures, then it runs the risk of bursting out instead at the level of unconscious will.
Steiner, C.S. Lewis, and others have pointed to a law of the spirit according to which a constructive force at the level of thinking or consciousness (as carried, say, by the nervous system) will be experienced as destructive if displaced to the level of unconscious will (as carried, say, by the metabolic system), and vice versa. Consider only the “constructive” processes of digestion, which have their rightful place in our metabolic organs and which, if displaced via the blood to the fluids surrounding the upper nervous system and brain, may be experienced as excruciating migraine. And likewise, notice how the cut-and-thrust gesture of incisive, penetrating thinking, if displaced into the will, may appear as pugilist aggression and violence.
In other words, if children come into the world bearing heavenly picture-making forces and fail to find rightful outlets for these creative forces in their worlds of imagination, these same constructive powers may well erupt as destructive forces at the level of volition and action –– “in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations”, as Steiner puts it.
“No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good,” he concludes. “For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves . . . .”
Wherever we find children––in the West, the East, or the Middle East––who have been robbed by their education or their culture of the opportunity to tap into their heaven-creative powers of picture-making, we can expect to find schools of earth-destructive terrorists. At the root of “radicalized” terrorism we may discern, faintly, pictures of mighty heavenly forces that have been denied their rightful place.
Radiance of the heavens will there confront us, albeit in distorted form, as the wrath of heaven.
[1] Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science as a Foundation for Social Forms (Dornach, 6 August – 11 September 1920), Lecture XVI of 11 September. I am indebted to Patrice Maynard, Director of Publications and Development at the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, for this reference.