Waldorf Problems

 

 

 

STEINER’S BILE

 

 

 

What were Steiner’s most hateful comments? It’s almost impossible to compile them all. The task is doubly difficult for individuals who are not fluent in German, Steiner’s native tongue. Some—perhaps many—of Steiner’s most egregious statements have not be translated into English by Anthroposophical publishers. (I wonder why?) Still, we can make a start. Here are several candidates for the Shame Hall of Fame. In addition to statements reflecting racism, anti-Semitism, and stereotyping of people Steiner considered subhumans, I have also included some remarks that show how Steiner wanted Waldorf students to be classified and punished. These latter comments may not be, technically, hateful. But they will probably make parents’ hair stand up.

A bit of advice: Anthroposophists become apoplectic when Steiner’s racism and other scurrilous opinions are laid bare. The Internet is virtually clogged with Anthroposophical defenses of Steiner. Read some of these defenses; they are interesting. But also read Steiner. Here, I will make a few comments of my own, but mainly I will simply quote R. Steiner. His own words are what undo him. According to his defenders, Steiner had no hatred in his soul for blacks, the French, American Indians, human “automatons,” humans possessed by demons, or anyone else. Perhaps so. But this misses the point. Whatever Steiner felt, here is what he said:

◊ [Racism and the Need for a Race War] “[Future human evolution] cannot happen in the world without the most violent struggle. White mankind is still on the path of absorbing spirit more deeply into its essence. Yellow mankind is on the path of preserving the period when the spirit is kept away from the body... [T]he result will have to be that [mankind’s next step upwards] cannot happen differently than as a violent fight between white mankind and colored mankind in the most varied areas...You see, we stand before something so colossal that, if we regard it through the diverse perceptions of spiritual science [i.e., Anthroposophy], we will in the future recognize it as a necessary occurrence.” [Rudolf Steiner, DIE GEISTIGEN HINTERGRÜNDE DES ERSTEN WELTKRIEGES {The Spiritual Background of the First World War} (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1974), p. 38, translated by Roger Rawlings, 2005.]

◊ [Racism] “The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe...It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race [of the French] and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), pp. 558-559.]

◊ [Racism] “On one side we find the black race, which is earthly at most. If it moves to the West, it becomes extinct. We also have the yellow race, which is in the middle between earth and the cosmos. If it moves to the East, it becomes brown, attaches itself too much to the cosmos, and becomes extinct. The white race is the future, the race that is creating spirit.” [Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE {On the Life of Human Beings and of the Earth} (Dornach: Verlag Der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung, 1961), p. 62, translated by Roger Rawlings, 2005.] According to Steiner, races become “extinct” when they move to the wrong neighborhood because they have deep spiritual bonds with their allotted places on the earth. Hence, physical separation of the races is it built into the races' very nature, according to Steiner.

◊ [Hierarchy of Races] “A race or nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type.” [Rudolf Steiner, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT (Anthroposophic Press, 1944), p. 149.]

◊ [Inferior People Are Unevolved and Evil] “Souls whose development has been delayed will have accumulated so much error, ugliness, and evil in their karma that they temporarily form a distinct union of evil and aberrant human beings who vehemently oppose the community of good human beings.” [Rudolf Steiner, AN OUTLINE OF ESOTERIC SCIENCE (Anthroposophic Press, 1997), p. 393.]

◊ [The Benefits of White Skin and Yellow Hair] “If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense...Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains.” [Rudolf Steiner, HEALTH AND ILLNESS, Vol. 1, (Anthroposophic Press, 1981), pp. 85-86.] See Peter Staudenmaier on Steiner’s teachings about the “Aryan race,” e.g. “Anthroposophy and Its Defenders”

http://www.communalism.net/Archive/13/ae1.print.php.

Anthroposophists aim their heavy artillery at Staudenmaier, but I commend his scholarship to you.

◊ [The Superiority of Northern Europeans] “Nordic man perceived the figures of the Gods [sic], the divine Beings working directly on his soul...This was direct experience to him.” [Rudolf Steiner, THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005), p. 132.] Other ancient peoples also had intuitions of the divine, but the Northern European perspective was the best. “Pictures or symbols of Teutonic mythology contain occult truths.” [Ibid., p. 19] “No other mythology gives a clearer picture of evolution than Northern mythology. Germanic mythology in its pictures is close to anthroposophical conception [sic] of future evolution.” [Ibid., p. 17] Even more important, Europeans continued to evolve, while other “races” did not. Read on.

◊ [Racism] "Negroes" are "decadent" and they "completely cut themselves off from the spiritual world" [Rudolf Steiner, quoted by an investigative commission of the Anthroposophical Society in the Netherlands, which labeled such remarks “unobjectionable.”]

◊ [Demons Caused the Existence of Different Races; Lower Races Are Less Evolved] “While there should have been basically only one form of human being...Lucifer and Ahriman [a Persian demon] preserved [earlier human types]...Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded....” [Rudolf Steiner, THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), p. 75.]

◊ [Blacks, Inferior, Are Childish] “[A] centre of cosmic influence [is] situated in the interior of Africa. At this centre are active all those terrestrial forces emanating from the soil which can influence man especially during his early childhood...The black or Negro race is substantially determined by these childhood characteristics.” [THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, p. 75.]

◊ [Black Novels] “[I]f we give these Negro novels to pregnant [white] women to read, then it won’t even be necessary for Negroes to come to Europe in order for mulattos to appear. Simply through the spiritual effects of reading Negro novels, a multitude of children will be born in Europe that are completely gray, that have mulatto hair, that look like mulattos!” [Steiner quoted by Peter Staudenmaier, “Race and Redemption: Racial and Ethnic Evolution in Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy,” 2004.]

◊ [American Indians, Inferior, Have Not Evolved] “If you look at pictures of the old American Indians the process of ossification [Indians are very bony, Steiner says] is evident in the decline of this race...The descendant of the brown race did not participate in [human evolution as seen, especially, in Northern Europeans such as Germans]. He held firm to the Great Spirit of the primeval past [i.e., an obsolete vision of the divine].” [THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, pp. 108-109.]

◊ [Racism: Normal Humans and the Others] “[I]t was the normal human beings that were ... the most capable of evolving. [Abnormal] peoples whose ego impulse was developed too strongly gradually wandered to the West [from Atlantis] and became ... the Red Indians of America. [Likewise, the abnormal] people whose ego-feeling was too little developed migrated to the East, and became the subsequent Negro population of Africa ... they deposited too many carbonic constituents in their skin and became black. This is why the Negroes are black. Thus both east of Atlantis in the black population and west of Atlantis in the red population we find survivors of the kind of people who had not developed their ego-feeling in a normal way. The human beings who had developed normally lent themselves best to progress.” [Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 118-119.]

◊ [“Lower” Humans Have Been Influenced by Lucifer] “[Superior] human beings...remained untouched by the Luciferic influence. [But] in the case of the lower types of human beings, the life body was too unprotected to be able to withstand the Luciferic influence.” [Rudolf Steiner, AN OUTLINE OF ESOTERIC SCIENCE (Anthroposophic Press, 1997), pp. 238-239.] (What is Lucifer’s “influence”? Bad stuff, naturally: “Freedom is the result of the Luciferian influence, and fear and similar feelings....” [Rudolf Steiner, AN OUTLINE OF OCCULT SCIENCE (Kessinger Publishing, 1998: 1922 edition), pp. 229-230.])

◊ [Subhumans, Including Some Waldorf Students] “[C]ases are increasing in which children are born with a human form, but are not really human beings...[they] are not reincarnated, but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon....Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, pp. 649-650].

◊ [Steiner’s Opponents Are Subhuman: Robots] “By being firmly enmeshed in materialism, we have people who not only think poorly about the body, soul, and spirit, but people who think materially and feel materially. What that means is that materialism causes the human being to become a thinking automaton, that the human being then becomes something that thinks, feels, and wills physically.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 115.]

◊ [Anthroposophists See Other Humans as Blind Moles] “When we today—permeated even a little with anthroposophical consciousness—take a walk in the streets, we no longer see human people; rather we see moles that move about in the smallest of circles....” [Rudolf Steiner, EDUCATION FOR ADOLESCENTS (Anthroposophic Press, 1996), p. 92.]

◊ [Anti-Semitism] “The Jews have a great gift for materialism, but little for recognition of the spiritual world.” [Rudolf Steiner, FROM BEETROOT TO BUDDHISM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), p. 59.]

◊ [Anti-Semitism] “[T]imes had changed and so had the bodies of the Hebrew people, so that they could no longer understand the revelation of the Fathers. [paragraph break] Jesus told his mother: ‘The revelation of ancient Judaism is no longer suitable for the earth.’" [Rudolf Steiner, THE FIFTH GOSPEL (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968), p. 65.] Two points: 1) Steiner had a surprising way of telling us that Jesus made various statements that do not appear in holy writ. The explanation he gave is that he could clairvoyantly read the “Akashic Record,” a supernatural transcription of everything that has ever happened. The subtitle of THE FIFTH GOSPEL is “From the Akashic Record.” 2) According to Steiner,  the ancient Hebrews had bodies that enabled them to comprehend revelation. Like so many racists, Steiner assigned great significance to physical differences. The big difference for later Jews was that their bodies “had changed” or worsened: With their new bodies, they could no longer “understand the revelation” and their faith, Judaism,  became “no longer suitable for the earth.”

◊ [Anti-Semitism] “Judaism as such has long outlived itself and no longer has a legitimate place in the modern life of peoples; the fact that it has nevertheless succeeded in maintaining itself is an aberration in world history the consequences of which had to follow.” [Rudolf Steiner, “Vom Wesen des Judentums” {On the Nature of the Jews}, DIE GESCHICHTE DER MENSCHHEIT UND DIE WELTANSCHAUUNGEN DER KULTURVOLKER, Dornach, 1968; English translation from "Anthroposophy and the Question of Race" (English summary for the media). Council of the Anthroposophical Society in The Netherlands, Zeist/Driebergen, April 1, 2000.] See also Dan Dugan, “Rudolf Steiner and the Jews”

http://waldorfcritics.org/active/articles/NJP_RudolfSteinerAndJews.html

Dugan, like Staudenmaier, is a target for heavy Anthroposophical fire. This is all the more reason to read his work and make up your own mind.

◊ [Separating Students into Four Categories] “The choleric temperament becomes immediately annoyed by and angry about anything that interrupts its activity...(Libra)...In sanguines (Virgo)...the sense of movement predominates. In the same way, in melancholics (Leo) the sense of life predominates and in phlegmatics (Cancer) the sense of touch predominates physiologically because the touch bodies are embedded in small fat pads.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, pp. 90-91. Emphasis added.]

◊ [Physical Appearance Reveals Inner Truth] “The melancholic children are as a rule tall and slender; the sanguine are the most normal; those with protruding shoulders are the phlegmatic children; and those with a short stout build so that the head almost sinks down into the body are choleric.” [Rudolf Steiner, DISCUSSIONS WITH TEACHERS, Foundations of Waldorf Education (Anthroposophic Press, 1997), p. 34] Note that sanguine kids are “the most normal.” This is different from being truly normal. And, clearly, all other kids are even less normal, according to Steiner.

◊ [Pity the Phlegmatics] “[T]he phlegmatic child will not sit with the mouth open but with a closed mouth and drooling lips.” [DISCUSSIONS WITH TEACHERS, p. 30]

◊ [Segregating Students] “[P]ut the phlegmatics together...have the cholerics on the opposite side [of the room], and let the two others, the melancholics and sanguines, sit between them.” [Rudolf Steiner, RHYTHMS OF LEARNING (SteinerBooks, 1998), p. 72.]

◊ [How to Treat Kids] “Under certain circumstances it may be necessary [for a teacher] to spank a child.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 22.]

◊ [How to Treat Kids] "We may never place ourselves in a situation where we may have to relent in a disciplinary decision...With punishment, we cannot relent." [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 109.]

◊ [How to Treat Kids] “If you must slap a child...you cannot [do it] sentimentally.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 323.]

◊ [How to Treat Kids] “If a child comes late ten minutes, have him or her stand for half an hour...Let them [sic] stand uncomfortably...you can be particularly effective if you allow [sic] them to stand in an uncomfortable place...We could also buy a number of little sheds....” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, pp. 109-110.] Think about those sheds awhile.