Steiner's refusal of moral exhortation as a social cure: telling classes to think better of each other leaves the arrangements that divide them intact.
Moralising and the Social Question in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the mistake of treating moral exhortation as a remedy for social disorder. Speaking at Stuttgart on 9 June 1920, in the study-evening printed as The Threefold Order of the Body Social, Study Series II (GA 337a), Steiner answered a speaker who had proposed that the gentleman should not look askance at the road-sweeper, nor the road-sweeper at the gentleman. Steiner replied that such advice, which he said savours rather strongly of moralic acid, leaves each man exactly where the existing order placed him. The social question, on his account, is a question of forms: of how spiritual life, rights life, and economic life are arranged, not of how classes regard one another. What he asked for instead was an understanding reached above and beyond classes, one that issues in a reconstruction of the forms of life rather than a correction of glances.
Moralising and the social question names the point where Steiner parted company with well-meaning social reform. In the Stuttgart study-evenings of 1920 he kept meeting proposals that asked people to feel differently about one another while leaving the arrangements that divided them untouched. His objection was not to kindness. It was to kindness offered as a substitute for changing how work, rights, and spirit are organised.
In Steiner's Own Words
And if you go through the whole tendency that lies in the Threefold idea, you will see that, here, there can be a question of its leading in actual fact to something which mankind cannot but long for today, in so far as they understand anything of the forces that are striving to realisation in world-history. These are the things upon which we must turn our eyes to-day, and not upon something, which is mere moralising, and yet is linked with those forms of social life which happen to be in force at the present day.
What it Means Today
Twelve years after that Stuttgart evening, Reinhold Niebuhr drew the same line from the other side of the Atlantic. Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1932 and shaped by Niebuhr's thirteen years pastoring an industrial parish in Detroit, argued that individuals can be genuinely decent in face-to-face dealings while human collectives, classes, nations, and corporations, cannot be reached by the same appeal. Groups hold their advantage by inertia and interest rather than by malice, so the preacher who addresses a class as though it were a conscience is speaking past his subject. Niebuhr concluded that justice between groups is won by political and economic rearrangement, with moral feeling working inside that rearrangement rather than standing in for it. Steiner had reached the same boundary in 1920 from spiritual science instead of social ethics, and he drew from it the demand for an understanding above and beyond classes: not a warmer feeling between fixed positions, but a threefold ordering in which the positions stop being fixed.
Thalira synthesis: we name the habit Steiner refused the Askance Reflex, the move that recasts a question of arrangement as a question of regard, because regard is the one thing a listener can be asked to change without giving anything up. The test he leaves behind is short and uncomfortable. If a proposed remedy costs its proposer nothing but a change of expression, it is moralic acid, and the forms of life will be waiting unaltered in the morning.
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