Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

The latest turning of the gyre, the beginning of what
Ewart Cousins has termed the second axial period, Kelly
calls “coming home.” Now, with the increasing threats to
the biosphere, the continuing danger of nuclear war, and the
intensification of ideological and socioeconomic divisions,
there is a movement toward international cooperation in a
genuinely planetary Earth community, accompanied by a
growing populist influence of Internet-facilitated democracy.
Paul Hawken has identified this newly born movement as
the “largest social movement in history.” Kelly adds to it the
New Paradigm and New Age (broadly defined) groups now
active, and finds the movement has doubled in comparison
with the size stated by Hawken.
If a genuine planetary wisdom-culture fully emerges and
becomes stable, then “business as usual, industrial growth
society, unchecked corporate rule, unsustainable modes of
production and consumption”—everything David Korten
defines as “empire” in his book, The Great Turning—must
fall. If all this occurs, what
is now countercultural will
become mainstream, and
this turn of the spiral will
be a final turn—a singularity.
Whether this “subterranean
and occult reality”
in the words of the influential
Edgar Morin, will
actually come to pass is
uncertain, but whether it
leads to a long menu of
disasters and apocalyptic
grief or to a genuine new
planetary wisdom-culture,
there is “neither stopping
nor turning back.”
There are those who
may find Kelly’s account to
be an exercise in ultra-determinism or reductionism by way
of metapatterns. Big pictures are not fashionable. Many
people are more comfortable with a history that is “one damn
thing after another,” or tend to align themselves with Henry
Ford: “History is more or less bunk.” A similar skepticism
has sometimes greeted the work of Kelly’s colleague, Richard
Tarnas, in response to his Cosmos and Psyche. Isn’t it tempting
for Kelly and Tarnas to find within the vast wealth of cultural
and historical events sufficient examples to conform to their
patterns of choice? Are Kelly’s fractal arcs influenced, at least
in part, by his own political leanings? Does he accord sufficient
recognition to the second phase of the triphasic pattern,
the differential moment that always seems to constrict
human energy?
Works of this scope and daring invite such questions.
Kelly’s thesis will not be found provable by the exacting
standards of a Karl Popper, to be sure, but how could they
be? The value in what Sean Kelly presents in Coming Home
is his faith in an organizing
idea, in the reality of
meaning and purpose
rather than an easy capitulation
to the flavor of the
times—contingency, and
it is in the imaginative
insight of his vision, the
passion that flames in its
pages. The sense of “evidence,”
as Georg Kühlewind
has pointed out,
cannot be demonstrated
by pointing to yet another
thought, but is rather to
be grasped as a cognitive
feeling of wholeness and
completion.
first issue 2011 • 59