The Difference Between Lifespan and Life Expectanc...

Did people in the ancient world ever live past 30? Actually, people in the ancient world could live as long as people today. Only, in the ancient world only a handful of people got to old age, whereas today most people expect to. It is the difference between lifespan and life expectancy. Life expectancy is the average expected of a child at birth, and is heavily influenced by things like infant mortality. If 50 out of every...

What to make of Göbekli Tepe from an Anthroposophi...

Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site in central Turkey with stone structures and carvings at least 11,000 years old. Mapping Steiner’s timeline to external history, to say nothing of geology, proves quite challenging. Everything back to the end of the 3rd post-atlantean epoch works quite well. Earlier than that gets progressively more challenging. The Theosophical tradition was quite big on exact dates and patterns,...

What did people in the 1920’s mean by Bolshe...

“Bolshevism” as understood in Steiner’s time would have been state control over the individual in order to force society into “the future”. Marx had predicted an inevitable outcome to capitalism. Lenin had to rework the “inevitable” piece because it did not fit the circumstances in Russia. But in action the Bolsheviks were ruthless and relentless and unashamed in their striving to...

The Destruction of the Middle Class Through Tax Po...

After WWII the US entered a phase of great shared prosperity. The tax code was responsible for that. Corporate tax rates at the end of World War II topped out at 90%. The results of this was that every corporation plowed as much of their profits as possible back into the corporation through hiring employees and investment in new equipment in order to show as little profits as possible to the IRS. That is what drove the...

Trump the Unprecedented

Historian Julian Zelizer explains in the Atlantic what is actually unprecedented about Trump, and what is frequently called unprecedented, but actually has lots of precedent. The short version: Two things are unprecedented: 1. Unfiltered spur-of-the-moment communications from POTUS (Twitter, rambling interviews) including spontaneous constant attacks on friends and enemies alike. 2. Trumps’s financial conflicts of...

Robert E. Lee and Slavery

I’m tired of hearing historical mythology used to lionize Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee. People say things like, Lee was against slavery, never owned slaves, and anyway, was a Christian. Robert E. Lee absolutely owned slaves. He ran a plantation that he had inherited between 1856 and 1861. And he beat his slaves himself when they tried to run away (evidenced in a personal letter). Lee’s...

An odd way to defend Republicans

I’ve noticed on Facebook that some people are taking an ingenious approach to defending Trump and the Republicans: pointing out that it was the Republican party that presided over the abolition of slavery, and was generally more supportive of women’s right to vote. This is a nice slight of hand that appears to work mainly because people don’t know much history. “What happened to the Republican...

Libertarian nonsense

Here is a silly graphic that is circulating on the Internet: The historian in me has to point out that a lot of this is drivel – and imaginary past that bears almost no resemblance to what 125 years ago actually looked like. 125 years ago child labor was legal. And common. Most milk bought in a city was adulterated. To say nothing of packaged meat products. “Freedom of contract” caused most working men to...

Polemic and History

Polemic and History A number of critics of Anthroposophy have acknowledged that they are writing polemical history when they attack Rudolf Steiner. Some even seem puzzled as to why that is considered a ‘bad’ thing. And certainly, from one point of view there is nothing ‘bad’ about polemic; it is what it is, after all. I have further argued that polemic history has important differences from standard,...

Eric P. Wijnants: serial plagiarist

Once upon a time I came across a site that annoyed me. It had a wealth of material on esoteric subjects, details that were available nowhere else on the web, and in some cases nowhere else at all. The only problem was that not one piece of it had any citations, and that made it essentially useless for my purposes. It is standard scholarly practice if you are talking about something that happened 300 years ago to describe the...

How do we know what Steiner said?

The historical sources for analyzing the development of Rudolf Steiner’s thought have been collected by the Rudolf Steiner Archive in Dornach, Switzerland, and have been published in the 330 volumes of complete works. Additional documents continue to be issued every year, and several important volumes from this time period were first published as recently as 2006. From accounts we have from his listeners, Rudolf...

Stenography and Steiner

As source material the stenographic records of Rudolf Steiner’s early lectures are both invaluable and problematic. Stenographic notes are a system of shorthand markings that allow the stenographer to write as fast as people speak. These stenographic notes must then be reconstructed into conventional written sentences. For many of Rudolf Steiner’s early works we have the reconstruction but not the original...