The Marginalisation of the Profound

Yesterday I suggested how, in its culmination in political correctness, Secularism was imposing a tyranny of blandness.

I only **suggested**. At the moment, I feel unable to do more than indicate and suggest …

I also suggest that the bland, faceless world of so much modern architecture is imposing far more on the soul than we ever fully realise.

But the great Christian Hermeticist Rudolf Steiner realised this deeply. He therefore worked to create an architecture that would **free** the soul from the weight of all those monotonous, repetitive rigid 90 degree angles that dominate our world more and more and more.

And what would Rudolf Steiner say to that British mother who feels a marginally Christian school imposes ideology on her children, but that apparently what a state school teaches is neutral and benign?

This is the **essence** of what I think he might say, though with far, far more eloquence and power than I can achieve:

‘There is nothing at all neutral, benign or free about modern education. As modern architecture imposes blandness, so does modern education impose on the child blandness and worse.

Much, much worse – a soulless, hopeless and meaningless world stripped of Mystery. Which increasingly trains children at earlier and earlier ages in the capacity for **dead** CALCULATION, at the expense of **living** THINKING, imagination and feeling.’

Potentially great souls, Steiner said, would be crippled by the kind of education he saw modernity developing. Their souls and minds would be warped.

This is why he pioneered his Waldorf education, which now counts over a thousand schools worldwide: To save the children of the future. To save the children!

But these fragmentary notes about architecture and education are just aspects of a far larger picture. We have created a worldview, markedly emphasising the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR of our human experience – that of the empirical senses and rational logic.

Markedly emphasising this – and this very definitely at the expense of mystery, imagination, feeling, soul. Without which however, our world becomes ever more colourless and bland.

Because to so markedly emphasise the empirical and the rational is to the emphasise the surface of life. And what is deeper than the surface – in other words, what is profound - becomes marginalised.

Such that what speaks to the profound – the Symbols of religion, for example - are seen not only as private fantasy, but often even as an intrusion into public life.

In American political correctness these days, it is sometimes held that we should use terms such as ‘holidays’ rather than, say Christmas, or a ‘holiday tree’ rather than a Christmas tree.

The underlying idea is that of sensitivity. Non-Christians should not have Christian traditions imposed on them.

The error here, I believe is to suppose that an idea like 'happy holidays' or a 'holiday tree' says nothing at all. But in trying to say nothing at all – they do indeed say a very great deal.

They speak of the poverty of our collective imagination, devastated by empiricism and rationality, and they actually impose on people that very poverty. A poverty of imagination is everywhere being imposed …

The French for example, try to ban Islamic headwear and the wearing of prominent crosses. These Symbols for profound tradition are not to be asserted - in certain public contexts, at least.

Yet there is not the slightest problem with asserting the Symbols of the banal in public. A fifty foot billboard which screams: “Coke adds life!” for example …

In a poor neighbourhood in Britain not that long ago, my wife saw near-infants 'suckled' on cola.

Now Our Lord came to bring us ‘life and life more abundant’. And today we have Coca Cola …