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“Questions of Courage” is a video/podcast with Nathaniel Williams, leader of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum. It is an independent and unique look at questions related to technology, education, art, ecology, vocation, community, justice and meaning require a deeper, spiritual take on life. The ability to take up these issues from this perspective is a question of courage.
This is Questions of Courage, a podcast from the Youth section at the Goetheanum. Hosted by Nathaniel Williams.
Hello and welcome. My name is Nathaniel Williams, and today I am beginning a podcast videocast project that is called Questions of Courage. I'm being supported in creating this by the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. I've been. A member of the faculty here for two months. I moved here from the United States, where I have a background in working with young people and on projects and programs always related to the contemplative practices and culture at the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society and the. School for Spiritual Science here today. I would like to. Just set some intentions for this podcast, which I'm calling Questions of Courage. And I hope that by the end of this reflection, this contribution today, the choice of that title will be clear. So I'm thinking today about all the young people that I know that I that I have worked with and that I have connections with over the past years. And I'm thinking about all the young people who are in. Affiliated groups around the world connected to the U.S., the rising generation groups and the Waldorf movement and the biodynamic farming movement and the many other movements. That are focused on practical implementation of ideas and inspirations that have been developed. Through the work of the Anthroposophical Society and the School for Spiritual Science. I'm also thinking about all of the young people. Today as much as I can. And thinking about all of the contexts that they find themselves in.
And what we have to see is a very unprecedented time. And today I would like to not directly focus on the challenges. That might be most immediately pressing. For young people. And I suggest not starting there because. I. Am convinced that through taking a what might appear as a detour. A lot is to be gained in understanding the situation that we find ourselves in today. In today's introduction. I'm only going to be able to characterize the overall situation that. Questions of courage is aligning itself within and only in the course of time, through more episodes and focused contributions will we be able to. Bring into visibility what this is about. But today I would like to talk about the experience of being young, but not for young people today, but for those who are older today. And I'd like to speak about this within the context of the United States and. Go back about 70 years to 1950. I think that what happened is, of course, very well known around the world because of the widespread distribution of, of course, American culture, but also the the political and power placement of the United States over the last 70 years. And I know that it has some resonances, for instance, with many other countries I can think of, and I know there are many other places where this might not have been the case. But in any case, it's it's very iconic in a way, what happened in the United States in understanding or getting a sense for the transition that we are still in at this moment, a transition that we're still in, in this moment in the 1950s, if you were coming of age right about then and earlier, it was not uncommon that you would be brought up in a church and church membership was something that was relatively stable and meaning that not only did you go to church at the same church your whole life, and not only on Sundays most likely, but also for various things during the week, but also your parents and your grandparents and possibly your great grandparents had been a part of the congregation.
And that through the institution of the church, you you kind of found your way into society. You were integrated into society and also found your way into your local community. And this was not only through the Sunday services and sermons, but it was through various service projects and civic associations and also educational programs. Sunday School, but maybe also Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday school. It was a social integration that was taking place, and it was when young people were coming of age in 1950, 1960, a very radical transformation started to happen, which quickly got everyone's attention. Within 15 years, young people who were coming of age when they came into these social, religious kind of institutions. They felt like there was something missing. They felt like there was a superficiality. Or like they couldn't find something that was very important that they were looking for.
They felt a dissatisfaction in the opportunities that limited opportunities may be or ways of being that they found in small town America. They felt like there was something narrow. Maybe even hollow. That they were encountering and they didn't want to go. And instead of going, they started to seek one another out and in one another. They started to find. That they had a common experience, that they were experiencing something within themselves that they weren't finding in society. Now at this same time. We have a. A kind of. Intensification of a civil rights movement, which had been going on for decades in the United States. But in the 1950s and 60s. Um, suddenly reached proportions that it had not known since, perhaps the 1870. And. Everyone around the world has. Heard the name or most people around the world have heard the name of Martin Luther King Jr, a great leader in this movement. But it wasn't only the movement for civil rights to end segregation in schools, to fight for true equality in voting. But we also have at this time a very strong movement for women's rights, feminist movement, and also for gay rights in the 1960s. And yet all of this activity in relationship to rights. And this generation. That in a certain way is meeting a social and religious society that it feels as alien to it. These two. Find themselves creating a way of talking about human rights.
That was radically new in a certain way in the English speaking legal culture. Now, there's no need to have any specialist or scholarly knowledge about this in order to understand what is being talked about. Because what was being talked about is that people were experiencing the dignity or the significance of one another of the human being on a different register, on a different level than had been the case before. Now for the young people who are listening, I don't know if you love to read or you love audiobooks, you can. Listen to the novel. David Copperfield. By Charles Dickens, written 100 years before in 1850. And listen to how rights are discussed in relationship to character, in relationship to finding one's situation within society. And you'll be able to understand even more clearly what I'm trying to indicate here. What happens is that there's a kind of. Are. In the conception of what another person is as a being and also what this being deserves as rights. The rights discourse, the way people talk about rights is as if when they're speaking about human beings, they're sensing something. Of a religious nature that they're sensing something. That. They feel in their hearts spreads out as a kind of reverence and awe. This is something that. Gives a color, a texture to the way people talk about human rights and about the goals of society and the duties of creating society together, which is a radical shift in the United States.
But we don't only hear it in the legal culture. In the change of the discussion about rights, we don't only hear it when the young people turn away from the institutions and conventions and traditions that they encountered when they came of age in the 1960s. No, we also hear it in other places. We hear it in the music. In the popular music, the folk music. We hear it in those young musicians who sat at the feet of Pete Seeger. Musicians like Bob Dylan, musicians like Joan Baez, the Canadian Joni Mitchell. These strains, these lyrics, the sentiments that we feel when we listen to them. Are so full of life and heart and experience. And what? Gradually. I think the word authenticity has come to mean for many people that we see it also as appearing in the music. If we look towards other forms of art. If we look at painting the very experience of color. Simple colors. Forms. Simple forms. Have a significance, that is. Baffling when we compare it to traditional painting methods. And the painters are. Are almost awestruck by the spirituality of their materials. Sometimes just letting colors spread on a canvas and dry and mix is such an interesting experience for them that it's enough to be called art. Because of this. We can think of the paintings of Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell. Emily Mason. There is a depth of experience in color and the experience of color and form.
Which has an intensity, a spiritual intensity, I'm going to say. That has a freshness as if something is just beginning, something totally new is possible. We also find it in the experience of nature. We find it in the way that the environmental movement, the back to the land movement, the ecology movement, take root in people's hearts. And find expression in the poems of writers like merely Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry. How there's a kind of spring experience in all of these different areas and tremendous hope. Of course, this was many, many people were only active also out of a more kind of militaristic political perspective. But even the Marxists of the 1960s were contending with these experiences. If you read a book, for instance, by a philosopher like Herbert Marcuse. You'll find this and his interest in the aesthetic experience. And Friedrich Schiller, for instance. These young people who came of age in the 1960s heard something in their hearts and in their thoughts, but their thoughts were experienced. They weren't abstract, abstract philosophies that gave them a kind of audacity and. Courage to want to reshape society in harmony with what they were experiencing as the dignity of the human being. A deeper significance in the world. The natural world and in the arts. Now the level of transformation that was anticipated. Did not come about. And we have to look at the fact that many setbacks and also what we would can only call corruptions and even acts of selling out have followed from this youthful impulse, this this kind of.
Sea change in spirituality and experience that we can see in the United States in the 1960s. And yet we also have to see. How transformative it has been. If we look, for instance, at the legal discourse that didn't go along with this new way of speaking about rights. And instead focus more on a kind of traditional way of talking about rights and relationship to property contracts which make up the meat and potatoes of every lawyer in the English speaking world. Or corporate law. We find that 20 years ago. There was a case, it was argued, in the Supreme Court and the United States of America, and this case had to do with the rights of corporations and groups to donate money to political candidates without. Um, being publicly identified that they were supporting these political candidates. Before there had been some form of regulation related to this. But the way that they argued this case before the Supreme Court was such. That they argued it as a matter of freedom of speech, that if corporations were limited in the amount of money they could give to support their chosen candidates, that in essence, we would be hindering their self-expression, their freedom of speech and their right to be who they are, what they are. And here you see that a kind of more traditional commercial interest in. In a legal case in the United States, sees how successful this transformation of the 1960s was to the point that it adopts its very language and the way to defend corporations in order to argue for the rights of corporations.
To imbue them with the kind of reverence that was being directed towards individuals in the civil rights movement. And this is a marker of a radical change. This is something that young people today. They have inherited. Um, many people, young people today may hear what I've just said. And since some affinity with it, they will sense that they. To feel some connection to this way of thinking about their own experiences and that maybe they don't feel as estranged as some of the young people who are coming of age. In the 1960s felt now. Before. This happened in the United States. It had happened in middle Europe and one wave. And. I'll tell you a short story about one of the most. Influential mediators between the United States and Tibetan Buddhist culture. He was walking in the 1950s through the Himalayas. One of these young people in the United States that were not satisfied with what they were finding. And when he went into Nepal and he went into Tibet, they would often say, oh, are you a German? Because they had seen. Decades before young people from the West who were coming to the east for similar reasons. These young people started to come in significant numbers. 1910. 19, 20. There was a youth movement that carried a lot of the same qualities as what we found find in the countercultural movements in the United States.
And. That likewise met in the routines and traditions and ways of living. In Europe at that time, something that left them utterly. Alienated and confused and unable to connect in a significant and authentic way. And. This is the time when the School for Spiritual Science was started. And the founders of the School for Spiritual Science and all of the many people that worked together to create this place here at the Goetheanum. And who have worked in countries all around the world and building up Waldorf schools, clinics for expanded integrative medicine that is inspired by the contemplative practices of Anthroposophy. They were also. Trying to. Shift culture in middle Europe at that time, but also more broadly towards this new experience of spirituality they experienced at that time already. That's 100 years ago now. That there was a cultural arc that had started 500 years ago in Europe where there was a kind of science and direction for culture and knowledge that worked with ingenuity, with genius, and with absolutely single minded focus to gain knowledge of the outer of the outer world. And to exclude everything. Of a related to consciousness, related to the human being from it to arrive at what was called what even today is still called objective knowledge of the world. And 100 years ago already it came to a point where the high temples of this knowledge, the universities and the places where young people were going in order to find.
What they. Felt in their hearts they were looking for that they didn't find. Teachers. They found people who. Had a kind of store of information of objective research. And that really couldn't be bothered about questions of good and evil. Sincere questions about good and evil. That couldn't be bothered about questions of how the human spirit And now when I say human spirit, I'm referring to some of these experiences of authenticity that have inspired the way we talk about rights today. How the experience of the spirit is related to nature. And they found in these universities. At the beginning of the 1900s. Just objective knowledge, but no people. They found. A similar situation to what young spiritually seeking people in the 1950s in the United States found in the churches, they went to the universities and what they were expected to do. What they were expected to try to know seemed to them to be unworthy of what they were being called, to seek out of their own experience and out of their hearts. And many of these people became the leaders. And the people who were taking initiative in the School for Spiritual Science. And the Anthroposophical Society and the Anthroposophical movement over the last hundred years. And in this movement and in this school. They developed and worked with meditative or contemplative ways of trying to gain deeper understanding and experiences of the human being.
Of nature. And of society. And they didn't only try to develop that as some kind of abstract philosophy. But to make it. To demand of themselves that this could support practical life. And a renewal of. Or not a renewal of the old, but a new start. A new take in. Cultural. Development or the directions of culture in Europe. Now, despite the fact that the success has been somewhat modest and we can definitely look back at. The last hundred years and see grave mistakes, immaturities bickering and all kinds of strange tendencies. We also can see truly significant contributions. And today, as I begin now with this podcast, Questions of Courage, I am looking back, but only to look. To the rising generation. Today, there is no use in being critical. Of the older generations. We do have to judge the failures and successes of the past generation. But ultimately we have to ask ourselves. If we're willing to take up from where they left off in their progressive in their meaningful contributions. And this is where we stand today. With what I would like to call the new spirituality. The new spirituality, we can see finding a form in Europe and in the United States and many other places. Though I may not be able to speak in such detail about them around the world. And this new spirituality, however, is coming in waves through the young people as they're coming of age, and they haven't had to face years and years of trying to transform the routines and the inertia of the past.
They come with a strong conscience. They come with this deepened experience and with a feeling that a revolution of values, a revolution of worldview, is really what's at stake. When we look at the challenges that we're facing today. And I would like to end with a reflection on the courage that it takes to pose these questions. Questions of courage. It's a market paradox that today perhaps people are more open and more interested in spirituality and entertaining spiritual ideas than for hundreds of years in the past in the United States and Europe. And at the same time, if you want to seriously and sincerely explore a spiritual question in relationship to chemistry, in relationship to human development or developmental psychology, or to biology and morphology, it is taboo. You can't speak about it. We have a situation today where there's this. Unbelievable nearness in the hearts and the will of people to enter into a spiritual. Conversation to have a discussion. And yet at the same time, the majestic culmination of 500 years of reductionist materialistic science. Stubbornly. And insistently. Refuses to. Accommodate such a conversation, and thereby this materialism, which we have to recognize is practically at work in almost all areas of our society. Can't become aware of its own limitations. It takes courage today to insist on asking questions about spirituality that are not only about personal well-being, that are not only about lifestyle and contentment to ask questions.
That have to do. With entertaining and openness to the spirit in the greater world. And in fields that we're used to thinking about an exclusively. Materialistic ways. Questions of courage is intended to be a forum to ask. Such things and in particular in relationship to the youth. The youthful age. The new experience of being young. But it is not only this rising generation, the youthful age of this rising generation. But of a youthful age that we can see has been beginning for just over 100 years. So that is the intention for questions of courage. Questions of courage is possible in part because I'm partnering the youth section is partnering with the Goetheanum communications team at Goetheanum TV and also the weekly Wochenschrift. One of our goals with this podcast is to also invite contributions to support young people who want to work with anthroposophy amongst themselves within youth led projects, who also want to come to the Goetheanum to participate in events, projects and programs here. And I would like to invite you, if you're listening and if you want to support questions of courage one, but also to support this work going forward, I want to invite you to make a contribution and whatever doesn't cover the minimal production costs will go towards a youth access and project fund of the Youth section. Thank you so much for participating and being with me in this and until next time.