Humanity's Rebellion Against the Spirit
In 1918, nearing the end of WWI, Rudolf Steiner addressed the question as to why relatively few people were able to gain access to a spiritual understanding to the world. He recounted how the times of instinctive living was over and now we must kindle the spirit within ourselves to avoid further catastrophe.
We now live in a time when people must admit to themselves: The era of instinctive living is over. We cannot achieve social structures unless we are able to revitalize social thinking through ideas that arise from an understanding of the spiritual world. That is why the social sciences are so sterile, and that is why humanity has brought itself into this catastrophic present, in which social structures are causing chaos throughout the world—because people are unable to allow spiritual-scientific ideas, which should flow from the impulses of human development, to flow into social thinking and communal life. There are indeed spiritual causes for this catastrophic present. This is humanity’s resistance to the inflow of the spirit. In truth, this is what has given rise to the current catastrophe. For everywhere, people are turning against the spirit that seeks to enter.1Death as a Transformation of Life, Lecture 5. Humanity's Rebellion Against the Spirit GA 182, 30 April 1918, Ulm.
Before the war, in 1912, he had repeatedly emphasized the necessity of humanity reconnecting with the spiritual impulses that were attempting to reconnect with this world.
Man has his Earth-mission to fulfil, that is to say, he has to develop and elaborate what is now called the “normal” consciousness. A wise World-Order has made it possible for many happenings to appear to him as chance; it therefore rests with his free will, whether or not he will recognise in them the presence of law. But several currents, not only one, are always in operation. Everywhere there is an inflow of the Spiritual, the Spiritual of which man, too, is part. The Spiritual would have been operating in an occurrence of the kind described above, even if the central figure had not been a clergyman; but in that case his own life of soul would not have been implicated to anything like the same extent. This episode provides a clear illustration of the operation of another element, side by side with reason and intellect. Both elements play continually into life. Do not imagine for a moment that people who claim to be “Monists,” in other words, materialists, have emancipated themselves altogether from the Spiritual, or that they “believe” in nothing at all, as they pretend. Monism is nothing but belief—belief, moreover, which obscures the Spiritual. What is all important is to see through the illusion, the maya. Human prejudices being what they are, it is, of course, difficult always to see through maya; when people are deeply imbedded in maya it is by no means easy to see through it. Those who look at history today from the standpoint of materialism, may say: “The course of evolution is such that on account of certain purely materialistic contrasts in the social life of man, some kind of collapse is inevitable, and out of this collapse a new order of society will grow.” This is now being taken for granted in the domain of “historical materialism.” It has been prophesied that the clash between classes and ranks will result in a collapse of the social order, and that a new order of society will arise from the ruins. A materialist who speaks in this sense will certainly be ready to admit that he believes in nothing, but bases his judgment upon historical facts; and he will refer with a kind of inner satisfaction, even with glee, to “queer fellows” who spoke of an “Apocalypse,” a “kingdom of a thousand years,” a “millenium,” of a different shaping of the future brought about by the spiritual worlds! He will look down upon them as eccentrics. But it never once enters his head that he is merely accepting another belief, substituting materialistic belief for belief in the Spiritual. Those who are seekers after truth, however, must see through such things and emancipate themselves from maya.
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, Earthly and Cosmic Man, Lecture 3, GA 133, 26 March 1912, Berlin