The Mission of English Speech by Virginia Sease Lecture given in London, Rudolf Steiner House during the Annual General Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain on May 7, 2011 Dear Friends, the motif for this theme evolved from a question which John Pickin had asked when the Council of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain was meeting with our Executive Council at the Goetheanum: “What is the significance of the English language?” Soon it was decided that this question perhaps would be something appropriate for the Annual General Meeting here in London, so the theme consists of two parts, “The Future Task of the English Language” and “The Mission of the English Speaking Peoples.” We find that there are two special aspects which Rudolf Steiner mentions specifically regarding the English language and the English-speaking peoples. As a person who speaks English as the “mother tongue” as I do and also many of you do, some aspects that Rudolf Steiner described are challenging and they have occupied my attention for many years. May I invite you to join me on the path of my own considerations? The first aspect may seem a bit obscure and perhaps it may make us feel uncomfortable because, after all, it is not just a figment of speech when we refer to the mother tongue. We have a deep connection with our mother tongue. Today there are many people who learn English as their first foreign language and in many cases they also develop a very deep connection with this language. However, the mother tongue encompasses something more than we may experience on the surface. You may know that Rudolf Steiner gave lectures in 1917 called “The Karma of Untruthfulness”. As a citizen of the United States of America I have to admit that in 1917 he especially pinpointed Woodrow Wilson. If you grew up in America, you experienced how Woodrow Wilson is always presented as a hero. “Bring democracy to the world” – and do not worry if places which have the same language are split up in a geometric fashion and then form different nations. This is what partially happened after the First World War. People within the same language group suddenly found themselves in different nations. We especially think about the people who ended
up in Austria or in Italy after World War I and they were obliged to speak the other language, German or Italian. This relates to what Rudolf Steiner described as connected with untruthfulness. One year later he mentions something similar with Anglo-American initiates. At that time Rudolf Steiner was referring to certain initiates of the Anglo-American people who were striving to attain universal earthly world leadership. Rudolf Steiner goes on, to say it in my words, that the English language is the appropriate means to carry out this goal. Why? Because the English language will be less and less adequate to express the truth. Almost a hundred years later I feel we can look at this tendency and ask if there is anything we can do about it, or do we accept it as a totally inevitable fact? This impresses us in quite a difficult way, in an unpleasant manner. What we do not know, specifically, is the basis for this statement by Rudolf Steiner, that the English peoples would be inclined to be working towards a quality of untruthfulness or of compromised truth. What was going on at that time? At that time Rudolf Steiner experienced the beginning of film. None of us experienced as adults, teenagers or children the advent of film. We grew up with film. In my lower and upper school, Saturday afternoon marked the time when everybody went to the so-called movies. The big difference between then and now is that only appropriate movies were shown on Saturday afternoon, and no adult would have risked his life to be in that movie theatre Saturday afternoon, also because all these children and teenagers were not particularly well behaved; today it would be considered nothing, but in those days munching on popcorn and winter issue 2011
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