Letters - 13 March 2026
From over-prescription to Brummana High School
Over-prescribed?
I reread Roy Payne’s letter (9 January) after that of Rosamond Reavell (27 February). I think Rosamond might be overstating the prescriptivism in Roy’s letter, which I, frankly, was unable to detect. I read him as encouraging an open mental attitude.
Consider for example the different views among neuroscientists, who are struggling to explain how a neuronal pattern becomes a mental representation (commonly known as the mind-body problem). Similarly, how did life come into being against all the organisational and statistical improbabilities? Is there something in the laws of physics we do not know about that leads inevitably to it, or is it chance – see Paul Davies’s The Origin of Life. There are real and knotty problems in which people tend to fall too quickly into either a too simplistic empiricist camp, or an equally unshakable metaphysical one. There isn’t much dialogue across the divide. But opening up questions, and asking new and deeper ones, rather than pretending we already know all the answers in an (over?) confident way seems the way to go.
Spirituality is a fascinating topic – in my house are many mansions, and so on. To encourage openness, as Roy does, in my view, seems fine, at least to me. What’s the harm in openness? Nothing prescriptive there.
St Albans Meeting has been running a spirituality reading group for everyone, the whole Quaker banana, once a month for the last year. I encourage other Meetings to set one up. It has been very educational – perhaps more about this in a future article.
And I haven’t mentioned ‘God’ once.
Neil Morgan
Lost purpose
The great misfortune of present day life is that we have forgotten the purpose of work. We have become confused by the pseudo-science of economics. Work should lead us to prosperity by following the simple rule of only doing what advances prosperity and avoiding what does not. But politicians and economists have taken their eyes off what we do and become wrongly focused on how it is measured.
Money is a measure of what we do. It has no intrinsic worth of its own but is simply a means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. Could it be that the system is valuing the things we do that hinder prosperity as equal to those that advance it? If so, would this not devalue the money we are using as the measure? Importantly, could this be a previously-obscured explanation for the increasing cost of living, or for the necessities that sustain us and provide shelter and comfort?
For example, the arms trade is a hugely wasteful use of vast resources, manufacturing harmful products. But the many manufacturers’ balance sheets, and the country’s GDP, state it is profitable. Measured in money, the value of adverse production is calculated to be equal to prosperous production. This is a problem of economics, deeming all production to be wealth creation and of positive value, even when contrary to the common good of all humanity.
The global arms trade is negative value production. It adversely impacts on international currencies, our living standards, the natural world, and, above all, life itself. This hypothesis questions the way economics is taught and practised.
Geoff Naylor
