A key for the future

A chocolate past could lead to a sweet future for Friends says Judy Kirby

How do you cover a story like Cadbury’s takeover if you are a Quaker newspaper?  Difficult. We are treading on hallowed ground here, speaking of legendary Quaker venture, of which British Friends are understandably proud. In some dimension of the Quaker consciousness, I am sure there is outrage. How can this happen? But in another, pragmatism prevails. Cadbury has been a multinational company for some time now, and the company chairman Roger Carr is quoted as saying: ‘the reality is we are part of a global business. Although Cadbury roots are deeply buried in Britain, the development of the company has been all over the world.’ And without many of the original Quaker credentials.

The ‘struggle’ that has been waging for months as the Kraft company staged its predatory bid was of course a struggle to get them to pay more money, not to repel them, a reality slow to click into place for those Friends hoping the bid would go away.

Among the many articles and blogs that have appeared since the news, a long piece by Peter Jackson on the BBC news website has a fact buried towards the end that, for me, contains the key to today’s reality.

‘By the 1870s’, he writes, ‘Oxford and Cambridge universities began accepting Quakers, opening up new professions and opportunities’. How do you keep them down at the factory once they have tasted academia?

Peter Jackson did his research well, consulting Helen Rowlands on how the strong Quaker business ethos developed in the wake of exclusion from professional life. He charts all the steps taken towards the Quaker domination of confectionery manufacture in Britain. And it certainly did dominate the taste buds of Britons – see too the article by author Andrew Martin, writing last week in the Guardian, who spoke of his York boyhood imbued with the flavour of Quaker chocolate. Grandfather and auntie worked for Rowntrees, ensuring plenty of treats coming Andrew’s way. He recalled the northern Willie Wonka – George Harris – who invented the KitKat bar, staple diet of my own reporting days in the 1960s and 1970s.

So we all loved Quaker sweets, and the ethical and compassionate business practices that went along with them, and for some of us today there will be bitterness in their passing.

But there may be another way to view this. There is an interesting word, zeitgeist, which simply means ‘spirit of the age’. For most of my adult life, the zeitgeist has been money. The desire for accumulation of it has gradually grown, spreading into all aspects of society until its acquisition has become our main preoccupation, whether by lottery player or shareholder. To argue against such a strong zeitgeist invites ridicule. You are just fighting the spirit of the age.

But Friends, it is important that we do resist, because that is what will stimulate the next spirit of the age into being – one so different as to be unrecognisable to us now. It may not arrive in time for some of us and there may be more shocks in store, but come it will some time in the natural course of evolutionary events. Values will change, from necessity as much as desire, and when they do, I’d like to feel that the pioneering and enterprising Quaker spirit will have brought on a whole new breed of Cadburys, Rowntrees and Frys providing the materials for a post-globalised, sustainable economy. If we want to be part of the story we had better start working on the next chapter now.

Judy is editor of the Friend.

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Comments

Resisting the spirit of the age. The spirit of the age is a real threat as we are often unaware how much it infiltrates our assumptions and our worldview. All around us the messages are “More is better1” and “Power is good if we win!” Part of us becomes complicit and energy is drained from us. Quakers have a remarkable insight which helps us deal with this energy. Isaac Penington wrote: “But wait to feel the relieving measure of life…Heed not distressing thoughts, when they arise ever so strongly in thee…be still awhile, not believing in the power which thou feelest they have over thee, and it will fall on a sudden.” Day Five (A Month with Isaac Penington, Saxon Snell, FHSC, 1966.) In our times, Rex Ambler writes of his own experience: “I became aware…that my life was rooted in a reality way beyond my ken, but a reality that I could nevertheless trust.” (p. 34, Light to Live by, Quaker Books., 2008.) I see three things we can do: 1. Read last week’s Friend article by Ann Banks on the “Experiment with Light”. Have a pause, once, twice a day and allow your life to become “ongoing experimentations with light” (An Epistle quoted in Seeing, Hearing, Knowing”edited by John Lampen, Sessions, 2008.) 2. Allow ourselves to feel the nonsense dished out to us, the hurt, the callousness. This is not just a matter for the intellect. 3. Work with a group – your own meeting – to live and begin to define the new spirit. This is the very theme of a booklet soon to be published by the John Macmurray Fellowship following a talk “Identifying the Powers that Be” I gave at the annual conference in October 2009. Richard Thompson 01189 626329 Reading LQM

By richardtho on 1st February 2010 - 11:52

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