Arguing for equality
Ian Beeson reflects on equality
Many readers may have been struck by the incongruity of the two photographs shown on facing pages (4-5) of the Friend of 9 January: one showing Manchester and Warrington Friends holding a vigil for equality on the steps of Mount Street Meeting House; the other a vigil held outside Friends House by staff calling for the reinstatement of three colleagues who had lost their positions when their zero-hours contracts came to an end. It made me wonder whether Friends had a clear or consistent position on what is meant by equality.
The recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM) put a public statement (‘New working contracts’) about the lost positions on the BYM website. An article about how the hospitality company works with BYM (‘Taking stock’) also appeared in the Friend of 30 January. Both pieces seek to clarify and reassure, and insist that proper procedures, grounded in Quaker values, were followed. But to me they seem short on detail, and defensive. They don’t answer the questions posed by the editor of the Friend, also in the issue of 30 January.
Equality, we may conclude, is a complex issue (like truth, justice and peace). Slogans and demonstrations won’t achieve it on their own, unless we know what we mean by it, and can back up our protests and actions with a credible analysis.
The latest Friends Quarterly (February 2015) contains a timely article by Jessica Metheringham about equality, based on her George Gorman lecture, which was given at Yearly Meeting Gathering last summer. If we want to plan effective actions for equality, she suggests, we need to continue to gather and share information, to enquire into how power is structured and how institutions work, and to analyse, through discussion, what equality really means to us, and what it means to others, in order to reach a better idea of what it would take to create a more equal society.
As Jan Arriens comments, in the same edition of the Quarterly, Quakerism is religion stripped down to its essentials, and anchored in personal experience. Early Friends insisted that God is to be found within, directly, and that God is in others as in us. From this minimalist foundation, they built a revolutionary programme for their own times. They also shaped for themselves enough of an organisational framework to survive. But they offered no complete explanation, or a detailed analysis, that was intended to serve forever. They also set no limits to enquiry. They left the future open for us. Unbound by dogma, and unafraid of science and innovation, we have the opportunity, each generation, to make sense of the world we find ourselves in, and to try and improve it.
Argument and analysis, however, are not strongly embedded in what we do. We know that we should pay heed to the promptings of love and truth in our hearts, and we stand ready to act according to our consciences or in support of another’s concern; but we lack a developed tradition of working together to articulate sustained arguments, rooted in our testimonies, that would support concerted action for a better society. In each Meeting for Worship we offer fresh insights, successively, and let them pass; in a Meeting for Business, likewise, we make separate individual contributions and leave any synthesis to the clerk. I would not change these methods, because they give us the depth and space we need for discernment. But at present it is much easier for us to ‘thank our Friends for their work’ rather than to engage in serious dialogue with each other. What we need is to establish additional regular practices among Friends, of the kind suggested by Jessica Metheringham, that will enable us to produce a specifically Quaker analysis of the state of the world and build coherent practical arguments for change.
If we don’t make such an effort, we face the danger of stagnation, or of accepting forms of practice and conduct, and of models of organisation, economy and society, from our surrounding culture, adding only a Quaker flavour or topping instead of proposing a radical alternative.
What economic model might we propose, consistent with Quaker testimonies? What policy for equality? What theory of justice? What kinds of schools, prisons, hospitals or armies? An early benefit of engaging more purposefully in analysis and argument might be that we see – collectively – how to reshape our own Quaker institutions and processes, so that they reflect the deeper truths we know in our hearts.
