A signpost, pointing to one side with 'Future', and the other side with 'Past'. Photo: By Hadija via Unsplash.
Future tense: Geoff Fielding outlines the ongoing potential of Quakerism
‘We are made for lives of peace.’
I am one of the oldies and wrinklies of Quakerism. Fitting a common profile, I came to Quakers after sixty, and am a member of a Meeting that has no regular young attenders. So I was at first surprised to hear that, amid the statistical background to last year’s Future of British Quakerism Conference, some Friends were inspired. I might even suggest that, had George Fox been reading the same reports, he would not have been. Where, I imagine him asking, has the life, the vitality and the enthusiasm gone?
When I first came to Quakers and eventually read Fox’s journal, I was glad it was not the first thing I encountered. Had it been so, I cannot imagine I would have joined. The Fox described in the journal was like a man possessed, going from steeplehouse to steeplehouse, muscling in on other people’s religious services, causing upset, being attacked and being thrown into prison almost wherever he went. He seemed egotistical to the point of being deranged. I never did finish reading the book. It seemed that a Quakerism founded on this base must be a very strange religion. And yet, in attending Meetings, it wasn’t. These Meetings seemed considered, measured and stable, almost the opposite of the Fox I had been reading about. But at the same time, Friends within those Meetings had been, were, or were open to, putting their Quaker beliefs into practice. The combination was intriguing and hopeful.
As more and more time has passed, I find myself empathising with George Fox.
Like early Quakers, we live in very turbulent times. We have appalling levels of inequality in both wealth and power. We have divisions between nations, between cultures, between religions, and between different sections of the same societies. We have common cultures that facilitate, and often encourage, the verbal and physical degradation of others. We have destitution that is not just legalised but also enforced. And we have young people, and old, suffering from trauma, depression, and mental ill-health. We have global heating for which the forecasts keep on getting higher and higher. We have increasing numbers of species becoming extinct, and increasing numbers of ecosystems at risk of collapse. We have wars, we have destruction, we have deaths, and we have millions upon millions of deliberately displaced people. Adding to this we have cataclysmic weaponry for purposes of ‘defence’.
AI, at the early beginnings of its power, is already disrupting political, social, and ecological systems in unpredictable ways. Large language models, such as ChatGTP, train on vast quantities of literary and other works, absorbing vast amounts of information, and absorb the aggressive norms and values prevalent in much of this material. Digital assistants and chatbots powered by these systems affect our capacity for cooperation and empathy, while the deep fakes that these systems enable can influence voters and erode trust. AI enables intrusive surveillance and facilitates the targeting of weapons, potentially without human oversight. These processes pose huge risks to our world.
Faced with such situations, the question these issues pose for me is, ‘What would George Fox have done?’ Would causing no harm be enough for him, or would he adopt a more active and more engaged response? The answer, I think, lies both in his journal and in Quaker faith & practice 19.32: ‘In the power of life and wisdom, and dread of the Lord God of life, and heaven, and earth, dwell; that in the wisdom of God over all ye may be preserved, and be a terror to all the adversaries of God, and a dread, answering that of God in them all, spreading the Truth abroad, awakening the witness, confounding deceit, gathering up out of transgression into the life, the covenant of light and peace with God.
‘Let all nations hear the word by sound or writing. Spare no place, spare not tongue nor pen, but be obedient to the Lord God and go through the world and be valiant for the Truth upon earth; tread and trample all that is contrary under… be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.’
‘Quaker beliefs and values could still have the transformative power.’
I am uncomfortable with Fox’s description of God in this quote, personally, and I find that words such as ‘terror’, ‘dread’ and ‘trampling’ need careful negotiating. Yet the message itself is not in doubt. Quakers, this says to me, have a duty to bring the values, so well expressed in the life and teachings of Jesus and of many other people, to the world to enable it to be healed.
From my perspective, Quakers seem uniquely equipped to do this. We believe that there is ‘that of God’ (or, if you prefer it, ‘the spirit of creation and of life’), in everyone, and that this spirit can be contacted and brought to the surface in all people. Within a Quaker community, we individually and together can discern the wisdom, or unwisdom, of the leadings we find. The Quaker way encourages us to listen patiently and to seek the truth that other people’s opinions may hold for us. In doing so we commit ourselves, not to disputations over the meanings of words such as, for instance, ‘God’, ‘Brahman’, ‘Allah’, or ‘Yahweh’, but to seek the sense and experience lying behind them. Importantly for me, Quaker beliefs also include William Penn’s observation that ‘A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may become of it’.
Allied to these is our belief in the need for, and practicality of, peace in our world. Increasingly, these insights are found to have strong scientifically-researched foundations. Antonio Damasio, for instance, tells us that our bodies and brains are cooperative systems, made from cooperative organs, cooperative cells, cooperative molecules, and cooperative atoms that are themselves made from cooperative particles. Cooperation he says, rules the biological world. Martin Nowak, the mathematician, discerns that we are supercooperators, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist, tells us that our ancestors were, almost certainly, cooperative breeders for two million years, fostering norms of caring, sharing, empathy and trust. From an examination of the archaeological evidence, James Ferguson also an anthropologist, identifies that a culture of war, defined as inter-community violence, took hold only about 6,000 BCE. Before then peace demonstrably reigned. Similar evidence for peace that lasted almost to the present day, is found in the cooperative and economic behaviours of mobile foragers and early agriculturalists. In our world it is competition and war that is unnatural. We are made for lives of peace.
These are not beliefs in the sense that other religions generally define beliefs. Consequently, if we could put aside structural differences of hierarchy and concepts of a physical battle between good and evil, most Quaker beliefs neither challenge nor conflict with most other religions’ beliefs. As such people can be, and are, Buddhist and Quaker, Hindu and Quaker, Jewish and Quaker, Muslim and Quaker etc – but also agnostic and Quaker or atheist and Quaker. Quakerism, genuinely, could be a belief system that unites us all.
When we place the beneficial, cooperative and constructive qualities of modern Quakerism against the disturbing realities of the crises we are facing, a very different vision for the future of Quakerism is revealed. Powered by our compassion for the future wellbeing of young people, it leads us to confront attitudes of aggression, to confront the instrumentalism that dismisses empathy and compassion, to confront vast inequalities of wealth and power, and to confront the paraphernalia of aggression and war with traditional Quaker plain speaking, and yet with openness, with listening, with generosity, and with love. Such action can be very powerful indeed – as can be seen from Buddhism and Christianity, which became so powerful that Ashoka and Constantine had to make pacts with them. (This compromised and tarnished the foundations of both faiths, but it can be imagined that, had these pacts not been agreed, cultures of love and peace would have flourished and prevailed).
These observations suggests that Quaker beliefs and values, which have not been subjected to such compromises, could still have the transformative power that is needed by our world today. Such a transformation will, however, only happen if these values are so widely adopted that those with power cannot ignore them.
This brings us back to the advice and ministry of George Fox. It suggests a duty we should not be ignoring. And this suggests a very different future for worldwide Quakerism, and, hopefully, for the world itself.
