Letters - 12 June 2020
From a mission of equality to our 'central command'
Mission of equality
After Sunday’s Zoom Meeting for Worship, a Friend was in tears because she felt helpless about the situation in the United States after the recent tragic death in Minneapolis.
‘The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and wellbeing of all persons.’
Please can I use your pages to encourage people to visit this American organisation’s website? It is easy to make a donation.
Bill McMellon
Revitalise representation
This letter was written before Meeting for Sufferings took place, see page 6 for full report.
In June Meeting for Sufferings meets electronically. The meeting lasts for two hours, allowing an average of just over ten minutes for each agenda item. With such constraints, it might seem self-indulgent if Meeting for Sufferings spends time focused on itself. However, there is an urgent need to do so.
Meeting for Sufferings, our representative body, needs to be revitalised to fulfil its roles of questioning, consulting Area Meetings, discerning the central work, seeking accountability, and guiding the life of the Society of Friends. Time now focusing on the depth and breadth of this role will be time well spent.
I hope all representatives and alternates will recognise this responsibility and commit themselves, and all of us, to fulfilling it. Meeting only four times a year in the next triennium, reduced from five, is not consonant with the importance of the role, and I hope the proposal will be set aside.
Christine Cannon
Question the narrative
Am I the only Friend who questions the whole narrative of coronavirus and who believes the lockdown is morally wrong, does more harm than good and is in likelihood also unlawful?
It’s impossible to lay out all the evidence here. If I only listened to mainstream news and the government I’d be fearful and compliant but only a little independent research is needed to realise that much of that information is questionable.
Putting the entire population under house arrest is an unprecedented human rights infringement, yet because we believe what we are told we meekly comply. Terrorism and wars couldn’t do that but the threat of a virus, invisible and ever-present? Perfect! We are meant to feel patriotic about it, like with fighting any external enemy. Yet what world are we creating with our warlike response? Does safety trump everything else? Even if it means fewer human interactions, more loneliness, less happiness, less spontaneity, more mental illness, more surveillance and above all more fear?
As Quakers, I would have wanted us to be a bit less mainstream, a bit braver, a bit more rebellious. Quaker membership thrived under persecution despite the severe punishments. People are drawn to truth and courage. Is there anything at all today that makes us different in our response to coronavirus and the lockdown?
Oliver Müller
Speak of what we can learn
I was interested to read Augene Nanning’s words in the Friend (22 May) reminding readers that many Friends struggle financially. It’s good to hear of Quaker charities that can help. It would also be good to hear from Friends about their experience of financial hardship because they have much to teach the Society as a whole, spiritually as well as practically. I hope the current revision of Quaker faith & practice will speak of what we can learn from poorer Friends as well as how Friends should live if they are fortunate enough to have the comfort of wealth.
Kathleen Bell
‘Green energy’
I’ve worked for thirty-ish years in the energy sector, and in that capacity am slightly alarmed by some of the correspondence currently circulating among Friends about ‘green energy’.
Around thirty-seven per cent of Britain’s electricity was generated from renewable sources in 2019. If no households had consciously moved to green tariffs in the last twenty years, the proportion would be… around thirty-seven per cent. The proportion has hitherto been determined by the overall level of national subsidy; unsubsidised projects have not (yet) been developed. If your green supply costs the same as, or less than, your previous brown supply, that should raise ‘too good to be true’ alarm bells.
By all means switch to a green tariff (these are also offered by traditional suppliers). I have, but we should not pretend that we are saving the planet in so doing.
We often hear that wind and solar electricity are cheaper than all other forms. That is almost certainly untrue now with the recent gas price collapse, but even before Covid-19 and its impact on fossil fuel prices the largest recent projects have been supported by de-risking contracts for difference (CfD), and the smaller ones with top-up feed-in tariffs (FiT). The ‘merchant’, in other words unsubsidised, renewables revolution has nearly – but not quite – arrived.
Some friends recommend the Ethical Consumer (EC). A Friend’s email doing the rounds refers us to an edition which is three years out of date. It recommended avoiding EDF Energy because it has nuclear power stations.
There is a very strong counter-argument that, given we have some nuclear power stations (generating close to twenty per cent of our needs), it makes sense to continue using them to generate carbon dioxide-free electricity as long as they are safe! That EC opinion piece does not speak for this author at any rate.
Andrew Hughes Nind
Levelling up
I was not brought up as a Quaker but married into a Quaker family and my wife had four Quaker grandparents, so I became well acquainted with Quaker practice. I always understood that the proper form of address to a Friend was ‘Charles Brown’ neither ‘Mr’ nor ‘Brown’ nor ‘Charles’ – at least in the latter case, until you knew Charles better.
As I often came into contact with people whose names I did not know (or cannot remember) I was struggling. To meet the Quaker tradition of equality, I now address everyone whose name does not come to mind as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’. I think it meets the criteria of equality and often has beneficial side effects. I would use the abbreviated form of madam, ‘mam’, rhyming with jam, which, incidentally, is the proper form of address to the queen after you have been introduced.
But in this part of the world everyone’s mother is referred to as ‘me mam’. Levelling up has much more attraction to me than overfamiliarity.
Robert Campbell
Our ‘central command’
I was astonished and alarmed to read in the Friend (29 May) an announcement by Britain Yearly Meeting about the closure of ‘Quaker headquarters, Friends House’. Have we now become a military organisation waging aggressive campaigns? Should our Area Meetings now be renamed ‘squadrons’ and a Local Meeting a ‘troop’?
In my experience Friends habitually seek to avoid the use of military terms and war imagery for obvious reasons. In any case it is quite incorrect to refer to Friends House as our ‘headquarters’. These are the central offices of the Religious Society of Friends – which serve and support our Local Meetings and from time to time serve as the focus of our national gatherings.
We are by our very nature a bottom-up organisation. We proclaim that our ‘central command’ lies within as individuals and can be found only there, but is confirmed and strengthened when we gather together with others in worshipping communities, whether locally, nationally or internationally.
Peter D Leeming
