Letters - 28 October 2016
From capitalism and peace to anti-Semitism
Capitalism and peace
I read G Gordon Steel’s article (21 October) while coming home from a ‘Justice and Peace’ day in Lancaster. Here we addressed issues similar to those raised by Gordon: How to speak ‘truth to power’, ‘when the powerful tend now to be faceless and remote from us?’
Father Tom’s prayerful words spoke directly to my condition. Calmly and wisely this erstwhile monk from Ampleforth warned of the danger of having expertise in areas of social activism – the danger of creating a ‘them and us’ approach – a separation – gently nudging us to recognise that we, too, are part of the problem.
We can use our power unconsciously. While remaining a ‘spiritually-focused pressure group’, true to our principles of integrity and peace –‘aiming to remind the commercial world of its responsibilities’ – it is easy to overlook the ways in which we might, unconsciously, be using our own power to the detriment of others. Maybe we move more effectively towards peace by waking up to this potential.
If, when meeting a different position from our own, we take the moral high-ground, judging others for their behaviour and decisions, we swiftly make enemies. While busy striving for peace we may, unconsciously, be forging the path to war.
Are we able to pick up the challenge to engage and work with ‘conflict’, as George Fox certainly did, rather than simply trying to take the shortcut to ‘Peace’. We should recognise that ‘the other’ may also be a part of ourselves?
Sue Holden
I hope we are more than a ‘small spiritually focused pressure group’ as suggested in last week’s ‘Thought for the Week’.
I am sure that is not how our Quaker forebears would have seen us. I don’t think there is anything inevitable about the loss of principled attitudes within the corporate sector, any more than I agree with Karen Armstrong that violence and war are inevitable. I am sure that there were many people in the eighteenth century who said that attempts to abolish slavery were futile since there had always been slaves in different societies. Quakers have a long history of campaigning for social change, much of it in conjunction with others, on the basis that there is nothing inevitable about war, injustice and oppression. Theodore Zeldin in his fascinating book An Intimate History of Humanity, says:
The Society of Friends, over three centuries of existence, has indeed fewer than a quarter of a million members… but it has had more influence on how human beings treat each other than any government ever had, of however powerful an empire. It achieved nothing by force or decree; it did not move mountains but it did show how exemplary deeds could at least cause them to crumble a little, gradually.
I prefer to see our Society in that way as a body that can, if it remains true to its testimonies, achieve extraordinary things.
Gerald Conyngham
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