Mind your language: Imogen Wedd says we should be wary of bias

‘Passion and anger create division; prayer and love are capable of moving mountains.’

The phrase ‘Speak truth to power’ is common currency among Quakers.  At its best it calls us to honesty, at whatever cost in reputation or worldly success. But the words are heavy with unspoken challenges. We can speak, but do we listen? Is it truth we speak, or fashionable platitudes? Is power an outside entity or should we be looking in the mirror? Is it possible we are so busy talking that we no longer hear the ‘still small voice’? Is it possible our truth in fact comes from a restricted perspective on life?

William Penn’s much-loved phrase tells us that ‘true godliness don’t turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better within it, and excites their endeavours to mend it’. This rightly warns us against quietism, but it, too, contains implicit challenges. Are we sure our attempts at repairing the world arise out of ‘true godliness’, not from a desire for personal meaning and virtue? Are our motives humble and selfless, or tainted by pride and self-will? Are they based on knowledge and evidence or on prejudice and emotion? Is it possible that we are indulging in the comfort of conformity?

I worry that we have drifted too far from the spiritual life – that social action has become activism. I become concerned when our communications are couched in emotive language, when views are expressed without supporting evidence or with disregard for other perspectives. One can cite recent examples where government proposals are described as ‘draconian’, ‘punitive’, and ‘threats to democracy’. These represent political opinions that are not necessarily shared, or supported by evidence, or rooted in deep spiritual soil. Indeed, such passions are almost invariably a warning sign that the self is intruding in a damaging way.

Quaker testimonies and processes were developed to safeguard the spiritual life of the Society from the twin errors of pride and worldliness, to ensure that we take a spirit-led view, that we avoid extremist notions or excessive attachment. We need their discipline. The most basic of our testimonies, on which the whole Society was founded, was Truth. If we lose sight of that, we lose sight of everything that makes Quakers who we are. Truth is an infallible guide to the rightness of our action. Right action will never come from falsehood, or propaganda, or political bias. Right motives require us to set aside our worldly ambitions, clear from our consciousness ideas of self-worth and self-importance, to submit ourselves humbly to something greater than ourselves.

If speaking truth to power is reduced to promoting our particular political perspective, if social action degenerates into personal enthusiasms, it will not serve either us or the world well. Surely what is needed most at present is not more politics but more prayer – not more anger but more love, not passion but peace. Passion and anger create division; prayer and love are capable of moving mountains. We should think carefully about the direction in which we are travelling, and the messages we are sending out.

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Comments

Thanks Imogen, this was all worth reading and thinking about,  and you are right,  I’m sure, in the essentials: our social action, as Quakers,  should be prayerful and spirit-led. But I am a bit troubled by the limitations you would impose on social action and the words we might use to engage with the powers that be. Some of the things the present government has done or proposes to do are - measured against all our testimonies - indeed ‘draconian’, ‘punitive’, and ‘threats to democracy’.  Truthfulness and plainspeaking require that we call them such, not in a spirit of enmity and derision towards those who think otherwise, but so a direction of travel can be discerned more clearly.  “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” as a Quaker-educated man once said, more or less, and that entangles us in politics whether we like it or not.  Before I came to Quakers in the 1980s I was a great admirer of Martin Luther King, and my respect for his activism, the choices he made in his time and place, remain undimmed. His nonviolence remains a source of Light to me. His famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, written in response to white Christian leaders who urged him to campaign for civil rights   more slowly, more quietly, and less stridently contains all the answers to the quietism that,  in truth, your principles could take us back to, whatever your hopes otherwise.  Yes, Quakers should seek to conduct themselves in the world with civility and make every effort to understand positions other than their, but that surely does not mean not facing up to the ways in which the ever-present “ocean of darkness” makes itself felt in our own times?

By RMNELLIS on 16th March 2023 - 15:01

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