'The impulse to "rightness", when embraced, is irrepressible.' Photo: by Michael Carruth on Unsplash.
‘We can play a ‘goodness’ game – profess love and goodwill for all – but how real is it?’
Thought for the week: Piers Maddox sees inconvenient truth
There’s a space between theism and nontheism that is important to explore.
Early Quakers witnessed the breakdown of village-based community, with enclosures driving the landless into towns. Merchants cheated, and you doffed your cap to your rich masters. It was the beginning of capitalist society. Those Friends felt the Spirit of Truth (an inner guide to ‘rightness’), which they identified with Jesus. To deny it would have been blasphemy. It was something real, inside, an essence behind the biblical words – but they knew you didn’t have to be Christian to feel it.
Our world is very different now, but that instinct was good. Fakery and injustice are with us still, perhaps more than before. The rich and the poor know their role but, for the middle classes, part exploiter part exploited, things are more confused. We can play a ‘goodness’ game – make token gestures to impress, and profess love and goodwill for all – but how real is it?
Meanwhile the eco-crisis pricks our bubble of delusion. Capitalism is unsustainable. We know it can’t go on, that we should end exploitation and war and live as one people one planet. But how do we justify our eco-footprint exactly? We’re at the mercy of the rich. Will those with the power and wealth see sense? And when they do, will there still be room for us?
We seek pleasure to distract us from our helplessness. Pope Francis has spoken of a virus of narcissistic spirituality. Shall we watch as the train crash unfolds? Should we pray for the rich western empire to fall to its knees and repent? What’s the salvation we need? Are we even bothered? If we are, we should decide what we want, and then act. We need two things. First, principles of ecological and economic justice – a little global ecosocialism. Second, we need awakened people to organise and act. But it has to be real, not greenwash and gestures. Transformation – perhaps revolution.
The history of monotheism isn’t great. It has a tendency to intolerance and is compliant to authority. Modern scholarship views the Jesus stories as fiction. Some think that’s disillusioning but, as early Quakers used to say, it’s the spirit not the scripture that counts.
What prompts people to self-sacrifice? Or to act for something beyond self at personal cost? There’s a choice each of us makes. The impulse to ‘rightness’, when embraced, is irrepressible. It’s challenging and uncomfortable at times, but it also comes with a feeling of contentment, like having a compass or a trusty mountain guide at your side (or a shepherd if you prefer). There’s a sense of connection with others working for a better world, part of a global striving for the future we need. It’s not done with the expectation of reward in heaven or even earthly hope of success, but simply because it’s the right thing to do – the way of life, the only thing of value you can do, to be a Friend of Truth. The alternative is fakery.
Comments
This is brilliant. I just read it to my fellow-Quaker, fellow-Rebel husband. It’s exactly how we feel and what makes us climate and peace activists. Anyone with no faith but a call to justice and truth would also connect with it.
By suehampton@btinternet.com on 15th October 2020 - 9:24
The Quaker Socialist Society offered the following as their no.1 suggestion for addition to QF&P:
1. George Fox, 1659, translated into Modern English by Rex Ambler
Let all those abbey lands and glebe lands that are given to the priests be given to the poor of the nation, and let all the great houses, abbeys, steeple houses and the palace of Whitehall itself become houses for the care of the needy, or for some use other than they have now, so that the blind and disabled can go there. Let all these fines that get paid to the lords of the manors be given to poor people instead, for the lords have enough already. Let the poor, the blind and the disabled be provided for by the nation, so that there needn’t be a beggar in England.”
By trevorb on 16th October 2020 - 23:14
Having just pre-ordered Nick Hayes new book, The Book of Trespass, then read this, they are both seem to powerfully in the same vein. The trouble is that the politics of Communism didn’t work.
By Diana&John; on 20th October 2020 - 11:27
I wonder if that’s the Diana&John; we all know and love?
The trouble is that the politics of neo-liberal capitalism only works for the few, and their fellow travellers, not the many across the world.(What Edward Heath, or was it Harold Macmillan or a.n.other? called the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’).
It’s surely not too much to ask that one day we might have a bottom-up driven economy, cyclic, sustainable and zero-growth that still allows for freedom and entrepreneurship, rather than a top-down ‘command’ economy driven by ideology or greed - or am I mistaken? Perhaps we can share Piers’ and Fox’s sentiment?
By trevorb on 20th October 2020 - 13:23
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