Who are the ‘naughty people’?
Ian Kirk-Smith reflects on a powerful piece of ministry at Meeting for Sufferings
The room was full of Friends from every corner of Britain. A gentle hum of voices had calmed to stillness. Meeting for Sufferings was settled. Worship began. The silence, after some minutes, was broken by ministry. A Friend revealed that she was a grandmother and had recently been talking to her grandson. He told her that, when he grew up, he wanted to be a farmer and that he wanted to produce food – but ‘not for the naughty people’. His grandmother was slightly taken aback. She explained to him that the naughty people also needed food. We had a responsibility to them.
Then she paused, looked around the room, and continued her ministry by mentioning a news item that she had heard earlier in the week. It announced that an Al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan was dead; but he had not been killed in a battle. He had been killed by an unmanned missile – a drone.
The most sophisticated modern technology is now being used in warfare. The unmanned missile that ended the life of this man in Afghanistan was fired and guided by another man sitting at a computer in America.
The Al-Qaeda leader had been instrumental in the death of many people. He had shown no respect for their rights. So he was treated the same way he had treated them. There was no trial. Killers have it coming to them. Some believe that is the moral of this news story. Or is it?
The Friend was clearly distressed. She was upset by the clinical, cold-blooded, nature of the killing. The soldier who had ‘guided’ the missile may have used a mouse or some kind of joystick, simulating the experience of being in the cockpit of an aeroplane, to do it. We do not know. All we know is that the technology clearly worked. The soldier guided a missile, from possibly thousands of miles away, and hit his target. A man was killed.
The ministry resolved abruptly. The Friend concluded with a simple question: ‘What morality guided this action?’
Science can help us to guide aeroplanes and ships - and unmanned missiles - but not our moral sense. Neither can it help us to define what we mean by the word ‘justice’. Is our justice a different, superior, justice to that of the ‘naughty people’? Is our morality a different, superior, morality to that of the ‘naughty people’? Who really are the ‘naughty people’? Do some people get seduced by a belief that because western technology is superior then it must have a superior morality?
People once killed each other using clubs and then swords. They developed pistols and, later, handguns and rifles and machine guns. Cannonballs fired from heavy guns were eventually succeeded by bombs dropped from planes. Now unmanned drones are used – not only for their original role of reconnaissance, but for killing people. They have killed many people in the early twenty-first century. There is no accurate figure on how many of them have been innocent civilians.
It is 350 years since Quakers made their Peace Declaration to Charles II. The way individual Friends, today, act out the resulting Peace Testimony is a central theme of Quaker Week.
There will always be new innovations in technology and change in science. Politicians, also, may change their positions and sometimes ‘blow with the wind’: but there will always be enduring truths. There will always be certain principles that never change.
The Quaker Peace Testimony has not changed and neither has the divine spirit which prompted it. Quakers must speak truth to power…and also to young Friends. They do not need moral weathervanes. They need clear moral signposts. Thank goodness for Quaker grandmothers.
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