Who’s for Balby?
Bob Johnson considers a Quaker rule not to run your life by
A hundred and sixty one years ago a small Quaker group penned a quiet proclamation that I believe is more relevant today than Martin Luther’s articles. In 1656 the elders at Balby wrote a famous ‘Epistle’. It was a list of points – but not ‘a rule to walk by’. They stressed that Friends should follow them ‘in the Spirit’ and ‘not from the letter’. Today, we all look for rules – what, perforce, should we do about this, or what about that? Whose authority do we follow in conducting our business, our taxes, our economy or our social behaviour? Let’s have a rule, for preference a ‘scientific law’, which everyone can (or must) follow, regardless. There aren’t – at least to me – any obvious such laws. Indeed, most of those laws purporting to be scientific ones – neoliberalism, for example – aren’t. The hope, which is often tacit, that ‘science’ will provide all the answers is doomed. Those Quaker elders offer the only viable solution. How long will it take for humanity to catch up with Balby?
This is not false (Quaker) modesty. This is scientific realism. The dream, perhaps since the 1914-18 war, has been that there is ‘an answer’, a scientific answer, objectively established, which all are bound to obey. Somehow, there is a plan, a universal law that, once revealed, will apply to all and sundry regardless of background, religion, ideology or culture. Wrong. The more we know about the curious planet we are on, the more incomprehensible it becomes. We have to make the best of what we’ve got, not keep hankering after a theological nirvana where all will be known.
Science is glorious as long as the theory behind it remains intact. When it fails, as with phlogiston (a substance supposed by eighteenth century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies), then it proves to be worse than useless. As the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli said, it has failed. Many will have heard of the uncertainty principle. At the heart of every atom in all our bodies is quantum mechanics, the core of which is uncertain knowledge. We crave certainty – but there’s none to be found in science as such. The great scientific endeavour is wonderful when it works and toxic when it doesn’t. As the American scientist Richard Feynman said: ‘If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t.’
So, what’s left? Take a closer look at that quite exceptional proclamation: ‘these things we do not lay upon you as a rule or form to walk by’. Read through the twenty points the Balby elders list in their Epistle and you’d think they would include some sort of rider to say these precepts are better than any others. But they don’t. They may sound like rules. But they’re not. What an astounding breakthrough. They delegate authority. It is as simple as that. Make what you can of these yourself – don’t take our word for it, but think, reason, taste, try out, live experimentally – keep a lookout for the ‘Light’, whatever that might mean to you. We’re not telling you what to think, merely to do so.
2016 raised precisely these questions of authority, especially political authority. It’s not good enough to take a referendum or a presidential election as authorising whatever you first thought of. No, every act needs reflecting on anew. Where does truth take us? What does the Light indicate? Breaking obvious rules, like peddling falsehoods, has consequences that can never, safely, be justified by prior authorisation. This Quaker insight is hard work. It’s difficult to maintain in a world loudly proclaiming the reverse. But if we’re not to be governed by autocrats – religious, scientific or political – we have to gird up our own loins, applaud the existence of ‘things which are eternal’, whatever they are, and never falter in our endeavours to make them more widely known and valued. So, who’s for Balby?
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