Letters - 04 October 2024

'Development'

Elizabeth Coleman’s article (20 September) showed the subject of child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to be very different from how we often imagine. I’d like to draw Friends’ attention to some other issues her article touched on. 

‘The soil has become so poor, because of mining, that agriculture is no longer an option.’ So the global north’s demands for minerals to maintain our way of life has destroyed the option of a sustainable way of life. The loss of connection to and respect for the land is reflected in children’s aspirations: to be miners (no other jobs available locally); to go to the city or to university; to become politicians or ‘a rich gold dealer’. And they want education (where they’ll acquire our unsustainable aspirations and culture).

While the lives of children, mostly boys, working in the mines is not as bad as we might imagine, the plight of girls, ‘most of whom make money by being paid for sex’, is worse. In other words, women and girls have become dependent and subservient.

This process of removing people from sustainable ways of life, making them dependent on waged work, and the further dependency of the unwaged, creating inequality, is the road to development.

Wendy Pattinson

International Day for Peace

21 September is the UN International Day for Peace and for the past few years Henley-on-Thames Quakers have been distributing white poppies to people in the town square. This year we gave out 200 white poppies during one very wet hour on that day. The poppies were welcomed but no one had heard of the International Day for Peace.  

I have never heard or read any mention of this day on the press or radio. White poppies seem particularly appropriate for a day of peace, perhaps even more appropriate than on Remembrance Day when the focus is on those who have lost their lives in war. We used to distribute white poppies in the weeks before 11 November but were frequently met by expressions of concern that we were somehow in conflict with the red poppies.

We would be interested to know what other Friends think of this idea.

Gillian Wilson

Life and literature

Jonathan Wooding’s thought-provoking article (20 September) questions whether, by the realistic depiction of lives lived in a harsh and hostile environment, the author Joseph Conrad intended to imply that a vacuum of humanity in the world demonstrates an absence of divinity in creation. 

Conrad’s reaction to Bertrand Russell’s essay, A Free Man’s Worship (‘We should worship only the God created by our own love of the good’), supports Wooding’s thesis. Conrad wrote to Russell saying, ‘For the marvellous pages on the worship of a free man, the only return one can make is that of deep admiring affection.’

This article is the latest in Wooding’s engaging and original series of insights into Quakerism through eloquent reflections on the themes of life and literature explored by some of our greatest writers. They have inspired me to find out more about Quakerism and about the works themselves. 

Richard Lander

'Intelligent' species

I read Howard Grace’s article (6 September) with interest. I do not agree, however, that we are the most intelligent species on this planet.  

Dolphins even get ‘drunk’ together, to celebrate a successful hunt. There is a particular fish that dolphins know about, which emits a narcotic substance when bothered. The dolphins surround this fish, and bother it, thus getting ‘high’. They don’t create great works of art and so on because they have no need to. They are sea creatures and, as such, only need what the sea can offer. 

A female mountain gorilla held in captivity for the whole of her life, demonstrated that these beautiful animals, are ‘inferior’ to us in only one respect – they have a larynx which cannot create the same range of sounds. This gorilla learned to communicate using a board with pictures on it, and sign language. 

She could follow movies and would laugh at the funny ones, and cry over the sad ones. She fell in love with the actor Robin Williams because she loved his movies. She then met Robin Williams, and hugged him delightedly. When he died, they had to tell her, and she was very sad. She refused every male gorilla they tried to pair her with, so she had no offspring of her own, but she tenderly cared for a kitten. When this cat died, she cried with grief. In other words, she was every bit as capable of every emotion that human beings are, and she displayed equal intelligence to us.

It was thought that ants did not make any sounds, until a man invented a microphone sensitive enough to pick up the sounds that they make. These are made by forcing air out of holes along the body of the ant. Ants have a very complex society, where nothing is wasted. Dead ants are collected and used for food. Who knows what sort of beliefs these ants might have? Likewise, bees, wasps and other insects that live in colonies.

I would argue that human beings are the least intelligent species on this Earth, since an ant would not be so stupid as to seek to destroy the very planet it depends on for life.

Anne Marie Brian

Death and dying

I am replying to Margaret Cook (30 August) and Deborah Jane (20 September). My beloved partner died in March 2023. Before that I, like Deborah and Margaret, abhorred the use of euphemisms about death by Quakers, and elsewhere. However, since the death of my partner, I have changed my mind. 

A few weeks after my partner died, I was speaking to a young male motor-mechanic. I explained that I had ‘lost’ my partner and he had always dealt with the car, so I needed more help. The young man said, not unkindly, ‘Why do people say they have “lost” a person when they mean they have died?’ 

At the time I was still in shock at my loss. Although my partner had been ill for more than a year, it was still a terrible shock that he had died. I didn’t and still don’t believe in an afterlife and found it devastating that I would never see my partner again. I found at the time the word ‘death’ so terrible. It spoke of the appalling finality more than any other word. The young man’s words brought tears to my eyes. I knew this could happen, but it was especially difficult as he was a complete stranger. This young man was not to know I was so fragile, and the word ‘death’ was so painful to hear. I can’t remember now how I replied to him.

Maybe the euphemisms used around death, by undertakers, ministers, celebrants, and so on, have come about because of bereaved people, like me, being unable to handle the word ‘death’ for some time after the person has died. Grieving for me has been a far deeper and more painful process than I had ever imagined.

Maybe I am wrong about this, and it is just a general societal avoidance of anything related to death. Our culture is still bad at talking about death, grief and bereavement. 

As you can see, I can now, eighteen months on, say and write about ‘death’, although it is still a painful subject. What do others think about this? Am I alone with these thoughts?

Penny Lilley

Marriage

Perhaps someone can explain why it is felt necessary to remove religion from our wedding declaration when a civil ceremony already provides for this. I simply do not understand. Both my sisters married men who were not religious; each had a really beautiful ceremony without any reference to God or the divine. The option is freely available. 

Sometimes one wonders if there is an entryist problem here and a humanist takeover! Or is it that those who want a Quaker marriage without God’s involvement actually just want to be married in a particular Meeting house? At our 1702 Meeting in Mosedale we have had to deal with this.

Kath Worrall