Friends and the Social Order
September 2, 2018 § 5 Comments
I have been reading the Official Report of the All Friends Conference, the first international conference of Friends held in London in 1920. The conference was held in response to the horrors of the first world war and it focused initially, on the peace testimony, but it ended up having some radical things to say about the wider social order—the capitalist economic system and the political and social institutions that enabled and favored it.
The Conference was held in a mood of deep soul searching, since so many Friends had served in the war, in contradiction to the peace testimony, and this seemed to challenge Friends’ commitment to the testimony. At the same time, both state and wider societal persecution over conscientious objection had descended on many other Friends, and by association, on the whole Society, because of their resistance.
Furthermore, especially for those attending from London Yearly Meeting (now Britain YM), the Conference also progressed in the light of that yearly meeting’s proceedings of the past few years. LYM had convened a Committee on War and the Social Order in 1915 charged with studying the causes of the Great War and with proposing steps to more effectively prevent such a horror from occurring again.
The Committee came back with an indictment of capitalism as a chief cause and with some principles that had a flavor of the small but influential Quaker Socialist movement. A Conference on War and the Social Order was held in 1916, which brought to the Yearly Meeting Seven Points of the Message of All Friends, quoted here. Unable to come to unity on these principles, they were returned to the quarterly meetings for comment in 1917 and by 1918, all had replied. A new set of eight principles called Foundations of a True Social Order was approved that year, somewhat watered down from the insistences of the more radical quarters, but still focused on the social order—the economic system—with a prophetic voice (quoted here).
During the world conference, one “Subject” focused on Personal Life and Society and the minute approved from that Subject included the following, which has distinct echoes from the efforts of the Committee on War and the Social Order:
Turning to more particular proposals, we ask Friends to give special thought to the following, and to consider how far they indicate a direction in which advance may be made:—
- Fuller recognition in every relation of life of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of man, and the vast implications flowing therefrom.
- And endeavor after greater simplicity in our personal way of life, asking ourselves—How far does my life recommend to others the cause I have at heart?
- The limitation of the return upon capital.
- The surrender of the absolute control of industry by capital, the furtherance of the spirit essential for co-operation, and the fuller recognition of the sacredness of personality.
- Some method for giving security of employment to the worker.
The Fatherhood of God
Note that Friends still looked to the Christian framework for the foundation of testimony, presumably primarily the peace testimony in this case, rather than the notion of a divine spark in everyone, as Rufus Jones had reinterpreted the phrase “that of God in everyone” about twenty years earlier. This helps to corroborate Lewis Benson’s speculation that it was the AFSC (which Jones had cofounded during the war) that popularized this idea.
Simplicity
In some of the presentations to the Conference and in the vocal ministry that followed these messages, as recorded in the Report, Friends had searched their own lifestyles and complacency regarding the peace testimony before the war, and found themselves wanting. And as regards the “social order”, they saw that the progressive changes they were proposing for the economic system required changes on their own part, if they were to be consistent with their beliefs.
Limits to return on capital
Here you can see the hand of the socialists and this is a remarkable, radical proposal. This is the sentence that prompted me to write this blog post. These Friends are calling for a cap on corporate profits. They don’t get specific about where the surplus profits beyond the cap should go. However, the focus on and off during the conference had been on labor, and the fifth proposal is for unemployment insurance, so we can imagine that they would return the surplus to the workers in one way or another.
Restructuring the economy
Control (economic democracy):
This final proposal is the other reason I wanted to pass this on to my readers. It has three parts, focused on control, competition, and “personality”. First, as regards industry control. Support for the Labour Party was strong in England at this time among Friends and labor’s plight loomed large during the Conference’s deliberations. The yearly meeting saw that, to make lasting and fundamental change, workers had to be given a say over their own labor.
Competition:
While giving market competition some credit, they also saw it as a cause of conflict, and even of the violence experienced in the war. They desired an economic system that focused more on cooperation and they called upon “industry” to understand its mission as one of pursuing service to society rather than profit for the individual.
Personality:
The word ‘personality’ had a broader meaning early in the twentieth century than it usually does today; it didn’t mean one’s style as a social person. In the 1880s, it came to mean ‘personalty’, one’s personal goods and personal estate in an economic sense. As used here, the word carries some of these connotations, but also something more: the broad sense of those qualities which make a person what she is, as distinct from other persons, and which distinguish personhood from ‘thingness’. Nurturing individual “personality” was a consistent theme throughout all these British discernment efforts—that each individual should be free to develop their talents, their lives, their personal resources in whatever ways gave them fulfillment.
Employment security
Friends saw clearly that the fear of losing one’s job was a sinful form of disempowerment. It was oppressive. And it should be dealt with somehow.
Are you thinking what I am thinking? That these Friends were unrealistically optimistic about their prospects regarding these principles? And that we have made very little progress indeed. Unemployment insurance is the only ideal that has been realized, if only partially.
But there is here a solid foundation for a Quaker testimony on economic justice.
Through the Flaming Sword 
I’ve recently finished a book by Alan Jacobs titled _The Year of Our Lord 1943: Chrisitan Humanism in an Age of Crisis. In it Jacobs traces the concern and effort of five Christian intellectuals (Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, W.H. Auden, and Simone Weil) to address the spiritual crisis that was being played out during WWII and was moreover threatening further calamity once the war was won, which by ’43 was expected to be only a matter of time.
Your blog, Steven, brought this book to mind because its subject is also the concern and effort of Christians in wartime to understand and counteract destructive social forces. Most of what you list as the Quakers’ recommendations dealt, I think, with symptoms of the problem, but the first item in the minute on “Personal Life and Society” (“Fuller recognition in every relation of life of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of man, and the vast implications flowing therefrom.”) refers to the substance behind the “vast implications flowing therefrom.”
Behind the vast implications and the dire consequences were assumptions that the intellectuals sought to uncover, examine, communicate, and possibly rectify: bringing the truth to light as a necessary first step toward recovery. I’m going to quote a fairly long passage from the book, because I feel it reveals the error modern Quakers have made and continue to make. I hope others will read this book that bespeaks the passion for the truth and the heroic dedication to promote it among those living at that time. Here’s the passage:
The debates and disputes I have been recording in this chapter bear witness to a widespread concern–concern at times rising to the status of panic–that liberal instrumentalism, that willingness to defer ultimate questions as the price to be paid for getting along with one another, had left the democratic West unable to generate the energetic commitment necessary to resist the military and moral drive of societies that had clear answers to Quid sit homo? [Who is Man?] Suddenly, intellectuals throughout the democratic Western countries felt impelled to improvise an ethics and a metaphysics to suit the moment [your post supports this claim] in much the same way that their nations’ militaries were scrambling to create new weapons and hasten the production and distribution of existing ones….The focus of these pages is on those who came to believe, in the harsh light of worldwide political crisis, that the decision to bracket, within the public sphere, fundamental questions about human nature had proved a disastrous one and needed to be rethought–and quickly. For these thinkers, vexed questions of human nature had to be raised once again, and raised in such a way that a Christian answer to them was made compelling (pp.33-34).
Hi !
This brother l;earned about your blog in a very good way from a Friend I respect a few years ago at NYYM at Lake George, NY.
I’m led to deepen my Friends Practice might here be another blog or two you might recommend for this newly convinced Friend?
Smiling your direction from CT.
Hi, Francis. Welcome to my blog. It’s not a complete list, but I can recommend the blogs listed under “Blogroll” in the right hand column of my own blog.
Yes, Steve, I’m thinking what you’re thinking: that these Friends were unrealistically optimistic — but what are we thinking they were unrealistically optimistic about? About being able to change the ways of the larger society, or about being able to approve a statement that would be taken by Friends as binding on them as Friends?
Eighteenth-century Friends’ minutes against slaveowning or involvement in the slave trade were — as I understand them — mostly adopted with a view to uniting Friends in a consistent pattern of godly behavior, no matter what evils “the world” persisted in. I’d think that the Report of the 1920 All Friends Conference would have been thought of, first and foremost, as an advice to all Friends everywhere to unite in supporting the social and economic reforms proposed — no matter how long it took the larger society (“the world”) to “get it” that “the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” required those reforms. The truly sad thing, in my view, is that the Report of the All Friends Conference didn’t revolutionize the world-view of Herbert Hoover and a good number of other Friends active in the 1920s, some of whom, I think, were captains of industry and finance. But you know the history better than I. And all that fine talk about the brotherhood of man didn’t seem to shake Indiana Quaker Daisy Douglas Barr’s allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan. We were no longer a unitable Society of Friends.
John, I haven’t researched Daisy Douglas Barr but Tom Hamm, in a lecture I heard him give said that her membership in the Klan was based on the Klan’s stance on temperance at the time. I could conceive of a zealous advocate of prohibition of alcohol saying there could be no brotherhood until human society was free of the intoxicating substance.