The Joy of the Quaker Way

October 24, 2014 § 7 Comments

Modern Quakerism has a lot of problems and I have tended to dwell on them in this blog—too much. Nor are the problems all with Quakerism. I myself am a problem. I have a prophetic, if not an apocalyptic, religious temperament—I always want to change things and I usually think I know what needs to change, and oftentimes I think I know how they should change. Sometimes, I even think I know how to change them.

The shadow side of this temperament is a tendency to go negative, even to stay negative; to get crusty, even nasty, when things don’t change; and to get arrogant and self-righteous. I can tend away from my joy in my religious life, forgetting how much Quakerism has given me in my grousing about its shortcomings.

I want to change my path. I want to recall this joy that I feel in the Quaker way. And I want to share it. And there’s a lot of it. I rejoice in so many aspects of the Quaker way! So many that I thought it would be hard to know where to start. But no. Two things jump to the front right away, though there are many others. One is collective and one is individual. First, the exquisite joy of the gathered meeting; and second, the joy of Quaker ministry. This latter is where I want to start.

Quaker ministry

Only the shared thrill of G*d’s presence in our midst in the gathered meeting for worship compares with the more sustained personal fulfillment of dedicating what gifts I have to the work G*d has for me to do. Let me catalog them before I unpack them:

The unfolding of calling. The way my ministries have unfolded has been to me a miracle of divine love in revelation: openings have grown into leadings, leadings have expanded into ministries, ministries constellate as an integrated sense of calling. And all of this has compounded to create in me a profound gratitude, strong confidence in my faith, and the deepest joy of spirit, a joy that is always there if I but pay attention to it.

Individual openings. And all along the way, little flowers have bloomed in moments of soaring, flaring opening into some little truth that lift my spirit into heavenly heights. I cannot say how great this feels, “more than words can utter”, as George Fox put. I completely understand, George.

Study. And these blossoms open because my ministries keep plunging me back into the spiritual discipline that has always been one of my greatest joys—study. I love to study. I love to read about religion, to take notes, to organize the material for works of written ministry and for workshops and presentations. And because we have no paid professionals to learn and teach our tradition (at least in the non-pastoral tradition), I feel a special responsibility to know the tradition myself.

Teaching. And I get special satisfaction from sharing what I know. I love to teach, and no other religious community would give me such an open and blessed channel for whatever gifts of teaching I possess. This is perhaps the greatest source of my joy in the Quaker way, that I can be a minister here according to my true calling, and not according to the dictates of the denomination or the categories of the seminary. I have wanted to be a minister on and off since I was 12, but I could never have become one in the Lutheran tradition of my youth, or in practically any other. Only here, among the priesthood of all believers.

I want to spend the next few posts expanding on this theme of joy in the Quaker way, unpacking these and subsequent sources of this wonderful gift of thrill and fulfillment in my life.

Quaker Groups Statement — Climate Summit 2014

October 2, 2014 § 3 Comments

In September, seven Quaker groups produced a group statement on climate change for distribution ahead of the People’s Climate March in New York City and the Climate Summit held the next week at the United Nations. The organizations were Quaker Earthcare Witness, Quaker United Nations Office, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Quaker Council for European Affairs, American Friends Service Committee, Quakers in Britain, and Living Witness. Click the following link to download a pdf file of this statement, Facing the Challenge of Climate Change: A shared statement by Quaker groups.

I am very glad that these organizations were able to present to the world a testimony on this all-important issue. I know it sometimes is not easy to get approval for such a statement by even one organization, let alone so many. And these organizations carry considerable weight, both among Friends and in some parts of the wider society. Furthermore, I know that it sparked a lot of conversation around Quaker circles and some action. New York Yearly Meeting, at the least, endorsed the statement and released a press release about its endorsement. I suspect that some local meetings and maybe some other yearly meetings and organizations did so, as well. So hurray for the faithfulness of the Friends who crafted and approved this statement.

I do have some concerns, however. But in the comments and critique that follows, I hold up this statement, not as a failure on the part of the Friends who wrote it and approved it, but as a jumping-off point for a discussion of how we Friends—liberal Friends, anyway—pursue and articulate our social and ecological witness.

My concerns—a summary. The writer in me wishes the statement were bolder—stronger and more direct in its language. The Quaker minister in me wishes it was more prophetic in its message and that that message came from closer to the heart of our tradition. Another way to put this concern is that I wish God and the faith and practice of Quaker ministry played a more central role. The document designer in me wishes it were formatted more attractively.

All this inner grumbling has made me somewhat outwardly grumpy.  I’ve written about this before: The liberal branch of Quakerism consistently produces witness statements that barely mention God and use secular language rather than clearly religious language, let alone distinctively Quaker language, to make its arguments. These minutes of conscience often could have been written by some secular organization, for all that you can tell.

Stronger language. In the main body of the statement, paragraphs begin, “We recognize . . . “ “Recognize” is as passive an action word as you can get. All you have to do to recognize something is to have your eyes open and your brain turned on. No small thing in this time of eco-denial, I admit. But we Friends can do much more than “recognize”—can’t we? Can we not TESTIFY!? If you replace all the Statement’s “We recognize” phrases with “We testify”, or something else that clearly declares our stand as religious, Quaker, and God-breathed, how much more powerful would it read! If you do these replacements, however, you quickly recognize that you need to change the message itself.

Prophecy. One testifies to the Truth. One testifies as a witness, which implies a prophetic judgment. One testifies to the Truth on behalf of its Source. Traditionally, a prophetic oracle invokes God, names the sin, and then it often predicts the consequences of that sin, hopefully with vivid and even poetic images. The language in this statement lacks prophetic teeth; in fact, it’s weak in prophetic perspective. If this testimony arose from a prompting of the Holy Spirit, then it should say so. Now I realize that some of these organizations serve “constituencies” that might not be comfortable with such overt religious language or they may have other obligations related to funding and mission that complicate the process for public proclamations like this. My question is about source and truth in our prophetic witness, and not really about this particular document: Do our minutes of conscience come from divine prompting? Are we speaking truth to power? What is that truth? And are we courageous enough to give it a prophetic voice that comes from our own venerable tradition?

Quaker tradition. Almost all the language of the Statement invokes the rhetoric of secular social justice work and secular environmental science. It uses “anthropogenic” (a technical, somewhat off-putting word that it must then define, which sounds condescending to my ears), “mean temperature rises”, “most vulnerable peoples”, “global economic injustice”, “limited natural resources”, “fossil fuel extraction”, “beautiful human family”. It never taps the rich resources of Quaker written tradition, except for the fantastic quote from William Penn at the beginning. It never invokes the Bible, either, except obliquely in its reference to the “peaceable Kingdom of God”, even though the Bible is the original source of all our testimonial rhetoric, just as the Holy Spirit is the source of the testimonial life itself, and of the distinctive testimonies that have arisen from that Life.

Speaking of God. Here’s the crux of the matter: Where is God in our public witness? The statement concludes with this sentence: “We see this Earth as a shining gift that supports life. It is our only home. Let us care for it together.” I wish we would end our minutes of conscience with powerful, explicitly Quaker/religious prophetic oracles.

The “gift” idea in this last sentence suggests a possibility for some earth stewardship language that clarifies where this gift came from (the Creator) and why we have a religious responsibility for it (stewardship). I think Christian earth stewardship has some problems of its own (the topic of my first unpublished book). However, if we took full responsibility for its principles, we would have a truly radical agenda, and earth stewardship has the additional value of appealing to a lot of people in language they understand. The gift comes from God, it’s not ours to do with as we please, we will be held accountable for how we steward the gift. It would speak most directly, I would think, to evangelical Christians, and to many Muslims and orthodox Jews.

However, when this last sentence capitalizes “Earth”, it unconsciously reaches for another perhaps more powerful if more difficult Truth, which the quote from Penn prefigures: Earth is not just a gift for life support, our spaceship earth. It is not just our home. Earth is worth capitalizing because it is alive with the very life and spirit and presence of the Creator.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God (referring to Genesis 1:1 here). All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:1-3)

Many Friends may not rise to this language the way I do, but it expresses poetically in the language of our tradition the truth that, in some deep and mysterious way, our God and the earth are one; they are integral to each other at the deepest levels of reality. Never mind the spat between Genesis and evolution; the creative process—evolution—expresses the divine in true and important ways. This truth is the traditional foundation for the testimony that Penn gives us in that epigram at the beginning: that the face of the Creator is “in all and every part of” creation.

This means that to destroy the Earth is to re-crucify Christ, who is the Word. Ecocide is deicide, not just suicide.

That’s what I wish this statement had said.

Muse is silent

September 30, 2014 § 13 Comments

I haven’t posted for a while and if I end up being silent for a while longer, I wanted you my readers to know why.

Of the Aspects of G*d I have known directly, one of the most precious to me is Muse. My writing life and my spiritual life are very closely knitted: my writing turns and transforms and reveals my inner work and opens my path forward, and my path inspires my pen.

I recently wrote a Quaker piece (not for this blog) that was, I was shown, clearly out of the Life. This has prompted me to question the rest of my Quaker writing. My muse is confused.

So I find that I’m in a period of waiting, of standing still in the light, and putting this blog aside for awhile until the way becomes clear again.

Challenges for Large Quaker Meetings

September 9, 2014 § 5 Comments

I moved to Philadelphia in June and while packing my Quaker library I uncovered a paper I didn’t know I had: The Caring Multitude: Is It Possible? Preliminary Reflections on Experience in a Large Quaker Meeting in an Urban Setting, by Dan Seeger. Dan is a fairly well-known Friend who has held several high-level positions with AFSC and was Executive Director of Pendle Hill for a time, among a number of other significant contributions to Quaker culture. His 1965 case before the US Supreme Court, The United States of America vs Daniel A. Seeger, won the right to conscientious objection to military service for secular people who were not claiming religious grounds for their stand.

The Caring Multitude was written in 1979 and was originally meant “to be shared with a small group of Friends concerned with the life of the Monthly Meeting”. I am not at all sure how I ended up with a copy, which is a photocopy of a typewritten manuscript that has someone else’s notes on it.

In this little talking paper, as he calls it, Dan addresses the challenges that large urban meetings face in three crucial areas: pastoral care, meeting for worship, and corporate social outreach. He makes a lot of really interesting points. More than interesting—they are true, to my mind, and very much worth considering, especially by Friends worshipping in large meetings.

Because I don’t have permission to republish his paper, I don’t feel comfortable even quoting it extensively, which I would like to do, but I do want to raise up some of his ideas and add some of my own, and invite my readers to think about them. They are especially pertinent for Friends in large meetings and for those of us who attend regional and yearly meeting sessions that get large.

What do I mean by “large”? I want to leave this definition to the subjective sense of large, rather than giving a number. I think, when you read further, you will have a sense of what I mean. And anyway, some of these dynamics apply even to smaller meetings.

What it’s like to worship in a “large” meeting?

I agree with Dan’s assessment that our way of silent, waiting worship doesn’t really work in large meetings. That it can’t work, in fact. Here’s why (the core insight here is Dan’s; most of the elaboration is mine):

A certain proportion of Friends are likely to feel a genuine call to speak in meeting. Another proportion are likely to speak with less obvious grounding in the Spirit. The more people in the meeting, the more people are likely to speak. When the population gets to a certain point, you get an awful lot of speaking, and, as Hegel first pointed out, at that point, quantitative change precipitates qualitative change.

First, it tends to induce popcorn speaking, a chain reaction of messages that have been prompted more by each other than by the Holy Spirit. Second, the increased number of messages squeezes the intervals between messages, and this squeezing suppresses the ministry of those Friends who feel it’s important to leave a decent interval between messages and who use that interval to properly attend to each offering. Thus the Friends who are most likely to bring a deeper, more seasoned ministry to the meeting are least likely to finish their seasoning or find an appropriate moment in which to deliver it.

This has several bad effects. First, by denying Friends the time of waiting silence necessary to go deep, we don’t go deep. By denying Friends the vocal ministry of some of its most gifted ministers, we disrespect both the Holy Spirit and the Spirit’s servants. And by virtually guaranteeing a certain amount of un-gifted ministry, we degrade the quality of the worship.

Furthermore, the situation reinforces the low standards for both corporate behavior and individual ministry that prevail in such a meeting, encouraging more of the behavior that causes the problem. It gives newcomers a false impression of what meeting for worship is for, and it inevitably drives some of them away. I know this from personal experience: one of my sons stopped attending such a meeting because “the same blowhards rise to speak every meeting”. And it drives away seasoned Friends who want a deeper worship experience; but before they go, it leads them into grief and even despair.

And the whole dynamic is a self-reinforcing downward spiral. The more devoid of Spirit the ministry is,

  • the more likely that gifted ministers will either keep quiet (and bring down the spirit of the worship with their despair), or leave;
  • the less likely that avid Spirit-seekers will stay and join;
  • the more bandwidth the blowhards will occupy; and
  • the more likely that gifted ministers will lower their own standards in desperation, and then get even more depressed because of their own perceived unfaithfulness.

Does any of this make sense to you? Is it your experience? Do you serve on a ministry and worship committee, which is charged with nurturing a deep meeting for worship and with protecting the worship from unworshipful influences? Do you have any idea what to do about these problems?

I hope you respond, and, in my next post, I want to try out some ideas for dealing with these problems. Some come from Dan’s paper, and some are my own.

2014 Swarthmore Lecture: Open for Transformation—Being Quaker

September 2, 2014 § 2 Comments

Ben Pink Dandelion is one my favorite Quaker authors and he gave the 2014 Swarthmore Lecture at Britain Yearly Meeting Sessions this summer. As usual, his thoughts are well worth considering. You can listen to the Lecture itself by clicking on the link below. The book is also available from QuakerBooks.org and the book version is usually an expanded version for print publication; I have not read it yet, but I plan to. A video is promised soon from BritainYearly Meeting.

I highly recommend it.

Gift Exchange Economies—An Alternative?

August 28, 2014 § 5 Comments

Well, I’ve been ranting and railing against the capitalist economic system for several posts now, using strong words like “evil” (which I didn’t bother to define) and “dung”. I find it brings out the vitriolic in me; it tempts me to a righteous and poetic indignation. Not so good. Not very constructive, anyway.

So it’s time to own up once again to the fact that our economic system is not only evil—not only hierarchical and anti-democratic; competitive, if not actually violent; deceitful and manipulative; inherently anti-worker and effectively anti-consumer; carcinomic, rapacious, and unsustainable; oh, and anti-biblical . . .

It is also good, in that it has raised the standard of living for huge numbers of people, arguably in fact everyone on the planet—except for indigenous peoples. It is an extremely creative engine of technological advance, and many of these advances serve the greater human good. Not so much the good of whales and frogs.

But more to the point—what else is there?

When I first started talking and writing about these predicaments of capitalism and Quaker testimonies, the Soviet Union still held sway over millions of people, and inevitably, Friends would respond with: “So, what—would you have us all become communists? Look how well that’s working out.” As if there were only two economic systems in the world. Now, many Americans anyway, think there is only one.

But what about socialism? Some democratic quasi-socialist states, like Norway, are doing quite a bit better than we are by virtually every measure. Many countries have vital socialist parties and manage, mostly, not to fall into chaos or hell, as the true believers in capitalism fear would happen here.

Meanwhile, everyone seems to have forgotten that fascism is also an economic system, featuring private ownership of capital but state control of the economy. Also basically a failed experiment.

But the economic systems that I find most attractive are the gift-exchange economies that most indigenous peoples have. Had. Virtually all the traditional gift exchange economies on earth have been destroyed by the market economy.

In a gift exchange economy, one gathers power, not by amassing wealth, but by giving it away. Those gifts obligate the receiver to reciprocate in some way at some time. Because people are different, as are circumstances, places, luck, and a host of other factors, some people end up with more power than other people—they have wider networks of obligation owed to them than the complex of obligations they owe to others. They often become chiefs.

The classic case is Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull was the first and only man to be the traditional chief of all seven tribes of the Lakota people. He achieved this status by providing many gifts, but one especially—the (temporary) salvation of his people. Sitting Bull saw that the American military strategy was to cut off the annual, seasonal, north-south migration of the bison, kill them off, and starve the plains peoples into submission. Military power wasn’t doing so well, at least not until the invention of the carbine, a short-barreled repeating rifle that could be cocked with one hand and used in close quarters, and thus was suitable for use by cavalry. William Tecumseh Sherman, more famous for his reign of terror across the deep South during the Civil War, and named, ironically, after one of the greatest Indigenous warriors of all time, commanded the Indian Wars for a time; he called the Plains Indians the best light cavalry on the planet, with the possible exception of the Cossacks, another indigenous horse-people.

Anyway. Sitting Bull’s counter-strategy was to cut off the southern bison migration himself and keep what was left of the bison herds in the north. He talked all seven tribes, the Northern Cheyenne, and several other tribes, into cooperating to achieve this. This delayed the conquest of the Northern Plains for almost a generation. Among his own people, he was called He Feeds the People. The Lakota gifted him with this name in recognition of his great gift to them.

In gift exchange economies, you gain power by feeding people. Or by giving them hides, for clothing, shelter, containers, bedding, etc. Or by giving them rights to one of your fishing camps. Or by gifting them with horses, or basket rushes, or . . . You get the idea.

Now, you feed people and provide all these other necessaries, in many traditional indigenous life-ways, by being very good at living with the land, by really knowing it and understanding it, by possessing a sublime eco-intelligence, by possessing valuable skills, by possessing powers of organization and persuasion, by caring about future generations. By giving.

Gift exchange economies elevate social roles, instead of giving people jobs. Instead of working for a wage and then buying your life in parts and assembling it at home, like we do, in a gift exchange economy, you trade goods and services, tasks and labor, favors, songs and dances, names, reputations and loyalties. You sing at my daughter’s wedding; I give your whole family meat that lasts a week; or maybe, two winters later, I take you in when your own hunters can’t find a herd.

Gift exchange economies work for small groups who live in partnership with the land. Scaling one up to serve 300 million people would be a challenge. When everyone lives three or ten degrees of separation from basic production of basics—of food, building materials, energy sources, clothing materials, medicines, etc.—the chains of exchange would become extremely complicated; only computers could keep track. When everyone in the system has quite specialized skills and jobs, trading services would be impossible. When the only thing you could trade is things, you are still locked into the mass production-mass consumption economy to acquire the things you might trade in the first place. So—elegant idea, maybe, but totally impracticable.

The market economy has won. It’s like kudzu: it soaks up so much of the sunlight that no other economies stand a chance.

What to do? We are left with the project of radically reforming capitalism.

We could start with usury laws. These were deregulated under Ronald Reagan, so many of us remember a time when interest rates were regulated more or less equitably, though I doubt that many of us were really paying attention. I know I wasn’t. But you can draw a straight line from Reagan’s policies on interest rates to the Great Recession. And here, unlike with many of our modern problems, the Bible really has something to offer as a starting point.

So let’s start there. Next time.

Mendaciousness—Capitalism and the Testimony of Integrity

August 15, 2014 § 4 Comments

I said in the introductory post of this series on capitalism and Quaker testimonies that, in terms of both its accounting methods and its conduct of competition in what it likes to call the open market, capitalism has built lies into its very structure. It also encourages deceit by its practitioners. It lies about its overhead, about the true costs of the resources it consumes and the wastes it produces. And it lies to its end-users in its advertising.

Capital lies.

The material culture of capitalism requires raw materials, resources that come from our Mother Earth to make and do the things it sells to consumers. It assumes that half the balance sheet of the Earth—the planet’s assets—are available for the taking. As for the liabilities, especially the accounts payable—to these capitalism turns its gigantic blind eye.

This cavalier attitude toward the Earth’s bounty should be noxious to anyone or any culture that holds a biblical worldview because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1; actually this is only one translation of this passage, and not, I suspect the most valuable one, both to us and to the writer of the Psalm—but that is another post). In this view, the Earth is not even a gift, but actually a loan. God has put it into our hands for right use and we will be held accountable for that use. But, when it comes to economics, our society is anything but biblical in its worldview, and the more conservative you are, and even the more conservative Christian you are, the less biblical your economic worldview is likely to be.

But back to capitalism and the Earth’s balance sheet. The “households” in our economic system factor the current cost of the resources it extracts from Mother Earth into the prices it charges for the goods and services it provides. Businesses pay the current value of these resources in the market. They factor in the cost of the rights to extraction; they factor in the cost of the resource as determined by competition for it in the market; they factor into the end-product price the cost of its transformation into capital goods. It’s worth noting, however, that the players in these markets try to distort the markets or manipulate them in order to get advantageous prices. This works especially well in the international market for raw materials, where the over-developed nations almost always hold resource-rich developing countries at a disadvantage.

However, the current value of a resource is not its real value. We do not really know its real value, because it is likely only to go up over time as the supply dwindles. More importantly, while a given resource (say, molybdenum, which is used in specialty steels, and which only a couple of countries currently produce)—while a given resource may be quite valuable to us today for our consumption, it might be desperately necessary some time in the future to our descendants for something we cannot today even imagine. Capitalism is oblivious to our descendants’ needs and it cares not a whit for the fact that they will curse us for our profligacy.

To account for this unknown potential value of Earth’s assets, we should be creating escrow trust accounts to help our descendants cope with the shortages we are creating. And we should be doing the same thing with the resources themselves; we should be holding some percentage of all that we extract as a trust against the demands of the future.

We do neither of these things. We lie about the true cost and value of our capital.

Waste lies.

We do the same thing with the true cost of our waste management. Capitalism does not figure into its pricing the real, final cost of disposing of its wastes safely, which ought to be part of its overhead, and never is. And when—or, to be realistic, if—the bill ever comes due for cleanup, capitalists inevitably try to squirm out of paying; it hurts profits and equity value.

This is especially important for wastes that do not biodegrade, but remain toxic and present in the body and bloodstream and organs of Mother Earth more or less permanently. And because Mother Earth is us—because our very bodies come from her—these wastes remain toxic and present in our bodies and bloodstreams and organs, as well.

The great killer disease of the industrial age was tuberculosis, the destruction of human lungs caused by the use of coal as a fuel. The great killer disease of the post-industrial age is cancer, the mutation of cells by toxic foreign substances. Thus some serious percentage of our healthcare costs should be included in the overhead cost of waste management.

Capitalism pretends that the only cost it must bear for managing its prodigious waste stream is the immediate one of getting it some distance away from its producer and providing for some minimal treatment before it gets poured back into Earth’s bloodstream or buried in her soil-flesh.

The superfund put aside for the treatment of “superfund” sites should be the model for the entire economic system. The goal should be zero toxic, non-recyclable waste returning to Mother Earth, zero toxic substances in our own bodies and those of our children—and a massive escrow account fed by some meaningful percentage of every economic transaction set aside to solve these so-far unsolvable problems in the future and to fund research and care for a public health increasingly threatened by capitalist dung.

The true cost of eliminating carbon dioxide, or uranium waste, or the 50,000 or so chemicals that we have never even tested for toxicity, would be staggering. So we just don’t think about it. Let the great-grandchildren deal with it.

In fact, if we really did account properly in our pricing for the destruction of natural capital and the remediation of capitalist waste, the system would collapse. Short-term greed is the main reason we don’t deal with these issues, but the reason we don’t even talk about it is the existential threat to the system itself that transitioning to an honest economic system represents.

Advertising—marketing lies.

Finally, capitalism depends on advertising for growth in an environment of intense competition for market share. This tempts economic households to psychologically manipulate their consumers through advertising. This manipulation distorts human relationships by turning consumers into objects. It tends to misrepresent the true character and value of its goods and services to make them seem more valuable than they really are. It tends to hide any negative aspects of its products and services. It resists attempts to keep it honest and transparent. The tobacco industry is the classic example. More recently, the lies and subterfuge about credit default swaps and mortgage derivatives brought the entire system to its knees—and taught the liars no real lessons at all.

But misrepresentation of products and services is just the more or less visible surface of its mendaciousness. More troubling really, is the ways that advertising invades and distorts our worldview, our understanding of the good life, and thus our very dreams. It tells us that consumption is good for us; that low prices that allow more of us to consume more, are good for us; that we actually need the things that in reality we simply desire. It tells us that the good life is defined by the things and experiences that we can buy in the marketplace.

The catch-all phrase (in America) for this constellation of lies is “the American dream”—owning your own house and as many good cars as your family thinks it needs, providing a good education for your children, securing freedom from fear of want, healthcare, and acquiring some things that provide, or at least represent, a comfortable life. Now, given the system, who could argue? These are all good things that anyone would want.

Only the earth cannot sustain seven billion American dreams. Nor is it true that you need all these things to be happy or fulfilled. And especially, it is not true that a mass production–mass consumption economy is the only way to have these things.

Is it? Are there any alternatives to this kind of system? These are my first queries for Friends. Here are some more:

How do we remain true to the testimony of integrity when our entire social, and material, and perceptual, and cognitive, and physical, and even emotional environments are totally saturated with lies—with salesmen seeing in me the pathway to their quota, with plastic bubble-wrap for individual pieces of processed cheese product, with images of half-clad women tugging on my pud with the promise of some fantasy fulfillment, with ideas like “the American dream”, with ads and billboards everywhere I look, with false desire trying to crash the gates of my amygdala? Why should our spiritual discernment and environment be polluted by this trash?

And now to the core: Would I be willing to pay the real cost of sustainable resource capital management and waste management with markedly greater prices for everything? And with my or your (probably) stagnant wages, how could you or I? Would I be willing to utterly change my lifestyle to accommodate a truly sustainable economy? For instance, would I accept the inevitable percentage of vermin that bulk food distribution inevitably entails—not just bring my own containers to the store—so that we could limit food packaging to the every minimal and the truly recyclable? How much am I willing to sacrifice, so that Mother Earth—and her creator-logos-the-christ—are not crucified on the cross of our economy instead?

Capitalism and the Peace Testimony

August 8, 2014 § Leave a comment

Capitalism is predicated on competition: competition between businesses for markets, resources, capital, research breakthroughs, and labor; between labor and management for the terms of contract agreements; between workers for jobs; between industries for government support; between corporate nation states and other economic macro-systems for all of these things.

Competition assumes shortages or limits—there is no need for competition if there is already enough of what everyone wants. Competition within the context of limits, real or assumed or artificially imagined or created, often leads to conflict, and conflict sometimes leads to violence. Capitalism is inherently, if not necessarily in any given instance, violent.

A classic historic example is the violence against unions in the early days of labor organization, a violence that has never really ceased, except that businesses no longer hire paramilitary organizations like the Pinkertons to murder and assault workers. And God help you if you’re a teacher, or work for any level of government.

Does competition have to lead to violence? Enlightened business owners, labor leaders, and political leaders can rely on cooperation and mutual understanding to resolve competing claims, and we do have a fairly robust infrastructure of negotiation and arbitration, from the United Nations to the National Labor Relations Board. Cooperation is most possible when the system is working well and no parties are near the particular edge or shortage that they fear. But the system does have these edges—these divisive thresholds—that necessarily separate the participants when we reach them, when oil becomes really expensive or when job shortages make dependence on military spending attractive. And the disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom—between economic classes at home or between the overdeveloped and the developing countries of the world, for instance—these disparities create a distance of experience and worldview that undermines understanding even when intentions are good, making conflict and violence more likely.

For a truly eye-opening and compelling look at how the unbridled global expansion of capitalism—what we call globalization—often collaborates with superficial democratization to unleash ethnic violence, I highly recommend Amy Chua’s World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. She describes how, when elections finally give power to an ethnic majority that has historically been dominated economically by an ethnic minority, that majority tends to turn on their minority oppressors. That is part of what is happening in Iraq right now, with a majority Shiite-dominated government paying back the Sunni minority for decades of oppression and disenfranchisement, except that in Iraq the religious identities are even more important than the ethnic ones.

This dynamic has played out in country after country, in the Balkans, in Indonesia, the Philippines, in Rwanda, and southeast in Asia, just to name a few. We have even seen it in the United States sometimes, as in the occasional tensions between Asian small store owners operating in mostly African American neighborhoods.

It’s true that business competition is extremely creative. It drives innovation. But even this dynamic is destructive. “Creative destruction” is the term of art for the fate of established businesses that can no long compete against upstart innovators—Kodak, for example, or the manufacturers of floppy disks, or the publishers of printed, multi-volume encyclopedias. This creative destruction almost always hurts workers; they lose their jobs to the technological advance. And it almost always disadvantages the lower-wage workers most, because they are the most easily replaced by technology. In this way, and in many others, the system tends to increase inequality, especially in mature economies that have more or less finished the process of industrialization.

We value—and measure—this destruction of jobs. We call this measure “productivity”. Productivity tracks how much work a worker can do in a given period of time. Increased productivity means that human energy has been replaced by technology. Economists and politicians love high productivity numbers, gleefully glossing over the fact that it means fewer human jobs, fewer humans needed to do the same work.

R. Buckminster Fuller defined another measure that economists seem to have ignored—the energy slave—which measures goods, services, and processes in terms of how many years of human labor have been replaced by technology. The energy slave is the only economic measure that, if only indirectly, acknowledges capitalism’s debt to the Atlantic slave trade. In places that can’t come up with enough energy slaves, they tend to come up with human ones.

Most importantly, perhaps, the moral system that is capitalism has no inherent interest in the fate of those who suffer at its hands, those whom it grinds down or even out of the system. The system has never done even the obvious, basic thing of providing for those who lose their jobs to layoffs or technological advance. That it leaves to government; that is, to you and me.

More importantly, it actually takes unemployment as a given and accepts 3–5% of the workforce trying to live without an income as a “good” number. This reflects the fact that the capitalist system needs at least a modicum of unemployment, of competition between workers for jobs, as a means of keeping wages and benefits down. And the system leaves it up to external actors to care for these victims, making the government and even the workers themselves pay for the human cost of this inherent competition. And we all accept this as normal, as a given, even as appropriate. We are all praying for an unemployment rate below five percent, as if that would be a great thing.

Furthermore, the competitive genes in capitalism’s DNA have always driven it to expand its influence beyond its own spheres of activity in the market, to seek to distort the behavior of external actors in its interest. Capitalism corrupts the political class, especially, and the entire social fabric, as well, with the ideology of the market as god, as the preeminent, most pervasive, and most valuable social system we have, as the “creator of wealth” and the pathway to, and even guarantor of, democracy (ironically, given its own quasi-feudal structure), and as the set of values and needs that should trump all others in social policy. That is the message of, and the reasoning behind, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision: the legal “personhood” of a corporation is even more valuable and important than democracy itself, certainly more valuable than real human persons.

And, of course, capitalism corrupts other systems, especially the political system, directly sometimes, through outright graft. Companies seek advantage, and inevitably, some politicians are willing to give it to them. For some people in high places, being a slave to capital, being ideologically captive to the system, is not enough. They want to remodel their house or go on an expensive vacation, too.

Back to the creative effect of capitalist competition, because this is a credible and compelling argument for it. We humans are going to compete, especially when faced with shortages. Furthermore, this competition has historically driven incredible advances in human well-being over the last three centuries or so. That’s the trade-off for the destruction and subjugation of indigenous and traditional societies, the rape of the earth, the infection of all other social systems with market values. And yes, the social-economic systems of the past have also been unequal and oppressive, though none has been as rapacious. And meanwhile, we see no clear alternative. We have to work with what we’ve got.

Nevertheless, I believe that capitalism historically and inevitably, if not necessarily, has and does lead to violence. That Spirit that leads us to avoid all occasions of war calls us to bring peace to our economic system, as well as to all other theaters of conflict.

I might pose the queries for Friends regarding competition thus: Is the trade-off between innovation and technological advance and the violence the system does to everyone, but especially to workers, worth it? How can we promote cooperation in a system that is adversarial to the core? How do we protect the weak and disadvantaged when shortages heighten the competition to the point of violence, whether physical or “just” economic, especially since we are approaching severe shortages of some basics around the globe—food and water, particularly, and many other resources regionally? How can we make economic “households”, especially corporations, inherently careful of the needs of all the stakeholders in the system—workers, consumers, and non-workers—and not just careful for owners and stockholders, while retaining the innovative energy that competition provides rather than chasing after them with regulators and economic ambulances after the fact of their violence?

How can we speak to that of God in the men and women who run our economic households? To that of God in those who find themselves the victims or the adversaries of these people and the systems they manage? To that of God in those who set social and economic policy? How do we speak to that of God in the legal “person” that is a corporation, if there is such a thing? What if there isn’t such a thing? How do we bring the gospel of peace to our economic institutions?

Capitalism—The Carcinoma Economy

August 6, 2014 § 5 Comments

Capitalism is predicated on growth. Unique among all physical systems in the universe, capitalism pretends to disobey one of the laws of thermodynamics by claiming to produce more energy than you put into it. It pretends to be a perpetual motion machine that not only keeps going, but actually picks up speed. Capitalism calls the allegedly surplus energy it produces profit. The energy you put into it is capital plus labor, or, following the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, materials, energy and know-how. Capitalism claims that after you account for costs, there’s still some energy left over for humans to use as they please. Never mind that we did not really factor in the true costs to the Earth and to wider society, let alone future generations, of irretrievable resource destruction, thorough waste management, worker basic education, infrastructure building and maintenance, and the support of other social systems that provide capitalism with numerous necessary services.

Profit—growth—is the goal, the fictitious end towards which the whole system strives. Furthermore, the growth itself is expected to grow. The curve is supposed to climb, producing more profit all the time, and it is best if the growth of the growth grows—the ideal system has periods of acceleration and expansion.

In a biological system—in an organism—growth that never stops is called cancer. 

The earth is a biological-physical system, a super-organism in which the biological subsystems—its ecosystems—interact with each other and with the earth’s physical systems, such as the atmosphere, the rivers, lakes, glaciers, and seas, and the rocks and soils, in a billions-year-old process of evolution that has been self-regenerative throughout all those geologic epochs. 

Capitalism is a cancer in our Mother Earth. Like a cancer, it never stops sucking up resources that other organisms in the super-organism need to survive and thrive. It never stops consuming Mother Earth’s finite supplies of captured energy, water, and industrial minerals. It never stops displacing other systems and organisms as it consumes, grows, and excretes its poisons. It never stops debouching its wastes into earth-cleansing systems that increasingly cannot keep up with the load.

Capitalism has metastasized. It has always needed fuel, water, and minerals. But at first, the fuel was wood, the water was local, and the mineral was iron. Now the fuels are several and most are poisonous, all the water of the planet is at risk, and the mineral and other material resources it requires include virtually all of the periodic table of the elements. At first, only local ecosystems were fouled by its waste. Now the vast oceans, all the waterways, virtually all the underground aquifers, and the entire atmosphere of the earth groan in tortured poisoned pain and unsustainable drawdown. Now even the electromagnetic fields of the planet are distorted and extra-planetary radiation rains in through its holes, killing off the primary source of oxygen on the planet, the phytoplankton off the coasts of Antarctica. We even put junk on the moon.

This describes the global capitalist system as a whole in the Mother Earth. But the smaller organisms in the system follow the same patterns. The cancer operates at all levels of capitalist organization. Tiny individual companies hope to sprout branches in nearby neighborhoods or cities. Startups dream of becoming big enough to go public or be consumed by some larger engine of consumption and profit. Whole new industries rise up to drive the expansion exponentially. National companies seek to become transnational. Some trans-national corporations are already meta-national—they no longer have any meaningful national identity and exist only as global entities with no meaningful allegiances except to profit. It seems only a matter of time before one of them makes a small country into a company nation, the way smaller corporations used to create company towns with their growth and hegemony (I think of Johnson & Johnson’s purchase of New Brunswick, New Jersey), trading meta-national status for the gift to a nation’s people of economic development, and thus acquiring a seat in the United Nations General Assembly. I expect Exxon Mobil to be the first, since it already has made Trinidad Tobago into a company country.

The system is predicated on a simple model of mass-production and mass-consumption. Companies produce goods that consumers consume or services and experiences that consumers purchase and internalize. In doing so, the companies themselves consume goods and services that other companies produce, and so on, back to the Earth as the ultimate source. Venders, producers, and consumers alike consume fuels in order to consume and they release wastes back into the system as an inevitable byproduct. All this takes place on a mass scale. Capitalism is a mass-production, mass-consumption, mass-excretion economic system.

Are you an organism in this system, a business, or a worker, or a consumer? Stop producing and you start to die. Stop consuming and you start to die. Run out of supplies or suppliers, you start to die. Run out of energy, you start to die. Lose your job, you are diminished. Have a really old computer or mobile phone? It breaks down and we lose touch, we lose our productivity, we die a little consumer death. We run out and get another one.

This economic system has to keep producing, keep consuming, keep growing, or it starts to die. The only thing worse than a recession, in which a nation-state organism in the system gets ill and starts shrinking instead of growing, is a depression, in which the organism goes into a coma.

Capitalism is carcinomic. Mother Earth’s immune systems cannot keep up. What reforms can we imagine that would halt its rapacious growth while continuing to deliver its benefits? This fantastical outcome seems impossible to me. Constant growth is part of capitalism’s basic DNA. 

So I might present the predicaments of capitalism for Friends in these queries: Can you imagine an economic system that is not predicated on continual growth at the expense of all the other physical and biological systems of planet Earth? Following the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, who popularized the phrase “spaceship earth”, can we envision a system in which all of its production, consumption, and waste generation take place in a series of completely sustainable cycles of reuse and regeneration as we travel through the galaxy in this finite vessel made of earth and air and fire and water? 

No—these are not true queries. They only have yes or no answers. The true query is not can we, but how do we, deliver the benefits of industrial and post-industrial capitalism without carcinomic growth, without the fiction of profit?

The deeper question is how can we redefine wealth as weal-th, as well-being for all organisms on Mother Earth, without embodying this well-being in things that must be produced and consumed, in experiences that must be produced and purchased? How can we organize the natural and necessary processes of an ecos, an organic household economy—providing food, fuel, shelter, clothing, health and healing, art, study, entertainment, and other forms of human expression and fulfillment—in a system that treats all the material and social resources required for these things as gifts to be returned, to the Earth and to each other? How do we build an economic system out of mutuality, reciprocity, respect, and renewal, without continual consumptive growth?

Gathered in the Spirit at New York Yearly Meeting

August 3, 2014 § Leave a comment

I have been away from this blog for a while, mainly because I attended New York Yearly Meeting Summer Sessions, held July 20–26 at Silver Bay YMCA in Silver Bay, New York, on the shores of Lake George. Because I’m staff (I’m the Yearly Meeting’s communications director), I have been extremely busy preparing for, attending, and following through on the Sessions.

The gathered body of New York Yearly Meeting was truly gathered in the Spirit this year at its Summer Sessions. 

This took place during a called meeting for business in worship on Friday afternoon, July 25, a meeting called to further consider the report and recommendations of the Yearly Meeting’s Priorities Working Group (PWG), which the Working Group had expressed in a written Statement of Leadings and Priorities (see also an interpretive document for the Statement). After earlier business sessions in which the body was markedly NOT in unity with the Working Group’s recommendations, the Working Group brought a revised version of the Priorities section of the Statement to the called meeting and, one after another, Friends rose to express how pleased they were with the new version and we gradually realized that we had been transformed in love. Rejoicing filled our hearts. We were renewed in our faith that love for each other and faith in the Spirit that guides us and trust in our process could bring us into joyful unity.

The Priorities Working Group (PWG) had been convened in 2011 to visit local meetings and worship groups around the Yearly Meeting to listen to local Friends’ concerns about, and desires for, the Yearly Meeting organization, and to discern from these visits the priorities of local Friends and local meetings as they should apply to the Yearly Meeting organization’s work and budget. In this context, the Yearly Meeting organization comprises the Yearly Meeting committees and the Friends under appointment to those committees, the apparatus for conducting Yearly Meeting Sessions (Fall, Spring, and Summer), and the Yearly Meeting’s staff and institutions. 

The event that precipitated the convening of the Working Group was the Yearly Meeting organization’s extreme difficulty in approving a budget in 2009. The main issue underlying that precipitating event is a long-standing disconnect between local Friends and local meetings from the Yearly Meeting organization in general, and from its budget process, in particular. The Priorities Working Group was New York Yearly Meeting’s sixth formal attempt to address these issues since the early 1990s.

The initial Statement of Leadings and Priorities included six Priorities, general vision statements distilled from PWG’s extensive visitation, and intended to express the priorities that local Friends and local meetings hoped would guide the work of the Yearly Meeting organization and its budget. Each Priority had a paragraph elaborating on the Priority. After the Priorities section, there followed a short section on accountability and two sections of “Leadings”, actions they were recommending for implementing the Priorities, one set for the coming year and another for the coming five years. The Priorities were as follows:

“We, the Body of Friends gathered through our New York Yearly Meeting, recognize as a priority for the Yearly Meeting . . .

  • the development of programs to teach and share our spiritual skills with each other, and to help meetings to revitalize themselves;
  • the development of programs to help sustain our monthly meetings financially and to increase membership;
  • the pursuit of greater contact and spiritual relationship among Friends;
  • assisting Meetings with developing First Day School curricula, building skills for working with our teens, helping rejuvenate First Day Schools, and providing support for parents of young children;
  • the responsibility to be an active voice for Friends’ faith, values, ministry and witness in the world;
  • the responsibility to hold itself accountable to the above priorities, ensuring their faithful fruition.”

The paragraph introducing the five-year vision for the Priorities provided what I felt was a truly inspiring general vision for the Yearly Meeting:

In approving this Statement of Leadings and Priorities, we commit to focus the energy and resources of our Yearly Meeting for the coming five years on achieving a vision of growing and vital monthly meetings [that] are open and loving communities, effective in their outreach, active in the world, and skillful in nurturing the spiritual lives of Friends of all ages. We envision a yearly meeting structure [that] is devoted to furthering this vision, is an effective focal point for organizing our collective work in the world, and [that] communicates that work broadly. We envision a yearly meeting structure [that] is accountable to these priorities, transparent in its finances and integrally connected to the monthly meetings it represents and supports. We envision a yearly meeting where there will no longer be “yearly meeting Friends” and “monthly meeting Friends,” but rather one, whole yearly meeting devoted to faithfully living out the leadings of the Spirit. We reaffirm our commitment to utilize these Leading and Priorities in “preparing budgets, staff work plans, and other services and initiatives of the Yearly Meeting and its committees and constituent parts.”

Initially, we were only to consider the Priorities section plus the accountability section that directly followed it, and not the one-year and five-year recommendations for implementation. 

As general statements of intent, the Priorities seem pretty straightforward to me. Yes, I had quibbles, but it was clear what their general intent was and the details are always a problem. So I was ready to approve them straight off. I felt differently about the accountability section, which I believe was fraught with real problems, and I had serious questions about the Leadings for implementation, as well.

When the document was presented on the floor of the meeting, it was presented in its entirety, and many members of the gathered body were very disturbed by many aspects of it. While the clerk had asked that we consider only the six Priorities and the accompanying accountability section, Friends soon lost track of those instructions and began to focus on the Leadings, the recommendations for implementation. 

Fear drove most of this ministry. In particular, I believe that many Friends rightly sensed—but could not necessarily have clearly articulated—that, if approved, the accountability recommendations would mean the end of the Yearly Meeting’s committee structure as it now stands, and thus, apparently, the end of ministries they hold dear. Additionally, many Friends felt that even the Priorities had left out some key constituencies in the Yearly Meeting and some key aspects of meeting life. Most of this discontent focused on youth and young adults, and on our witness life.

During several sessions, held both in small groups and in plenary, Friends became more and more dissatisfied. At the end of Thursday’s meeting for business in worship, with only two more business sessions left, and one of them the celebration of our Junior Yearly Meeting program with all the kids and a final reading of the Epistle to consider, the clerk called a called meeting for Friday afternoon and the Priorities Working Group was directed to bring us a new draft of the Priorities to consider.

PWG changed little of the original draft of the priorities. They shortened the elaborating paragraphs while developing them a little more, and they restated the Priorities on youth and witness, as follows:

We . . . recognize as a Priority for the Yearly Meeting . . . 

  • the nurturing of our children, youth, and young adults;
  • the responsibility to be an active voice for Friends’ faith, values, ministry and witness in the world, and to support Friends active witness.

This was enough. Probably the many informal conversations held offline and the ministry during the earlier sessions in support of the Priorities helped Friends focus more clearly on the Priorities and hear the intentions behind them. Furthermore, we considered the new draft without the accountability section, which was easily the scariest and most problematic part of the original document. I suspect that the accountability section would have presented a stop to many Friends’ approval, mine included.

But Friends approved the direction envisioned in the Priorities for the Yearly Meeting organization and the broader Yearly Meeting proper, with an ease and a sense of joy that testified to the faithfulness of both the Working Group and the gathered body, and to the guiding presence of a Spirit of Love and Truth. 

This was a bit different than most of the gathered meetings I have experienced during meetings for business in worship. In most others, the gathered body has experienced some remarkable, even dramatic turning point, usually brought on by some powerful vocal ministry. You can feel the lightning strike; you can watch the winds of the Spirit billow the meeting’s sails into a rich, taut pulling toward a new direction, you can feel the ship surge into this new current.

By contrast, this gathering built gradually. As one Friend after another rose to support the Priorities, our expectation of gusts and waves of dissatisfaction slowly dissolved. The more we began to expect messages of support instead, the more peaceful the room became. After a while, we knew that we had arrived at the farther shore. We knew—perhaps with some residual anxiety, I’ll admit, for we could clearly see some storm clouds in the distance—we knew that we were ready to try a minute of approval. And approve we did.

From the safety of that little harbor, we acknowledged that we still have a long journey before us. And we are likely to revisit our complaints with both the new process for accountability to the Priorities that the Working Group develops, with the details of how we will implement them, and with the implications for the whole Yearly Meeting organization that real accountability entails.

Moreover, now the local Friends and the local meetings themselves have an important role to play. This is not just a vision for the Yearly Meeting organization. If this is what the local meetings want, they have to welcome and support the ministries—the leadings, whatever they are—that these Priorities generate for implementation. And they have to pay for it.

Local Friends have long complained that they have no input in the numbers in the budget, that they ship money off to the Yearly Meeting organization without knowing what that money does and without getting meaningful services from the Yearly Meeting organization in return. Now, if the Yearly Meeting organization begins developing the kinds of programs envisioned in the Priorities, as local meetings have asked, the local meetings better recognize that and pay for it.

And for its part, the YM organization has much more work to do.

It has to come up with a structure and process for holding itself accountable that Friends can accept—and Friends have to accept some discipline and let go of some fear. We do need an accountability structure of some kind. 

And it is true that many of the YM organization’s committees do not do much to serve the needs of local Friends. Many of the ministries they pursue are worthwhile and in many cases Spirit-led, but they do not really serve local Friends or these Priorities very directly.  What will be the fate of these ministries and their committees under the new priorities?

Finally, the gathered body did not find fault with the Leadings offered by the Priorities Working Group for the first year and the next five years so much as they found things that were missing. They felt that the Leadings did not reflect all of the voices in the Yearly Meeting. They therefore felt that those voices had not been heard. So the Working Group will have to revisit its notes from its visits and its discernment and recover those missing voices. They will need to bring us a fuller vision for implementation.

I do not doubt their faithfulness, so they will do their best. I guess I am a little less certain of the wider body of “Yearly Meeting Friends”, as we call ourselves, those Friends who regularly attend Sessions and are often under appointment to the Yearly Meeting committees that are being asked to completely re-envision their charge in light of the Priorities from local Friends. But we answered G*d’s call this July, so I am full of hope for the future.

And I have faith in the Spirit that Jesus promised to send to us in the gospel of John, for we have just been visited most wondrously. As long as we remain in love and commit to real worship, we can expect that promise to be fulfilled again.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. . . . The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. . . . I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. (John 14:15-17, 26; 15:15)

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