Toward a Quaker culture of place

February 14, 2011 § 1 Comment

My meeting (Yardley, Pennsylvania) sits on a beautiful piece of property. The meetingroom has windows along two opposing walls and one set looks out into a stand of mature conifers to a vigorous, volatile stream that falls a decent distance from a dam. The waterfall is easily audible from the room when the windows are open in warmer weather. Some years ago, the stream flooded catastrophically and filled the room with mud. A third wall, opposite the entrance to the room, has more windows framing a large fireplace that hosts a blaze in colder weather. The elements are treasured members of our worshipping community.

Many Quaker meetings have similar experiences. Even urban ones. Brooklyn meeting went into a period of mourning when a new skyscraper radically altered the skyscape offered by the meetingroom’s huge vertical windows. These intimate connections with an environment sometimes draw the meeting into outward engagement, as well. Yardley Meeting has been central to a local movement to save the stream’s dam system and the pond one of these dams created and which some ancestors of the meeting had played a part in creating in the first place.

So history, ecology and worshipping Quakers often form a mutually supportive bond—a covenant—that can enrich the meeting’s life, protect the meeting’s place and contribute to the wider community’s well-being.

My favorite example of this convergence of history, ecology and religious life is the settlement of Friends in Richmond, Indiana. Why Richmond? Friends settled in Richmond originally, having migrated from the slave culture of the South, because it was as far away from slavery as they could get and still live within the territory ceded to European Americans by the indigenous peoples of the region in one of the few land transfer treaties all parties considered legitimate (the Treaty of Fort Stanwick, I think it was)—and still have a stream suitable for a mill. The White River is one of the reasons Richmond is an epicenter of Quaker life.

This piece of history is potentially a seed for a religious culture of place for Richmond Friends. But how could we go deeper, to a deep ecology of the spirit? How could we integrate the ecosystems our meetings inhabit with the religious life of our meetings more intimately? Or do we want to?

A seed for this kind of spiritual ecology does rest hidden in our Quaker DNA, but apparently as a recessive gene. One only has to think of the role that Pendle Hill and Firbank Fell played in the visionary life of George Fox and thus the history of early Quakerism. Then there’s the incredible amount of time Fox spent outdoors during his long ministry, but especially in the beginning. George doesn’t talk much about these things and it’s impossible to speculate about their role and importance without having been to these places. But once you go there—wow!

I’ve not been to Pendle Hill, but Firbank Fell blew my mind. Bill Samuels has a couple of good photos and the excerpt from Fox’s Journal recounting his preaching to the Seekers there. But the photographs do not convey the sense of height and distance you get from standing there, the closeness of the sky. The Yorkshire Dales are narrow valleys situated between tall, steep ridges. Standing where those Seekers stood, your view is blocked by the surrounding ridges on two sides, giving an enclosed, even intimate feeling. Turn ninety degrees, though, and you look out over a vast prospect from a great height. It is a powerful place that richly rewards the pilgrim who visits.

But this ‘spiritual ecology’ gene is recessive, driven underground, as it were, by our religion’s intense interiorness, our inward focus on the Inner Light and the Christ within, our silent worship, the way we’ve raised up the direct, personal experience of God. Many of us have had profound, even life-defining spiritual experiences in nature, but our corporate experience is almost completely circumscribed outwardly by the meetingroom and inwardly by this inward attention.

It’s worth noting, though, that virtually every major revelation in the Jewish and Christian and even Quaker traditions has taken place outdoors and often through natural agency and/or in the wild: this God seems to prefer meeting God’s people out of doors. Jesus himself was so familiar with the “deserted places” of Galilee and Judea that he could have served as a trek guide. He’s always hiding out in the wilderness, from the beginning of his prophetic career right after his baptism (and later, from his own disciples) to the end of his career, hiding from the temple police on the Mount of Olives. I’ve made a study of the spiritual ecology of Jesus’ ministry—where he went to do what and why, and the role that the landscape played in these key events—and it’s clear that he worked the landscape as part of his own spiritual practice. And this kind of land-based spiritual ecology goes back to the very origins of western religion, in which ecology, technology and the highlands of Palestine played an essential role in shaping the emergence and early evolution of our tradition (a topic for future posts).

So what would a deeper Quaker culture of place look like?

Jesus the Christ and Quaker Economic Testimony — The Proclamation

February 9, 2011 § 10 Comments

I said in my previous post that I think the Bible, and specifically, the gospel of Jesus should be one of the places we go for guidance and inspiration when trying to develop an effective and spirit-led testimony on economics. The good news is that the gospel of Jesus is, at its very heart, an economic message. Jesus defined his role as “the Christ” in specifically economic terms. To see this, though, you have to let go of our traditionally Pauline christology and even the testimony of the evangelists, and turn directly to Jesus himself. You have to ask, what did “the Christ” mean to Jesus?

Nowhere in Christian scripture does Jesus forthrightly claim, “I am the Christ, the Messiah” (christos in Greek and messiah in Hebrew both mean “anointed”). In every passage in which these words are used—but one—someone else is speaking confessionally, proclaiming Jesus as the Christ, or simply assuming it. There is one place, however (Luke 4:18), where Jesus does say the word. Moreover, though he does so indirectly, nevertheless he quite plainly claims the title for himself. Yet this passage is almost never used to define what “Christ” actually means. Why in the history of christology (the theology of who and what the Christ is) do theologians so rarely turn to Jesus himself as their starting point?

I think it’s because of how Jesus defines his ‘christ-hood’. He mentions nothing about sin or salvation. Rather, he defines the role of the messiah in terms of liberation from poverty. The Christ is a redeemer—but in the economic sense of releasing someone from their debt. Though we must add that, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus equates sin and debt (forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors), and this, in fact, reflects a deep and far-reaching connection between spiritual and financial redemption, not just in his teaching, but in the very DNA of the religion of ancient Israel.

Here’s what Jesus said in Luke 4:

Jesus has just returned to his home town after being tested in the wilderness. Barely six weeks have passed since he heard his call to prophetic mission at his baptism. He is invited to give a guest sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth. These will be the very first words of his public ministry in the gospel according to Luke. He reads from the 61st chapter of Isaiah, the first couple of verses: (I’m quoting from Isaiah below, rather than from Luke, since Luke quotes the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Torah in use in his time; but Jesus and his synagogue would have used either the Hebrew text or an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew, a Targum; the Hebrew and Septuagint versions of these verses differ a little, but without changing their substantial meaning.)

The spirit of the Lord Yahweh is upon me,

for Yahweh has anointed me (christos, messiah),

he has sent me

to bring good news (evangelion) to the poor/oppressed,

to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to captives

and release for the prisoners;

to proclaim the year that Yahweh favors.

After reading these verses, Jesus sits down and begins his discourse: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” That’s all he says. He has claimed: “I am the anointed one that Isaiah foretold and my mission is to bring good news to the poor—to end their poverty and oppression; specifically, to proclaim the year that my father favors—a Jubilee.”

The year of Jubilee refers to the practice defined in Leviticus 25 in which, every fifty years, all debts are cancelled, all debt slaves are set free, all families who have been alienated from their family farms due to bankruptcy and foreclosure are returned to their ancestral inheritance, and the land is to lie fallow for a year’s rest. (Actually, for a second year’s rest, since the fiftieth year follows the 49th, the end of the last of seven sabbatical years—Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15 established seven years as the maximum term for debt slavery, for paying off short-term debts with your labor, and the land was also released from labor every seven years. The Jubilee was for long-term debt.)

There is no evidence that the Jubilee was ever practiced at all, let alone every fifty years. But it was not too uncommon for kings in the ancient Near East to proclaim a Jubilee, often upon accession to the throne. It was in this context that Jesus, the anointed prophet king, claimed the authority of God’s own spirit to proclaim universal redemption—release from debt.

In the paralellism of Isaiah’s and Jesus’ poetry, in which the second line of a poetic couplet reiterates and develops the idea of the first, “the poor” are the “brokenhearted—men who have lost their family farms and must rely on day labor to support their families; the “captives” and the “prisoners” are people whose debts have completely overwhelmed them, so that they now have no prospect of paying off their debts through their labor, even in seven years; they have become permanently dependent on the holders of their notes as their servants.

Jesus’ claim to be able to fulfill all these things was laughable on its face, as he well knew: “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he said, for he was himself as poor as you could get. He had just spent six weeks living off the land in the desert. He must have been emaciated, his cloak full of dust and thistles, his hair matted, his eyes burning with that praeternatural shine that comes from extreme fasting. He must have looked like like that other nut, John the Baptizer.

We have to wonder ourselves how Jesus planned to pull off this outrageous claim. Luke gives us the answer in Acts, chapters two and four—new rules for community in which those with surplus wealth liquidate it for distribution to the poor (see specifically, Acts 4:34-37 for how this was supposed to work). Jesus’ answer to how he planned to fulfill such a radical promise was: that you will do it for each other. You will organize the community around the principle of koine, of fellowship, of sharing what you have to relieve each other’s suffering.

A Quaker testimony that rested on the gospel of Jesus as its foundation would likewise organize community around this kind of fellowship, offering good news to the poor and those in debt.

This has profound implications for community dynamics. It requires a completely new approach to the testimony on community, not just a new faith, but new practices, as well. Here also, the gospels (the Synoptic Gospels, anyway) and Acts offer clues as to where to start. Material for another post. . .

 

Renewing Friends’ Testimony on Economics

February 7, 2011 § 2 Comments

One of the reasons I’ve been writing on Quakers and capitalism is that I hope to invite Friends to consider more deeply our testimony on economics (and I don’t mean our testimony on money, but on the structure and institutions and worldview of our economic system) with a fuller appreciation of our economic history as context. I believe we stand in some ways in the same relationship with capitalism as we do with penitentiaries: our ancestors played key roles in the emergence of capitalism (industrial capitalism, anyway) and its early evolution, just as we did with the penitentiary. And just as the penitentiary was, in its inception, an advance in human welfare, a positive solution to a problem, and now has become part of the problem, just so industrial capitalism brought tremendous improvements to humankind, only to become in some ways a new source of suffering and oppression. In both cases, our historical role lays upon us some kind of obligation to reform the system and minister to the victims of our legacy.

Where to start? We have four paths to walk, I think. They are somewhat independent of each other and each deserves careful consideration. In my initial thinking, anyway, these four paths to a renewed testimony on economics are:

  1. Starting with divine inspiration. The first impulse, of course, is to turn to our Teacher, from whom we have learned to expect continuing revelation. Spiritual renewal comes from G*d (using G*d as a placeholder for the Mystery Reality behind/within our personal and corporate religious experience, whatever that experience is). So, in addition to study, thought and discussion, we need to pray and worship and support those who are called to ministries of witness in this area.
  2. Starting with secular progressive thinking on political economics. The vitality of our economic testimony depends on being Spirit-led. Its effectiveness depends, to a great degree, on knowing the science of economics and the work of its progressive thinkers and critics. There’s lots of material here, and therefore lots to learn and lots of work to do.
  3. Starting from our present testimonies. We can work our way ‘laterally’ across our testimonial life from the other testimonies. This is a common and natural tack. I’ve done this myself, turning the light of the testimonies on peace, integrity, simplicity and equality on economics. This yields great fruit and I will return to this approach in some future posts.
  4. Starting from our foundational traditions, including, especially, the Bible. I think a lot of ‘liberal,’ ‘post-Christian,’ ‘post-traditional’ Friends overlook the Bible, partly because they just don’t know it and partly because, in some folks’ hands, they have experienced the Bible as a weapon of regressive thinking. This extends to the sphere of economics no less than other areas social and political life. In fact, I devote a lengthy section of Quakers and Capitalism to the often, though not exclusively, negative influence of evangelical thinking on progressive political economics. Nevertheless, our Christian Friends are in a position to lead the way here, because the gospel of Jesus is, at its core, a powerful progressive economic message.

I’ve been writing another book on the gospel of Jesus whose sections on his teachings on ‘economics’ have grown so much that it now looks like it needs to be its own book. The new book’s tentative title is Good News for the Poor: The Economics of Redemption in the Common-wealth of God. I’ve explored some of this material in my other blog, www.biblemonster.com, including a series on the Beatitudes, which, when you know enough about the ‘economic legislation’ in Torah, turn out to be midrashim on inheritance law and, specifically, on bankruptcy.

In fact, Christian scripture—the synoptic gospels, anyway (Matthew, Mark and Luke)—are totally saturated with economic testimony. Jesus was preoccupied with the poor and the people and social, political and religious institutions that oppressed the poor. (It’s worth noting that in Hebrew and Aramaic (Jesus’ native tongue), the word is the same for “the poor” and for “the oppressed”—ani, as in Bethany (beth ani, house of the poor/oppressed), the little town not far from Qumran where Martha, Mary, Lazarus and Simon the Leper lived.)

Jesus healed the poor and I believe that several of these healings included a social welfare dimension in the healing itself—that we too narrowly define these ‘miracles’ as medical cures of disease, and miss the innovations and reforms in community life that serve as context for his healings. Several of his other miracles also have an economic dimension. Several parables deal directly with poverty. Many of our favorite sayings of Jesus are essentially teachings about economics or have economic elements, including not just the Beatitudes, but also much of the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, and the two love commandments. The Lord’s Prayer has economics at its core. But more importantly, Jesus defined his ministry, his role as the Christ, the Messiah, in economic terms. Economic justice was the very foundation of Jesus’ ministry.

These are far-reaching claims, I know, and to some, all the more startling because these teachings often are virtually invisible to the ‘untrained eye.’ We know so many of these passages so well that it’s hard to believe such a different and radical meaning could be hiding in there. So it takes a while to make the case. I hope you’ll bear with me.

Nevertheless, I believe that Jesus’ teachings on ‘economics’ are comprehensive, far-reaching, radically progressive and totally relevant to our situation today, notwithstanding their original context in an agrarian economy very different from our own. The gospel is a great place to start when reconsidering out testimony on economics. I think I’m going to pursue this mostly in BibleMonster because that blog is dedicated to the Bible, but it will take time. For one thing, I have another theme I want to take up there, as well—what I call “spiritual ecology”: a look at how Jesus used the landscape of Palestine in his own spiritual practice (where he went in Palestine to do what and why); and also a look at the role that ecology and technology have played in the emergence and evolution of the Western religious tradition more broadly.

In the meantime, I want to lay out in BibleMonster the “economics of redemption” as I see them and bring these principles into Through the Flaming Sword as planks in a platform for a more fully developed Quaker testimony on economics. More to come . . .

Quakers & Capitalism — Quaker Contributions to the Emergence and Growth of Industrial Capitalism

January 28, 2011 § 2 Comments

Now we come to the material that never fails to blow Friends’ minds when I do presentations on the history of Quaker economics. When Friends hear the scale of these contributions, when they recognize the significance of some of these contributions, not only for capitalism but for modern civilization itself, they inevitably ask, why have we never heard this before? For the sheer length and scope of this list is astounding, and the impact of these developments could hardly be exaggerated.

Friends were, to a greater or lesser degree, directly responsible for the five developments that made a broad-scale economy based on industrial production possible:

  • Industrial tooling materials. Quakers developed new, improved techniques for casting iron and, more importantly, invented a method for casting steel. These technologies made durable, mass-producible machine parts possible. Without them, the industrial revolution would have been more of a series of occasional local uprisings. Machines made it possible to mass produce goods for the first time in history, and cast iron made machinery possible. Cast steel made it possible to mass produce durable machines. This development exponentially accelerated the industrialization of the economy. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of these breakthroughs.
  • Industrial strength transport. Friends built the first railroad in England and developed the technologies essential for its expansion: iron bridges, iron rails, steam locomotion. Horse-drawn locomotion on normal roadbeds, especially those outside of major cities, constrained the transport of everything: raw materials, prepared materials, supplies, parts, fuel, products, people, money—all moved in small quantities at a snail’s pace, when it moved at all. The problem was especially acute in the case of industrial metals like iron and steel, zinc and lead. (Quakers invented the passenger train, as well.)
  • Finance. Friends formed many of the first private banks in England. Several of these banks soon became some of the largest private financial institutions in the world. The Bank of Norwich (the Gurneys) was for a long time second only to the Bank of England in its holdings. Lloyds was the first bank to diversify its holdings and invest in more than one industry. The other name in banking that everyone knows is Barclay’s, but there were other major Quaker banks, as well.
  • Energy. It was shortage of fuel (wood) that had stalled the British iron industry in the seventeenth century. British Quaker iron magnates invented rotated crop coppice farming to solve this problem of dwindling virgin timber supplies for fuel. But their real breakthrough was coke, a refinement of coal, a fuel that burned hot enough to make quality steel possible. They also invented the match—for the first time in history, you could afford to let your fire go out because you could restart it easily any time you wanted. This significantly released the tremendous burden on fuel supplies.
  • The industrial business model. New materials, especially cast steel, made a new kind of production possible. Friends were among the very first to develop a production model that capitalized on this material potential. The interchangeable parts plow developed by Robert Ransome in the 1720s represents the very beginning of mass industrialization. Also, Quakers created the first conglomerate, breaking out of the single family–single site business to create larger associations of many small business units in a variety of industries. Friends also played a key role in developing business associations. Finally, John Joseph Rowntree is the first person known to have engaged in industrial espionage, stealing trade secrets from his (mostly Quaker) competitors in chocolate production while interviewing them for potential jobs; he hired some of these people but he picked the brains of all.

So Friends came up with key technological innovations in such key areas as industrial materials, industrial processes, transport, energy and organization. They also built key industries and, of course, businesses in those industries. They created industries that had never existed before or introduced them to England for the first time. Here’s a partial list of the industries in whose development Friends played a significant, if not essential, role:

  • banking
  • iron
  • coke smelting
  • iron casting
  • steel casting
  • brass and zinc production
  • lead mining
  • silver mining and refining
  • railroads
  • canals
  • porcelain
  • safety matches
  • chocolate
  • coffee houses
  • English cutlery

In the next post we’ll look at Quaker contributions in venture capital and the role of Quakers in creating the consumer economy itself, including the famous invention of the price tag.

Meanwhile, clicking here: Quaker Contributions to Industrial Capitalism—will open a document that concisely summaries some of these contributions. It’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism—The Book page.

Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success

January 26, 2011 § 3 Comments

Here’s the next installment in Quakers and Capitalism, outlining aspects of Quaker character and community practice that helped make Friends so phenomenally successful in business during the ‘double-culture period” between roughly 1700 ad 1900. I realized while working on this section of the book that the last post in the series, on the Protestant ethic as discussed by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, really belongs with the material I had planned to publish in this post, so I’ve deleted the earlier post and combined the contents of both in a longer section.

This section would have been too long to post in its entirety here, anyway, so I invite readers to download Factors in Quaker Business Success; it’s also available on the Quakers & Capitalism page, whose link is to the left. So here’s a brief precis:

Quakers & Capitalism—The Double-culture Period: Factors in Quaker Success

The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit

The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of capitalism. Weber himself mentions Quakers frequently, not just as a community, but also George Fox and Robert Barclay. He devotes a lengthy section of his book to “The Baptist Sects,” in which he includes Quakers. To my mind, he seems to understand Quakerism rather well.

Weber discussed at length in his book how two qualities of the “Protestant ethic” converged to produce just the double culture we are discussing: material engagement in a world from which you are spiritually withdrawing. The two forces he describes are worldly asceticism and rational asceticism.

Worldly Asceticism

Friends defined the ultimate spiritual value as the inward experience of Christ and then sought to ground all their actions in the world in the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This led to a rejection of the world as a source of spiritual fulfillment and recast the world as the sphere of spiritual expression. The combination generates an impulse to be perfect in the world. When you see leadings and moral direction as revelations of God, it sanctifies all action as calling. At the same time, hearing the call requires silence, that is, removal from the world.

Rational Asceticism

When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).

These are highly adaptive qualities for sustainability in the high-risk, intensively entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment of rapidly-evolving capitalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. First, though, you must get into the world of commerce in the first place. These ascetic spiritual qualities might have actually impeded Quaker involvement in the world of money and business, if Friends had been left to themselves. But they weren’t left to themselves; in fact, they were left no choice. Fate—in the form of the persecutions—threw them into the counting houses and fledgling factories of England. Of course, early Friends didn’t believe in ‘fate’; they believed in God’s ever-guiding hand. Once into the deep water, they determined to swim as though God had thrown them in.

Quaker Culture and Quaker Character

Quaker culture cultivated other personal character qualities that also served the phenomenal financial success of this period. Some, like their famous frugality, moderation and financial prudence and their Puritan rejection of entertainment, drink and gambling, protected their wealth from dissipation. Some traits, like their integrity and discretion, built up a reputation that engendered trust and attracted customers, suppliers, and business associates. Some, like their meticulousness and their sense of business as service, directly affected the quality of their products and services.

Here, I offer a simple bullet list of these character traits. For the fuller treatment of each trait, see the pdf file.

  • Business as service
  • Spiritual standards for daily life
  • Meticulouslness
  • Silence and discretion
  • Simplicity, frugality and moderation
  • Prudence and debt

Quaker Practice and Quaker Wealth

Corporate community practice also guided, supported and constrained Quaker business practice, and in many ways, these were more important even than Quaker character in helping them build their fortunes:

  • the emergence of testimonies on the conduct of business that were enforced under the disciplines of gospel order, including
  • the testimony against civil suit;
  • apprenticeships;
  • more or less enforced intermarriage; and, most importantly,
  • traveling ministry, intervisitation and correspondence.

The written and visitation ministry networks soon became so active and fully developed that often only one or two degrees of separation stood between one Quaker business person and another. Students of the Internet have been developing network-oriented business theories that would offer very interesting opportunities here for more fully understanding this aspect of Quaker success. I suspect that this ‘network effect’ is the most important factor in the rapid expansion and extraordinary success of early Quaker capitalists.

 

Quakers & Capitalism — The Double-culture Period: The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic & the Capitalist Spirit

January 22, 2011 § 7 Comments

The Protestant (Quaker) Ethic and the Capitalist Spirit

The early, groundbreaking sociologist Max Weber, in his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), offers a useful framework for approaching the relationship between the religious culture of early Friends and the social culture necessary (or at least optimal) for the rise of capitalism. Weber himself mentions Quakers frequently, not just as a community, but also George Fox and Robert Barclay. He devotes a lengthy section of his book to “The Baptist Sects,” in which he includes Quakers. To my mind, he seems to understand Quakerism rather well.

Apropos to our current exploration of Quaker character and how it served their extraordinary financial success, Weber discussed at length in his book how two qualities of the “Protestant ethic” converged to produce just the double culture we are discussing: material engagement in a world from which you are spiritually withdrawing. The two forces he describes are worldly asceticism and rational asceticism.

Worldly Asceticism

Friends defined the ultimate spiritual value as the inward experience of Christ and then sought to ground all their actions in the world in the promptings of the Holy Spirit. This led to a rejection of the world as source of spiritual fulfillment and recast the world as the sphere of spiritual expression. The combination generates an impulse to be perfect in the world. When you see leadings and moral direction as revelations of God, it sanctifies all action as calling. At the same time, hearing the call requires silence, that is, removal from the world.

Rational Asceticism

When you cannot achieve grace through sacraments, good works or confession, the only proof of grace is a way of life that is unmistakably different from that of others. This requires a certain withdrawal from the world. It requires the individual to supervise her own state of grace in her conduct—that is, it permeates the life with asceticism, forcing the “rationalization of conduct within the world for the sake of the world beyond,” as Weber put it. The requisite “rational” planning of one’s life in accord with God’s will forces you to reengage the world with a plan—or, more accurately, with a discipline (discipleship); that is, a self-conscious deliberateness that includes robust structures and processes for drafting the plan (discerning God’s will) and correcting mistakes through negative feedback (gospel order).

These are highly adaptive qualities for sustainability in the high-risk, intensively entrepreneurial and opportunistic environment of rapidly-evolving capitalism in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. First, though, you must get into the world of commerce in the first place. These ascetic spiritual qualities might have actually impeded Quaker involvement in the world of money and business, if Friends had been left to themselves. But they weren’t left to themselves; in fact, they were left no choice. Fate—in the form of the persecutions—threw them into the counting houses and fledgling factories of England. Of course, early Friends didn’t believe in ‘fate’; they believed in God’s ever-guiding hand. Once into the deep water, they determined to swim as though God had thrown them in.

The next post in the Quakers & Capitalism series discusses specific character traits emphasized in early Quaker culture and how they fostered Quaker success in business.

The “angel of the meeting”

January 21, 2011 § 13 Comments

I learned from Bill Taber in a Pendle Hill class that, through the 18th and much of the 19th centuries, many Friends believed that each meeting had its angel. They got this idea from the second and third chapters of the Book of Revelation. Some ministers, especially when they had been invited (or sent) to a meeting to help sort out some difficulty, would ask to meet with the meeting in worship before talking to anyone so that they could try to commune with the angel of the meeting about the problem first. Ever since learning this, I’ve tried to commune with the angels of the meetings I’ve visited and I’ve had three such experiences, one of them quite intense.

Does anyone know more about the history and theology of this practice? Has anyone else tried this? Had any success? Or has anyone had such an experience spontaneously?

Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)

January 13, 2011 § Leave a comment

Quakers & Capitalism – The Double-culture Period (1695–1895)

Introduction

The Restoration of Charles II and the persecutions ended a period of radical Quaker engagement with virtually all the institutions of English society. But the Lamb’s War focused particularly on religious institutions and not so much on those governing commerce. Capitalism had yet to emerge in any meaningful way. The primary engine for wealth creation was still the land. As trades people and yeoman farmers (that is, agricultural producers who owned their own land), early Quakers were not at the bottom of this food chain, but they started out more or less frozen in their places, without much visible prospect for change. But change was all around them and Friends adapted with remarkable resilience.

By the end of what I am calling the first transition period in the economic history of Friends, they had not only survived an economic harrowing, but had actually thrived, and not just in spite of it but, in some ways, paradoxically, because of it. They were thrust into uniquely challenging economic circumstances and they turned their tribulations into opportunities. But they responded to these challenges with an oddly bipolar cultural alignment.

On the one hand, they built walls around themselves. Take plain speech and plain dress, as only one front on which Friends retreated from the Lamb’s War. Originally these cultural forms embodied early Friends’ testimony to equality in the spirit before the Lord, which they found in scripture and which they confirmed in their hearts. In what I am calling the “double culture” period, these practices became cultural identifiers that told the rest of the world, “We stand apart.” This happened quite quickly, before even the first generation of leaders had passed away. Margaret Fell expressed her concerns about the shift in one of her later epistles. Similarly, in one area after another, Friends withdrew from the world around them.

All but one. They left one wide gate in their wall against the world. This gate opened into a new country, one that was sparsely peopled, nearly devoid of institutions, of infrastructure, of rules and conventions, a virgin landscape waiting to be developed—an economy based not on land and its produce but on technology and industrial production, an economy in which wealth was created by private (or corporate) ownership of capital goods, by investment determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by prices, production and distribution of goods determined mainly in a free market, that is, in a market relatively free from government regulation. In a word—capitalism.

As I have rather arbitrarily defined it, the first transition period stretched between the Restoration in 1661 to 1695, when Parliament passed the Quakers Act of 1695, which allowed Quakers to substitute an affirmation where the law required an oath, except when giving evidence in a criminal case, serving on a jury, or holding an office of profit from the Crown.* (The new affirmation read: “I, A. B., do declare in the presence of Almighty God, the Witness of the truth of what I say.”). One might close the period of persecutions with the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689, which granted freedom of worship to Nonconformists of the Church of England, Protestant dissenters like Quakers, Presbyterians, and Baptists (it deliberately excluded Roman Catholics and Unitarians, however). The Toleration Act did significantly ease the state’s assault on Friends, especially the financial burden, though local compliance was somewhat erratic for a long time and Friends continued to pay fines for failure to pay tithes into the 19th century. So the Toleration Act closed the door, more or less, on the persecutions. But the Quakers Act opened the door to more or less unhindered economic life, because of the importance of law in the conduct of business. Without the Quakers Act, Quaker business might have remained a much smaller, more self-contained endeavor. With the right of affirmation, however, Friends were free to fully participate in the new contractarian social order that was a necessary precondition for the rise of capitalism. They used this freedom to build an all-new economy.

This was an extraordinary achievement: despite huge financial losses during the period of the persecutions, Friends ended up rich. Really rich. By the beginning of the second period of Quaker economic history, fourteen Quaker families enjoyed revenues over £100,000. And this was only the start of something big—there followed two hundred years of thriving economic life characterized by incredible wealth-building and by a perennial stream of significant contributions to emerging capitalism, industrialization, technological innovation, social reform and philanthropic work.

Quakers became a people with a double culture. Their economic culture could not have been more engaged with the world. Their social-religious culture could hardly have been less engaged.  Even as late as the 1860s, a woman might be raised to adulthood in a well-to-do Quaker family in Baltimore without ever coming into contact with nonQuakers. When Quakers call the 18th and 19th centuries the “quietist period,” we mean the religious culture and we forget the economic culture.

Yet, these two cultures were intimately related. This was one people, after all. Individual Quakers, their families and meetings, lived these two cultures as one life. They fused the two cultures without apparent contradiction and with phenomenal success.

How did they do this? What sociological factors fed their material success and economic engagement with the world and denied them social and religious engagement? These are complex social dynamics and I’m not a sociologist. But I think I see three general areas in which Quaker culture encouraged creative, successful economic engagement in the world—with phenomenal financial results—out of the spiritual values that drew them inward toward each other and toward their Inner Teacher and away from the wider world.

  • Quaker character. The first area is the fortuitous ways Quaker culture helped shape Quaker character so as to make Friends successful business people. One aspect of this Quaker character was an ethos Friends shared with their radical Puritan forbears and contemporaries, which they exemplified with extraordinary energy. We’ve already touched on how the Protestant ethic gave birth to the capitalist spirit, a la Max Weber, and here I want to elaborate on two of Weber’s key ideas as they apply to Friends: “worldly asceticism” and “rational asceticism.” Furthermore, Quakers expressed this ethos in distinctive ways and even encoded some aspects of the Quaker character in their testimonial life. Quakers became famous for a set of character traits that served to guide their behavior in business and to build a reputation that nurtured their success.
  • Quaker practice. Quakers also adopted corporate practices that fostered economic and financial success. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of corporate Quaker practice in building their personal fortunes. Quakers did not—could not—build their fortunes by themselves.
  • Sublimation. All the energy (and money) that Quaker character and culture repressed had to go somewhere. Thus, when Quaker character, with the indispensable support of Quaker culture, tackled a worldly problem, it tended to generate amazing creativity and innovation, a freedom of modes of thinking that was paradoxically opposite to the gradually solidifying (and ultimately ossifying) modes of religious thinking that took hold in Quaker culture. It would barely stretch the truth of the matter to say that Quakers were the wellspring from which gushed many of the main streams of industrial capitalist development, even as their own well of spiritual vitality gradually went dry.

Download a pdf file of this post.

* The Act also allowed legal proceedings to be taken against Quakers before a Justice of the Peace for refusing to pay tithes if it did not exceed £10. The Act would have expired in seven years but, in 1702, Parliament extended it for another eleven years by the Affirmation by Quakers Act 1701 and then made it permanent in 1715.

Quakers & Capitalism – Persecution & Gospel Order (1661-1695)

January 4, 2011 § 2 Comments

I have published the next segment of my work on the history of Quakers and capitalism, available as a pdf file through a link on the page to the left: Quakers & Capitalism–The Book. The title is “Transition (1661-1695): Persecution & Gospel Order.” I’ll be loading it soon on the wiki QuakerCapitalism, as well.

The last posting in this series described how early Friends anticipated the radical transformation of the social order as a natural outcome of the Lamb’s War. This was a war of words and signs, rather than of outward weapons. The call to arms was a vivid experience of Christ’s presence and teaching, rather than a revolutionary ideology of social change. Although they challenged the social and economic status quo with their practices of hat honor and plain speech, they did not seek to remake the social order per se, but sought rather to be faithful to the Seed within them, to the Word who led them forth. In fact, they failed to develop a coherent testimony on social and economic institutions even as they absorbed the period’s most radical movements for economic reform, the Levellers and the Diggers.

This first brief burst of apocalyptic fervor faltered for a moment in 1656, when James Naylor reenacted Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem in the streets of Bristol and was tried and convicted of blasphemy. Then came the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, the return of the monarchy, and the collapse of the Puritan experiment in a haltingly theocratic republicanism. This begins a period of transition in which the external forces of persecution combined with forces of moderation within Quakerism, embodied in what George Fox called “gospel order,” to significantly transform Quaker culture and, especially, Quaker engagement with the outside world. Friends emerged from this crucible completely changed. The heat of persecution and the pressure of internal discipline had made of them a new and more durable alloy—albeit at a cost. At the same time, they played a key role in remaking Britain’s political economic culture, opening the way for the emergence of capitalism. Thus began an intimate relationship of mutual influence between Quakers and capitalism that would totally remake the social order after all.

By the way I can’t recommend Doug Gwyn’s book The Covenant Crucified enough. He brilliantly describes the forces at work in this period and their consequences and I’ve borrowed much of what I’ve written from his landmark contribution to Quaker history.

Seebohm Rowntree on NPR’s Marketplace

December 23, 2010 § 2 Comments

On Tuesday, December 21, American Public Media’s daily financial news radio magazine Marketplace featured a piece on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954), a member of one of Britain’s three great chocolatier families. I feature this extraordinary man quite prominently in my book on Quakers and Capitalism and was tremendously excited to hear him profiled on this program. I highly recommend listening to it and/or reading the transcript of the story. Here is the link.

Rowntree exemplifies and was a major force behind momentous changes in both Quaker culture and in social, political and economic policy, especially in the UK. His book, published in 1901, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, literally changed the world, a little bit. And yet, as with John Bellers, whom I’ve mentioned in an earlier post about our economic history amnesia, Seebohm Rowntree is virtually unknown to Friends, at least here in the US. Poverty is available from Google Books for free as a download here.

Poverty launched Rowntree on an exceedingly prolific writing career; Amazon lists 26 books. (Here’s a link to Seebohm Rowntree – A Bibliography.) He resurveyed York in two follow-up studies to Poverty. Four main themes dominate his work: He returned again and again to the problem of unemployment and he wrote several books on housing. He wrote about the Christian and the Quaker responses to social problems. And he wrote several books trying to humanize business and industrial relations. He also applied for a patent in chocolate manufacturing.

This extraordinary man deserves our thankful remembrance for the following landmark achievements:

  • Groundbreaking work—understanding poverty. Poverty is the second attempt in history to use a sociological survey (and statistical analysis) to understand a social problem (poverty) and to shape a meaningful policy response. The story on Marketplace claims that it’s the first, but this in incorrect. Rowntree based his own research on the methods first used in London by the early sociologist Charles Booth, who interviewed tens of thousands of people in London’s slums and wrote a massive, 17-volume report in the years between 1889 and 1893. (The new social science of sociology was just then being developed by a handful of thinkers.) Booth’s study was, however, too huge, too dense with statistics, and too ploddingly written for many people to actually read. Rowntree saw how important it was, as did some other intellectuals in London, and he decided to do something about it. He used the same survey methods in his own hometown of York (interviewing more than 11,000 people), where there were only two industries—the Rowntree chocolate factories, and the railroad. Where Booth’s work was unreadable, Rowntree’s book was short and compellingly argued, with just the right balance of facts, figures, and exposition. It became a huge best seller.
  • Defining the “poverty line”. Rowntree is widely credited for inventing the idea of the “poverty line,” an income level below which a person or a family can no longer provide for the basics of food, clothing and shelter. I believe, however, that again we can thank Charles Booth for this innovation. However, Rowntree put it on the map and I believe he revised Booth’s calculations to make them reflect reality a little more accurately, though most economists today agree that it still needs to be redefined. The current formula for the poverty line (at least in America) comes originally from an American economist from the 1930s named Mollie Orshansky, who based her own work on Rowntree’s. The idea really caught on with the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Once a ‘scientific’ way to define poverty had been established, Rowntree (and before him Booth) came to a revolutionary and truly startling conclusion:
  • Groundbreaking conclusion—the poor are poor through no fault of their own. Rowntree’s research proved that poverty was not primarily the result of personal moral failing, but was rather a systemic, structural problem endemic in the capitalist system itself. It proved that the vast majority of the poor actually worked, worked hard, too hard; they just didn’t make enough money to survive—their wages were too low. It was not indolence, drink, gambling, sex (too many kids), and general wantonness that had cast them into poverty, as most people believed until then, though these factors often made things worse. The real problem for the poor was not at its root moral; it was structural—it was low wages. The poor wanted to work, they did, in fact work. It just wasn’t enough to lift them up out of poverty.
  • Groundbreaking paradigm—social science and technocratic solutions. This helped to usher in the modern social scientific approach to understanding and treating social problems. Poverty showed that scientific methods yielded results that you could not arrive at using moral philosophy, and it helped to pinpoint where and what the problems really were. This did not put an end to moralizing, as we well know. Conservatives, especially, have continued to cite moral failure as the cause of social ills up to the present day. Now, however, they must also downplay, discredit, bypass and obstruct scientific arguments that clearly point to structural evils in the system. Rowntree’s book ushered in an age of warring paradigms in social policy. One of them was rooted in 19th century evangelical theology and the political economics it had nurtured, focused on individuals, their choices and their ‘freedom’ from government intervention. The other paradigm was rooted in science and focused on communities, on systemic causes and solutions to social problems, and on the roles that only government was in a position to play in addressing these issues.
  • Groundbreaking policy—the birth of the welfare system. The book led directly to the modern welfare state in England and, by extension, everywhere else in Europe and North America. Someone recommended it to Winston Churchill, then a young Conservative Member of Parliament, who could not get it out of his consciousness, calling it “a book which has fairly made my hair stand on end.” He wrote and spoke about it all the time, and ultimately joined the Liberal government that formed in 1906. Lloyd George became Rowntree’s friend and would brandish Poverty as he spoke to large crowds all over Great Britain campaigning for the New Liberalism that he, Churchill and others were inaugurating. In 1911, Parliament passed the National Insurance Act, providing state-funded insurance for unemployment, sickness and old age. The modern welfare state had been born and Poverty: A Study in Town Life had provided much of the prevailing argument for this earth-shaking advance in human welfare.
  • The end of the ‘double culture’ period and the reengagement of Quakers. Seebohm Rowntree was part of the generation of modernist Friends that remade Quaker culture around the turn of the 20th century. They included his cousin John Wilhelm Rowntree, Rufus Jones and a number of others who had been energized by the Richmond Conference in 1887 and the Manchester Conference in 1891. They were the internal force for change within the Society of Friends that met the external forces that helped shape what I call the second great transition period in Quaker history, moving us from the double culture of religious and social withdrawal, on the one hand, combined paradoxically, on the other hand, with energetic engagement with the worlds of business, industry and commerce. They pulled us out of our isolation and insulation until both our feet were planted in the modern world.
  • Quakers discover capitalism as a system. Seebohm Rowntree’s landmark book and methods opened Quaker eyes to capitalism as a system. Until then, Quaker testimonial life had regarded the ‘social order’ as a matter for individual attention; that is, on the one hand, as a matter for the discipline of personal behavior, of “right walking” over the world, while on the other hand, individual Friends and Friends’ meetings had focused their efforts to address social ills like poverty on individuals. Recall Elizabeth Fry’s work in Newgate Prison raising up the educational and moral levels of inmates. With Poverty, Friends became aware for the first time of structural evil, of the way that systems caused suffering. This new awareness took a long time mature. It got major reinforcement, at least in the UK, during the Great War, when London Yearly Meeting convened a Committee on War and the Social Order charged with trying to determine what underlying causes had led to the war and with proposing ways to act that would prevent such a cataclysm from happening again. The resulting Eight Principles of a Just Social Order stirred intense debate in the 1918 sessions of London Yearly Meeting, because the Committee had essentially blamed capitalism. The Principles carried over into the first Friends World Conference held in London in 1920. (We’ll revisit this fascinating moment in Quaker history in a future post.) Nevertheless, it was not until the 1960s that systemic thinking really began to shape Quaker testimonies in any meaningful way: Right Sharing of World Resources addressed global trade policy; AFSC turned increasingly from service to the suffering toward advocacy on behalf of the oppressed; and the War in Vietnam vividly illuminated the power and role of the “military industrial complex” in our economic life. The war also brought Marxism back to life; Marx and Engels had understood that capitalism as a system oppressed the working class way back in the middle of the 19th century. But Quakers never really warmed to Marxism, even though Das Kapital mentioned their own John Bellers by name, and even though a small, very active group of socialist Friends did emerge in the same period in which Rowntree was doing his work late in the 1800s.

After writing Poverty, Seebohm Rowntree continued to bring innovative thinking to industrial relations, social welfare and management. He became a true liberal. Nevertheless, he was himself a transitional figure. Liberal and forward-thinking as he was, he still held on to some of his paternalistic past. For instance, though he saw clearly that a labor movement was essential to economic reform on behalf of the working poor, he resisted the organization of unions in his own business. He took it personally. He also adjusted his company’s wage system to guarantee a ‘living wage,’ a wage above the poverty line that he had himself defined. But he also established a rigorous system of quarterly employee review designed to ensure that his workers were performing well enough to deserve it. Under-performing employees were counseled, reassigned, and/or dismissed.

For all these monumental contributions to the cause of a more just and compassionate political economy, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree is one of my heroes. He also is one of the unsung heroes in the history of Friends. And so I have become one of his modern champions.

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