Religion & Economics; Culture
RELIGION & ECONOMICS (5)
356. Testimony: John Woolman on Today's Global Economy (by David Morse; 2001)
About the Author—David Morse is a writer and sometimes carpenter who lives in CT; he is a member of Storrs Friends Meeting. He has written essays and articles for diverse magazines and Quaker publications. He wrote the novel The Iron Bridge, about a Quaker's contribution to building the first iron bridge at Severn Gorge in the 1770's. New England Yearly Meeting's Committee on Prejudice and Poverty sponsored an earlier version of this essay, entitled John Woolman and the Global Economy, available from FGC.
[Introduction]—How would John Woolman respond to today's globalized economy? How would we respond to the issue of slavery in Woolman's 18th century world? John Woolman was an American Quaker born in 1720. He left the family farm to work for a shopkeeper. Woolman agonized over [his employer's directive that he] write a bill of sale [for the selling of a Negro woman]. He rationalized & wrote the bill of sale, but remained troubled. By putting his faith above his material comfort, he was led from one step to the next along a path that was as logical as it was intuitive. According to his journal, he confronted individuals directly—friends & associates, slaveholders & sea captains—in a spirit of contrition & from love rooted in his faith in God.
Woolman used written ministry's power to evoke empathy among Friends for kidnapped Africans plight, to "sympathize with Negroes in their afflictions & miseries as we do with children or friends ... [To] willingly join with unrighteousness to the injury of men thousand miles off is the same as joining with it to our neighbor's injury." [He argued with slaveholders who used scriptural arguments; he quoted scripture of his own, & later wrote, "men are wont to [use] weak arguments to support a cause which is unreasonable." He ventured into Indi-an territory to seek peace, & refused to pay taxes levied to support French & Indian War, even though "society generally paid, [which was] disagreeable. But to do a thing contrary to my conscience appeared more dreadful."
Woolman's testimony extended to Friends acquiring unnecessary wealth. A person seeking such wealth was likely to work too hard, or drive others [to do the same]. Underlying these choices were sometimes dreams or visions, but also a keen observation of economics & a sense of order. He saw colonial economy as slavery-based, with exploitation & oppression that went beyond Negroes to include lower classes, Indians, even work animals. In all this he saw that he was complicit; he focused on his own heart & actions before preaching to others about systemic evil. In order to reduce his complicity, he left shop-keeping & took up the trade of tailor.
For [all] his uniqueness, for the moments in which he stood alone in confrontations, Woolman was part of a group of radical Quakers who supported each other in their beliefs—a movement including Anthony Benezet, Joshua Evans, John Churchman, Daniel Stanton, Israel & John Pemberton, & others. Philip L. Boroughs writes: "While they clearly critiqued practice & values of their co-religionists, they did so within appropriate structures & procedures of their faith community." Woolman was Clerk of Burlington Quarterly Meeting of Ministers & Elders for several years. In England, 1772, he made the case that slavery was a global issue. London Yearly Meeting then approved an Epistle that encouraged Friends in the colonies to oppose slavery's "unnatural bon-dage." [He sought to not be complicit with widespread oppression & exploitation he encountered on his way to England, & during his time in England]. His personal, moral choices touched the lives of the people around him.
[Compelling Conditions and Queries of Our Day]—Would I have the courage and the moral imagination to make choices [similar to Woolman's]? Conditions of slavery or near-slavery still exist in Nepal, Senegal, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, even in the US. We in the wealthier parts of the world purchase [what is produced under these conditions] without necessarily knowing their true cost. How do I recognize my complicity [in substandard work and living conditions worldwide], and make my actions consonant with my beliefs?
One concerns people of goodwill have is: Does process of globalization not bring at least some small improvement to desperately poor people in less developed countries? [How do we reconcile need for techno-logical development with needs for environment preservation, economic & social justice]? [How do we react to positive changes in the Asian poor's wages, resulting from a flood of cheap Asian goods, & resulting in lower hourly wages for western factory workers & a necessary adjustment toward global equity? What effect will globalization have on international competition and on building a structure for peace? How is some structure like the World Trade Organization (WTO) necessary or not necessary to govern globalization? The solution to governing globalization is to replace WTO, World Bank, & International Monetary Fund (IMF) with more democratic structures that respect human rights & the environment.
[Global Trade; Transnational Corporations; Capital Mobility]—Global Trade must be governed somehow, to ensure some degree of social equity and to curb its destructive tendencies. Much of the damage is "done at great distance and by other hands" (Woolman). Transnational corporations' power and mobility exceeds the power of governments to regulate them in terms of labor relations, the environment, paying taxes, and fair prices to subcontractors; unfair prices lead to exploitation of work forces. [Capital mobility is such that speculative foreign exchange] amounts to more than a trillion dollars a day. This, and bad advice from the IMF, accelerated the collapse of the Southeast Asian economy a few years ago. This also fostered crime cartels & money laundering, a dark side of globalization. The gulf between rich and poor grows ever wider. The assets of the 3 richest people were more than the combined GNP of the 48 least developed countries (600 million people). [The fast pace and size of the economy is compounded by runaway technology, [which leads to] runaway capitalism.
[The situation] challenges capacity of religious & other value-based organizations to respond in a timely manner. How should the earth's resources be allocated? How do we as a species decide issues? [How should a truly representative international organization codify] protection of local economies & the bio-sphere, & promotion of global peace based on economic justice? Process & institutions created should operate transparently & in the International Declaration of Human Rights' spirit. 1999 Seattle WTO meeting collapsed, partly because powerful industrial powers tried to launch new initiatives without correcting existing destructive imbalances. [The operations performed by international bureaucracies comprised of WTO, IMF, & World Bank], & terms of treaties like NAFTA & FTAA, are skewed heavily in favor of powerful corporations. Deregulated & privatized globalization has brought chaos & loss of farms to rural people], & reintroduced to cities & factories a return to barbaric labor conditions, & for Mexican workers, a drop in real wages to 1980 levels.
[Shortcomings of the New Global System]—[Worldwide there have been fires] taking place regularly in Asian factories caused by unsafe conditions. The 1993 fire outside of Bangkok officially killed 188; more were likely incinerated. [There was relatively little news coverage, international cooperation, or investigating the cause of these fires. [How do we be aware of the exploitation of distant workers scarcely older than the children they make toys for, and avoid it]?
John Woolman today would observe companies exploiting the cheapest labor available, jumping from [one hemisphere] to the next at the drop of a hat, to wherever the work-force is most helpless, and the government officials [are most buyable]. Woolman would pay little credence to the argument these people need any job they can get; [he heard about improving the wretched lives of free Negroes, by giving them "better lives" here as slaves]. Observing the degradation not only of workers, but also of consumers, he would see it as a systemic evil that degrades the human spirit. John Woolman's gift is to see that current global conditions depend on our complicity, that we can live without it, that we are not captive—and then to take that 1st small step of refusal.
We are invited to sit blindfolded within the [status quo] box, to feel overwhelmed by the world's complexity, to experience choiceless-ness before the glut of information & goods. How can we restore our field of moral choice? [Media decides what is "newsworthy" & marginalizes us, driving us] out of the citizen role & into the empty consumer role. What is new now is [the pervasiveness of media & its ownership being] concentrated in a few corporate hands. In Seattle 1999, the pro-WTO media exaggerated the violence that occurred within overwhelmingly peaceable demonstrations, which was used to justify a militarized police response.
We can't look to the commercial media for intelligence, let alone wisdom. We aren't being helped to understand that all the issues with cities, weather, environment, diseases, poverty, lower wages as profits soar—are part of the global process. Americans remain largely in the dark on the matter of genetically modified (GM) food, [due to the effort of Monsanto & others to keep GM off the list of regulated commodities]. American citizens are more docile than citizens in England, France, & India in resisting GM. Besides that, our children [& ourselves] are being branded by multi-million dollar ad campaigns, our dreams commodified. Individually, we make decisions to buy foreign commodities. Most often we are left to choose in ignorance. How can we know how workers and the environment is being treated in the production of a particular commodity?
The WTO makes its rulings purely on the basis of trade, with no consideration for environmental, human values, or cultural differences; all these can be categorized as "non-tariff restraint of trade" and lead to heavy penalties. It is hard to imagine a system better designed to roll back the hard-won gains achieved by environmentalists and human rights advocates over the past 30 years. How would John Woolman respond to the ferocity of the attack on the efforts of ordinary people to live ethically? What are the obstacles to our responding with the same clarity of spirit that informed Woolman and his cohorts? In April 2000, Bolivians resisted the privatization of water supplies, as dictated by the World Bank and the IMF; a violent crackdown resulted in several deaths. The news scarcely surfaced in the US media.
When we are systematically denied a basis for making moral choices, we are forced to make amoral choices. Knowledge of our complicity in turn reinforces our apathy, and thus we deny ourselves the possibility of moral choice. The great challenge to a prophetic, spirit-led ministry like Woolman's is to keep the human scale. It would involve intellectual confrontation, as well as networking. We can see signs of movement within various religious denominations, broad-based coalitions, and in secular nongovernmental organizations.
The Britain Yearly Meeting adopted a 1997 minute which stated [in part]: It can't be right to leave the world poorer than we found it in beauty or in the rich diversity of life forms. Nor to consume recklessly ... [knowing] our actions carry the likelihood of future tragedies ... We need to dedicate ourselves to keeping alive an alternative vision of a society: centered on meeting real human needs ... [not desires]; where inequalities of wealth and power are small enough ... [to allow] equality of esteem; which is mindful ... of future generations and is sustainable; and a society which is content with sufficiency rather than ... excess. Jonathan Dale says, "We must recover, against the spirit of the times, something of the original sense of testimony and the testimonies, [which] form unbreakable bonds between spiritual insight and social action."
A living testimony is founded, as Woolman's was, on lifestyle choices. The example has a way of rippling outward, until they find shape in a corporate testimony. We should free ourselves [from John Woolman's 18th century image to look for today's Woolmans among the unsung heroes and heroines practicing non-violent civil disobedience in resisting powerful private corporations. What should remain constant is honesty and love like Woolman's in confronting others, in whom he recognized the presence of God.
[Utilizing Inspirational Models]—How do we draw strength from those who inspire us? When we speak of someone like Martin Luther King, his work includes efforts of other civil rights leaders that have been subsumed under the MLK mantle. We are also talking about a person who walked among us. How do I dare to aspire to MLK's depth of conviction? How do I overcome my assumptions of being less capable than MLK & settling for lesser goals & passion? Quakers are especially prone to false humility. Our collectivism, lack of hierarchy, & consensus is a radical gift to a competitive, hierarchical society based on majority's tyranny. American Quakers perform good acts, individually & collectively. We are also capable of procrastination, [subduing bold, energetic, leading spirits], & moral cowardice, [towards others & within ourselves]. [I have told myself contradictory excuses why I can't act]. How do I bring change within my own heart?
The realization that John Woolman is in some respects a composite, reflecting the courage and support of other dedicated but lesser known individuals, is nothing less than exhilarating. I have to make space for spiritual discovery. Actions follow. Small steps lead to larger ones. How can our faith keep up with the velocity of change? How can we as individuals keep up with change? Faith will have to be borne partly by individuals and small groups, as it always has, if it is to survive as a vital force among us. It helps if we think of ourselves as [participants] in a larger prophetic voice. "The times are ripe for further work" [Woolman]. Quaker process is by its nature slow. But let's not diminish ourselves or it by thinking of ourselves as plodders. Let our silence be full. When it is time to act, collectively or individually, let us act [in the spirit and example of John Woolman].
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290. Quaker Money (by S. Francis Nicholson; 1990)
About the Author—S. Francis Nicholson was a born to an Indiana family in 1900; he graduated from Westtown School, Earlham College, and Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He worked 41 years at Provident Trust Co. (Provident National Bank). His personal concern has been the care and management of Quaker funds. For 60 years, he has held financial management responsibilities for individuals and organizations [e.g]. Fiduciary Corporation of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (FCPYM).
INTRODUCTION—My hope is that Friends will contemplate Francis Nicholson’s commonsense approach sufficiently to see the Quaker sense beneath it. Serious researchers will discover that this common sense is very uncommon. I hope readers will find a stimulating mix of Quaker sense of life and an experienced, competent, professional voice. I studied economics and religion and became curious about Quakers. I got caught up in the mysteries of an economic system that had failed, and in doing something about the ethics of our society.
Then came Francis Nicholson, who offered me a job in the Provident Bank and thus gave me a chance to see Quakers at work in the real world. I worked in minor ways with prominent Quakers on their financial matters. I was impressed with how they honored the minor details of work with care and respect for others. Francis showed me that conscience can be applied to the routine tasks of making a living. We had long discussions about the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the role of pacifists in times of war. I later realized I was enrolled in a random course in Friends’ testimonies. We would go spend leisure time at his home.
There was an appealing integrity in this Quaker’s life at work, home, & play. Nicholson’s reflections come from a long, involved life that has held together the sacred & secular. Avoiding the trap of false dichotomies between God & Mammon is a challenge to all people of conscience. The breadth of his concern reveals a Quaker sense of the whole of life. I hope we will all take a look at how we look at money. I trust that we will appreciate his witness of competence not in conflict with conscience, but joined to it in service of Truth. Andrew R. Towl
Where does Quaker Money come from and Where does it Go?—My personal reflections are in response to certain questions including the one above. [I will present the others in turn as headings]. We like to think that most Quaker money comes from constructive, useful work or from honest trade practices. In earlier times many operated their own farms, businesses, or financial activities [on both sides of the Atlantic]. In this 20th century there is more dependence on salaries, which may result in comfortable living but not in large capital buildup.
In the last ½ of the 20th century, appreciation in land & security value, & inheritances have been the basis for many large gifts & bequests to Friends meetings & activities. Quaker activities have often received support from non-Quakers with the belief that funds would be handled & disbursed with care & sensitivity. Gifts, grants, & be-quests have been made for purposes revolving around meetinghouses, education, social & missionary concerns.
Many meetings have received moderate bequests of funds to care for their properties. I question the desirability of capital funds being established to meet ordinary meeting expenses; individual members should be involved in fulfilling this responsibility. I believe that capital funds for foreign missions have been modest in amount. Educational purposes account for a large portion of Quaker gifts & bequests. Friends want attention in schools not only to academic standards but to attitudes of teachers & students that reflect the worthwhile values inherent in Friends testimonies. Comparison [with the spending in other schools] isn’t wrong, but I fear their having too much overt or subtle influence on decisions that [tend toward enrollment by high-income families].
The extent of Quaker education seems large in relation to the few Quakers there are in this country & the world. A few students become Friends as a result of their school experience. Pendle Hill is an unusual special-purpose school that has received gifts for endowment recently. Will adequate funds be available in an inflationary age or a recession? How should trust funds for “poor” children be applied? Should a program be dependent on subsidies & scholarships? Can an environment of Quaker values be maintained? The large amounts of money required for publication come from sales, individual gifts, Friends meetings, and endowments.
For social concerns, efforts have been made to improve conditions for prisoners, mentally ill persons, black people, coal workers, native Americans, Japanese-Americans, and others. Since 1917, AFSC has channeled the efforts and money of Friends and non-Friends toward many areas of need and the problems of injustice. Many older social action committees are no longer able to function; some have been consolidated with the Fiduciary Corporation of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting.
Beginning around 1970, continuing care retirement communities were established near Philadelphia; subsequent creation of such communities has occurred in other areas and there are current plans for still more. The concern for ill persons has led many Friends to be physicians and has resulted in the establishment of hospitals and well-equipped old-age facilities. Quaker employees have pension funds, considered by them as a contractual right. There can be a relationship between all the activities mentioned above and the spiritual values of life. Whatever the total value controlled by Quakers, what matters is that we try to understand the meaning of money and property with respect to human welfare and try for the best insight as to how to meet our responsibilities.
What is the Meaning of Money?—Money is among the best and most necessary tools ever invented. It is a medium of exchange, measuring/storing value, borrowing & lending, debt /tax payment, investment, inheritance transfer, and charity. The value of money is completely dependent on people’s lives and activities being interrelated. On the bad side of money, it provides a temptation to activate many of the worst human instincts. Economic, political, and social pressures cause money to be created in excessive amounts, creates inflation and injustices. [Quakers struggle with] evaluating the need for money while realizing that final solutions require changes in the hearts of people. [Money is neither a cure-all nor] the root of all evil.
In a time of high money rates no one likes idle money, & the use of credit cards proliferates. The money system has become [increasingly &] fantastically more complex & hopefully more efficient [with more use of electronic transactions]. Increased “security” has become another human need for which people pay much money to various government agencies or private insurance companies. I see problems ahead in rising insurance costs, in their effect on various costs, & inflation. There’s also the Social Security trust fund’s dependence on bonds issued to finance federal deficits. Security may properly be sought to the extent that money can buy it sensibly & prudently; security shouldn’t become an obsession. Using money to buy security can be cost ineffective.
The money cost of security goes far beyond insurance premiums. There is police and fire protection, federal law-enforcement, the CIA and the military establishment. Many Quakers would agree that the CIA and the military provide neither an effective nor a moral basis for feeling secure. It is worthwhile and less costly to try to prevent mistakes and misdeeds through things like education rather than to deal with them after they occur.
It is interesting and regrettable that money, instead of being looked on as a useful tool, is widely regarded as a separate commodity and its ownership as an end in itself. There are too many institutions, government and private programs whose principal commodity is money. Security markets have expanded beyond their useful and normal actions to an excess in accommodating speculation. My endeavor is to concentrate on the sound value characteristics of securities more than on their speculative possibilities.
The free-market money system works well most of the time, but there are too many exceptions in which executives & directors are paid excessively or merger manipulators receive outrageous fees. Fees should be above average when problems are difficult & well below average for minor problems. I believe that there should be questions about any extremes that develop in an economy [e.g.] athletes, musicians, politicians, surgeons, lawyers. The goal of social and economic stability can sidetracked by too much distortion of business practices, especially those involving money. People are compensated by a sense of: congenial association with co-workers; uplifting creative experiences; gratification of productive usefulness; pride in performance.
In the supermarket, I see many relatively fixed prices—some of them fair & others obviously above the cost of production. Except for monopoly control, compulsory price fixing rarely succeeds. Perhaps the early Quaker concern for fair pricing [could be applied to current prices or compensation received]. [The desire for ever-in-creasing amounts of money in families] seems characteristic of real life. Few people set a cap on the amount they want, even though their needs are amply provided for. Social problems arise from extreme maldistribution of wealth beyond the limits of social morality; there are widely different opinions as to what is “too much.”
It should be realized that even generous givers may be alienated by solicitations that appear to be too frequent, costly, or impersonal. It would be ideal if meeting members took the initiative with their contributions without any need for solicitation. There should be a contrarian on each board or committee to raise spending questions. Those who work for it may understand the value of money better than others who receive it without personal effort. When someone wins a $50 million lottery, I wonder how many had the thought that the lifework of 50 people had been transferred to one and how wrong that was. Sound money should have stable value that changes only within very narrow limits. Part of the blame for inflation rests on ordinary people who speculate, borrow excessively, spend beyond our means, and “learn to live with” inflation that destroys 4% to 5% of the value of money and wages each year, greatly affecting the less privileged in our society. The value of Quaker funds has been maintained by holding common stocks or real estate properties.
What is the Motivation for Quaker Gifts and Bequests?—The amount of any single contribution depends on the depth of the concern and the degree of conviction that the gift will be efficiently applied to accomplish its purpose. Gifts should seldom be influenced by expectations of thanks or gratitude from Friends meetings or other organizations. Donors should thank organizations for carrying out the purpose of their concern.
Some Quakers are concerned to foster a feeling of stewardship, so that resources are administered responsibly. They think of their resources as belonging to a kind of trust. I believe it is wrong to encourage the “dues” concept in meeting by announcing precisely what each member costs the meeting; averages can lead to distorted reasoning. Giving from a sense of duty is not an ideal attitude, but it is not wrong. It is impractical to expect all gifts to be based on strong, carefully thought-out concerns.
I have mixed feelings about fundraising. I sometimes question the costs of solicitation, pressure methods, and playing games with the giving process; employers matching the gifts of their employees is acceptable. Many donors seem to act in the belief that Quaker procedures provide careful handling of money and good judgment in applying funds in ways consistent with Friends’ ideals. Each donor can learn from personal experience whether he or she believes “it is better to give than to receive.”
It is interesting that the IRS’s rules are needed to bring out our best instincts for charitable giving; tax-savings can be substantial. There may be an advantage to making lifetime gifts in place of bequests. Friends are increasingly motivated to arrange for deferred giving plans. If there is no pooled fund or if gifts of real estate are contemplated, a unitrust can be the best way to proceed for amounts greater than $25,000 for donors 65 years old or older. There can be a further major tax advantage if pooled life-income funds or unitrusts are given low-cost securities or low-cost real estate. Donors should not give money and property that are likely to be needed later for support of themselves or their families. Quakers are motivated by a wide variety of ideas about taxes; some conscientiously refuse “war taxes”; some minimize income; some conscientiously pay. Is paying taxes a voluntary act, or a transfer of money that does not really belong to the taxpayer? Since taxes have to be paid, is there any reason for not being gracious in the way the obligation is recognized? There may be more money available for the real concerns of giving if tax matters are prudently planned.
What are the Fiduciary or Trust Aspects of Quaker Gift & Bequests?—Meetings & other Quaker organizations generally delegate responsibilities for endowments to committees & trustees. My own experience has been with FCPYM, an independent group created by PYM to handle its own capital funds & the funds of other Quaker organizations in the Philadelphia area; several funds have been accepted from distant areas. FCPYM manages a very large amount of investments for over 100 different Quaker groups; it is trustee for an increasing number of trusts. Different funds are allocated units in a single large “consolidated” investment fund.
Any trustee for Quaker funds is obligated to maintain accurate accounts, separating principal & income & disclosing how much is available for each fund purpose. Trustees should avoid conflict of interest & to avoid using trust assets or income for ulterior purposes inconsistent with the trust’s purposes. Quaker trustees & project managers should accept a high standard of trust responsibility & carry out the donor’s directions. Trustees shouldn’t condone wasteful practices just because ample moneys are available. A fiduciary should apply funds in ways close to the [now-outdated] purpose of a fund, & verify that funds are being properly used by the designated organization. Income should seldom be converted to principal; funds are expected to be used for charity.
It is unwise to burden managers with many separate capital funds to manage. Records of each fund’s value should be kept after they are combined. Perpetual trusts should be avoided in favor of some time limitation, even though it be a long time. Donors should allow for restrictions on fund use to be waived or modified in times of crisis. The option of spending of 3 to 5% of the principal after the donor’s death, at the trustee’s discretion could be authorized. The donor should trust their fiduciary & not use a lot of narrow restrictions. Using “desire” or “wish,” rather than directives will avoid future problems with bequests that can no longer serve their designated function. Trusts shouldn’t be set up to accumulate substantial income. No one can leave more to society than one owns at ones death. Trusts should be supported by a document of wishes and directions. Additions to existing funds are simple; new, separate funds require more elaboration. The Society of Friends [concern] is to channel money to right purpose but not let it become the dominant goal. Spiritual life is not always nurtured by riches.
What Understanding Should a Quaker Investor or Trustee have about Business Principles and the General Economy?—Expertise in fund management requires: understanding money, investment, and economic process relationship; understanding investment analysis; knowledge of security markets; combining preceding understandings with clear thinking. I define economics simply as: A social science that deals with the ownership of money and property; with the production, financing, transportation, and ultimate use of goods and services intended to meet the real or imagined needs of people. An economic system’s parts are interrelated; it must operate with some degree of efficiency to meet needs and improve quality of life. A Quaker investor’s concern is about efficient production of useful goods and services. There is a temptation in seeking capital gains, to lapse into an attitude of gambling, questionable ethics, and business dangers.
Some buyers emphasize growth stocks, which can result in substantial loss, if predicted growth doesn’t continue. Some investors buy stock in long established, “blue chip” stock; returns are good as long as the stock isn’t bought at high prices. Some investors are easily influenced by what others seem to be doing, when the best business judgments are often contrary to what others are thinking. An investor should think primarily of real value in relation to price. Emphasis on low price-earnings ratios is generally rewarding from a business standpoint.
Present-day business [practices and market “gimmicks”] threaten the legitimate purpose of security markets. I believe that investment decisions should always be subject to [a close] relationship between real value and market value. There should be caution not to carry on excessive trading, which can be costly and take away the recognition of securities as real investments, rather than just pieces of paper. A manager should try to cope with the dilemma of deciding between conservative, fixed-rate bonds and profitable, variable, risky stock investments.
Enormous amounts are involved daily in buying & selling foreign currencies, partly for constructive purposes, & partly to speculate on short-term changes in value. The instability from political, military, & social pressures cause deficits, cheapens money & encourages global speculation. Quaker funds have investments in other countries. Investing is dominated by professional managers of pension trusts, mutual funds & other institutions. An individual investor is at no disadvantage if decisions are made based on sound value & on a long-term basis.
What Ethical Principles are Important with Regard to Money Investments, and Business?—In considering the moral aspects of money, investments & business, I will mention several areas Quakers have focused on: Integrity (e.g. honesty, truthfulness, justice); Creative Achievement (actual accomplishments, efficient production of useful goods and services); Simplicity of Life Style (less consumption of materials, time, energy, and money, and less strain on the environment, less waste); Stewardship (looking upon their money as a kind of trust to be administered responsibly for the good of others and themselves).
Investments—They are like people in that they are seldom 100% good or bad. I focus on production of useful goods and services, carried on with integrity, efficiency, a nd right relations between employers, employees, customers, and community. I give credit for the creation of needed jobs and a genuine interest in the community’s and the world’s welfare. I have made many decisions to sell or avoid investments in companies substantially involved with intoxicants, tobacco, gambling, excess speculation, and military contracts.
Involvement of 20% or more in questionable products or practices is usually deemed substantial. 10 to 20% involvement in seriously wrong things or ways may be enough to not invest. Questionable involvement of less than 10% is approached as being overshadowed by the good. I caution against decisions dependent on precise mathematical figuring. Scrutiny of the [more subjective] plus and minus factors is necessary.
South Africa (1% involvement there is not enough for an adverse judgment; using coercion is not an appropriate trustee action, or in keeping with the Quaker message); The General Economy (excessive competition, greed, and injustice make it a questionable system; Quakers can work to change things ); Excesses and Ethics (normal and proper activities like expansion, borrowing, competition, salaries can be carried past healthy limits; obsession with growth leads to an excess of merger, conglomerates and dangerous speculation. Is the business growth I seek an ethical goal? Do I value and seek economic stability enough?
Lending and Borrowing—I believe there are limits to the total amount of debt that can be supported by a regional, national, or world economy. The 1980’s have produced an unbelievable burden of debt in government and business. There is something ethically wrong [with business expansion and ownership based on] the excessive use of loan money. Tax deductions for loan interest may partly cause excessive amounts of loans.
Money Coercion—I’m one of those Quakers who regard widespread boycotts & embargoes against countries as warfare or violence inconsistent with the Quaker contribution toward mediation, persuasion, & conflict recon-ciliation. I believe those who behave ethically in business may achieve success in both business & ethics. If both can’t be attained, more peace of mind arises from success in ethics. I believe that waste, excessive borrowing, speculation, inflation, & economic coercion are more serious evils than is generally recognized. If events in the investment world are viewed in a common-sense relation to soundness & high quality of life & environment, useful business & ethical distinctions can be made between the good & the questionable in handling money.
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About the Author—Tom Head is professor of Economics and chairperson of International Studies at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon; he has been for over 30 years. He is nourished by the challenge of finding theological and spiritual common ground between divergent groups, Quaker and otherwise. He has had a long-standing interest in the integration of religion and economics. This pamphlet grew out of his Nov. 2008 PH workshop of the same name and the July 2009 Quaker Institute for the Future Summer Seminar In Berkley, CA.
[Introduction]—I am an economist, an analytical person, a scholar; deep inside I am a mystic. We seldom encounter mystic and economist in the same sentence, chapter, or even book. Holding these 2 dimensions in creative tension with each other is the work to which I am drawn. The transcendent gives meaning & purpose to the ordinary, and ordinary daily living in the material world is the vessel that gives spirits a home. My parents encouraged me, and Arthur O. Roberts handed me a copy of John Woolman’s Journal. Kenneth and Elise Boulding shared with this young academic from the deep wells of insights, inspiration, and integration.
I encountered a procession of wise, kind helpers, sometimes in writing, sometimes in person, sometimes both. Wendell Berry believes that: “If we are to maintain any sense of coherence or meaning in our lives, we can’t tolerate disconnection between religion & economy.” If we are to structure economic systems that … work for the benefit of all … without ruining the planet & all life, we must recover moral vision in economic affairs. We can’t depend on the economics field for such vision. Economists distinguish between “positive” economics and “normative” economics. [A positive statement is a factual claim, not necessarily demonstrated as true, but which is nonetheless used as the basis for] formulating economic models. Paul Krugman asks: [See Query #1 at end of summary].
The Economy—[See Query #2]. We often feel that we do not understand the economy, that it is complex and truly beyond comprehension. We like economic progress, freedom and opportunity, a good return on investments, and fairness. It gets more complex when we think about people who are further away. In globalization, we now see this beautiful sphere for the finite spaceship that it is, [with 7 billion souls seeking life and space].
Some people [place their trust in] the market forces’ invisible hand. Experts aren’t easily understood, don’t agree, or are just wrong. [I am] a minor league expert myself, & yet there is much I don’t know or understand. Shaping a working global economy is an huge task, & one we can’t and needn’t neglect. Our current one isn’t sustainable; our financial stability is also shaky, with dwindling reserves & deeper deficit holes. [See Query #3]. Redesigning the economy begins with reframing the questions. [Rather than the 3 traditional question about product, production method, and distribution], I prefer Peter Brown’s and Geoff Garver’s questions [See Queries 4-6]; [stewardship is involved]; [See Query #7].
Sources of Wisdom—The human family has been grappling with basic economic questions for a long time. Real understanding, true wisdom, finds convergence in all dedicated truth-seeking, whether it begins in sanctuary or laboratory. [My entire spiritual journey have been shaped in some very basic way by my earliest experience of a spirit that inhabits every cell of my body. Then, I simply accepted this tradition as a given. [At times I rejected religious claims as nonsense. Eventually, I began] looking at it all again for the 1st time. I found my village religion not to be such a bad one after all & came to a more complete & settled sense of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Appreciating one’s own faith tradition needn't exclude the glory & inspiration of others’ journeys.
[See Query #8]. One of the very foundations of the economy is that we are pretty much individual, independent, and autonomous beings, and that it is the exercise of this very freedom that makes for the genius of the marketplace system. Both Wall Street and Main Street prize our supposed entitlement to use things as we please; we own things. But faith challenges this autonomy over our economic affairs and leaves us with questions about what else might be relevant for truly and deeply achieving a moral economy
Economic Justice—The biblical concern was both for short-run needs, such as having food for the day, and for establishing workable long-run arrangements that limited concentrations of wealth and power. George Monsma writes: “Laws, if followed, assured each family control over the resources necessary for them to be active, decision-making producers … Note that laws severely limited the degree to which “ownership” and control over wealth could become concentrated into a few hands.”
I am especially interested in what the gospels have to tell us about economics. [See Queries #9-10]. One can build a pretty good case that promoting a moral economy was a pivotal project for Jesus. [See Queries #11-13]. Marcus Borg’s work summarizes 5 key roles or aspects of Jesus’ rather brief public period: mystic, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and a movement founder. Borg says: “Jesus the wisdom teacher offered an alternative view of reality … He was critical of the way conventions and institutions functioned in his day, especially among the peasant and marginalized classes. Jesus the social prophet followed earlier prophets advocating for social justice … by protesting the economic and political arrangements that oppressed and exploited. Jesus the movement founder led an inclusive and egalitarian movement promoting an alternative social vision.”
Rereading the gospels with fresh eyes invites come startling conclusions. It would not be wildly inaccurate to sum up their work as suggesting that Jesus was killed because of his economic policy ideas, his challenge to the dominant powers of his day. Much has been done to bring this prophetic passion for economic justice into our economic affairs. We have yet to understand the spiritual truth that “there must be limits on the concentration of wealth, income, & economic power.” When we take in this truth, we start to see the sins for which Jesus died.
Beyond Borders—It is important to understand what a moral economy looks like to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. When it comes to understanding economics and the importance of life, there is a lot of common ground. One Buddhist article stated: “The Buddhist path is about awakening from delusions. We cannot rely upon our present economic and political systems to solve the problem, because to a large extent they are the problem. Buddhism’s focus on greed, ill, will, and the delusion of separate self points us in the direction of relief, for these 3 poisons function institutionally as well as personally.
When both Buddhist writers and Catholic social teachers are telling us about the delusion of a separate self and its significance in seeing truthfully and shaping an economy morally, there is a convergence that needs our attention. Michael Gazzaniga asks [See Query #14] and writes: “I am convinced that we must commit ourselves to the view that a universal ethics is possible …We now understand how biased our beliefs about the world and … human experience truly are … It is the job of modern science to help figure out how [ethical] order should be characterized.” Wisdom is what we need when trying to see and build a moral economy. It is not about finding the one right economic design but about the values making up the economic parts of life.
Economic Systems—Any number of social inventions meet morality tests. [See Query #15]. When Adam Smith’s market mechanism works, it is best to let that famous & infamous “invisible hand” do its work. But it doesn’t always work. [Market distortions] work in many forms. One instance is extreme individualism present in the western world. What is missing is a sense of the larger, fuller life web. [Extreme compensation] is exploitation, given philosophical support by what amounts to idolatry of individualism. A misplaced belief that financial markets naturally seek equilibrium & their true value has contributed to instability & crisis. We are neither isolated individuals nor collectives. We live individual lives on this planet as a part of groups, local communities, & global communities. It isn’t likely that economic science will ever sort out [the mix] of individual effort, endowment, exploitation, & the vast gift of life in the universe. Those who prosper, ask: [See Queries #16-18].
John Woolman’s Moral Economy—John Woolman humbly sought truthful answers to economic questions, and he let those answers change his economic choices. Good work nourishes the soul, expresses the spirit, and fulfills our lives. He said: “Either too much or too little action is tiresome, but a right portion is healthful to our bodies and agreeable to an honest mind.” He made a distinction between needs and wants, a distinction that seldom enters modern economic discourse; economic man is insatiable. Woolman knew from deep sources that nourished and informed his life that more is not always better, that a different, more balanced approach would lead to truer happiness. He announces truth and proclaims its implications for the use of things, a true use of things. This is the doorway to a moral economy. As he found a sense of balance and right living in his personal affairs, he also looked outward and saw the injustices of an enslaving system that maximized income for a few.
Economic Peacemaking—The economy that we know & experience in the here & now is truly violent. Most wars have underlying economic causes, often about access to resources. [See Queries #19-20]. In the 1960’s I had enrolled in the Army ROTC but was experiencing greater & greater discomfort with military training. I signed up for a class on nonviolence at the university. I learned about Quakers and other peace churches; seeds were planted in that class. I began worshipping with Quakers, came to a clear conviction about being a pacifist, and filed for discharge [from the Army] as a conscientious objector (CO).
The Army scheduled 3 hearings to process my discharge request. The commanding officer & mental health professional [conducted routine interviews & passed me on to the next interview]. The chaplain’s “pastoral care” was mostly argument. [Though] we shared a common faith, we came to very different conclusions about the demands of our Christianity. After a lengthy session of proof-texting & theological arguments, he turned to economics, [citing the difficulty of getting a job with that on my record]. The Army honorably discharged me as a CO.
My pacifism was part of what qualified me to work at a Quaker institution. I turned to studying peace. My questions were: [See Queries 21-25]. Those who seek to effect an economic system that is just & sustainable are very much caught up in a system which continues to function in unjust & unsustainable ways. To take the first steps towards a moral economy may require bold & radical action not unlike historic witnesses against slavery.
Where to Start—Theology and moral criteria alone will not uniquely determine one correct set of arrangements. Thomas Paxson says: “The conditions of human flourishing are so complex, and human values so numerous, one would expect a large variety of political economies to satisfy reasonable moral and theological criteria … Theology provides criteria for evaluating the propriety of systems without stipulating structure.” [The 4 Quaker testimonies of integrity, simplicity, peace and equality will each bring important qualities to a moral economy]. [See Queries 26-27]. One can start at any number of places and find the way to the same economic truth: people matter; life matters. A moral economy will begin there.
Queries—1. What do we think is the morally right thing to do in economics? 2. How might we describe the best possible economy [& how would it work]? 3. Is it right, sane or moral, that most people on this planet are poor? 4. [What is the goal of an economy & how does it work? 5. How big is too big? 6. How should a fair economy be governed? 7. How ought the human economy function as part of Earth’s life system? 8. [How do we act as stewards rather than owners]?
9. What would Jesus advise if he were an economic advisor? 10. [What would a Jesus who cares about income distribution say about justice & generosity? 11. What was Jesus up to [economically] in his public acts & statements? 12. What did he have in mind [economically] for us human beings & our relationships with each other? 13. What did Jesus think he was doing? 14. When making moral judgments, are we perceiving external truths or expressing internal attitudes? 15. Where & how do social inventions [e.g. free market & central planning] work best & serve our needs best? 16. Why am I prospering? 17. Why are others not prospering? 18. How is it all connected?
19. How many violent deaths are attributable to underlying economic causes? 20. What might I do to be peacemaker, healer, reconciler, & caregiver to life in this economy? 21. What is economic equi-valent of being a conscientious objector? 22. How do I say no to global poverty & yes to sufficiency for all of God’s children? 23. How do I say no to environmental degradation & yes to right relationship with a living planet? 24. How do I say no to murderous economic imbalances & distortions? 25. How does one apply for a discharge from this distorted and violent economy? 26. How does any economic system speak to the need for every human being to have enough? 27. Is sacrificing some members of the human family [to achieve a “workable economy”] ever a morally sound approach to the economy?
Queries: How did you come to your present financial situation? Do you feel wealthy & privileged, or economically disadvantaged? How do you apply the Quaker testimonies of integrity, simplicity, peace, & equality to envisioning a moral economy? What is “enough” for you? What are ways that a concerned individual can join with others to envision & seek to realize a “moral economy”?
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Trends in Social Protest/ Definition of Holistic Economics/ Mexican Strawberries: An Example—Social protest is changing, from resistance to positive action. We wonder whether we have been treating only the symptoms, not the causes. Should we also be concerned with why they’re starving? Must we only conscientiously object? Are we consuming too much? Are we oppressing people in less developed countries? Is our own greed a cause for war?
Economics is very complex, & even economists have such different answers, or none at all, that they may be of little help to lay people. We often suspect them of representing special interests. I would like to show that the impact of any action may be more far-reaching than most people believe. Holistic means 1st that things are connected. 2nd, prevention is better than cure. Finally, holistic philosophy envisions the whole as more valuable than the parts. Military spending has widespread consequences; deficits transfer income from the poor to the rich. Often forms of protest affect the whole economy and all society in ways that are unforeseen.
Instead of devoting so much of their land to strawberries for rich folk, shouldn’t Mexicans be producing corn for their own poor? If we were to boycott, would the strawberry farmers instantly produce corn in-stead. Probably not. The poor still couldn’t afford the corn, and rich Mexicans would enjoy cheaper strawberries with little change in output. Strawberries earn foreign exchange, used to buy raw materials and machinery. Without these, Mexicans would be without jobs. It would not increase the corn available for the poor. The answer may be to teach more technical skills, and have more credit and capital available, to grow more corn where it can best be grown. Ways should be sought for poor Mexicans to have more income to buy corn with. The 2 lessons from Mexican strawberries are that this is one of many world problems we cannot solve. And we must trace the impact of our protest [to include] the effects that will pop out where we least expect them.
Migrant Workers—All over the world there are people who wish they were in the US, because of political oppression, not enough jobs, or poor pay. [Relatively speaking], our wages are high & our unemployment is low. The migrant stream of Mexicans, Cubans, Haitians, Vietnamese, & Cambodians are visible. Others are not; they haven’t been allowed to come. The kind-hearted say let them come; let us share. Others worry about job competition and “importing” unemployment. It is not realistic to think of totally free immigration. There are menial jobs that few of our own people want to do that are better jobs than many 3rd world workers could find at home. Should we not invite them to come here to help us? Europe has, and so has Saudi Arabia. Both experiments have been successful with some problems, like class distinctions. Another problem is that poorer people reproduce more rapidly than richer people. A 3rd problem is what to do with guest workers in economic downturns when jobs become scarce. The laws we are thinking of for migrants workers have risks. How shall we persuade other American workers to risk lower wages and pay higher taxes?
Unions and the Minimum Wage—Illegal immigrants are often exploited, enslaved, and threatened; [they feel unable to go to the authorities. These conditions existed in Dickens’ and Karl Marx’s time; they are still with us. The legalization of immigrants’ must be a concern for reformers. Unions have led us through demanding high wages, mechanization and job loss, higher consumer demand from higher wages, increased production, rehiring of workers. Do we see the conflict between concern for inhuman conditions and environmental concern on the one hand, and protecting the standards of living and jobs of our own workers?
Possessions—What can we do to transfer some of our surplus goods to these poor people? We can consume less. If we consume a lot less, a glut would occur & prices would fall; that would help the poor. There would also be unemployment. The poor in the 3rd World would suffer, because we would buy less from them. We should still reduce our possessions, but if we live simply, we do it for ourselves, not because it will help somebody else. Why don’t we give these possessions directly to those who need them? There have been many failures in foreign aid. The success of foreign American Friends Service Committee projects comes from the fact that they do more than transfer resources; they help integrate; they help people adjust; they spawn cooperatives to increase rural production. The poor become more productive and bid resources away from the rich, from us.
Competition and Loving Efficiency—Competition and efficiency address the economic problems of: How much can we produce with what we have? And, when the pie comes out of the oven, how is it to be cut? Efficiency addresses the question of technology. It is “getting the most with the least.” It is how to achieve human rights with minimum pain for those who oppose us. The most efficient way to produce is with love. Loving efficiency is sharing what there is of scarce resources with love.
Competition addresses what goods we will produce, how many, who will produce them, & who gets the product. I see much good in competition. It holds inefficient producers in line. Liberal economists have extolled competition for helping determine quantities & prices. [In the case of milk prices], the government has decreed support prices. Poor consumers suffer spending a higher percentage of income on milk when no farmer may lower prices below the support level. Are the ills of competition forced on us by “the system”? Or can we compete lovingly? Otherwise, how will we determine how a fair amount of milk at a fair price will be delivered? Competition and scarcity is a fact of life; [allocation needs to be done] with loving efficiency. We must have practice in losing. [We must redesign the system so that losing one’s original desire will result in an outcome as good, if not better than that expected from the original desire]. If we emphasize winning rather than constructive choices, then competition makes our society sick. We are the ones who do these good or evil things.
Boycott—I once heard a friend suggest that each taxpayer should have the right to declare the use to which his or her taxes would be put. Taxpayers, being more sensible than politicians, would devote more funds to constructive social endeavor and less to war. The poor would lose most or all their votes on the budget. Rich people would have more votes. With economic power as a weapon, more power goes to the rich than to the poor. In the case of boycotting South Africa, those able to buy gold and diamonds decide what is right and wrong. I am talking about the rich and powerful bringing about political solutions on behalf of other people.
If one were to boycott Nestle, for instance, I sense that the effect of a boycott will burst out in unexpected spots, like on a cocoa farmer in Ghana, when chocolate sales drop. Will a boycott stop the sale of baby formula in the 3rd World? A holistic approach asks: What is everything that will happen if ... ? If we wish to diminish baby formula in the 3rd World, it seems to me the approach lies elsewhere. It lies in education & water sanitation.
In the case of South Africa & stopping Apartheid, I believe that Apartheid will be ended by South Africans, & in a prosperous rather than broken economy. Black unions can legitimately bargain. Their effective leverage will come from a strong economy, not a weak one. Destroying an economy leaves the poor with less capacity to confront their masters. Holistically we ask: Where will the suffering surface? What will be the effect on the liberation movements within? We should act as if others will follow our example. Will we seek positive ways to approach evil, or will we approach evil by perhaps destroying the lives & livelihood of others?
The New International Economic Order—Should we support the 3rd World calling for protection of export prices in a New International Economic Order (NIEO)? The NIEO has a long list of ways the 3rd World want to improve their bargaining power. They want organizations like OPEC for copper, tin, coffee, and bananas. We want to help the poor against [likely monopolies]. We need to know if the terms of trade have been moving against primary-product [i.e. products from the earth] exporters. No, they have not. Price comparison has has shown no general tendency for either class of price persistently to rise or fall relative to the other. Claims of deteriorating primary-product prices are based on viewing selective years.
Before we [go ahead and pay higher prices for their exports], let us examine the matter holistically. Let us divide the world into rich and poor people, rather than rich and poor countries. Who owns the source of primary products and the exporting companies and where does the money go? Will the current demand hold up with higher prices? In the case of higher oil prices, the proceeds went largely to people already wealthy. 3rd world countries went into debt, oil-base fertilizers became too expensive for their small farmers. Aid went to only a small number of 3rd world countries, and the aid sent was a tiny fraction of the amounts extracted in higher prices. Governments spent very little on improving rural areas or creating employment. NIEO would result in higher prices being paid to rich people, much of it coming from poor people.
Multinational Corporation (MNC)—Protesters feel MNCs are powerful, something like governments unto themselves, & that their profits are at the expense of poor people throughout the world. I have a hard time being persuaded of the MNCs’ great power. MNCs pay up to 100% higher wages. they provide hospitals, housing, & schools; they pay about 70% taxes on profits. Often foreign-exchange purchases & prices are government-regulated. They may be able to move, [but their fixed assets, the product source, can’t go with them]. If MNCs pay much more in wages than local companies, what happens to the economy, & workers not employed by MNCs? I believe that MNCs shouldn’t even pay the high wages they do pay. MNCs & local urban industries create an urban-rural dualism. It brings machinery & unemployment, one of the 3rd World’s greatest problems. It creates a labor elite that must protect their privileges against less productive, less well-paid outside workers.
Protesters ask, are MNCs not making enormous profits? Do we know what profits they are earning? A Gallup poll taken of US students shows a greatly exaggerated idea of what corporate profits are. A strong anti-business mood on campus goes along with widespread ignorance of the cost and rewards of doing business. US petroleum had high earnings, US manufacturing profits were varying from 8% to 15%.
Most petroleum companies are now nationalized, & the trend of MNCs is away from mineral investment & toward investment in local market manufacturing. MNC profits will likely decline toward the lower percentage, because non-wage costs are higher & prices are kept lower. Why do protesters believe that MNC profits are so high? 2 books stand out as comprehensive treatment of MNCs: Sovereignty at Bay & Global Reach. The 1st manages to follow the rules of research to protect itself from biases. The 2nd has unverifiable anecdotes selectively perceived. Drawing generalizations from anecdotes is the deadliest way to confirm previous opinions instead of investigating them. Another form of selective perception is to read only books saying what we want to hear.
I am not a blanket defender of MNCs, for they commit many offenses that I find repulsive: bribery, and conniving with national governments to deprive indigenous people of their lands in order to produce an export crop. Coca-Cola is a frequent target of protesters. Since Coke has no nutritive value, is it not immoral for the Coca-Cola company to introduce it to already undernourished people in the 3rd World? Who is the judge? 3rd world citizens are quite capable of resisting culture they do not want. They are no more naive in their choices of beverage than are the protesters themselves. The MNC should not be disparaged as a generic form but only as specific MNCs have committed specific wrongs. The wrongs of all types of companies need to be protested against. There is good in MNC; evil is evil no matter who commit it.
Seeking a Moral Way—Holism does 2 things. It views all the ultimate effects of a given action, particularly one that will damage the individual or the economy. It values the economy’s total health as more positive than just a sum of healthy parts. When we examine an economy holistically, let us ask for a 2nd opinion from someone whose way of thinking differs from the 1st. Examine all aspects of the economy. Listen to economists of differing viewpoints. Question where their information came from, & whether it has been selectively perceived, especially information we would like to believe. Selective perception is not confined to economists of any one ideology.
Be aware of decisions which sacrifice one type of consumer for the sake of many “more important” consumers. If only a few refuse to pay war taxes, they may not only respect their own consciences but have an effective voice. If everyone was a conscientious objector, the effects would be less destructive than war. The same isn’t true of boycotting. Social reformers need to consider [the difficult] questions. There is no solution that doesn’t leave a moral dilemma. This shouldn’t prevent us from making moral decisions with dilemmas [& unexpected consequences we can live with].
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450. Money and Soul (by Pamela Haines; 2018)
About the Author—Pamela Haines is a member of Central Philadelphia MM. Her paid work includes childcare leadership development, community building, and organizing for policy change. She is active in Friends Eco-Justice Collaborative, and the Economic Integrity Project. She works with the interfaith group Faith, Ecology, Economy, Transformation. She wrote PHP # 420 Waging Peace: Discipline and Practice. This pamphlet grew out of a plenary talk at Intermountain YM in 2017 titled "Money, Integrity, and Community."
The Soil in Which We Grow—Money can be hard on our souls. It's hard on us to love money, hard to need it. Some early experiences & childhood messages about money from our families have [stayed with us, either incorporated or resisted in our lives]. This is the soil in which we have grown. After working with conscientious objectors, a Quaker friend challenged me to write my own statement of conscience. She realized this was a process we should all engaged in. I asked: To what do I conscientiously object and why? As I sat with this question, it wasn't war that rose to the top: "I believe that a culture of economic materialism damages the soul and damages the fabric of society. It sets up a false god, squanders our resources, threatens our earth, distracts our attention from real issues and needs, and separates us from each other and from our higher selves ... There is something about an economic system based on greed that seems even more evil than war. [Accumulating profit and power] regardless of human cost ... is the greatest evil I know and everything in me ... cries out against it."
What is the soil in which I grew, [the money habits of the people around me]? [My father would watch the pennies of my mother's weekly budget, & we as a family would seek to explain every discrepancy found & brought to my mother on Sunday morning]. It might have been good stewardship or integrity, but it had a negative impact on our family community. As newly convinced Quakers, my parents easily fell into judging others who didn't even measure up to their values. What I remember most were their comments about those who could ill afford such poor choices about luxury items. Their own focus was very much on simplicity & nonmaterial goals, & I found that nourishing; it rang true to me. The community that our Quaker meeting offered was the best gift I got as a child. I realize my childhood experiences around money had a lasting impact on me, in the values that endure, & the mixed messages I still deal with. [In my Quaker youth communities], we were asking big questions about how the world worked & how to do the right thing. [How would I handle my "entitlement to possessions" when they] put me on the wrong side of a struggle about equality and right sharing?
Claiming a Right to the Territory of Economics—My father was an economics teacher. For decades he taught classical economics; he wrote a book called Money & Banking. Gradually he questioned the basic assumptions of his book & his working life. He spent his last decades as an outspoken critic of those assumptions. His thinking [gave me permission] to look around this territory, to notice inconsistencies, to use the language, to ask questions. [Everyone has this right, particularly in economics]. We boldly say "No" to generals & their "expertise," which is based on flawed assumptions & can never get us peace. Yet we meekly say to economists, "Okay. It all seems complicated & you sound as if you know what you're talking about, so we cede that whole [area] to you." Economists' expertise is likewise based on flawed assumptions & can never get us to prosperity.
[Just as Wall Street has been occupied], let us occupy the economy together. Let's start by seeing it as a human system, created by humans to promote human welfare. In the late 1800s, economists introduced irrefutable mathematical equations, eliminating anything that couldn't be measured. (My father called this "physics envy.") Walter Wink believes that institutions, or Powers, are created with the sole purpose of serving the people's welfare; when that stops, their spirituality becomes diseased. [If that is the case, the church needs to] call them back to their original "divine vocation." How has our economic system strayed from its divine vocation? What do we want to call it back to? What is true wealth? How can what we value be increased? What needs to be equal and who decides? Where should control be located? How do you track wellbeing? Robert F. Kennedy said: "The GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, the strength of our marriages ... our wisdom or learning ... It measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile."
Economics Stories—[A Friend's concern about Friends Committee on National Legislation's (FCNL) silence on unrestrained economic growth started a grassroots campaign to empower FCNL to seek] "environ-mentally sustainable economic policies" [from governmental bodies]; it took several years. [A school nurse from Tamaqua, PA joined her local borough council and worked to prevent toxic dumping in nearby abandoned mines. The Community Bill of Rights she proposed claimed that human rights and nature's rights took precedence over property rights. Other municipalities, and even Ecuador followed suit.
In 2014, after a slow, painful recovery from the 2008 recession, Philadelphia YM reported that "If the stock market continues to grow, we can anticipate more reassuring financial statements ..." Our YM was gambling on growth in the stock market. Yet that growth is a driver of economic inequality and environmental destruction. How could we challenge this ["gambling"] economic system with integrity and effectiveness? How can individuals and communities make money decisions with integrity when we are entangled in a system that fundamentally lacks it? [These and other questions] led to the book Toward a Right Relationship with Finance: Interest, Debt, Growth, and Security.
In the 1950s, people paid 91% taxes on income over $250,000 [the 2017 inflation equivalent is $2,300,000]. With Reagan in the late 1970s, those tax rates plummeted to 28%. Our retirement system had changed over time from being Social Security- & pension-based, toward being Individual Retirement Accounts- & financial [speculation]-based. When untaxed gains, government subsidies, high drug industry profits, bloated military spending, & healthcare privatization schemes are taken into account, there are plenty of resources to create greater common economic security. And we have options for financial security that don't depend on receiving interest from investment. Virtually all the money that flows through our economy is created by banks making interest-bearing loans. More money needs to be made in order to pay off debt plus interest; need for growth is baked into the system. Low populations and great untapped resources in the past supported growth, and the costs could go unseen. But it has no future. The 2 major costs of the current expansive system is the strain on the earth's ecosystem, and the growing inequality as lenders getting interest have more and more and debtors have less and less.
Do we have a right to interest income that we haven't earned through our own effort? Does having resources mean we are entitled to them? [What is an equitable way for people with no assets to get some? How should young people's need for resources be handled before they start working?] When does having a debt become having a life of indebtedness? What if my gain in economic security is someone else's loss? What really brings security? "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."
The Testimonies as a Framework to Reflect on Money: Integrity—How do we best manage our money and best navigate the larger economic environment in which we swim? Economic issues pervade the testimonies. [The lack of conscience, increasing consumption and inequality, discarding of marginal folk, alarmingly high rate of resource usage, and the violent byproducts of our exploitive economic system run contrary to our valued testimonies of simplicity, equality, community, good stewardship, and peace.
What rings true? What messages have we taken in throughout our lives that muffle the bell's truth? What keeps us from discerning our institutions' true divine vocations? [How does privilege & inequality interfere with possible friendships]? We don't have to wait for a miracle. We can wait expectantly, & be more attentive to the true moments in our lives. When has a moment rung true to me; what made it right? We can look for our true moment, where they happen, & with whom. We can dig away at the stuff that muffles them. How can we bring an experience of integrity to the economic sphere? We are complicit in the economy as it currently functions, but that doesn't mean we need to be immobilized or silenced. What values do you claim in this area of money and economics? To what do you conscientiously object? To the extent that I am complicit, so much must I reach to connect, face, and grieve.
Simplicity/ Equality—Our current economic and monetary system depends on continuous growth—which breeds inequality and environmental destruction. This requires people to be defined as consumers who are easily swayed by advertisers [to buy more]; people who have lost track of what is enough. When we have easy access to more than we need, how can we tell what is enough? [We haven't worked out how to avoid buying that unnecessary "one more thing" in our lives of "modest" consumption].
I experimented with this concept of enough recently, [using tiny amounts of my favorite foods]. I am getting the same amount of enjoyment out of things that I love simply by putting more attention into enjoying them. Excess weight is easier to see as a problem than excess shoes, stuff or entertainment. [We need to avoid] seeking fulfillment through the getting rather than enjoying, because it will never feel like enough. The path to feeling like we have enough for most of us lies more in our attitude & where our attention goes than in greater consumption. Living out our testimony on simplicity fully is part of calling the economy back to its divine vocation of providing for human welfare on a finite earth.
The unfortunate reality is that our economy naturally and steadily widens class differences, promoting ever-greater inequality. We can begin by taking on personal and community practices around money that tend toward greater equality. We can put our weight behind practices that pull down the accumulation of excessive wealth, and behind finding ways to discourage making money from money without contributing anything to the real economy. We can put our weight behind policies to pull people up out of oppressive debt. We can get our minds around the systemic racism that has been present in asset-building since the Civil War, and have an eye out for policies that level the playing field. The greater scarcity and insecurity the middle-class is experiencing has brought them closer to the poor; yet growing fears lead them to scapegoating the poor for systemic economic problems. We can back efforts to raise the minimum wage and campaigns for a living wage.
Community—How do we, with all our differences in economic means and money assumptions, while remaining in the spirit of simplicity and equality, do money together? Things to avoid: entitlement assumption; class and race blindness; tightfistedness; making judgments that lead to separation. Since our economic system depends on individual greed, the antidote of community is critical to our salvation. [A wide range of community-based enterprises serve as a welcome and] hopeful contrast to the withdrawal of resources from community that comes with financial speculation and global corporate control.
[In the money management field, there are examples of local money-management, like the Bank of North Dakota, which] has done much to keep local resources from being drained out to national & international banks and financial markets. There are also credit unions, where debt and interest stay in the same closed local system. I borrow from neighbors there and my money is used to support my neighbors. If our money is in speculative financial markets, we can screen out a variety of negative investments. Ordinary people can invest locally in com-munity investment funds or specific businesses. Families and religious communities buy up student loans and credit card debt from their members and set up repayment with zero or minimal interest rates. Right Sharing of World Resources was created with the mission of relieving the burdens of poverty and materialism.
Stewardship—Stewardship doesn't have to be about mastery & control, arrogance & separation. If our goal is to protect the resources that sustain us, then we'll certainly have to give up mastery, domination, control, warfare, & subjection. Stewardship implies separateness, whereas we need to reclaim connection with & belonging to the earth. When we can know this truth deep in our bones, the role we can play becomes easier to discern.
I am replacing stewardship with regeneration, supporting the creative process. If we contrast generation & extraction, it's easy to discern an extraction economy. Each resource, work, & financial transaction has a goal of maximum extraction, at the expense of the earth, other living things & ordinary people. The choice between extraction & generation is everywhere. From workers, children, communities, & fun, we can extract great benefit for ourselves, or we can generate benefits for others & ourselves. Generation helps us identify where to build power & the will to challenge our extractive economy. It helps us identify new institutions for building up a generative economy. I'm sure a healthy financial ecosystem would have its resources "meander" & percolate slowly through the local economy, not an efficient stream pouring stuff out of the end, [& out of the local economy].
Peace—I remember the mother of one of my Quaker friends protesting against the pointless air raid drills [conducted in our town as] "protection" against nuclear war; just one woman and one night in jail. The opportunity to protest the Vietnam War as a teenager came as a welcome relief to me. I could see the Peace Testimony as more than just a moral imperative to do a deeply unpopular thing. We could play a significant role in getting the opposition in motion; more and more people joined in. [A tiny Quaker protest against shipping arms to West Pakistan in 1971 was at first turned easily away, but it led to allies among the longshoremen, [a boycott on loading arms], pickets in front of the White House, and suspension of all arms exports to Pakistan.
In the early 1980s, [I invested a lot of time & money in the Jobs with Peace campaign] to pass a referendum asking that more federal funds be made available for local jobs & services by reducing military spending beyond the nation's defensive needs; it passed by a 3:1 margin. Now I could link peace with justice. It didn't have to be an individual moral stand. How much war is fueled by inequality & the demands of a growth economy in a world of increasing scarcity? How much war is fueled by a desire to gain greater control over wealth or productive assets or water? Removing economic injustice drains a lot of conflict. The divine vocation of the economy is to organize our communities to meet our common needs; it is a way of evoking peace.
Conclusion—To be part of reclaiming our economy's divine vocation will require hope, courage & connection. My discipline of hope is a repeated decision to be present to the goodness of reality regardless of compelling reasons for despair. On my blog (www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com), my goal is to have 4 things, spanning global, national, local, & just plain human, which give me hope. Imagining the end of the world more easily than a new economic system is a lethal failure of the imagination. [New realities must be woven from the most insubstantial of threads that few can imagine; those realities must be believed in and acted on.
The courage called for is for facing unprecedented evil, loss and privation, welcoming chaos, reaching beyond our comfort level for connection, speaking truth to power. With a sense of connection and seeking connection, we can see how anxious, [individual] attempts to put things right are rooted in the fear and vulnerability that comes from separation. I ask childcare workers to look at their goals and find one concrete step they can take in the next 10 days; they always find one. There are many steps we can take from where we are standing right now: in our personal lives and families; in our meetings and wider communities, and through lending our weight to social movements and shifts in national priorities.
President George W. Bush urged us to shop after 9/11. I knew this wasn't the right path. My economist-father said the search isn't for an economic theory that works, but for a life-theory that goes beyond current economics. Could our Quaker faith and testimonies incorporate economics fully enough to be that theory of life? Together we get to make the path by walking, and the more of us who walk together, the clearer the path.
Queries—How might Friends approach healing a system that we are all entangled in? What would we have to give up? What has accumulated around our social institutions that keeps us from discerning their true divine vocation? How can we bring an experience of integrity to the economic sphere ? What can Friends do to create a healthy, sustainable, "generative" economy?
39. Christianity & Civilization (Burge Memorial Lecture, 1940, at Oxford; by Arnold J. Toynbee; 1947)
[About the Author]—Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was a British historian, philosopher, author of numerous books and research professor of international history. Toynbee in the 1918–1950 period was a leading specialist on international affairs. He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). With his great volume of papers, articles, speeches and presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was a widely read and discussed scholar in the 1940s and 1950s.
Introduction—In May of 1940, England was facing a crisis which was certainly not less formidable than the one that is confronting her now, in 1947. The crises of peace are in some ways more difficult to wrestle with than those of war; in war everything is simpler and clearer to the public interest at stake. It is as true in 1947 as it was in 1940 that nations like individuals can only be saved by themselves.
The decline of Western Europe might still be as serious for the prospect of civilization as was the decline of Greece in the last century B.C. Our secular life in this world is only a fragment of some larger life of higher spiritual dimensions, and there is no reason for supposing that the spiritual welfare of the kingdom of God is jeopardized by our temporal misfortunes in this world.
We are at grips with something that transcends the limits of human understanding and experience. [Humankind] cannot wait to act until they have attained that fullness of knowledge which is always beyond their reach. Advances in our understanding of [the workings of physical nature do not] appreciably diminish the infinite expanse of our ignorance. [It] has not been accompanied by any corresponding increase in spiritual enlightenment. The universe as we see it through Western eyes is not the true picture of the universe as it is. From the eternal standpoint of God, we may be sure that it is no more than a mirage. We have to shift our attention from the physical nature to the life of the spirit; from the creature to the creator.
[Christianity: Destroyer of Civilization]---The motto of this university [is] Dominus Illuminatio Mea (The Lord is my Light). If the truth about this University is told in those three Latin words, then we know for certain that the light by which we live will not go out. My subject this afternoon is the relation between Christianity and civilization. One of the oldest and most persistent views is that Christianity was the destroyer of the civilization within whose framework it grew. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon’s writes: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” I believe there is a fallacy in this view. I think Gibbon’s initial error lies in supposing that the ancient civilization of the Graeco-Roman world began to decline in [the Age of the Antonines,] the 2nd century after Christ. I think it really began to decline in the 5th Century before Christ [and] it died, not by murder, but by suicide. The philosophies arose [in this decline] because the civic life of that civilization had already destroyed itself by turning itself in to an idol to which men paid an exorbitant worship.
From his peak in the 18th century Gibbon looks back to the Antonine peak in the 2nd Century. That view has been put very clearly by [Sir James Frazer]. It is the formal antithesis of the thesis . . . I want to maintain. He writes: “Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state. . . All this was changed by the spread of Oriental religions which [instilled] the communion [and salvation] of the soul with God as the only objects worth living for. Thus the center of gravity was shifted from the present to a future life . . . a general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages [1,000 years later], marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and conduct, to saner manlier views of the world [and an ebbing of the tide of the Oriental invasion].” I would agree with Frazer that the tide of Christianity has been ebbing and that our post-Christian Western secular civilization . . . is of the same order as the Pre-Christian Graeco-Roman civilization.
[Christianity: Transitioning of Civilization]---A 2nd possible view [is that] Christianity is a transitional thing which bridges the gap between one civilization & another. After an interval [of decline of over 700 years] you find in 9th Century Byzantium & the 13th Century West . . . a new secular civilization arising out of the ruins of its Graeco-Roman predecessor. [When you] take other higher religions which are still living on in the world of today . . . you can see Islam's role as a chrysalis between ancient Israel & Iran & the modern Islamic civilization of the Near & Middle East. Hinduism seems to bridge a gap . . . between modern Hindu culture & the ancient culture of the Aryas; Buddhism seems to play the same part as a mediator between the modern history of the Far East & the history of ancient China.
If you look at the histories of the ancient civilization of South-Western Asia and Egypt, you find there a rudimentary higher religion in the form of the worship of a god and a related goddess. I think you can see that this rudimentary higher religion . . . played the historical role of filling a gap where there was a break in the continuity of secular civilization. However . . . this apparent “law” does not always hold good. Between the Minoan and Graeco civilizations you do not find any higher religion corresponding to Christianity. If you go back behind the ancient civilization of Aryan India, your find a still more ancient pre Aryan civilization in the Indus Valley . . . but you do not seem to find any higher religion intervening between the two. It is between [the more recent] civilizations . . . that the intervention of a higher religion seems to be the rule.
[Christianity: Transcendence or Repetition of Civilization]---A 3rd possible view of the relation between civilizations & higher religion [is that] breakdowns & disintegrations of civilizations [& the resulting suffering] might be stepping-stones to higher things on the religious plane. The Christian Church has Jewish & Zoroastrian roots; those roots sprang from an earlier breakdown of a Syrian civilization. [Abraham & Moses] were Christ's precursors; the sufferings through which they won their enlightenment were Stations of the Cross in anticipation of the Crucifixion. Religion's continuous upward movement may be served & promoted by civilizations' cyclic movement around the cycle of birth—death—birth.
Our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at best be a superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one. We have obviously, for a number of generations past, been living on spiritual capital, I mean clinging to Christian practice without possessing the Christian belief—and practice unsupported by belief is a wasting asset.
Our present view of modern history focuses attention on the rise of our modern Western secular civilization as the latest great new event in world. If we can bring ourselves to think of it as one of the vain repetitions of the Gentiles, then the greatest new event . . . will still be the Crucifixion and its spiritual consequences. On the old-fashioned time scale [where] creation of the world [took] place not more than 6,000 years, 1,900 years seems a long period of time. [On the longer geological time-scale] it is a very recent event.
[Christianity, Roman Empire, & Kingdom of Heaven]---At its 1st appearance Christianity was provided by the Graeco-Roman civilization with a universal state in the shape of the Roman Empire, [which aided] Christianity’s spread around the shores of the Mediterranean. Our modern Western secular civilization may serve its historical purpose by providing Christianity with a worldwide repetition of the Roman Empire. Just as Clement’s and Origen’s work infused Greek philosophy into Christianity at Alexandria . . . so the present religions of India and the form of Buddhism practiced in the Far East may contribute new elements to be grafted onto Christianity in days to come. And if it is civilization that is the means and religion that is the end . . . then Christianity may be expected not only to endure [the end of West civilization], but to grow in wisdom and stature as the result of a fresh experience of secular catastrophe.
What is the relation of the Christian Church to the Kingdom of Heaven? As the primitive species of societies has given place to civilizations . . . local & ephemeral [civilizations] may perhaps give place in their turn to a single worldwide & enduring representative in the shape of the Christian Church. If this were to happen, would it mean the Kingdom of Heaven would then have been established on Earth? Unless & until human nature itself undergoes a moral mutation which would make an essential change in its character, the possibility of evil as well as good will be born into the world afresh with every child. Human society on Earth won't be able wholly to dispense with institutions [from which comes the binding power of] partly habit & partly force.
The institutional element has historically been dominant in the Church herself. The Church in traditional form stands forth armed with the Mass' spear, the Hierarchy's shield of the & the Papacy's helmet. I think that the institutions created, or adopted & adapted, by Christianity are the toughest & most enduring of any that we know & are therefore the most likely to last. The institutional element in traditional Catholics, however necessary it is to survival, [is of earthly origin] & keeps it forever [earthbound &] different from the Kingdom of Heaven.
[Christianity & Progress]---The last topic I am going to touch [is] that of the relation between Christianity and progress. Religious progress means spiritual progress, and spirit mean personality; religious progress must take place in the spiritual lives of individual personalities. Are higher religions essentially and incurably anti-social? Are spiritual and social values antithetical and inimical to each other?
The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological way of expressing the revelation that God is a spirit; the doctrine of the Redemption is the theological way of expressing the revelation that God is Love. Seeking God is a social act The human soul that is truly seeking to save itself is as fully social a being as the ant-like Spartan or the bee-like Communist. The Christian soul is a citizen of the Kingdom of God, and therefore the paramount aim is communion with, and likeness to God.
Relations with fellow humans are consequences of, and corollaries to, one’s relations with God. The social aims of mundane societies will be achieved much more successfully [in the Church Militant] than they ever have been or can be in a mundane society that aims at these objects direct, and at nothing higher. The aim and test of progress under a truly Christian dispensation on Earth would be the spiritual life of individual souls in their passages through this earthly life from birth into this world to death out of it.
Until this Earth ceases to be physically habitable by Man, we may expect that the endowments of individual human beings with original sin & with natural goodness will be about the same as they have always been. The matter in which there might be spiritual progress [in the long-term] is the opportunity open to souls, for getting into closer communion with God, & becoming less unlike God, during their passage through This World.
What Christ has bequeathed to the Church and what the Church has preserved for generations is a growing fund of revelation [illumination] as to the true nature of God and the true end of humankind here and hereafter, and the inspiration [grace] to aim at getting into closer communion with God. Is the spiritual opportunity given by Christianity an indispensable condition for salvation? If this were so, then innumerable generations of humans would have been born and have died without a chance of the salvation which is the true end of humans and the true purpose of life on Earth.
[Christianity & Human Soul]---The hypothesis that individual human souls existed for the sake of society, and not for their own sakes or for God’s is repugnant and inconceivable when we are dealing with the history of religion, where the progress of individual souls towards God and not the progress of society is the end on which the supreme value is set. We must believe that the possibilities of learning through suffering in This World have always afforded a sufficient means of salvation to every soul that has made the best of the spiritual opportunity offered to it here.
A soul which has been offered, and has [accepted] the illumination and the grace that Christianity conveys will be more brightly irradiated with the light of the Other World than a pagan soul that has won salvation by making the best of the narrower opportunity here open to it. The Christian soul can attain, while still on Earth, a greater measure of humankind’s greatest good than can be attained by any pagan soul in the earthly stage of its existence. It is individual spiritual progress in This Word for which we pray when we say “Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” It is for the salvation that is open to all men of good will—pagan and Christian—who make the most of their spiritual opportunities on Earth that we pray when we say “Thy Kingdom come.”
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43. Standards of Success (by Teresina Rowell Havens; 1948)
[About the Author]—Teresina Rowell was born in 1909. She graduated from Smith College in 1929. After extensive travel and studies abroad in comparative religions, she returned to the US, studied and received a Ph.D in comparative religion from Yale. She taught the subject at many different colleges throughout the country. She began her association with Pendle Hill in 1940, and became a Quaker the same year. In 1942 they set up a work and prayer commune in nearby Chester, PA., where she met and married Joseph Havens in 1947. In 1972 they started Temenos, a spiritual retreat in Shutesbury, MA. She died in 1992.]
INTRODUCTION—The dominant system of values of the culture-pattern as a whole dictates [who is] considered a success; [anyone outside that pattern] is regarded as a failure. In our society, most people try to succeed according to the conventional pattern. Some have begun to suspect the hollowness & unsatisfying nature of the goals they pursue. Others of our generation, [seeing] other cultures, have been forced to recognize that the contemporary industrial world’s standards aren't the only ones by which to judge the worth of a man’s life; young people no longer know what standard to follow. [This study is] undertaken in the hope that an understanding of other religions’ & cultures’ standards of success may stimulate us to reassess & reformulate our own.
PART ONE—CHALLENGE:
1. HISTORY CHALLENGES THE WEALTHY: ISRAEL AND CHINA—The prophets of both ancient Palestine and ancient China proclaimed fearlessly their conviction that God’s standards are the opposite of man’s. They declared forthrightly that God will bring to naught those who achieve worldly success. Are there many modern prophets who tell businessmen in an attractive suburb that God despises their mansions and will destroy them? The worldly success of the few, likely at the expense of the many, is likely to mean failure as judged by the welfare of the many. [Jer. 22:13; Amos 6:1-6; Is. 29:10-11 and Tao Te Ching cited]. Besides being a sin against brotherhood, the amassing of wealth at the expense of the poor blinds even the religionists so that they can no longer see the truth. Equally disastrous is the pride which almost inevitably infects the outwardly successful. [Is.2:12, 17; Is 23:9 and Tao Te Ching cited].
Chinese & Hebrew thinkers came to almost identical conclusion as to what true success is: it is precisely the opposite of what the world admires. As the Hebrew people experienced suffering & defeat, it was only this view which enabled them to face & transfigure their fate. It was a realization that redemption can come through the despised, the rejected; worldly “failure” may be more creative than apparent “success.” [Is. 53: 3,5,12 cited].
The identification of “redemptive failure” with the criminal class is very significant. The one who suffers & bears punishment may make the greatest contribution in a spiritual sense. The respectable man at the top of society shares in the criminal’s guilt. The vitality of this principle, [also to be found in the Cross], has been dis-covered by conscientious objectors who went to prison rather than acquiesce in conscription. They see with new clarity how we all share the guilt of each one of us; they issue to our conventional society a challenge.
2. DEATH’S CHALLENGE TO WEALTH: INDIA AND THE BUDDHA—In Vedic times the people of India, like their fellow human beings elsewhere, [and including religious teachers], desired long life, offspring, and cattle; [success was measured by these things]. By 500 B.C. some of India’s thinkers began to realize that these goods do not last. There is a Death dialog in the Katha Upanishad and the Brihad Aranyaha Upanishad. The immemorial question of India is: “What should I do with that by which I do not become deathless?” Poverty, asceticism, celibacy, pilgrimage mark the road, but the test of success is: Have you found God and realized the oneness of your soul with Cosmic Reality?
Gotama, later known as the Buddha inherited this ultimate aim, and made it more dynamic and psychological. [After admitting that extreme asceticism was working], he remembered how once he had transcended sense-pleasures and wrong states of mind; an experience of rapt contemplation had come to him spontaneously. Only if it leads to inward growth may a brother judge that his outward manner of living is successful. Wealth is not thought of as evil in itself, simply a hindrance, a distraction. It is no “sacrifice” for the monk to renounce possessions, but a privilege, a way to freedom. The criterion is in terms of attitudes, not garments: “The Almsman who … has put greed from him … who …has put malice from him … who … has put wrong outlooks from him—of such an Almsman I say that he succeeds in treading the recluse’s path of duty.”
The true test comes when the brother is attacked. The Buddha wasn't afraid to use the language of success & failure. He was careful to warn the brothers against premature self-satisfaction. This wise spiritual counselor warns his disciples against the temptation to think themselves superior because of apparent success in their pilgrimage, [& perhaps fail because he stops growing]. In the little dialog entitled “In Gosinga Wood,” the Buddha poses “queries” to 3 brothers like: “Do you live together in concord and amity, harmony and unison, viewing one another with eyes of affection? The dialog concludes with a statement of how the achievement of the 3 young men will benefit their family and clan and indeed the whole world, by showing men what they should aim at in life. This became the Buddha’s own greatest contribution to humankind. Thus the Buddha, like the Christ, becomes for his devotees the supreme Standard of success. [Luke 12:16-21; Matt. 19:24; Luke 9:24-25 cited].
3. HOLY POVERTY AS CHALLENGE & CRITERION OF SUCCESS—From time to time there have arisen dynamic bands of men & women who have felt solidarity with the poor & exploited as keenly as the Hebrew prophets, & have at the same time renounced the world in their quest for God. They challenge sharply the common notions of success as consisting in rising “above” other men. The Franciscans called themselves “Minores” to express their identification with artisans & peasants. Gandhi wore homespun & did the scavenger work of untouchables. Japanese Itto-en members wear the workmen’s rough uniforms. With their rejection of everything which doesn’t lead to the “World of Light,” they lead others to question the value of secondary goods.
Most saints of both East and West have regarded the intellect with suspicion. Tenko San of Itto-en wrote: “I happened to be an uneducated man, and could conceive nothing for the way but to count my own errors and defects, so I came to establish this life of resolute repentance, prostrated before “The Light.” These challengers exemplify at its highest the power of religion to change man’s desires. They free others from the desires, the pride and the fear which usually drive men to pile up wealth. By their own inner peace and freedom from harassing fear, these blithe apostles of poverty exemplify a fulfillment of life which the ordinary man longs for but does not believe possible. [Luke 18:22; Matt. 6:19-21; 31-33; Luke 22:26-27 cited].
PART TWO: NORMS FOR THE LAYMAN
EVEN-MINDED IN SUCCESS AND FAILURE: HINDUISM—What is to be the standard of success for most men and women? The wise old religions have provided a clear and explicit answer. [Success for layfolk] lies in performing ones function as conscientiously as possible, in a spirit of detachment and a composed mind. The Hindu layperson was faced with 2 contradictory ideals: withdrawal from action in the outer world; obligations of his inherited caste duty. [For the Hindu peasant], the social system is not a ladder but a web, within which each finds his interdependent part. [They ask questions like]: “Have I fulfilled the potential of my particular state? Have I dedicated all my work to God? To those who think in terms of inward realization, one’s position in the web is not the crucial matter. Perform the caste-duty to which you were born, but offer it to God with the detachment and devotion of the monk, unperturbed by failure or success.
Early in her religious quest India’s God-seekers began to realize the transiency of worldly aims. True success lay in detachment from all desire for attaining them. Time and history are but projections and “progress” a child’s dream. Hindus regard joy & sorrow, praise & blame, beauty and squalor, as revelations of one ultimate Reality. The absolute is beyond all duality, beyond all distinctions, embracing everything without exception.
Why then, should one work at all, if all things, even seeming “good” and “evil,” are the same? Man should work as God works, not to gain any particular end, but to hold the world together [Bhagavad Gita cited]. The Hindu imagination has created the symbol of the Dance of Shiva. Shiva, personifying the cosmic divine energy under its destructive aspect, dances the evolution and decay of countless worlds through immeasurable aeons. But his inmost essence remains unshaken [Bhagvad Gita cited]. True success from this superhuman standpoint is to act as God does in his cosmic dance.
5. WHAT IS TRUE MAN?: CONFUCIANISM—Confucianism is pre-eminent among the world’s religions as a lay religion; it has no place for monks. Your 1st aim in life is to be the best possible in your chosen role, more important than money, fame, [or power]. This standard of success was so high that Confucius felt he hadn't been able to live up to it himself. The Confucian principle approximates the Golden Rule as a standard of behavior [which has widespread effect from one man & his family, extending to the whole country].
Only if government leaders lead the people to inner self-government [as in the ideal family] can they be successful. Confidence in the basic goodness of the cosmic order, and of man’s nature as a reflection thereof, is another assumption which leads Chinese thinkers to emphasize immediate relationships. A good Confucianist could never consider himself as “successful” if he achieved large-scale “results ”at the expense of his family or neighborhood relationships. Both Hindu and Chinese agree that a person’s essential integrity of spirit is a more important criterion of the ultimate success of his life than what he accomplishes outwardly. The Hindu principle is stated in mystical and theistic terms; the Chinese is more humanistic and social. By the integrity of his own life and character Confucius exemplified for all later ages a compelling standard of what a “true man” can be.
6. BEAUTY AND EVANESCENCE (fading away): JAPAN—From India and China the standards we have just considered found their way across mountain and ocean to the Land of the Rising Sun, where they have helped mold the lives and ideals of countless generations of Japanese children. Before Indian and Chinese influences, the primitive Nipponese as artists probably had no conscious standard of achievement, but intuitively found their lives most worth living, when they felt themselves one with the cherry-blossoms and red maples.
[Rather than being supplanted by outside influence, their intuitive lives] were given deeper meaning. Love of form & politeness was given a cosmic rationale by the Confucian philosophy of ceremony & propriety. The poignancy of quickly-passing things was given a metaphysical foundation by Buddhist teaching (Nō play Kantan cited]. The Buddhist ideal of inner awakening came to Japan in the form of lay-Buddhism known as Mahayana. The ideal of enlightenment in the midst of the world rather than in separation from it, has governed the lives of [all classes & walks of life in Japan]. The feudal & Buddhist standards of success coalesced in Bushi-do.
Through the “Tea Ceremony,” the “Sacrament of Tea,” even factory girls in contemporary Japan are trained in a standard of frugality, cleanliness, order and appreciation of beauty in plain and natural things. Figures like the wandering poet Basho (1644-1694) exemplify for successive generations of Japanese a standard of success which cares nothing for money and is able to find Enlightenment through communion with the smallest revelation in nature. During this same period Confucian ideals came more to the fore, fostered by the Tokugawa officials as a means of keeping the various social classes satisfied with their static position in the social scale.
In the latter years of Tokugawa rule a somewhat different type of Confucian popular teacher developed, exemplified by Ninomaya Sontoku. His life of frugality and complete sincerity enabled him to revive both the people’s and their economic life in many villages which he reformed. Speeches like the following were made about his life: “… The job which was given me was charcoal-making. When I thought of 50 years of doing this, I began to hate my job. My 68 year-old grandmother said to me: ‘…What will be the fate of Nagano Prefecture if all the people become Prefectural Governor?’ What a fool I had been to think like this and neglect my valuable work. When I thus found my real self, I abandoned my mistaken ideas, and began to work hard making charcoal. [I] am a useful member of the State as long as [I] am earnest in doing my work.”
For 100's of years ordinary Japanese have been trained to fulfill traditional patterns rather than “express himself.” Typical Japanese were trained how to behave in certain circumstances; it failed to help them develop dynamic standards for new situations. The Japanese will have to learn to think for themselves, [to synthesize a new civilization standard; they aren’t alone in having to adjust to conflicting values of a competitive age].
7. PROTESTANTISM AND AMERICAN STANDARDS OF SUCCESS—In India, China, and Japan, the standard of success even for the layman has been essentially an inward one, based on the same ultimate assumptions of value as those held up for saint, monk, or sage. In Medieval Europe, the other-worldly aims of monk and friar were expected to be the ultimate aims of the layman, though realized through sacraments, pilgrimage and minor penance. When monasticism was abolished, the layman would no longer know what his own aim in life should be; he would more easily turn to this-worldly goals.
Luther and Calvin tried to avoid this development, by sanctifying the ordinary man’s calling, expecting him to be as fully, daily devoted to God in his work as the monk was at his meditations. But forces stronger Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines were at work in the western world, undermining the whole religious framework of daily life and with it the Middle Ages standards of success. As Lewis Mumford put it: “The 7 deadly sins became the 7 cardinal virtues”; it was a completely reversed standard. Calvinism contributed to the dishonoring of poverty by its doctrine that worldly success in one’s calling was a proof of election.
The dominant “makers” of the New World were heirs to this world view, which was supplemented by: absence of alternative standards; apparently limitless physical potentialities; the necessities of mass-production. There was no established church or the prestige of birth to base a standard on. The frontier produced a new kind of [“rags- to-riches”] hero, the opposite of religion’s rich man voluntarily becoming poor. The price of this new hero’s “successes” came high, & is still being paid by the American people in forest depletion, soil, & subsoil resources. Success was judged in terms of size & number; without realizing it, the salesman [applies the same size & number standard to the church minister’s success or failure]. How are we to free ourselves from the subtle influence of this [size/number] standard, which continues to affect our unconscious judgment of our own worth? And the mechanistic science of the 19th century continues to influence us more than we realize, & probably contributes to our faith in statistical surveys & numerical criteria of achievement, even in education.
PART THREE:
NEW CRITERIA OF SUCCESS—[Can our modern culture find mental or physical health, creativity, and holiness without some criterion of success deeper than outward action alone? Those seeking a solution to this problem approach it] from different angles. All imply the need to measure success in terms of understanding, sensitivity, and inward growth. [Seeking only outward achievement leaves one with re-pressed sides of one’s nature, which exact revenge for repression with heart disease, stomach ulcers, & neurosis].
Depth psychologists are convinced that we must learn to release the undeveloped sides of our nature into creative expression, if we would avoid mental catastrophe. Lewis Mumford maintains that the “deliberate amateur” is more successful as a person than the efficient executive or one-sided professional who has no leisure. Many artists and writers are contributing to our search for new criteria. Artists are driven by inner necessity to resist any pressure to “succeed” in terms of financial security. The path to creative expression cannot open until one stops “doing” long enough to pay attention to what is happening within.
[Our meager American culture] reflects our failure to believe in the reality and importance of the life of imagination and feeling. For those who can no long act, action cannot be criterion of their success. Failure may be more important for one’s spiritual growth than “success,” provided one learns through it. If crises and failure force us to re-examine our norms of success they will not have been wasted. The despised things may come indeed to confound the things which have been mighty, both in our civilization and within ourselves.
http://www.pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets
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46. The Faith of an Ex-agnostic (by Carol R. Murphy; 1948)
[About the Author]—She was born in Boston, Mass., Dec. 1916 (died 1994). After a childhood of home schooling in rural Massachusetts, the family moved to the Philadelphia area; Carol attended Quaker schools. In 1928 the family became convinced Friends. She graduated Swarthmore Class of 1937 & earned an M.A. in International Affairs at American University in 1941. She began her association with Pendle Hill in 1947. This pamphlet is the 1st of 17 that she was to write, & is the results of a search for a meaningful philosophy of religion, involving the failure of science, the nature of God, commitment, & redemption.
FOREWORD—My philosophy isn't so much the record as the result & rationalization of an inward change which touched depths of personality unplumbed by conscious reasoning. [I needed a credible philosophy for a belief in God]. I had to restate religious ideas before I could return to traditional Christian language. I hope this philosophical essay may help troubled seekers to a view of the nature of things that will encourage their seeking.
It was not logic that carried me on … It was the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years and I find my mind in a new place. The whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. John H. Newman
CHAPTER I: Failure of Science as Saviour—[When we read of technology trying to outdo the German war machine, we know] all’s not right with the world. We are frightened [of overwhelming mass-production], psychologists’ revelation of our darker side, and the genie of nuclear energy. In this sad morning-after of our civilization, what shall we do? What are the characteristics, vital or lethal of our Western culture?
Lewis Mumford says that the dogma of the religion of ultilitarianism “is the dogma of increasing wants.” Thus science served appetite under the guidance of reason. Science, in conquering Nature for reason has imposed too great a burden of power on reason. We [once] thought that nature could do us no harm when tamed to our purposes. But nature is, Emily Dickinson said, “docile and omnipotent,”—and dangerous as well. Henry Adams saw that “our power is always running ahead of our mind.” We have pursued knowledge so hotly that we have almost forgotten that knowledge has its moral requirements, that knowing depends upon being.
How long will scientific integrity last in this struggle for power fought with armies of ex-Nazi scientists? The bent of our minds is away from ultimate values which men must serve, which are ends not means, & their own excuse for being, [like Truth]. Science as a whole doesn't contemplate Reality as does the artist or the lover or the worshiper, for its own sake. We have to do something with our knowledge. The world has forgotten the importance of being. Being itself is doing: a beautiful personality has a radiant energy cast on all around. How shall we persuade humankind to concentrate on inner growth? The motive for self-improvement must be something more than self. Altruism is the principle that will save us; perhaps morality can save us.
CHAPTER II: Failure of Simple Morality as Saviour—There are number of ways of explaining—or explaining away—human morality and the moral consciousness. It is obvious that human conceptions of moral conduct have evolved, but this does not mean that there is no eternal truth which men increasingly perceive. The commands of logical, mathematical, and moral necessity come to us with the same magisterial grandeur, and none are the invention of a society at times morally more obtuse than its best members.
Can an unexamined morality long remain the motive power of human effort? To make certain of the ultimate consequences of one’s act is to become paralyzed with conscientiousness. If non-resistance means the victory of a military conqueror, how far away will eventual deliverance be, and how responsible is the non-resister for the intervening years of rapine? All morality needs some further supplement, some more fundamental ground than anxious calculation to give men the courage for action.
Another failing of secular morality is that it looks to the outward act rather than the inward man, from whom the impulse to act must proceed. Lawrence Hyde wrote: [The reformer] alternates between the dangerous excitement of working for an abstract aim, and the depression awakened in him through contemplating the features of a world which appears more ugly and sordid to him than it does to others.
While sense-of-duty has some motive-power, it is notorious that to the average man joy is divorced from duty; sin is fun, and morality is usually drudgery. How are we going to put some pep into virtue? The reasons why secular morality fails as a motive-power are that such morality is not clearly integrated with cosmic reality; there is no assurance of cosmic backing. Humans, being rational animals, want to know the meaning of the cosmos of which they are a part, so they can work with the grain and not against it.
Our enthusiasm for others beyond our immediate circle of friends must be reinforced by a common bond of likeness, or a common task which draws us together. Why should we love humankind? Are we worth it? What are we, anyway? We need faith in our ideals, in the universe, and in ourselves; to obtain that we must look beyond morality itself.
CHAPTER III: Beyond Morality—There are 2 ways of looking at the cosmos in which we live, move, and have our being. One is naturalistic and the other religious. Naturalism’s goal of moral effort is human happiness; whatever ministers to this is of value. Happiness, once discovered and analyzed, might still be the goal of rational morality. It is fairly obvious that what is sought is a quality of happiness; it is the quality, not the happiness, which is the distinguishing factor. Naturalism is in a dilemma. As long as it conceives values to be the products of natural desires, it can explain them naturally but this conception of values is inadequate.
The naturalistic view of humans wavers between cynical materialism & starry-eyed humanism. The true view of humans will be one in which mercy & truth are met together; a view expressed in terms of present conditions & growth, actuality & potentiality, humility & hope. Religion seems to provide the life & power that makes moral perfection possible. Thomas Kelly says: “It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busyness for the Kingdom of God … The mark of the simplified life is radiant joy. Knowing fully the complexity of men’s problems it cuts through to God's Love & ever cleaves to God.” Religion can and does bring powerful aid to the moral struggle. Its answer to the moral difficulties is that the motive power behind the categorical imperative is love; the supreme objective of devotion is Perfect Love. The moving principle of the cosmos is also redemptive in nature. Love is its own reward; it brings altruism naturally.
To submit one’s moral independence to another is to bow down before an idol. Nor is a good cause adequate for devotion, [for a cause is concern for the welfare of human beings; it is hard to become devoted to humans en masse]. The religious person gives devotion to the divine reality which is conceived to be an end in itself; unlike a human personality, it is worthy of moral obedience. The love given it enriches rather than displaces love for humanity. All love adds meaning to life; it is not surprising that the religious life becomes totally meaningful. The great religions have had faith in a creative element, a redemptive principle, a Way, Truth and Life which releases humans from the wheel of life, or forgives their trespasses, giving humans the assurance that they need not be limited by their past misdeeds, but can grow into blessedness. The Buddhist Suttas declare “the truth [to be] lovely in its origin, lovely in its progress, and lovely in its consummation.”
CHAPTER IV: Basic Philosophical Considerations—We must ask: Is religion true as well as useful? Is the universe basically good, bad, or indifferent? Is it a divine creation or not? We cannot prove any final conclusion we may reach. From [our] partial experience of the universe we try to draw conclusions as to the nature of the whole. Meaning differs in the light of different presuppositions. We must beware not only of bias, but of hasty theorizing. A waiting attitude is especially important in studying the many aspects of humans’ dim perceptions of cosmic and religious realities. It is best to accept all the diverse aspects in their variety, no matter how paradoxical they may seem, as functions of an organic whole.
We cannot be resigned to imprisonment in our own minds. [So we have] the common sense, if paradoxical, feeling that we have both mental activity and direct contact with reality. Mind and things interpenetrate, interact, in functional, organic relationship. It has often been supposed that rational concepts and universal qualities belong to an eternal “realm of essence,” independent both of mind and temporal existence. Surely qualities are not invented or imagined, but found in functional relation to existing things. Until our ideals are realized, they appear to be only in our minds, and a gulf again threatens to open between mind and world. Are ideals separated from reality, or are they real and acting on reality? The ideal must be a possibility in the material; the purposer must be able to say, “It can be done.” Bearing in mind both the norm and the need for change is the creative attitude and when applied to all it is creative love. We ask, What growth or purpose is responsible for all this? How was it possible? What is the meaning of meaning?
Depth psychologists are convinced that we must learn to release the undeveloped sides of our nature into creative expression, if we would avoid mental catastrophe. Lewis Mumford maintains that the “deliberate amateur” is more successful as a person than the efficient executive or one-sided professional who has no leisure. Many artists and writers are contributing to our search for new criteria. Artists are driven by inner necessity to resist any pressure to “succeed” in terms of financial security. The path to creative expression cannot open until one stops “doing” long enough to pay attention to what is happening within.
[Our meager American culture] reflects our failure to believe in the reality and importance of the life of imagination and feeling. For those who can no long act, action cannot be criterion of their success. Failure may be more important for one’s spiritual growth than “success,” provided one learns through it. If crises and failure force us to re-examine our norms of success they will not have been wasted. The despised things may come indeed to confound the things which have been mighty, both in our civilization and within ourselves.
http://www.pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets
www.facebook.com/pendlehill?fref=ts
46. The Faith of an Ex-agnostic (by Carol R. Murphy; 1948)
[About the Author]—She was born in Boston, Mass., Dec. 1916 (died 1994). After a childhood of home schooling in rural Massachusetts, the family moved to the Philadelphia area; Carol attended Quaker schools. In 1928 the family became convinced Friends. She graduated Swarthmore Class of 1937 & earned an M.A. in International Affairs at American University in 1941. She began her association with Pendle Hill in 1947. This pamphlet is the 1st of 17 that she was to write, & is the results of a search for a meaningful philosophy of religion, involving the failure of science, the nature of God, commitment, & redemption.
FOREWORD—My philosophy isn't so much the record as the result & rationalization of an inward change which touched depths of personality unplumbed by conscious reasoning. [I needed a credible philosophy for a belief in God]. I had to restate religious ideas before I could return to traditional Christian language. I hope this philosophical essay may help troubled seekers to a view of the nature of things that will encourage their seeking.
It was not logic that carried me on … It was the concrete being that reasons; pass a number of years and I find my mind in a new place. The whole man moves; paper logic is but the record of it. John H. Newman
CHAPTER I: Failure of Science as Saviour—[When we read of technology trying to outdo the German war machine, we know] all’s not right with the world. We are frightened [of overwhelming mass-production], psychologists’ revelation of our darker side, and the genie of nuclear energy. In this sad morning-after of our civilization, what shall we do? What are the characteristics, vital or lethal of our Western culture?
Lewis Mumford says that the dogma of the religion of ultilitarianism “is the dogma of increasing wants.” Thus science served appetite under the guidance of reason. Science, in conquering Nature for reason has imposed too great a burden of power on reason. We [once] thought that nature could do us no harm when tamed to our purposes. But nature is, Emily Dickinson said, “docile and omnipotent,”—and dangerous as well. Henry Adams saw that “our power is always running ahead of our mind.” We have pursued knowledge so hotly that we have almost forgotten that knowledge has its moral requirements, that knowing depends upon being.
How long will scientific integrity last in this struggle for power fought with armies of ex-Nazi scientists? The bent of our minds is away from ultimate values which men must serve, which are ends not means, & their own excuse for being, [like Truth]. Science as a whole doesn't contemplate Reality as does the artist or the lover or the worshiper, for its own sake. We have to do something with our knowledge. The world has forgotten the importance of being. Being itself is doing: a beautiful personality has a radiant energy cast on all around. How shall we persuade humankind to concentrate on inner growth? The motive for self-improvement must be something more than self. Altruism is the principle that will save us; perhaps morality can save us.
CHAPTER II: Failure of Simple Morality as Saviour—There are number of ways of explaining—or explaining away—human morality and the moral consciousness. It is obvious that human conceptions of moral conduct have evolved, but this does not mean that there is no eternal truth which men increasingly perceive. The commands of logical, mathematical, and moral necessity come to us with the same magisterial grandeur, and none are the invention of a society at times morally more obtuse than its best members.
Can an unexamined morality long remain the motive power of human effort? To make certain of the ultimate consequences of one’s act is to become paralyzed with conscientiousness. If non-resistance means the victory of a military conqueror, how far away will eventual deliverance be, and how responsible is the non-resister for the intervening years of rapine? All morality needs some further supplement, some more fundamental ground than anxious calculation to give men the courage for action.
Another failing of secular morality is that it looks to the outward act rather than the inward man, from whom the impulse to act must proceed. Lawrence Hyde wrote: [The reformer] alternates between the dangerous excitement of working for an abstract aim, and the depression awakened in him through contemplating the features of a world which appears more ugly and sordid to him than it does to others.
While sense-of-duty has some motive-power, it is notorious that to the average man joy is divorced from duty; sin is fun, and morality is usually drudgery. How are we going to put some pep into virtue? The reasons why secular morality fails as a motive-power are that such morality is not clearly integrated with cosmic reality; there is no assurance of cosmic backing. Humans, being rational animals, want to know the meaning of the cosmos of which they are a part, so they can work with the grain and not against it.
Our enthusiasm for others beyond our immediate circle of friends must be reinforced by a common bond of likeness, or a common task which draws us together. Why should we love humankind? Are we worth it? What are we, anyway? We need faith in our ideals, in the universe, and in ourselves; to obtain that we must look beyond morality itself.
CHAPTER III: Beyond Morality—There are 2 ways of looking at the cosmos in which we live, move, and have our being. One is naturalistic and the other religious. Naturalism’s goal of moral effort is human happiness; whatever ministers to this is of value. Happiness, once discovered and analyzed, might still be the goal of rational morality. It is fairly obvious that what is sought is a quality of happiness; it is the quality, not the happiness, which is the distinguishing factor. Naturalism is in a dilemma. As long as it conceives values to be the products of natural desires, it can explain them naturally but this conception of values is inadequate.
The naturalistic view of humans wavers between cynical materialism & starry-eyed humanism. The true view of humans will be one in which mercy & truth are met together; a view expressed in terms of present conditions & growth, actuality & potentiality, humility & hope. Religion seems to provide the life & power that makes moral perfection possible. Thomas Kelly says: “It is the beginning of spiritual maturity, which comes after the awkward age of religious busyness for the Kingdom of God … The mark of the simplified life is radiant joy. Knowing fully the complexity of men’s problems it cuts through to God's Love & ever cleaves to God.” Religion can and does bring powerful aid to the moral struggle. Its answer to the moral difficulties is that the motive power behind the categorical imperative is love; the supreme objective of devotion is Perfect Love. The moving principle of the cosmos is also redemptive in nature. Love is its own reward; it brings altruism naturally.
To submit one’s moral independence to another is to bow down before an idol. Nor is a good cause adequate for devotion, [for a cause is concern for the welfare of human beings; it is hard to become devoted to humans en masse]. The religious person gives devotion to the divine reality which is conceived to be an end in itself; unlike a human personality, it is worthy of moral obedience. The love given it enriches rather than displaces love for humanity. All love adds meaning to life; it is not surprising that the religious life becomes totally meaningful. The great religions have had faith in a creative element, a redemptive principle, a Way, Truth and Life which releases humans from the wheel of life, or forgives their trespasses, giving humans the assurance that they need not be limited by their past misdeeds, but can grow into blessedness. The Buddhist Suttas declare “the truth [to be] lovely in its origin, lovely in its progress, and lovely in its consummation.”
CHAPTER IV: Basic Philosophical Considerations—We must ask: Is religion true as well as useful? Is the universe basically good, bad, or indifferent? Is it a divine creation or not? We cannot prove any final conclusion we may reach. From [our] partial experience of the universe we try to draw conclusions as to the nature of the whole. Meaning differs in the light of different presuppositions. We must beware not only of bias, but of hasty theorizing. A waiting attitude is especially important in studying the many aspects of humans’ dim perceptions of cosmic and religious realities. It is best to accept all the diverse aspects in their variety, no matter how paradoxical they may seem, as functions of an organic whole.
We cannot be resigned to imprisonment in our own minds. [So we have] the common sense, if paradoxical, feeling that we have both mental activity and direct contact with reality. Mind and things interpenetrate, interact, in functional, organic relationship. It has often been supposed that rational concepts and universal qualities belong to an eternal “realm of essence,” independent both of mind and temporal existence. Surely qualities are not invented or imagined, but found in functional relation to existing things. Until our ideals are realized, they appear to be only in our minds, and a gulf again threatens to open between mind and world. Are ideals separated from reality, or are they real and acting on reality? The ideal must be a possibility in the material; the purposer must be able to say, “It can be done.” Bearing in mind both the norm and the need for change is the creative attitude and when applied to all it is creative love. We ask, What growth or purpose is responsible for all this? How was it possible? What is the meaning of meaning?
“… In its most characteristic embodiments religious happiness is no … escape. It cares no longer for escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ” William Blake
CHAPTER V: Freedom & Self—Humans find it hard to believe in or understand their marvelous existence; they waver [between being “All-Creator” & being a helpless puppet]. The selves we know have a mind/ body union; research shows many effects that mental states have on the body. There are reactions in the self determined by physical causes & there are bodily events determined in part at least by thinking. Does the self have any independent determining power of its own? What is its relation to its constituent parts & to its environment? The self both has & is its experiences; the thinker is more than the sum of the thinker’s thoughts.
A self is a psychic organism, to some extent self-determining, whose unifying principle is immanent in & transcendent of its members. The self has a power of self-government. The self has the basic freedom to choose freedom, & sometimes the power to achieve freedom. The Dialogs of Buddha say that we can have our hearts in our power & not be in the power of our hearts. [Sometimes will resists itself]. How can fractured will pull it-self together? Religion claims that there is a beloved Reality, such that service to it is the way to obtain perfect freedom. Human selves can achieve a certain originality of response, can act purposively, & can build systems of rational meaning or of value. How shall we realize that we do belong to a whole? Let us, like the mystics, look into our selves, not to see our selves as isolated miracles in a dead universe, but to find the Beyond that is also within. Self-study reveals some power not ourselves but partially revealed in us in our most creative moments.
CHAPTER VI: The Divine Activity—The universe appears to have a value-producing activity which can act through people or upon them. It appears in evolution, history, and in the moral effects of prayer. Life has been growing more adaptive, more sensitive, more fragile, more aware of values not instrumental to its survival. Religious people call it Providence; non-theistic thinkers often conceive it more vaguely as a “dialectic” or dialog. Marxism has a certain religious sense, a metaphysical insight, but it is not metaphysical enough. It does not link up with William James’ “vast, slow-breathing Kosmos with its dread abysses and unknown tides.”
Beauty, truth & goodness are heightened & the worth of life increased by a creative synthesis which purely human efforts cannot bring about. Worship & prayer provide another channel for creative cosmic action. A certain attitude on the part of the worshiper, when sincere, always bring a certain result. Prayer brings the illumination of self-knowledge, it purifies the heart, & brings moral and strength. Selves are channels for a larger creative activity. Is this creative activity only one of many forces, or an expression of the principle by which the universe exists & functions? We can no longer assume that the activity is cosmic but purpose only human. God is both life-force and eternal ideal; God is the push from below and the pull from above.
CHAPTER VII: The Nature of God—If will is the unity of the self, then God must be a Self; but to what extent can the Law of the Universe of which we persons are a part be said to be a Person? Religious consciousness gives valuable insights which must not be ignored. It insists that God is real, an insight that has received different emphases, from only Brahman is real (Hindu) to only God has perfect being (Scholastic teaching). Religious intuition also insists on the paradoxical ultimacy and intimacy of Divine Reality. Many who have lost faith are those who imagined God as a distant, thundering Jehovah, a finite being moving around in the universe.
Because of these reactions, from a personal Jehovah to the Cosmic Law, the modern mind has great difficulty in thinking of God as at all personal. The greater the personality, the less pettily “personal” and the more steadfast it is. Though not a human, God has a conscious purpose and will; God is self-determining and so in the highest degree a self. God has moral value, and only a person capable of possessing a good will is a locus of moral value. God may be thought of as supremely real, both immanent and transcendent, a Self that differs from our Selves in being more integrated and in being entirely creative.
Creative insight into persons is creative love, which when communicated [by God] to its objects, brings a sense of hope & humility which gives persons strength to become their better selves. Prayer is when a person is most sensitized to God’s action, & when one receives God’s criticism & encouragement. God’s judgment is God’s mercy; moral law’s obligation is the drive of God’s creative love. The universal search, from meaning to the Creator of meaning, has ended in the God of religion, a Divine Reality of creative, redemptive love.
CHAPTER VIII: The Redemption of Evil—The vivid realization of evil has prevented many from being able to believe in either a benevolent or a powerful deity. The fact of evil, when faced, makes us search not only our hearts and our world-view, [but also the value and meaning of life]. Religion affirms that there is such a meaning, [though some call it wishful thinking]. The truest religion is a way of doing God’s will not human will. The truly religious person sees that every act can be a sacrament, every thought a practice of the Presence of God. This person thinks reality worthwhile enough to accept fully without protests or daydreams.
The 1st step is to make only reasonable demands on the universe. The next step is to wonder whether our demands on the universe are just, whether we should make any. Perhaps suffering is not always an evil, or perhaps it can be redeemed. It is crippling only if men have no freedom to make the redemptive rather than the natural & instinctive response to suffering. J.S. Bixler says: “[The mysterious] hints that certain things must be accepted on their own terms as contrasted with ours.” We & all creation are under the imperative to grow.
The 3rd step is creative cooperation with the universe, and seeing evil as an impediment to growth, not a frustration of our desires. With humankind rests the greatest responsibility for that refusal to grow which is sin. [Perhaps not all responsibility or freedom may be ours; small allotments of freedom may belong to animals]. Evil may now be defined as that which takes us away from God. It is God who triumphs over evil by giving life all its meaning, the only meaning it can have. Without belief in a Divine Reality, the problem of evil is insoluble. Given such a belief, one can face evil and be more than conqueror of it.
This search for ultimate meaning has now come as far as words can carry it. Our human minds are unable to supply all the connections, answer all the questions, or make sense, even of humankind; yet there is real value and order in the world. There is a Creator of value who is not ourselves; whose existence endows everything with meaning. You who wish to find the ultimate assurance of worth must seek your own contact with the Source of all meaning, and trust to the eternally patient strength of redemptive Love.
http://www.pendlehill.org/product-category/pamphlets
www.facebook.com/pendlehill?fref=ts
CHAPTER V: Freedom & Self—Humans find it hard to believe in or understand their marvelous existence; they waver [between being “All-Creator” & being a helpless puppet]. The selves we know have a mind/ body union; research shows many effects that mental states have on the body. There are reactions in the self determined by physical causes & there are bodily events determined in part at least by thinking. Does the self have any independent determining power of its own? What is its relation to its constituent parts & to its environment? The self both has & is its experiences; the thinker is more than the sum of the thinker’s thoughts.
A self is a psychic organism, to some extent self-determining, whose unifying principle is immanent in & transcendent of its members. The self has a power of self-government. The self has the basic freedom to choose freedom, & sometimes the power to achieve freedom. The Dialogs of Buddha say that we can have our hearts in our power & not be in the power of our hearts. [Sometimes will resists itself]. How can fractured will pull it-self together? Religion claims that there is a beloved Reality, such that service to it is the way to obtain perfect freedom. Human selves can achieve a certain originality of response, can act purposively, & can build systems of rational meaning or of value. How shall we realize that we do belong to a whole? Let us, like the mystics, look into our selves, not to see our selves as isolated miracles in a dead universe, but to find the Beyond that is also within. Self-study reveals some power not ourselves but partially revealed in us in our most creative moments.
CHAPTER VI: The Divine Activity—The universe appears to have a value-producing activity which can act through people or upon them. It appears in evolution, history, and in the moral effects of prayer. Life has been growing more adaptive, more sensitive, more fragile, more aware of values not instrumental to its survival. Religious people call it Providence; non-theistic thinkers often conceive it more vaguely as a “dialectic” or dialog. Marxism has a certain religious sense, a metaphysical insight, but it is not metaphysical enough. It does not link up with William James’ “vast, slow-breathing Kosmos with its dread abysses and unknown tides.”
Beauty, truth & goodness are heightened & the worth of life increased by a creative synthesis which purely human efforts cannot bring about. Worship & prayer provide another channel for creative cosmic action. A certain attitude on the part of the worshiper, when sincere, always bring a certain result. Prayer brings the illumination of self-knowledge, it purifies the heart, & brings moral and strength. Selves are channels for a larger creative activity. Is this creative activity only one of many forces, or an expression of the principle by which the universe exists & functions? We can no longer assume that the activity is cosmic but purpose only human. God is both life-force and eternal ideal; God is the push from below and the pull from above.
CHAPTER VII: The Nature of God—If will is the unity of the self, then God must be a Self; but to what extent can the Law of the Universe of which we persons are a part be said to be a Person? Religious consciousness gives valuable insights which must not be ignored. It insists that God is real, an insight that has received different emphases, from only Brahman is real (Hindu) to only God has perfect being (Scholastic teaching). Religious intuition also insists on the paradoxical ultimacy and intimacy of Divine Reality. Many who have lost faith are those who imagined God as a distant, thundering Jehovah, a finite being moving around in the universe.
Because of these reactions, from a personal Jehovah to the Cosmic Law, the modern mind has great difficulty in thinking of God as at all personal. The greater the personality, the less pettily “personal” and the more steadfast it is. Though not a human, God has a conscious purpose and will; God is self-determining and so in the highest degree a self. God has moral value, and only a person capable of possessing a good will is a locus of moral value. God may be thought of as supremely real, both immanent and transcendent, a Self that differs from our Selves in being more integrated and in being entirely creative.
Creative insight into persons is creative love, which when communicated [by God] to its objects, brings a sense of hope & humility which gives persons strength to become their better selves. Prayer is when a person is most sensitized to God’s action, & when one receives God’s criticism & encouragement. God’s judgment is God’s mercy; moral law’s obligation is the drive of God’s creative love. The universal search, from meaning to the Creator of meaning, has ended in the God of religion, a Divine Reality of creative, redemptive love.
CHAPTER VIII: The Redemption of Evil—The vivid realization of evil has prevented many from being able to believe in either a benevolent or a powerful deity. The fact of evil, when faced, makes us search not only our hearts and our world-view, [but also the value and meaning of life]. Religion affirms that there is such a meaning, [though some call it wishful thinking]. The truest religion is a way of doing God’s will not human will. The truly religious person sees that every act can be a sacrament, every thought a practice of the Presence of God. This person thinks reality worthwhile enough to accept fully without protests or daydreams.
The 1st step is to make only reasonable demands on the universe. The next step is to wonder whether our demands on the universe are just, whether we should make any. Perhaps suffering is not always an evil, or perhaps it can be redeemed. It is crippling only if men have no freedom to make the redemptive rather than the natural & instinctive response to suffering. J.S. Bixler says: “[The mysterious] hints that certain things must be accepted on their own terms as contrasted with ours.” We & all creation are under the imperative to grow.
The 3rd step is creative cooperation with the universe, and seeing evil as an impediment to growth, not a frustration of our desires. With humankind rests the greatest responsibility for that refusal to grow which is sin. [Perhaps not all responsibility or freedom may be ours; small allotments of freedom may belong to animals]. Evil may now be defined as that which takes us away from God. It is God who triumphs over evil by giving life all its meaning, the only meaning it can have. Without belief in a Divine Reality, the problem of evil is insoluble. Given such a belief, one can face evil and be more than conqueror of it.
This search for ultimate meaning has now come as far as words can carry it. Our human minds are unable to supply all the connections, answer all the questions, or make sense, even of humankind; yet there is real value and order in the world. There is a Creator of value who is not ourselves; whose existence endows everything with meaning. You who wish to find the ultimate assurance of worth must seek your own contact with the Source of all meaning, and trust to the eternally patient strength of redemptive Love.
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