The Zen of Quakerism (2016)
friendsjournal.org
friendsjournal.org
The best part about Quakerism, in my opinion, is that it teaches a very hearty disrespect of un-earned authority without teaching disrespect for the concept of authority itself. One of my favorite anecdotes is a group of Quakers who refused to doff their hats for the King, as they only doff their hats for God.
There's another old practice of refusing to swear on the Bible before telling the truth, as that would imply that they weren't telling the truth before they were sworn in.
I find the inclusion of Zen in this article is interesting, as you won't find the word "Holy" or "God", used, and "Spirit" is only used twice, once to comment on how he felt pressured to receive a message from it. The original purpose of Quaker silent worship was to remove the church-imposed barrier between man and God (the "Holy Spirit") so that anyone could be a mouthpiece for the wishes and desires of the Spirit. Modern American Quakers, especially the ones who write in Friends Journal, tend to be pretty secular.
I've always found it extremely odd that anyone swears on the Bible, since it pretty plainly says not to do that:
Matthew 5:33-37
“Again you have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn.’ But I say to you, Do not take an oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not take an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.
> Under pretence that atheists must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a falsehood.
And we were taught that the need to swear or affirm truthfulness nowadays simply evinces the requisite understanding of the seriousness of testimony in court / under oath — and, by extension, that the testimony must therefore be truthful in order to duly perform the judicial function of arriving at an accurate understanding of past events and realities.
"In the 1930s, the president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, began objecting to state laws requiring school students to salute the flag as a means of instilling patriotism, and in 1936 he declared that baptized Jehovah's Witnesses who saluted the flag were breaking their covenant with God and were committing idolatry."
At the same time, a koan is a paradoxical question or story used in Zen Buddhism to break logical thinking and provoke a deeper understanding beyond words and concepts.
Even though both are separated by an immense span of time and distance, the story of Job functions surprisingly well like a koan because it presents an apparently impossible paradox: if God is just, why do bad things happen to a good person?
This question has no logical answer, and when God finally speaks to Job, He doesn't explain the suffering but instead shows Job the overwhelming mystery of creation. Job's response isn't intellectual understanding but a transformative experience.
Just like a koan, Job's story seeks to break through logical thinking to produce spiritual enlightenment.
More recently did a mindfulness session, and was quietly surprised that I already knew the forms, just without emphasis on the self (breathing, body position and all the muscle aches, itches, etc).
When I was told Quakers did not kill, would not take up a gun and point it at a fellow human, I was surprised. "What if they are trying to kill you?" little kid me asked with incredulity. "You cannot even kill in self-defense," I was told.
Even then I could appreciate the seriousness of their conviction.
Some Quakers actually joined the American civil war because they felt fighting slavery was more important than not killing others. So there’s a wide range of feelings on pacifism within Quakerism.
What I value most about Quakerism is the emphasis on absolute honesty.
My father took time off college to protest the war -- which war, I'm not certain. He found himself questioning whether pacifism was truly his belief or something he was brought up with. So he enlisted to try out the other side. He didn't actually fight, but was trained as an artillery surveyor. When his superiors suggested he go to officer training school he asked for some time off to think about it, then came back three days later having decided he wanted to finish college and become a psychiatrist. He met my mom at his Quaker college, went back to Meeting, and some years later became a psychiatrist (and died shortly thereafter, not from the psychiatry). I've always thought it was cool that he tested his beliefs like that. His wider family was a bit uneasy with his choices but respected his process.
The honesty is really the most onerous aspect. I absolutely need to be honest with myself or I end up miserable. For example, if I work a job that requires me to shoulder the burden of my employers cognitive dissonance I’ll become depressed and force myself to quit.
It seems like in nature or on its own such a mindset would be akin to being in a death cult- you're just going to get rolled over by someone else and your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.
But if you live in the midst of a society full of other people who are willing to kill or be killed to protect those in it beliefs like that can grow and gain followers without any risk of external challenge putting their faith to the test.
Reading my comment I realize it may sound a little bit inflammatory or perhaps bloodthirsty- that's not my intention, I don't know how to word it better. Just a passing thought on this topic
It's also important to note that pacifism has been a divisive issue for Quakers from very early times. The play 'Sword of Peace' that's performed throughout the year in Snow Camp, NC, is about Meetings in the US struggling with the question of pacifism vs. the desire to aid their nascent country during the American Revolution. It was a debate for Friends during the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and onwards – one of the tenets of Quakerism is the need to wrestle with those issues by listening to the 'still small voice within' rather than blindly accepting the dictates of others. For many Friends, the threat posed by British colonial rule, the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany simply outweighed the demands of their conscience not to bear arms.
Friends often refer to the anecdote of William Penn asking George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) whether Penn should stop wearing his sword because he was now a Quaker. Fox told him, 'wear thy sword as long as thee is able' — meaning he should give it up because his conscience dictated it, not because he was a Quaker.
This is an atheistic understanding of the world that a Quaker obviously wouldn't share. Self-sacrifice aren't genes or memes your tribe reproduces, they're divine truths, the logos of the world so to speak that everyone will eventually be drawn into (represented by Christ as a person).
You can't destroy self-sacrifice any more than you can kill beauty or empathy or gravity. You can kill every good person, but not goodness ultimately. The entire starting point of the faith is Jesus dying on the cross, which in early Rome he was mocked for[1] according to exactly this logic "what, you worship a guy who just died on a cross, how will that religion continue to exist?"
Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.
I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.
Literally every Quaker could die today and their beliefs would still survive because we can do things like write books and publish websites now. The spread of knowledge and culture isn't limited to direct person-to-person transmission, and it doesn't depend on anyone doing violence on anyone else's behalf.
The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.
Of course, from a game-theoretic perspective, such ideas can only persist if someone else protects the pacifists from being killed, likely by use of lethal force. In this situation the only morally acceptable choice for the pacifists is to not be afraid of death, and not demand somebody to do the dirty work for them. Which is what we see.
This seems to assume the "the burden of killing" is not only necessary but unavoidable, as if violence were a constant which should be equitably distributed amongst everyone. If so, I would presume the Quakers would disagree, and would be perfectly satisfied if no one bothered killing at all.
And historically speaking not a lot of people have been willing to kill to protect pacifists like the Quakers who have little capital, social clout or political power. So it isn't much of a burden to begin with.
Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military. I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.
Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.
People have no choice but to offload the "burden" onto the police and military, that's the entire premise of civil society and the state's monopoly on violence. Your ability to commit violence within society is already legally proscribed, and except in the case of military conscription, has never been required.
>I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.
No, because it is explicitly an expression of opposition to the violence of secular society. In the absence of such violence, such a belief wouldn't be necessary.
>Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.
We're going to have to agree to disagree that the purpose of the police and military, or most equivalent groups throughout history, has ever been to "protect the whole."
Being able to endorse extreme pacifism long enough to have your belief turn into a large group with many followers is a privilege of being a subgroup in a society where someone else isn't bound by that particular moral outlook. That's all I meant by offloading the burden. You can oppose the violence of secular society, as you put it, while also accepting that that opposition would only ever have worked at any point in history if only a part of your population agreed with you.
I would comfortably say I completely share this conviction. I would not like to find myself in a position where that conviction was tested -- such as that you describe -- but not killing is almost universally understood to be a fundamental law of civilised society.
One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.
As we used to say in the military, "the enemy gets a vote, too". You may find that your non-lethal methods of self defense come up short when the enemy is equipped with a knife or gun. Or at the state level, perhaps a ballistic missile. There have been plenty of victims of those in the media recently. What non-lethal methods would you recommend they use to protect themselves?
If you want your society (and by extension your belief system) to survive, there must be a segment of that society that is at least willing to engage in lethal violence, if only as a last resort. You do not get to hide behind others who are willing to do your moral dirty work and declare yourself morally superior to them. That's like a meat eater looking down on slaughterhouse workers because he bought his meat at the store (I say this as a meat eater myself).
What methods are you referring to? Pepper spray? Aiming for the leg?
> that do not involve murder.
By definition if one is defending oneself, one is not committing murder.
Despite the fact that I think you understood what they were saying perfectly fine, you can substitute "killing someone" (or "taking another life", etc.) for "murder" in their above sentence if it helps you.
specproc: I have to say I'm fortunate enough never to have found myself in that situation. Is this something that happens regularly in America?
We all know it's not common in any industrialized society for a parent to have to kill to protect their child's life. And asking laurent_du about the American experience may not be productive as he or she may never have been to America.
Regardless, the frequency of a situation is not relevant to a discussion of what a person would or should do in that situation.
Violence is abhorrent. Frequency is relevant because one can base one's life and actions on principles of nonviolence, and deal with such extreme situations in the unlikely event they ever come up.
It's a dumb playground question, like would I cheat on my wife if $FAMOUS_HOTTIE came on to me.
One can live one's life by not being violent, by not working in violent industries, by not owning weapons, by seeking and promoting solutions that do not involve violence in one's community and national politics. This is a morally correct life.
Sure, one day, someone might try and kill my child. I hope it never happens, and I hope that situation could be resolved without anyone dying.
But say, somewhere in this long tail, I killed to defend, I don't believe that would invalidate how I've lived the rest of my life.
Only extremists create their principles from extreme cases.
Murder and manslaughter occurs in every country. Violence is hyperlocal and can be entirely stochastic. There are simply broken humans everywhere.
>One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.
Too much fiction, not enough fighting experience. There are myriad ways in which you cannot effectively defend yourself and cannot flee in these lose-lose scenarios. There largely wouldn't be victims, if this were true.
Dumb drunk guy swung at my face, I took it, a bunch of bystanders jumped on him and hauled him off. Pretty much end of story.
I've plenty of fighting experience, the ones that have ended badly for me have been the ones where I've fought back.
Obviously not the trolley problem-esque situation from the context, but my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.
Isn’t that what happens when we codify limits of behavior, which are often extreme, into laws or religious texts which then govern a population?
Even if you don’t consider law as de facto defining morality, moral lessons from literature to oral tradition are often handed down as metaphor through stories of finding balance between extreme outcomes.
Where we run into trouble is where we say, well here is an example of a case where this extreme behaviour may be countenanced.
There may well be such cases! If I had a gun (I don't) and someone was attacking a loved one (fortunately rarely if ever happened) with intent and ability to kill (definitely never) and the only way I could stop them because of the specific situation was to kill them (waaay down the tail now)... perhaps, I don't know how I would react in that situation.
Here's where ethics becomes like programming. I could sit down and come up with a list of cases in which I felt it appropriate to kill, and code all the edge cases. This is inefficient and sorta silly, and I guess how I chose to interpret the comment that started this thread.
I could come also up with a clever algorithm which balances harm done and harm prevented (or good caused) based on a range of parameters. I think this is more what GP was pointing to, a teleological ethics. But what model? What parameters? What loss function? Which libraries?
My position here, at least on violence is deontological. If everyone can write their own crufty (and inevitably closed-source) solution to the problem, then bad actors can (and do) code it so they get the results they want when they need them. The result is a violent world.
The cleaner, more elegant, and more ethical code simply prohibits harmful outcomes altogether. I suspect derivations from this initial simplicity in religious texts and interpretations are malicious code added in later updates.
When a third party becomes involved you only need to rely on option 1. You are still probably acting out of “selfish” reasons in this case, however; I’d rather save my child than preserve the life of a murderer, but that is simply because my child’s life is more important to me than that of a murderer, regardless of moral justification.
The questions about self-centeredness get more interesting in life boat scenarios, where you have to choose between equally innocent parties.
Not because the concept would be wrong or there would be no need for it - of course a state has to be able to defend its population against attacks - but because as soon as there is a situation where it applies in war, both sides seem to stretch it to absolutely unrecognizable lengths and use it to justify essentially everything in warfare.
That's why I'm wary if someone makes a theoretical argument about personal self-defense that's tailor-made to justify killing. It feels too much like the same tactics in war propaganda.
There are nonlethal ways of defending oneself or others, too, btw. Learn martial arts, knock them out, use a taser if you have too, then grab your kid and run. None of that requires shooting them.
Agree with the general sentiments of your post. A lot of pro self-defense talks online read like thinly veiled "bad ass" fan fiction where someone salivates over the idea of killing someone in a legal manner that they face no consequences for.
But I don't think this last part is very realistic and possibly even very dangerous. Martial arts aren't anywhere near as effective as people make them out to be if you are not highly trained and essentially useless if the other person is armed even with a knife. They are better for training confidence/athleticism than self-defense. Tasers are frequently shrugged off by aggressors (no shortage of videos online showing this) and if you miss you just escalated the situation with no other way out. A gun is really the only thing that puts even the weakest victim on par with the strongest aggressor. But situational awareness for where you are and who is around you is 100x more important.
A lot of the more horrific acts of war seem designed not to defend the people who happen to live in a state, but the state apparatus (or the interests of that states stakeholders) itself.
It's the individual that generally has no right to self defense, if measured by the ability to mount an effective armed self defense. In most countries, the individual is as expendable as a red blood cell is to the overall organism. They are not prevented from fighting back per se, but this natural right is severely and harshly limited.
Morally, I'd argue they have none.
Were it so simple, police forces would simply act out Hollywood-esque movie moves. But in reality, individual officers must often resort to firearms to stop assailants, or in some countries, mass unarmed officers must swarm a single assailant.
In regards to states' self-defense claims, they have every incentive to claim it as a casus belli. It's too powerful and righteous to not try to get it to 'stick', and big lies do sometimes work. That doesn't obviate there being actual cases of self-defense, it's just not something that can be taken for granted, and when information is a battlespace all its own, I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
When you kill that person, you have joined them in also sinning against God — irrespective of what your reason was.
I'm not taking a side here but just pointing out that Quakers have a very clear directive that goes, more or less, thou shalt not kill.
(It's perhaps a bigger surprise that countless other Christian religions have all kinds of addendums that I guess allow for that one.)
In seriousness, I agree — it's always odd to see Quakerism discussed in other contexts, as well as running into other Quakers in other contexts outside of things like /r/quakerism or such. I do wish it were a more widespread practice, as I feel like it's such a good anodyne to the modern "I got mine, forget you" approach endorsed by so many megachurches.
Which is probably why the CIA loves recruiting them so much.
The majority of people "recruited" by the CIA are used for information or for their specific field of expertise.
A forgotten history I guess.
Another contrast is quaker worship is done in a community looking inward towards the center of the room, Zen meditation when done in a temple is done looking at the wall. for me this is a contrast between the quaker "society of friends" and zen can be done in isolation
Quakers for me have a special place in my heart.
I'm a bit sad that in California there are very few Quaker communities when compared to Buddhist or Zen communities. The quaker communities that do exist seem to be hanging on from the counterculture movement several decades ago.
I've attended a Quaker community for the past couple of years and sadly it is dying out. Almost all of the members are past 60 y/o and almost zero young adult members or younger members attend.
I think the Quaker philosophy is powerful and unfortunately i believe it has lead to its downfall. The lack of creed and resistance to structure makes it hard for new members to feel comfortable and make it easy to be more casual about your membership. this leads to people just dropping out.
also the structure of quaker practices can seem offputting for people from more conventional religious backgrounds. For example christmas "celebrations" are done entirely in silence from the moment you enter to when you leave. this is a staggering contrast to almost every other celebration. (also in contrast to most of christianity a lot of quakers dont believe jesus was "holy" but rather an ordinary man who was more in touch with the "light", underscoring the intensity of their egalitarian beliefs)
I think Quaker has a branding problem. People think of quaker oats or amish. (amish have nothing to do with quakers). Zen is more trendy and "mystical". If quakerism was "rebranded" a lot more people would be attracted to it.
My heart yearns for more Quaker communities. Its so sad to see them die out.
You might be right about rebranding, but to me a lot of what appeals is the focus on the substance rather than perceptions.
The Quakers, like many minorities, face other people who know next to nothing about them claiming them as mascots. Quaker Oats are called that not because of a special Quaker fondness for oats or a cultural association between Quakers and oats but because General Mills thought the image would be good for their brand. If they were selling socks or buckets, they would have slapped that Mona Lisa-esque visage on those products. I have heard there was a particular Quaker mill owner whose likeness they used. I'm sure his quaint, 18th or 19th century attire, and the presence of Amish in Pennsylvania, are why people think there's some connection between the two religions. (Also, both are peace churches, but Baha'i and Jains are also pacifists and people don't confuse them with Quakers.)
In Pennsylvania there's a business of some sort called "Quaker Steak and Lube". The Quakers I know -- and I grew up among them in a large, well-connected Quaker family -- have no salient connection to either steak or lube. It's just that back in the mists of time Quakers founded the state which others now thoroughly control and some businessman in Pennsylvania thought it would be funny to slap their name, initially invented as a slur against them, onto his business.
So Quakers have two branding problems: people don't know their brand and they do know other peoples' brands that pretend to have some association to them.
About Quakers withering away, I do see a lot of agèd Quakers. The group that meets near my house is pretty old. But there are still Young Friends groups that are thriving, Quaker summer camps (full of non-Quakers), and such. Quakers probably are fading away, as most non-rightwing religions are, but I don't think they're a special case. At least they still believe in procreation, unlike the Shakers.
I find it interesting that the author felt pressure to be moved to speak. In the eight years I attended a Quaker school and attended thousands of meetings for worship, I never felt that vibe. Whenever there was any discussion about the expectations of behavior in a meeting (such discussion usually being done offline, i.e. not during the actual meeting), it was always quite clear that not only was speaking completely voluntary, but also you were free to say whatever moved you, as long as it was suitable for the entire group; there was no need to be "spiritually profound," whatever that means.
Granted, the daily meetings I attended were for the student and faculty (the vast majority of whom were not Quaker). But on the few occasions we got to attend the "real" meeting for worship on Sunday (held in the school's meeting house), I found it to have exactly the same tenor, only with fewer kids (and about 40 minutes longer).
But quakerism as a living religion is extremely small and quite diverse for its tiny size, and groups practicing the traditional silent worship are a small minority even within that. The majority of living quakers experience a religion much closer to the main stream of evangelical christianity than you will expect from reading about it online. IIRC something like half of quakers are african.
Could you elaborate on this? This is fairly surprising to me as someone raised as a Quaker and who still attends meeting occasionally despite being an atheist. While I’m aware of a few different sects within Quakerism, I’ve never heard of one which eschews silent worship. I haven’t ever personally encountered an evangelical Quaker, and the thought seems particularly strange to me.
In the US iirc only about half of meetings are "unprogrammed" which is the traditional silent meeting. The other half more or less follow a normal low church formula, with congregational singing, bible readings, and one or more sermons. Also usually a period of silent worship still but it's not the bulk of the meeting. The doctrine of these churches is still quaker, because nearly anything can be, but people's polled beliefs are basically protestant christian.
Outside the US this second style was much more active in evangelism and missionary work and so the "programmed" style is vastly more popular. The majority of silent worshipping quakers are in the US & england, but globally they only represent something like 20% of active quakers. Africa and a few south american countries outnumber them by a huge margin.
The numbers are not good or reliable either because it's an extreme minority religion, something that might not be obvious if your exposure was in a large american city (or esp in one of the historical quaker regions) or on the internet. But best counts are less than half a million globally so even by the standards of minority religions just so so small. By comparison with other religious minorities there are more jews in los angeles, more muslims in chicago than there are quakers in the world. So whatever your local expression or personal experience of quakerism is it is probably unique and in some sense a historical outlier.
Did I misunderstand something, what's your better informed take?
If you're in the US or Canada and interested in experiencing silent worship, Friends General Conference maintains a directory of meetings here: https://www.fgcquaker.org/find-a-meeting/
In 1650, Fox was brought before the magistrates Gervase Bennet and Nathaniel Barton, on a charge of religious blasphemy. According to Fox's autobiography, Bennet "was the first that called us Quakers, because I bade them tremble at the word of the Lord". It is thought that Fox was referring to Isaiah 66:2 or Ezra 9:4. Thus the name Quaker began as a way of ridiculing Fox's admonition, but became widely accepted and used by some Quakers
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers#Beginnings_in_England
which translates in many if not most cases to less anti-intellectual
Because experts are some of the most resented earthly authority in America, and individual meditation is great for alternate facts. Going viral would be prayers answered
A brief and reductive explanation: The Religious Society of Friends (colloquially “Quakers”) are a religious movement (nominally Christian, in practice often agnostic) which originated in England circa 1650. A core part of the theology is that God might speak to anyone, so worship generally consists of sitting around in silence until someone hears from Him and stands up to repeat the message, hence why the article is drawing parallels between that practice and Zen Buddhism.
A spicy example is discussed in the book "Zen at War"[1]. Myanamar and Sri Lanka[2] have their own ultra nationalistic Buddhists movements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhalese_Buddhist_nationalism
Does that help?
You REALLY think anyone would benefit from him adding:
BIG CAVEAT: BUDDHISM IS A RELIGION OF BILLIONS AND SOME PARTICULAR GROUPS MIGHT NOT FIT WITH THE DESCRIPTIONS OF MY EXPERIENCE!!!!
ALSO, IT IS ABSOLUTELY *IMPERATIVE* THAT YOU KNOW THAT THERE ARE SOME MILITANT BUDDHIST GROUPS IN MYANAMAR!!!! WARNING WARNING WARNING!!
???
(Some on the left who oppose liberalism actually do some versions of this, quoting Mills on colonialism - but that is a genetic fallacy.)
It makes much more sense to say that anytime some teaching/philosophy becomes popular at a continental scale, the people who are involved in conflicts will try to appropriate it to justify their position.
If you want to evaluate the role of the teaching itself, one would have to compare it to alternatives and whether they would be more easily appropriated.
Some prefer to discuss what a purported ideology or its adherents does out in the real world.
The immediate problem is the troll that is lying and hiding behind a purported agenda. Exposing their real agenda is the immediate fix.
You don’t rhetorically concede to the troll that “reducing crime” is good because they’re a troll. Conceding anything to them is a strategic blunder. They are trolling. It’s irrelevant to the case.
Can you tell us more about what you mean by "cultural appropriation," and how you see it as differing from "imitating others' useful practices"?