#BlackLivesMatter: A White British Quaker's Perspective

'Slave Trade' by John Raphael Smith, after George Morland's
‘Execrable human traffick, or the affectionate slaves’

Recent events have brought back to wider public consciousness that rallying cry, “Black Lives Matter”. It comes from the United States of America, but its resonance is felt around the world. As we see from the incidents that prompt outcry, it is most easily associated with excess deaths of black people – but it’s about a lot more than that.

Now, most Quakers in Britain are white. Not all of us, by any stretch, but definitely most. We’re also mostly relatively educated, with a much higher incidence of post-graduate qualifications than the general population, and there’s a definite tendency towards being culturally middle class. This has a lot of results, some of which I’ve written about before, but one of them is a real difficulty in engaging with the deep issues that underlie the statement that Black lives matter. I’ve seen Quakers in public on social media respond to that simple statement with one of the most problematic responses that we see everywhere – that “all lives matter”.

Why is that statement a problem? After all, don’t we – with our pacifist tradition and believe in a sort of universal divinity – really fundamentally believe that all lives matter? Yes, of course we do. It would be silly to suggest otherwise. In fact, especially among Quakers, it’s so obvious that it doesn’t even need saying. So why do we need to say that Black lives matter?

Reflection on ‘Aphorism 3’ (Do not ask for lessons)

“Do not ask for lessons; all I can give are opportunities.”
–Aphorism 3

This is an interesting one, to be sure. To understand what it might be taken to mean, we must consider the possible meanings of different parts of it. For instance, what is meant by ‘lesson’, and what by ‘opportunities’? More profoundly, in whose voice should it be taken as being? At the same time, it is a very simple statement that seems to have a fairly straightforward meaning, at least from the point of view of certain approaches to education. So straightforward that it might be considered a pat answer itself, in fact (though that adjective, pat, has some divergence in meaning that means it might be appropriate whether the explanation is trivial and misguiding or simple and correct).

Let us first consider that straightforward answer. A popular view of education, of the process of learning, is that the only true agent in the process is the learner. Constructivist theories of education hold that knowledge cannot be transmitted, only constructed by the individual. In that context, even modified in such variants as social constructivism (where knowledge construction takes place in the context of interaction between individuals), a more traditional ‘lesson’, in which knowledge is transmitted from teacher to student, is impossible – or at least ineffective. The educator instead provides opportunities for the construction of knowledge, facilitates the process. It might be said, then, that this aphorism is simply a truism in the context of constructivist educational theory. However, in receiving it as ministry it behoves us to look beyond that simple explanation. That is where we must consider the possible meanings, beyond that of constructivism, and the voice of the statement.

Aphorism 12

Aphorism 3

The Great Lord and His Sons

There was once a great lord. His realm was peaceful and prosperous. He had five sons, and he gave thought to how they should be raised.

He had not been raised to rule himself, as he had elder brothers. They had all died before their father, so the rule had fallen to him. So it was in his mind to raise them all to know what it is good for lords to know. He saw that it would be best for his realm if any one of them could take up the rule of the realm, govern rightly and judge fairly.

Yet his aunt had married the lord of another realm, and had had many sons. They had all wished to take the place of the lord their father when he died, and so had schemed and plotted and killed, and in the end gone to war on one another. All had died, in assassination or in war, and the last at the hands of his people when he claimed rule over a land broken by war. The lord of that realm now was the the great lord's aunt's grandson, and the power in the hands of courtiers ruling in his name. So it was that the great lord saw that it would be best for his realm, and for his family, if none of his sons should greatly desire to succeed him.

Plain Speaking and "Academic" Language

Liberal Quaker communities aren't usually terribly representative of the communities in which they are situated. Here in Britain, we tend to be white, culturally middle class, English-speaking (particularly noted in Wales), and educated. There's lots of theories about why this is; I tend to subscribe to the idea that a non-representative community is more forbidding and less welcoming to those who do not already fit into it than those who immediately “fit in”. A black, Asian or other minority ethnic (the currently most acceptable term in this country, abbreviated to BAME) person, in a town that is ethnically diverse, will react the first time they go to a group based on what they see – just as a white person would, but with very different dynamics of social history behind it. If they see 40 people in a room, all white, they will feel that this group is not for them. It may be subconscious, and it may be counterbalanced by other factors (and we'd better hope it will be), but it will be there; none of us is “colour-blind”, however much we might have a misguided aspiration to be so. Similarly, when a person who is culturally working class finds themselves in a room full of middle class accents, when they come to a shared meal and find half the contributions based on couscous and quinoa, they feel that this is a group that is not for people like them.

I emphasise “educated” in this list because it is, in one important way, not like the others. It is something that each of us can potentially change about ourselves, and it is seen as a positive by even the most enlightened social egalitarian. It is not hard to argue that that is it is a good thing that we are mostly quite educated, provided that we include those who are educated by less formal means. We might believe that we are mostly educated because those who join our community who are less educated become more educated in part because of their exposure to Quakers and their living out of Quaker values.

Competition and Cooperation

In my experience, Friends are keen to emphasise cooperation over competition. Whether it be with our children and young people, or in our approach to the world at large, it is obviously true to the Quaker way of thinking that working together is better than working in opposition.

And yet, competition and cooperation are not inherently opposing concepts. Competition has its positives, and a preference for cooperation to the extent that we lose those advantages will do us, and wider society, less good than we might hope. Competition does not preclude cooperation, and need not even be in tension with it; seeing them as alternatives is both reductionist and counterproductive.

Spiritual "Zones of Proximal Development"

We have all of the ingredients we need for our
individual and collective development - we just
have to recognise them and work out how to
put them together.

Following some recent online discussions, I feel like it's worth spending another post exploring some learning theory, how it relates to Quaker practice – and what we can take from it to improve that practice. Previously, I wrote about communities of practice, and now I'll be looking at the idea of zones of proximal development.

ZPDs, as they are more concisely known, as a way of talking about what it is readily possible for a given learner to learn. There is what they already know, what they can already do, and there are those things that would be a struggle to attempt, and in between is the ZPD, the things that they can reasonably learn, or the things that they could do with help and guidance. This is a much simpler idea than communities of practice – in these last couple of sentences, the fundamentals of it are covered. Of course, there's more to it than that, but that's the basics all done. Given, in many spiritual situations, liberal Quakers' aversion to “teaching”, it might seem hard to apply this, but I think it has a particular application to spiritual development that doesn't require any sense of the didactic. It is this interpretation and application that I intend to explore in this post.

Dogmatic Non-Dogmatism and Rituals of Non-Ritualism

Why the flowers?

Quakers, at least of the liberal variety, are generally considered to have no dogma; Quakers of all stripes reject creeds, even if they have been known to organisationally endorse documents that look a lot like them. Unprogrammed Quakers eschew ritual.

But do we really? Are there not ways in which our non-dogmatism becomes dogmatic, and our non-rituals become ritualistic? In this post I will be exploring these questions, what I have learned from Friends in many places, what I have experienced myself – and what I think we should take from that.

Science and Faith: A Quaker Perspective

A popular trope these days depicts faith and religion as opposed to science. The logic behind this is simple – science is based on testability, reproducibility, and acting based on evidence. Religion by it's nature is considered to require actions based on faith, rather than evidence, and many religious claims are inherently untestable, or at least such tests as may be argued to be possible have factors that make such testing not reproducible; in terms of philosophy or science, the claims are unfalsifiable.

Anti-religion advocates also often point to religious persecution of scientists, as in the case of Galileo Galilei, or of religious authorities resisting the adoption or teaching of science, as in the case of evolution (for some time) or the attempts to have schools teach intelligent design as science. However, it is also true that many great scientists have been religious, such as the (Quaker) astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, and the polymath Blaise Pascal. There are also cases of cultures and times where religion, even relatively authoritarian religion, has been a dominant feature of life, yet sciences have flourished – most notably the Islamic Golden Age.

The debate about whether religion in general is compatible with science will carry on in many places, especially online forums and blogs, for a long time yet. In this post, I will be addressing specifically the underlying assertion that faith stands opposed to reason and evidence, and applying specifically my own non-theist Quaker approach to faith to look at the implications.

Belief, Experience, Conception, Communication, Understanding

In an excellent blog post, Craig Barnett (no relation) recently wrote about the limitations of thinking of faith in terms of belief; rather than a conventional, simplistic view of belief leading to action, a better description – especially for Quakers – is of a cycle, practice leading to experience leading to community leading back to practice. Personally, I think that cycle should be bi-directional, but generally I think this is a good model, as far as it goes.

People, however, have a habit of thinking about things, not to mention talking about things (even if sometimes they don't do it in that order). It is when we talk about our experiences that our language, our choice of words and what we mean by them, our choice of phrases and references, brings something else to the fore, which we tend to refer to as “belief” – how we refer to God/the Divine/the numinous/the Spirit/whatever, the characteristics implicit in the terms we use, create the picture of what the speaker believes in.

For many liberal Quakers, however, theology – questions of the nature of the Divine – is a nebulous thing. I have heard many take a partially agnostic view, that whatever the Divine is in incomprehensible to us, fundamentally unknowable, which is a position with which I agree. The words we use don't reflect the kind of certainty that “belief” implies, when used in a religious context; rather, they are our groping after meaning that reflects our experience and attempts at understanding, indefinitely provisional. They are the shadows on the wall of the cave. So, if they don't reflect belief, what do they reflect?

Quakers as a Community of Practice

When I was studying educational research, there was a particular model, generally applied to informal education, that I became particularly taken with. From the first, I though that it may be applicable to liberal Quakers. Communities of Practice are a theoretical model developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, hereafter referred to as Lave & Wenger. It is a model of what is called situated learning, wherein learning is not considered the transfer of knowledge and skills from those who already possess them to those who do not, but rather the development of knowledge and skills within a social situation.

A community of practice is, unsurprisingly given the name, defined by commonality of practice. Where a community of practice has many units, such as local branches, one characteristic that determines that it is truly a single community of practice is that someone who normally participates in a single branch could participate in any branch without special notice or preparation, and that practice would be sufficiently similar between the two that the visitor can fully participate. It is this compatibility and centrality of practice that differentiates a community of practice from a community of interest, which the community is bound primarily by a common interest of some sort. In addition, most knowledge is tacit, gained from some sort of experience, rather than delivered in a didactic manner or reified in documentation.