Shoulda' Woulda' Coulda'

There's just one regulation I wish we had 3-4 years ago, and that is the following: The only kind of mortgage instruments available for owner-occupied, primary residences are fixed-rate, level payment loans. No ARMs, no balloons, no fine print. Think how much of the present turmoil would have been avoided!

Of course, the economy depends on "growth" and to fuel that growth, the pirates in power look for any equity nest eggs they can steal. They saw a great possibilities in the housing market. For most people, most of their net worth is tied up in the house they are living in. So the market invented the sub-prime ARM -- where one refinances at a "teaser rate" with low payments for a year or two, followed by a ratcheting up to the usual usury (typically described only in the fine print.) As long as the housing market continued to increase in value, the defaulting home owner could be sacked and the seized property then sold at a handsome profit. But it didn't work out that way. Perhaps there is some justice in the universe, however, because the financiers are now holding the (nearly empty) bag.

This is world that has been turned on its head, and to see this Republican administration using taxpayer resources to bail out these venerable thrift (or is it 'theft') institutions, is highly amusing. As the Rolling Stones said, "just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints..." so it would appear that every Republican is a Democrat, at least in terms of deficit spending. Too bad their spending isn't on things that do the average fellow any good. A trillion on the war in Iraq, a trillion for friends on Wall Street, but not much for schools and health care and the homeless folks who've lost their houses. I guess the political minions of the captains of finance have once again chosen mammon in spite of all their high minded talk.

Frankly, I don't care that much because a dollar isn't worth a damn anyway, so why get excited just because we're talking about trillions of them?

Good Tidings of Great Joy...

And as we run ourselves ragged in this 2007 Christmas Season, trying to buy all those expensive gifts for everyone on our list, with our credit cards maxed out and the interest rate on our sub-prime mortgage about to reset and dump us into bankruptcy with Chapter 7 now out of reach for all but a few... remember that the message the angels sang was: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

How is this orgy of consumerism helping us to achieve the angels' proclamation? Have you asked yourself who made those gifts under the tree? Was it children in China or sweatshop workers in Malaysia? How much oil was used just to get them to your door by Christmas eve? Are we celebrating the birth of the savior, or sacrificing our souls to Madison Avenue and the god of consumerism?

How does this contribute to the attitude of outsiders toward our American ways? Do you care? Should you?

Remember a simpler time, when Christmas morning brought a stocking with sweets, and orange and sometimes a new scarf or sweater that was actually made by the person giving it... Are extravagant gifts a suitable substitute for something that was handmade and heartfelt? Simplicity can save the world, by conserving our resources and using them wisely in a sustainable way. Isn't that what a savior would want?

Love, Peace and Joy to you this Christmas!

FDRs words ring true...

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself... So said FDR in his 1933 inaugural address, but it is still true today. For the opposite of peace is not war, as Tolstoy implied, but fear. It is fear that leads us into violence. Violence is seldom the response of one who truly has nothing to fear. More commonly, it results from an attempt to banish fears, be they real or imagined.

For people of faith, it is an easy thing to put aside violence. For the early Friends, and for many others, once you have had a direct experience of unity in the Light, you need never fear for your spiritual security again.

The vision quest of this work is to find a way to articulate the message of Peace so compelling that it convinces those who are divided by their fears to come together and talk to one another, rather than being driven further apart.

We think of fear and hopelessness as touching the powerless. But it also underlies the behavior of those in power. It was fear of the United States that drove the Kremlin to financially exhaust their state in the nuclear arms race of the later 20th century. It was fear of the loss of oil revenues that drove the current regime into a foolish war with Iraq. What drives someone to amass fortunes so large that they can never ever spend even a small fraction of it in their lifetime? Fear. What drives a person to ignore the needs of others who are different than them? Fear. And what drives a tribe, clan, or nation to take up arms against innocents? Fear.

Some of those in power understand this primal relationship between fear and violence. They manipulate us through it. Are you afraid?

Excessive Excess...

There are no extra notes in a Bach Fugue...
There are no extra words in a Shakespeare Sonnet...
There is no extra wood in a Shaker Table.

If these examples of economy and simplicity are hailed as great achievements of Western art and culture, then why then are we, in the West, so enamored of excess?

More isn't always better.

Cutting out excess takes time, but improves the impact of the written word, as Pascal noted in one of his letters: "I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter" Likewise, cutting out excess from our daily lives takes some thought, but can lead to improvement rather than impoverishment.

The Almighty Dollar

One of the ways in which the powerful maintain their authority is to control the medium of economic exchange -- in this country, the "dollar." The United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, states:

"The Congress shall have Power [...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;"

Now of course, all of this makes perfect sense when one considers the founding fathers (and mothers) had just left Europe where the monarchies routinely debased and inflated their currencies to cover war debts and dissipative excesses, so these powers are not given to the President, but instead to the Congress. Nevertheless, they eventually debased it anyway, and let Presidents manipulate it too.

Money was invented to eliminate the need for direct "tit-for-tat" exchanges in a barter economy. "I'll trade you seven pigs, two chickens, and this pocketknife for your 2 year old prize bull." Historically, precious metals like gold and silver were used, because they were relatively easy to identify, and fairly limited in supply. In 1792 the US established coinage standards, then in 1873 a gold standard at fixed exchange rates that were modified from time to time, before the gold standard was abolished altogether by Richard Nixon in 1971. Since then, we have had a paper fiat currency with no inherent value at all, other than that determined by what you will trade for it. In fact, since modern day transactions are largely completed using "paperless" methods (bank debit cards, credit cards), the currency is largely just "1"s and "0"s in our banks' computers.

For how many such "1"s and "0"s do you trade your day of labor?

And with the powerful in control of the banking system, the fear of being "wiped out" (having your "1"s erased and being left only with the "0"s) is a powerful factor in influencing group behavior. Perhaps this is why Jesus chased the money changers from the temple. As a society, we have become entirely too preoccupied with something that has no inherent value!. Learn to look beyond the pictures of George, Abraham, Andrew and Benjamin, to see the people who are really controlling you.

What is the Peace that is Possible

Thoughts on Violence and Quaker Testimony

by Alden Josey

Violent behavior of any kind has been so thoroughly rejected in Quaker tradition, and the futility of violence as a means of solving problems so thoroughly stressed, that a pervasive negative feeling surrounds this subject and makes many who seek to follow the Quaker way want to eliminate violence totally from their lives. Who would question the desirability of eliminating violent and destructive behavior and its twin roots of rage and hatred? However, it is necessary to make a critical distinction between feeling and action; controlling and eliminating violent action has benefit in the personal and collective realms, but suppressing and denying emotions, whether positive or negative, leads to neurosis in the former realm and to insidious forms of conflict in the latter.

The Quaker testimony on peace and non-violence derives directly from the central assertion that there is a Divine principle at the core of every human personality. Violent action, of whatever kind, against another is a blasphemy, an act against the God principle in life. During the persecutions of the Restoration period in England, 1660-1672, Friends in England were subjected to extreme violence by the government, ostensibly because they were held to be a seditious sect that threatened the hold of the King on state power. Beyond that, their religious ideas and practices were felt to be a clear threat to existing institutions of religion and social order. Under the weight of the most severe distraints and punishments, Friends tried with amazing courage and general success to keep to their vision of the sacred core of individual life and spiritual community and to live out its implications, privately and publicly.

Re-thinking the problem of violence, either inter-personal or inter-communal, in the light of modern depth psychology reveals, first of all, that powerful negative emotion and its violent expression are archetypal in nature. That is, they reflect a basic human experience of the world as well as a basic human tendency to respond to this experience.

Every individual experiences angry, aggressive emotion, and everyone has responded at times with violent feelings and perhaps with actions. No one is exempt from these archetypal structuring factors that are fundamental features of every human psyche. It would seem, then, that all are vulnerable to tides of violent feeling that may lead to violent action. Efforts to suppress, deny or split-off this psychic reality in the service of a moral imperative do not negate or dissipate it. Rather, they force it into the unconscious from which psychic location it becomes a Pandora’s box of troubles.

We are well aware of the varieties of overt violence. Covert violence, though it avoids certain physical expressions, is less than completely honest in the way that it hides emotional states. It can be as destructive in the infliction of pain and suffering through its forms of silence, withdrawal and virtual killing as a physical act. Equally dangerous to relationships of all kinds is the tendency for unconscious contents to be projected onto external figures and situations where one discovers one’s own shadowy demons in the behaviors of other people.

Denial of one’s violence in the form of “Who, me?” and an effort to assert one’s goodness fail the Quaker requirement to honor the Light in another. On the contrary, the real task is to transform the rage and violent feeling that are part of psychic life into constructive and creative forms, and to do this it is necessary to embrace it, at least to accept these as archetypal realities in human psychic life. To do this effectively, it is necessary to see violent emotions in a more fundamental way not prejudiced by negative, rejecting attitudes.

As psychic phenomena, rage and violence are manifestations of psychic energy constellated by certain experiences that the ego experiences negatively, for example, being publicly humiliated by an adversary. Psychic energy, or libido, is a neutral phenomenon until value is assigned by the ego in the form of a choice of action. It is useful to consider that violent feeling has a more primary aspect as psychic energy constellated by a particular experience. In this sense, it is a natural and inescapable fact of our human nature.

The violent outburst of affect or action with its destructive consequences, either overt or covert, is merely the expression of the psychic fact that a personality is unable at its present stage of development to assimilate or integrate the energy that is released. It is less true to say “I had a very violent reaction to..” than it is to say “A very violent reaction had me..”

Seen in another image, psychic energy liberated in violent affect and action has popped up outside the boundaries of the conscious personality, which cannot integrate it but rather is assimilated by it. A reasonable conclusion is that violent behavior in general is to be transformed most effectively by enlargement of personality, by a psychological development that frees one from the limitations and constraints of an inferior state. The most telling service to a Quaker principle of non-violence is conscious self-development.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is made to speak to this notion in a profoundly appealing metaphor:

Jesus said:
Blessed is the lion which
the man eats and the lion
will become man; and cursed is the man
whom the lion eats and
the lion will become man. [emphasis added]
Thomas, Logion 7

Perfect Peace in human relationships is an ideal state not achievable except in certain measure, and that measure is a reflection of the consciousness that is brought to the relationship space by all the parties. In seeking to live in a spirit of Peace, we do not reject our own paradoxical psychic nature with its constantly shifting refractions of dark and light. Rather, while owning these contradictions as our own, we choose to awaken to the permanent dialogue between them and to choose Peace, to “eat the lion” and not be eaten by it. We choose the Peace that is possible in us at every moment, letting the lion become man as a creative act of individual personality.


Revised 7 May 2007

submitted by: Alden Josey

The [Im]morality of the Warrior / Enemy Model

by Keith Helmuth

As a[n] example of contributing to an “open focus” process, I want to amplify a theme on which I spoke briefly at the last meeting, and on which I am particularly drawn to work. In order to be fully serious about the task we have been given, it seems to me we have to recognize and address divergent and competing moralities. For example, we have to understand and respond to the morality that is now being reconstituted around the image of the “enemy” and the ideal of the “warrior.”

From a Quaker point of view this is a regression in psychosocial and societal development. The entire history of the Religious Society of Friends has been oriented toward the evolutionary transcendence of this tribal and dominator ethos. The sense of human solidarity, the sense of right relationship, and the sense of cooperatively shared commonwealth that Friends have traditionally incubated, and transplanted into the development of the modern world, is the heritage that we are now endeavouring to keep alive.

It seems more and more evident that this heritage is being deliberately and systematically sidelined by powerful interests that are planning for a future of enclave security and nomadic military domination and control of resources. It seems very unlikely this strategy will work in the long run, but, at the moment, this regression is in the ascendancy. Human solidarity and right relationship with regard to justice and equity is being eclipsed at the policy level by a dynamic of economic triage and social and environmental write off. Wealth and military power are more and more regarded as the determinants of the human future. Friends can only regard this as a betrayal of the Christian and humanitarian tradition. Spirit led analysis of this situation, and enhancing the countervailing influence of Quakerism, stand out as a potentially significant theme for our committee’s work.

The vantage point I have had on the publishing industry (both scholarly and popular) for the last decade has made me keenly aware of the concerted effort being made to portray war as normative human behaviour. The arguments that are being advanced for the necessity of military action and the militarization of culture are undercutting and eroding the culture of peace for which Friends and others have been working. In order to understand why this is happening, and be clear about the context of our response, we need to research this literature and understand this world view.

For example, on my desk are three new and relevant books:

The first is The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by General Rupert Smith. Smith is a retired British Army officer. From the praise it has received, it appears this book, and the thinking it advances, must be understood by anyone working in war and peace studies.

The second book is War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat. Gat is a professor at Tel Aviv University. This book professes to “solve the riddle of war” by showing how it grows from general human desires that are everywhere more or less the same – hence the ubiquity of war, and the normative behaviour argument. The book is being extravagantly praised as the pinnacle of scholarship on the subject.

The third book is Savage Century: Back to Barbarism by Therese Delpech. The author is the Director of Strategic Affairs of the French Atomic Energy Commission. Her analysis appears to be profoundly observant and astutely critically with regard to the parallels between 1905 and the present time. She fears we are tending toward another catastrophic political and social breakdown from which recovery – this time, in any meaningful sense - may not be possible. We have here yet another serious, professional voice (in a steady procession of such voices) with deep holistic foreboding about the human future. Her last chapter is titled “The Human Soul Torn to Pieces.” Although she is dealing with the same world-historical factors of human behaviour as the other authors noted above, she offers a very different voice. (I am often struck by the difference between men and women with regard to this kind of analytic and policy judgment work. This may be an interesting sub-theme to consider.)

At the same time, there are a number of new studies that do not accept violent conflict and war as normative, and which argue for both a different interpretation of the human record and for the evolutionary potential of human learning and cooperative societal development. There is abundance of relevant, emerging work on which we can draw – if we choose to do so - for a fully rounded study of this theme. (I am not proposing that this theme become the dominant focus of our work, but only that it be taken up within the range of themes that may emerge.)

Coming back to the matter of divergent and conflicting moralities, I have been pondering a situation for which I can find no resolution, but with which I think Friends must deal, if only to gain a clear understanding. Our committee’s work may be a venue in which this dilemma can be explored and articulated.

Anthropological study introduces us to the reality of different value systems in different cultures. This fact was made real to me in an especially powerful way when, early in the American invasion of Iraq, a reporter put a microphone in front of an Iraqi father whose son had just been killed by American bombing. The father, who spoke clear English, shouted angrily at the American reporter: “You don’t understand! We are a people of revenge!” In that voice coming to me across the miles, I heard a deeply fervent moral reality. For that father to fail the code of revenge would be as much a moral failure for him as it would for a Buddhist to abandon compassion or for a Quaker to turn violent. How do we understand this reality in the context of the Quaker vision for peace? How do we see this moral reality within the ethos of human solidarity?

As Friends, we live in the conviction, as the songs says, that “any eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” But the reality of the revenge code is not only profound, it is, seemingly, on the ascendancy. The deeply rooted and pervasive expression of this code argues powerfully for a “natural” or biological context. It certainly predates the rise of compassion, forgiveness, reconciliation, and cooperative problem solving as an emerging, ever widening moral code of societal development. There is a sense, it seems to me, in which this emerging alternative moral code is an effort to transcend the more deeply spontaneous moral code of revenge. The moral code of compassion and human solidarity relies on a strong element of learning and the sense that “human nature” is highly malleable. It can be seen as a revelatory step in relation to the unfolding energy and technology environments of human development. It can be seen as evolutionary divine guidance for human well being, and, likely, human survival.

But that Iraqi father, and his anguished cry from within a deep sense of innate moral reciprocity stops me in my tracks, and makes me ask; what is going on here? How can we be talking about the “evolutionary potential of Quakerism” in the face of this reality. It seems to me, among everything else we might do, we must somehow take this reality into account.

At the moment, the fulfillment of this emergent morality seems like a long shot. The question may be asked: Are Quakers, and all the other folks who have been working for this emergence, on a fool’s errand with regard to the human future. I think there is temptation in this direction, even among Friends. Fatalism is in the air. It hard not to breath it in. I am especially interested in the potential of our committee to work with this dilemma in a way that helps clarify and articulate a Quaker voice on the human future.

What is at stake is more than just the peace testimony. As already articulated by committee members, the root issue is integrity and the sense of being a vessel for emergent truth in a complex cultural world. Our world view about this truth is being put to the test. The key line in Fox’s peace testimony speech is, “the spirit of Christ is not changeable.” While this conviction provides solid footing in changing circumstances, the collective sense of this experience has itself been, and continues to be, a context of profound social change. Whether the societal changes that flow from the spirit of Christ can be maintained and further prosper is a real question. My sense is we are trying to answer this question in ways that help Friends keep faith and hope alive, and which links the Quaker voice effectively with the world wide movement for justice, peace and the integrity of Creation.

With that said, I will end on an up-to-the-minute bibliographic note. Paul Hawken has just published a truly marvelous book titled, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.

submitted by Keith Helmuth