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Re-visioning the Quaker Peace Testimony

In 2006 a leading from Center Monthly Meeting on re-visioning the Quaker peace testimony came to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. In November of that year, a called session of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was convened at the Arch Street Meeting House in response. The outrage and fear that had erupted after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon in September of 2001 had deeply stirred Friends’ consideration of the peace testimony. Some Friends and Friends organizations did not hesitate to advance a heightened sense of relevance for the peace testimony and its activist witness. Some Friends, on the other hand, found these expressions ringing hollow in this situation and their sense of moral response was confused. They felt a moral response must be made, but saw no way for the peace testimony to make such a response.

A few Friends argued, the peace testimony not-with-standing, the moral response was to support military action against those who wish to bring America’s economic and cultural dominance in the world to a crashing end. Some Friends wondered if, in times this bad, an argument should be made for withdrawing from this level of political conflict altogether, a return to the Quietist period of Quaker history. This can be an attractive resolution, and some people may need to respond in this way. The argument that example is the best contribution Friends can make, can bring personal closure to the troubling and stressful questions linking economics, energy use, war making, ecological destruction and public policy.

While acknowledging this range of responses, the call has now come for a deep, holistic re-visioning and renewal of the peace testimony. Quakerism’s historic strengths are still solid ground for dealing with the moral confusions and temptations of our time. Consistent with the heritage that has made Quakerism a significant catalyst for societal betterment and human solidarity for over three hundred and fifty years, this leading keeps the door open to Kenneth Boulding’s vision of “the evolutionary potential of Quakerism.”

The called meeting at Arch Street was a well-attended and intense event, which helped open this door a little wider. The Committee for Re-visioning the Peace Testimony is now working to follow this leading in a way that responds to the full panorama of the human condition—a panorama that includes present and future conflicts, ranging from the personal to the global. In the light of the holistic, spiritual intuition that has guided Friends in their articulation and practice of the peace testimony, the task is to lift up the full dimensions of the moral context in which we live and work. Economics and ecology are central to the human situation in all its material, spiritual, and moral aspects. The peace testimony, in its vital evolutionary potential, is the channel through which compassionate and cooperative human relationships are sustained by ecologically sound economies. Peace on Earth means peace with Earth.

Right Relationship

Right relationship can be thought of as having two “carrying beams” - ecological coherence and social equity. Ecologically coherent economic adaptation draws on earth science. Social equity draws on the heritage of human ethical-religious development.

While ecological coherence is now self-evident, social equity is often problematic for many people.  Real differences occur between abilities at the personal level and endowments at the social and geographic levels. A Darwinian underlay of natural selection that emphasizes competition is now a virtually unconscious assumption in the minds and feelings of most people.  We have been conditioned to overlook the reality of cooperation in the dynamic of evolution. In both biological and social contexts cooperation is the governing platform of life’s commonwealth. Competition comes into play as a program—as a secondary dynamic—within the overarching reality of cooperation. Competition is a spark plug in the engine of cooperation. Competition can only function in a useful way where there is an underlying platform of cooperation. Total competition, heedless of the social context, destroys both social and ecological integrity. This is a key to our current adaptive failure.

Within this context, cooperation and competition are naturally occurring processes which tend toward very different results.  This is always a matter of choice. Choosing to foster and draw out cooperative behavior produces equity. Choosing to exploit competitive behavior produces inequity. The emergence of human social development within Earth’s story is a prime example of the cooperative dynamic at the core of evolution. Without the underlying platform of cooperation our ancestors would not likely have made it very far on the great trek of human development, nor would organic evolution overall have achieved the magnificent interdependence and reciprocity of the Earth’s commonwealth of life.

Norway is a good example of cooperative behavior. Through a variety of cooperative means, the people of Norway chose to completely eliminate poverty, even before the advent of North Sea oil revenue when Norway operated on a very modest economic base. Some people in Norway today have greater wealth than others, but nobody lives in poverty or without access to the full range of social and cultural benefits. Equity means access to a fair share, a valued status, and the prospect of a productive and rewarding life.

Economics and ecology are domains of relationship at the level of a whole society. Economics is about access to the means of life. Ecology is about the mutual interdependence of life communities. When we bring these two perspectives together, the lens of human solidarity and the lens of ecological science pivot into a single focus. Through this focus right relationship becomes the central motif in both the social design of human well being, and in ecologically sound economic adaptation. The Quaker tradition teaches us that in right relationship we touch the fullness of human meaning and the presence of the Divine. Quaker practice is about elevating all areas of human policy and practice into this zone of right relationship.

The moral development of social equity and ecological integrity is a decision by persons on how to live, and by communities and societies on how they collectively arrange their economies. The scale and intensity of human activity is now such that the question of right relationship is a survival question. Decisions on public policy for basic equity, and for ecological integrity are ethical choices that will give human communities a coherent and resilient prospect within the commonwealth of life. Working for such decisions is a clear expression of the peace testimony.

Fortunately, humans have a history of moral development, and a long religious heritage of ethical concern, to which can now be added the critical knowledge base of science. Together, these spiritual and intellectual traditions in ethics and science enable the recognition and clear identification of right relationships. That identification process becomes a guidance system, and that guidance system gives the peace testimony the tools it needs to develop its evolutionary potential.

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