The Quakers Again

A happy family, we’re told, eats together.  The dinner table is the fulcrum of the family where life is talked out under the benign eye of the loving matriarch. Dad provides some jokes.  It’s not really how I remember meal times growing up. We did eat together, it was important to the family and it was often a laugh, but meals didn’t really take the form of a pleasant middle-class dinner party.  Instead dinner started with a frantic scramble for food, followed by a grim silence as the days takings were consumed.  The atmosphere was more Gulag than Come Dine with Me, talk and laughter followed after dinner was eaten, which in the case of me and my brothers never took more than ninety seconds.  My father approved of this gluttony and insists to this day that it’s a genetic imprint of the Famine.  Irish people, he reckons, were so traumatized by the 1845-49 famine that they consume food in a desperately functional manner.  It’s an interesting hypothesis; although I think in our case eating habits may have been more influenced by our father’s prodigious, Wellesian voracity than some folk memory.  I wouldn’t dismiss the argument altogether though; a person has a right to suppose that the Famine is the single defining event in Irish History.  As with most of our story, it becomes subsumed by the bitterness in our relations with the British, and the Liberal government of the time demonstrated a spectacular disregard for the Irish peasantry.  The second episode of my Quaker documentary, Waterford’s Friends, features a choice quote from Sir Charles Trevelyan to the effect that the Irish deserved what they got.  To be fair, and to fudge the matter as I usually like to, the previous Conservative government of Robert Peel did take what action it could to relieve the situation.  Peel may have been attracted to the Free Market but he was enough of an old school Tory paternalist to believe that when poor people are starving the government may have some responsibility to help.  John Russell’s Whigs in an act of blinkered idealism – which ought not to be lost on us today – wanted the market to decide who lived and who died.  Also to be fair, many of the starving peasants were hunted from their holdings not by absentee landlords but good catholic Irish nationalist farmers from whom they sub-let and from whom they got little in the way of compassion.  However, politics and recrimination aside, the desperate fact of the famine, an event so terrible it could, according to my Dad, genetically program the behavior of subsequent generations of Irish people in their eating habits is what fascinates me.  Our main cemetery in Waterford, Saint Otterans, is located where it is because that is where the refugees from the land died in their hundreds.  The country boreens festooned with the dead and the dying.  The desperate journeys to America where success awaited some, penury the others.  The Waterford Quakers were one of the first (although as they are quick to point out, not the only) groups to organize relief.  Their religion had little time for economic theory, economic practice was more their line; nor were they too interested in questioning the motives of God.  God may have had His reasons, but their job was simple, to help.  What I love about that help was that it often took the form of loans, those they helped paid them back, and the money was reinvested somewhere else.  The Quakers were not interesting in feeling good about themselves, they wanted to get things done.  There was no religious caveat to the help; Quakers don’t seek converts, reasoning that a person must find their own way to God, without nudges.  It seems to me that the Quaker belief in God is so profound that they are much more comfortable in allowing that God discretion in His own decisions, a refreshing contrast to the zealots around the world today who are determined to do God’s will themselves in case, I don’t know, He forgets.  I’m not into conversion myself, I suppose an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Catholic is much the same as an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Quaker, or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Muslim or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Mormon.  But I’ve developed a profound respect for the Quakers of Waterford, as much for their practicality as anything else.  The second episode of Waterford’s Friends is broadcast tomorrow at 11am.

Peacefully Radical

There may or may not be lessons to be taken from history.  First and foremost, I like the stories and the weirder the better.  One of my favourites is the Siege of Munster (German Munster, not our Munster) during the early stages of the Reformation.  Growing up in a country with such Catholic baggage and where Protestantism had been the religion of the ruling establishment, I think we tend not to fully understand the excitement of the reformation, its iconoclasm, its radicalism, its individualism.  In an age where belief in God was deeply held and unquestioned and where that God could only be communicated with through a monolithic church, Martin Luther’s idea that your own personal faith in God alone will decide your destiny must have been thrilling for those (usually artisans and shop-keepers) willing to embrace it.  The new protestant theologians found that no one had exclusive ownership of the bible and its meanings. In this teaching we have the beginnings of individual liberty, freedom of expression and, paradoxically, secularism and atheism.  Quite how thrilling this could be was revealed in the religious-political mania that took hold in Munster in 1534. A group of radical Anabaptists took control of the city and declared a second Jerusalem.  They were generally artisans, bakers and tailors and the like.  They instituted adult baptism sparking a powerful revivalist movement amongst the population (in a time of high infant mortality though, early baptisms were a big selling point for the Catholic Church).  The expelled Bishop began to besiege the city and Anabaptist leader Jan Matthys, believing himself to be a second Gideon, led thirty men to attack the Bishop’s army. It didn’t go well.  Tailor John Bockelson took over the rebel city and things got really interesting.  He introduced communal living – which meant confiscation of all goods for his own use – and polygamy, promptly taking sixteen wives for himself.  Execution and torture became commonplace and a proto-secret police was developed. He anticipated 1970's British stand-up comedy by publically beheading one of his wives. The city was retaken and Bockelson was subjected to a pretty gruesome execution himself.  Not surprisingly Munster gave radical Protestantism a bad name and as a consequence pacifism became a cornerstone of many protestant groups thereafter.  An intense devotion to the bible and rejection of any interlocutor priesthood between the individual and God was politically unacceptable in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and successor groups to the Anabaptists, like the Mennonites, the Amish or the Dunkers could only insulate themselves from the full rigours of religious persecution by insisting on a quiet, peaceful existence.  This Friday WLR FM will broadcast the first of my two-part documentary on the Waterford Quakers, a religious group whose famous pacifism came from a similar political expediency.  The Quakers emerged from a revolutionary period in English history.  The political could not be separated from the religious during the English Civil War which ended with the execution of a King – an extraordinary event in 17^th Century Europe.  Lest the chopping off of the King’s Head might encourage too much revolution, the Cromwellian government was keen to keep a lid on groups like the Levellers, and the Quakers were regarded with suspicion, hence their attachment to peace.  However unlike other pacifist religious groups, the Quakers believed in a full engagement with the economic life of their environment.  This practical aspect of the religion sets it apart from protestant fundamentalism.  Clearly the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is an anathema to Quakers, but so too is some of the theology of protestant groups, particularly the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination.  Pre-destination basically dictates that God has already chosen those who will ascend to heaven before the creation of the world, before you or anyone else was born.  The doctrine removes all notions of individual responsibility and morality and is profoundly stupid.  The Quakers believed that we are put on this earth to make use of the talents God gave us, an individual relationship with God and bible is important, but it’s only a starting point.  The Quakers in Waterford were very useful; they started Jacob’s biscuits, Waterford Crystal, the Portlaw Cotton Mill, and the Neptune Shipyard.  They traded throughout the Atlantic seaboard and were responsible for a third of the trade in Waterford with no more than 2% of the population. They also saved the Irish language in Waterford through their intervention in Ring during the Famine.  In fact, you can be an athiest and still approve of Quakerism which may explain why athiest pin-up Christopher Hitchens sends his children to a Quaker school. Their contribution to Waterford is remarkable; I hope the programme does it justice.  Lessons from history?  Well, when the Malcomson family got fed up paying exorbitant fees to export their cotton from Portlaw, they decided to build their own ships in Waterford.  There’s a lesson there somewhere.