Debt Subcultures

Whenever the phrase “debt culture” is used I raise an eyebrow. The connotations are rather paternalistic, and so are the arguments. There’s the “Brown is setting a bad example by borrowing so much” (and now, it seems, we’re getting his comeuppance), which deflects our own borrowing guilt, trnasferring the blame to him. And there’s the recongition that debt has become economically necessary for everyone under the age of about 30 who isn’t financed by parental blank cheques, and far too many people above 30, followed by the “And because it’s part of the culture, people get used to it” (subtext: debt culture make us reckless with money). Which seems like taking things from the wrong perspective, as if by some mysitcal force or desensitisation we get ‘hooked’ on debt.

To me, it seems much simpler: for most people, taking out a loan is something that doesn’t merely make it easier to buy things, it is a necessity which has already happened and which then makes it harder to work out what we can afford. There was, as they say, a time when if you saw something you couldn’t afford, you didn’t buy it. Now, it’s not so much that you go in and take out a loan and get it, it’s that you’ve already got so many loans and you might not even know how much is in your bank account in any given day of the month, and even if you have enough cash now, there’s no way of knowing that you will need to save the money up to pay off your debts because next year you’ll be getting a real-terms pay cut while your loan grows even larger and you should have thought of that before you bought it/took out that loan/got that job/started breathing, shouldn’t you?

My response is to be a miser, and gnash my teeth every time Sainsbury’s basics go up by 2p. But in a way, I quite understand the people who realise that they don’t have that peculiar survival skill of the modern age known as “being able to calculate compound interest while picking the most relevant rate of inflation from a choice of three and adjusting it for local factors and personal consumption habits”. People who say “to hell with it”, buy a plasma TV and wait for the demands to come to them. People who work themselves into the ground to afford things they can’t take the time to enjoy. People who start smoking because the borrowing guilt and self-enforced financial anxiety is too much. Or anything in between, really.

For the architects of our economic world, this shouldn’t be a problem because the ideology of ‘choice’, not to mention the economic model these prodessionals use assumes we’re all perfectly capable of performing such feats for every potential purchase, every possible life decision, from mortgages to families to groceries to jobs to recreation. But of course it is, and it’s a big one. The only people who can really take advantage of our supposed freedoms are the ones who can afford accountants and stockrokers and so forth, the people who don’t need to go into debt or who can pay off more debt in a year than we can earn in a lifetime. For the rest of us, our predicament is deepening: wage slavery is developing into debt slavery. And when interest grows quicker than your ability to pay it back, that’s a very long period of indenture.

A Quaker Approach to Intolerance?

I didn’t intend my first post to be full of acronyms or theology, or so long, in fact I didn’t know it was going to be about Quakerism at all – but I feel I have to write this.

There is presently a great deal of consternation about the approach to sexuality that different parts of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) are taking. I am not a ‘member’ of the Society, but I attend Quaker Meetings (including some Local and Area Business Meetings), I do part-time custodial work for my local Quaker meeting house, and I am very much interested in exploring the thought, practice, and the organisational structure of Quakerism.

On the whole, Quakers in Britain are the most supportive of LGBTQ rights of all religions and denominations (as far as I can tell) in this country (leaving aside the tricky question of whether or not atheism is a religion), and there seems to have been a conscious understanding for many decades of the importance of welcoming and cherishing gay members and attenders, as well as holding meetings for commitment for gay couples.

Two issues have recently opened up this debate once more. Both need a great deal of background explanation, so I will take them one at a time.

The first is an epistle sent by East Africa Yearly Meeting reproduced below. Unlike the rantings of archbishops, epistles are more than personal views, they agreed by and at the Yearly Meeting, essentially a consensus-based decision at in which all members of the society who are able to attend take part (rather like AGMs). Decisions of Yearly Meetings therefore need to be taken seriously.

Apart from statutory business of the Conference, time was allowed for presentations and discussions on some areas of importance to the church and our day to day lifestyle, including stress management, poverty eradication and the introduction of Gay Culture among others.

The latter ‘Gay’ was condemned wholesomely since it does not come to us as an error made by God. God created man and out of him. He made a woman for man and it was good and without error.

Gay is contrary to the scriptures and nature. Even the tiniest crawling creatures observe strictly God’s command and formation of nature Mark 10:7-9.

This Yearly Meeting shall not team up with any group that proclaims this immoral conduct.

- excerpt from 2006 Epistle from East Africa Yearly Meeting (Text from BYM Blog)

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Correction: Jez points out in a comment below that the above date is the 2006 epistle (I had it as 2007, mistakenly), and he reproduces the full text of the 2007 epistle here. I haven’t altered the rest of my post. The following passage from that epistle makes things a lot clearer:

This yearly Meeting got absolutely disgusted with some FUM member yearly Meetings; (Canada, Baltimore, New England, North Pacific and New York) if not some monthly Meetings within the yearly Meetings, that write to us pages and pages of Epistles containing no spiritual information to pass on to our members BUT ONLY their immoral sexual mannerisms of Gay and Lesbianism.

Furthermore, Marshal points out the meeting I am referring to should be clarified as East Africa Yearly Meeting (North), and not East Africa Yearly Meeting (Kaimosi), another of the fourteen or so YMs in Kenya.

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Naturally, this caused some consternation over here. Although most Quakers here were aware of the divisions in the Anglican Church in this matter, and although most were aware that Quaker organisations outside of Britain are often a lot more like mainstream Christian churches both in terms of doctrine and practice, I think it felt like that this was a very hurtful and unprovoked attack. Britain Yearly Meeting of 2008 ultimately decided to publish the minute in print, but not to do the same on its website (along with no less than six others from meetings across Africa and the US which were not “felt to be uplifting in their spiritual content”). This has not pleased everyone.

Having delved into this online, it seems that there is some more necessary contextual information, and that the epistle discusses a specific “teaming up”. I have no idea if this was on the minds of BYM 2008 when it met, but it seems relevant that the ‘parent organisation’ to which East Africa Yearly Meeting is affiliated, the Friends United Meeting (FUM, a sort of Quaker International for conservative meetings) has among it meetings which are also affiliated to Friends General Conference (FGC), the ‘liberal’ Quaker International. There is, incidentally, a further International known as “Evangelical Friends International” (EFI), which does what it says on the tin. Britain Yearly Meeting is not linked to any of these, though it seems to me it has by far the most in common with FGC.

Anna from a FGC/FUM meeting in New York has some insights very much worth reading here and here, and it is partly my inferences from her accounts that I base my understanding of the situation.

I think so far, my post has been entirely descriptive, albeit written from my personal point of view. So now, to the arguments.

One of the main pillars of Quaker Practice is the Testimony of Simplicity. To me, that is echoed not only in eschewing ornate decoration, commodity fetishisation, and artifical rhetoric and pomposity, but also in stripping our practices down to the most essentially functional elements. Quaker meetings (admittedly only those that are ‘unprogrammed’ – i.e. 11%: most of those in BYM and FGC, but not most of those in FUM and EFI) have no rituals, just a silence which is a space that is shaped by our thoughts and our manner of ministry. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing attentively, honestly, and in a constructive spirit. So too with epistles: each Yearly Meeting sends an epistle each year to its members and all other Yearly Meetings. I don’t really know what their function is supposed to be, and those I have read don’t seem to give much clue, but I would hope it is more significant than exchanging polite pleasantries. It is apparently not normal practice to reply to an epistle – but if we do not respond in some manner, either in identifiable, concrete action or at least in our next epistle, do we not assent by our silence?

This brings us on to the question of whether we have the right to do something. If we are dealing with a conflict internal to FUM, it might be argued that we in BYM should stay well clear. Similarly, if an epistle is a true assessment of the feelings of a particular meeting, it is difficult to simply say “you’re wrong”. It is also easy to slip into a western-centric habit of lecturing former colonies how to behave. Indeed, I have seen it remarked in The Friend (a Quaker periodical) that it would be dangerous to allow gay rights to become synonymous with imperialism.

On the other hand, we must examine what our commitment to equality actually means. We have a relationship not only with the very varied institutions that come under the wide umbrella of the Quaker movement, but also with Quakers as individuals, including those in a location with no Yearly Meeting, and including those whose own Yearly Meeting disowns or disapproves of. Our commitment to peace, equality, and social witness applies equally to Quakers and non-Quakers, in this country and abroad.

Furthermore, epistles are the only mechanism by which Quakers across different Yearly Meetings can communicate and share messages we feel other meetings should hear. East Africa Yearly Meeting is aware of this, and used their epistle to express its disdain for fellow human beings. If the passage came from a government document, we would be challenging it – why do we not speak out against homophobia when it comes from an organisation which calls itself Quaker? For me, this really calls into question the effectiveness of Quaker organisation if it is culturally unable to challenge oppressive behaviour in its own ranks.

Ultimately, our response must be based on what we can do for LGBTQ people in East Africa – is there anything we can do? We can not force East Africa Yearly Meeting to take a different ‘line’, even if that were desirable. But I am uncomfortable with going so far the other way that East Africa Yearly Meeting does not realise how strongly BYM differs. While we should not try to isolate EAYM, they have declared a wish to separate from more progressive meetings, and not talking about the issue and hoping that the many Meetings for Commitment for gay couples held in Britain will be ignored or overlooked in EAYM’s campaign against ‘Gay’ seems a little dishonest; we have to approach EAYM openly and give them the opportunity to judge for themselves what truth lies in our feelings – to do any other seems patronising. While I understand there is also some slow work that is going on through on-the-ground engagement (I’m not very clued in on that subject, I’m afraid), I fear that if the climate changes – for example if those more determined in their campaign take heart from the lack of support for “Gay Culture among others”, this engagement may become much more difficult to maintain. And other than ‘continue what we were doing already’, it’s difficult to see what can be done on that front.

More puzzling than the decision not to respond was the decision to authorise the publication of certain epistles in hard copy “so we can face our differences in truth and love”, but not online (which would have allowed those of us who can’t afford to buy a book of epistles can join in with facing those differences). I am intrigued by what was in the excluded epistles, and why no less than six meetings decided to send us something so spiritually depressing that BYM could not bear to put them online. Did BYM hear each one before deciding which should be included? If only BYM had had the conviction to publish them and add a note to the end of the offending epistles to clarify that the issues have raised eyebrows instead. I get the feeling that the decision not to publish the rest online was borne more out of insecurity about the issue than out of confidence in the application of the Testimony of Equality to LGBTQ concerns. Perhaps it is unquakerly to raise such suspicions, but difficult decisions about tackling prejudice need to be done as openly as possible to exclude resentment of those making the decision and to help the Quaker community as a whole understand and appreciate the decision and the motivations behind it. Minute 35 of BYM 2008 simply doesn’t do it for me:

Minute 35: Publishing Epistles

We have heard an explanation from Yearly Meeting Agenda Committee of their decision not to publish all epistles received from other Yearly Meetings this year. We thank Agenda Committee for wrestling with this issue on our behalf, and recognise their care for gay and lesbian Friends who share an equal place in our Yearly Meeting. We agree that all epistles received should be printed and made available to Friends in Britain Yearly Meeting (with a clear statement that these are the work of the sending Yearly Meeting) so we can face our differences in truth and love. However we think that epistles from other Yearly Meetings need not be published on the Britain Yearly Meeting website. Quaker World Relations Committee are engaged in dialogue with East Africa (North) Yearly Meeting and other yearly meetings in Kenya, and we uphold them in their work. We recognise that this dialogue will be made more difficult by the complexity of the relationship between yearly meetings in East Africa, and the political divisions in Kenya which Friends are active in trying to resolve.

- BYM 2008

As to the actual decision, I do not see what partial or complete censorship could do to help. It does not protect the LGBTQ community, because while it is known that these feelings exist, they cannot be specified, allowing for scaremongering and speculation – that’s at least as hurtful. Moreover, there’s the old problem that censorship by a clique is desperately liable to corruption, while censorship by a decision in which the entire membership participates means locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. While I have some sympathy for certain manifestations of the “No Platform” concept – where an organisation has a policy that it does not waste resources publishing views which contradict its aims and organising events jointly with groups it considers dangerous (e.g. campaigning organisations refusing to hold joint meetings with far-right groups), paper publication and online omission is the least sensible way of applying this. Finally, we must ask why it is appropriate or even remotely consistent to refuse to publish online an open letter by a sibling organisation because of its content while at the same time refusing to contradict the content openly or even express its support for LGBTQ rights and LGBTQ individuals in East Africa.

Assuming the meeting was properly conducted, and the sense of the meeting was fairly recorded, I am left with the feeling that Quakers in Britain need to address our own culture with regards to how seriously we take homophobia within our own society and within the Religious Society of Friends itself.

Message in a Bottle

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

- Frank Herbert

The internet, and in particular the more recent explosion of blogging and the like, is frequently touted as a great equaliser, a place where we can spread our ideas freely, and so on and so forth. It is dismissed as cliché with almost equal regularity nowadays. That’s not really an argument, though. Aside from the fact that this is clearly untrue in certain more repressive regimes, aside from the fact that criticising your employer on your blog is a pretty good way of getting sacked, the idea that political freedom extends as far as being free to have a server provide a your opinions on certain matters to anyone who’s looking for it is a fairly narrow view. Certainly, it’s a step up from not being able to do that, but firing messages off into the void of cyberspace in the hope that someone might someday read them is hardly the height of political organisation. What’s really important – if anything – is the links that are made between real life and the virtual world, the solid action which must fight its way past the passive commentary and idealistic waffling.

I should perhaps have started with an introduction, to link this pseudonym into real life. I don’t feel like copying out my CV though. So for now, it’s just a name: Hello, I’m Daniel.