Quakers Prefer Lies

WHEN QUAKERS PREFER LIES All too frequently I have listened to Quakers who speak during silent worship, who tend to personalize “their” truth, declaring this or that to amount to “my truth.” This tendency troubles me, because their remarks seem to amount to locating objectivity within the realm of their subjectivity. That is to say, such personalizations of the truth seem to me to amount to declarations that the matters of which we can be the most certain are the things that are closest to our hearts and spirits and souls. My own take on the matter is more or less the opposite of this. People do not lie to others with anywhere near the frequency with which they feel compelled to lie to themselves! In reality, the matters that are the closest to our being are the matters in regard to which we are most likely, not the least likely, to be deceived — or self-deceived. These subjective self-evaluations tend to be the matters in which we are deprived of any objectivity at all. I also listen as too many Quakers attempt to “Balkanize” the truth, by issuing statements that amount to descriptions of “our” truth. These seem to me to be nothing more than exercises in groupthink, and as such, they seem inherently dangerous. Many Quakers are trivializing the truth by characterizing the attitudes of others as “your truth,” or problematizing it with posers such as: “whose truth?” — and that gets the situation precisely backward. Ever since its inception during the English Civil War, Quakerism has been sponsoring a subjective attitude of “me in direct communication with my God.” Historically, this began as our way of reacting against the established English church’s theological declarations and credos. However, reacting against someone else’s error does not amount to the same thing as overcoming one’s own error! Bearing this history in mind, we can see that what is happening now (as of the year 2019) isn’t at all President Donald John Trump’s fault. Liar though he is, he didn’t originate any of this lying. We ourselves, we Quakers, were pulling such stunts long before any American president came along to define the truth, in his shamelessness, as merely whatever he finds it useful for him to tweet. This amounts to the sin of pridefulness. Now, it seems to me, we Quakers have a special responsibility to end such madness — for after all wasn’t it us who so long ago pioneered this? A title to this present writing, “Quakers are Liars,” sic, was suggested to me by a hostile Quaker historian affiliated with a well-regarded Friends school in Washington DC. This person had for months been avoiding my emails and phone-calls but, finally, I had managed to get him inadvertently to pick up while he was distracted by commuting. When he found that it was me who was on the line, he commented about my efforts to obtain historical objectivity “You’re the one who is calling Quakers liars.” Having announced who I was and what I amounted to, he proceeded to offer me a pack of lies during which his telephone reception kept getting worse and worse, evidently by putting his smart-phone on the seat and covering it with a coat, and then speaking more and more softly and HDT WHAT? INDEX QUAKERS LIES unintelligibly, while I pleaded with him to telephone me or email me, until finally he terminated this pretense by announcing that he was going through a highway tunnel (of which there are none in the District of Columbia area), while hanging up on me. I thought, well, if he is going to characterize efforts to obtain historical objectivity as “calling Quakers liars,” then his only agenda was to get me to play the role of the nasty man, “the one who is calling Quakers liars.” So I decided not to agree to play that game. I decided to give this writing the somewhat less confrontational title “When Quakers prefer Lies,” and provide this internet URL file with the label “RichardNixonAndOtherQuakerLiars.pdf”. This title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows us to be aware not only that not all liars are Quakers: purple = Quakers blue = liars = Donald Trump But also, this title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows for the HDT WHAT? INDEX LIES QUAKERS fact that that not all Quakers are liars: purple = Quakers blue = liars = Austin Meredith, yours truly This title “When Quakers prefer Lies” also allows for the fact that although not all Quakers are liars, some Quakers must HDT WHAT? INDEX QUAKERS LIES indeed to be described in that manner: purple = Quakers blue = liars = Friend Richard Nixon Also, this title “When Quakers prefer Lies” allows for the fact that what passes popularly for Quaker History does happen for HDT WHAT? INDEX LIES QUAKERS some strange reason to be riddled with self-serving falsehoods: purple = Quakers blue = liars = self-serving falsehoods This URL file “RichardNixonAndOtherQuakerLiars.pdf” consists of a chronological list of various of these self-serving falsehoods that Quakers have been telling themselves —and eagerly telling anyone else who will listen– about their past trajectory. Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια? During my childhood in Indiana I attended a Chautauqua in the local park one night, one that featured a hypnotism act. The stage mesmerist hypnotized a couple and told the husband his wife was a chicken that needed to be prepared for supper. He then handed the husband a pillow declaring that it was a hatchet, and we children all howled with delight as this husband chased his wife around the platform, whopping her over the head with the pillow. It would have been a foolish mesmerist, however, who would have handed an actually hypnotized husband an actual hatchet, instead of this being perhaps merely an amusing stage act — because then there might well have been blood all over that platform, real blood. In this real world, fake facts have awfully real consequences. Craziness abounds: a husband who actually supposed his wife to be a chicken might actually have attempted to prepare her for supper. HDT WHAT? INDEX QUAKERS LIES As Henry David Thoreau wrote in his conclusion to WALDEN, WALDEN: No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. THE QUAKER TESTIMONY OF OBJECTIVITY The moral I draw here is very broad and consequential: that having good intentions is simply not sufficient to enable one to fulfill ones duties as a decent person leading a decent life; that there is in fact no way for us to become and remain decent and moral people in this real world around us unless we know –know correctly– a broad category of actually true things about the nature of this very real world in which we actually do live; that we need to be savvy enough to refuse to credit various preposterous stories that would mislead us, about the nature of this actual world we actually do live in. For instance, when our nation went to war in Iraq we were willing to do so because we credited some lies we had been told by our President George W. Bush and his cadre of liars ensconced in a special office in the Pentagon building, about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. Do you remember the following quote? — “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Look what has happened because of a collection of Fake Facts! We know that one of the things that had enabled the Holocaust, in central Europe during World War II, was that there had been a massive long-term campaign under Adolf Hitler to portray the Jews as “vermin.” Hitler and the Nazis had found the simple slogan they repeated again and again to discredit accurate reports: “Lügenpresse.” Today the extreme right in Germany has revived this term, and also, it has been revived in the English language, by President Trump, as “fake news.” Now, one might reasonably offer, the Nazis may have been evil but they were surely not stupid, they were in fact aware that Jews were in every sense fellow human beings — that they were not in any sense a different species, a rodent species say or an insect species. One might aver that the Nazis were well aware that the metaphor they were so carefully deploying, “vermin,” was a mere metaphor, metaphors being something of which we know to handle with care. That could be alleged! However, I would maintain that making long-term and pervasive use of such a metaphor blurred a boundary, enabling the anti-Semites to deal with Jews in the same way we deal with bothersome rodents or insect pests — with an application of Zyklon- B pesticide gas. This is what happened, we cannot avoid that this is what in fact happened to the world’s eternal shame.

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