The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” flyer showing “Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes”:http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm. An annual tradition, this flyer breaks down U.S. government spending.
This year 49% of income-tax generated federal spending is going to the military. That’s $536 billion for current military spending, $349 billion to pay for past military spending and a projected $50 billion that the President will ask Congress for after the elections.
There’s just so much wrong with this amount of miliary spending. This is money that could be going into job creation, into supporting affordable health care for Americans, into giving our kids better education. The strongest defense a country could ever have is investing in its people, but that’s impossible if we’re spending half of our taxes on bombs. And having all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the ability to fight wars largely by ourselves.
The WRL flyer always goes beyond mere number crunching, however, to show some of the human impact of this inbalanced spending. This time we have listings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health standards around the world, the lost freedom of prisoners being held by the U.S. against the Geneva Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.‘s unilateralist war.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ President
Beyond the MacGuffins: Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule
December 26, 2003
A review of Michael Sheeran’s Beyond Majority Rule. Twenty years later, do Friends need to experience the gathered condition?
Beyond Majority Rule has one of the more unique stories in Quaker writings. Michael Sheeran is a Jesuit priest who went to seminary in the years right after the Second Vatican Council. Forged by great changes taking place in the church, he took seriously the Council’s mandate for Roman Catholics to get “in touch with their roots.” He became interested in a long-forgotten process of “Communal Discernment” used by the Jesuit order in when it was founded in the mid-sixteenth century. His search led him to study groups outside Catholicism that had similar decision-making structures. The Religious Society of Friends should consider itself lucky that he found us. His book often explains our ways better than anything we’ve written.
Sheeran’s advantage comes from being an outsider firmly rooted in his own faith. He’s not afraid to share observations and to make comparisons. He started his research with a rather formal study of Friends, conducing many interviews and attending about ten monthly meetings in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. There are sections of the book that are dry expositions of Quaker process, sprinkled by interviews. There are times where Sheeran starts saying something really insightful about early or contemporary Friends, but then backs off to repeat some outdated Quaker cliche (he relies a bit too heavily on the group of mid-century Haverford-based academics whose histories often projected their own theology of modern liberal mysticism onto the early Friends). These sections aren’t always very enlightening – too many Philadelphia Friends are unconscious of their cherished myths and their inbedded inconsistencies. On page 85, he expresses the conundrum quite eloquently:
If the researcher was to succumb to the all too typical canons of social science, he would probably scratch his head a few times atjust this point, note that the ambiguity of Quaker expression makes accurate statistical evaluation of Quaker believes almost impossible without investment of untold time and effort, and move on to analysis of some less interesting but more manageable object of study.
Fortunately for us, Sheeran does not succumb. The book shines when Sheeran steps away from the academic role and offers us his subjective observations.
There are six pages in Beyond Majority Rule that comprise its main contribution to Quakerism. Almost every time I’ve heard someone refer to this book in conversation, it’s been to share the observations of these six pages. Over the years I’ve often casually browsed through the book and it’s these six pages that I’ve always stopped to read. The passage is called “Conflicting Myths and Fundamental Cleavages” and it begins on page 84. Sheeran begins by relating the obvious observation:
When Friends reflect upon their beliefs, they often focus upon the obvious conflict between Christocentric and universalist approaches. People who feel strongly drawn to either camp often see the other position as a threat to Quakerism itself.
As a Gen-X’er I’ve often been bored by this debate. It often breaks down into empty language and the desire to feel self-righteous about one’s beliefs. It’s the MacGuffin of contemporary liberal Quakerism. (A MacGuffin is a film plot device that drives the action but is in itself never explained and doesn’t really matter: if the spies have to get the secret plans across the border by midnight, those plans are the MacGuffin and the chase the real action.) Today’s debates about Christocentrism versus Universalism ignore the real issues of faithlessness we need to address.
Sheeran sees the real cleavage between Friends as those who haveexperienced the divine and those who haven’t. I’d extend the former just a bit to include those who have faith that the experience of the divine is possible. When we sit in worship do we really believe that we might be visited by Christ (however named, however defined)? When we center ourselves for Meeting for Business do we expect to be guided by the Great Teacher?
Sheeran found that a number of Friends didn’t believe in a divine visitation:
Further questions sometimes led to the paradoxical discovery that, for some of these Friends, the experience of being gathered even in meeting for worship was more of a formal rather than an experiential reality. For some, the fact that the group had sat quiety for twenty-five minutes was itself identified as being gathered.
There are many clerks that call for a “moment of silence” to begin and end business – five minutes of formal silence to prove that we’re Quakers and maybe to gather our arguments together. Meetings for business are conducted by smart people with smart ideas and efficiency is prized. Sitting in worship is seen a meditative oasis if not a complete waste of time. For these Friends, Quakerism is a society of strong leadership combined with intellectual vigor. Good decisions are made using good process. If some Friends choose to describe their own guidance as coming from “God,” that their individual choice but it is certainly not an imperative for all.
Maybe it’s Sheeran’s Catholicism that makes him aware of these issues. Both Catholics and Friends traditionally believe in the real presence of Christ during worship. When a Friend stands to speak in meeting, they do so out of obedience, to be a messenger and servant of the Holy Spirit. That Friends might speak ‘beyond their Guide’ does not betray the fact that it’s God’s message we are trying to relay. Our understanding of Christ’s presence is really quite radical: “Jesus has come to teach the people himself,” as Fox put it, it’s the idea that God will speak to us as He did to the Apostles and as He did to the ancient prophets of Israel. The history of God being actively involved with His people continues.
Why does this matter? Because as a religious body it is simply our duty to follow God and because newcomers can tell when we’re faking it. I’ve known self-described atheists who get it and who I consider brothers and sisters in faith and I’ve known people who can quote the bible inside and out yet know nothing about love (haven’t we all known some of these, even in Quakerism?). How do we get past the MacGuffin debates of previous generations to distill the core of the Quaker message?
Not all Friends will agree with Sheeran’s point of cleavage. None other than the acclaimed Haverfordian Douglas V Steere wrote the introduction to Beyond Majority Rule and he used it to dismiss the core six pages as “modest but not especially convincing” (page x). The unstated condition behind the great Quaker reunifications of the mid-twentieth century was a taboo against talking about what we believe as a people. Quakerism became an individual mysticism coupled with a world-focused social activism – to talk about the area in between was to threaten the new unity.
Times have changed and generations have shifted. It is this very in-between-ness that first attracted me to Friends. As a nascent peace activist, I met Friends whose deep faith allowed them to keep going past the despair of the world. I didn’t come to Friends to learn how to pray or how to be a lefty activist (most Quaker activists now are too self-absorbed to be really effective). What I want to know is how Friends relate to one another and to God in order to transcend themselves. How do we work together to discern our divine leadings? How do we come together to be a faithful people of the Spirit?
I find I’m not alone in my interest in Sheeran’s six pages. The fifty-somethings I know in leadership positions in Quakerism also seem more tender to Sheeran’s observations than Douglas Steere was. Twenty-five years after submitting his dissertation, Friends are perhaps ready to be convinced by our Friend, Michael J. Sheeran.
Postscript: Michael J Sheeran continues to be an interesting and active figure. He continues to write about governance issues in the Catholic Church and serves as president of Regis University in Denver.
Google can’t be wrong
December 7, 2003
I usually think cyber-pranks are just silly. But I have to laugh at this one: Enough bloggers have linked to President Bush’s official bio with the words “miserable failure” that if you now type that phrase into Google our President comes up as the very first return. More on this “Googlebomb” from this Newsday article. And just to help the results along, I’ll concur that I think he’s a miserable failure.
Attacks a sign of our success
October 28, 2003
I couldn’t believe it when a friend told me the news. In the wake of four coordinated suicide attacks in iraq that killed 30 and injured 200, President George Bush claimed that the “attacks were merely a mark of how successfully the U.S. Occupation is going”:www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/27/sprj.irq.main/index.html :
bq. “There are terrorists in iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more success we have on the ground, the more these killers will react — and our job is to find them and bring them to justice.”
This is really his way of explaining away all opposition to the U.S.: people must be jealous of all we have and all we do. But maybe iraqis continue to be angry that we invaded their country; maybe they’re angry that we’ve only reinstalled many of their generals and many of Saddam’s henchmen. Maybe they’re waiting for a democratically-elected council. I’m sure many iraqi’s condemn yesterday’s bombings. But it’s still way too early to declare victory in the war of iraqi public opinion.
In Two Years, What Have We Learned?
August 18, 2003
*By Johann Christoph Arnold*
bq. “I often wonder how many more tragedies it will take before we learn to truly love each other, and before we grasp how happy we could be if we cared for those around us as well as we care for ourselves.”
Fifty-eight Years of WMDs
August 6, 2003
Today, August 6th, marks the fifty-eighth anniversary of one of the saddest events in human history: the use of weapons of mass destruction against a civilian population.
There’s much that’s been written about the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. At the time, U.S. leaders said that use of such overwhelming force would prompt a quick Japanese surrender that would save the thousands of American and Japanese casulties that would surely result from an invasion. We have since learned the Japanese were secretly suing for peace even as the bomber planes took off.
We have learned that President Truman was looking ahead. He used the bombing (and the attack on Nagasaki a few days later) to demonstrate the weapon to the Soviet Union. In the post-war world emerging, it was clear the U.S. and the Soviet Union were on a collision course and Truman wanted to start the competition off with a bang. The lesson the Soviet leadership learned from the blast was that they’d better get their own atomic weapons and the arms race was on, straining the economies of both countries for the next fifty years.
Amazingly, those two bombs remain the only atomic weapons ever to be used against people in an act of war. Through all the years of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union, and despite the multiplying members of the “nuclear club”:www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd.htm, no one has ever done what the U.S. did all the Augusts ago. It is a fact that the world should be grateful for.
But there is no guarantee that the human race will go another fifty-eight years without mushroom clouds of human ashes. Or that development of super-bombs that pack Hiroshima-like charges won’t be used to equally-devastating effects. The U.S. is busy developing all sorts of low-yield exotic nuclear weapons to make their use more palatable to a queasy public. “As the current mayor of Hiroshim Tadatoshi Akiba said earlier today”:http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030806p2a00m0fp022000c.html :
bq. A world without nuclear weapons and war that the victims of the atomic bomb have long sought for is slipping into the shadows of glowing black clouds that could turn into mushroom clouds at any moment. The chief cause of this is the United States’ nuclear policy which, by openly declaring the possibility of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by starting research into small ‘useable’ nuclear weapons, appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.
On the Nonviolence.org Board, there’s a lively commentary on this anniversary of “Humanity’s darkest hour approaching”:www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3976
Lesson on Internet-time scoops
July 28, 2003
White House smear campaign: Gay and Canadian
July 18, 2003
This would be funny if it weren’t serious. This would be serious if it weren’t pathetic. A few days ago ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman ran a story about low morale among U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The next day someone in the White House tipped off gossip king Matt Drudge that Kofman was openly gay and (maybe worse) a Canadian. Lapdog Drudge complied with the headline “ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN.” It’s amazing what tidbits the White House thinks are newsworthy. You’d think the milestone that U.S. casulties in Iraq have surpassed those of the 1991 War might just get the President’s attention.