Some­times it seems as if mod­erns are look­ing back at his­tory through the wrong end of the tele­scope: every­thing seems soooo far away. The effect is mag­ni­fied when we’re talk­ing about spir­i­tu­al­ity. The ancients come off as car­toon­ish fig­ures with a com­pli­cated set of worked out philoso­phies and pro­hi­bi­tions that we have to adopt or reject whole­sale. The ideal is to be a liv­ing branch on a long-rooted tree. But how do we intel­li­gently con­verse with the past and nego­ti­ate changes?

Let’s talk Friends and music. The car­toon Quaker in our his­tor­i­cal imag­i­na­tion glares down at us with heavy dis­ap­proval when it comes to music. They’re squares who just didn’t get it.

Get­ting past the cartoons

Thomas Clark­son, our Angli­can guide to Quaker thought circa 1700, brings more nuance to the scru­ples. “The Quak­ers do not deny that instru­men­tal music is capa­ble of excit­ing delight. They are not insen­si­ble either of its power or of its charms. They throw no impu­ta­tion on its inno­cence, when viewed abstractly by itself.” (p. 64)

“Abstractly by itself”: when eval­u­at­ing a social prac­tice, Friends look at its effects in the real world. Does it lead to snares and tem­pa­tions? Quak­ers are engaged in a grand exper­i­ment in “chris­t­ian” liv­ing, keep­ing to lifestyles that give us the best chance at moral liv­ing. The warn­ings against cer­tain activ­i­ties are based on obser­va­tion borne of expe­ri­ence. The Quaker guide­lines are wikis, notes com­piled together into a col­lec­tive mem­ory of which activ­i­ties promote–and which ones threaten–the lead­ing of a moral life.

Clark­son goes on to detail Quaker’s con­cerns about music. They’re all actu­ally quite valid. Here’s a sampling:

• Peo­ple some­times learn music just so they can show off and make oth­ers look talentless.
• Reli­gious music can become a end to itself as peo­ple become focused on com­po­si­tion and play­ing (we’ve really decon­tex­tu­al­ized: much of the music played at orches­tra halls is Masses; much of the music played at folk fes­ti­val is church spirituals).
• Music can be a big time waster, both in its learn­ing and its listening.
• Music can take us out into the world and lead to a self-gratification and fashion.

I won’t say any of these are absolute rea­son to ban music, but as a list of neg­a­tive temp­ta­tions they still apply. The Catholic church my wife belongs to very con­sciously has music as a cen­ter­piece. It’s very beau­ti­ful, but I always appre­ci­ate the pastor’s reminder that the music is in ser­vice to the Mass and that no one had bet­ter clap at some per­for­mance! Like with Friends, we’re see­ing a delib­er­ate bal­anc­ing of ben­e­fits vs temp­ta­tions and a warn­ing against the snares that the choice has left open.

Con­text con­text context

In sec­tion iv, Clark­son adds time to the equa­tion. Remem­ber, the Quaker move­ment is already 150 years old. Times have changed:

Music at [the time of early Quak­ers] was prin­ci­pally in the hands of those, who made a liveli­hood of the art. Those who fol­lowed it as an accom­plish­ment, or a recre­ation, were few and those fol­lowed it with mod­er­a­tion. But since those days, its progress has been immense… Many of the mid­dle classes, in imi­ta­tion of the higher, have received it… It is learned now, not as a source of occa­sional recre­ation, but as a com­pli­cated sci­ence, where per­fec­tion is insisted upon to make it worth of pur­suit. p.76.

Again we see Clarkson’s Quak­ers mak­ing dis­tinc­tions between types and moti­va­tions of musi­cian­ship. The laborer who plays a gui­tar after a hard day on the field is less wor­ri­some than the obsessed ado­les­cent who spends their teen years locked in the den prac­tic­ing Stair­way to Heaven. And when music is played at large fes­ti­vals that lead youth “into com­pany” and fash­ions, it threat­ens the reli­gious soci­ety: “it has been found, that in pro­por­tion as young Quak­ers mix with the world, they gen­er­ally imbibe its spirit, and weaken them­selves as mem­bers of their own body.”

Music has changed even more rad­i­cally in the suceed­ing two cen­turies. Most of the music in our lives is pre-recorded; it’s ubiq­ui­tious and often invol­un­tary (you can’t go shop­ping with­out it). Add in the drone of TV and many of us spend an insane amount of time in its semi-narcotic haze of iso­lated lis­ten­er­ship. Then, what about DIY music and sin­ga­longs. Is there a dis­tinc­tion to be made between testoterone power-chord rock and twee singer-songwriter strums? Between are­nas and cof­fee­house shows? And move past music into the other media of our lives. What about movies, DVS, com­put­ers, glossy mag­a­zines, talk shows. Should Friends waste their time obsess­ing over Amer­i­can Idol? Well what about Prairie Home Companion?

Does a social prac­tice lead us out into the world in a way that makes it hard for us to keep a moral cen­ter? What if we turned off the medi­ated con­sumer uni­verse and engaged in more spir­i­tu­ally reward­ing activities–contemplative read­ing, ser­vice work, vis­it­ing with oth­ers? But what if music, com­put­ers, radio, is part of the way we’re engag­ing with the world?

How to decide?

Finally, in Clarkson’s days Friends had an elab­o­rate series of courts that would decide about social prac­tices both in the abstract (whether they should be pub­lished as warn­ings) and the par­tic­u­lar (whether a par­tic­u­lar per­son had strayed too far and fallen in moral dan­ger). Clark­son was writ­ing for a non-Quaker audi­ence and often trans­lated Quak­erese: “courts” was his name for monthly, quar­terly and yearly meet­ing struc­tures. I sus­pect that those ses­sions more closely resem­bled courts than they do the mod­ern insti­tu­tions that share their name. The court sys­tem led to its own abuses and started to break down shortly after Clarkson’s book was pub­lished and doesn’t exist anymore.

We find out­selves today pretty much with­out any struc­ture for shar­ing our expe­ri­ences (“Faith and Prac­tice” sort of does this but most copies just gather dust on shelves). Monthly meet­ings don’t feel that over­sight of their mem­bers is their respon­si­bil­ity; many of us have seen them look the other way even at fla­grantly egre­gious behav­ior and many Friends would be out­raged at the con­cept that their meet­ing might tell them what to do–I can hear the howls of protest now!

And yet, and yet: I hear many peo­ple long­ing for this kind of col­lec­tive inquiry and instruc­tion. A lot of the emer­gent church talk is about build­ing account­able com­mu­ni­ties. So we have two broad set of ques­tions: what sort of prac­tices hurt and hin­der our spir­i­tual lives in these mod­ern times; and how do we share and per­haps cod­ify guide­lines for twenty-first cen­tury right­eous living?