In the mid-80s I was one of the many idealistic college kids who interned with the UFW for a summer. I got to hang out with him a number of times. His son-in-law ran the NYC-based media campaign and Cesar would come for planning meetings but also to visit his daughter and grandkids. She made great cheese enchiladas and all of us would talk late into the night as he told stories.

I do remember thinking—and asking—why the sainted VP Dolores Huerta never actually seemed all that involved, at least not to the point of ever coming East that summer to participate in NYC-based media strategy meetings. It was explained she was needed back in California.¹ I never met her. I remember not being surprised at all that she didn’t ascend to the UFW presidency when Cesar died. It went instead to the son-in-law who had led our office.

My direct supervisor was a schlub and sexist pig. He was always making inappropriately suggestive comments to the young female interns, which they universally laughed off. They were all smart, confident women with futures who weren’t going to be put off by him. I was the only male intern that summer and he put me in shitty assignments, pressuring me to drop out. I assume I was seen as competition and indeed I did start dating a fellow intern (the only reason I put up with his behavior and made it through the summer). I see he’s still with the UFW, now listed as first vice president, which is not at all inspiring.

It was perhaps the most dysfunctional office culture I’ve ever seen. The union’s influence had obviously declined since the heady days of RFK marching with Cesar in huge rallies. They seemed to jump from fad to fad hoping to recapture attention. That year direct marketing was all the rage in business circles and the UFW was jumping in with both feet. We would spend hours in meetings setting unrealistic expectations, then break our own guidelines to “meet” them. I’d be called out for trying to do things the way we had agreed. I remember wondering if any of the office work I did that summer actually made a jot of difference. Helping to organize East Coast appearances of Cesar was definitely the highlight of the summer—well, that and the girlfriend and getting to hang out in New York City all the time.

I do have to wonder now if some of the dysfunction and sexism in the office was ultimately related to Cesar’s repeated molestation of children.² Did he foster a culture in which we laughed off bad behavior and didn’t question poor management?

Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.

I appreciate her comments on invested readers. The number of people who were part of the “Quaker blogosphere” back in day was not that large but something about the crucible of the writing and debating meant that they developed ideas that have outsized influence today. The same sorts of conversations continue to happen today in corners of Facebook, Reddit, and Discord but there’s not the same sort of feeling of shared community.

Requiem for Early Blogging

As part of Talking Points Memo’s 25th anniversary, I wrote an essay on early blogging, and what I…

Elizabeth Spiers

Silent Weddings: The Simple, Unconventional Tradition That Could Be Right For You — Glam

Silent weddings have been taking place since the 18th century among the Religious Society of Friends. Here’s what…

Glam

This line is one of my favorites: “According to the History Channel, an English Dissenter called George Fox established the Religious Society of Friends, or the Quaker Movement, in England in the 1800s.” I’m not sure what’s worse: admitting you’re sourcing your work from the History Channel or getting the date wrong by a couple of centuries (Quakerism is considered to have started in 1652).

But in reality, I’m not sure you need to click through to the article unless you want to see just how bad it’s gotten on some of these SEO-chasing content farms. I’m pretty sure this was largely written by AI. The ZeroGPT detector picked up some sentences; I checked other articles written under the same bylines and ZeroGPT lights up whole paragraphs.

Spending some more time with this idea, including during Meeting for Worship, I realised that I actually have a strong intuition against there being any form of life after death. Not only do I not think that any life which may or may not occur after death should affect my actions now (I don’t do things because I want to get into heaven or generate good karma for my next life, and nor do I accept eschatological verification), I actively think it’s unlikely, even impossible, that such a thing exists.

Friends Journal devoted an issue to The Art of Dying and the Afterlife a few years ago, including an introduction I wrote.

Liberal Quakers and Life after Death

In the light of our high ideals, it can be hard for individual Quakers not to feel inadequate. I certainly do. We’re exhorted to “let our lives speak”, and I often feel like my life doesn’t have much to say. But I am a writer. As a community that listens patiently for the truth, Quakers provide a unique place for creativity. The faith that can sit through hours of Meeting – through boredom, frustration, distraction – is the same thing that keeps me going when I’m struggling for my next idea. We worship in silence, but we’re waiting for words, which somehow gives me faith that, if I wait in front of a blank page for long enough, the right story will come.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/09/top-10-quakers-in-fiction?CMP=twt_gu

A phrase that keeps coming to mind is “a new Quakerism,” and oddly enough, I’ve been hearing other Friends unknowingly echo this phrase back to me. It seems to me that many Friends, even those who consider themselves “convinced,” are hungry for more than what the Society has to offer.

Of course it’s part of our tradition that it needs to be forever reborn. You can’t recycle sermons or use the prop of your university learning as a crutch. We are never to know what might happen when worship starts, since the idea is that it’s directly led in the moment by Christ. It’s also a part of our tradition that forms are forever calcifying and that we need to remember why we’re here and who’s brought us together. Glad to see the work continue.

A New Quakerism

Make no mistake: Cadbury’s speech is cringeworthy. Some of the quotes as reported by the Times:

You can prove to your oppressors that their objectives and methods are not only wrong, but unavailing in the face of the world’s protests and universal disapproval of the injustices the Hitler program entails.

By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his policies against them.

If Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.

The idea that we might be able to appease Hitler was obviously wrong-headed. To tell Jews that they should do this is patronizing to the extreme.

But in many ways, all this is also vintage Quaker. It is in line with how many Friends saw themselves in the world. To understand Cadbury’s reaction, you have to know that Quakers of the era were very suspicious of collective action. He described any boycott of Nazi Germany as a kind of warfare. They felt this way too about unionization–workers getting together on strike were warring against the factory owners.

When John Woolman spoke out about slavery in the 1700s, he went one-on-one as a minister to fellow Quakers. During the Civil War, Friends wrote letters one-on-one with Abraham Lincoln urging him to seek peace (they got some return letters too!). Cadbury naively thought that these sorts of personal tactics could yield results against authoritarian twentieth-century states.

Missing in Cadbury’s analysis is an appreciation of how much the concentration of power in industrializing societies and the growth of a managerial class between owners and workers has changed things. Workers negotiating one-on-one with an owner/operator in a factory with twenty workers is very different than negotiating in a factory of thousands run by a CEO on behalf of hundreds of stockholders. Germany as a unified state was only a dozen years old when Cadbury was born. The era of total war was still relatively new and many people naively thought a rule of law could prevail after the First World War. The idea of industrializing pogroms and killing Jews by the millions must have seen fantastical.

Some of this worldview also came from theology: if we have direct access to the divine, then we can appeal to that of God in our adversary and win his or her heart and soul without resort to coercion. It’s a nice sentiment and it even sometimes works.

I won’t claim that all Friends have abandoned this worldview, but I would say it’s a political minority, especially with more activist Friends. We understand the world better and routinely use boycotts as a strategic lever. Cadbury’s American Friends Service Committee itself pivoted away from the kind of direct aid work that had exemplified its early years. For half a century it has been working in strategic advocacy.

Friends still have problems. We’re still way more stuck on racial issues among ourselves than one would think we would be given our participation in Civil Rights activism. Like many in the U.S., we’re struggling with the limitation of civility in a political system where rules have broken down. No AFSC head would give a lecture like Cadbury’s today. But I think it’s good to know where we come from. Some of Cadbury’s cautions might still hold lessons for us; understanding his blind spots could help expose ours.

At first blush, such a process might be celebrated as a process of enrichment: Quakerism version 1 turns into Quakerism v2, now new and better because it has bells or outward sacraments or what-have-you. But note that this kind of change is not just a matter of simple addition, because elements drawn from various other traditions are themselves embedded deeply in some culture, and so they are clothed round with meanings and nuances that are implicitly adopted along with the idea or practice that has been explicitly imported.

Love, judgment, and the “inner critic”, pt. 2b: Syncretism, dilution, and the drawbacks of cultural appropriation