Hey, Girl...where's your website? Ask the Quakers...

What do Quakers have to do with anything?
Hang on...let me first tell you the good news is that I have temporarily taken down my website (which is why if you were looking for it, you're here instead) because I have been so booked, I haven't had the time to re-write the content to update it. The bad news is, that could eventually mean when I am not so busy, no one will remember all the things I've done and can do, if they think of me at all!

Meanwhile, in order to take a break from writing and consulting, and to procrastinate on the website, I thought I would write and consider...Quakers...

Recently, while doing some research for a series of articles on South Jersey (US Airways Magazine 2/09), a local historian brought my attention to a remarkable book: Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer. It's about a million pages long, and so makes a mighty night stand all on its own, but it vindicates itself for being so darn enormous, by being so darn interesting. The book retraces American thought today back to the thoughts our British founders were thinking as they followed the trade winds west.

As I embark on the next ten years it will take me to read this book all the way through, what occurs to me as I pick out the parts that seem the tastiest, is that while they might have been hearing some funky syntax in their heads (all those ye's and thou's and double ff's and e's on the end of everything), our British forebears were not thinking anything we're not thinking.

Annoyed with elitists/rabbel rousers, angry at being silenced by political correctness/not being heard, and full of ire for the king/messiah/doofus/(insert clever moniker here)...or full of ire at some such group or person that somehow seemed to make a perfect world impossible, they knew they were right, even if misunderstood.

This could be America today!

So, they headed over here to a place where they expected to once--and--for--all--dammit, be left alone to think whatever the heck they wanted. Well, oops, okay, so there were already a few native folks living here--some of those British pioneers figured out how to make that work out well, others did not, but the larger point is that as Buckaroo Bonzai once said, "Wherever you go, there you are."

Which is why as soon as they got down to building their New Englands, New Yorks and New Jerseys, they started running into the same old, same old. (Maybe they should have been more creative with the names...)

The Puritans hated everybody while professing the love of God (alright--I actually skipped over most of that part to read about the Quakers instead, but I did study Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in college!). The agrarian southerners liked their slaves, even if they took offense to being seen as lower than the snobs above them. The Quakers were partial to the "live and let live" frame of mind, which meant they also didn't want to fight (except with each other over who owned what land, among other issues). And all hell broke loose with the wild Scots, Irish, and poor Brits (I think I can skip most of those chapters, since these characters are all related to me anyway).

Everybody felt right at home, as though they'd never left Old England!

Eventually, of course, the English got to be a real drag, with taxes and bowing and scraping and all that, so enough of these settlers shook off their inertia (understanding that EVERYONE in this story gets points for having bothered to cross the ocean in the first place) and staged a revolution so we could finally get around to making things NEW!

Only, just as before and probably forever after, to the victors go the spoils, so"new" is a relative term. All of which brings me 'round to the point (You'd better make it good, girl!). Okay...

I would bet you dollars to doughnuts that you don't know a darn thing about the Quakers. (Wha...? I read all the way to here for this?)

We don't really learn much about them in school, since we're too busy learning about the cranky Puritans (burn, baby, burn!) and their descendants. And the reason for that is the Puritans loved the written word, and so they were, by and large, the ones who wrote the history books. On the other hand, according to Fischer, colonial Quakers were intensely ambivalent about higher education. To them, universities canonized the subjective into the Truth, which threatened the Inner Light of each individual.

Since the Quakers saw no need to cultivate a professional ministry, they didn't bother to shell out the scheckles on universities and libraries, nor did they bother to write much about their experiences (except for William Penn, for whom there is named an Ivy League school and who wrote copiously about the dangers of literacy...go figure). In fact, says Fischer, Quakers "cultivated disinterest" in education altogether.

And yet, it is upon the Quakers' iconoclastic (and to most Puritans, flat out weird) notions of pluralism and civil liberties that much of our Constitution is actually built. For example, in the colony of West Jersey, settled by Quakers in 1674, their charter allowed anyone who owned land free and clear to vote. (By the way, that's why New Jersey's legislators today are known as "freeholders.") Meanwhile, next door in Puritanical East Jersey, if you were an athiest--fugettaboutit! You weren't votin' fa nuttin', baby.

Put another way, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Sound familiar?

This is not meant as an apologia for Quakerism. I am not, nor do I expect I ever will be a Quaker. Neither do I think Puritans were all bad. They got us here, didn't they? It is, however, meant to bring attention to the notion that whenever we think we are the ones who have all the answers, it's just as likely that we are standing on the shoulders of others--probably groups we think are really, really stupid--who thought they did too. And no matter how many liberating answers we actually do have, we're just as likely to be oppressive in other ways.

So just how smart, evolved, and full of fresh thinking are we, really? History might have a few things to teach us about that.

I'm just sayin'...