Reparations for slavery
Decision to make reparations for the transatlantic slave trade taken at Yearly Meeting in May.
Quakers acted on their commitment to anti-racism this year with a historic decision to make reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. The agreement, made at Yearly Meeting in May, followed an earlier announcement to rename the William Penn room at Friends House after abolitionist Benjamin Lay. The new name was suggested by staff at the Quiet Company, which manages Friends House. BYM said that Penn ‘made important contributions to religious freedom, democracy and pacifism, and these will be remembered. But we cannot ignore the truth that he was also a slaveholder, profiting from enslaved people, like many other Quakers’.
Meanwhile, Friends across the country committed to work towards improving diversity. In August, Edwina Peart, BYM’s diversity and inclusion coordinator, said that the Quaker community has made ‘good progress’, but ‘we need to be brave and continue to engage with what are often difficult conversations’.
The year ended with December’s Meeting for Sufferings reiterating the Quaker Life request that Friends cease using the term ‘overseer’.
But why do we feel burdened by guilt over practices that ended about two hundred years ago? Why do we feel this to be a stain on the name "Quaker"? Why we feel associated with the doings of people now long dead?
One personality test I encountered simply ask participants to list twenty things they are:
I am a …
This was suggested as a starting point to understanding the socially constructed side of identity. In addition to the roles you fill, many of the answers would map belonging, the bond you feel with the society that surrounds you, not just with your family or kinship group, but beyond. What is interesting is how many of those bonds which help define your self-identity in our modern context are with 'social objects': organisations, institutions, businesses, clubs, societies, corporations – objects which are even recognised in law as persons, entities, beings in their own right. They are shared fictions which exist in social contexts and have economic, legal and performative aspects which are their manifestations. They do not exist outside human behaviour.
What is even more surprising is how we can form emotional bonds with such social objects; the Society of Friends being one such. Other species do not do this. They may bond into herds, packs or flocks, and even recognises an out group: a pack that is a threat to your pack's hunting grounds, will cause your pack to unite to drive them off; but only humans form bonds with intangible entities, with social objects. There are no nations, sects, cults or clubs amongst other species.
Nationality is one of the primary identities among modern humans, it even carries great legal weight and consequences. In earlier times who you owed allegiance and service to better defined you. Now patriotism is both expected and demanded towards such nebulous social objects as nations. A patriotism that may even require the sacrifice of your life, or that you kill others in its 'defence'. But what is the psychological mechanism that bonds you with such social objects?
Jung used the term participation mystique to describe those bonds. He adopted the term from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), but adapted it for his own purposes, because it seemed so well to describe one of the driving forces of the human psyche: passionate involvement with what are abstract entities, social objects, such as "my country", "my faith", or even, "my football team". And, yes, there is passionate involvement: elation, misery, excitement, anticipation, longing, despair, humiliation, comfort, belonging, … all deeply and completely felt depending on the fortunes of the object of participation. Think of the jubilation or despair of a football supporter depending on whether 'their' team wins of looses, even if they have not witnessed the match. That is a relatively trivial example compared to the bonds formed with religions, political parties or nations.
It is no accident that many Catholics are so engaged by 'The Passion' as to offer themselves for crucifixion on Good Friday, or Shia Muslims self-flagellate in mourning for Husayn ibn Ali whilst preparing for Ashura. They are public demonstrations of the power of the participation mystique.
We derive much of our identity from relations with different communities and other social objects. For many modern people that is a patchwork of shifting associations. Historically there was far less fluidity. Your birth determined almost all of your social identities, as it still does to a large extent with people like the Amish and other Plain People. Now, elements of identity are almost a matter of consumer choice. There is a lot of elective identity in terms of association with subcultures (Gamers, Punks, Bikers, Goths, Vegans, … ) which can make association superficial and dispensable, but often leaves a yearning for something more embracing and identity confirming. A yearning that is a vulnerability that can be capitalised on by cults, or by inducing participation in online communities that bond via adherence to particular conspiracies or ideologies such as incel.
Jung noted the power of the participation mystique only too clearly at work in the rise of the Nazi movement with its abundance of conspiracy theories about the Jews. A search for meaning in life is also a search for identity. Identities much of which are necessarily derived from relationship with social objects. The collapse of social objects such as Imperial Germany leading to an identity crisis that was only resolved for many Germans by the rise of the Third Reich.
Such bonding leads not only to moments of pride, elation, excitement, delight and jubilation, but also to despair, shame, and guilt, depending on how the social object fairs.
One way of dealing with collective guilt was the Jewish practice of turning out a goat into the wilderness, burdened with all of the sins of the community – the scapegoat. It was a symbolic enactment ritualising communal guilt: we still prefer to outsource our burden of guilt than address its causes.
The mantel of both collective and inherited guilt appear to be part of the deal as soon as you associate with a social object. You get to share in its triumphs and tragedies, in its accolades and shames. You participate in not only its current doings, but in its past: the shadow of its misdeeds falls over you. Penance and atonement may be required in order to expiate the wrongs buried in its history.
I was informed recently that I should feel shame over the fact that some Quakers were slave owners, and that others even took part in the notorious triangular trade, shipping African slaves to the New World. Apparently, I inherit the guilt about their actions when I became a member of the Society of Friends. In fact I was told told that my guilt should be threefold: first, because I am a Quaker; second because I am white: and thirdly because I am British. It did not help when I mentioned that my family name was Friesian and originated in Lower Saxony in what is now Germany. That at least sowed doubt about my Britishness and its slave-trade guilt, but lay me open to inheriting guilt for the holocaust; and should I only shoulder inherited guilt to the degree that my genetic heritage is White European, and be excused to the extent that it may be East Asian? Or should that part be embroiled in another set of guilts?
I am aware that in the Judaism there is a recognition of the inheritability of guilt, a belief which was passed on into Christianity:
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation. (Authorised King James Version, Exodus 34, 6-7)
However, with regard to transatlantic slavery we are now well beyond the fourth generation. Is there no statute of limitations for historic wrongs?
Jung had a lot to say about collective guilt. He noted how much we like projecting it onto others and how much we fear its being projected onto us; but also how much the victim archetype within each of us likes to assume the mantle of guilt, or to slink away in denial. Far more comforting to award yourself virtue points for donning the guilt, at least cosmetically: sackcloth and ashes on the catwalk of human esteem.
But then that also invites another way of processing the guilt: displacement. Carry out a public act of atonement aimed at expunging a past sin, rather than deal with the discomfort caused by current ills which are too overwhelming to be put right by simple and symbolic acts such as changing the name of a room, make a gesture of offering reparations or put up a blue plaque. All outward signs of penitence concerned with both self and public image, and with reputational damage limitation – but what is the real issue? Embedded and entrenched racism, disadvantage and inequality in the here and now! How do such penitential gestures address those?
You only have inherited or collective guilt in so far as you are trapped by the participation mystique: you are a willing participant in the guilt. What are you gaining from such participation? What are you contributing? How does it feed your self-esteem or identity? How does it build the future?
