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CHAPTER 1

Integrity

Friends, whatever ye are addicted to, the tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you, and then you are gone. Stand still in that which is pure, after ye see yourselves; and then mercy comes in.

George Fox, 1652

Reflection: What rings true?

Every now and then I find myself engaged with life in a way that seems just right. I have a human interaction that is clear, connected, and deeply satisfying. I pause when I walk under a tree, taking in the colors, light and shadow that the sun and leaves create. I extend the life of something old and functional with a careful mend. I do a piece of work that matters and clearly has my name on it. I take the hard next step that's waiting to be taken in a friendship. I transplant a flower to give away, using my good compost. Something about what I'm doing rings true.

What rings true? I think this is a powerfully illuminating question to bring to all parts of our lives. When has my mind been clear? When have I made a decision or had an interaction, no matter how simple, that I'd be happy to live over and over again? What made that possible? When, in emotionally-charged mine-fields like relationships, gift-giving or eating, has a moment rung true? What made it right?

A bell can't ring true when it is covered or padded or stuffed. We have to get down to the bare bones of the matter. What clutters our minds? What messages have we taken in (from our childhoods, from advertising, from society at large) that muffle the truth? What has accreted to our social institutions that keeps us from discerning their true vocations? What layers of history and privilege and inequality obscure the possibility of respectful and mutual friendship in any situation?

Quaker John Woolman advises us to "Dig deep. ... Carefully cast forth the loose matter and get down to the rock, the sure foundation, and there hearken to the Divine Voice which gives a clear and certain sound."

What if the central principle for organizing our lives was moving ever closer to what rings true? It can be discouraging to notice how much of our time is spent elsewhere. We know that what we're doing doesn't ring true, but it's hard to see an alternative. Or we try to get some relief from that tinny sound with activities that are supposed to be pleasurable or comforting, but then those activities — often some form of addictive behavior — don't ring true either.

Just identifying this as something we want, however, and being able to recognize the moments when we've had it, is a big step forward. I smile as I imagine us counting up the minutes that ring true in our lives — just two minutes this day, maybe seven the next — and then reaching for more.

We don't have to just wait for a miracle to hear the ring of truth more often in our lives. We can remember those moments, and value them. We can look for where they most reliably occur. We can get help working to reproduce the conditions that encourage them. We can dig away at the stuff that muffles them. There may be no work that's harder — or more worth doing. And maybe, as we keep trying, it will get less hard — and we'll hear that ring of truth in our lives more often.

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What rings true in the messages we get about ourselves as actors in our economic system? Much of it has a distinctly tinny sound: We need more stuff. Greed is good for us. Selfishness defines our essential nature and is the building block of a healthy economy. Advertisers help us secure the products that will make us happy. Well-being is most accurately measured in financial terms. Competition brings out the best in us.

Going for the roots, where can we hear the ring of truth in ideas about what the economy is for? Is it for steadily increasing the power of the wealthiest? Maximizing profits by eliminating jobs that people need? Convincing us we need things we are better off without? Stripping the earth of resources and diminishing its ability to sustain life? Surely not.

The storyline of expanding opportunity, with rising tides lifting all boats, sounds a little better. Yet, as wealth has become steadily more concentrated at the top while more and more ordinary people struggle below, it has an increasingly hollow sound.

Where can we stand? The meaning of integrity centers around being sound and whole. Personal integrity calls for aligning our actions with our beliefs so they form one whole. Integrity of systems requires that all parts function together soundly, as a whole. Theologian Walter Wink contends that every human institution has a divine vocation, and the divine vocation of our economy is to provide for livelihood and welfare.

This aligns with the word's derivation: "eco" comes from the Greek "oikos," meaning an extended family unit, and "nomos" has to do with management. Thus, in its origins, economics meant the management of hearth and home. How do you manage a household with integrity? It is not hard to think of some basic approaches and values: know what is coming in and going out; don't take more than your share; take care of little and vulnerable ones; attend to cleaning; give up on things that are not working; don't focus on function at the expense of beauty; keep the long term in mind.

Widening our lens, we can notice places in our economic lives that have a ring of truth about them. A local credit union, a worker cooperative, a community supported agriculture scheme, a tool library — these are some of the building blocks of an economy with integrity.

The pursuit of integrity in the economic sphere requires us to keep several questions in front of us at once. How can we notice and build on those places that have the ring of truth? As we listen for that tinny sound, how can we face and name uncomfortable truths? And how can we do this both in our personal lives and in our wider communities?

In our personal lives

As a young adult, I was blessed to be part of a couple of religious and social change communities that took right relationship seriously. I got to experience simple community living, and engaging in "bread labor," part-time work that freed up time to pursue larger goals. We were all asking big questions about how the world worked, and how to do the right thing.

I remember the refrigerator question. Did I have a right to a refrigerator? There was no reason in the present to give it up, and I wasn't seriously considering it. But what if I came to the point where I felt that I couldn't do without one? If I believed that I was entitled to a refrigerator, would that someday put me on the wrong side of a struggle about equality and right sharing? Would I find myself protecting my possessions from those who had none? I still think it's a good question.

In an increasingly globalized economy, the question of complicity with injustice is everywhere. For just one example, consider the connection between our cell phones and warfare in eastern Congo. Profit from the mineral trade motivates and finances armed groups on all sides of the conflict there. Atrocities are used deliberately to intimidate local populations and secure control of mines and trading routes, causing the death of over five million people since 1998 — the largest documented death toll in the world since World War II. These minerals are critical in the manufacture of electronic devices — and those from the Congo are especially attractive because unregulated mining and cheap labor keep the costs down.

Are we ready to require that all the raw materials in our cell phones and computers be injustice-free — or give them up? Looking wider, consider that 40% of the people of Bangladesh live less than three feet above sea level, and it is the industrial West's level of consumption that is fueling global warming. How do we weed that out of our lives?

We need to come to terms with this hard truth: not only are we deeply complicit in war and injustice, but our best effort could never be enough to extract us from that complicity. It still makes sense to point ourselves in that direction — to live simply, to be willing to sacrifice convenience for the sake of right relationship, to keep alert to ways that we can disengage from evil. But perhaps our attention should be less on disengagement than on building our capacity for deep connection in the face of injustice — with our neighbors, with the people of Congo and Bangladesh, with our precious earth, with the Spirit that inhabits us all.

In our wider communities

Sometimes a community is faced with an issue of integrity that is as hard to navigate as the individual question of cell phones and atrocities in the Congo.

The umbrella organization for Quakers in the Philadelphia area had gone through some lean and painful years following the 2008 recession, laying off over a third of our staff and slashing program expenses to the bone. Finally, after several more years of tight fiscal controls, forced savings and austerity spending, at annual sessions in 2014, we heard the good news from our treasurer: Spending is stable; resources are up; income is showing a tendency to rise. If the stock market just continues to grow, we can anticipate more reassuring financial statements for years to come.

"If the stock market just continues to grow ..." That phrase rang in the ears of several of us who were active in our Friends Economic Integrity Project. What a paradox! We depend for our financial health on growth in the stock market. Yet that growth is a driver of economic inequality and environmental destruction.

Several of us gathered at the end of these sessions to scratch our heads together. With our organization's finances so deeply dependent on these investments, and many of us counting as never before on investment for our own retirement security, how could we challenge this system with integrity and effectiveness? To gather the will to make a transformative change, it seemed that we would have to break our dependence on financial speculation. This dilemma is nested in a much larger one: How can we as individuals, families and communities make money decisions based on integrity when we are entangled in a system that fundamentally lacks it?

Those of us who gathered after sessions had many more questions than answers. But we knew they were important questions. We had a sense that recognizing and naming complicity was the first step in moving toward clarity and action. And we were willing to learn.

We do not live in a world that encourages us to listen to conscience. Yet, since conscience is one of the ways Spirit speaks to us, the more we listen the louder that voice will be. What would happen if we listened together more to where conscience might be leading us?

The things that are wrong in our economic system will never be changed until integrity is brought more fully to the public arena, and our values are on the table. Yet few of us feel that we belong. It helped me that my father was an economist, and the language of economics was in our house. I also witnessed a remarkable journey of integrity on his part. For decades he taught classical economics. His text that helped send all six of us to college was called Money and Banking. But in my teenage years I heard him questioning more and more the most basic tenets on which that theory was built, on which he had based his working life. His last decades were spent as an outspoken critic, calling the most fundamental assumptions of classical economics into question.

I had my struggles with my father, but this was a big gift. I learned that I had a right to look around this territory even without any formal training, a right to notice things that seemed inconsistent, a right to use the language, a right to ask questions.

I want everyone to feel that they have this right. Our world needs people of faith who are as outspoken about economics as Quakers are about war and peace. We are just not fooled when generals and politicians claim to be the experts about what will bring peace and security. We're ready to say that their expertise is based in flawed assumptions, and can never get us to peace. Even though we've never known a world without war, we hold to our beliefs, and are confident, outspoken and engaged.

Yet, when it comes to economists claiming to be the experts about what will bring prosperity, and advising us to leave the matter in their capable hands, we have tended to meekly comply. What would it be like to assert that their expertise is based on flawed assumptions that can never get the world to prosperity? Even though we've never known an economic system that works for everybody, we could hold to our deepest beliefs — that greed is not the source of well-being, and that unbridled growth comes at the expense of the planet's integrity — and be equally confident, outspoken and engaged.

What are the big values questions that need to be asked? Here are some that come to mind:

• What is true wealth? Is it the amount of money in our accounts? Is it the value of our infrastructure and what we produce, or our natural resources, or our fund of common knowledge, or our human capacity, or our spiritual depth? How can what we value be increased?

• What needs to be equal? Probably not everything — but some things.

• How do you track well-being? What do you measure?

• What does democracy have to do with economics? Who should decide, and where should control be located? There is probably no one answer for all situations, but it is a question that cries out to be asked.

Theologian Walter Wink sees Spirit at the core of every institution. These institutions, or Powers, he says, are created with the sole purpose of serving the general welfare of people and when they cease to do so, their spirituality becomes diseased. The task of the church is to identify these Powers, discern whether they contribute to the common good and if not, redeem them and call them back to their original "divine vocation."

Let's claim our right to do this, and bring our deepest faith values to the task. How has our economic system strayed from its divine vocation, and what do we want to call it back to?

Equality

That the sweat and tedious labor of the farmers, early and late, cold and hot, wet and dry, should be converted into the pleasure of a small number of men — that continued severity should be laid on nineteen parts of the land to feed the inordinate lusts and delicate appetites of the twentieth, is so far from the will of the great Governor of the world, ... [it] is wretched and blasphemous.

William Penn, 1669

Reflection: Meditations on Class

I had the unusual opportunity to be raised in an intentional community that was racially mixed, but solidly middle class. The adults around us knew enough to avoid racial stereotyping — which was an enormous gift — but they were not as aware about class. The plumber who made different spending choices from my Quaker parents, the girls from the trailer park down the road whose tight skirts and lipstick set them apart from us on the school bus, the mountain people who, for some unknowable reason, could never be part of our world — these were the people who were "other" in my childhood.

Yet is hard to have an "other" without a "better than," calling into question our deeply cherished belief in equality. The unity that is Gospel Order, or the Kingdom on Earth, requires everyone to be seen and known as God's children. The invisible walls that separate us from others also separate us from that beloved community.

Quakers who are comfortably white and middle class in the West (the experience from which I speak) often yearn for relationships with the oppressed. It's not surprising that we are drawn to those who have been badly treated. After all, that is our legacy. Our people were persecuted, and lived on the margins. Many of us have chosen the margins of our own culture, often believing that our faith requires that choice.

There is enormous power and liberation in claiming our right to relationship with people whom we've been taught were beyond reach. We assert our right to look for and find that of God in them, and our lives are richer as a result. I have experienced this in my diverse urban neighborhood. I love rubbing shoulders with my African American neighbors, with immigrants from Southeast Asia and West Africa. It makes me feel safer to not be so separated from people who are different from me. I can get to know human beings, and have some protection from the trap of believing that those differences are too great to be bridged.

Yet I find myself a little less eager, a little more defended, as I take on the challenge of reaching out and claiming white working-class folks. There is no lure of the exotic, just our own boring roots — and perhaps a reminder of the harshness from which we, or our families before us, worked hard to escape. In addition, for those who remain it can seem that the only way to handle that oppression is to create distance from the people who are even farther below, often minorities. It is hard to join with those whom we perceive as prejudiced, but in our eagerness to distance ourselves from them, are we any better?

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Excerpted from "Money and Soul: Quaker Faith and Practice and the Economy"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Pamela Haines.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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