The Quakers were in a grey zone during the American Revolution because they tried to be neutral and were probably trading with both sides. One of the targets of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" was the Quakers.
I remember attending a Libertarian convention where a prominent member said that he was a Quaker and that there are several Quakers in the Libertarian Party. That was over 2 decades ago.
The idea that there is "that of God in everyone" (an idea that was not limited to the Quakers, since all Christians believe man was made in God's image) has evolved into the normative individualism of Left Liberalism or Progressivism, or the notion that there is nothing of ultimate value beyond individual states of mind or feelings, and therefore the claims of individuals should prevail over those of communities or of custom (John Gray). That evolution explains the decline in intermediary institutions ("subsidiarity") leaving the individual alone to face the state, which is an ideal condition for technocratic elites or totalitarian rulers.
So there is a website where I can look up my local Quaker meeting. Going to their website on the front page there is a kind of news feed on the latest happening in the group.
Item #2 is that the local meeting groups Anti-Racism Working Group has decided that the plaque outside the building used for their worship that give a brief history of the building does not mention that it used to be a segregated library. They want to replace the plaque with a new one that acknowledges this fact.
When I go to the "Our Values" page, it contains a link to Friends Committee on National Legislation
Right. Conquest's Second Law (or O'Sullivan's First Law), "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." Derbyshire wrote he used the Church of England as a religious example, and in 1989, John O'Sullivan would use the Episcopal Church.
You could say the same thing about all the other Mainline Protestant sects, though they are different stages of evolution and region-weighted internal schism. And of course there's the Catholic Church especially lately under Pope Francis, about which the less said, the better.
The mechanism at work is that if you are not willing to stand at all costs against the highest social-status zeitgeist of your culture, then will just be consumed by that zeitgeist. If you are going to relax orthodoxy to make compromises with Current Year progressivism, you will just compromise everything that progressivism thinks is actually too important to tolerate deviation, and when you give all that up, it means nothing you have left is actually important.
If you are not willing and able to fight the Borg, you will just be absorbed into and assimilated by the Borg: "Welcome to the NPC hive-mind, beep boop." Instead of having a distinct religion, you will only be wearing the skin-suit of a formerly living religion, but actually all you have done is converted to the dominant ideology while maintaining the pretense of the name of a former sect and taking possession of its assets and real properties.
That’s true it seems to me. Interestingly, to me at least, when you put it that way it seems like leftism is synonymous with totalitarianism, demanding everything important be under its control. That seems new, but then maybe it is because the allies of leftism in the US haven’t always been totalitarian, but the core of leftism (which would be Marxism perhaps?) always has been.
This is how Hazony used 'imperialism' in "The Virtue of Nationalism", in historical parallel with the struggles against 20th Century 'totalitarian' regimes, and the tolerance of difference only when unimportant* is what Stanley Fish meant by "Boutique Multiculturalism." In one of his volumes of "Theory of Communicative Action"**, Habermas made reference to the "totalizing ideology" in contrast to what I think these days we would call "spontaneous order" driven by impersonal market forces, invisible hand, supply and demand, etc. which can operate on the basis of self-interested human interactions (i.e. in pursuit of positive sum gains from trade, and so forth) without any need to rely on any kind of ideology, worldview, political or moral theory, etc.
*Not just 'unimportant', sometimes the left will bite its tongue and allow an unprincipled exception to avoid alienating an important voting block like Muslims, but this is at best a Potemkin, hollow-pluralism, acts like a thorn in the side, and is on the "most wanted list" for elimination as soon as circumstances permit. In European countries with fast-growing Muslim populations, it seems the progressives and strongly religious Muslims both think that time is on their side and they only have to bide their time until their ideology's magnetic pole of attraction triumphs over its rival. They could both be wrong, but at most only one of them can be right, and time will tell. Mark "Demography is Destiny" Steyn's money is on the Muslims.
**I hadn't thought about post-Frankfurt, latter-day Habermas in years, but now that I think about it, I think in TOCA 1 and 2, he was grasping - albeit from a different perspective and with different intent - for something very similar to what Arnold is trying to do in his series of essays concerning human interdependence. Worth taking a look.
I'd argue that your post is very tribal. It all sounds like things I'd like to believe but is it true?
Surely there was a time when the Republican party wasn't right wing. Is it moving left?
Is Trump any less authoritarian than leftists? We know a few examples of Republicans who have spoken against him. How many have instead left politics, stayed quiet, or even chose to support him?
At my former workplace, a Jewish colleague was gossiping about another half-Jewish female colleague (the wrong half, I think) and told me that this colleague and her Jewish husband were raising their children as Quakers. Perhaps for some progressive Jews, Quakerism serves the same function as the Unitarian Church used to serve for Jews who no longer wanted to be identified as Jews.
"But the missionaries who had done so much for them had also done one thing which more than offset it all: for they had taught them not to defend themselves, and had thus exposed the poor beings who trusted their teaching to certain destruction. No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer and quicker; but the wrong was peculiarly great when at such a time and in such a place the defenceless Indians were thrust between the anvil of their savage red brethren and the hammer of the lawless and brutal white borderers. The awful harvest which the poor converts reaped had in reality been sown for them by their own friends and would-be benefactors."
Exactly. I attended Quaker schools growing up outside of Philly. They are the kind of belief that can only grow up in times of security. They are in essence an indulgence but not serious people.
Or perhaps more charitably, one tribe can only maintain pacifism in the long run as a protectorate of a stronger tribe. It can either make the beliefs universal (not practicable), or it can attach itself to a group that does not share those beliefs.
Well not just the small Quaker group , but the most famous sermon ever given, who was a Jewish rabbi , teaches . . .
“You heard that it was said: ‘You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
However, I say to you: Continue to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you,
so that you may prove yourselves sons of your Father who is in the heavens, since he makes his sun rise on both the wicked and the good and makes it rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.
For if you love those loving you, what reward do you have? Are not also the tax collectors doing the same thing?
And if you greet your brothers only, what extraordinary thing are you doing? Are not also the people of the nations doing the same?
You must accordingly be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’’
The resistance, avoidance, rejection of basic biblical principles, maybe because they are in the Bible, is a tremendous loss.
There is another angle to this that I think is being missed, which is the "taking the revolution seriously" problem. A modern observer looks back on 17th-18th century Quakerism and George Fox's 'perfectionism' and sees much that seems, when viewed through a secularizing filter, 'modern' (i.e., progressive) and "ahead of its time". Scott Alexander argued that in secular form the views, practices, and attitudes of these particular, mostly American, Protestants have basically triumphed as the dominant framework of values in much of the developed world. Which is true. He was not too concerned with an important thing to note, which is that actual Quakers are quickly going extinct, especially (and predictably) Shakers ("shaking quakers"), in the sense of dinosaurs being extinct but with lots of very different living descendants in the form of birds. A recurrent theme in history is that when a human group becomes intellectually dedicated to maximizing implementation of an ideology's implications, with the spirit of "taking the revolution seriously" - that is, willing to embrace extremely radical changes immediately, not willing to make reasonable compromises with tradition, stubborn cultural realities or human nature, and sanctimoniously condemning anyone proposing such compromises as insufficienly devout - it immediately starts running into major problems as it gets smacked in the groin by 2x4s of reality, from within and without. Either a system of high status authority takes control of the value system to stop the ideological singularity downward spiral (as happened after the worst days of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions) or the whole thing just implodes in on itself and the life of the group as something fully animated by that particular pre-implosion worldview just dies forever. Similar can be said for "communes" historically up to the hippie era, which never lasted long as they tended to end it disasters as they ran themselves into the ground trying to hew to the original principles. The Chinese compromised with capitalism, as did the Israelis with regard to Kibbutzim and the Socialist state, the Soviets with family and gender roles.
A compromise that progressivism - the triumphant descendant of Quakerism - is not willing to make is in regard to gender egalitarianism (see, e.g., Margaret Fell's "Women's Speaking, Justified...", 1666 with great exercises of logic like, "And whereas it is said, 'I permit not a woman to speak, as saith the law,' but where women are led by the spirit of God, they are not under the law ..." - QED.) The trouble is, every revolution that has taken that seriously stopped making enough babies to perpetuate itself, and like "population sink" cities of former eras, relying for survival on having long half-life periods and what you might call "ideological immigration", that is, conversion of members of more numerous or fecund outsiders.
But, in the long run, like real- life Quakerism itself, that's not sustainable.
I wonder if this isn't related to the decline of Protestantism more generally. IE, if you look at the media, as digitization ate away at their business model/revenues, they dropped their pretense of objectivity and became more openly partisan so they could function as proxies for political parties/candidates and thus maintain their relevance that way. Similarly, as mainline Protestantism has declined over the past ~40 years or so, is it possible many Quaker and Episcopalian congregations are essentially trying to do the same thing as the Boston Globe or the Philadelphia Inquirer?
I agree. Great post Arnold! "God in Everyone" is very similar to the concept of the Holy Spirit in Catholicism (I grew up Catholic, and I guess I would still describe myself this way). BTW, if you haven't, I would encourage readers to read Scott Peck's book "Further Along the Road Less Travelled" where he discusses this subject. I think the book may be out of print, but it is excellent.
I moved several years ago into a neighborhood with an attractive Quaker meeting house set amid native landscaping. I thought, hey, maybe I’ll attend a Quaker meeting! Or some sort of community gathering. But there has never been more than one car in the parking lot from that day to this.
Richard Nixon was born a Quaker. Trump has been Quaker-adjacent his entire life (attended a military HS, but then never joined the military; attended Fordham and UPenn, both at least Quaker-adjacent schools). Both presidents shared the "realism/humility" quadrant that Mr. Kling shared in an earlier post.
The mantra of what we might call "conservative Quakerism" is that the US should build the biggest, baddest, meanest, modernist military the world has ever seen--and then never use it. I think both Nixon and Trump subscribed to that philosophy. (And also Reagan, who grew up in Quakerish Central Illinois.)
Hello, I've been reading your blogs for a very long time. Does this statement not seem a bit hyperbolic or improperly characterizing of actual beliefs people hold? Is it really your contention that a broad swathe of liberals, many of whom are themselves white men, literally hold "a belief that white males are inherently evil"?
I know there are always some people who will say something ridiculous like this, but I don't think it's particularly accurate or appropriate as a description of any real beliefs held by a large group of people.
Do you really sincerely think that a large number of people hold "a belief that white males are inherently evil" ?
Although I am not well versed enough in either Friends theology or conservatism to pretend to speak on either of their behalf, I do think it might be worth considering whether the progressive strain of liberal Quakerism might be in tension with the communitarian/integralist strain of conservatism.
Might it be possible to fit liberal Quakerism and communitarian conservatism into something like the traditionalist – modernist tension as apparently propounded by Robert Nisbet?
"Although Robert Nisbet’s view of history is complex and multifaceted, its essentials are clear: the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”; and though Nisbet prizes the values of modernity, he is not so naïve as to believe that their triumph has brought only good to the lives of men and women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Rather, he is intensely aware of the erosion of one set of values by the other: that is, he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism. In Nisbet’s philosophy, all of these values should have a place; and it is only the totalist ideologies—sometimes of traditionalism, sometimes of modernism—that seek the complete suppression of one set or the other."
The final sentence about all these values having a place calls to mind Dr. Kling’s previous warnings regarding moral dyad errors:
“In most interactions, both sides have feelings, and both sides have agency. We seem to prefer not to see conflicts that way. Instead, we gravitate toward the moral dyad.”
And yet it seems that there are important thinkers who believe that there is a major philosophical conflict between liberal individualism and communitarian institutions. Adrian Vermeule, for example, writes “Liberalism has so relentlessly atomized the intermediate institutions of civil society—churches, social clubs and institutions, neighborhoods, families—that it no longer has any stable substrate on which to rest.” (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/ ) Has liberal Quakerism been a part of this destructive liberalism?
Maybe there is a dilemma, perhaps not too unlike that of Machiavelli. As Quentin Skinner exposits:
“Machiavelli’s dillemma is accordingly this: how can the body of the people – in whom the quality of virtu is not naturally to be found – have this quality successfully implanted in them? How can they be prevented from sliding into corruption, how can they be coerced into keeping up an interest in the common good over a sufficiently long period for civic greatness to be attained?”
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy offers some ideas about resolving such conflict. Personally I see more positive and hopeful approaches in other political and faith traditions, in particular the simple functionality of a positive law code such as the Arthashastra ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arthashastra ) and the institution of Gram Panchayat but that is another argument.
The Quakers were in a grey zone during the American Revolution because they tried to be neutral and were probably trading with both sides. One of the targets of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" was the Quakers.
The Scotts Irish basically accused them of letting them drive the Indians out of PA for them while harping about their pacifism.
Ah. The Scotch-Irish: "Born Fighting".
Washington's letters to the Jews of Rhode Island and the Quakers of Pennsylvania were very different, and for good reason.
I remember attending a Libertarian convention where a prominent member said that he was a Quaker and that there are several Quakers in the Libertarian Party. That was over 2 decades ago.
The idea that there is "that of God in everyone" (an idea that was not limited to the Quakers, since all Christians believe man was made in God's image) has evolved into the normative individualism of Left Liberalism or Progressivism, or the notion that there is nothing of ultimate value beyond individual states of mind or feelings, and therefore the claims of individuals should prevail over those of communities or of custom (John Gray). That evolution explains the decline in intermediary institutions ("subsidiarity") leaving the individual alone to face the state, which is an ideal condition for technocratic elites or totalitarian rulers.
So there is a website where I can look up my local Quaker meeting. Going to their website on the front page there is a kind of news feed on the latest happening in the group.
Item #2 is that the local meeting groups Anti-Racism Working Group has decided that the plaque outside the building used for their worship that give a brief history of the building does not mention that it used to be a segregated library. They want to replace the plaque with a new one that acknowledges this fact.
When I go to the "Our Values" page, it contains a link to Friends Committee on National Legislation
https://www.fcnl.org/
The top issue at the front is anti-Israel. In general the page seems indistinguishable from prog talking points.
Right. Conquest's Second Law (or O'Sullivan's First Law), "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." Derbyshire wrote he used the Church of England as a religious example, and in 1989, John O'Sullivan would use the Episcopal Church.
You could say the same thing about all the other Mainline Protestant sects, though they are different stages of evolution and region-weighted internal schism. And of course there's the Catholic Church especially lately under Pope Francis, about which the less said, the better.
The mechanism at work is that if you are not willing to stand at all costs against the highest social-status zeitgeist of your culture, then will just be consumed by that zeitgeist. If you are going to relax orthodoxy to make compromises with Current Year progressivism, you will just compromise everything that progressivism thinks is actually too important to tolerate deviation, and when you give all that up, it means nothing you have left is actually important.
If you are not willing and able to fight the Borg, you will just be absorbed into and assimilated by the Borg: "Welcome to the NPC hive-mind, beep boop." Instead of having a distinct religion, you will only be wearing the skin-suit of a formerly living religion, but actually all you have done is converted to the dominant ideology while maintaining the pretense of the name of a former sect and taking possession of its assets and real properties.
That’s true it seems to me. Interestingly, to me at least, when you put it that way it seems like leftism is synonymous with totalitarianism, demanding everything important be under its control. That seems new, but then maybe it is because the allies of leftism in the US haven’t always been totalitarian, but the core of leftism (which would be Marxism perhaps?) always has been.
This is how Hazony used 'imperialism' in "The Virtue of Nationalism", in historical parallel with the struggles against 20th Century 'totalitarian' regimes, and the tolerance of difference only when unimportant* is what Stanley Fish meant by "Boutique Multiculturalism." In one of his volumes of "Theory of Communicative Action"**, Habermas made reference to the "totalizing ideology" in contrast to what I think these days we would call "spontaneous order" driven by impersonal market forces, invisible hand, supply and demand, etc. which can operate on the basis of self-interested human interactions (i.e. in pursuit of positive sum gains from trade, and so forth) without any need to rely on any kind of ideology, worldview, political or moral theory, etc.
*Not just 'unimportant', sometimes the left will bite its tongue and allow an unprincipled exception to avoid alienating an important voting block like Muslims, but this is at best a Potemkin, hollow-pluralism, acts like a thorn in the side, and is on the "most wanted list" for elimination as soon as circumstances permit. In European countries with fast-growing Muslim populations, it seems the progressives and strongly religious Muslims both think that time is on their side and they only have to bide their time until their ideology's magnetic pole of attraction triumphs over its rival. They could both be wrong, but at most only one of them can be right, and time will tell. Mark "Demography is Destiny" Steyn's money is on the Muslims.
**I hadn't thought about post-Frankfurt, latter-day Habermas in years, but now that I think about it, I think in TOCA 1 and 2, he was grasping - albeit from a different perspective and with different intent - for something very similar to what Arnold is trying to do in his series of essays concerning human interdependence. Worth taking a look.
I'd argue that your post is very tribal. It all sounds like things I'd like to believe but is it true?
Surely there was a time when the Republican party wasn't right wing. Is it moving left?
Is Trump any less authoritarian than leftists? We know a few examples of Republicans who have spoken against him. How many have instead left politics, stayed quiet, or even chose to support him?
I'd characterize Handle's post as an observation.
Ok, maybe, How should that change my response?
Remove everything after "...but is it true?". Do your homework and see if it is in fact, true.
Well, to start I think it is more a matter of opinion than fact. I offered one or two counter-examples and another opinion.
At my former workplace, a Jewish colleague was gossiping about another half-Jewish female colleague (the wrong half, I think) and told me that this colleague and her Jewish husband were raising their children as Quakers. Perhaps for some progressive Jews, Quakerism serves the same function as the Unitarian Church used to serve for Jews who no longer wanted to be identified as Jews.
Conquest's Second Law strikes again! Edit: and Handle beats me to it.
T. Roosevelt in Vol. 1 of The Winning of the West on the ill-fated Moravian Indians, a tribe that converted to a Quaker doctrine (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11941/pg11941-images.html):
"But the missionaries who had done so much for them had also done one thing which more than offset it all: for they had taught them not to defend themselves, and had thus exposed the poor beings who trusted their teaching to certain destruction. No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer and quicker; but the wrong was peculiarly great when at such a time and in such a place the defenceless Indians were thrust between the anvil of their savage red brethren and the hammer of the lawless and brutal white borderers. The awful harvest which the poor converts reaped had in reality been sown for them by their own friends and would-be benefactors."
Exactly. I attended Quaker schools growing up outside of Philly. They are the kind of belief that can only grow up in times of security. They are in essence an indulgence but not serious people.
Or perhaps more charitably, one tribe can only maintain pacifism in the long run as a protectorate of a stronger tribe. It can either make the beliefs universal (not practicable), or it can attach itself to a group that does not share those beliefs.
Arnold
Well not just the small Quaker group , but the most famous sermon ever given, who was a Jewish rabbi , teaches . . .
“You heard that it was said: ‘You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’
However, I say to you: Continue to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you,
so that you may prove yourselves sons of your Father who is in the heavens, since he makes his sun rise on both the wicked and the good and makes it rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous.
For if you love those loving you, what reward do you have? Are not also the tax collectors doing the same thing?
And if you greet your brothers only, what extraordinary thing are you doing? Are not also the people of the nations doing the same?
You must accordingly be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’’
The resistance, avoidance, rejection of basic biblical principles, maybe because they are in the Bible, is a tremendous loss.
Thanks
Clay
"God bless and keep the Czar ... far away from us."
There is another angle to this that I think is being missed, which is the "taking the revolution seriously" problem. A modern observer looks back on 17th-18th century Quakerism and George Fox's 'perfectionism' and sees much that seems, when viewed through a secularizing filter, 'modern' (i.e., progressive) and "ahead of its time". Scott Alexander argued that in secular form the views, practices, and attitudes of these particular, mostly American, Protestants have basically triumphed as the dominant framework of values in much of the developed world. Which is true. He was not too concerned with an important thing to note, which is that actual Quakers are quickly going extinct, especially (and predictably) Shakers ("shaking quakers"), in the sense of dinosaurs being extinct but with lots of very different living descendants in the form of birds. A recurrent theme in history is that when a human group becomes intellectually dedicated to maximizing implementation of an ideology's implications, with the spirit of "taking the revolution seriously" - that is, willing to embrace extremely radical changes immediately, not willing to make reasonable compromises with tradition, stubborn cultural realities or human nature, and sanctimoniously condemning anyone proposing such compromises as insufficienly devout - it immediately starts running into major problems as it gets smacked in the groin by 2x4s of reality, from within and without. Either a system of high status authority takes control of the value system to stop the ideological singularity downward spiral (as happened after the worst days of the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions) or the whole thing just implodes in on itself and the life of the group as something fully animated by that particular pre-implosion worldview just dies forever. Similar can be said for "communes" historically up to the hippie era, which never lasted long as they tended to end it disasters as they ran themselves into the ground trying to hew to the original principles. The Chinese compromised with capitalism, as did the Israelis with regard to Kibbutzim and the Socialist state, the Soviets with family and gender roles.
A compromise that progressivism - the triumphant descendant of Quakerism - is not willing to make is in regard to gender egalitarianism (see, e.g., Margaret Fell's "Women's Speaking, Justified...", 1666 with great exercises of logic like, "And whereas it is said, 'I permit not a woman to speak, as saith the law,' but where women are led by the spirit of God, they are not under the law ..." - QED.) The trouble is, every revolution that has taken that seriously stopped making enough babies to perpetuate itself, and like "population sink" cities of former eras, relying for survival on having long half-life periods and what you might call "ideological immigration", that is, conversion of members of more numerous or fecund outsiders.
But, in the long run, like real- life Quakerism itself, that's not sustainable.
I wonder if this isn't related to the decline of Protestantism more generally. IE, if you look at the media, as digitization ate away at their business model/revenues, they dropped their pretense of objectivity and became more openly partisan so they could function as proxies for political parties/candidates and thus maintain their relevance that way. Similarly, as mainline Protestantism has declined over the past ~40 years or so, is it possible many Quaker and Episcopalian congregations are essentially trying to do the same thing as the Boston Globe or the Philadelphia Inquirer?
I agree. Great post Arnold! "God in Everyone" is very similar to the concept of the Holy Spirit in Catholicism (I grew up Catholic, and I guess I would still describe myself this way). BTW, if you haven't, I would encourage readers to read Scott Peck's book "Further Along the Road Less Travelled" where he discusses this subject. I think the book may be out of print, but it is excellent.
I moved several years ago into a neighborhood with an attractive Quaker meeting house set amid native landscaping. I thought, hey, maybe I’ll attend a Quaker meeting! Or some sort of community gathering. But there has never been more than one car in the parking lot from that day to this.
I don’t think Quakers are much of a threat.
Richard Nixon was born a Quaker. Trump has been Quaker-adjacent his entire life (attended a military HS, but then never joined the military; attended Fordham and UPenn, both at least Quaker-adjacent schools). Both presidents shared the "realism/humility" quadrant that Mr. Kling shared in an earlier post.
The mantra of what we might call "conservative Quakerism" is that the US should build the biggest, baddest, meanest, modernist military the world has ever seen--and then never use it. I think both Nixon and Trump subscribed to that philosophy. (And also Reagan, who grew up in Quakerish Central Illinois.)
Hello, I've been reading your blogs for a very long time. Does this statement not seem a bit hyperbolic or improperly characterizing of actual beliefs people hold? Is it really your contention that a broad swathe of liberals, many of whom are themselves white men, literally hold "a belief that white males are inherently evil"?
I know there are always some people who will say something ridiculous like this, but I don't think it's particularly accurate or appropriate as a description of any real beliefs held by a large group of people.
Do you really sincerely think that a large number of people hold "a belief that white males are inherently evil" ?
Although I am not well versed enough in either Friends theology or conservatism to pretend to speak on either of their behalf, I do think it might be worth considering whether the progressive strain of liberal Quakerism might be in tension with the communitarian/integralist strain of conservatism.
Might it be possible to fit liberal Quakerism and communitarian conservatism into something like the traditionalist – modernist tension as apparently propounded by Robert Nisbet?
"Although Robert Nisbet’s view of history is complex and multifaceted, its essentials are clear: the history of the Western world since at least the Renaissance has been dominated by an unceasing battle between traditionalism and modernism; the former is most often associated with such values as “community, moral authority, hierarchy, and the sacred” and the latter with “individualism, equality, moral release, and rationalist techniques of organization and power”; and though Nisbet prizes the values of modernity, he is not so naïve as to believe that their triumph has brought only good to the lives of men and women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Rather, he is intensely aware of the erosion of one set of values by the other: that is, he sees the desiccation of community, the decline of authority, the devaluation of hierarchy, and the avoidance of the sacred by the overemphasis, and the often distorted emphasis, on the victorious values of modernism. In Nisbet’s philosophy, all of these values should have a place; and it is only the totalist ideologies—sometimes of traditionalism, sometimes of modernism—that seek the complete suppression of one set or the other."
https://kirkcenter.org/best/robert-nisbet-and-the-idea-of-community/#:~:text=Although%20Robert%20Nisbet%E2%80%99s,or%20the%20other.
The final sentence about all these values having a place calls to mind Dr. Kling’s previous warnings regarding moral dyad errors:
“In most interactions, both sides have feelings, and both sides have agency. We seem to prefer not to see conflicts that way. Instead, we gravitate toward the moral dyad.”
(https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/misreading-others-minds-moral-dyads ) And so too by recognizing the inner light in everyone would liberal Quakers too appear to be avoiding the moral dyad error.
And yet it seems that there are important thinkers who believe that there is a major philosophical conflict between liberal individualism and communitarian institutions. Adrian Vermeule, for example, writes “Liberalism has so relentlessly atomized the intermediate institutions of civil society—churches, social clubs and institutions, neighborhoods, families—that it no longer has any stable substrate on which to rest.” (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/ ) Has liberal Quakerism been a part of this destructive liberalism?
Maybe there is a dilemma, perhaps not too unlike that of Machiavelli. As Quentin Skinner exposits:
“Machiavelli’s dillemma is accordingly this: how can the body of the people – in whom the quality of virtu is not naturally to be found – have this quality successfully implanted in them? How can they be prevented from sliding into corruption, how can they be coerced into keeping up an interest in the common good over a sufficiently long period for civic greatness to be attained?”
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy offers some ideas about resolving such conflict. Personally I see more positive and hopeful approaches in other political and faith traditions, in particular the simple functionality of a positive law code such as the Arthashastra ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Arthashastra ) and the institution of Gram Panchayat but that is another argument.