The other week a This American Life podcast featured a young man who had taken it upon himself to try to prevent the re-election of Trump, and was feeling personally responsible for how badly his mission was going.
“How’s your shame spiral?” a gentle interviewer asked him, and I felt great empathy for his personal tragedy amid the bleak wider outlook. It set me thinking about the power and the curse of being the kind of person who is moved to Do Something - in other words, an activist. And if that’s you, I ask with gentle kindness: how’s your shame spiral today?
International, national and local circumstances conspire to create a real sense of hopelessness just now. International conflicts bring daily horrors, while both Britain and the US face elections without obvious candidates upon whom to pin socialist hopes. The febrile scuttling of populist totalitarianism creeping over Europe and North America, and the lack of consequent outrage, illustrates how historic swings to the right were ‘allowed to happen’. But you know all this, and hearing it from us won’t make you feel any better.
This time last year I was lucky enough to be a writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library in North Wales. Today, I have a postcard on my desk featuring a quote from William Gladstone:
“Be inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as best we can, but an elevated and lofty destiny.”
Easier said than done, mate. How?
A potential answer to that conundrum fell into my lap this week, as 2024 celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of George Fox, the founder of the Quakers. We have two personal reasons to show an interest in him, as I’ll explain. Bear with me for a quick tour of 1600s Britain, I promise it’s leading somewhere more hopeful…
… It was a time of war, as the movies say. The Civil War raged between the Royalists (who believed in the divine right of kings) and the Parliamentarians (who thought God might prefer democracy). Everyone was affected by this brutal war, and there was a sense of end-times, in which previously unquestioned ideas about the fabric of life were being ripped apart.
The question of how to live was hotly debated between Catholics and Calvinist Protestants, but both broadly agreed that we are all fallen, corrupt and sinful. Salvation - a ticket to Heaven rather than Hell once your earthly goose is cooked - was a gift from God, not based on your personal merits or anything you might have said or done. God’s ‘grace’ was a choice to save an elect predetermined population, and the priests and ministers could tell you who was In and who was Out.
It must have been terrifying to live with the understanding that eternal damnation awaited you at the end of a brutal struggle, with a very good chance that you might be seen off at any minute by a torrid fight for power between two elites. Radical thinkers were thus inspired to think outside the box. Among these were George Fox, who had a revelation on the top of Pendle Hill in Lancashire. We grew up in the shadow of that remarkable hill, and its famously eerie aspect. Fox would have known of the famous witch trials of just 40 years earlier when he obeyed a whim (or a command from God, depending on your outlook) to climb to the top, in the days when hill-walking was only for sheep.
Fox had a spiritual experience, in which God’s love and power was released within him. In other words, rather than listening to priests and ministers frightening people into the grave, he suggested that if we listen closely enough, the voice of God (or the right thing to do, depending on your outlook) could be heard from within each and every one of us. He said we could all be ‘set free from sin’ by nurturing this precious seed with focus and stillness.
The spectacularly radical aspect of this is how everyone is therefore spiritually equal - men, women and children of all backgrounds. This was extremely subversive, somewhat arrogant and hugely popular among the disenfranchised. That day on Pendle Hill, Fox decided he should spread the word and wound up founding a successful global non-conformist movement. He encouraged people to look within for answers, and to think for themselves.
We know about it because of The Journal of George Fox, which he dictated to others, for he seems to have been dyslexic. One of these amanuenses was our 7x great-grandfather, Edward Haistwell*, who had a sort of apprenticeship with Fox, and whose expenses were recorded in Margaret Fell’s accounting book under the affectionate ‘Neddy Haistwhistle’. It must have been a good education, because by the 1690s Neddy was one of the largest tobacco merchants in London, and some silk from the damask curtains he once owned (suspiciously flashy for a Quaker gentleman) can be seen in the V&A museum!
Curtains aside, what struck me about Fox’s revolutionary idea was that he disrupted the ‘shame spiral’ for himself, and for his community. You are not inherently sinful! He told people to stop absorbing shame and blame, and start seeing their life as a great and noble calling, not a mean and grovelling thing to shuffle though as best they could, as Gladstone might have put it.
In psychology they talk of ‘externalising’ and ‘internalising’ agency, and therefore blame and shame. Externalisers tend to feel everything is someone else’s fault, and there’s nothing they can do to change how things turn out. Not necessarily pessimistic, externalisers accept whatever comes as though it were as uncontrollable as the weather. Internalisers, on the other hand, tend to feel responsible for everything, however far out of their hands things may be. They take credit for success and accept the blame for failure. If only they had done something differently then none of it would have happened. Perhaps you recognise yourself in these extremes, although most of us flounder somewhere in the middle.
Social psychology identifies a phenomenon known as ‘fundamental attribution error’ (or sometimes ‘correspondence bias', but that sounds like something to do with our last post about the two letters that changed the course of 1924). People tend to apply different underlying causes to their own behaviour compared to other peoples’. They put more weight on what people are like than what might be happening to them, when explaining their behaviour. But when we explain ourselves, we put more weight on our situation than our disposition. So he’s late because he’s selfish whereas I’m late because of traffic. She got into Cambridge because she’s good at maths, whereas I got in because I worked really hard.**
It seems like 400 year-old George Fox would encourage us to internalise just enough to take responsibility for ourselves, but not so much that we take on blame and shame for things outside our control. So, next time you feel yourself sliding down a shame-spiral, reach out and cling to the unlikely duo of George Fox and William Gladstone who offer you a hand each. Use their faith in you to climb up to ‘an elevated and lofty destiny’. You don’t have to found a religion or be made Prime Minister (four times!) to do that, because Fox’s radical egalitarianism tells us that we all contain a seed of brilliance.
All we have to do is let it grow.
* Haistwell was our mother’s father’s father’s mother’s father’s mother’s father’s father. Or something like that
** these are merely examples; we are too angsty to be late, we are both terrible at maths, and most certainly did not attend Cambridge university.