Recently, I was pleased to learn the expression “aspirational recycling.” To try to live now as I imagine I ought to be living might be to play the fool. But as Bayard Rustin said in his 1948 William Penn Lecture, “We have reached that stage where only a miracle can save us – the miracle of individual responsibility.” My state (California) banned single-use plastic shopping bags in 2014. This was coupled with a requirement for stores to charge 10¢-25¢ apiece for “reusable and recyclable” plastic bags, a fee that was meant to discourage their use. But it didn’t. The pounds of plastic shopping bags that were trashed by Californians only continued to rise – from 8 pounds per person in 2008 to 11 pounds in 2021. So, the governor signed a new law this fall – to ban plastic shopping bags altogether, starting in 2026. This absurdly slow progress was won, no doubt, by scores of activists and policy wonks who, in their personal lives, have done their own shopping with canvas bags all these years. Like I have. Like most readers of Western Friend have, I imagine.
But I still buy loaves of bread in plastic bread bags. I still buy quarts of yogurt in plastic tubs. Then I play my part in the aspirational theater of recycling my plastic. And I respect my friends who refuse to take part in the farce. I don’t pretend to know the most effective way to influence the trajectory of the multinational plastics industry or the multinational petrochemical industry. But I do know that Friends as a matter of integrity accept some responsibility when we are involved in something we discover to be wrong. And we help each other to see which things seem wrong. Then we wait until we feel moved and clear to act. And then we act.
However, I do find that I am less tolerant of other people’s “different” actions when they diverge from “my principles.” My particular understandings of nonviolence, integrity, fairness, etc., are deeply intertwined with my sense of self and my pride. Harold Loukes’s observation here is embarrassingly relatable to me: “In secular society, two individuals can find their happiness in entirely different ways without coming into conflict with each other. . . But as soon as a religious element enters the argument, the tension is raised at once. . . If a man has only himself to please, he may . . . [let] different men go their own ways. But if he has God to please . . . [he might feel] a temptation to . . . compel naughty and irreverent people to fall into line with a high moral ideal.” (1954) Apparently, I’m not the only Friend who feels some responsibility for keeping others from “going astray.”
And indeed, such shepherding has been a core purpose of Friends from the start. Margaret Fell wrote in the introduction to her published collection of epistles, “[At] the first appearance of truth among us, when we were young in it . . . we saw perfectly that there was no safety . . . but as we obeyed the Light . . . And so, we came to discern between the precious and the vile . . . and between the chaff and the wheat . . . [Then] we became very zealous for God, and for His truth . . . and we had a pity for all people’s souls that remained in darkness. . . [This] made us very importunate with all people, both Friends and others, to direct them to the Light, and obey it.” (c.1670)
So, we wrangle with each other over what it means to be a Good Quaker, what it means to live a Good Life. Yet still, we are called together to work together to make some good in the world. And we have learned to self-organize, bottom-up, until we have formed a tall enough platform that activists and policy wonks can launch themselves from our support into the fray. This September, the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) published a legal brief that clarifies the compatibility between the “International Legally Binding Instrument on Plastic Pollution” (ILBI), currently under deliberation by the UN’s International Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, and existing international trade law under the World Trade Organization. Part of the “binding” of the ILBI would be to limit the extensive government subsidies that are currently received by the multinational primary plastics polymer industry and have been for decades. Thus, the QUNO effort is directed at the “cradle” of the global plastics pollution crisis, while local shopping-bag bans chip away at the grave.
The pain is intense when dear friends turn away from principles that seem precious to me. But we are complex creatures who live on many levels at once. We can work in harmony together even when we sense discord underneath. And in that same essay above, Margaret Fell reminds us that when we go underneath the underneath, “The Truth is one and the same always; and though ages and generations pass away, and one generation goes and another comes, yet the word, and Power, and the Spirit of the living God endures forever, and is the same, and never changes.” ~~~