A little perspective
Let’s examine nowmy community, the Religious Society of Friends of the Truth, the early name for the Religious Society of Friends in Britain and America, more commonly known as Quakers.
This year is the 350th anniversary of Quakers in England. Their émigrés in America, on the other hand, arrived in 1656. So did the American start beat the British one by two years? The first formal gathering in England around George Fox is thought to have been delayed by British persecution at the time. The banner picture is James Nayler, prominent English Quaker leader pilloried and whipped in Bristol in 1656. See also a cool British timeline here.
Quaker emigration to America and the 1681 charter granted to William Penn by King Charles II, lead to Pennsylvania becoming a haven for religious refugees, both from England and from less liberal colonies like Massachusetts.
The lesson here is that dates don’t denote precedence, as in this case originators start date ’followed' the émigrés’ by two years. The reason is simple: the comparable real start dates are in fact 1658 in England and 1681 in America, of significant & stable meetings or congregations.
Similarly I had American friends claim that since the 1789 year of the French Revolution followed the 1776 year of American Independence… that America exported its revolution to France! Like British Quakers’ start was delayed by persecution, the French Revolution was delayed by the resistance from incumbent royalists. And the same way Pennsylvania issued from a royal British charter, Benjamin Franklin helped finance the American rebels by calling on French royal and noble funding!
[One confusion may have been the fact both revolutions were inspired by French philosophers Rousseau & Voltaire. And half a century later one of the best descriptions of the American ideology is by Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique: His return from America and glowing account just before the mid-19th c. French Commune and other European uprisings, may indeed give the impression Americans exported their revolution later on.]
Again, dates don’t denote precedence. These details not taught in American schools — my daughter was born in Texas & went to primary school in California — come from Howard Zinn’s A people’s history of the United States and David McCullough’s 1776.
A fortuitous move from Australia to France at the end of my elementary school also gave me rare insights at such a tender age. I happen to have learned early 19th c. history in consequent years, first the Anglo version in Brisbane then the French one in Pau. And especially around Napoleon, it was the dates and place names that helped me realise we were talking about the same events! The emphasis was so different — I remember all about Waterloo on British version and Austerlitz on French one — that I really learned then:
- how much it mattered whose side you were considering
- how important it is to see both sides, better still all sides
I later went on to perennially seek the story behind the story both in current affairs and at work (see between [square brackets]) with a little help from my reporter friends. And today Twitter is my best source of ‘alt.news’ as the most inquisitive and least centrally controlled.
So in this series, I first called upon logic to help us think straight, second looked at a case study of a confused grasp of reality, and third looked where confusion in current affairs can lead us. Here a quick history of my current religious community whose tenet is truth, finds itself amid mis-truths yet is not alone in that.
