4 - Restoring the link between money, price signals and ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
After an earlier career teaching French at the University of St Andrews, Jonathan Dale was led to live and work in Ordsall, Salford, where he helps a group of tenants to manage their social housing. He was also a part-time project worker with Church Action on Poverty for several years. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and has acted as Clerk of Quaker Social Responsibility and Education. In 1996 he gave the annual Quaker Swarthmore Lecture, entitled ‘Beyond the spirit of the age’. Since that time he has served on the Rediscovering Social Testimony Group and wrote the introductory sections to its final report, Faith in action – Quaker social testimony, which was published in 2000.
When the Stranger says: ‘what is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other?’ What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a community’. (T.S. Eliot, chorus from The rock)
Iam not an expert on the detail of any of the issues surrounding the right use of money. I am simply a Quaker who has reflected on some of them through the prism of the Quaker Testimonies. These are our convictions as to what is ultimately true about our life on earth, because, if you like, they come closest to reflecting our intimations of the nature of God. These Testimonies are nothing unless we practise them and, in doing so, experience afresh the deep reality they point to. They can be crudely summarised as Testimonies to Peace, to Equality, to Simplicity, to Truth and Integrity and to the Earth; but they are experienced truths – not mere notions or theories. My own practice of them has taken me from a university career in St Andrews to working with a housing cooperative in inner-city Salford. Such a change gives insights into inequality: I have taken a 50% pay cut in the process and still been immeasurably better off than the people I work with. Here, going as a family even on a subsidised day trip to the seaside can be a big financial decision. The same economic gradient has become transparent in my moving house from the desirable leafy suburb of Didsbury to Ordsall, through the body language and utterances of estate agents, for whom such moves are as unnatural in our economic system as water flowing uphill. It is such experiences that lie behind the simple arguments that follow.
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- Information
- The Right Use of Money , pp. 29 - 38Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2004