The Viner Dimension

Quakers and Diggers

Even in our timeline, we know that those ideas were common enough in that era. The Quakers had made that connection early on - it doesn't take much time with web-searches to find that one out. For example, the right to wear a sword was supposedly an important privilege, a gentleman's badge of rank. But leading Quakers such as William Penn - you've heard of Pennsylvania, right? yes, that's him - realised that, with the sword, it meant that 'gentleman' was in effect a synonym for 'person willing to murder others for property' - and hence a true gentleman would be one who did not wear a sword.

And core to the Quakers is that idea of responsibility. Not just the idea, the practice. That everything is our own personal responsibility - that wherever we see that action is needed, that it is our responsibility, not the mythical 'they', not Somebody Else's Problem.

That may have been behind that whole 'Certificate of Responsibility' thing, for Aunt Kat's house. Property as declaration of responsibility, not 'rights of possession'.

Would be interesting to explore the implications of that a bit more.

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Another key figure from that time that I found out about in those web-searches was Gerrard Winstanley, founder of a kind of practical-anarchist group called the Diggers. A former cloth-merchant whose business had been destroyed by the war, he focussed on a more Biblical view of equality: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?" He's what we might call a communard, an extreme egalitarian: "All who believed were together and had all things in common", he writes, quoting from the Bible; "they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as had need". Kind of a prototype for Marx's much-quoted "From each according to ability, to each according to their need" - but a full two centuries earlier than Marx himself.

There's another phrase from Winstanley that catches my eye: "In the beginning of time, God made the earth. Not one word was spoken that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but that selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over another."

That's a huge indictment of the claims of the aristocracy, the pretensions of the self-styled 'gentlemen', the privileges and property-'rights' of Cromwell's Grandees; a huge indictment of the Church; a huge indictment and warning about the colonialism that was already underway by that time.

In Aunt Kat's timeline, the Commonwealth and the Agreement of the People demolish all of those.

But in our timeline, all of those things 'won'. And everyone lost. We still are. Losing.

Almost four hundred years, going flat-out in the wrong direction. A missed-opportunity of global proportions. Literally.

Kind of hurts, to look at it like that...