Thanks for adding that related information :) I don’t think that insufficient tolerance or diversity of opinion is Quakers’ problem, and I hope that I didn’t give anyone that impression. If so, thanks, for correcting the record.
As far as I can tell, Quakers have the social tech to robustly permit and engage in discourse (which is an important start!), but not the social organization to reliably digest and use it in an environment that is not robustly friendly. Their social tech reminds me of some parts of the Federalist Papers; in particular, the desideratum that systems ought to be more likely to simply grind to a halt than do harm. No. 10 is a good example:
If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.
Within Quaker communities, the “social organization” that encourages Friends to “digest and use” their principles is grounded in a tradition of equibalance between “faith and practice”.
This tradition of equibalanced faith and practice is so strong that many Quaker congregations (re)write an explicit statement of their own community’s faith and practice at 10-to-20-year intervals; a web-search for “Quaker Faith and Practice” will find dozens of examples.
At the individual level, the consequences of the tradition of faith and practice equibalance are, broadly, as follows.
Suppose that an individual Friend’s faithful views and practices are broadly consonant with the traditional values that are associated to the Friendly mnemonic “SPICES”
S—Simplicity
P—Peace
I—Integrity
C—Community
E—Equality
S—Stewardship (optional)
Yet suppose too, that an individual Friend’s views and practices, in some sense or another, extend beyond traditional Quaker SPICE-values and SPICE-practices.
In this eventuality—which is so exceedingly common among Friends as to be nearly universal—individual Friends are expected to do nothing more, and nothing less, than to practice their own SPICE-values quietly, faithfully, and effectively.
Over time-spans of years and decades, individual Friends whose living faith and practice are assessed by their local Quaker community to be effectively SPICE-y come to be regarded—informally, without external reward, and solely by their local community—as “weighty” Quakers.
It is the faithful views and effective practices of individual weighty Quakers that chiefly inform each new “Faith and Practice” that is written by individual Quaker communities. And in turn, each community’s “Faith and Practice” is read by other Friendly communities, and influences them (or not) in proportion to their assessed SPICE-y weight.
By this individually-grounded and feedback-corrected mechanism of social evolution, the aggregate faith(s) and practice(s) of global Quakerism are stable on time-scales of years, moderately adaptive on timescales of decades, and transformationally adaptive on timescales of centuries.
As an in-depth account of this process, there is no better summary (known to me) than Howard H. Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years (1952), a history that was recently updated to Friends for 350 Years (2002) … and of course, younger Quakers look forward with reasonable confidence to reading Friends for 400 Years on-or-about the year 2052. :)
Needless to say, LW readers who foresee (e.g.) an AI Singularity as imminent on time-scales of decades, will assess the Quaker practice of guiding social evolution solely via local assessment of Friendly individual faiths and sustained effective practices, as being impracticably slow and (perhaps) irrationally informal.
Thanks for adding that related information :) I don’t think that insufficient tolerance or diversity of opinion is Quakers’ problem, and I hope that I didn’t give anyone that impression. If so, thanks, for correcting the record.
As far as I can tell, Quakers have the social tech to robustly permit and engage in discourse (which is an important start!), but not the social organization to reliably digest and use it in an environment that is not robustly friendly. Their social tech reminds me of some parts of the Federalist Papers; in particular, the desideratum that systems ought to be more likely to simply grind to a halt than do harm. No. 10 is a good example:
Within Quaker communities, the “social organization” that encourages Friends to “digest and use” their principles is grounded in a tradition of equibalance between “faith and practice”.
This tradition of equibalanced faith and practice is so strong that many Quaker congregations (re)write an explicit statement of their own community’s faith and practice at 10-to-20-year intervals; a web-search for “Quaker Faith and Practice” will find dozens of examples.
At the individual level, the consequences of the tradition of faith and practice equibalance are, broadly, as follows.
Suppose that an individual Friend’s faithful views and practices are broadly consonant with the traditional values that are associated to the Friendly mnemonic “SPICES”
S—Simplicity
P—Peace
I—Integrity
C—Community
E—Equality
S—Stewardship (optional)
Yet suppose too, that an individual Friend’s views and practices, in some sense or another, extend beyond traditional Quaker SPICE-values and SPICE-practices.
In this eventuality—which is so exceedingly common among Friends as to be nearly universal—individual Friends are expected to do nothing more, and nothing less, than to practice their own SPICE-values quietly, faithfully, and effectively.
Over time-spans of years and decades, individual Friends whose living faith and practice are assessed by their local Quaker community to be effectively SPICE-y come to be regarded—informally, without external reward, and solely by their local community—as “weighty” Quakers.
It is the faithful views and effective practices of individual weighty Quakers that chiefly inform each new “Faith and Practice” that is written by individual Quaker communities. And in turn, each community’s “Faith and Practice” is read by other Friendly communities, and influences them (or not) in proportion to their assessed SPICE-y weight.
By this individually-grounded and feedback-corrected mechanism of social evolution, the aggregate faith(s) and practice(s) of global Quakerism are stable on time-scales of years, moderately adaptive on timescales of decades, and transformationally adaptive on timescales of centuries.
As an in-depth account of this process, there is no better summary (known to me) than Howard H. Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years (1952), a history that was recently updated to Friends for 350 Years (2002) … and of course, younger Quakers look forward with reasonable confidence to reading Friends for 400 Years on-or-about the year 2052. :)
Needless to say, LW readers who foresee (e.g.) an AI Singularity as imminent on time-scales of decades, will assess the Quaker practice of guiding social evolution solely via local assessment of Friendly individual faiths and sustained effective practices, as being impracticably slow and (perhaps) irrationally informal.