I recently had the opportunity to compare notes with someone from a strong Calvinist background. The Calvinists also have a strong culture of “obey all the rules”, but one with an ethos of “lawfulness is submission to rightful authority” rather than “law is the tree of life”. Their parents and teachers had an ethos of “don’t talk back,” very different from my Jewish upbringing where, even among the Orthodox (which we were not), while you were expected to eventually come to the endorsed answer, and were expected to follow the object-level rules in the meantime, it would be considered wrong not to ask questions until you understand.
The Jewish way is of course still highly imperfect, because the system as a whole lacks the appropriate error-correction mechanism for cases where the objection really is valid. Lacking a proper line of retreat short of abandoning the community altogether, there’s strong social pressure not to ask some of the most important questions. But it’s different in an important way from systems that treat argument per se as disobedience.
I agree that in the absence of this error-correction mechanism autonomes still end up clashing with the culture. Consequently, I think that a full ROL culture would have to have social structures for error-correction. Taking another Jewish example mainly because it’s been on my mind lately, the protected role of prophets during and before the era of the First Temple seems like it served something like this purpose—prophets’ main role was to criticize, not to predict. And they criticized kings for things that are only violations of orthodoxy in the hindsight of a tradition that made some of their criticisms canonical. Quaker meetings where everyone has full standing to say anything the spirit moves them to say seem like a different and promising sort of error-correction mechanism. Courts of law or other formal venues for petition are another.
I recently had the opportunity to compare notes with someone from a strong Calvinist background. The Calvinists also have a strong culture of “obey all the rules”, but one with an ethos of “lawfulness is submission to rightful authority” rather than “law is the tree of life”. Their parents and teachers had an ethos of “don’t talk back,” very different from my Jewish upbringing where, even among the Orthodox (which we were not), while you were expected to eventually come to the endorsed answer, and were expected to follow the object-level rules in the meantime, it would be considered wrong not to ask questions until you understand.
The Jewish way is of course still highly imperfect, because the system as a whole lacks the appropriate error-correction mechanism for cases where the objection really is valid. Lacking a proper line of retreat short of abandoning the community altogether, there’s strong social pressure not to ask some of the most important questions. But it’s different in an important way from systems that treat argument per se as disobedience.
I agree that in the absence of this error-correction mechanism autonomes still end up clashing with the culture. Consequently, I think that a full ROL culture would have to have social structures for error-correction. Taking another Jewish example mainly because it’s been on my mind lately, the protected role of prophets during and before the era of the First Temple seems like it served something like this purpose—prophets’ main role was to criticize, not to predict. And they criticized kings for things that are only violations of orthodoxy in the hindsight of a tradition that made some of their criticisms canonical. Quaker meetings where everyone has full standing to say anything the spirit moves them to say seem like a different and promising sort of error-correction mechanism. Courts of law or other formal venues for petition are another.