One of the takeaways of this election this is that we’ve all siloed ourselves away in our self-selected Facebook feeds. We listen to most our news and hang out primarily with those who think and talk like us. One piece of any healing will be opening up those feeds and doing the messy work of communicating with people who have strongly different opinions. That means really respecting the worldview people are sharing (and that’s as hard for me as for anyone) and listening through to emotions and life experiences that have brought people into our lives. Basic listening tips apply: try not to judge or accuse or name call. If someone with less privilege tells you they’re scared, consider they might have a valid concern and don’t interrupt or tell them they’re being alarmist.
But all this also means apologizing and forgiving each other and being okay with a high level of messiness. It’s not easy and it won’t always work. We will not always have our opinion prevail and that’s okay. We are all in this together.
In economics, there’s a concept known as Pareto efficiency. It means that you ought to be able to eliminate any choice if another one dominates it along every dimension. The remaining choices sit along what’s called the Pareto frontier.
Silver then followed up with a real world example that speaks to my interest in food:
Imagine that in addition to White Castle and The French Laundry, there are two Italian restaurants in your neighborhood. One is the chain restaurant Olive Garden. You actually like Olive Garden perfectly well. But down the block is a local red-sauce joint called Giovanni’s. The food is a little better there than at Olive Garden (although not as good as at The French Laundry), and it’s a little cheaper than Olive Garden (although not as cheap as White Castle). So you can eliminate Olive Garden from your repertoire; it’s dominated along both dimensions by Giovanni’s.
These days we choose more than our dinner destinations. Spirituality has become a marketplace. While there have always been converts, it feels as if the pace of religious lane-changing has steadily quickened in recent times. Many people are choosing their religious affiliation rather than sticking with the faith traditions of their parents. For Quakers, this has been a net positive, as many of our meetinghouses are full of “convinced” Friends who came in to our religious society as adults.
Quakers are somewhat unique in our market potential. I would argue that we fall on two spots of the religious “pareto curve”:
The first is a kind of mass-market entry point for the “spiritual but not religious” set that wants to dip its toe into an organized religion that’s neither very organized nor religious. Liberal Friends don’t have ministers or creeds, we don’t feel or sound too churchy, and we’re not particularly concerned about what new seekers believe. It’s a perfect fit for do-it-yourself seekers that are looking for non-judgmental spiritually-minded progressives.
Our second pareto frontier beachhead is more grad-school level: we’re a good spot for people who have a strong religious convictions but seek a community with less restrictions. They’ve memorized whole sections of the Bible and might have theological training. They’re burned out by judgmentalism and spirit-less routine and are seeking out a more authentic religious community of religious peers open to discussion and growth.
It seems we often reach out to one or the other type of “pareto” seeker. I see that as part of the discussion around Micah Bales’s recent piece on Quaker church planting–do we focus on new, unaffiliated seekers or serious religious disciples looking for a different type of community. I’d be curious to hear if any Quaker outreach programs have tried to reach out to both simultaneously. Is it even possible to sucessfully market that kind of dual message?
The two-touch pareto nature of Friends and pop spiritual culture suggests that meetings could focus their internal work on being the bridge from what we might call the “pareto entrances.” Newcomers who have walked through the door because we’re not outwardly churchy could be welcomed into Quakerism 101 courses to be introduced to Quaker techniques for spiritual grounding and growth – and so they can determine whether formal membership is a good fit. Those who have come for the deep spiritual grounding can join as well, but also be given the opportunities for smaller-scale religious conversations and practice, through Bible study groups, regional extended worships and trips to regional opportunities.
If you add charts to blog posts, people will think you’re super-duper smart.
L.A. Kauffman’s critique of consensus decision making in The Theology of Consensus is a rather perennial argument in lefty circles and this article makes a number of logical leaps. Still, it does map out the half-forgotten Quaker roots of activist consensus and she does a good job mapping out some of the pitfalls to using it dogmatically:
Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective.
All that said, it’s hard for me not to roll my eyes while reading this. Perhaps I just sat in on too many meetings in my twenties where the Trotskyists berated the pacifists for slow process (and tried to take over meetings) and the black bloc anarchists berated pacifists for not being brave enough to overturn dumpsters. As often as not these shenanigans torpedoed any chance of real coalition building but the most boring part were the interminable hours-long meetings about styles. A lot of it was fashion, really, when you come down to it.
This piece just feels so…. 1992 to me. Like: we’re still talking about this? Really? Like: really? Much of evidence Kauffmann cites dates back to the frigging Clamshell Alliance—I’ve put the Wikipedia link to the 99.9% of my readers who have never heard of this 1970s movement. More recently she talks about a Food Not Bombs manual from the 1980s. The language and continued critique over largely forgotten movements from 40 years ago doesn’t quite pass the Muhammad Ali test:
Consensus decision making is a tool, but there’s no magic to it. It can be useful but it can get bogged down. Sometimes we get so enamored of the process that we forget our urgent cause. Clever people can use it to manipulate others, and like any tool those who know how to use it have an advantage over those who don’t. It can be a tribal marker, which gives it a great to pull together people but also introduces a whole set of dynamics that dismisses people who don’t fit the tribal model. These are universal human problems that any system faces.
Consensus is just one model of organizing. When a committed group uses it for common effect, it can pull together and coordinate large groups of strangers more quickly and creatively than any other organizing method I’ve seen.
Just about every successful movement for social change works because it builds a diversity of supporters who will use all sorts of styles toward a common goal: the angry youth, the African American clergy, the pacifist vigilers, the shouting anarchists. But change doesn’t only happen in the streets. It’s also swirling through the newspaper rooms, attorneys general offices, investor boardrooms. We can and should squabble over tactics but the last thing we need is an enforcement of some kind of movement purity that “calls for the demise” of a particular brand of activist culture. Please let’s leave the lefty purity wars in the 20th century.
On Twitter earlier today, Jay T asked “Didn’t u or someone once write about how Q’s behave on blogs & other soc. media? Can’t find it on Qranter or via Google. Thx!” Jay subsequently found a great piece from Robin Mohr circa 2008 but I kept remembering an description of blogging I had written in the earliest days of the blogosphere. It didn’t show up on my blog or via a Google search and then I hit up the wonderful Internet Archive.org Wayback Machine. The original two paragraph description of QuakerQuaker is not easily accessible outside of Archive.org but it’s nice to uncover it again and give it a little sunlight:
Quakerism is an experiential religion: we believe we should “let our lives speak” and we stay away from creeds and doctrinal statements. The best way to learn what Quakers believe is through listening in on our conversations.
In the last few years, dozens of Quakers have begun sharing stories, frustrations, hopes and dreams for our religious society through blogs. The conversations have been amazing. There’s a palpable sense of renewal and excitement. QuakerQuaker is a daily index to that conversation.
I still like it as a distinctly Quaker philosophy of outreach.
There are a lot of good conversations happening around Rachel Held Evans’s latest piece on the CNN Belief Blog, “Why millennials are leaving the church.” One centers on the relationship between Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants. As is often the case, the place of Quakers in this is complicated.
Some historians categorize the original Quaker movement as a “third way” between Catholicism and Protestantantism, combining the mysticism of the former and the search for perfection of the latter. It’s a convenient thesis, as it provides a way to try to explain the oddities of our lack of priests and liturgies.
But Quakers traded much of our peculiarity for a place setting at the Mainline Protestant table a long time ago. The “Quaker values” taught in First-day schools aren’t really all that different than the liberal post-Christian values you’d find posted on the bulletin board in the basement of any progressive Methodist, Presbyterian, or Episcopalian church. We share a focus on the social gospel with other Mainline denominations.
In a follow-up post, Evans re-shares a piece called The Mainline and Me that tries to honestly explain why she finds these churches admirable but boring. The lack of articulation of the why of beliefs is a big reason, as is the the fire-in-the belly of many younger Evangelicals and a culture adverse to stepping on toes.
One of the people she cites in this article is Robert E. Webber, a religious Evangelical of another generation whose spiritual travels brought him back to Mainline Protestantism. I first discovered him ten summers ago. The cross-polination of that book helped me bridge the Quaker movement with the progressive Evangelical subculture that was starting to grow and I wrote about it in the Younger Quakers and the Younger Evangelicals.
I suppose I should find it heartening that many of the threads of GenX loss and rediscovery we were talking about ten years ago are showing up in a popular religion blog today (with the substitution of Millenials). But I wonder if Friends are any more able to welcome in progressive seekers now than we were in 2003? I still see a lot of the kind of leadership that Webber identified with the “pragmatic” 1975 – 2000 generation (see chart at the end of my “Younger Quakers” post).
Webber might not have been right, of course, and Evans may be wrong. But if they’re on to something and there’s a progressive wave just waiting for a Mainline denomination to catch a little of the Evangelical’s fire and articulate a clear message of liberal progressive faith, then Friends still have some internal work to do.
Sometimes I see blog posts that make me really sad at the state of journalism. PhilyMag is the latest but you have the follow the daisy-chain of ramped-up hyperbole back just to make see how ridiculous it is.
The restaurant chain Red Robin recently made a fifteen-second TV ad whose joke is that its veggie-burgers are perfect for customers whose teenage daughters are “going through a phase.” It’s had rather limited airplay (it’s the 450th or so most run ad in the past 30 days) but still, Business Insider ran a piece on it which claimed that “the chain managed to insult all potential vegetarian and vegan customers” with the ad. For evidence, it cited three mild comments on Red Robin’s Facebook page. Fair enough.
But then the page-view-whores at Huffington Post saw the BI piece and wrote that Red Robin is “under fire for dissing vegetarians,” still citing just those Facebook comments. Under fire? For three comments?
Sensing fresh (veggie?) meat, Phillymag links to HuffPost to claim that ”vegetarians and vegans far and wide are freaking out” and that a boycott has been declared. The author tells us that “‘Offended’ gets tossed around so rapidly” and it must be true, right?, as she uses it three more times just in her opening paragraph. It’s a pity that none of the three Facebook commenters were considerate enough to actually use the words “outrage” or “boycott.” One described the ad as “disappointing” (ouch!). Another used the word “dissatisfied” (zing!), though he was speaking not about the ad per se but rather a recent visit to the restaurant.
Seems like if there is an epidemic of offended-ness going on, we might take a look at the desperation of what passes for modern journalism these days. Offended-ness must get page views, so why not be offended at being offended? (I imagine some hack further down the pageview food chain is right now reading the Phillymag piece and typing out a headline about the worldwide vegan army issuing a fatwa on the teenage daughters of Red Roof executives.) Is this really the kind of crap that people like to share on Facebook? Do Internet users just not follow links backward to judge if there’s any truth to outrage posts on outrage? I usually ignore this kind of junk even to read past the ridiculous headline. But the phenomenon is all too ubiquitous on the interwebs these days and is really so unnecessarily divisive and stereotype-perpetuating.
This is just so depressing: the Facebook gorilla has bought its second mobile photo sharing app in recent weeks. Lightbox was a great app. It auto-posted to everything I cared about (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare, Flickr) but also had its own beautiful website that kept it above the fray. Lightbox (my account is/was at http://martinkelley.lightbox.com/) was what Flickr should have and could have become and it let me enjoy the fantasy while also dual-posting to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_kelley), which has stored my photos since Mark Zuckerberg was in training diapers. For more on the Flickr that never was, see today’s piece in Gizmodo, “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet.”
Lightbox is joining Facebook!
We started Lightbox because we were excited about creating new services built primarily for mobile, especially for the Android and HTML5 platforms, and we’re honored that millions of you have…
Hey all, the Reclaiming Primitive Quakerism workshop at California’s Ben Lomond Center wrapped up a few hours ago (I’m posting from the San Jose airport). I think it went well. There were about thirty participants. The makeup was very intergenerational and God and Christ were being named all over the place!
I myself felt stripped throughout the first half, a sense of vague but deep unease – not at how the workshop was going, but about who I am and where I am. Christ was hard at work pointing out the layers of pride that I’ve used to protect myself over the last few years. This morning’s agenda was mostly extended worship, begun with “Bible Reading in the Manner of Conservative Friends” (video below) and it really lifted the veil for me – I think God even joked around with me a bit.
As always, many of the high points came unexpectedly in small conversations, both planned and random. One piece that I’ll be returning to again and again is that we need to focus on the small acts and not build any sort of movement piece by piece and not worry about the Big Conference or the Big Website that will change everything that we know. That’s not how the Spirit works and our pushing it to work this way almost invariably leads to failure and wasted effort.
Another piece is that we need to start focusing on really building up the kind of habits that will work out our spiritual muscles. Chad of 27Wishes had a great analogy that had to do with the neo-traditionalist jazz musicians and I hoped to get an interview with him on that but time ran out. I’ll try to get a remote interview (an earlier interview with him is here, thanks Chad for being the first interview of the weekend!)
I conducted a bunch of video interviews that I’ll start uploading to my Youtube account and on the “reclaiming2009” tag on QuakerQuaker. When you watch them, be charitable. I’m still learning through my style. But it was exciting starting to do them and it confirmed my sense that we really need to be burning up Youtube with Quaker stuff.
I need to find my boarding gate but I do want to say that the other piece is putting together collections of practices that Friends can try in their location Friends community. Gathering in Light Wess led a really well-received session that took the Lord’s Prayer and turned it into an interactive small group even. We took photos and a bit of video and we’ll be putting it together as a how-to somewhere or other.
