u/keithb

Last weekend I happened to be at Swarthmoor Hall. Friends worshipped in the "great hall" of the house. There's a historical note on a display for visitors explaining that in the early days of the church it was illegal in and of itself to meet for worship in the manner of Friends and many Friends had been arrested in that room.

The question arose: if attending worship in the manner of Friends were illegal now, would you still go?

A Friend asked, what philosophy beyond Popper's actually very liberal views on not censoring intolerant philosophies for as long as possible might be useful in Quaker spaces?

So, here's one: to put it at its very most misleadingly simple, Theodor Adorno was trying to understand how liberal capitalist societies, the fruits of the Enlightenment, had become Fascist. One contributing factor that he came up with was Identitätsdenken, which I translate as "thinking-in-identities", although it's often called "identity thinking" or "identitarian thinking".

I think it's in part the explanation for those head-spinning conversations that go like this:

        ROE
So, I've been thinking about X and I'm starting to come round to the idea

        DOE
Aaaa! Y and Z are horrible! Because… [continues at length]
 
        ROE
No, but X is…wait…I don't even think Y and Z!?

        DOE
Well it certainly sounds as if you do.

        ROE
No, that's terrible, of course not Z! And Y isn't great, but X…

        DOE
But we know that Y and Z are awful and appalling for [very good and true reasons…]

and so on.

What has happened here, I think, is that Doe has done a first-match search through their memory for people who said X, recalled what position such people seemed to be arguing for (that's the "identity", the identity is "people who think all of X, Y, and Z"), recalled which parts of that position are most obnoxious, and then delivered the most compelling response to the worst aspects of that position. This leaves Roe confused because…well, they don't think Y and Z. They really don't. Or, maybe they do, but they haven't mentioned them, so how would anyone know, really?

This is a case of what Adorno describes as the concept pretending to exhaust the particular. Here the concept of "XYZ-ian" is taken to tell us everything we need to know about Roe, and everything particular to Roe and their life and (ironically) identity as a person has been erased. Doe has decided that Roe, for the purposes of this conversation, is identical to everyone else who believes any of X, Y or Z. Whatever they do or don't think. Which is a kind of violence all by itself, a violence done to Roe's selfhood. What does our tradition of peaceableness say about such things?

Authoritarian regimes do this in order to justify programmes of oppression against groups, kinds, or classes of people. And it's still dangerous when done by well-meaning, fair-minded, progressive, centre-left, democratic socialist folks. When we allow good people to use that mechanism of oppression, albeit at small scale, bad people will learn from us that it's OK. Do we want them to learn that from Quakers?

And in Quaker discourse especially, this manoeuvre hooks into a kind of "hermeneutics of suspicion" which makes it impossible for Roe to make any progress with their actual, sincerely held interest in X, because Doe is so sure that they have Roe all worked out. Doe simply will not believe that Roe doesn't believe Y and Z, however much they deny it, perhaps sincerely and correctly, because Doe has placed their theory in a superior position over a person.

As Quakers, don't we owe it to everyone to at least give them the benefit of the doubt? To take what they say at face value?

And don't we owe that especially to other Quakers? To explore the possibility that they might be sincerely reporting their actual beliefs? That they are, in fact, speaking plainly?

To loop back to Popper: in order to deploy the "paradox-of-tolerance" move, we have first to identify someone as intolerant. Let's be careful about that.

It comes up often enough here, often in a mangled form, so as a service to Friends here is what Karl Popper said about the so-called "paradox of tolerance". It's footnote 4 of chapter 7 of Vol I. of The Open Society and Its Enemies. Emphasis in original.

>The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that from freedom in the sense of absence of any restraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. This idea is, in a slightly different form, with a very different tendency, clearly expressed by Plato [the subject of ch. 7]

>Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society agains the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and the tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress, even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, un the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Popper was from a Jewish family and fled Austria around 1936. So we know who he means when he says that "[proponents of intolerant philosophies] may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because [they say] it is deceptive, and teach [their followers] to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols." He means both Fascists and Communists, he means fighting in the streets and and political rallies.

Query: When you invoke Popper to claim the right to ignore, suppress, or expel from your community those whose ideas you find objectionable, are you sure that those people pass this bar? Do you see them "answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"? Are you not able to " counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion"?

The above quote is copyright material but I believe that my use of it here is short enough to be in line with "fair use" and "fair dealing" provisions.

I'm a "liberal" Quaker, but I'm going to keep denominational apologetics out of this, but, there is a line of thought that's very clearly present in a lot of liberal Quaker meetings that I want to explore. It's present in other liberal Protestant areas too, I think, but maybe not so strongly as with liberal Quakers.

The idea is this: all regions are at heart the same, point to the same essential truth, and have essentially the same message.

This does not seem to me to be obviously true.

I start from the position that: at least two religious traditions exist each of which describes themselves, their cosmology, theogony, soteriology, their ideas about the origin, nature, and purpose of human existence in terms that are incompatible. I grant that each tradition's description of itself is veridical; they are not mistaken about themselves.

I also have three normative claims in mind:

• external observers should not tell the adherents of another tradition that they are mistaken about their own tradition
• external observers cannot detach their understanding of another tradition from their own tradition, in fact, observers must recognise their own tradition in order to make claims about another
• external observers owe to the adherents of another tradition sincere consideration and genuine attention to their own veridical description of themselves

So, then, I think that as observers we must allow doubt our own impressions of another tradition and we must remain open to the possibility that what we think of it from within our own tradition may be incorrect. We should not demand that our understanding of what another tradition "really" believes must be correct. But we might anyway.

And, we should commit to a position from which we understand the world, to our own veridical account of what we hold to, but we might try not to

This produces a 2x2 matrix of options and what this model says about them.

• decline commitment, decline doubt: impossible and forbidden
• decline commitment, accept doubt: "pluralism", impossible
• accept commitment, decline doubt: "assimilation", forbidden
• accept commitment, accept doubt: permitted and required

I've been a management consultant so I love a 2x2 matrix. But I can't make reddit's tables work.

So, with the, I think reasonable, stance described at the top, we're left with one feasible position: commit to our own faith tradition and decline to interpret another tradition as necessarily the same as ours once we've explained to it's adherents what they really believe. If one doesn't want to do that, they have to decide which of the claims at the top they want to abandon.

That's the ethical position but having taken it, how, then, should we act?

I think we can only approach the other tradition in its own terms and reflect on what it says to us about our own. A we can only repeat that, as what we learn of the other tradition perhaps changes how we think about our own, but we can't hope, expect, or claim to ever have fully worked out what the other tradition "really" is.

If you haven’t already heard the Thee Quaker episode about Quaker work for peace during The Troubles, I strongly recommend it. Great work!

For context: my mother’s family are Irish Catholic, they moved to the UK in the 1950s. I was visiting Friends in Belfast towards the end of the Troubles…at about the same time as having my employment in London disrupted by IRA bombs.

There are a few lines from the episode I want to call out (which I have taken from the podcast app transcript):

> You were expected to pick a side, Protestant or Catholic, loyalist or Republican, but Quakers refused. They leaned on their history of being this trusted third thing, standing in the middle and offering a hand of peace to both sides.

> That historical trust [of Friends] was like an old skeleton key. It unlocked doors that were bolted shut to the government, to the police, and even to other churches. And so, the Quakers looked around Belfast, found the places where no one was helping, and quietly went to work.

> The [UK] government asked the Quakers to set up a visitor center [at HMP Maze/Long Kesh]. It was a highly controversial task, offering hospitality to the families of accused terrorists. […]
> they didn't say, you know, do you want to come and meet prisoners' families and support Loyalist and Republican prisoners or any of that? They said, can you make tea?

> […] Quaker House.
> For decades, […] served as a secret diplomatic backchannel, a quiet living room in South Belfast where politicians, paramilitary leaders, and rival church officials could sit down and talk together off the record. […] In a country where you couldn't even trust your own neighbors, the only people with the social capital to host these secret meetings were the Quakers.

This worked. It helped to crest the conditions for the Good Friday Agreement.

And now, I want Friends to think about a current conflict, one with walls that separate communities in the name of “peace”, one where a land is partitioned, one with soldiers of the streets, atrocities, polarised communities, seizure of land, suppression of religion. Can you think of a current conflict like that? I’m sure you can.

And now, think about the rhetoric you hear from Quakers today about that conflict, and compare it with the account in this episode of the prison visiting, and the cottage where families from opposing sides could meet, and the house where leaders could meet and talk and start to find away to put down their guns and bombs. All of which was possible because Quakers were trusted because we would not take a side in the conflict.

Is what Friends are doing now in regard of that other conflict…in with a chance of working?

I was moved to write this following spoken ministry at Britain YM in May.

Without creeds, yet we still have a social orthodoxy within Britain YM. How well does that serve truth?