Dialogue and Friends

We spend a small part of our class discussing Bohm's idea of dialogue. It is, on the surface, fairly counterintuitive. Doesn't the world need bosses? Organizers? First Principles? That seems obvious to most of us, but then is it true?

Dialogue say in a nutshell two fairly simple things. First, that we need to have a more consequential view not of our actions, but of our thoughts and understand that they aren't separate from our feelings and our body. This is fairly problematic for many of us because we are deeply invested in a Cartesian world view that puts on a pedestal the concept that thinking is over the body and rationality is something that we can rely on for understanding the world. This commitment is deep and long lasting, but it of course isn't true. The body and the mind work together; our feelings do influence our ideas.

Secondly there is the idea that communication itself, using a reasonable sample of people, will lead to deeper understanding and is sufficient for providing a basis for solving some complex problems. This idea is very revolutionary on some level, but then it also isn't. It is, after all, something that has deep roots in the Common Law as it developed parts of the world that were under British influence and is, after all, what we saw historically in old Athenian Agora, in the peer jury system and the famous New England Town Meeting. It is also enshrined in Karl Popper's philosophy of the Open Society. While large systems might need an executive or organizational function there are precedents that have been shown to work quite well with such a communicative bias.

In religion the Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers, stands in clear contrast, though not opposition, to the Catholic Church. There is an executive function in the form of a clerk, but the Society operates on the function of leaderless meetings. No meetings, no Society. The Church, on the other hand, operates on strong organizational and hierearchal principles, with a Supreme Pontiff (a role assumed directly from the Pontifex of the Roman Empire) overseeing bishops who in turn have absolute authority over their flock through priests. The Pope (the working term for the Pontifex) claims absolute authority and infalliability for his decisions.

The Catholics educate and guide their flock (the term itself is pretty illustriative) through documents called catecisms. Catecisms have questions and answers. "Good" catholics can answer the questions verbatim. You have to believe the answers too, and the points are pretty absurd, like the composition of the Trinity. The Friends have guides for faith and practice too, but they are based not on answers to questions, such as the virginity of Mary or the ressurection of the dead, but are more concerned with the idea of keeping communication open, such as the idea that you have to reject violence, have regular meetings, and respect the individual as capable of having unique insights as gifts from God. (more).

What is interesting is that the Quakers are organized into groups by the frequency of their meetings; there are Yearly, Monthly and Weekly meetings. There is an inverse hierearchal relationship between the frequency of meetings and their relative importance. Yearly meetings write the Faith and Practice document. The idea that individuals have unique contact with the divine and that this has to be built into the structure is certainly dialogic.

Have to go now, but Dialogue also has important similarities to Tolstoy's idea of history and the Open Source software movement.