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The Zen of Quakerism (2016)

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124 points surprisetalk | 3 comments | 29 Jun 25 13:40 UTC | HN request time: 0.977s | source
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quacked ◴[02 Jul 25 18:23 UTC] No.44447143[source]▶
It's always weird to see Quakerism be mentioned somewhere else. I grew up Quaker and still sometimes attend Quaker meeting, and I related to his ceiling-tile counting; I used to count the wooden boards that formed the ceiling of our meetinghouse.

The best part about Quakerism, in my opinion, is that it teaches a very hearty disrespect of un-earned authority without teaching disrespect for the concept of authority itself. One of my favorite anecdotes is a group of Quakers who refused to doff their hats for the King, as they only doff their hats for God.

There's another old practice of refusing to swear on the Bible before telling the truth, as that would imply that they weren't telling the truth before they were sworn in.

I find the inclusion of Zen in this article is interesting, as you won't find the word "Holy" or "God", used, and "Spirit" is only used twice, once to comment on how he felt pressured to receive a message from it. The original purpose of Quaker silent worship was to remove the church-imposed barrier between man and God (the "Holy Spirit") so that anyone could be a mouthpiece for the wishes and desires of the Spirit. Modern American Quakers, especially the ones who write in Friends Journal, tend to be pretty secular.

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JKCalhoun ◴[02 Jul 25 18:40 UTC] No.44447323[source]▶
Attended Quaker meeting as a kid growing up as well. I appreciated the non-heirarchical aspect of it. No priest or anyone "leading" the "worship". No crosses or statuary of any kind. A simple room with half the seats in the room facing the other half. Occasionally someone broke the silence and said something short ... meditative?

When I was told Quakers did not kill, would not take up a gun and point it at a fellow human, I was surprised. "What if they are trying to kill you?" little kid me asked with incredulity. "You cannot even kill in self-defense," I was told.

Even then I could appreciate the seriousness of their conviction.

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laurent_du ◴[02 Jul 25 19:33 UTC] No.44447887[source]▶
What if they are going to kill your child? I have zero respect for this kind of conviction.
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specproc ◴[02 Jul 25 19:40 UTC] No.44447955[source]▶
I have to say I'm fortunate enough never to have found myself in that situation. Is this something that happens regularly in America?

I would comfortably say I completely share this conviction. I would not like to find myself in a position where that conviction was tested -- such as that you describe -- but not killing is almost universally understood to be a fundamental law of civilised society.

One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

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9x39 ◴[03 Jul 25 02:53 UTC] No.44451195[source]▶
> Is this something that happens regularly in America?

Murder and manslaughter occurs in every country. Violence is hyperlocal and can be entirely stochastic. There are simply broken humans everywhere.

>One can defend oneself and others in a myriad of ways that do not involve murder.

Too much fiction, not enough fighting experience. There are myriad ways in which you cannot effectively defend yourself and cannot flee in these lose-lose scenarios. There largely wouldn't be victims, if this were true.

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1. specproc ◴[03 Jul 25 04:35 UTC] No.44451669[source]▶
The last two times I've been in a fight went exactly the same way.

Dumb drunk guy swung at my face, I took it, a bunch of bystanders jumped on him and hauled him off. Pretty much end of story.

I've plenty of fighting experience, the ones that have ended badly for me have been the ones where I've fought back.

Obviously not the trolley problem-esque situation from the context, but my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.

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2. 9x39 ◴[03 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44454870[source]▶
> my core point is that one cannot construct morality from extreme hypotheticals.

Isn’t that what happens when we codify limits of behavior, which are often extreme, into laws or religious texts which then govern a population?

Even if you don’t consider law as de facto defining morality, moral lessons from literature to oral tradition are often handed down as metaphor through stories of finding balance between extreme outcomes.

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3. specproc ◴[03 Jul 25 19:59 UTC] No.44458660[source]▶
Yes, we take extreme behaviour, that is harmful to others, and prohibit it as a society.

Where we run into trouble is where we say, well here is an example of a case where this extreme behaviour may be countenanced.

There may well be such cases! If I had a gun (I don't) and someone was attacking a loved one (fortunately rarely if ever happened) with intent and ability to kill (definitely never) and the only way I could stop them because of the specific situation was to kill them (waaay down the tail now)... perhaps, I don't know how I would react in that situation.

Here's where ethics becomes like programming. I could sit down and come up with a list of cases in which I felt it appropriate to kill, and code all the edge cases. This is inefficient and sorta silly, and I guess how I chose to interpret the comment that started this thread.

I could come also up with a clever algorithm which balances harm done and harm prevented (or good caused) based on a range of parameters. I think this is more what GP was pointing to, a teleological ethics. But what model? What parameters? What loss function? Which libraries?

My position here, at least on violence is deontological. If everyone can write their own crufty (and inevitably closed-source) solution to the problem, then bad actors can (and do) code it so they get the results they want when they need them. The result is a violent world.

The cleaner, more elegant, and more ethical code simply prohibits harmful outcomes altogether. I suspect derivations from this initial simplicity in religious texts and interpretations are malicious code added in later updates.