Losing My Religion (and finding another)

[tcpip]

Unitarian elections were as expected on Sunday, with a significant victory to the Marxist-Lenninist faction (yes, this steeple-jacking really did happen and the same people are still in control), who were trotted out for their annual vote. More disappointing was the decision to vote down a proposal to introduce proportional representation, which cements an wilfully exclusionary attitude. Amusingly, they now have a treasurer who doesn't believe that the organisation needs a budget (following a c$60,000 loss last year). As one more neutral member has observed in a classic understatement, "the church has governance issues" (including classics such as bikeshedding). Same person also suggested that I am better off putting my energies in an organisation where they can actually have some effect, rather than having any attempt to change or initiate being blocked as it perceived as a threat.

Indeed I had come to the same conclusion prior to the meeting, and will be directing my energies instead towards the Uniting Church, specifically St. Michael's Church in Melbourne where the executive minister, Dr. Francis McNab, has advocated the sort of ecumenical and liberal religious perspective that I would be comfortable with. They have a much better idea of financial and organisational management, a much larger congregation, and overall a much larger national grouping (albeit they have a more orthodox and Christian viewpoint overall, but I am accepting of that). I will of course, keep my subscription to the Unitarians, because that is where my orientation lies, but I seriously cannot see any chance of the existing group even considering reforming themselves before their life reaches its historically inevitable conclusion.

Ultimately it does give rise to the need to avoid organisations whose leaders have irrationalisible ideologies, as they will always prone to intransigence and reject good ideas on the grounds of that ideology. Larger and less ideologically-driven organisations are better as they are used to dealing with diversity within their group, they understand the need for a fair distribution of power which recognised participation. Most importantly they have the organisational intelligence to work out what actually constitutes a good argument. Doctrinaire ideologues can never understand this. They will always fail a test of intelligence because they have ideological blinkers. This said, I am surprised (and impressed) by the number of regular congregation members who have contacted me to express their frustration at the events. Perhaps it also time for them to find a new home.

Comments

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

I was actually at St Michael's yesterday performing in their St Michael's Day service. I have my own opinions on what I'd prefer to do regularly on Sunday mornings, but I can say that the person organising the musicians for yesterday's service was subject to some pretty interesting behaviour in the lead-up.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, well I like having my brain turned on in the morning. Indeed 10am might be too late!

So, dare I ask, was the "interesting behaviour" good, bad, or weird?

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

It's something I probably shouldn't discuss here. Feel free to prod me on G-talk.

[lifedistilled.livejournal.com]

Haha, "Historically inevitable conclusion." The Marxist-Leninists. I see what you did there.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I was hoping somebody would catch it :)

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

In my experience, groups such as these tend to reach their historically inevitable conclusions sooner than later whenever run by Marxist-Leninists.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That does raise the interesting question about the relationship between organisations an their own variable levels of adaptable system and ideology. MLs are quite competent at obtaining power; after all they have this Promethean sense of history and collectivist discipline. However, once they obtain it, they're absolutely useless at managing an organisation towards growth, because of their ideological blinkers.

On a wider scale, we've seen how ideological growth ended in millions of deaths (e.g., the forced collectivisation process in the USSR, or the Great Leap Forward in China). In contrast the Brezhnev stagnation seemed to be a safer bet. In other words, a slow and steady decline ending in a whimper.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I once read a paper that dealt with Soviet economic planning, and among other things it talked about this phenomenon of mid-tier economic managers tapping into an inter-managerial black market, not merely for their own aggrandisement, but also to make their own economic units function better. Suppose they needed some cement, or some train cars, or whatever, and the economic planners at the top are once again incapable of interacting with reality. They'd bypass their bosses and go directly to the source.

If I figure out what the paper was called, I'll try and link it.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, the issue of lacking relative feedback mechanisms was always a disaster for consumer logistics and complex goods.

Economic planning of the Soviet style does work well for simple goods (low inputs, low outputs, easy logistics). Nobody can deny the successful military productivity that the Soviets engaged in WWII from the Urals; guns, tanks, and bullets are all quite low on the complexity scale.

[carlowe.livejournal.com]

Every committee is going to be the same to some extent. Is why I steer clear these days.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I have to confess, having spent a little bit of time on said committee several years back, that this was probably the most exhausting I have experienced from the multitude I have been on. There were no standing orders (although the chair has improved significantly in an informal manner in this regard over the years), and most irritating there is very little in the way of standing procedures or policy. So each and every item of correspondence is evaluated at each committee meeting.

It is most inefficient activity imaginable. Every case becomes a special case, with the worst possible level of opportunity cost. It is little wonder the organisation struggles in effectiveness when all the time is spent in meetings!

Perhaps the committee members are secretly Aos Sí, and are actually immortals who have a different concept of time to mere humans.

[(Anonymous)]

Good work all round tovarisch. xx
Redmetal :-)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thanks brother, will keep up the good fight.

It's not what you fight, but what you fight for

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, we know how that story ended up :)

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

More disappointing was the decision to vote down a proposal to introduce proportional representation, which cements an wilfully exclusionary attitude.

A wilfully exclusionary attitude? From Marxist-Leninists? Well, I must say I'm astonished by this totally unexpected turn of events.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, I must say I'm astonished by this totally unexpected turn of events.

I wasn't of course, surprised by the results, but I was surprised by the lack of intelligent arguments in opposition to PR.

I really don't mind losing in the political arena, because that's just how power and democracy intersect. If I was really upset about such things, I wouldn't be a radical; indeed, I could have made myself quite a good living if I had taken the conservative path.

What does annoy me when obviously daft arguments are presented and people wilfully hang on to them, not because of their veracity but because of their source. I would much rather be proven conclusively wrong by the force of the better argument.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I would imagine you warned them well in advance that the Vanguard of the Proletariat there can be a bit... cliquish about things. And I share your frustration. On balance I tend to be a bit of a fan of PR (and I'm happy to say that is not just cultural baggage on my part) and if it was blithely struck down without so much as a good counter-argument, well, that's sad indeed.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Cliquish is a good description; but even more so a complete moral flexibility when it comes to the acquisition of power. After all, there has been clamouring for proportional representation by M-Ls when they are in a minority, but also the banning of political opposition when they have power.

This is just par for the course for Lenninist opportunism.

Speaking of cultural baggage I saw some very interesting comments by Linus Torvalds on the US electoral system. This particularly struck a chord:

That's when you also notice that the whole US voting system is apparently expressly designed to be polarizing (winner-take-all electoral system etc). To somebody from Finland, that looks like a rather obvious and fundamental design flaw. In Finland, government is quite commonly a quilt-work of different parties, and the "rainbow coalition" of many many parties working together was the norm for a long time. And it seems to result in much more civilized political behaviour.

Apparently some people think that political rainbows are wrong.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Linus is right, I think; that is a characteristically Finnish view. In fact, Finland has one of those rainbow coalitions right now. I do recognise the merits and flaws in both FPtP and PR, and I believe that to an extent it is a matter of subjective preference which set of merits and flaws one prefers, but I know I would be endlessly frustrated if American-style attack ads or some such thing ever successfully reached Helsinki. (Although to what extent the prevalence of such phenomena depends on electoral system, I'm not too clear on. It's certainly true Finnish society has been sharply... let's say violently bifurcated by political differences in the past. We got better.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Well, I must confess I don't see too many merits in FTP. It satisfies majority criteria, but so does every other voting system. It fails Condorcet tests, and tests on binary independence and clone tests. The only "problem" with PR (except for the complexity of the count, but that only matters to those conducting the count) is that it it leads to fragmentation - which of course isn't a failure of the method (it does what it says on the box), but rather a political aesthetic.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Its adherents seem to like the clarity of vision it offers. The programmes of governments under PR are often cobbled together after elections, as power relationships between parties become evident, whereas if one's system tends to put one lot clearly in charge the voter theoretically gets to pick between clear-cut programmes that the parties have spelled out in advance. (Sweden's two-bloc system offers something like this within PR, though.) I've also seen it defended on the basis of a sort of localism, but that generally devolves into an exercise in comparative cultural studies, and, ultimately, into a debate on the relative merits of the US primary system.

I absolutely agree with you on, and will defend PR against, charges that it encourages undue fractiousness. FPTP advocates have asked me whether I don't think it's absurd that an entirely marginal party can, if it happens to hold the balance of power in parliament, spell the downfall of an entire coalition and prevent anyone from "getting things done". I have two pat answers to that old chestnut. One is flippant and the other is not.

The serious answer is that while there are certainly places where parliamentary deadlock is common and problematic -- Belgium is generally indicated, and sometimes Israel as well -- there are also plenty of places where quilt-patch coalitions live long and prosperous lives. So this is a reflection on the sharpness of local political differences rather than an integral feature of PR. The flippant answer is that parliamentary minorities probably shouldn't expect to "get things done" willy-nilly anyway, so when a minor party cripples a coalition by denying it a parliamentary majority, what we're witnessing is not a bug, but a feature. (Which I think rather neatly ties into your point about the political aesthetic of it.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Right, and the other feature being if a minority party hold successive governments "to ransom", by exploiting the fact they hold a balance of power, then in a very short period of time they'll infuriate the major points of view who will form a grand coalition.

My (limited) understanding of the Belgian situation is due to the particular linguistic differences that has sharpened into political differences, and especially over Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde.

[(Anonymous)]

Good luck with your conversion to a new religion. I was at Sunday’s AGM and in my recollection of events, the only thing I can deduce from the election results is that you were resoundingly rejected both as Treasurer and Committee of Management member. I wonder if that had anything to do with your negativity and lack of respect towards other members of the Church, as demonstrated by your loud sniggering and side-comments when others had the floor and were trying to voice their point of view? I am sure the Unitarian Church will continue to thrive with or without your input. Oh, and finally, I don’t think any Church would benefit from members who claim to be open-minded and yet use blogs to attack others by negatively accusing them of belonging to specific political factions, e.g. “with a significant victory to the Marxist-Lenninist faction (yes, this steeple-jacking really did happen and the same people are still in control), who were trotted out for their annual vote” – your reaction smacks to me of being that of a sore-loser... wouldn’t you say?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Hello Patrizia,

It was your second time in attendance last Sunday, wasn't it?

I was at Sunday’s AGM and in my recollection of events, the only thing I can deduce from the election results is that you were resoundingly rejected both as Treasurer and Committee of Management member.

Well given the CoM has the second-least democratic voting method that is not surprising. In a democratic voting system I would have been easily elected. Not that is a good reason to pick one voting system over another.

As for treasurer, I know that I received a majority of votes from those who turn up at least twenty times a year, and almost zero from those who turn up less than three times per annum. What does that suggest to you?

I wonder if that had anything to do with your negativity and lack of respect towards other members of the Church, as demonstrated by your loud sniggering and side-comments when others had the floor and were trying to voice their point of view?

I doubt that made any difference at all. Certainly if a candidate for treasurer says that the organisation like this doesn't need a budget, I will am likely to have a little chuckle.

I am sure the Unitarian Church will continue to thrive with or without your input.

Are you? It certainly had reached a very low point by the end of 2010. In those two years membership has doubled and attendance has gone to 150% of that figure.

Now, would you care to make some predictions on what the next two years will be like?

Oh, and finally, I don’t think any Church would benefit from members who claim to be open-minded and yet use blogs to attack others by negatively accusing them of belonging to specific political factions, e.g. “with a significant victory to the Marxist-Lenninist faction (yes, this steeple-jacking really did happen and the same people are still in control), who were trotted out for their annual vote” – your reaction smacks to me of being that of a sore-loser... wouldn’t you say?

I don't mind losing elections at all. If I did, I wouldn't be a radical. I run for positions to introduce ideas and change systems.

As for the MLs, are you denying this is true?

Have a nice day,

tcpip

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting response - where were those illusory supporters you have referred to? They weren't there when it counted, were they? Perhaps it tells you something about those who did turn up, because the AGM mattered and they wanted their voices heard... delude yourself at will, blame the process of election as you like, blame it on the blow-ins, but ask yourself this - why did they come? As for myself, I was there because I love the values held by the community within that branch of the Unitarian Church and, like you, made a point of being there, to exercise my voting rights. I follow closely what happens at the Church, even if I cannot presently attend as I would like to, and I wanted to make sure my voice was heard. Ironically, I had no idea who you were until your manners (or lack of them) alerted me to your presence.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Interesting response - where were those illusory supporters you have referred to?

Ummm.. They were there and they voted for me?

Sure, I can name four or five people who are regular attendees who couldn't turn up for very good reasons, but my comment still stands. I received a majority of votes from those who turn up at least twenty times per year, and almost zero from those who turn up less than three times per year.

The average attendance for 2012 is 38. I received 30 votes. Of the people who voted for me who are "less than regular attendees", I received 2 3 votes (EDIT: I was reminded of one other).

What do you think this means for the church?

blame the process of election as you like

Well, I think that's a just claim. If you can put aside the personalities for a moment and try to engage in a non-partisan and informed judgement, why do you think that majoritarian block-voting is a fair voting system?

Perhaps it tells you something about those who did turn up, because the AGM mattered and they wanted their voices heard...

Sure, we know why people who are almost never in attendance turned up, don't we? Look, I understand that partisan politics is about establishing and controlling organisations. Heck, I've been in the ALP for long enough to see what branch stacking looks like.

Do you really think it was just pure good fortune that twenty new members were signed up earlier this year, just in time to acquire voting rights for the AGM? And none the month afterwards?

Sort of smacks a little of convenience, doesn't it?

It really is quite sad and weird behaviour, that is going to be prone to encouraging people to put their energies in more accepting organisations that recognise and respect ability.

Ironically, I had no idea who you were until your manners (or lack of them) alerted me to your presence.

Oh, do get over a little snicker, already, shall we? Mea culpa!

Now, you claim that you follow closely what happens at the Church and yet you had no idea who I was?

http://levlafayette.com/unitarian-universalist

Perhaps it could be argued that I'm a little biased on the matter, but if you had been following closely you would know how much I have contributed to the church. So either you're a lot less aware than you think you are or you're being less than truthful.