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

[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.