Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [61]
Edna didn’t charge for any of her services but did accept voluntary donations. With nothing to give her that she needed, we resorted to fungible currency in this transaction. A hundred dollars was more than she’d ever gotten, she said. Fair enough; in return we’d receive more than we’d ever gotten too.
Thirteen
Secrets and Politics
I had attended church services, barn raisings, and hoeings, but there were other Minimite meetings that no one talked much about and that I had never visited. One time when I dropped by Sylvan’s, he wasn’t home and I waited for him for a few minutes. He finally pulled up in his buggy, and I asked him where he’d been.
“In council,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”
The answer only piqued my curiosity. I gathered from his secretiveness that the meeting was unusually important. I had to know more. I gave Sylvan a hurt puppy-dog look.
He sighed. Finally he began spilling some beans. He couldn’t get too specific because personal privacy was involved, but he could reveal some generalities. This information, combined with tidbits provided by others, helped me piece together the puzzle.
The council was the Minimite form of self-government. It was their apparatus for reconciling differences and choosing technology. It was also the supreme test of willingness, or self-surrender: only by first yielding power to one another and to what they regarded as the spirit of their unity, a spirit from above, could the members wield it over machines.
The form of the council was not rigidly prescribed but developed, more or less sui generis, along topics and thoughts as they arose. Like the religious service, it was contemplative and querying, punctuated by periods of pregnant silence.
After an opening prayer, followed by a pause for reflection, members one by one would speak their minds. Older members went first, followed by younger, until everyone had had a say. Formal votes were not taken. Usually the general sentiment was clear enough, or if not, the ministers—chosen by popular nomination followed by a lottery—decreed the outcome.
Max Weber, somewhere in his Protestant Ethic, drew a sketch of an Anabaptist meeting and made it clearer why the conclusions reached in such gatherings could be so penetrating:
“The peculiarly rational character of [Ana]baptist morality rested psychologically above all on the idea of expectant waiting for the Spirit to descend, which even today is characteristic of the Quaker meeting…The purpose of this silent waiting is to overcome everything impulsive and irrational, the passions and subjective interests of the natural man. He must be stilled in order to create that deep repose of the soul in which alone the word of God can be heard…
“But in so far as Baptism affected the normal workaday world, the idea that God only speaks when the flesh is silent evidently meant an incentive to the deliberate weighing of courses of action and their careful justification in terms of the individual conscience.”
Put another way, Minimite councils depended on a secret similar to the one Mary and I had discovered while relaxing with the windows open in the evening: in true leisure there is mastery. If the enemy of self-direction was passion and impulse, its ally was quiet repose, mindfulness, perceptivity. Yet the act of reflection transcended the rational; it followed a course that could not be entirely foreseen, yielding conclusions that could not be reached if too deliberately pursued. From this quiet, something surfaced—a reserve store of living experience, a world of subtle connections and insights, and possibly