John Cowan <[email protected]> says: >> I hope things have not reached that point among Schemers! > > I think they have, with respect to goals rather than means. If we > agreed on goals, then means would be a matter of engineering judgement. > But in fact, the only major goal that all the electors seem to agree on > is unity! Everything else is up for debate.
If you mean only that there is some unclarity in articulating the shared goals of our community, this can be resolved by discussion and consensus. If you mean that there is a true bifurcation (or worse) of goals, then your later comment becomes very relevant: >> As a result, changes often don't happen until an >> old generation dies off. > > Alternatively, they happen by split. And if things are as bad as you suggest about goals, then maybe that's a better solution than an attempt at papering over the problem. (As I said earlier, I hope that's not the case.) You say: > Sometimes the splits heal: the division of New York and Philadelphia > Yearly Meetings into Orthodox and Hicksite factions in 1827 was repaired > in 1955. But I don't think the Scheme community can wait that long. but also: > The usual way to call the question in the IETF, which makes > decisions by rough consensus, is "Is there anyone who can't live with > this?" I submit that if the IETF, which really /does/ have to move in a hurry, can live with consensus, there's no reason Schemers have to feel too rushed to afford consensus. But, yeah, the IETF has the advantage (in a funny sense) that everyone knows the Internet is a just-grew kludge; nobody is defending God's Network Protocols. :-) That makes it easier to be able to live with things. Anyway, the lesson I draw from the Society of Friends is that when decisions are made by narrow majorities, that's a sign of trouble, regardless of who won, and pretty much regardless of the context, unless the decision is about something trivial where no matter of principle is involved, like whether to eat Chinese or Thai for dinner tonight. (And even then it's a sign of trouble if the winning narrow majority is always the same people.) And I still claim this is a deeper lesson than the one Lord draws from the California budget. [And I say this despite the fact that I'm an employee of the state of California!] But thanks for improving my understanding of the Friends history! _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
