I've been thinking some more about my likening the brethren system to a serial story, and the more I think, the more I like the analogy. Obviously the parallels aren't exact - such thought exercises never are - but it is a useful way of looking at it. I think so, anyway.
One of the points I was trying to make was about plot twists. Surprises and changes that confound expectations are a good thing in a drama. They keep up interest, they provide reasons to carry on when otherwise things might be getting stale, they stimulate and, in this case, they provide the always vital sense that the story is moving forward. But only as long as they are believable. A twist that undermines what has gone on before can disengage belief, without which the story is pointless.
Which brings me to the technology issue.
From my observation, the brethren themselves seem to have swallowed this dramatic u-turn quite well. There is a little bit of cynicism in places, and I'm quite sure there will be a bit of dark muttering from some who like consistency more than development, but the great thing is that people who tend to be slightly rebellious have their interests directly aligned with the change (technology can be very useful to people who don't find brethren life itself very rewarding), while those who are most inclined to dislike the change, having invested emotional energy in hating technology, are the ones most loyal to the person instigating the move forward. That doesn't leave much room for any upheaval.
But I've had reason to chat with a few non-brethren over the last few days, ones from that specific group who have never been part of the brethren but who have reason to know them quite well. And I think the brethren management would be a little bit shocked at the cost to their public image of the switch from technology rejection to embrace.
The general feeling is that while the brethren held out against modern ways, they inspired an admiration of a kind even from those who thought the whole thing was mad. They got credit for sticking to their guns and articulating a point of view, even though it was becoming an obviously increasing disadvantage to them. People know about other religious sects who reject aspects of western life, and the approach gets the benefit of the doubt. "Not my cup of tea," says the average tolerant Briton (at least), "but hats off to them for making a go of it."
And now? Well, that benefit of the doubt has been pretty much entirely replaced by cynicism. If the brethren can change so abruptly on something which, to the world around, was a central component of their beliefs and one of the main things a person could rely on when dealing with them, then nothing they say is of much value any more. Now, people expect that as soon as there is enough reason to change, they will do so, and so their beliefs get no respect at all.
I'm a great fan of technology and what it can enable, but I can't help thinking the brethren may find they've paid a higher price than they think for that enablement. They're more reliant on the goodwill of those around than they think, and in this case they've lost the most from those who know them best and have been natural supporters.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Brethren in the business world
Yesterday was spent (mostly) in a business meeting. My employers have signed up with a company that provides a management system with a managed database and server, and their representatives needed to go through a long list of questions in order to tailor the software to the needs they discover.
That's interesting in itself, because it has taken less than two years to move from "no computers ever" to near normality. All the while that I've been jury-rigging systems using nothing more than MS Office, I've been saying that it would be better to do things properly, but it was never an option. Now it is, and there will soon be very little to differentiate brethren businesses from others in their systems. I'm a little bit wistful that my funny little systems with customised quirks will be less needed but, as I say, it's been something I've recommended all along. And it turns out (doesn't it always?) that the new system is not quite so all-embracing as it was first presented, so no doubt I'll be kept busy with things that need doing and in the meantime there's a major transition period.
But what led me to post was the meeting itself, which made me chuckle internally.
The brethren way is to compare notes on everything they do, and every option tried on anything that may need doing, and converge on something. So various brethren businesses have been signing up for software, and the company that comes out best is now getting a big boost to their sales ... and this is the company in question here. That happens quite often, and a particular company will suddenly become very familiar with brethren as the word goes round.
And always, they can't resist getting sucked in. It must feel like privileged access to a secret society or something. Whatever it is, they start to drop hints about things they know, people they're familiar with, and make clear how unsurprised they are at oddities in the interaction. Yesterday, for example, the meeting was structured to avoid the need for lunch. Names were dropped. Other brethren were proclaimed to have found particular features valuable. Awareness was self-consciously demonstrated of the need for some settings.
To be honest, most brethren don't like this much. As I've said before, they like to maintain a feeling of mystery, and are suspicious of people getting too interested in the detail. That often comes across, yet still these outsiders can't help it.
At one point, the main man in this case had to show off that he was well inside by claiming knowledge of policy that hadn't yet been announced. Apparently he'd been chatting to the person at the central brethren computer organisation who has oversight of systems, and got hold of the fact that company websites were on the way - so we shouldn't rule it out. Keep the option open, nudge nudge wink wink.
I do enjoy watching people interact, even if I do have to go without lunch to do it.
That's interesting in itself, because it has taken less than two years to move from "no computers ever" to near normality. All the while that I've been jury-rigging systems using nothing more than MS Office, I've been saying that it would be better to do things properly, but it was never an option. Now it is, and there will soon be very little to differentiate brethren businesses from others in their systems. I'm a little bit wistful that my funny little systems with customised quirks will be less needed but, as I say, it's been something I've recommended all along. And it turns out (doesn't it always?) that the new system is not quite so all-embracing as it was first presented, so no doubt I'll be kept busy with things that need doing and in the meantime there's a major transition period.
But what led me to post was the meeting itself, which made me chuckle internally.
The brethren way is to compare notes on everything they do, and every option tried on anything that may need doing, and converge on something. So various brethren businesses have been signing up for software, and the company that comes out best is now getting a big boost to their sales ... and this is the company in question here. That happens quite often, and a particular company will suddenly become very familiar with brethren as the word goes round.
And always, they can't resist getting sucked in. It must feel like privileged access to a secret society or something. Whatever it is, they start to drop hints about things they know, people they're familiar with, and make clear how unsurprised they are at oddities in the interaction. Yesterday, for example, the meeting was structured to avoid the need for lunch. Names were dropped. Other brethren were proclaimed to have found particular features valuable. Awareness was self-consciously demonstrated of the need for some settings.
To be honest, most brethren don't like this much. As I've said before, they like to maintain a feeling of mystery, and are suspicious of people getting too interested in the detail. That often comes across, yet still these outsiders can't help it.
At one point, the main man in this case had to show off that he was well inside by claiming knowledge of policy that hadn't yet been announced. Apparently he'd been chatting to the person at the central brethren computer organisation who has oversight of systems, and got hold of the fact that company websites were on the way - so we shouldn't rule it out. Keep the option open, nudge nudge wink wink.
I do enjoy watching people interact, even if I do have to go without lunch to do it.
Monday, April 13, 2009
A Straightjacket of Story
This week I had my first ever direct exposure to Doctor Who. For the record, I thought it was great, but that isn't why I'm writing this time.
My mind seems to work by way of parallels, metaphors, similarities and common threads. And while noting the way a long-running serial works, I realised that the management of the brethren as an organisation is in many ways the same. The Brethren - new series! Where will the twists be this time around? Will the audience still be enthralled, or will they drift away?
No, seriously.
As I understand it, a show like Doctor Who (or, say, Star Trek for something equally long-lived) is big enough that it needs quite a large team to make it work. Also, at least in the case of my prime example, there is one person where the buck stops, and who gets to say what goes. Other people may do a lot of the writing, but it must fit into the top person's structure. It is the Creative Director's personal universe. If that sounds familiar in any way, you may see where I'm going with this.
In a similar way, a new person was recently employed to write a new James Bond novel. Imagine the sense of power, being that person. Finally (assuming the person is a fan), you get to say what goes. If some detail has always annoyed you, then zap! that detail need no longer exist. James Bond is now a chivalrous teetotaller who has a clear understanding of the importance of a clear command structure and proper bureaucracy.
But there's a problem. In any of these types of scenarios, the all-powerful creator of story is not operating in isolation. There is an audience, and that audience has some kind of investment in the history and workings of the narrative universe. They will want something new, if the genre is not completely fossilised, but it must not be at the expense of the structure already in place ... and for any long-running story, that structure will have a lot of detail, many tangles. Some untouchable pillars, but also a whole load of "just stuff" that makes it what it is. As a story-writer in such a situation, complete freedom is not what it sounds like.
Yes, you can make changes. But major changes will need a lot of work within the story: something that happened earlier must be revealed to be a mistake, a dream, presented wrongly for some reason first time round, or some reason must be found for the change that doesn't insult the intelligence of people who value the story. Small things may be glossed over, but people have a deep need for even trivial things to somehow make sense, and contradictions will weaken their hold on the story by making it easy to dismiss. And how many such changes could be made without fatally weakening the story structure by mocking its past?
What I'm saying, which is probably obvious by now, is that while I've often thought of the brethren as a kind of creature, this week it has occurred to me that the system is just as much of a narrative. A long-running serial, handed over from team to team and head writer to head writer, always with the body of the brethren as the long-term audience. The kind of things that finally led me to lose patience with even pretending I could believe in it were just plot twists that were too sudden as the new team let the continuity slip. I give them some credit - they're trying to drag the story into the modern age - but it's a tough task doing that while keeping an audience on board who have certain expectations, and I think they're struggling.
My mind seems to work by way of parallels, metaphors, similarities and common threads. And while noting the way a long-running serial works, I realised that the management of the brethren as an organisation is in many ways the same. The Brethren - new series! Where will the twists be this time around? Will the audience still be enthralled, or will they drift away?
No, seriously.
As I understand it, a show like Doctor Who (or, say, Star Trek for something equally long-lived) is big enough that it needs quite a large team to make it work. Also, at least in the case of my prime example, there is one person where the buck stops, and who gets to say what goes. Other people may do a lot of the writing, but it must fit into the top person's structure. It is the Creative Director's personal universe. If that sounds familiar in any way, you may see where I'm going with this.
In a similar way, a new person was recently employed to write a new James Bond novel. Imagine the sense of power, being that person. Finally (assuming the person is a fan), you get to say what goes. If some detail has always annoyed you, then zap! that detail need no longer exist. James Bond is now a chivalrous teetotaller who has a clear understanding of the importance of a clear command structure and proper bureaucracy.
But there's a problem. In any of these types of scenarios, the all-powerful creator of story is not operating in isolation. There is an audience, and that audience has some kind of investment in the history and workings of the narrative universe. They will want something new, if the genre is not completely fossilised, but it must not be at the expense of the structure already in place ... and for any long-running story, that structure will have a lot of detail, many tangles. Some untouchable pillars, but also a whole load of "just stuff" that makes it what it is. As a story-writer in such a situation, complete freedom is not what it sounds like.
Yes, you can make changes. But major changes will need a lot of work within the story: something that happened earlier must be revealed to be a mistake, a dream, presented wrongly for some reason first time round, or some reason must be found for the change that doesn't insult the intelligence of people who value the story. Small things may be glossed over, but people have a deep need for even trivial things to somehow make sense, and contradictions will weaken their hold on the story by making it easy to dismiss. And how many such changes could be made without fatally weakening the story structure by mocking its past?
What I'm saying, which is probably obvious by now, is that while I've often thought of the brethren as a kind of creature, this week it has occurred to me that the system is just as much of a narrative. A long-running serial, handed over from team to team and head writer to head writer, always with the body of the brethren as the long-term audience. The kind of things that finally led me to lose patience with even pretending I could believe in it were just plot twists that were too sudden as the new team let the continuity slip. I give them some credit - they're trying to drag the story into the modern age - but it's a tough task doing that while keeping an audience on board who have certain expectations, and I think they're struggling.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Favourite Book given low marks
I've just been looking for something light to watch while winding down (something has hit me hard in the last few days, I don't know what, and drained me of energy), and happened upon a show where the host finds out things that his guest has never experienced and makes sure they do - always something very popular or well-known that the person has avoided or missed out on. It's called "I've never seen Star Wars", which gives the flavour.
Anyway, the guest in the chair this time was very well read, and was familiar with most of the books on the show's list, and so they ended up discussing one of the two options she hadn't previously read, which happens to be one of my all-time favourites. And neither of them liked it at all, or understood it!
The book in question: The Satanic Verses.
Now, is it my background that makes me love this book so much? After all, I remember when I first read it, in the sixth-form library (probably mostly when I should have been at lessons), and the disappointment then when the teachers and the woman in charge of the library both dismissed it as nowhere near as good as Salman Rushdie's other books. They didn't seem to "get" it, either. I have wondered since whether you need to have experienced both an insistence on religion and an awakening of personal thoughts to appreciate it, and today's discussion kind of confirmed that. Obviously the religious people who read the book and hated it enough to wish the author dead realised what it was all about, yet these intelligent and educated people on the TV had so little clue that they were reduced to finding the book's synopsis on Wikipedia so as to be able to say anything about it. I could hardly believe it.
Very definitely The Satanic Verses is a heretic's book. The aim of it, it seems to me, is to explore the consequences of doubting dogma, how who we are is related to who we try to be, the shape of our souls in response to the mould of our circumstances, and the ridiculousness of the notion that there is any inherent meaning in the world or our lives. I can only conclude that for many people, none of that has much meaning. They have never experienced anything in their lives that lets them even see it within fiction. Certainly to skim through the book looking for some scandalous passage that caused the trouble is missing the point - both tonight's readers concluded that such a passage didn't exist.
And it doesn't. More, there is a steady drip-feeding of absurdity, and the unforgivable sin of treating a serious religion as slightly silly and mildly amusing BUT by someone who is clearly very familiar with its detail. That must have hurt, and clearly did. While modern agnostic Westerners have grown up thinking that religion is slightly silly and mildly amusing and that life is pretty pointless, and so, for them, a book that says so at great length is just deathly dull. Well, I think it's great.
But I am now feeling slightly vulnerable, having seen something I love belittled, and I am seriously wondering if I am in a one-man fan club here.
And, as an afterthought, I am also wondering what the result of a similar book that dealt with the brethren would be ...
Anyway, the guest in the chair this time was very well read, and was familiar with most of the books on the show's list, and so they ended up discussing one of the two options she hadn't previously read, which happens to be one of my all-time favourites. And neither of them liked it at all, or understood it!
The book in question: The Satanic Verses.
Now, is it my background that makes me love this book so much? After all, I remember when I first read it, in the sixth-form library (probably mostly when I should have been at lessons), and the disappointment then when the teachers and the woman in charge of the library both dismissed it as nowhere near as good as Salman Rushdie's other books. They didn't seem to "get" it, either. I have wondered since whether you need to have experienced both an insistence on religion and an awakening of personal thoughts to appreciate it, and today's discussion kind of confirmed that. Obviously the religious people who read the book and hated it enough to wish the author dead realised what it was all about, yet these intelligent and educated people on the TV had so little clue that they were reduced to finding the book's synopsis on Wikipedia so as to be able to say anything about it. I could hardly believe it.
Very definitely The Satanic Verses is a heretic's book. The aim of it, it seems to me, is to explore the consequences of doubting dogma, how who we are is related to who we try to be, the shape of our souls in response to the mould of our circumstances, and the ridiculousness of the notion that there is any inherent meaning in the world or our lives. I can only conclude that for many people, none of that has much meaning. They have never experienced anything in their lives that lets them even see it within fiction. Certainly to skim through the book looking for some scandalous passage that caused the trouble is missing the point - both tonight's readers concluded that such a passage didn't exist.
And it doesn't. More, there is a steady drip-feeding of absurdity, and the unforgivable sin of treating a serious religion as slightly silly and mildly amusing BUT by someone who is clearly very familiar with its detail. That must have hurt, and clearly did. While modern agnostic Westerners have grown up thinking that religion is slightly silly and mildly amusing and that life is pretty pointless, and so, for them, a book that says so at great length is just deathly dull. Well, I think it's great.
But I am now feeling slightly vulnerable, having seen something I love belittled, and I am seriously wondering if I am in a one-man fan club here.
And, as an afterthought, I am also wondering what the result of a similar book that dealt with the brethren would be ...
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