I.
True decentered systems have subtle self-generalizing properties. Decentered epistemics chafe against their own substantial skin, falter at underwriting the very substantial ontology that would underwrite it. Take Quakerism. Like Methodists and Baptists, Quakers (aka the Friends) are historically “second-layer” Christian reformers that seek to radicalize the Protestant rupture of a previous century. Yet George Fox’s metadoctrine of the Inner Light and the corresponding practice of Unprogrammed Worship (blank, creedless, preacherless, songless) are almost unintelligible to Christianity. Unprogrammed Worship is expectant silence, Grelet’s l”attente, waiting (but literally/epistemologically “stretching out for”) the Inner Light to commandeer just anyone present. Correspondingly, the core of Quakerism is in testimonies, binding without ground: God in the enemy, the disregard of hat honors, the refusal of oaths, plain speech, plain dress.
Quakerism has long been in my radar out of that manic dream pixie perennialism that leads a devoid of particular religious anchoring to collect near-random spiritual ideas that seem to add up to something that speaks personally to him. But as I started writing this essay, I had either the Inner Light or the Quaker testimonies pegged as a kind of nomadic Revelation of the People of the Truth, an empiricist tradition that believes it has the lab paraphernalia to compile something akin to spiritual knowledge. Yet — notwithstanding the rough fact that three in four Quakers do claim to be Christians — Quakerism is all “irony, contingency, solidarity”.
II.
Quakerism relates to Effective Altruism as wind chimes relate to a condom. Seriously — EA is by now inextricable from the sex scandal; as a movement, it cannot be without continual self aggrandisement; it is perhaps little more than a grand gesture of self-aggrandisement extending through/along bundles (fasces) of whole timelines. But then the sex scandal is coterminous self-aggrandisement for whores and creeps. That there’s little to be salvaged, in some kind of “philosophical” register, but the enthusiasm itself would mark EA as a manifestation of that “woke” impulse that has by now been cleared of left-wing exclusivisms. Efforts towards philosophical salvage could then be attempted by taking these people seriously. Yet the sex scandal obviates this all: nothing of an abstract ethical good can really be washed from the smell of water-based lubricant; and, hell, the sounder ideas in EA have actually been the orthodoxy in Nobel-winning-econ since, what, tbe bebop revolution?
To borrow from our lowercase friends, the uppercase Friends: sex scandal botches any possible testimony, as it first testifies for debauchery. For once, theory can rest; let taste speak for itself; let the decentered matter of taste self generalize into something that chafes against the very idea of a moral judgement. To be clear, Aella did nothing wrong! But for once, the abstractmost testimony of General Axiology can be sensed to exclude something.
III.
Quakers are also known to own businesses and manage them through idiosyncratic unity raising methods heavily borrowing from the silence-to-be-broken of their worship meetings. If we could only co-opt their methods, systematize the whole matter of theory that writes itself not as revelation but as living praxis… we might crack the secret to achieving General Axiology. At that point, of course, we would be epsilon-close to being Quakers ourselves, enough that it’d make more sense to pause theory and dive deep into the Quaker pursuit until the Inner Light tells us something about asemic horizon (or, instead, moves us to an ethical life in the here-and-now, which would be both defeat and liberation from this albatross of a project). Yet — it doesn’t seem right to join the silent search for the inner light to make progress on a specific theoretico-metamoral project — not anymore than it’d make sense to join them to figure how to solve Linear-A or something.
IV.
In most useful senses, Unprogrammed Worship is a rebuke and alternative to the Socratic project and to paideia (which we still find as the nervous system that moves theory to praxis). I can’t be a Quaker just yet because there’s no Unprogrammed meetings anywhere in this whole continent, but also because I’m unwilling to part ways with paideia. Paideia is everything that EA is not — a humbling exposure to civilisation and an overwhelming commitment to every aspect of being-human. It precludes the beautiful simplicity of Quaker testimony. More of a death blow, perhaps: sous les pavés lá plage, under this renewal of omnieducation, the century shall be Deleuzean. All of this is commitment to something complex backed by trust-me-bro promises that ever increasing abstraction eventually becomes both simple and infinite.
V.
“Onion” is a near palyndrome. It is one taken sylabically: on & on. The significance of this is left as an exercise for the reader
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