Tech writer Anil Dash has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on Coop­er­a­tive Over­lap, the obser­va­tion that dif­fer­ent cul­tures have dif­fer­ent for­mats and expec­ta­tions in con­ver­sa­tion. With over­lap, peo­ple talk over one anoth­er in a way that is encour­ag­ing and expect­ed and con­ver­sa­tion­al. It’s dif­fer­ent from inter­rupt­ing, in that it actu­al­ly demon­strates engage­ment. The con­cept comes from Deb­o­rah Tan­nen via Tik­tok (because: 2021) and Dash relates talk­ing over one anoth­er was com­mon in his Indi­an Amer­i­can fam­i­ly grow­ing up. He men­tions that:

Some­times it’s ascribed to eth­nic­i­ty or com­mu­ni­ty instead of geog­ra­phy, like folks who’ve told me it’s part of Jew­ish tra­di­tions (or sim­i­lar to the ubiq­ui­tous Yid­dish influ­ence on speech in New York) or the var­i­ous South Asian com­mu­ni­ties that I’m part of. 

If we were going to encode this, we might say that “coop­er­a­tive over­lap” is eth­nic. Tan­nen describes the reac­tion from peo­ple who did­n’t grow up with over­lap as a cul­tur­al background:

Those who aren’t used to coop­er­a­tive over­lap­ping can end up feel­ing inter­rupt­ed, silenced, maybe even attacked — which clouds their minds and ties their tongues. 

I think it’s safe to declare that his­tor­i­cal­ly Friends are decid­ed­ly in the no-overlap camp. In our wor­ship, a gap between min­istries is con­sid­ered essen­tial; many Friends con­sid­er it bad form to even speak in direct response to a pre­vi­ous mes­sage in wor­ship. But it’s not just some the­o­log­i­cal posi­tion. We can be an uptight peo­ple, our lan­guage even in con­ver­sa­tion full of unwrit­ten rules.

So what hap­pens when some­one used to coop­er­a­tive over­lap shows up at a Quak­er fel­low­ship hour? They’re going to talk a lot, in a way that’s going to make the no-overlappers among us uncom­fort­able. Both Tan­nen and Dash stress that there’s no right or wrong way to con­verse but that we should under­stand our dif­fer­ent styles. But do we? I’m in a posi­tion that I’ve heard prob­a­bly hun­dreds of sto­ries of peo­ple pas­sion­ate about the val­ues of Friends who had trou­ble fit­ting in. I sus­pect norms of con­ver­sa­tion­al style is some­times a big part of that.

Back in 1987, Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Samuel Cald­well, gave a talk at the Pen­dle Hill retreat cen­ter called “The Time Has Come to Choose.” It became col­lo­qui­al­ly known as the Quak­er Faith vs Quak­er Cul­ture essay. Cald­well exag­ger­ates some things for effect and his descrip­tion of Quak­er cul­ture is of a very par­tic­u­lar Philadelphia-area man­i­fes­ta­tion and so parts of the talk haven’t aged well. But his main the­sis is worth remembering:

It doesn’t take a rock­et sci­en­tist to size up our sit­u­a­tion. Our num­bers have dwin­dled to a few. There aren’t enough Quak­ers left even to effec­tive­ly gov­ern our insti­tu­tions. Many of our meet­ings are strug­gling just to sur­vive. Our voice is no longer heard – at least, any­where that mat­ters [more from him on this]. We have become pet­ty and peev­ish. We bick­er about what is Quak­er and what is not. We are total­ly dis­tract­ed by issues of orga­ni­za­tion, struc­ture and bud­get. Let us not deceive our­selves. We have become a pathet­ic, irrel­e­vant cult. Like the ser­vant in the para­ble, we’re so afraid of los­ing the orig­i­nal prin­ci­pal that we’re los­ing all our oppor­tu­ni­ties, too. We have become ardent con­ser­va­tors of an arid tra­di­tion, not ambas­sadors of a liv­ing faith.

And that, Friends, is the crux of the prob­lem. On the one hand, we have the Quak­er faith — a pre­cious trea­sure giv­en to us by God. On the oth­er hand, we have Quak­er tra­di­tion and cul­ture — the ground, if you will, in which we have buried our trea­sure. The first spells life; the sec­ond spells death. Like the ser­vant in the para­ble, if we mere­ly con­serve our tra­di­tions and cul­ture, what faith we have will be tak­en away and giv­en to oth­ers. And, this is pre­cise­ly what is wrong with Philadel­phia Year­ly Meet­ing today – we are focused on con­serv­ing our cul­ture, not ven­tur­ing with our faith. What’s worse, we are con­fused between the two. 

This essay went viral among the Quak­er blo­gos­phere about 15 years ago. Johan Mau­r­er ref­er­enced it in a post about insti­tu­tions for­get­ting the why of their work. Chris Mohr wrote about it, Rich Accetta-Evans had a two part. I can only find Cald­well’s talk via Archive​.org; because I don’t like things dis­ap­pear­ing on the inter­net I’ve put it up on Google Docs.

I’m sure that the no-overlap Philadel­phia Quak­er con­ver­sa­tion­al stereo­type is not uni­ver­sal. I should think that more diverse meet­ings have worked through this already and I know that Quak­er cul­tur­al norms has always more relaxed the fur­ther you get from Philly. But I think it’s still worth ask­ing if a par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion of ours is faith or cul­ture. And whether main­tain­ing it is intrin­sic to our prac­tice or mere­ly a stum­bling block to shar­ing faith.