Book Review: In the Days of Rain

[osprey_archer]

And now for something completely different: a review of a memoir that I actually quite liked! Rebecca Stott's In the Days of Rain is half memoir, half family history of her family's four generations of involvement with the Exclusive Brethren, who are sort of like the Plymouth Brethren except they believe the Plymouth Brethren are not hardcore enough and in fact are especially damned for getting so close to seeing the light and then not going all the way.

This is a background guaranteed to add pep to any memoir, and Stott combines it with a thoughtful and lucid writing style and an excellent figure for a central character: her father, brilliant, charismatic, and flawed, the very definition of larger-than-life. I am glad he's not my father, but he's fascinating to read about.

The Exclusive Brethren seem to have been a fairly normal conservative sect until the sixties, when a new leader harangued his way to power by accusing everyone else of a lack of reforming zeal, at which point the Exclusive Brethren basically began to run like small-scale version of the Soviet state in the 1930s. If a sect member was suspected of breaking the rules, the Brethren would send a pair of churchmen in good standing to interrogate that person at their house, and if they did not prove repentant on the first try, to lock them away in their own house, not allowed to speak even to their family members, but only to the interrogating brothers until they were deemed sufficiently sorry. This led to a rash of excommunications and suicides.

Stott was still a child when her parents got fed up and left the group during a schism, so her viewpoint of this is inevitably rather limited. However, as Stott points out, people like her father who were involved were often too ashamed to speak of it. He was still trying to write his memoir when he died, but he just could not get past the new leader's abrupt ascent to power to the part where he himself became complicit in the system.

The abruptness of the transition really struck me: the character of the sect changed almost overnight when the new leader rose to power. It reminded me of progressive websites that I've been involved with that have begun to eat their own through this same kind of Purer Than Thou rhetoric - 50book_poc, the original Slactivist, Ana Mardoll's blog. (Mardoll's blog is a bit different in that the rot set in not through the commentariat but in Mardoll herself, but it created a toxic environment in pretty much the same way.)

Is this just something that inevitably happens to groups of humans who try to be too far morally superior to the surrounding masses? Does the attempt inevitably loop back around into hair-trigger ostracism for the masses and worshipful adulation for the few who have successfully anointed themselves holier-than-thou?

Comments

[sovay]

He was still trying to write his memoir when he died, but he just could not get past the new leader's abrupt ascent to power to the part where he himself became complicit in the system.

Did he leave anything for Stott to draw on in writing her own memoir (is that part of why he works as central character) or did he not even get that far?

[osprey_archer]

He leaves a few scattered notes about it, but Stott ends up drawing most of the information about that era from her own memory, her discussions with her father's friends after his death, and an online support forum for ex-Brethren in which her father was very active.

In fact, he seems to have left more evidence on the forum about his activities in the sixties than in his memoir proper. Maybe it felt easier to talk about it in that seemingly more ephemeral setting.

However, the sixties do seem less detailed than the rest of the book. Stott's father is a good central character not because she's got complete information about him, but because he's a vibrant person who never did anything by halves - being a member of the Brethren, diving into the Beatles and the films of Ingmar Bergman once he'd left the Brethren and it was allowed, weeping as he recites his favorite poems, spiraling down into a massive gambling and drinking problem. He's always doing something.

[missroserose]

So, uh...not direct personal experience, but I have it on good authority that something exactly like this is happening in the Church of Scientology right now, and especially the Sea Org. It's likely why they've had such a rash of high-profile defections lately...although, unfortunately, their terrorism tactics (and their social isolation tactics, and their actual offered-value...because, much as some people would debate it, their tech does have actual psychological benefits, especially in conjunction with the support of a closely-knit community) have been effective enough to keep a lot more folks in the organization. And then there's the celebrity aspect too...they treat their celebrity clients like rock stars, and in the eternal words of Rom from Deep Space Nine, "we all want to stop being exploited and become the exploiters!"

[osprey_archer]

Cults! What is it with humanity and cults? Probably it's the close-knit community aspect that draws us to them; people will sacrifice almost anything for that, it seems.

[brigdh]

Is this just something that inevitably happens to groups of humans who try to be too far morally superior to the surrounding masses?

This is such an interesting question. I don't have a good answer, of course! But I can see the parallel you propose between the Brethren and leftist websites I've been involved with, too. Sometimes it's nice to have the reminder that it seems to happen to every shade of human nature, at least.

[osprey_archer]

I think there's something about placing too much emphasis on purity (for any definition of purity) that almost inevitably causes a race to the bottom: whoever claims the most purity most loudly inevitably "wins," usually by shouting everyone else down, and generally trampling over any kind of nuance or subtlety in the process. What are nuance and subtlety but smudges on the otherwise austere beauty of purity?