[r-t] Tintinnalogia / CC Decisions

[Don Morrison]

Graham John wrote:
> "I submit the following detailed change proposal for your 
> consideration and constructive comment"...

Philip Earis wrote:
> The thing is the whole tone and patched-up nature of the current 
> Decisions is so rotten, ineffectual, inelegant that there's no point 
> suggesting minor tweaks. What you need to fundamental overhaul.
...
> It strikes me as both hugely sad and morally bankrupt that the 
> current Decisions refuse to allow some of the historic and truly 
> ground-breaking extents on 5 and 6 bells detailed in Tintinnalogia

Robin Wooley wrote:
> Chiefly amongst these is the desire by a very small number of ringers
>  for recognition by the Exercise at large for their iconoclastic 
> performances.

And lots of others wrote lots of other things, with some folks clearly
having strong feelings on various matters in this vicinity.

I think we're putting the cart before the horse. Until we can agree on
*why* we have a body like the Council making Decisions at all, we're
never going to agree on what those Decisions should be, and I'm not
convinced everyone is really agreed on why we have Decisions.

So why do we?

Possibilities I can think of are:

1) We want someone else to tell us what we may or may not ring.

2) The flip side of (1), we want someone to tell others what they may or 
may not ring.

3) We want some consistency to our terminology to ease record keeping,
clarify communication between us, and ensure we can easily ring together.

4) Closely related to (3), but probably a little different, we want some
set of objective rules by which compare ringing performances as a
competitive activity.

Those are the only ones I can think of right now, but perhaps others
have other ideas?

Anyway, here are some thoughts on the first three of those four:

1) We want someone else to tell us what we may and may not ring.

This seems unlikely. True, there are many folks that are more
comfortable living their lives being told what to do and not having to
make decisions themselves. But it seems unlikely that the majority of
ringers would feel that way. And even more unlikely that those that do
would be stridently vocal about it. And it's easier to get this effect
by just copying what the next tower down the road is doing, or whatever;
you don't need a whole Council and Decisions to do this.

2) The flip side of (1), we want someone to tell others what they may or 
may not ring.

I suspect it may be this, either as a real motivation or believing it, 
rightly or wrongly, to be someone else's motivation, that causes some of 
the most heated rhetoric on both sides of the various arguments we have 
about the Council's Decisions.

I believe that this should *not* be a motivation for us. Mostly we ring
for fun and/or to offer a service to the church. If it's for fun, we
should be doing whatever it is we choose to do. For service to the
church, it's the quality of the striking and number of bells that
matter, not the arcana of method construction and the like.

If we find something others are not ringing fun ourselves, it's
reasonable to encourage others to try it, but unreasonable to attempt to
force them to do so. Similarly, if others enjoy ringing something we do
not, we should simply avoid mimicing them, but there's no reason to
prohibit them from ringing it. I don't think I'd enjoy ringing a peal of
Double Darrowby, but if eight other folks would, by all means, please
have at it.

3) We want some consistency to our terminology to ease record keeping,
clarify communication between us, and ensure we can easily ring together.

This seems like the most persuasive reason for having Decisions to
me. Many of us do seem to enjoy keeping records.

 From this vantage, it seems clear that to first approximation a peal is
whatever ringers choose to ring and call a peal; a method is whatever
ringers choose to ring and call a method; etc. The problem is just that
this first approximation doesn't work long term, since different folks 
end up diverging in details (mostly honestly, though in some cases 
deliberately to stir up trouble), and we need to refine things a bit.

 From this perspective it's reasonable that the Council's decisions
address things like "How many changes constitute a peal?" so we can be
consistent in our record keeping. A "peal" of 4,000 changes is somehow
something less than one of 5,000, and it's reasonable to choose to 
record it as something different.

And it's possibly reasonable even to have Decisions address things like 
"Is this, rung on eight bells, essentially the same thing as that rung 
on six" so that we can have some consistency in record keeping and 
communicating with one another.

But it's bizarre to be saying "you can't ring peals on nine bells" or
"you can't ring variable cover" or "you can't ring something false in
the plain course even if you can get a true extent of it" or "you can't 
ring something that doesn't divide evenly into leads". Assuming the
quality of striking and so on are comparable, ringing a peal of Dixon's
is certainly no less challenging and worthy a performance than ringing
one of Plain Bob; on the contrary, it's a whole lot more challenging.

I believe the Council should be framing its Decisions to enable it to as
efficiently record, and gather statistics, about what folks are ringing
as possible. Anytime it instead makes folks feel like they are being
told what they may or may not ring, even in a peal, something's wrong.



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at mv.com>
"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other
languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their
pockets for loose grammar."                            --James Nicoll