Greetings all,
Various pressures have prevented a proper engagement with this thread
before, so I apologise if I am going over old ground. However, having read
the summary (very handy) the following occurs to me.
A constitutional democracy is an improvement on autocracy or dictatorship,
for many reasons, but from a MoQ point of view one of the key improvements
is that it allows a transfer of power without necessarily abolishing the
cultural values or expertise that have earlier been built up over time. So
within a constitutional democracy, there is the scope for developing eg
civil services or 'neutral' armed forces, whilst still allowing room for
necessary changes to the personnel in powerful positions. So in MoQ terms a
constitutional democracy allows for static latching whilst still leaving
room for dynamic breakthroughs. In a dictatorship there is room for
spectacular dynamic breakthroughs (revolution) but such events have a 'throw
the baby out with the bathwater' tendency - seen most clearly in the French
Revolution, but present elsewhere. If a new dictator comes in, then he/she
(lets be inclusive about bad things as well as good ;-) ) will normally
seek loyal personnel throughout a governmental organisation, so the chaotic
effects ripple out, and lots of productive energy gets wasted on trying to
reinvent the wheel, or on trying to establish some form or other of
legitimacy.
So to get back to the question "What do the patterns of higher quality have
that those of destruction, decay and disorder don't?" It seems to me that we
need some way of phrasing the desirability of static latchings. Obviously
too much static latching is deathly (UK politics) but so also is an
overemphasis on chaotic dynamic quality (I occasionally get the impression
that some contributors fetishise or glamorise the dynamic. Pirsig doesn't).
Quite how we achieve that I don't know - "to preserve the best of the old
while keeping room for the new" captures most of it, but that's a bit
anodyne. (An analogy is the possibly apocryphal tale about Islamic carpet
weavers, who would always introduce a flaw into their otherwise immaculate
tapestries, so as not to try and imitate the all-perfect and all-holy. They
still worked well as carpets though. ) I'm not convinced, btw, that quality
is only visible a hundred years down the line. The fall of the Berlin wall
was pretty unambiguous IMHO.
Just a few thoughts to add to the brew.
Sam
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