We celebrate diversity unless we're strongly invested in having our own uniform way with everyone all at once. Then any attempt to experiment with different approaches in different areas becomes a "
patchwork." Patchwork is bad! Hobos wear patchworks. What we want is a seamless inescapable garment, one size, one color, one style fits all. Because by golly we know we're right, and you'd all better like it.
I think all "comprehensive solutions" in government should be voted down, regardless of who came up with them. There is no such thing, and people should not be encouraged to think so.
ReplyDeleteDolly Parton has a song about a coat of many colors.
ReplyDelete"Patchwork"...reminds me of a story told by Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov, who served as Deputy Manager of a Stalin-era Soviet factory. The factory general manager was a very smart and energetic man, and great strides were made in improving processes and morale and improving output. But the factory, which was a lumber mill, was increasingly strangled by difficulties in procuring raw lumber. Gennady, whose father had been in the lumber trade before the revolution, was contemptuous of the chaos into which the industry had been reduced by the Soviets:
ReplyDelete"The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering."
As Gennady says:
"Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder."
I think one of the main divisions in American politics is between people who implicitly understand that point and those who reject it.