Today’s marching orders were to attend a Greek Wedding in Camber…well half a Greek wedding…the bride’s half. Of such is the life of a Journeyman Tenor. There was a commercial break half way through the service. The Church Doors were flung open and in trooped the other half of the bridal contingent. Some found room with us in the choir stalls. They had not been caught up in Rye’s six weeks of road chaos en route from Nikosia…as first suspected…but had simply driven past the church and got halfway to Folkestone before discovering the error of their ways.
Arriving at Folly Wall at the appointed hour for my ride out to Camber, I woke Alan Catt from his midday nap. Either he recovered well or has impeccable social graces because while awaiting Frances Catt’s return I was well looked after with a gin and tonic and good conversation. Just time for a quick lunch before being wafted across the marshes.
The Catts have been sheep farmers on Romney Marsh for generations…and have one of the purest breeds of Romneys around. Fifteen years ago a boatload of ewes, rams…and sheep dogs…from the Catt’s Romney Marsh flocks was shipped out to The Azores on the instructions of some World Bank experts. I wonder how they have fared? Alan tells me that this year the rain came just in time to put enough grass on the fields for the lambing season.
The Catts and their guests from Battersea and America went off on a Bluebell Safari after we returned from the wedding…the woods are blanketed with bluebells at the moment. I was tempted to join them but instead buried my head in a PCHut computer for a couple of hours before taking myself off for a drink in The Ship Inn.
Herewith the second of two weblogs on social morphology…with extracts from The Foundations of Structural Sociology...see yesterday's weblog for the first instalment. In the inverted state the letters spelling the name of each mechanism have been reversed and run from right to left...Leonardo da Vinci knew a thing or two. This reversal indicates that in the Inverted State not only has the Hierarchy of Dominance inverted...this is the Societal Inversion to which Thomas Robertson refers in his 1947 book Human Ecology...but the goal of each mechanism has become the reverse of what it would be in the Natural Order.
The Natural Order----------------------------------------------------The Inverted State
This is the Bad News. But consider the other possibility. Once the Inverted State has destroyed the Natural Order and a Money Culture has elbowed aside the Cathedral Culture then the constituent institutions of society will be under great stress. Under the right conditions small changes in a subsystem can lead to a sudden shift in the structure of the whole system. Living in an Inverted Society means being alive in interesting times…which is the Good News.
Ilya Prigogine referred to such structures as Dissipative Structures and won a Nobel Prize for his scientific explorations into their nature. Ilya Prigogine was interested in social analogies. Perhaps he never knew that Bernard Shaw...a man greatly skilled in his use of metaphor...had come up with one.
In The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism Shaw asks rhetorically whether his young woman reader had seen a curiosity called the Prince Rupert Drop. He explains that it is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914 he added before switching off from big things like empires and their wars to little familiar things like pins. The world is like that today...and getting worse. Shaw's image of the Prince Rupert Drop is powerful but where is the hope? Who will sweep up the pieces? The Great Charlady in Heaven? Structural sociology is more hopeful.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known. Montaigne was no doubt thinking of religious fervour when making this remark…but with Global Warming on the agenda for tomorrow I will give it a different spin.
