So Phædrus had been right in running then. But now — funny thought — this was actually his home. All his income came from here. His only fixed address now was right here — his publisher’s address on Madison Avenue. He was as much a part of the Giant as anyone else.
Once you understand something well enough, you don’t need to run from it. In recent years each time he’d returned to New York he could feel his fear of this old monster lessening, and a kind of familiar affection for it growing.
From a Metaphysics of Quality’s point of view this devouring of human bodies is a moral activity because it’s more moral for a social pattern to devour a biological pattern than for a biological pattern to devour a social pattern. A social pattern is a higher form of evolution. This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating something better than any biological organism could by itself achieve.
Well, of course! My God! Look at it! The power of this place! Fantastic! What individual work of art can come anywhere near to equaling it? Sure: dirty, noisy, rude, dangerous, expensive. Always has been and probably always will be. Always been a hell-hole if what you’re looking for is stability and serenity… But if you’re looking for stability and serenity, go to a cemetery, don’t come here! This is the most Dynamic place on earth!
Now Phædrus felt it all around him — the speed, the height, the crowds and their tension. All the early strangeness was gone now. He was in it.
He remembered that its great symbol used to be the ticker tape, ticking out unpredictable fortunes rising and falling every second, a great symbol of luck. Luck. When E. B. White wrote, If you want to live in New York you should be willing to be lucky, he meant not just lucky but willing to be lucky — that is, Dynamic. If you cling to some set static pattern, when opportunity comes you won’t take it. You have to hang loose, and when the time comes to be lucky, then be lucky: that’s Dynamic.
When they call it freedom, that’s not right. Freedom doesn’t mean anything. Freedom’s just an escape from something negative. The real reason it’s so hallowed is that when people talk about it they mean Dynamic Quality.
That’s what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured out. From a static point of view socialism is more moral than capitalism. It’s a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions. That’s what gives socialism its drive. But what the socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any socialist city and it’s always a dull place because there’s little Dynamic Quality.
On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don’t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.
The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined.
The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since the Second World War than the major socialist economies. It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists.
People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in series, and that is what happens in this free-enterprise city. When things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But when they’re organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity becomes an increase in diversity more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the probability of success. It’s this diversity and parallelism that make this city work.
And not just this city. Our greatest national economic success, agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in paralleclass="underline" eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel, democracies operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when it is organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies.
It’s ironic that although the philosophy of science leaves no room for any undefined Dynamic activity, it’s science’s unique organization for the handling of the Dynamic that gives it its superiority. Science superseded old religious forms, not because what it says is more true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more Dynamic.
If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed. But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth. As Phædrus had written on one of his slips, The pencil is mightier than the pen.
That’s the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don’t have the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon you’re back with the cave man. But if you don’t have the freedom to change those patterns you’re blocked from any further growth.
You can see that where political institutions have improved throughout the centuries the improvement can usually be traced to a static-Dynamic combination: a king or constitution to preserve the static, and a parliament or jury that can act as a Dynamic eraser; a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight can wipe out old static patterns without destroying the government itself.
Phædrus was surprised by the conciseness of a commentary on Robert’s Rules of Order that seemed to capture the whole thing in two sentences: No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority. The power of those two sentences is that they create a stable static situation where Dynamic Quality can flourish.
In the abstract, at least. When you get to the particular it’s not so simple.
It seems as though any static mechanism that is open to Dynamic Quality must also be open to degeneracy to falling back to lower forms of quality.
This creates the problem of getting maximum freedom for the emergence of Dynamic Quality while prohibiting degeneracy from destroying the evolutionary gains of the past. Americans like to talk about all their freedom but they think it’s disconnected from something Europeans often see in America: the degeneracy that goes with the Dynamic.