Pattern Recognition

In a huge room, brightly illuminated with fluorescent lights and marked off in rows of architectural drafting stations, I was introduced to the idea of the database. It was 1976. I was hired as a project secretary for the programming department but quickly became part of the group of “systems anarchists” working to create the first automated inventories of furniture and equipment for the hospitals the company designed.

Roger Hill, the project architect for the Saudi Arabian hospital to be built in King Khalid Military City, had a desk one pod down from mine. He was fuming. “Why can’t you commit to a deadline?” he asked our chief programmer, the brilliant Pat Schilling. He had been in the army. Projects ran on deadlines, especially when he had to take a large batch of drawings and reports overseas.

Pat stood her ground, however. In her mind, everything she did was iterative; probable, but not a certain thing. “I’ve seen the computer spit out the cards all over the floor!” she told me. She was programming, in FORTRAN, the first databases I had ever run into. I did the input, dialed up a mainframe and ran the data through the programs, sometimes even editing them at her direction. The ability to sort and tabulate, make changes and re-report was a big improvement over the unwieldy notebooks in which specs were currently pasted.

For a pattern-oriented person such as myself, databases were a groove. I was working my way into writing a novel and I promptly set up a page of input blanks for the “fields” I would write up as the properties of my characters, each of which would have their own “record.” I xeroxed these blank sheets and may have even filled in a few of them, but it didn’t turn out to be the best way to know a character!

Today, when databases full of our least economic whims trail us and underground bunkers store our data which is usually too voluminous and too boring for anyone to pay attention, it is hard to believe they were still being developed less than 50 years ago. They weren’t even relational! Just big flat files. Jeff Bezos was 12 and Mark Zuckerberg would not be born for another eight years.

Pattern nevertheless rules. In the next year a book, printed on thin paper and full of illustrations, titled A Pattern Language began to circulate around the office. It was the work of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, directing people to the timeless ideas which had infused buildings and towns in the past. I held the book reverently in my hands. It was beautiful. And revolutionary. A salvo against corporate, egocentric, meaningless buildings, with more to come.

I think I have always been interested in underlying structures. When trying to understand myself and my place in the world, I used all of the conventional tools (astrology, both Western and Chinese, the enneagram, birth order theory and Meyers-Briggs personality typing). Lightly, of course. I didn’t take any of it too seriously, but in the Western world a young person is given no direction. We are told we can be anything, but we must come to terms with ourselves in the real world.

Personality is a defense, developed at such young and impressionable ages we are unaware of it. On the other hand is one’s inner drive, the emergent attractors innate to our lives, compelling us forward. Our personality is the context within which we are able to follow our strange attractors and accomplish things. These inner patterns and structures, our own and those of the world, take a lifetime of study. Those we sometimes call clueless are those who haven’t worked at it, allowing themselves to drift.

These people may, however, take external characteristics more into account than is warranted. Our identities are simply characteristics: race, hair color, gender. These are generally expressed visually and may be confused with motivation. To some extent all of us make sure we appear sane and attractive by adhering to cultural norms. But, in groups, we sometimes see vicious rules governing one’s admission or exclusion. These surface, visual clues and symbols can have an effect on one’s livelihood and certainly on one’s social standing.

But healthy people modulate between their adherence to internal and external patterns, finding a place in the world as they assuage their inner drives. Bjork described the genesis of her music and art saying, “I’m only happy when my inner and outer worlds match.”

Getting inner and outer selves to match introduces value to the patterns we discern. Robert Pirsig posits that people know quality when they see it. In Lila: An Inquiry into Morals [published 1991] he describes a hierarchy of inanimate, biological, social, intellectual and finally mystical spheres, each with its own quality. Dynamic quality flows through these channels, moving evolution forward. And all of us are drawn to it. We recognize the good.

Christopher Alexander describes a similar objective value. In repeated questioning, he found that, when confronted with two objects, most people agree that one has more inherent “life” than another. These experiments are described in his volumes on The Nature of Order [published from 2002-2004]. Moreover, a sense of wholeness inheres to those objects which have the most life, more quality. He was working to discern and create wholeness, life in buildings and all the things we make.

Being able to discern objective value is human, but many people fight it. They have somehow been taught that there is no objective reality, that they alone are the creators of their world. With this as a basis, it is no wonder our culture is fragmented and contentious. We have thrown the old Victorian hierarchies out, with good reason, but we must admit that we have a human nature, that the natural world can be objectively studied and that science, for all its deep creativity, needs human judgment regarding its value.

My own fascination with pattern and structure, plus wide reading and much experience, have brought me to these conclusions. It is hard to feel anything but compassion for young people who are at the mercy of their desires and fantasies. Romanticism, narcissism and corporate greed feed these world views. And almost no one has the guts (always excepting E.O. Wilson and Christopher Alexander) to say what the new human values might be. Perhaps only in the face of the dire prospects of climate change will people figure them out.

Alexander writes about being mesmerized by the beauty of our “joyous, ugly” world as he drives his truck across the Bay Bridge, singing. “Ugly as it is, it is also wonderful because it speaks, in some degree, of freedom, our freedom. … we cannot make the world over. We must accept our world, and within it, make our beings, in a fashion consistent with this world, and its demands, and its harsh realities.” In his new picture of the world, “everything matters.” The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground [published 2004].

E. O. Wilson:  “To the extent that we depend on prosthetic devices to keep ourselves and the biosphere alive, we will render everything fragile. To the extent that we banish the rest of life, we will impoverish our species for all time. And if we should surrender our genetic nature to machine-aided ratiocination, and our ethics and art and our very meaning to a habit of careless discursion in the name of progress, imagining ourselves godlike and absolved from our ancient heritage, we will become nothing.” Consilience [published 1998].