The Designer & The Architect

Over the past few years, I’ve spent a fair amount of energy trying to work out how Americans and increasingly, people of the world, can cooperate to tackle our shared problems. Something that comes up frequently is the divide that we see seemingly growing between the progressive and conservative perspectives, in perhaps many countries but particularly America. With the collapse of the grand and collective stories that tackle the most fundamental questions of philosophy and life, and a growing distrust in the institutions that we rely on to keep us informed and unified, so too has our faith in and perhaps love for our fellow countrymen eroded. With the events of the recent times, such as the Covid epidemic, and the many odd protests and riots that we’ve seen crop up within it’s span, it’s become painfully clear to more and more of us that there is something not quite right with the way things are going at this moment. While no one has quite yet stumbled on what it is that has gone wrong, such that we can all aim towards some shared goal, it does seem obvious that something has gone wrong.

Though I don’t believe I am yet the person to have solved the problem of figuring out exactly where we are, I think it’s important to address the issue of cooperation at this time. In all of our quibbles and mutual resentment we seem to have lost the plot of how it is that we actually make progress. An image, however rough it may be that comes to mind is that of a visionary designer, and a calculating architect. The visionary dreams of creating the most wonderful and beautiful of structures and is willing to break down any and all obstacles, and sometimes reason itself to build them. The architect, in the usual fashion, barges into the planning studio to report the impracticality of the particular design ideas the visionary has presented. The issue here, is that the visionary is needed as it is true that some limitations are self-enforced and long untested, and are worth questioning and trying to break through, and the architect is needed because at some point, we have to pay for things, and make sure the structure can actually stand up to the wind. The point is that this thing doesn’t work without both players, both parties being able to work effectively with one another. The visionary on their own, builds an unfinanceable, exotic and impractical structure that no one can afford or utilize, and the architect fails to build anything dynamic and new that leads towards something innovative and fresh, or breaks molds and pushes against arbitrary limits. The house may stand, or have feng-shui but it needs to have some reasonable combination of both in order to make anything that looks like progress. Long story short we need each other if we want to make this thing better, and in order to cooperate we must learn to compromise rather than merely agree to disagree. Existing in a bunch of gated communities, only works as long as those communities don’t have to cooperate or interact, except eventually they do. This leads to something that looks much more like tribalism when everyone is living in their own little version of the world without a shared basis for understanding. I suggest that we learn perhaps again, or perhaps for the first time, that we are all capable of error, but recognize that we love each other and need each other, and we are all in this thing together.

Bit of a different theme than usual but I felt like this was important, particularly in these confusing and difficult times. I hope that this has been useful and encourages you to re-invite people back to the thanksgiving table, even if it is a virtual one, and I hope you will be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEyeBlog author