A "Pattern" and How It Can Be Effective Given Limited Sharing

The understanding that balance is desirable provides an organization based on the presence of a common element in the diverse sets of understandings that severally concern their different domains. In all of them, the desirability and benefit of including the "proper" proportions of different things is noted and also the cost of not doing so. The simple existence of the same sort of understanding in quite different areas of life may make it likelier that the understanding will be influential in each of them. To the extent that the understanding is a morally charged one, as balance in social relations and character is, it becomes even more effective and able to influence or guide behavior in a variety of areas.

The difficulty with these common element organizations, "patterns," having a substantial effect on general cultural conformity is that their influence depends on there being a good deal of sharing of the understandings involved. On the face of it, the balance notion in body functioning can only be made compelling for those who share it and also share the balance understandings concerning relationships and character. Since most people know nothing of Galenic medicine, including its emphasis on balance, the acceptance of this type of medicine would, it might seem, hardly be increased by the fact that those same people are committed to balance in social relations and in character.

There is a substantial basis, however, for the pattern being effective in promoting conformity despite the widespread lack of sharing of its component

understandings. This basis is in the fact that somewhere in the chain of advisers who serve to supply the "missing link" between the understanding that one is ill and the understanding that there is help in dealing with illness, there is usually someone who knows about balance in medicine as well as in social relations and personal character. By inclining the experts or serious amateurs who know about Galenic balance to recommend Galenic practitioners rather than other kinds, the organization affects some of those who do not share the balance understandings in some domains.

It may be of some interest to suggest that not only do understandings affect those who do not share them but organizations can affect those who are innocent of their components. At least one process by which the latter occurs is the same as the one that brings about the former. This is, of course, that people accept advice from each other, with an important source of the acceptance being the general expectations in the multiplex relationships within which it is given.