184. Unity in diversity

Here I start a series on ‘the whole and the parts’, on how a composition depends on the components and components on the composition, and how this affects measurability, control and change, and how it can produce ‘system tragedy’.

Development, creation, and innovation, in nature, language, science, art, and politics, require variety, with individuals escaping from the unity of the universal, and thereby, when successful, contributing to its shift.

Evolution is driven by the generation of variety (in biology: mutations, crossover of chromosomes).

We need a combination of unity and diversity, which is an ancient theme. Isaiah Berlin made a distinction between unifiers and multipliers. Learning and innovation proceed by an alternation of integration and disintegration. We need both. This appeared in item 31 of this blog, where I presented a theory of invention. 

Innovation is often collaborative because innovation feeds upon variety in order to achieve novel combinations of features in a new product. Different, complementary skills or other resources are required to achieve it.  

I give a few examples of unity in diversity.

A form manifests itself in a variety of ways, in nature (a species), science (a scientific paradigm), and in art (a style, such as impressionism, surrealism).

Along the canals of Amsterdam we see rows of individual gables, with distinctive arches, angles, flats and curves. Yet they have something in common that is pleasing to the eye. What is it? It is the use of the golden ratio[i] for the proportions of the height of windows, with the lowest window the highest, the next window 0.618 of that height, and so on upwards. The golden ratio appears also in nature and in mystic symbols (as in the five-pointed star in the flag of Morocco).      

In politics, the blessing of a well-working democracy is that it allows for diversity. To complement that, and as a safeguard, we need a constitutional state that unifies, in a guarantee of equality under the law.

Alas, in some countries this is being reversed: democracy becomes unified and legality differentiated. Democracy is being crafted to a populist, nationalistic voice that clamours for homogeneous national identity. The rule of law is being differentiated between inhabitants who are and those are not seen to belong to the nation, which is leading to outright discrimination. This is happening in my own country, the Netherlands, which used to be seen as paragon of justice for all. In the Italy of Berlusconi the diversity of private connections of family, region, profession, religion, etc. trumped the rule of law.

In markets, competition elicits diversity in the form of product differentiation. It is not profitable to compete only on price, with a universal, simple product that is identical for all suppliers. Profit is made by distinguishing products from each other, each for a different segment of the market. Yet the different varieties share a function in their use and a corresponding market, in which to a greater or lesser extent they compete.

In the Netherlands, health insurers compete on price for the basic, minimum standard insurance package, obligatory for all insured, which all insurers are obligated to offer. They make profits on additional, specialized insurance products in opaque packages with many different forms, conditions of availability and tariff structures.

Next to these cases of simultaneous unity and diversity, there are also sequential forms.

In science, new theory arises from a disarray of old theory and gets consolidated and standardized in a unified new theory, and then moves on to accumulate empirical misfits that fracture theory again, hopefully to produce a new synthesis, which will sooner or later fragment anew.

---

[i] Take two segments of a line, the smaller a and the larger b, which satisfy the condition: a/b = b/(a+b). That is the golden ratio. Solving the equation yields a/b = 0.618