The fourth dimension is very interesting in architecture going back to Gideon’s Space Time and Architecture, one of the great modernist architecture books. But, the more conservative or tradtional strains in architecture see the house and all of its codes and memories, its references to survival lessons learned and its shaping to survival furntions like bathing, eating and sleeping as a defense (the Fence) against time. It tradtionally creates security with timelessness ( ironically the great modernist measure of a masterpiece.)

How can anyone feel anything other than alienation when they are afraid of putting a nail in a wall to hang a treasured picture because they are afraid of weakening the commodity value of their home? Ironically the result of the “free market” as many have noted is stupefying homogenaity in suburban tract developments. Everyone dreaming of a future when they can trade up this commodity for another.

An alternate that is interesting is Oregon Truckhomes

http://www.housetrucks.com/

Here, a modern take on chattle homes, for a completely mobile labor force, outside the artificial environment for making a home (no building code, no financing) yet totally personal, no boundary between the maker, the owner and the inhabitant. And existing in four dimensions, three-space and time(motion).

just some musings.

Maybe modern pragmatists, calling themselves Progressives, just have a different slant on authority, on individual rights, on property, on the US Constitutional limits of government power over the states and individuals. All together, now, let’s all say… “Who really knows?” Well, this is how I look at it:

It seems to me that diversity, enfranchisement, individualism, civil rights, Bill of Rights, US Constitution, collective subjective — all these concepts/Ideals support the principle that the liberty to exercise free enterprise as close to the natural inclination that those human activities move within the consented order represents (over time) the will of the people deciding amongst themselves how to live together — that’s pragmatic. but at the grassroots level, perculating upward. That’s what Edmund Burke might say is practical. I say that.

Another important consideration revolves around Karl Popper’s Law of Unintentional Consequences, which often gets unaccounted for in the state controlled, top-down, expert and special interest group agenda-setting legislation. which becomes the kind that serves to get a politician elected, not what actually works (an important pragmatism principle). After all, isn’t pragmatism all about the collective subjective, what’s good for all? Something that feels good still has to pass the “reality test” — outcomes matter, right? Experience counts. History has clues to consider when making decisions. Wouldn’t you say, Edmund Burke might have had that in mind? I do.

If Progressives, who are pragmatists, want to control that human activity, then liberty is diminished deliberately to create some desired equality or fairness, as if those issues hadn’t been accounted for in free enterprise already. Outcomes aren’t the same, because everything can’t be equalized or tweaked by some offset — I mean, just consider carbon offsets, for goodness sake. It’s ridiculous!

Differences in race, ethnic customs, language can be tolerated and celebrated, but not equalized unless tyranny forces it. Ambition and luck might be part of the inequality that exists, but we can’t very well ask humans to be humans without these inequalities. Our equality is somewhat checked with our voting privileges and other rights before the law. Class envy suspiciously allows a politician to push self-interest instead of common interest.

Just look at our present political condition. There’s the outcome. A real, citizen-informed, literate, press-educated bunch, aren’t we? We’ve been divided, and we’ve been conquered. Pragmatism works ! The Progressive approach — change we can believe in — controlled change, fast change, expert-advised change, legislated change without worrying about knowing what is being voted on. Legislation without representation. Wish all we had to worry about was taxes! I agree with Edmund Burke’s pragmatic ideas.

It’s interesting you mention the connection to anthropologists, because I think that is exactly right. Whenever I teach that Burke (instead of your Burke :) ) in anthropology I take pains to say something like, “You’ve heard he’s a conservative, but you might want to tread carefully — when you look at him closely he’s saying things a lot of anthropologists end up finding themselves saying too.” I guess that comes down to the fact that on the whole relatively few thinkers of that era were interested in giving *any* primacy to existing social convention. By contrast anthropologists are, like Burke, deeply invested in arguing for its importance.

So the rightness of longstanding positions or traditions is not a permanent rightness which must be secured against change. It’s that there is some rightness in them because they are organic products of a people’s experience of history, which it is wrong to change instrumentally, from outside of those traditions.

The problem with making Burke a simple rallying figure for post-1950 American conservatism is that most American conservatives haven’t really had any ideas at all about what might constitute progress, or they took the position that the United States circa 1928 or so had achieved a kind of omega state of progress. Or worse yet, they found Burke appealing for a narrow instrumental reason, namely, that he seemed to be a useful defense against civil rights. (As James Baldwin once said to William Faulkner on the subject of race and rights in the South: you don’t mean “go slow”, you mean “don’t go”.)

When you read Burke looking for a systematic account of what actually causes an organic, rooted society to change progressively, you won’t find it. Nor generally will you find it in similar kinds of later arguments: it’s pretty hard to figure out concretely what Jane Jacobs thought was “good planning”, save that she thought that such a thing could exist. Frankly, in this sense, there’s a Burkean feel to a lot of contemporary anthropological practice: anthropologists often defend the “what is” (or more often, the “what just was”) of the social worlds they study, while conceding that they ought to change progressively in a way that is native or appropriate to them. But I do think it’s important to understand Burke in these terms. He was not defending actually-existing society against all possible change, just against a kind of transformative project that he saw as “external” to actually existing society.

“The city of Sphoronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the
Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-
city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is
permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant
lots of another half-city.

And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry,
the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary. Here remains the
half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it begins to count the
months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.”

A complete life. In the sense of not only a second life?? ;)