Benedictus Benedicat

May the blessed one bless.

In September 1960, I enrolled at University College, and lived at Sir Daniel Wilson Residence for three years. The donors who funded Sir Dan stipulated that there would be a formal dinner every evening with students wearing academic gowns. While we stood waiting behind our chairs, a Don on the dais would give the blessing, "Benedictus benedicat", and then we would sit and eat dragging the sleeves  of our black gowns through the gravy. 

We were all young men, away from home, forgetful of manners, no Mum to remind us. It took the gravitas of tradition to keep us from reverting to primitives like the lost boys in Neverland with no Wendy. 

A ritual blessing offered before a meal is what Arthur Koestler would have called a trigger, spilling a cascade of regulation down the holarchy to keep the boys civilized. For the most part, it worked. I don't remember any food fights. However, yours truly was sometimes a jerk. One evening I played a prank just to get some attention. I filled a glass with water, covered it with a piece of paper, turned it upside-down on the table, removed the paper, and stood back to watch the busboy deal with it. It worked perfectly, water all over the place. However, it didn't get the laughs I was looking for. The other guys were appalled at my lack of respect for someone providing a service. Looking back, the elderly me is also appalled. So I must have learned something since then, even though I was not caught and punished. Maybe it was the girlfriend.

This story shows how holarchy and tradition can fail to keep us out of trouble. I don't remember a commandment that says thou shalt not prank the busboy. What's the problem? If it isn't forbidden, it's permitted. Right? Even when reminded of traditional rules, we are capable of antisocial behaviour to feed conflicting instincts. Sometimes, instead of rules, we need principles applied flexibly, principles like respect, restraint and reciprocity. And when we don't know what we are doing, we learn by trying things that seem promising and paying attention to what the girlfriend says when she finds out.

Arthur Koestler made holarchy into an explanation for everything in sight: perception, language, cognition, social order, evolution, epigenetics, and other things I still have to read about. However useful, any single model of reality must be inadequate. We need other ways of seeing to get the whole picture. So I would add the network as a useful model of how things are organized, and recursion to account for how things change when your girlfriend finds out what you've been up to. Make sure there is a girlfriend in your network. If you are the girlfriend, keep your guy out of trouble while he grows up.

Since 1980 the residence is coed and there are young women to impress. I think the college has learned that they won't always get the desired result from paternalistic tradition cascading down the holarchy. 

Beati sumus.
We are blessed.