But what is involved can and should be as much a matter of recognising reliable patterns as imposing a rigid uniformity. Just because we don’t want to pigeonhole doesn’t mean we should deny the existence of pigeons. By doing so, we wilfully blind ourselves to the forms and patterns that are everywhere in the lived world, and which give it the beautiful, orderly, richly meaningful landscape it has, rather than that of a featureless desert, filled only with identical particles of sand scattered hither and thither by every gust that blows.
