Part 6: Model Category: Patterns of Action

As we’ve noted, coping with large amounts of information requires a system of mental organization. Narrative-based history books generally ignore this need. We’re dealing with this problem by using basic elements of drama as organizers. Thus far looked at with “setting“—the environment a society occupies, and “actors“—the society’s demographic characteristics. We now move on to “action”—to a society’s usual, standardized, or patterned ways of acting, and changes in them over time.

Patterns of action have enormous historical consequences. Each society standardizes ways to create, distribute and exchange goods and services, and these patterns form its economic system. Each society develops ways to make, change, and enforce big decisions that affect the whole society, and these make up its political system. Other patterns—for using resources, for child-rearing and education, for dealing with crime, forming families, solving problems caused by nature or by outsiders, and the like—are of critical importance in understanding past, present, and probable and possible futures.

Patterns are often so familiar we aren’t conscious of them. Comparing societies helps us see differences, and makes our own patterns more obvious to us.