Discovering new pattern-languages: how to draw a vision of the future from the study of the present

Much of our early work implicitly made use of the idea that good patterns were to be derived, somehow, from existing culture, thus ensuring a relation to the subtleties of culture variation, and preserving things that were good and important, which had been swept aside in the onrush of techno-civilization. But there was always hanging over this process, a sword of Damocles. If — as a procedure — one takes the patterns from existing culture, then one merely reiterates what is being built. That is not necessarily good.
Who is to say which bits of culture are to be preserved, and which bits laid aside?

The truth of a pattern had to do with the question, “Does injection of this pattern into contexts of the stated type, in fact make these environments more alive?” This required making judgements about generic centers and the degree to which they sustain life, and judging which generic centers do the most to create, or contribute to, the life of the environment!

So how was one to find good patterns?
Was this a process of observing existing culture — hence very conservative?
Was it an arbitrary process — without a solid basis that one could determine?
Or might it be a process where one could somehow make legitimate judgements about culture and society as they are, yet then use these observations to move forward to a new state, in a non-arbitrary way?
In this latter case, which was perhaps our hope, one seemed to face the most profound and disturbing moral problems, since it was not clear how one could ever reach “the truth” about such matters.

Was there, indeed, any way in which one might, by observation of culture as it is, decide in what direction that culture ought to go, in the future? Could one, then, draw the future from the present, by any kind of objective process?
This is of course, exactly what the unfolding process seeks to do.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/13 Patterns#