Ignorant Design: L'universo della Moda

There is only one word that captures the passage from microscopic intentionality to macroscopic emergence, from the apparent causality of local interactions to long–term structural randomness, and, therefore, to the emergence of trend lines, in the diachronic development of reality, unexplained in terms of a purely causal logic. This word is “fashion”. The universe follows fashion. Culture follows fashion. Language follows fashion. Therefore, one should not — as proposed by the theory of intelligent design—project the causal scheme that underlies the local reading of the world onto a universal scale but, instead, lean towards the idea that the pockets of causality in the universe are nothing but concretions limited in time and space, local phenomena on which a causal logic manages to have a grip only if it considers them as isolated from the very long period in which they are located, and with respect to which, on the opposite, it would be more correct to adopt a theory of ignorant design, that is of a blind, casual, but nevertheless effective development of the universe. The article exemplifies such dialectics with reference to a key study: the emergence of the value of transparence in turn–of–the–century western cultures.