Weaving and tempering and arousing and then releasing

The essence of narrative is the folding out of crucial information through time. This narrative-like character finds its expression in the policy realm by building institutions that function in and through time, that alter their structure from season to season, where one strand operates for a while and then another strand takes over, and where the resultant is greater than any of the elements. 

Institutional design, especially for society, must be nuanced and more sophisticated, and more rhythmic, than what passes for the state-of-the-art these days. The Biblical design represents such a sophisticated conception, a conception that is misunderstood because of the impoverishment of people's conceptions of what's possible in the design of institutions. 

When one is managing a project with a fixed objective it might well not be necessary to get too sophistictaed in the institutional design but when managing an on-going society one can't lay it all out and expect it to play through without there being an internal, dynamic tension. The American founders created such an inner tension by building in a balance of power into the government. The Bible achieves that inner tension through rhythm and through the alternation of power-wielding over time. 

The reason art is important for society is because the artist understands the rules of rhythm better than any of the other practitioners in the social order; and rhythm is how history moves forward. Hegel and Marx tried to capture that spirit of rhythm in the notion of the dialectic but it's not only about synthesis, it's also about the temperance that comes of two or three or multiple strands weaving and tempering and arousing and then releasing each other.