Are there patterns that belong to humanity as a whole? David West takes up the question at two scales, looking at people as individuals and as members of larger cultures.
His interest is in generalizations that stay constant even when cultures interpret them differently. A pattern of this kind would not erase local meaning. It would describe a recurring shape that each culture fills with its own practice.
West argues that the effort to build large, habitable, complex systems depends on knowledge of human beings and of the cultures they have created over many thousands of years. Without that knowledge, he suggests, the work has little chance of success.
The full paper appears in the PURPLSOC 2017 proceedings. It is a useful counterweight to the more technical uses of patterns, reminding readers that the approach began with questions about how people live well together.