It has been argued, usually rather informally within the circles of development work courses and by some sociologists, that if you superimpose the ethic of doing, with the precision that doing requires, on a society that is concerned with being, struggling with its being, then doing becomes a means to being, is subsumed to that being. In other words the doing becomes ritualised. But that is glib. It supposes that doing has its own legitimacy, a legitimacy beyond that of being. It doesn’t. For western societies are just as concerned with being. Their doing is only so hasty and makes them forget their being. They are what they do.