“In order to work, these living processes – especially when applied to the large urban areas and modern agglomerations of urban regions – require freedom of action, freedom within the process. That means that each process must allow every step of each adaptive sequence sufficient latitude to go wherever it needs to go, IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WHOLE, to make the whole more alive. This requires freedom of action at each step.

For the most part, the necessary freedom of action cannot be provided within the context we came to know in the 20th century as a totalitarian democracy. By totalitarian democracy I mean the system of thought and action which is prescribed by the rules, procedures, lock-step process of the modern democratic state, which attempts to create buildings by social routines that are military and regimented, not FREE or ORGANIC. In virtually every walk of life, as we have come to know the process of planning and construction from the 20th-century heritage, freedom of the kind necessary to create profound wholeness is hampered by our institutional norms and by the normal process of our society.

This is strange, and not easy to get used to. In modern democracy we have come to believe in the freedom of our own society, and we look with intellectual detachment (touched with a smug of feeling of superiority) at the great literature of George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, Eugene Zamiatin’s WE, as if these works describe caricatures of something which may have occurred in other societies – in Communism, in Totalitarianism, in Fascism – but never in our own. Rarely have we understood that our own society, too, our own democracy, thought originating in the ideal of freedom, has nevertheless created a system of thought and action, in the sphere of architecture, which makes living structure all but unattainable – at best BARELY attainable.

The problem creates a new kind of challenge for democracy. To create living structure, we need a kind of freedom which the founding fathers of the American constitution (for example) did not dream of, because the issues involved in the creation of life in the environment simply were not visible to them. To create living structure in the environment of our own age, and in the future age which stretches before us, we must now find ways of turning society beyond its too-regimented path, and toward paths of design and planning and construction which allow the life of every whole and the life of every part to emerge freely from the processes by which we make the world.”

“The Process of Creating Life” by Christopher Alexander, page 496-497.

However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method. This business of isolating things, breaking them into fragments, and of making machinelike pictures (or models) of how things work, is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it.

Descartes himself clearly understood his procedure as a mental trick. He was a religious person who would have been terrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this. But in the years since Descartes lived, as his idea gathered momentum, and people found out that you really could find out how the bloodstream works, or how the stars are born, by seeing them as machines – and after people had used the idea to find out almost everything mechanical about the world from the 17th century to the 20th century, people shifted into a new mental state that began treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

For the purpose of discussion, in what follows, I shall refer to this as the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint. The appearance of this 20th century mechanistic view had tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that the “I” went out of world picture. The picture of the world as a machine doesn’t have an “I” in it. The “I” , what it means to be a person, the inner experience of being a person, just isn’t part of this picture. Of course it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which have no “I” in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the “I”? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of “I” and no natural way that the personal inner life can be part of the picture of things – leaves the art of building as a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened with the onset of the 20th century mechanistic world-picture was that clear understanding of value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is this deep order which is our main concern.”

From the book The Phenomenon of Life in the four book series The Nature of Order, by Christopher Alexander, page 16.

More related to the article, I have really enjoyed this series and feel the ‘Western’ world could gain much from this. That the first state of development is ‘awakening’ speaks volumes. In the United States it seems people only awaken when confronted with a nervous break down or life threatening situation, and even then the social forces(debt, marketing, peer pressure ect.) strive to lull them back to sleep. Thank you for all your hard work Craig!