Christopher Alexander on a Pursuit of Wholeness

This reminded me of Pirsig’s thoughts on contrarians:

“… you risk a great deal when working within a new paradigm which includes a) human relationships of trust, b) on-going decisions about trade-offs, c) the overall wisdom of how to spend a given modest amount of money to get the best from your money. It is risky within the current system based on a) legalisms, b) blueprints and contracts that preclude sensible adaptation, c) profit and gain, and d) too little human trust.

People who attempt to do these things will be in jeopardy when they attempt to do them within the present system.

… All in all, for more then 40 years I have had the experience that – on any given issue – three times out of four, what I instinctively wanted to do because I thought it was right, was at odds with somebody’s picture of how things ought to be. For years this seemed like a coincidence. Sometimes it seemed to my friends that I was just plain stubborn, ornery, ‘against everything’ – that I had a built in desire to be in conflict with people. But then, gradually, – and only fully in the last ten or fifteen years – it began to sink in that this apparent source of conflict had a straightforward origin. It came about, because my instincts were governed, as often as I found possible, by respect for life, respect for wholeness in the world (at least up to the limitation of my own ability to see it). What it did came from my desire to see the whole, and my desire to build according to the whole, and my refusal to give up on the whole.

… The pursuit of wholeness, pure and simple, was at odds with virtually every institutional and social reality of the 20th century.

… Of course the adventures which I have been living for more than forty years, now, and the observations I have made, might still be attributed to the monomania of a solitary individual, overzealous, who had a blindness to the format and procedures that are proper in the worlds of architecture and society.

… we need to preserve the sacred quality of our life and the life of our cities and our planet, and to seek a new form of processes in which we can be whole.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 2: The Process of Creating Life