Christopher Alexander on Our Birthright

deep sigh … there’s a book ending to contemplate … architecture!!!

“I should like to make one last comment on the buildings I have shown, the processes, the forms. Throughout, in all this material, we touch on a birthright. Yet this birthright that I speak of, it is in the mind, in people’s minds. And it is almost gone.

… The birthright being lost is not only the beautiful Earth, the lovely buildings people made in ancient times, the possibility of beauty and living structure all around. The birthright I speak of if something far more terrible; it is the fact that people have become inured to ugliness, that they accept the ravages of developers without even knowing that anything is wrong. In short, it is their own minds that have lost, that core of them, from which judgment can be mad , the inner knowledge of what it is to be a person, the knowledge of right and wrong, of beautiful and ugliness, of life and deadness.

And since this inner voice is lost, stilled, muffled, there is no possibility – or hardly any possibility – that they can cry out, ‘oh stop this ugliness, stop this deadness which floods like a tide over the land.’ … the source of such a cry has almost been stilled in them.

That process, it seems to me, is nearly irreversible since, at least to an extent, this knowledge is culture-borne.

… What has been lost is the inner language which connects you to your own soul, which makes you know, with certainty, which way is likely to be right, and which way is likely to be wrong. To be more clear about it. To feel it, as a real thing. To know, listen to, the voice that is in your own heart.

But that is becoming harder and harder. Even as people are becoming more and more sophisticated, and education is increasing, this inner voice is falling further and further into the background.

That is what I mean by the loss of birthright.

Is there some chance – now that these matters have been brought into the open and that living process has been partly defeined – that this birthright may be saved, and that we can come back to what is ours again?”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World