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Remembering What Matters
By Peter Block
Christopher Alexander is an architect who, for thirty years, has been
arguing to bring feeling, humanity and beauty into construction of the
built environment. His writing about buildings is really a set of
beliefs about the way we construct the world around us. Here is how he
begins his 1985 book entitled, “The Production of Houses.”
“In the modern world, the idea that houses can be loved and beautiful
has been eliminated almost altogether. For most of the world’s housing,
the task of building houses has been reduced to a grim business of facts
and figures, an uphill struggle against the relentless surge of
technology and bureaucracy, in which human feeling has almost been
forgotten. Even in those few houses, which openly concern themselves
with their appearance, beauty has also been forgotten. What happens
there is something remote from feeling, an almost disgusting concern
with opulence, with the taste of the marketplace, and with fashion?
Here, too, the simple values of the human heart do not exist.
The real meaning of beauty, the idea of houses as places which express
one’s life, directly and simply, the connection between the vitality of
the people and the shape of their houses, the connection between the
force of social movements and the beauty and vigor of the places where
people live—this is all forgotten, vaguely remembered as the elements of
some imaginary golden age.”
When I read these words, they seemed to be describing the modern
workplace. If you simply replace the word house with the word
organization, and reread these two paragraphs, you find a description of
the institutions where most of us dwell. It is becoming rare that people
express any love for their workplace. Our organizations are being driven
by facts and figures, pulled by technology and the taste of the
marketplace. Remote from feeling, distant from words connoting beauty;
the ideas of loyalty, long-term commitment and care seem to be
disappearing from our vocabulary.
The idea that our workplace might be a place worthy of long-term
commitment is increasingly quaint. We now have evolved to an
instrumental relationship with our employer, if we have one at all. The
relationship between employer and employee has become commodified,
defined by barter and open to constant re-negotiation from both sides.
We have free agency, staying and signing bonuses, outsourcing, full-time
temporaries and on it goes. We even speak with pride of the virtual
organization, one that exists only on paper, which can be born in an
instant and dissolved in a day.
This all comes with a cost that Alexander’s words warn us about. What
we create in the outer world is eventually reflected in our inner world.
When we create houses or organizations that eliminate love and beauty,
and where human feelings are considered an unaffordable luxury, then we
have created that same landscape within ourselves. And this will also be
the defining feature of our relationships.
In a virtual work world, I experience myself as a virtual being, one
whose value is primarily defined by facts and figures, and is constantly
open to reinvention. I begin to expect myself to change as rapidly as
the marketplace, finding my identity coming from the product I have
become. I begin to substitute networks for relationships. I think of
intimate conversations as taking place “offline” instead of being the
point. This virtual and instrumental culture is reducing the experience
of our own freedom, even though it is supposedly our freedom that this
virtual world is offering us.
Freedom vs. Liberty
It is common to confuse the experience of freedom with obtaining our
liberty. Liberty is about the absence of oppression; the lessening of
external constraints on our actions. The virtual and instrumental
culture may, in fact, give us more liberty and reduce constraints. We
have no boss or many bosses, we work more at home, we dress casual, we
have portable pensions, no loyalty oaths and soon we might be able to
manage our own social security accounts.
These liberties, however appealing, have little to do with our
freedom.
Freedom is an inside job. It is having the will to construct our own
house, our own way of seeing reality, and having a mind that runs
independent of convention. It is the capacity to define the world as we
see and experience it, rather than to follow fashion and let others
define it for us. It is finding a calling and vision from God or from
within ourselves and not from top management. No job structure can
create or restrict the integrity of our own experience. Our freedom has
to be given away, it can’t be taken. Freedom is having the courage to
pursue meaning and beauty and has more to do with our subjective
experience of what Alexander calls the “simple values of the human
heart.”
Alexander speaks of houses that “can be loved and beautiful.” This
would be strange language to apply to the new economy, but maybe these
are appropriate words to use if our freedom were the point, and the
marketplace were just a place to discover it.
The importance of freedom is that it creates real accountability: I will
care for what I have constructed. For example, what we need to recapture
in the midst of this new economy is to care for the whole even though
the whole no longer seems to care for us. Who will care for our
institutions if not us, even if the old threads of loyalty and a long
relationship have disappeared?
Fashion or Fate
While a virtual and instrumental world may seem inevitable, and a
requirement of the marketplace, Alexander also suggests in his statement
that our attraction to technology and a virtual existence may be driven
more by fashion than necessity. This is especially true in the business
world where a herd instinct towards popular ideas is common. Every
organization says it wants to be a leader, but is reluctant to try
anything that has not been proven first by others. It is possible that
all the language about free agency, the exponential rate of change, the
need for agility, and the fundamental shift caused by the Internet are a
sea of modern fashion that we happen to be swimming in.
What Christopher Alexander has given his work-life to is stated in
another beautiful passage in his book, where he offers the possibility
that we can create houses in which, “Human feeling and human dignity
come first; in which the housing process is reestablished as the
fundamental human process in which people integrate their values and
themselves, in which they form social bonds, in which they become
anchored in the earth, in which the houses which are made have, above
all, human worth, in the simple, old fashioned sense that people feel
proud and happy to be living in them and would not give them up for
anything because they...are the concrete expression of their place in
the world, the concrete expression of themselves.”
Our workplace and organizations are the daytime social houses in which
we dwell. Why would we not build more permanent, rather than virtual,
places for our selves, in the face of our infatuation with modern
fashion and a dot.com address? It only requires that we understand the
existence of our freedom and know that our organizations can still
become what we decide to imagine them to become.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in September 2000
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