02 • Challenging your belief system

Are you supposed to start believing in magic, esoteric, spiritual woo-woo to understand »The Nature of Order«? A rationalist's guide to reading Christopher Alexander.

The new academic year has started and the Building Beauty program has just welcomed this year's students. I have joined the program as a student again this year, and I'm happy to see that the group of — as they like to call us — "software people" is well represented in this cohort.

I can already tell from the questions asked in the first webinar, that this is going to be an interesting journey for many of us, and that just a few chapters into the first book of The Nature of Order are enough to raise an issue that worries the analytical mind, in particular that of professional software engineers. I myself struggled with this throughout my first reading, and it took me a long time to come to terms with it.

A software engineer's journey through The Nature of Order: Book I

Christopher Alexander starts the series in book 1 The Phenomenon of Life with a prologue and preface that sets the stage. His big picture mission is a "search for real beauty". He suggests that we fundamentally understand our world through its geometry — arrangement in space, and that "building is an essential order-creation process". He goes on about how "order is difficult to describe" precisely and reflects on how we understand mechanism and harmony. His tone is serious and scientific.

(All quotes from Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order book I, The Phenomenon of Life; highlights mine)

Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order. What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter. So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem.

In a sense, everyone knows what order is. But when I really ask myself “what is order” — in the sense of deep geometric reality, deep enough so that I can use it, and so that it is able to help me create life in a building — then it turns out that this “order” is very difficult to define.

In part 1 he defines as precisely as he can what he means by order, life, living structure, and wholeness. His background in mathematics and physics shows through, his definitions aspire to mathematical precision, without ceremonial technicalities or symbolism. We get the impression that this is a scientist writing for scientifically-minded practitioners interested in actionable advice on how to create beauty. He stays inclusive, avoids jargon, and keeps his language accessible.

What we call “life” is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city. And further: The key to this idea is that every part of space — every connected region of space, small or large — has some degree of life, and that this degree of life is well defined, objectively existing, and measurable.

Next he explains his theory of centers. This is where software people begin to fall in love. Centers are a concept close to what software engineers deal with every day: a fairly abstract, recursive structure of components that can themselves be made up of smaller components and together form larger components. However, centers do that in physical space.

Centers are always made of other centers. A center is not a point, not a perceived center of gravity. It is rather a field of organized force in an object or part of an object which makes that object or part exhibit centrality. This field-like centrality is fundamental to the idea of wholeness.

[T]he wholeness is made of parts; the parts are created by the wholeness. To understand wholeness we must have a conception in which “parts” and wholes work in this holistic way.

He progresses into a long discussion of 15 fundamental properties — ways in which centers arranged in space enhance each other.

Objects and buildings which have life all have certain identifiable structural characteristics. The same geometric features keep showing up in them, again and again.

Each property is described in great detail, many examples are provided, including lots of pictures, and we get deep observations of how (and why) these properties occur in nature. The description of each property is specific enough to clearly recognize it in many places, and abstract enough to easily connect it to other contexts.

It is here where the imagination of a software engineer's analytical mind flourishes and you can feel the potential power in these ideas. If we could just transfer them to our domain!

If it all ended here, even with many questions raised and left unanswered, perhaps this book would be even more popular in software circles than Alexander's A Pattern Language.

However, it doesn't end here.

And what comes next is… unexpected.

Getting personal

Part 2 takes a hard turn towards personal experience. Suddenly the tone shifts. It is not so much that Alexander's writing changes, but as the analytic mind of the engineer is still bathing in the insights and promises of part 1, it struggles to connect to what Alexander has to say now.

Where everything until now was satisfying high standards of objectivity, suddenly he begins talking about personal experience, something we would consider highly subjective. Ultimately, he brings up personal "feeling as the inward aspect of life".

I believe the personal feeling I have touched on in this chapter, which is directly connected to order and life, is a mobilization in which my vulnerable inner self becomes connected to the world. It increases my feeling of connection and participation in all things. It is feeling, not emotion. It does not — directly — have to do with happiness, or sadness, or anger.

Rather, it is the feeling of being part of the ocean, part of the sky, part of the asphalt on the road.

He started as a scientist and now he completely lost the plot and talks about being "part of the asphalt on the road". WTF?!

That's it. The love is gone. The analytical mind feels betrayed. This doesn't make any sense!

What now?

This is somewhat how I remember my own first reading of The Nature of Order. I suspect — listening to questions from other students — I'm not alone. Of course, not everybody will have this exact same and perhaps extreme reaction (which I've certainly dramaturgically enhanced in this rendition).

As software engineers, or more generally as highly rationalist and scientific-minded people, we are somewhat at a disadvantage here. We may have an extraordinarily low tolerance for and prematurely dismiss some concepts that to us do not immediately seem to be grounded in rational and objective reasoning.

Getting to this point — halfway through the first book, just far enough in to feel the sunk cost of many wasted hours — raises uncomfortable questions:

• Is this a waste of time?

• Can I trust Alexander to have any scientifically valid or at least practically useful insights?

• Or am I supposed to start believing in magic, esoteric, spiritual woo-woo?

These questions would stay with me throughout all four books. I had signed up for (and spent money on) a 1-year course, so I had a good incentive to pull through no matter what.

And I would find love again in the more scientific chapters about the fundamental process, structure-preserving transformations, in his observations of nature and biology, in his math-grounded symmetry experiments, or in his reports of practical building process and tips for designing rooms to live in.

But I would also fall back into doubt and despair, when the most crucial step in making progress towards wholeness lies in feeling what's next, when his arguments start to rely on religious examples, when he describes how he experiences certain works of art, and when he finally confronts us with his search for god.

In hindsight, this struggle was perhaps the most valuable, albeit also the most difficult, aspect of reading The Nature of Order. Ultimately, it paved the way for substantial insight. Like a good work of art… erm… science… should…?

Reading The Nature of Order is not your usual non-fiction reading experience. You are not reading a shallow pop-sci book with lots of padding to fill a certain number of pages. You’re not reading a business book filled with practically applicable but overly generic how-to guides and diagrams and checklists. You're not reading "The top 10 tricks to build beautiful buildings (and number 7 will surprise you!)".

You are reading the result of a lifetime's worth of observing and trying to make sense of fundamental patterns in our environment. Although stretched out over 2500 pages in four volumes, this work is unbelievably dense. It takes an astonishing intellect to create something that is capable of challenging your belief system.

The difficult part: To benefit, you must allow it to be challenged.

But what about science?

I cannot claim that after spending a full year reading all four books I had fully grokked Alexander's work. I probably still don't today. But I definitely noticed how it was changing me. Reading through these four books, trying to make sense of them, I didn't just accumulate new knowledge; they fundamentally changed my perspective and I began to see things differently.

Art, and the creative process became more interesting and important to me. I paid more attention to inward experience. And, because I still couldn't just accept some of the more out there claims Alexander makes, I went deep into cognitive science to see if that could alleviate my skepticism. Spoiler alert! It did.

Do you have to leave behind your objective, scientific, rational belief system to make sense of Alexander's The Nature of Order?

No, you do not.

However, you will probably have to adapt the way you view the world…