Our mechanized process

The trouble is that it is mechanical process only, something which subverts the inner fire of true living process.
In a mechanistic view of the world, we see all things, even if only for convenience, as machines. A machine is intended to accomplish something. It is, in its essence, goal-oriented. Like machines, then, within a mechanistic view processes are always seen as aimed at certain ends. We think of things by the end-state we want, and then ask ourselves how to get there.

Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute-to-minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end-result, because the end-result is not a goal.
Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose — its goal, what it is intended to produce.

The process of getting to the goal was thought to be of little importance in itself, except insofar as it attained (or failed to attain) the desired goal.

The mechanistic view of architecture we have learned to accept in our era is crippled by this overly-simple, goal-oriented approach. In the mechanistic view of architecture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of a building, and far too little of the way or process of making a building as something inherently beautiful in itself.
But, most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view — a static world almost without process — just is not a truthful picture. As a conception of the world, it roundly fails to describe things as they are. It exerts a crippling effect on our view of architecture and planning because it fails to be true to ordinary, everyday fact. For in fact, everything is constantly changing, growing, evolving.

Why is this process-view essential? Because the ideals of “design”, the corporate boardroom drawing of the imaginary future, the developer’s slick watercolor perspective of the future end-state, control our conception of what must be done — yet they bear no relation to the actual nature, or problems, or possibilities, of a living environment. And they are socially backward, since they necessarily diminish people’s involvement in the continuous creation of their world.
In all this, process is still not present as something essential, only as something mechanical. In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment.

Our understanding of process, like our understanding of order, has been severely compromised by the value-neutral Cartesian picture, and in a similar fashion. In the case of static order at least, everyone knows that things have value; the mistake has been in the fact that we have been encouraged to think that the value of an object is subjective. Process presents a deeper problem since, in our time (with some exceptions), we are not used to evaluating it at all, even in subjective terms. We have yet to learn that , objectively, there is life-creating process and life-destroying process.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Preface — On Process#