Improving processes
If we seek to improve the living structure of our world, we must increase the presence of living process all over the world. This in turn requires (or at least common sense strongly suggests) that our effort must start from these everyday processes as they actually are, and modify them. It would be far too hard to replace all the everyday processes with new ones. That could only be done in a utopia, in some kind of science-fiction.
We must therefore find a way — a practical way — of slowly, gently, transforming today’s processes from what they actually are today, to making them better, making them more workable, without creating too much disturbance, without upsetting society too drastically, as the changes occur.
That slow, incremental change towards more living process is the subject of the next four chapters.
The first, purely cost-based process causes acquisition of beautiful bits of land for roads (and the destruction of their beauty), without regard for the damage done to ecology or health of the land. The pure cost-based process is therefore implicitly a life-destroying process.
Even though it must be argued that cost reduction achieves important social goals and thus indirectly helps to create life in other areas of society, this process does, unmistakably, damage and destroy life as a direct consequence of its narrow formulation.
The second process, on the other hand, with its emphasis on maintaining places of natural beauty and on juggling funds and cost to make this feasible, is implicitly a more living process, since it preserves and extends living centers where they exist, and builds the new center of the freeway roadbed and its right of way in such a way as to increase, not reduce, the harmony of the land taken as a whole, while also trying to conserve funds.
The second process is a more living process because it helps create gradual improvement in living centers in the world. The emphasis on centers is hidden, once again not easily visible in the way the rule is formulated. Yet the distinction between this process which does emphasize life, and the purely economic version of the process which does not, is considerable.
In particular, it interferes with our freedom to do what is right. It neither encourages us to create life, not does it even allow us to create life.
We know what is right, often, and could act on it, if we were free. But the processes that govern do not give us the freedom to do the life-creating thing.
The second kind of process creates a policy framework in which we are free to create wholeness when we can see it — whereas the first process, being purely cost-based, does not give us the freedom to create wholeness in the world.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/18 Encouraging freedom#