The generation of monsters
Above all there is, in today’s society, an overall atmosphere, a quality of attitude and fact which again and again and again, seem to conspire to make living process difficult, even impossible.
The problem is so severe that — if it were not absurd — one might almost imagine that modern society has been created, intentionally, to make living process hard to implement, to drive it from the door.
Living processes […] are morphogenetic.
They create form intentionally and explicitly.
They are directly aimed at the unfolding of life, they have the unfolding of living structure as their goal.
Modern processes, for the most part, are not morphogenetic. The thousands of processes I have referred to in chapter 18, exist very much as a fragmented multitude. They are not ordered, not coordinated, not coherent as a system.
It is as if — and indeed this is true — the society which spawned the 20th-century processes, did so without realizing that these processes would have morphological effects. The effects are chiefly negative. Even when positive, they are clumsy, awkward. Thus 20th-century society, in respect of modern apartment buildings, entered a kind of monster phase, a Frankenstein phase, where government decisions indirectly generated horrible living conditions without intending to.
If this bad effect were confined only to apartment buildings, that would already be bad enough. But comparable effects exist in almost every part of urban and rural society.
Bad conditions and bad building form are generated indirectly by regulations, processes, and influences, in almost every part of a modern urban region; and their bad effects come from the deepest layers of ethos, practice, and assumption, often spread pervasively and forming the substratum of society.
The effects of bad-structure-generating social process are hideously widespread. The rules and processes that have been introduced do generate a world. But they generate a world that is destroyed, that strongly lacks living structure. And, they do so with a ferocity and speed which could make someone from outer space believe — if it were not patently absurd — that it is being done on purpose.
How could rules, laws, and processes which generate such obviously harmful structures, have been introduced and replicated throughout modern society, unless it were on purpose?
Yet of course, it is not on purpose. It is all by mistake. And it is by means of a very particular kind of mistake. We, the first children of the modern age, have not yet understood the huge extent to which the physical structure of the world is generated by its processes.
The processes do have huge impact on the way the world is shaped. But these impacts are most often unintended, tangential. So the structure-destroying transformations which run rampant in creating our modern environment are on the loose, uncontrolled, created by idiot processes for which no one takes morphogenetic responsibility. We have let loose a system that creates monsters. And we do not even realize that it is we who created this system of processes and we who continue to let is loose!
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/19 Massive process difficulties#