A Timeless Way of Governing

I was talking with a friend the other day, advocating two of my favorite books, architect and city planner Christopher Alexander's A Timeless Way of Building and its companion book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. If you're unfamiliar with these books, let me recommend the first of the two you-- and the second, if you ever want to build a home.

What Alexander proposes is daring, and yet obvious in retrospect. His thesis is this: Within every human being is deep, possibly hereditary, knowledge about how we want to live. Build to that heritage, and your architecture will not stand in the way of human happiness. Alexander is the leading light of an architectural derriere-garde that tells the architectural world to screw off and stop making ugly, harsh buildings that are possible with modern CAD and modern materials, and actually make buildings that people like. He called this knowledge of what people like "The timeless way of building."

His second book, A Pattern Language, contains components of human construction that starts at what height the doorknob needs to be and ends with the layout of an entire city and its surrounding environs. It's a charming book beautifully titled. Some of my favorites, probably influenced by my having children, include things like "couple's realm," "children's realm," "half-private office," "sunny place," and "intimacy gradient"... the last describes how to build a relatively large home so that there's a progressive intimacy of place for strangers, business partners, acquaintances, friends and finally lovers the deeper one goes into a home.

The biggest point of the book is that it's contents were vetted, peer-reviewed as it were, by five other master architects at the time and in the 31 years since its emergence the worst critics can say about it is that the results of Alexander's construction and arrangement recommendations aren't "interesting" or "beautiful." But Alexander never said he wanted to make beautiful homes and neighborhoods. He said he wanted to make harmonious homes people enjoyed living in.

I thought of Alexander the other day while reading Edmund Burke's letter to a friend in France:

In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions; they render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations; and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable.

(I would have cut that down more, but Burke loves his long sentences.) This quote, which is part of a longer essay used by modern conservatives (at least, the ones who read) to buttress their argument about what it means to be conservative, in fact says quite the opposite. Burke is not excoriating the French for failing to adopt the tradition, but for failing to adopt any tradition at all. What he's saying about governance is what Alexander says of architecture: people know what form of governance works for them. It has been done. Burke continued soon thereafter, on France's failures that led to the bloodiness of her revolution:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.

This is curiously similar to what Alexander wrote about "modern" architecture and it's brutalism. It isn't just that the Revolutionaries thought to overturn the current model: it's that they thought they knew better than thousands of years of history and tried to create a satisfying State out of academic theories. That doesn't work. It didn't work for them, it didn't work for Lenin.

Which leads me to wonder: where is the wunderkind political science student who has written The Timeless Way of Governing and its companion book, A Pattern Language: Municipalities, States, and Nations?

Alexander's book isn't about "one way" to build, it's about all the different decisions we make about a building given our expectations, the immediate terrain and climate, and the goal of each decision. It's about the whys not just the hows.

There should be a similar book about governance. Why a town council. Why a governor and a lieutenant governor. Why staggered elections. The local conditions that would lead to choosing an elected mayor rather than elevating a councilman to the position of municipal executive.

A systematic analysis of what works for people with respect to governance, and what conditions lead to that working, would probably be one of the more valuable contributions to political science. The topic is bigger than architecture: interactions with the legislature, with police and fire districts, with larger polities and businesses. A survey of municipalities, states, and nations that teases out the patterns of interaction between executives and agencies and shows which kinds are the most effective at creating efficiency and discouraging corruption, and then brings all those observations together into a series on starting from very little and resulting in a nation-state.

At the very least, such a series would make for a great SFnal setting.

Brains: Gotta remember to update the title!

The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Your Clutter

Monks keep it simple, and get a lot done. Why can't you?

Seth: How To Make Money on the Internet

Just plain goodness. Enjoy.

Republicans: Dying from the Head Down

( Rebuilding this party will take a generation )

Crippled Dogs and One Trick Ponies: The Texas State Board of Education's Science Hearings

( As depressing as it sounds )

Obama's secret plan to muzzle talk radio. Very, very secret.

( Why must they make it hard on themselves? )

I'm Three! Three! Three Humans In One!

solarbird pointed me to some thingy that supposedly analyzes your blog and spits out what kind of person you are on your horoscope the Briggs-Meyers map. Running these against all of my blogs has some fun results:

( Elf M. Sternberg at LiveJournal: The Thinker! )

( Pendorwright: The Doer! )

( ElfSternberg: The Scientist! )

Smashed Metro Bus Windows

Smashed Metro Bus Windows

The other day I took the bus home from work, and saw that the two windows behind the driver's seat had been smashed. "I guess some people just don't like the bus," he told me. Even worse, it turned out that Metro knew about the problem and didn't have a bus to spare, so they pressed this broken bus into service, taping up the damage to warn people away from the potential harm.

Man, those are my tax dollars someone just smashed. His own, too.

I've always wondered why the most rabid anti-tax Republican is pro-road but not pro-transit. If the goal as "someone who governs" is to provide people-moving capabilities from one place to another, the mix of roads and mass transit would seem to be ideal: both are supplmented by non-transit, non-auto fees of some kind. I think roads are just so ubiquitous and seemingly invulnerable that we just see them, we don't think about them. It's the fragility and daily maintenence that gnaws on the conscience.

Metro just raised all prices by 25¢ to 50¢ depending on the route and time of day. The state's budget is taking a huge hit in the next two-year cycle; I hope that our county gets the mix right, because there's a lot of commuter pain coming down.