Religious and axiological reading of harmony-seeking computation

Harmony-seeking computation should be read against Alexander’s explicitly religious late work. The relevant essay is “The Long Path That Leads from the Making of Our World to God” (2007), abridged in First Things as “Making the Garden” (2016). On this reading, harmony is not merely an aesthetic score: making a center-strengthening world is participation in a reality whose deepest order is intrinsically good. The manuscript’s Fact and Value section explicitly rejects value-neutral mechanism as sufficient for understanding cosmic harmony #8HCCLH and invokes the older scientific idea of a universe moving toward harmony #VWK7B2 There is nevertheless a productive tension: Alexander denies that harmony-seeking is teleological or goal-seeking #HTRZHU yet describes systems as disposed toward positive space #FDFT8L and as progressively healing larger wholes. The best formulation may be immanent rather than blueprint teleology: no predetermined final form, but a directional norm internal to each unfolding situation. “Inner calm” is not static equilibrium but the felt and structural resolution of competing forces into a configuration where centers support rather than violate one another.