Grace or the Absence of Grace

The Philosophy of Building Better: Chapter 8 - The Better Builder Strives to Repair

Mar 06, 2025

The Course of Empire: Desolation by Thomas Cole

Surely the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art are full of them- weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of manufacture' also natural, animal, and vegetable,- in all of them there is grace or the absence of grace. And ugliness and discord and inharmonious motion are nearly allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness.

Plato, The Republic

Today, we continue our series of outlining the Philosophy of Building Better:

The finish line is nearly in sight. This is my last post outlining what it means to build better, with our next two chapters focused on putting the Philosophy of Building Better into action.

We’ve covered a lot of ground together. In our treatment of the Philosophy of Building Better we started by acknowledging that we are all builders and that the purpose of building is to further human flourishing. We argued that there is an objectively right way to build for every context and that the best way to do that is to learn from the great builders of the past. We discussed how building better seeks to resolve the tensions within a given system through a deep understanding of context. We contended that building better must be normative and strive to encourage people’s best impulses, not take advantage of their worst. In our last post, we draw an ethical line in the sand that the better builder must refuse to cross.

Today, we will discuss the final piece of the puzzle that comes after your building is complete. Once we have taken the time to acknowledge our responsibility as builders, built with our user’s flourishing in mind, taken into account the proper context, and built a solution that uncompromisingly supports the best in us, what then?

Do we just sit back and breathe a sigh of relief?

Is it enough to move on knowing that we have done our best to leave the world brighter and more whole than we found it?

Yes and no.

The truth is that there is no final piece of the puzzle. We never truly arrive as builders. There are always opportunities to improve things. There are always more people who can be better served. There are always more areas where someone determined can heal a piece of the world, no matter how small.

But even with all of this in mind, we must remember that there is a fundamental force that will push back against our building.

Entropy. The inevitable movement of systems towards chaos and disintegration.

It is crucially important that we learn how to build better. We must build things that enable the people around us to flourish, but our job as Better Builders does not end there.

When our project appears to be complete, there is one thing we must endeavor to do with just as much determination as our original building effort:

Repair.

We must always be conscious of the need to repair the things we build, because no act of manmade building is completely self-maintaining. Its foundation must be reinforced in order to avoid otherwise inevitable decay.

Part of building is making a commitment to yourself, your users, and the world around you that you will periodically revisit what you have built and invest what is necessary to repair and maintain it.

If you are a writer, you must revisit prior ideas and evaluate them for needed updates.

If you are a toymaker you must repair defects and be willing to fix what you have broken.

If you are an artist, you must take steps to ensure your works are maintained.

The things we build are like gardens. If we don’t invest the resources necessary to maintain them, they may sustain themselves for a time, but eventually they will end up covered in weeds. In many cases, our initial efforts followed by prolonged neglect, could leave them even more overgrown and disordered than they started.

It is important to point out, when we talk of “repair,” we don’t simply mean restoring something to the way it was originally. For the Better Builder, repair is a never-ending effort to bring forces into balance in an emergent and ever changing system of relationships.

By taking this broader and more dynamic view of repair, we are encouraged to pick our heads up from the specific forces at play in our individual building efforts and notice the unresolved forces in the world around us. And once we have seen the opportunities for repair all around us, we cannot unsee them.

Ultimately, if we are to build better, we must seek to repair the world around us.

This may seem a herculean task for any one person to take responsibility for, but this is our calling as Better Builders. We must always seek to nudge the world in a better, healthier, more whole direction. Even if the magnitude of that nudge feels small on the grand scale of our world.

We cannot fall into the trap of only focusing on what we build in a vacuum while ignoring the world around us. If we take this perspective, we will have sacrificed the deep acknowledgement of context that is so critical to our successful acts of building. In Chapter 4, we discussed how the key posture that allows one to build better is by seeking to resolve the opposing forces contained within a given context. This can be the micro context of ensuring that our flower beds receive enough sunlight ,but we also need to be aware of the macro context of how our flower beds fit in with our neighborhood as a whole.

If we only seek to build better for ourselves and our immediate users, without any thought of the impacts on other stakeholders around us, we will find ourselves continuing to perpetuate a cycle of poor building.

If you build a new house on your street, no matter how beautiful and artistic your house is, if it doesn’t take into context the neighboring houses, it will stick out and introduce discord into your community. Even if the home you build is reconciled internally, you’d be adding tension to the system as a whole.

Instead, if you build in a way that pays homage to the context around you, you make the entirety of your street look more beautiful, reconciled, and whole.

This is the highest aim of the Better Builder.

Not just to build things that are whole and fully reconciled to the forces they contain, but to build things that bring the forces around them into balance and promote wholeness more broadly.

Not just to build things that are good, beautiful, and in harmony with the natural patterns around them, but to build things that repair the goodness, beauty, and natural balance of the world.

Every act of building is an additional attempt at repair in a never ending cycle.

Every act of better building seeks to make the world more whole and properly ordered.

If we build in silos we lose the ability to make the world a better place.

If we build something and then never invest the time and energy to maintain it, the world slides backwards towards disintegration.

Building better is participating in a cycle.

We observe a need, immerse ourselves fully within the context to understand the forces at hand, learn from the great builders of the past to develop patterns to resolve opposing forces in an ethical and life generating way, and then we look to repair the parts of that system that decay.

Observe.

Immerse.

Resolve.

Repair.

Observe.

Immerse.

Resolve.

Repair.

This is the cycle of building better.

This is how we make the world a more whole place.

This is how the things we build can lead to the flourishing of our customers, users, communities, and, in the process, ourselves.

Each of us who puts the Philosophy of Building Better into practice will make a tangible difference, but imagine what a movement of Better Building could accomplish. Imagine a world where our children grow up not knowing what it is like to build poorly. Where everything around them is designed to enable and support their flourishing. Where everything we build draws their souls into harmony with beauty and reason like a health-giving breeze from a purer region.

This may seem like a fantasy, but the more of us that commit to the precepts of building better, the closer we will move that world towards reality.

One building at a time.