¤ jetless heights

+ Mon, January 10

On Order

When things get quiet around here it’s because of one of two things: I’m just in a general writing lull which occurs after bursts of heavy writing or I’ve got a large post in mind that must be written but is not done bouncing around yet.  The recent quietness is the latter, not the former.

This past winter break was one of the best I’ve had in recent years.  Very reflective, very nicely paced—a good point to step back, observe and realign.

I remember three years ago, being up late one weekend night, talking with friends.  I remember going to the bathroom, finding an ant in the sink and killing it without pausing to think.  Now, I’m no vegetarian but then again, I’m not particularly violent or hateful, it was just a bug in the wrong place at the wrong time.  In any event, I remember just standing there and for whatever reason thinking about what had just happened.  “All I did was squish it and now it’s dead…”  It’s an odd thing: apply a little pressure, end an autonomous creature.

At the time I was taking a heavy courseload focused on order and logic and all.  Analysis, Chemistry, Latin, Analytic English.  That in mind, it’s not surprising to know that I thought about that ant in terms of its order and my finger as an act of disorder.  After all, the only thing keeping it alive was the order and functioning of its organs, intricate and breathtaking as they were.  Disrupt that order and suddenly life wafts out of that broken body unable to return.  All because of a little disorder.  Odd, that.

Break out of that bathroom scene.  We’ve all heard of the eventual heat death of the universe promised to us.  The gradual rise in entropy that’s guaranteed to consume everything.  Think also of the way a gas will fill a room in a random pattern.  The air you breathe is a random collection of a huge number of gases and no matter how many times you breathe will you ever draw a breathe of pure oxygen.  Randomness, entropy, chaos—it’s everywhere in our non-biological world.

How is it, then, that our biological lives do nothing but strive towards order?  Our bodies exist as a testament to that drive, organs compartmentalized away, linked in terms of function.  Kidneys filtering out the nasties, purifying our juices, muscles arrayed in impossibly tight bundles, neurons shooting in unfathomably complex patterns so powerful that they allow a hunk of carbon, calcium and sodium to stand up and proclaim itself “Me”.  Order, functions, rationality.  The biological refute of the chaotic cosmos.  What gives?

Three years later and I still have no clue.  I don’t know how that happened, but I know it’s interesting and very, very real.  At the time though, I thought this was a very original idea.  I certainly hadn’t heard it spelled out before and it just hit me after crushing that silly little ant in my bathroom sink one night at 1:30.

Back to today and this break though.  The first book I absorbed over break was Pirsig’s Lila and, needless to say, I loved it wildly.  The real world applications of the beautiful view I found so enthralling in his first work—very interesting for me right now.

To skip over any number of important details, I’ll cut to one of the central points.  Within Lila, he makes note of being able to divide existence into a few categories: the inorganic world, the biological world, the social world and the intellectual world.  He described each of these levels as each containing a certain quality in and of themselves and how in large part each of these levels does a large part to overcome boundaries created by its preceding level.  The social world overcoming the biological, the biological overcoming the inorganic—click!  Right there, there it is.  The biological over the inorganic.

That little ant comes into focus once again.  There’s a certain wonder in the inorganic world (see Modest Mouse’s “So Much Beauty In Dirt”), but look at how much of the biological world is an attempt to overcome that.  How each of us constantly command trillions of lifeless atoms to continue our lives.  Look at how much of the social realm is in effort to overcome the biological terms of quality.  You know biological terms of quality: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Socially, we limit these sources of pleasure because what kind of evolving society would be possible from a bunch of toked out addicts screwing their lives away?  And if the social level never blooms, how would the intellectual realm find safe harbor to shoot up and blossom?  We’ve got society around us to keep us sheltered and protected from the dangers of life.  I doubt Kant would have found time to write had he spent his life making sure there was no wolf stalking him behind the next tree over.

Reading Lila, thinking back to that bathroom epiphany, the realization “so much for genuinely original ideas…” sets in.  But that’s alright.  I’ve got something new to think about.

4 people have chimed in.
→ Add your 2¢ by reading through and commenting at the end.

1 → Debashis  –  (Jan 10 2005, 12:37 PM)

I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon —- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite poems… just thought I’d share it.

2 → p. burke  –  (Jan 11 2005,  2:24 AM)

keep thinking out loud, phil. :)

3 → shanecavanaugh  –  (Jan 11 2005,  9:34 PM)

For me, thoughts of universal/natural order always bring about questions of humanity and society’s place in it.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to, and might never, fit human nature into the natural model; so your post made me think of a quote by Albert Camus:

If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of a pen.

Something else to think about concerning the emergence of order [via]:

If we want to stick to the idea of natural laws, we could say that as nature itself evolves, the laws of nature also evolve, just as human laws evolve over time.

– Rupert Sheldrake

4 → Laura DeCamp  –  (Jan 14 2005,  3:39 PM)

Hey Phil.  Here’s a comment for you.  I <3 you and the little ants. 






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