Why We Like Order in the World
What drives us toward it?
“Moth and rust doth corrupt.” The nature of things to disintegrate, to devolve into chaos, has long been observed. Yet order, pattern, and structure are everywhere we look. Spider webs. Trees. Streets. Books. Time would destroy all of these, yet they persist. How is this possible?
The majority of this complexity is found in living creatures. Certainly, there is order to be found in the non-living world. Materials aggregate together through mechanical and chemical processes, creating salt flats, mineral deposits, and oceans. Half-fill a jar with sand and pebbles, shake for a while, and the largest pebbles will be at the top, with the finest sand grains at the bottom. Voilà! You have ordered the contents.
But a sunflower is so much more complicated than a jar of its chemical constituents, and only life can maintain that complexity in the face of the moth and rust problem. To do that, it needs energy, and that energy comes from the sun. (It is more complicated than that, involving entropy, but plain old energy will do here.)
So it follows that life is an order-creating phenomenon. Wow.
That means that humans have an innate drive to create order, and we can see that in our everyday existence. Just think of the order inherent in books arranged by subject or (ugh) by color; collections of fiesta ware, stamps or sneakers; Nash terraces; the legal system; and society itself. It is why music appeals to us so much; it has two patterns at once, of rhythm and melody. You could say that creating order is the purpose of life.
But too much order doesn’t work, either; life needs change to continue growing. It needs to exist somewhere in the space between the two poles, and in the flow from order to chaos, life uses energy to swim upstream and maintain its place.
So next time you have to clean house or balance your checking account, feel the pleasure of creating order in the world.