Readers of my blog, if they delve beyond single articles into the larger body of work that is Edge Induced Cohesion, may be a bit overwhelmed by the large mass of material that exists about a wide variety of subjects. No doubt, if I were so inclined, it could be even more far-ranging and even less easy to understand the underlying order and structure that ties all of my disparate thoughts and observations together into a coherent, if complicated, whole.

It is a common joke among some friends and family of mine (how accurate the joke is is difficult to say for certain) who joke about my being an Aspy person, in the lighter range of the Autism spectrum. Whether that is true or not, I am fascinated by patterns. Patterns are a powerful element in understanding the way life works. Normally we tend to see events in an isolated fashion, not part of a coherent or connected narrative and flow. All too often we may, from our limited experience and understanding, force a narrative on reality that does not in fact correspond to that reality. It is an entirely different and more difficult (but also more fruitful) method to draw a pattern of behavior from the evidence, and then to see if that same pattern of behavior can be shown elsewhere, to show a common method of dealing with similar problems, especially in the same temporal context.

Human beings are narrative beings. Being a literary-minded person myself I tend to see human beings as books, or occasionally libraries. We are each the heroes of our own works, with our own villains and sidekicks, the twisting and turning plots of our lives, the tragic and comic and melodramatic and farcical moments that draw emotion from ourselves and others (though not always the intended response), and more than this we tend to consciously attempt to shape and drive the plot of our lives, exploring that fine line of tension between our control and any authorial design that comes from another place. A result of our often self-aware narrativity is our relentless tendency to force narrativity on the lives we live, to attempt to determine for ourselves the sort of text we will be in, and the sort of book our existence is.

And yet in one way it is impossible for us to determine our narratives in advance. If we are of a gloomy and melancholy frame of mind, what we intend to be an immense tragedy may be seen by others as only a melodrama. We may resolutely determine ourselves to be a comic hero, but if our life is tragic that will only deepen its tragedy. On the other hand, what appears to be a tragedy to us may be a black comedy for others, if they are not sympathetic to us. To make matters even more complicated, we are heroes of our own books, and we may be bit characters or secondary characters, sidekicks or villains or supporting characters in the plots of other people’s lives that we might not even think to understand.

The same is true for our interests. Some of us are fairly narrowly focused people, only concerned (but with a depth of understanding) in a very narrow sort of field, which we understand well. Others among us may be interested superficially in a broad area of life, flitting first this way and that like butterflies only briefly and occasionally settling on a given flower and then flying off to the next thought or field without any kind of structure or coherence. As a person I try to bridge the gap between them. I do not wish to sacrifice breadth for depth or vice versa, because both of them are vital. There can only be genuine insight with depth, but for it to be relevant it must have more than a narrow applicability. To give but two very brief examples of this problem, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution has been applied in a very superficial way to a wide variety of fields, but evolution itself has remained a content-free box, showing “change over time” with its presuppositions front-loaded assuming a creative role for genetic mutation, even as the superficial “theory” has been used largely in racist and anti-religious theology. On the opposite side of the coin, the field of linguistics has a wide variety of very narrow and technical laws (with their own exceptions) to describe the change over time of languages to attempt to reconstruct long-dead languages from those living languages that are judged to have common origin.

Here we see that on the one side are broad and general laws that are supposed to have great relevance but whose explanatory power is weak because the claims made for the theory far outstrip the actual and modest content present within the theory itself. Likewise, on the other side there are a multiplicity of laws and rules determined ad hoc to attempt to explain a given reality but with a large amount of exceptions. In both cases we tend to find a heavy amount of controversy, and that controversy extends over a large amount of ground–can we verify insights that we gain from the use of logic and deduction given the lack of evidence on the ground, what constitutes evidence, do we have our own assumptions and worldviews that prevent us from seeing reality as it is, and is the past simply impossible to uncover given our distance from it and the fragmentary state of our knowledge or our possible understanding, and what sense of humility does this reality give us? These are all difficult and vexing questions, but we face them in so many of our endeavors, because we want to know and yet our own abilities and evidence are rather fragmentary and limited. We are trapped between infinite longing and pitiful reach.

Our expectations, in addition, are very great. We study the past in large part because we wish to predict the future. We want to tame the risk and uncertainty of the future by seeing how it is determined in the past. And yet history is not that determinative. We are bounded by our experiences and our backgrounds, to be certain, but we are not determined by them. We have options (sometimes more limited than we hope, sometimes more expansive than we realize), and therefore we have responsibility. We have certain channels that are more comfortable because they have been used over and over again for a long time, but given the right push we can jump those channels and build new ones. Therefore the future always remains impossible to exactly predict, simply because human beings can and will do unpredictable things on occasion.

Nonetheless, a study of patterns is still useful. Our intent must not be to attempt to force ourselves or others into a narrow box that is easy to understand (surely we ought to understand we are all more complicated than that), but rather if we know how people are wired, we can determine with a tolerable rate of error or unpredictability how people will generally respond (as well as how we will respond), and we can at least lesson the unpredictability of life, up to a point. Of course, once we have some understanding of the patterns of ourselves and others, we may find that these patterns are at cross-purposes, and that without anyone being entirely to blame, it may be impossible to reach mutually desired goals given those patterns. Certain conclusions and options may be foreclosed from happening. Others (including undesirable ones) may be extremely likely because of the particular context of a given situation.

As a result we are constantly in a state of tension between our general knowledge that we bring to bear on a particular situation and the context-dependent elements that we have to understand before we can make sense of a given issue. Because of the unpredictability of life and the people who live it, initial conditions and assumptions may have a vastly more determinative role in conclusions than we care to admit, or than seems just and reasonable. On the opposite side, environmental factors in general may be so strong as to dampen individual peculiarities and force a fairly widespread equilibrium on a wide variety of seemingly disparate phenomena. And, to make things more difficult, it is not easy to see which particular situation is present in a specific context.

Again, life is full of tensions, and it appears that some of the tensions are designed into the systems of our life, to allow for long periods of stasis but also periods of crisis and revolution, to allow for drastic change in our behaviors or the seemingly dull repetition of the same patterns that allowed Andy Warhol to deliberately break the conventions of art on the one hand but then insist on having the same Campbell’s Tomato soup for lunch every day on the other side. We are strange combinations order and chaos, structure and randomness. we cannot expect for our world to be any simpler when we are given to such tensions and contradictions in our own existences.

And so, because there seem to be underlying instability given our freedom to choose at every moment how we will behave, first one way and then another, sometimes showing the same patterns but also fairly frequently attempting to break away from those patterns, our existence is the same thing only different. It may have the same tendencies, but it may also be that different parts of our lives (like that of Andy Warhol) may seek to balance out the question of order or chaos, thinking or feeling, fact or intuition, or sociability or introspection, within our particular life. Furthermore, we not only strive for a personal balance across our different endeavors, allowing for chaos in one area, but being fairly pattern-oriented and rigid in other aspects, but our families and businesses and institutions and cultures have to strive for similar balance and resolve similar tensions. Furthermore, what makes life more orderly for some makes life more chaotic and tense and stressful for others, a factor that leads to great complications in our larger cultural and institutional divides. We may gain more security for ourselves by increasing our personal power, but that only makes others subject to our inconsistencies and whims and chaotic tendencies, making others try to balance out that chaos that out by behaving more rigidly in other ways to find their own balance.

And this would appear to be an insoluble problem. Because we are free, we can choose to change our patterns, or change how we work with the materials and talents we have been given. But since other people have free will we can never gain total equilibrium because others can shift the balance in different directions, even without being conscious of the effects of their individual behavior on an overall balance. And yet as human beings we do not fare well living in quicksand. We have a strong bias toward order and structure to make us feel comfortable and that the world that we live in is stable and sure, even if we know it is not on a rational level. It should therefore not be a surprise that we struggle between order and chaos, structure and randomness when it comes to every aspect of our lives, because it would seem that in order to feel totally at ease we need both great freedom as well as a sure foundation, making ourselves conflicted and paradoxical on every level of our existence. So why not enjoy the madness once we understand it is unavoidable in some fashion?