Entropy and the Order of Things

We are homo sapiens, from the Latin "wise man" or "knowing man". This term is neither accurate nor defining. In our early agricultural days we must have been splendid, planning and creating and changing our environment for all the world to see. Now our knowledge has fallen on hard times. Information trumps wisdom; things seem beyond our reach--even those things we have created. We have gone from the sorcerer to his apprentice, lost in a complex world of a master's making. Both art and science now declare that accuracy and understanding are impossible as a maxim. Despite our massive influence, something has been lost.

Nor is the phrase defining. Our brain is startling and vastly different from our competitors but we are not thinking beings with emotional baggage, we are emotional beings with thinking added. We are an elaboration of those very competitors we have outrun. We are a palimpsest with the look of thinking but emotions-- deep, ancient and mysterious-- bleeding through.

This incredible mixture of emotional hardware and thinking software do not exist on a border of antagonism and conflict, they complement each other. They are intertwined. They allow for texture, scent and hue--the complexity of life. But this wondrous gift comes with a price: There must be order. There must be structure. We each must impose ourselves upon the potential chaos of these independent elements. Just as God has devised his innumerable macrocosms, so we must our microcosm.

All systems deteriorate, wind down. Even a solar system, or a galaxy of solar systems, built and fired from some primal furnace will eventually cool and lose its integration. Entropy is the order of things. And each of us must create his world--and maintain his fragile order against the decay--with his "knowing" will.