When Order Conceals Chaos
Order is about more than appearances
Have you seen this image before?
It plays with an innate human tendency to define "order" in primarily visual, tangible terms. If I can see the whole system — if I can break it down then count and classify its parts — it's more organized than the messy reality on the left.
But order and chaos are in the eye of the beholder.
What a human considers "ordered" is wildly different from Mother Nature's view.
Natural order develops organically. The tree branch's parts are connected to create a self-organized, functional, living system. The system — a tree — is defined by not only its parts, but the relationship between the parts. The branch, the bark, and the needles exist in a harmony with one another to perform a function.
Imposed order creates legibility. With the branch broken down into constituent parts, we can quantify and analyze, but at the expense of system's ability to function. The tree is no longer alive, no sunlight is converted to energy, no water transmitted through the tissue. We trade the life of the system for atomization, where we can maximize the use of each part.
In a single image we get a metaphorical representation of what James C. Scott wrote about at length in Seeing Like a State. Top-down, centrally-planned systems long for legibility: for a means to count, quantify, reorganize, and optimize. In pursuit of legibility, we don't notice the invisible emergent order we tear down in exchange.
There's a utopian streak that burns inside a certain type of person. The planner, the expert, the organizer, the idealistic visionary whose dreams of perfection override their perception of the current state of the world. Before they spend the time to appreciate the breathtaking depth of complexity of the world around them, they've moved on to envisioning grand schemes that will chase flawlessness. And they lack the wisdom to realize it's a fool's errand.
Emergent order tends to emerge to fulfill a purpose. When an outsider observes a seemingly-chaotic system with designs on how they'll "optimize" it, the challenge is fraught. What hidden purpose might there be within the nested, entangled system of relationships? What unintended 3rd-order consequence will rear its head once The Planner shatters the intricate dependency network?
Rules, institutions, and traditions are systems implemented for a reason. Seeing "chaos" from one perspective and tearing them up to reorder reality to new specific ends risks missing the lost, imperceptible purpose. Philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote about this, what came to be known as the "Chesterton fence":
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Imposing our own new order on a system, regardless of good intentions, risks tampering with functions and benefits we happen to enjoy, though may not realize it.
Chesterton would've appreciated the paradox in this tree branch example. He was a regular critic of the modern impulse to reduce everything to rational categories and mechanistic abstractions, which he saw as a form of hubris. He'd have been impressed (depressed?) by the number of efforts in the 20th century to impose control that ended up destroying the very thing we sought to improve. The urban renewal projects to remove urban blight, but displaced people in favor of sterile, soulless, often crime-ridden communities. The farming monocultures that over-tilled and overtaxed the soil, and made land infertile for years. Or when Prohibition attempted to curb alcohol use, but simply drove it underground, and fueled organized crime, unsafe production, and ultimately failed to prevent anyone from getting drunk regardless.
True order is often hidden within what looks chaotic. And superficial order can actually be the cause of unexpected chaos. It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail. If we spend some time zooming in and watching a system work, we notice details about its purposes and inner workings before we propose new greenfield solutions.