Is the world on the brink of chaos, or is the chaos already here?
Some commentators view the presidential campaign as a referendum on chaos.
“I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”— Taylor Swift, endorsing Kamala Harris
Others predict that the election will be the spark the sets off the craziness. Axios recently predicted that “mayhem is bound to rain down in November,” briskly listing five “conditions for chaos” with bullet-pointed subheads for easy reference.
Then again, maybe whatever is about to happen in American politics is just the latest symptom of a larger disorder. Last December, The New Yorker asked “what to call our chaotic era,” meaning … all of it. The accompanying article, by Kyle Chayka, cataloged a familiar litany of crises and catastrophes and suggested clever names for the whole epochal megillah.
“Some have argued that the aggregate events of recent years call for a new label that we can apply to our chaotic historical moment, a term that we can use when we want to evoke the panicky incoherence of our lives of late.”— Kyle Chayka
But the answer was implied in the question. This is the Age of Chaos! The urge to define it more precisely expresses a counter-chaotic wishful thinking, a hope — or superstition — that acknowledging how much disorder exists might be a way of asserting at least a symbolic measure of control over it.
Chaos, aptly enough, is an unruly word with a volatile history. In modern English, there is something violent and unpredictable embedded in its very spelling and pronunciation: the hard “c” where the Greek letter chi, which resembles a sloppy “x” (formerly known as Twitter?), would have been; the weird, backward-looking “ao” combination; that final “s,” which wants to make the whole situation plural. Are we talking about one thing or a lot of things? Could the election be a single chao among many?
Or maybe it’s nothing: In Greek, “χάος,” a singular noun, means chasm or void. It designates the emptiness that came before the beginning of time in both Hellenic and monotheistic creation stories.
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”— Genesis 1:2
Modern usage tends in the opposite direction, away from the abyss and toward the overwhelming, overloaded state of too much — the pandemonium the world is heading toward rather than the vacuum it emerged from.
“every person, place and thing in the chaosmos of Alle anyway connected with the gobblydumped turkery was moving and changing every part of the time”— James Joyce, “Finnegans Wake”
In its mythological and literary meanings, chaos can refer to a condition, a place or time, or an allegorical figure.
“But most, like Chaos – Stopless – cool
– Without a Chance, or spar –
Or even a Report of Land –
To justify – Despair.”— Emily Dickinson, “It Was Not Death, for I Stood Up”
“Before the sea and lands began to be,
before the sky had mantled every thing,
then all of nature’s face was featureless –
what men call chaos: undigested mass
of crude, confused, and scumbled elements,
a heap of seeds that clashed, of things mismatched.”— Ovid, “Metamorphoses” (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)
“… a dark
Illimitable Ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,
And time and place, are lost; where eldest Night
And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold
Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise
Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.”— John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
Terrifying! Or is it? It seems that violent disorder has its upside, its appeal, its inspirational qualities. The internet is full of upbeat memes urging you to “embrace the chaos,” and quotes, some of them verified, about the anarchistic sources of creativity.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: It can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, introduction to “Frankenstein”
Chaos is integral to the modern tech ethos, with its celebration of disruption, contrarianism and “breaking things.” Chaos reigns in popular culture. Chaos is Joker. Chaos is Beetlejuice.
Chaos is messy. Chaos is brat.
Chaos is Gritty and the Cat in the Hat.
Dr. Seuss did not write a children’s classic called “The Responsible Fish.” But you may recall that it’s the fish who saves the day, badgering the cat and his rambunctious minions, Thing One and Thing Two, into cleaning up the mess they’ve made.
“Oh, the things they will bump!
Oh, the things they will hit!
Oh, I do not like it!
Not one little bit!”— The fish, in Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat”
The id needs the superego, and vice versa. No cat without a fish. No Ernie without Bert.
A dozen years ago, in Slate, the legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick divided the world into Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets. She was proposing a way of classifying Supreme Court justices (really!), but this kind of dichotomy — Goofus and Gallant, Bart and Lisa, Dionysus and Apollo — can apply to just about any area of human endeavor.
“Cookie Monster, Ernie, Grover, Gonzo, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and — paradigmatically — Animal, are all Chaos Muppets. Zelda Fitzgerald was a Chaos Muppet. So, I must tell you, is Justice Stephen Breyer.”— Dahlia Lithwick
It may not be necessary to choose between chaos and order. It may not even be possible to tell them apart. In the sciences, chaos theory is the study of elusive patterns and complex systems that determine the behavior of matter and the structure of the universe.
“Now that science is looking, chaos seems to be everywhere.”— James Gleick, “Chaos: Making a New Science”
Does that mean that everything makes sense in the end, or that nothing does? Should we be afraid of being plunged into chaos, or of discovering that we’ve been there all along? Or is chaos, on the contrary, something we should welcome?
“A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
two things are one.”— Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos”
I hope that clears everything up.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
