Jason Peterson
December 4, 2009
Theory of Knowledge 2
“People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events (adapted from John Gray, Heresies, 2004).” In what way and to what extent would you say this claim is relevant in at least two areas of knowledge?
The statement is relevant to the natural sciences and history. People have a need to find an “order” because people, as stated in Grendel, are “patternmakers.” We must find a way to make sense of the world around us and by doing so we find ourselves in a state of believed truth. Chaos has no order and thus we cannot grasp the concept of disorder. By finding patterns within things we find that there is “order” within “disorder.” The problem lies with that people need to have an “order.” We cannot simple function without it. I must wake up everyday at 6:45am, take a shower, shave, put on clothes and shoes, tie shoes, and then drive to school. If someone were to disruption our “order” then it is almost seen as taboo. Take example of the first day of school. Everyone goes to their first class and sits where ever they choose and go on throughout their school day, assuming that there are no assigned seats. If this “order” goes on for an extended amount of time then it’s safe to say that close to all of those students are still sitting in their seats in the same way they were on the first day of school. I see it everyday in school; where if one student sits in the seat of another student who sat there the previous day then the second student become enraged at the first student for disrupting the second student’s “order.” One tiny, almost insignificant occurrence (well I think its little), caused the disruption of an entire classroom just because one student interfered with another’s “order.” The same effect goes when parking a car. When I drive to work or to school I park in the same spot every single day. I admit I get mad when I see someone else in “my” parking spot as well. So technically what right do I have to write a paper on the people needs for order where as I myself have my own personal biases? It is because that I experience them as well that enables me to comprehend and understand what I am describing as a way of defining people’s necessity for order.
The sciences have the most chaos than any other area of knowledge. The sciences are the area of knowledge that has, to some degree, the least amount of knowledge obtained so far. Science enables us to put definitions onto things that which we do not comprehend. For instance the basic of the atom is a fundamental theory that has been created so that we can understand what makes up the world and all the objects around us. Physicists tell us that our bodies have millions and millions of molecules that have more space between them and that no molecule is ever “touching” another molecule. Without these basic theories produced by “patternmakers” other pattern makers would not be able to understand what was happening to them amongst the chaos of the world. The natural sciences are based on the chaos of the world and when we try to apply order to thing pre-described disorder can actually cause more harm than good. For example, a few months ago three fellow students and I participated in the “Group 4” project which is common throughout the I.B. programme. We had to learn how to use a pH detector for our experiment; however, we only learned how to use the tool the day prior to the actual field test. This was a problem for us for we were trying to put and “order” to the data that we were collecting however the chaos that was needed in order to attempt to find order caused more problems than solutions. The quick learning of the tools and instruments could not have produced a valid test result and thus not a valid order to the chaos. Natural sciences have theories that are based off the repetitive recreation of a law. A theory is not the same as an idea or belief, yet can a theory not be? A theory in raw form is just the collection of “assumed to be correct” information that we ourselves created in order to find order. Is that not what a belief is? Is that not what religion is? Should we rather consider “science” to be more of a “religion” than a method to attempting to unravel the chaos? Chaos is not a tangible thing that we can comprehend and thus we fear it. Through fear we find comfort in order and thus when our order is disrupted we become fearful. All in all the natural sciences have a way for us to define the order amongst the chaos, but it short there is no way for us to completely understand disorder or order. There are no truths in science just laws and proven theories that we will continue to assume are correct, for we are not capable of knowing that we do not know.
Historians throughout the ages have recorded the past and present knowledge so that we can understand what the past was like. However there is a great downfall to this. If a historian is too write about the 18th century, should not the author live in the time period to accurately describe it? Also the phrase “the winner of war writes the history” which in short means that history is mainly based on that of a one sided opinion. When reading a history book how do we truly “know” (assuming that there is a thing as “knowing”) that the author is not some washed-up math teacher putting his or her spin on what they think is history? However some exceptions would be that yes many history books go through rigorous processing by other “credited” historians. Yet for a history book to be acknowledged in short means that the information that is within the pages of the book coincides with what the historian believes to be “history.” Reading a book about WWII form an American History text book would be a lot different than that of a Japanese WWII text book. We truly can never know about history because we “pick and choose” what to learn about. We “choose” what we deem to be “relevant” on the topic being learnt. Every “historical” text book on the subject being taught is literally equivalent to that of a grain of sand amongst the Sahara Desert. How do we choose what is relevant or not? What is more important: the goal or the means to reach that goal? There are no “true” answers for these questions just like there are no truths in science or history.
In conclusion the belief that people need order when dealing with chaos is the only “true” information that can be stated. Natural sciences provided us with the ability to see things beyond our own visual spectrum and history teaches valuable lessons from leaders from the past yet we should assume that none of it is “true.” We must live out our lives being naïve so much so that we do not go insane by the sheer vastness of implication of what chaos is and the desperate things we humans have done, are doing, and will be doing in order to find our “order.”
