World mythologies are superficially immensely varied, recounting tales of hundreds of gods and heroes in dozens of languages and social settings. Despite their many differing details, most seem to address the key, charged tension between chaos and order, and their close relatives, destruction and creation.
In the Old Testament, God supposedly created the world out of an immense, unknowable darkness. The completion of His world garden was followed by the promise of His good will to Noah, and the later imposition of social order in the form of the ten commandments.
Hindu mythology presents us with cycles of creation and destruction, reflecting an ordered world, a descent into chaos, followed by renewal.
The details vary, the message remains the same. Human beings and their broader societies can fall into madness and chaos, but it’s hopeful to think that order can be restored.
Two extended wars, the Napoleonic Wars and Second World War, included among their putative motives, imposing order “on the chaos of Europe.”
Napoleon updated the French law code and tried to apply it throughout the Europe he had conquered, until, that is, the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 and his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
Hitler wanted to purify the racial composition of Europe by extinguishing the Jews and exterminating minor sects of people he had decided were inferior—anyone physically or mentally challenged, as well as homosexuals, gypsies, or anyone else who didn’t fit his model of Aryan superiority. Such people were interned, executed, or worked to death.
Similar fantasies haven’t lost their allure — consider the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, where lunatic leaders have imagined they can impose order, paradoxically by unleashing chaotic violence and destruction.
An ordered world suggests the element of predictability. Climatologists have observed that the last ten thousand years or so have been marked by a generally consistent range of climatic variations. True, there were brief interruptions to this pattern, caused by such events as massive volcanic eruptions, but temperatures, rainfall, and other aspects of climate fell within a general bell curve range that enabled human civilizations to evolve into their varied bio-geographical niches.
Today, despite dramatically improved weather prediction, the security of a benign climate’s predictability is slipping away. Citizens of Tuvalu watch as the rising sea level eats away their island home.
Atmospheric rivers dump unheard-of amounts of rainfall in unexpected places.
Drought, heat and wind have recently destroyed thousands of hectares of the great city of Los Angeles by wildfire.
The COVID that killed millions may easily be followed by new epidemics, especially when a growing, skeptical subset of the public prefers thoughts and prayers to vaccination and proper medical care.
This kind of disorder is profoundly disheartening, in that our capacities to respond to emergent catastrophes are being eroded, even as previously reliable food-producing areas are gradually becoming uninhabitable, further stressing the world system.
Our sociopolitical responses increasingly consist of scapegoating, dimwitted forms of discrimination, varieties of greed and violence, and the atavistic desire to return to some mythic paradise through increasingly energetic application of methods that are causing the disorder in the first place.
“Bring it home?”
More like a 21st century version of King Canute trying to command the tides.
“Drill, baby, drill?”
The repeated mantra of a president described by his own staff as a f***king moron.
Welcome to chaos, folks.
