The Order of Things

The world we see around us is one of infinite complexity, and to look at it and think about that world seems to be an important part of the human experience. In other words, we interpret how we stand within the order of things. Although it might be tempting, we should not descend into what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as the “fallacy of the rule,” where we force the world into a formal set of categories. The problem with this is that we have taken what is an organic set of behaviors and forced it into an artificial one. There is, as we understand it, no order of things. The very word “order” suggests that there are natural rules that the world follows. The variety of human experiences cannot be forced into these categories because the categories are made to shape human behavior, rather than to simply observe it.