“People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events"?

            The question at hand is a very difficult one to answer, as it proposes a relationship between human desire and a field of study, the human sciences. It is also problematic in its vagueness; what exactly is the “order” or the “chaos” that Gray talks about? When he mentions the “chaos of events,” he refers not to a traditional form of chaos, but, rather, the uninterrupted and unpredictable course of human history. The “order” that has to be glimpsed from it is a way to be able to understand why the things happen the way they do and why they happen at all. Finally, the question proposes an intriguing knowledge issue: what makes something relevant and can relevancy mean different things? In this blog post, I will try to evaluate the prompt with this in mind.

            Fields within the human sciences such as psychology seem to provide the quick and easy response: people’s need to find order in the chaos of events is extremely relevant in the human sciences. The Gestalt theory of visual perception, familiar to all (or most) psychologists, provides perhaps the most appropriate analogy to demonstrate this. When black spots are displayed on a white screen in such a way that they suggest a shape, say a triangle, we will be able to see that triangle although its not really there. This suggests that the brain has self-organizing tendencies, trying to find patterns, or order, in the middle of a mess, chaos. Although this is limited to perception, it can also be seen in other ways of knowing. In 1961, a Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, was on trial and this triggered people’s emotions, making them ask the question, “could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” The holocaust was a majorly unpredictable event and yet people were trying to understand why and how it could have ever happened. When Stanley Milgram set out to answer this question with the aptly named Milgram experiment, he proposed in the possibility that there could be some explanation why such an atrocity could happen. In other words, he was suggesting that order could be glimpsed from absolute chaos. This claim becomes relevant in this case for the human sciences because it served as an impetus for psychological research.

In some cases, the person that wants to find order is not the observer, but the observed. This is seen directly in what is known as the Hawthorne effect—people have a tendency to modify their behavior when they know they are being studied in order to produce the result they believe the observer wants to see. In such a case, it is evident that people need to make sense of the situation they have been placed in. They don’t know what is being tested (they actually have no idea what is actually going on) and thus, try to find order in a chaotic situation. This occurred with the Stanford Prison Experiment’s “John Wayne,” who claimed that he acted more violently because that is what he thought was expected of him. Whether or not this claim is true as inconsequential, as it still evidences someone trying to understand why he behaved in a certain way. Even decades after the experiment, he was trying to find order in the chaos of the experiment. This demonstrates a relevancy of the idea that people need to understand why the unpredictable happens in the human sciences because it can be seen anyone, and is thus of value for many a psychologist.

All that said, there is evidence to suggest that the claim is not relevant in the human sciences. When Milgram published his findings, people were shocked: how could it be that 65 percent of people were willing to administer a lethal shock to a complete stranger? This data could suggest reasons for why the atrocities in the holocaust were allowed to happen, but the population was averse to the findings. This suggests that humans are not actually looking to find order or to understand why some things happened; rather, they want to confirm their own suspicions and feelings. They wanted to show that “normal people” are not the same as a Nazi war criminal and once the data suggested otherwise, they reacted negatively with much emotion. What this shows is the opposite of Gray’s claims, people want to find what they expect, not order from the chaos events. This is similar to another idea, that of confirmation bias, a tendency of social scientists to cherry pick information or interpret it in such a way that aids their beliefs and hypotheses. Many times, researchers will go into a study with supposed full knowledge of what their end result will be and will only look at results that support this. This, again, suggests that instead of trying to find order, we are simply trying to satiate ourselves and our beliefs. This excludes the claim from relevancy in the human sciences, for the pre-disposed biases and emotions overrule the need for order. The field of anthropology can also be seen as a counter claim. When an anthropologist places himself in a different culture for an ethnographic study, he undergoes what is known as reflexivity. in anthropological research; observer and observed

When conducting the alien anthropological ethography, I felt that the only thing I wanted to do when using my “objective lens” was to make sense of everything the humans do. With an objective perspective on all that occurred around me, every event, like Gray said, seemed like chaos, and I just wanted to find order in that mess. As a pretend anthropologist in that case, I realized the extreme relevancy of the idea that order must be found from the chaos of events, which, in turn created a personal knowledge issue—am I able to objectively discuss this topic even if I had an experience that leaned strongly towards one side? Yes; by analyzing both sides, as I did, I can eliminate my bias, and as such am ready to evaluate the claim. It appears that something is relevant to a particular area of study if it will affect it significantly. In this case, it appears that a “need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events” is, to a great extent, relevant in the human sciences, for, even if there are cases when human sciences do not deal with this need, the fact that there are many cases that only came to be as a result of this need displays a great relevance of it to the human sciences.