Order Is a Verb

On why anything stands at all.

I · THE LEAVING

Everything that exists is leaving. This is not pessimism; it is bookkeeping. Left alone, things drift toward disorder. Heat spreads. Paint fades. The cup falls and does not reassemble. The old name for this drift is entropy, and the word has long since escaped into everyday speech as a synonym for decay.

Now look at what is sitting in the room with you. A cell. A sentence. A column of stone, fluted and balanced, standing where the same sun has spent twenty-five centuries trying to return it to sand. If drift were the whole story, none of these would be here.

II · THE LOOPHOLE

They are here because the drift has a loophole large enough to hold a civilisation: it describes things left entirely to themselves, and nothing alive is left to itself.

In 1944 Erwin Schrödinger put it simply: a living thing keeps itself ordered by feeding on what he called “negative entropy”. It takes in what it needs and sends the disorder out into the world. Order does not have to win a war against decay. It only needs something to run on, and the discipline to keep running.

So order is not a thing you have. It is a thing you do. A river is not a shape; it is a continuous act of shaping. Stop the flow, and the form is gone by evening.

III · THE WORD

We have always had a name for the drift. We were slower to name its counterpart. In 1983 the novelist J. Neil Schulman used extropic in The Rainbow Cadenza. In 1988 Max More and Tom Morrow gave the idea a journal, Extropy, and a banner. The coinage is plain Latin plumbing: extra-, beyond, and entropy. Beyond the drift.

It is worth being exact about what the word is. It is not a law, and it makes no prediction. Nothing guarantees that anything will grow in order, intelligence or vitality. Extropic is an adjective for a direction, and a direction is a thing a system can have, lose and recover.

IV · THE OLD INTUITION

The intuition is older than the word by two and a half thousand years. Heraclitus saw that you cannot step into the same river twice, and drew the wrong conclusion only if you think the river is a thing. Aristotle called flourishing an activity, not a state: you do not arrive at a good life, you keep performing one. Spinoza, in the Ethics, wrote that each thing strives, as far as it can, to persevere in its being, and called that striving its very essence.

Camus pictured Sisyphus pushing a stone that always rolls back, and concluded that one must imagine him happy. The extropic temperament adds one quiet amendment. Some stones, pushed carefully, stay. We call them walls, and bridges, and laws.

V · THE WISDOM OF THE BODY

Medicine learned this before philosophy had words for it. In the 1870s Claude Bernard saw that the body works to hold its own inner environment steady, and called that steadiness the condition of a free life. In 1926 Walter Cannon named it homeostasis, and in 1932 gave his book a title that says everything: The Wisdom of the Body. Every second, you are the sum of ten thousand corrections.

Most of the great victories of medicine have been victories of attention. In 1847 Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers died less often when doctors washed their hands, and was mocked for it. In 1854 John Snow removed the handle from a single pump on Broad Street, and a cholera outbreak ended. In 1928 Alexander Fleming looked twice at a spoiled culture dish. Smallpox killed an estimated three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone; in 1980 the World Health Organization declared it gone. In 1900 the average human lived about thirty-two years. Today it is more than seventy. None of that was a miracle. It was boundaries, currents and repairs, done on purpose, by many people, for a long time.

VI · THE MIND

The mind keeps its own order, and loses it in its own ways. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the camps, wrote that people can bear almost any how if they have a why, a line he borrowed from Nietzsche and proved with his life. In the late 1970s the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky asked what medicine rarely asked: not what makes people ill, but what keeps them well. In 1949 Donald Hebb proposed that the connections of the brain strengthen with use, and the century since has shown that he was right: a mind is not a fixed object but a habit the brain keeps.

It would be too neat to say that suffering is only a loss of structure, and it is not a treatment to say so. But look at how recovery tends to look from the outside: a current (sleep, food, light), a boundary (limits, safety, someone who can say no), a memory (a story in which the day makes sense). The slow rebuilding is rarely heroic. It is usually repetitive. That is not a failure of drama. It is how order is made.

VII · REWRITING THE TEXT OF LIFE

In 1922 in Toronto, a dying boy was given insulin and began to recover; a disease that had been a sentence became a condition. In 2003 the first human genome was read to the end. In 2012 Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed how to cut a genome at a chosen place. In 2020, within a year of a new virus’s genetic sequence being published, vaccines built on messenger RNA were in people’s arms.

It is tempting to call this mastery. It is closer to proofreading. A genome is the longest text anyone has ever tried to read, and biotechnology is the art of noticing a misprint and correcting it without damaging the sentence around it. The humility in that comparison is the point. The reader who tears out pages is not a better reader.

VIII · THE LONG MEMORY

Civilisations are also things that stand only while they are held up. Monks copied manuscripts by candlelight for centuries so that a sentence could outlive its paper. Around 1450 Gutenberg made the copying cheap, and memory stopped depending on a single hand. Rome’s aqueducts carried a river into a city; one of them, begun in 19 BC, still carries water to Rome. After the Great Stink of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette built London’s sewers, and the city’s deaths from cholera stopped repeating. Every one of these is the same trick: a current, a boundary, a memory.

The Parthenon makes the point more plainly than any essay. In 1687 a shell set off a powder store inside it. For about fifty years now, architects have been putting back what they can, stone by numbered stone. The temple is not a survivor. It is a long, shared, repeating decision.

IX · THREE HABITS

Look at anything that has lasted, from a bacterium to a constitution to a temple, and you find the same three habits.

It takes in a current. Food, light, attention, labour, money, argument. Something flows through it and something leaves, and the structure lives in the difference.

It keeps a boundary. A membrane, a skin, a border, a foundation, a set of rules. A boundary is not a wall against the world; it is what makes “inside” a meaningful word, so that order can accumulate somewhere.

It remembers and repairs. Genes, libraries, craft, law. Memory is how a pattern outlives the material it is made of, and repair is how it outlives its own mistakes.

X · THE ARCHITECTURE

Decay is the weather. You cannot repeal it, and you would not be thanked if you tried. But no one has ever been forced to live without a roof because it rains.

This is the quiet wisdom hidden in an unusual word. It asks for neither optimism nor denial. It asks only that you notice which way the current runs in the things you care about, a body, a friendship, a craft, a city, a mind, and that you put your effort where order has to be paid for. It will always have to be paid for. That is not the tragedy of order. It is the meaning of it.

Every standing thing is a decision, renewed.

extropic (adj.) tending toward growth, order and life; the opposite of entropic.