The chaos lapping at the edge of our lives

When explorers like Columbus stumbled onto a landmass on their haphazard voyages across the water, they were always trying to figure out whether they’d found an island or a peninsula or an entire continent. The only way to tell was to follow the shore. The only way to figure out the big picture was to study the edges, the places where the land grew thin and then disappeared. That’s how it is sometimes in life.

This weekend, my husband and I were watching the Padres playing the Dodgers in the MLB playoffs. It was a heated game, especially for baseball, and in the 7^th inning, the referees stopped play because Dodgers fans were throwing objects onto the field. Mostly they were throwing things at Jurickson Profar, who had taunted them earlier when he plucked Mookie Betts’s homerun out of the stands. Then they started throwing things at another outfielder, Fernando Tatis, Jr.

The delay lasted nine minutes, which is a long time when measured in the tightness of a pitcher’s throwing arm. It wasn’t clear from the TV broadcast exactly what was happening. The public address announcer reminded the fans several times that throwing objects onto the field was grounds for expulsion from the game. Perhaps security was in the stands doing just that, escorting fans out of the stadium. If the officials were waiting for the fans to calm down, it wasn’t working. The booing just got louder and louder. They brought the outfielders in to protect them. They waited.

It was one of those moments that happens sometimes in sports and other venues where the very thin line between chaos and order suddenly becomes visible. If the fans wanted to keep throwing stuff onto the field, there was really nothing the officials could do to stop them. They could empty the entire stadium, but that would be quite the undertaking. There is a rule that I’ve heard evoked in the NFL that if fans won’t stop throwing things onto the field, it becomes a forfeit and therefore a loss for the home team. But the Dodgers were already losing so that threat didn’t mean much. It’s also unlikely to happen in a playoff game.

The bottom line is that if the 56,000 people in Dodgers stadium decided they wanted to throw shit at the players or storm the field or engage in a gladiator-style free for all, there’s not much the officials or security could do about it. Say the security team is one hundred people. One hundred versus 56,000? I know who I’m putting my money on.

I’ve seen similar moments in NFL games when the players on the field get into scuffles or all-out fights and the referees, who generally look like small children compared to the very large men playing the game, try to stop these altercations. Eventually, cooler minds prevail, but if two football teams wanted to go all-out and fight each other, there is simply no way the referees could stop them.

On the sports field and in life the line between order and chaos is so very thin. That line only becomes visible when you stand at the edge. When the curtain slips and you see how chaos is always lurking.

This essay, though, is not about the chaos, but the miracle of the order. I do not believe that civilization is all that keeps us from devolving into Lord of the Flies-level violence. In fact, when a group of schoolboys were stranded on an island in real life, they did not kill or hunt each other. They cooperated and took care of each other. This is probably much truer to our human nature than so many fictional accounts. The question of why we are so very invested in the idea of humans as inherently violent and destructive is a whole other subject.

Photo by Yuriy MLCN on Unsplash

What’s interesting to me about the case of the Dodgers’ fans is precisely that it is a rarity. Most of the time, fans do not throw things onto the field. Most of the times on a football field, players do not throw punches, even though they are engaged in a legalized form of assault. Even players from the opposing team reach down and pull each other up off the ground. They joke and laugh with each other. The fights happen, but they are the exception, not the rule. Why?

This is a question that obsesses sociologists. Nicholas Christakis argues that there’s a social suite of mostly positive tendencies that are part of our evolutionary heritage. Put kids together in a group to play by themselves, he argues, and they’ll quickly form a little society with rules for how to get along. They will not resort to hunting or eating each other. Christakis is a sociologist, so making a case for a human nature based in biology is strange from a disciplinary perspective.

Much earlier, Emile Durkheim proposed that what holds society together is a sense of solidarity and belonging, often rooted in our interdependence. We need each other, Durkheim argued. More than that, it feels good to belong to a group. We like it. We crave it.

I don’t know exactly what magical force keeps the 56,000 people in Dodgers stadium from devolving into chaos. Or what keeps traffic moving in an orderly manner most of the time. I don’t know why we line up at the grocery checkout and keep our shit together even when the person in front of us is doing something slow and insane like, you know, writing a check in 2024. We do, though. Even during the pandemic when our anxiety and fear and aversion toward other people stretched us to our very limits. We still went about our lives in a fairly orderly way.

No big deal. Order is all around us. We depend on it. We take it for granted. It’s invisible most of the time. But when you take a moment to see it—really see it—it’s hard not to be amazed. It’s hard, at least for me, not to conclude that there’s a message in this orderliness. Chaos always threatens, but deep down, we’d rather not throw stuff at baseball players. We’d rather not be violent. The order is easy. Creating chaos is hard. In the moments when people are working so hard to create that chaos, it’s good to remember that it is, in fact, hard work. It takes effort to live at those edges. I imagine it’s exhausting. I’m exhausted just watching it.

Chaos is always lapping at the shore of our orderly lives. Sometimes it’s good to stand there at the edge and see it, just to appreciate the solid feel of land under our feet.