Entropy

Babies are chaos machines.  Of course, that's the nature of the universe, or at least of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy tends toward a maximum, that order devolves into disorder.

Helena has always loved to make a mess, but now that she is bigger and more mobile, she is more effective at destruction.  Perhaps her favorite activity in the world right now is tearing down towers that Rita and I build from plastic blocks.  It animates her like noting else, bating her breath, inspiring her to do things she doesn't like to do, like crawl; she's always wanted to walk, but crawling just doesn't do it for her.  Even so, right now, as I am writing, Rita has been building towers, and Helena has convinced herself to crawl just to topple them.

I think, though, that this little experiment shows the conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and the process of human history.  While Helena increases entropy in the world, she's actually building order in herself: she's learning new things, building new neural pathways, and growing up.

Physicists suggest that entropy may be the arrow of time, what makes humans perceive time as passing, and not like the other three dimensions, which we feel as spacial, through which we can move and then return.  But the way we understand time growing up is exactly the opposite, as an increase of order.

All of which, I suppose, returns us to what Helena taught me about Hegel this weekend.  The old German philosopher may be right that that history advances through negative, but it is a very strange sort of negation that does it.  Rather like learning how to crawl in order to tear down a tower so that, to quote Joshua before the battle of Jericho, one stone not lie atop another.