Meaning, not raw facts, is what humanity seeks, and society is a
collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning.
Ordering is one of the simplest and most durable human methods for
finding or making meaning. Take a variety of things and put them in
some kind of relationship, a simple sequence, a taxonomy, a hierarchy,
or a cause-and-effect pattern, say, and they make sense, apparently for
no better reason than the tautological one that order and relationship
are felt by human beings to be meaningful.
-- Alvin Kernan. The Death of Literature