La Mano, also known as The Fingers of Punta del Este, is one of the most evocative pieces of public art I have seen anywhere in the world, and for me is emblematic of the human condition.
As the philosopher Steven Pinker has argued, entropy (the falling apart of all things) is a basic physical principle, otherwise known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
As he puts it, “If you walk away from a sand castle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.”
But humans have shown that as a species we are capable of overcoming entropy. It’s what we have done for our whole existence on the planet and what we will always do. We are that hand thrusting out of the sand.
Bad things happen. It’s built into the world. But quoting Pinker again, “The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving is to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An under-appreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.”