Social order makes the urban world of strangers bearable by predicting identities.

Evidence

The order which is found in human life may be created in a variety of ways. It may emerge through a series of mutual agreements and understandings. It may be imposed on the majority by a small group with a corner on power. It may simply develop without special intent on anyone’s part. Or it may arise out of some combination of agreement, coercion, and “accident.” However it is created, once in operation, order functions to make life relatively predictable and thus, in some senses, bearable. Just how the appearential order of the preindustrial city came to be, just how the socially defined identities of the urban populace came to be so overtly expressed, is lost in history. But once this order emerged, it served to make predictable, and thus bearable, the world of strangers that is the city. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 260

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s framing: when the appearential order collapses in the modern city, the result is precisely the isolation and unreliable witnessing that Cole’s narrator embodies.