Final Blog

Danel. Order From Chaos. 21 February, 2010. Flickr.com. 15 April, 2010.
In the Order and Chaos class we looked at the different aspects of order and chaos. One of the words that we picked to describe chaos was madness. In Elie Wiesel's story Night, he says, "Did I write this so as to go mad or, on the contrary. to go mad, in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mandkind?" (Wiesel vii). Wiesel describes everything that happened to him as madness. The people were forced to leave their homes and work in concentration camps where many of them would soon die in the gas chambers. These people were living in a life of misery.

Another word that goes along with chaos is to disobey. In The Burial At Thebes. Antigone said,"I disobeyed because the law was not the law of Zeus nor the law obtained by justice, justice dwelling deep among the gods of the dead" (Heaney 29). In the play Antigone disobeyed the law and ended up creating a lot of chaos for herself and her family. Everyone wanted her killed because she wanted to bury her brother. Even though he died a bad man, Antigone still thought that he deserved a proper burial.

Another word to describe chaos could be crime. In The Book Of Job, Zophar said, "For he knows that you are a sinner;he sees and judges your crimes" (Mitchell 31). For the crime that Job did not even commit he is being punished. It is creating chaos in his life because he wants to correct what he has done, but he has really done nothing wrong.

In the novel. 1984, Orwell describes a place where everything is dictated by "Big Brother". In the novel Orwell said, "The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, about the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up my it" (Orwell 6). The key to order in this place is that everyone has the same everything and that everyone has to watched and heard through the telescreen.

Under the group of order, the word protection could also fit. In John Stuart Mill's, On Liberty, he said "By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers" (Mills 61). This contributes to order because if everyone has equal liberties than there will not be anyone having more power than anyone else. This even stops the political rulers from having too much power over all of the people.

Through out this course I have been able to have a better understanding of Order and Chaos. Even though these words have opposite meanings it was interesting to find that all of the pieces that we read connected the two words.