Ordering this blog: Part II.

Before delving into the innermost essence of humanity, an explanation for why this blog came to be is in order.*

This project is inspired by National Endowment for the Humanities “Enduring Questions” grant awarded to Dr. Joanne Robinson, a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The “Enduring Questions” grant ”supports faculty members in the teaching and development of a new course that will foster intellectual community through the study of an enduring question. This question-driven course will encourage undergraduates and teachers to grapple with a fundamental concern of human life addressed by the humanities, and to join together in a deep and sustained program of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.” The aforementioned prompt inspired the development of a course on human attempts to organize the world as it is.

The course description for this course and the major impetus for this blog is as follows:

What is order? Is order inherent in nature or is it a human construct (or a mix of both?) When is order appropriate and when is it restrictive or even oppressive? What assumptions form the foundations for classifying and categorizing things, people and ideas? This class will examine theoretical foundational cosmological myths alongside various historical approaches toclassification.Students will have ample opportunity to delve into classification and order schemes outside the classroom.

Human beings are constantly involved in making, unmaking and maintaining order, yet we rarely have time to reflect on what order is and why it matters. We unthinkingly accept many ordering schemes (such as age-based grouping of children in traditional classrooms) and consider others the concern of specialists (such as botanical nomenclature.) Yet concerns about order and the threat of disorder have pervaded Western thought and practice. Many humanities courses explore specific ordering systems related to race, gender, religion and social class; consequently, students tend to have asensitivity to how race and class are "ordered," but they rarely have a chance to explore other ordering systems. This course will examine order as an abstract concept with very tangible and pervasive results. Above all, student in this course will examine how the orders we posit or acknowledge shape our understanding of ourselves in the world.

Using these questions to begin, I attempt to question order, structure and the human need for understanding, utilizing this blog as a means to present my thoughts. (Or, rather, order my thoughts…)

Over the course of this blog, I will attempt to ferret out my thoughts, ideally in the Talkeetna Mountain Range of Alaska. 

* Author's note: the almost unnoticeable compulsion to explain why I created this blog illustrates the very reason that this blog exist. 

Ordering this blog: Part 1.

Greetings! Salutations! Welcome one and all to “Order and the World,” a blog intended to examine the most widely accepted phenomenon in human society—the existence of order.

"Order in the world..." basically, why does this bother us? 

Call it whatever you would like—order, structure, organization, et. cetera—the premise remains the same. Whether or not we readily accept it, human beings crave a sense of order; we like to know that things have a predictable structure that we in turn utilize to understand the world around us. What happens, though, when we take a step back and question the very structure that allows us to question? In other words, if we investigate the very existence of order, something very shocking may happen: we may discover that order, as we know it, does not exist.

Structure or chaos? The Hewes St. Metro Station in Williamsburg, a borough of New York City. 

While I don’t yet intend to claim such a statement, I do intend to utilize this blog to investigate the thing so obvious that it is often left unacknowledged: you guessed it, order. Come along for the ride and join me in my attempt to question the most quintessential facets of human existence.

As mentioned, this blog seeks"...to question the most quintessential facets of human existence," namely, the purpose of the above contraption in Louisville, Kentucky.