Order and Chaos
The law of disorder, which Albert Einstein calls the most basic law of science, states that everything, when left on its own, leads to chaos. The state has an important job to try to counteract this occurrence by new reconstructions and regulations in many realms of life. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott discusses the simplifications that took place, specifically in Paris around the eighteenth century.
Descartes stressed the value that comes with a logical construction of a city with straight line streets intersecting at right angles. Many advantages come to the state with such a utopian design, including transparency, underground order of pipes, cables, subways, and more, as well as easy accessibility and navigation for the military. I experienced the benefits in my own way during my time in DC, where navigation was easy in a city that is primarily constructed on a grid, with streets named sequentially by numbers or letters. Though residents do not always benefit directly from this legibility, it has allowed for great opportunities for the market, decrease in crime, and public health advancements.
Map of DC
These simplifications extend beyond city mapping in ways that order is restored to the state. Previously, a person’s name changed with different stages of life, but since the creation of surnames that began to emerge in the fifteenth century, there has been more reliable documentation and administrative registries. This allowed for the influence of the state to increase as order among people became more consistent and organized.
The power of the state also expanded as an official language was named. In France, officials named French the standard language of the country, which provided a necessary standardization for the country’s administration and a bonding commonality among the French people. This was important for the French culture because as travel routes were expanding as well, the people had a way to remain unified by the common language. These changes may have seemed radical at the time, but they brought standardization and order to a state that would have, otherwise, been dominated by chaos.
