Chaos As Social Order

modelling[sic] the system”(6).  Dissipation–depreciation, degeneration, degradation, die-off, extinction–may be seen as the means by which normally and naturally functioning social and natural systems stabilize long-term function against short-term instability caused by proliferation of divergences.  Dissipation, in this sense, according to Hao, “causes the volume representing the initial states in phase space to contract in the process of evolution”(19).

            Oscillations in practices of all kinds are well known and extensively documented (Shils).  Oscillations are identified as such in a field of possibilities whose limits are defined by the tolerance of the practitioners for divergence.  A tolerable range of difference exists, as I describe in detail elsewhere (Cornberg (1)), not as a statistical array or generalization, unless quantification of actions is specifically sought, but as a range of preferences enacted and reenacted in contexts.  The tolerable range of difference defines a phase or state space in social life; enactment and reenactment of preferences constitute trajectories of practice.  When a trajectory does not span the attractor, it dies out.

            The research of Ott and Sommerer also encourages us to seek what we have already found in other ways–nested, embedded, and encaptic contexts or attractors.  The critical attractor of every human group is reproduction.  Examples of human groups are families, tribes, nations, and corporations.  All living things must reproduce for their species to survive but humans have the additional task of reproducing practices not just progeny.  Reproduction, such as human progeny, language transmission, and continuity of traditions, all

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