Chaos As Social Order

young people in Taipei was the subject of my dissertation as well as of two articles ((2) and (3)) which condensed the content of the dissertation for a wider audience.  I take the position that the moral experience of young people in contemporary urban Taiwan–Taipei–can best be understood in terms of three interacting sites:  the family, the street, and the school.  On the basis of historical considerations that include the perdurant streams of classical Chinese and the intervening streams of European, Japanese, and American civilizations, the moral basin of each context or attractor can be characterized as family/hierarchy, street/fluidity, and school/competition.

            When young people in Taipei traverse, inhabit, and (re)create each site in the course of a day, they are the bearers of the pieces of each basin that recursively layer one another in ongoing oscillations of attitude and behavior.  They carry from the family a hierarchically ordered deference to older siblings and adults into the street and the school.  They carry from the school an egalitarian competition into the school and the family.  From the street they carry a fluid, individualizing sense of freedom and responsibility into both the family and the school.  As layered, recursive carriers of practices who are continually impacted by their peers and by adults, young people live social reality as porous.

            Porosity can be understood as a metric on the state space of society.  The degree of porosity–interpenetration, mixing/folding– is a good index of the degree of chaos in social life.

            The porosity of the space, moreover, makes it holographic in the sense indicated by Ott and Sommerer’s

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37