That's the gist of it. Cellular Automata are the same concept, maybe even simpler, since equations aren't required to appreciate them. It's good to remember occasionally that nature doesn't do math, but really excels at recess.
The social movements of the 20th century - feminism, racial diversity, sexual freedom, the welfare state - were all deconstructive. Using these movements to create a new society is like building a house with dynamite. It's why Derrida is so flip; he can't answer the dumb s--- question by the science major fulfilling an elective: If you deconstruct everything, what's left?
One answer to that question is a dark age, perhaps the end of man. But chaos gives a strange hope. The world is not descending, but breaking up (who cares how) to rebuild again. There are patterns and structures, swirls and eddies all around us, jousting, combining, most fading away, but something is filling the landscape.
Very interesting observation, monkey. I agree with you that the social movements to which you refer were all deconstructive, and moreover reductionist and disordering. But this leads to a question: What, exactly, are these movements deconstructing, reducing, and disordering?
I have my own speculations about that, of course. For I do understand the question and have been thinking about it for a while now. Without getting into a whole lot of details here, IMHO the “what” can be summed up by what Eric Voegelin has termed the millennial constant: which has to do with the ways man historically has understood himself in relation to God and man, the world and society. My speculation is that what we are seeing in Western society today is a kind of “end stage” of a social process that began to gather steam in the eighteenth century. Generically, the process is called Progressivism, which is itself a complex of ideas (e.g., materialism, phenomenalism, positivism, utilitarianism, scientism, atheism).
There are other precedents in history for this type of general breakdown in the social order — Athens, Rome, nineteenth-century Europe in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, et al. Inevitably, once these things have run their course (and we’re still living in the time of the last, though even that is changing before our very eyes), then man has had to search for, and restore, the order of himself and society.
What these smelly little deconstructionists are trying to do is simply to expunge the idea of society (you can just forget about God) as having any particular legitimate claim on human beings. For them, the “radical individual” is all there is. (And then they set to deconstructing that.) Yet there is no way to reconstruct a decent human society from that premise alone. But then, isn’t that the entire point of the deconstructionist exercise? As you say, it’s like trying to build a house with dynamite….
Gleick’s Chaos suggests that there are deep structures of order “hiding under” the apparent disorder that we see in the world. I gather that Cellular Automata suggests the same also. The message seems to be that, in any dynamic, non-linear system, disorder left to itself long enough will eventually recur back to the fundamental structured state.
We assume the universality of entropy, the tendency of things to disorder and decomposition, to falling apart into their elemental constituents. I gather that the deconstructionists are in the entropy business. Yet chaos theory suggests something altogether different about the way nature (and presumably human nature and human societies), “left to her own devices,” operates. I, too, see chaos theory as a strangely hopeful development.
LOL monkey, “…nature doesn’t do math, but really excels at recess”! Of course nature doesn’t do math. But I’m beginning to wonder whether she must execute a certain program, which the equations are attempting to penetrate and describe in a suitable human language. Perhaps all that nature does at recess is to generate complexity from a small set of simple, universal rules. Diversity in unity.
IMHO Chaos was an odd book in a certain way. I imagine an atheist reading it might find ways to account for a universe without God in its pages. Yet a theist might view it as furnishing evidence of the hand (or rather, the mind) of God at work in all things. Remarkably, Gleick cites Plato twice, delighting this reader. He even touched on the millennial constant once. I suppose there are few works written these days that could/would draw such a variety of reactions…. This is really heady stuff! I’m looking forward to A New Kind of Science, which should arrive Monday. Thanks, monkey – bb.