The Chaotic Society: Product of the Social Morphological Revolution

Abstract

SOCIETY as a whole has been viewed historically from many perspectives. It has been envisaged among other ways as great (Wallas, 1916), acquisitive (Tawney, 1920), and affluent (Galbraith, 1958). Contemporary society, whether observed globally, nationally, or locally, is realistically characterized as chaotic and best understood as anachronistic Contemporary society is realistically characterized as chaotic because of its manifest confusion and disorder-the essential elements of chaos. On the international scene, to draw upon a few examples, consider the situation in Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the Middle East, and Nigeria. On the national level consider the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, and almost any country in Asia, Latin America or Africa. On the local level, in the United States, consider New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, Miami, and over 100 other cities which have been wracked by violence. Contemporary society can be best understood when it is viewed as an anachronistic society. To be sure, society at any time, at least during the period of recorded history, has been an anachronistic society. For throughout the millennia of the historical era, society, at any instant in time, comprised layers of culture which, like geological strata, reflected the passage and deposits of time. Confusion and disorder, or chaos, may be viewed in large part as the resultant of the dissonance and discord among the various cultural strata, each of which tends to persist beyond the set of conditions, physical and social, which generated it. In some ways chaos in contemporary society differs from that in earlier societies only in degree. But there are a number of unique factors in contemporary chaos which make it more a difference in kind. First, contemporary society, as the most recent, contains the greatest number of cultural layers, and, therefore, the greatest potential for confusion and disorder. Second, contemporary society, by reason of the social morphological revolution, possesses cultural layers much more diverse than any predecessor society and, therefore, much greater dissonance. Third, contemporary society, unlike any predecessor, contains the means of its own destruction, the ultimate weapon, the explosive power of nuclear fusion. Fourth, fortunately, contemporary society possesses the knowledge, embodied in the emerging social sciences, including sociology, that affords some hope for the dissipation of confusion and the restoration of order before the advent of collective suicide. It is a moot question, however, as to whether society yet possesses the will and the organization to utilize available knowledge to this end. * Prepared as Presidential Address, 63rd Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Boston. August 28, 1968. 1