Chaos As Social Order

has changed.  Its phase space now includes multi-story office buildings with advanced electronic equipment in Fairbanks, satellite dishes with color TVs, and the latest in snowmachines and outboard motors in the villages.  The trajectories of an older, slower, more complicated language, and an older, slower, less reliable material technology, with hunting and gathering as their basin of attraction, do not span the new attractor.  The result is that they become transients with varying degrees and kinds of “death.”

            Languages that span the national and international artistic, political, economic, and military attractors are English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Arabic, and Japanese.  The history of each language shows a contraction of state space with a subsequent decrease in diversity.  A contraction decreases diversity because, as transients die out, there are fewer possible trajectories on a particular attractor.  The unification of the Chinese language, for example, began over two thousand years ago.  The creation of a standard English, French, and Spanish was also achieved at the expense of many local variations some of which, like the Catalan and Basque languages, became smaller attractors with sufficient local energy to survive, but many of which have long since ceased to exist.  It is only in the last decade, according to my own sources in the region, that Athabascans of Interior Alaska have begun to consider unification as a language preservation strategy.

2.  Moral Basins.  Features of linguistic basins are displayed by moral basins.  The last century of life in Taipei, Taiwan provides a stunning example of cross-cultural contact and mixing.  The moral experience of

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