ORDER THROUGH CHAOS

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ORDER THROUGH CHAOS


1. Non-equilibrium structures


Prigogine obtained the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his investigation of non-equilibrium systems which, in the words of the Nobel Committee, "created theories to bridge the gap between biological and social scientific fields of enquiry" (1976, 1980).

It is evident that the world system is far from being in an equilibrium state or even near it. As Holling notes, for example: "An equilibrium-centred view is essentially static and provides little insight into the transient behaviour of systems that are not near the equilibrium...

The present concerns for pollution and endangered species are specific signals that the well-being of the world is not adequately described by concentrating on equilibria or conditions near them." (1976, p.173).

Unfortunately the tendency has been to focus on equilibrium research and, in the case of social systems, on visions of desirable societies formulated in equilibrium terms as "peaceful" utopian end states.
This is only realistic when dealing with closed systems exchanging nothing with whatever can be described as an "external" environment.

As Jantsch notes "Equilibrium is the equivalent of stagnation or death" (1978, p.10). In the more realistic case of open systems, it is the high degree of non-equilibrium due to the presence of such exchanges which can maintain self-organizing processes that give rise to "dissipative" (non-equilibrium) structures.


2. Dissipative structures


Dissipative structures are associated with an entirely different ordering principle called "order through fluctuation".
Such structures can in effect arise from the amplification of fluctuations resulting from instabilities which, in the case of the world system, for example, are perceived as the curse of orderly planetary policy-making and global programme management.
Open systems in a state of sufficient non-equilibrium endeavour to maintain their capability for exchange with the environment by switching to a new dynamic regime whenever entropy production becomes stifled in the old regime.

Order may therefore increase, and the response to fluctuations is the less random the more degrees of freedom the system has (E Jantsch and C H Waddington, 1976). Fluctuations on a sufficiently small scale are always damped by the medium.
Conversely, once a fluctuation attains a size beyond a critical dimension, it triggers an instability (E Jantsch and C H Waddington, 1976, p.119).
There is no longer a consistent macroscopic description (Ilya Prigogine, 1980, p.141).
In the formation of dissipative structures, it is the fluctuations that drive the system to a new average macroscopic state with a different spatio-temporal structure.

Instead of being simply a corrective element, the fluctuations become the essential element in the dynamics of such systems (E Jantsch and C H Waddington, 1976, p.9396). Dissipative structures can therefore be considered as giant fluctuations whose evolution over time contains an essentially stochastic element (1976, p.93).

Fluctuations play this critical role in macroscopic systems in the neighbourhood of bifurcations where the system has to "choose" between alternatives (Ilya Prigogine, 1980, p.132).
Given the situation of the world-system in the face of such alternatives, Prigogine's work merits careful attention.

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