The gloom-and-doom politicians who warn that everything is falling apart fail to grasp a key scientific principle -- that while there is chaos in all order there is also order in chaos. The danger of the chaos view in politics is that it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor of emeritus of history and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is author of "American Soul" (Mercury House, 1995). This is the second of two articles on chaos as a world view.

Politicians' most popular explanation for why things go wrong is that the world is falling into chaos -- a view that got a big boost in the 1980s when science discovered chaos. Yet many of the scientists involved in chaos theory have also shown that, at least in the natural world, while there is chaos in all order, there also is order in chaos.

Thus James Gleick, in his best selling book "Chaos," detailed how even the most entangled lines in a computer image eventually settle down to points or "limit cycles" -- what mathematicians call "strange attractors." Already in the 1940s information theorist Claude Shannon discovered that chaos produces enormous amounts of information that help create paths leading back to order.

Does this same principle of the natural world apply to the human world as well? The question is worth asking because, as history has all too often shown, the danger of leaders taking a world-in-chaos view is that it becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, taking a non-chaos view greatly improves the chances for a non-chaotic outcome in the world's conflicts.

In Western eyes the prime example of a region descending into chaos is Africa, which author Robert Kaplan calls a harbinger of "the coming anarchy." With the exception of South Africa, Africa exists in the Western eye as images of starving people, slaughtered civilians, ravaged towns, brutal executions, and millions of refugees milling about. Howard Reed of the U.S. Trade Representative's Office recently told American businessmen he saw little promise for immediate investment opportunities in most African countries.

But the one partial exception Reed made was Uganda. From my own recent observations, this country of 17 million may offer for the human world what Shannon's theory of counter-chaos information did for the electromagnetic world.

A decade ago, Uganda was in chaos from two civil wars and was just beginning to feel the effects of one of the world's highest AIDS infection rates. Cities, towns, villages, universities, schools, roads, markets were in shambles. Today it is booming, with a growth rate of eight percent per year, Africa's highest. Despite 1.4 million orphans, I saw no homeless kids on city streets and none in the villages of this largely agricultural country.

Uganda was able to pull itself back together again through the revival of age-old traditions of family, land and markets. Through family and clan bonds, the countryside has remained connected to the city and urban folk have remained connected to the village, each serving as a support network for the other. Uganda's capital of almost one million people, Kampala, produces almost half of its own vegetables and poultry, suggesting that, rather than the city obliterating the village, the village is annexing the city. And the city's markets, peopled by extended family networks, generate a cash income that cushions both city and village.

Even now few Western observers even now take notice of these survival mechanisms reemerging from two decades of chaos and one of the most brutal dictatorships anywhere in the world. Yet today, not only are a growing number of businessmen flocking to Uganda, international tourist operators, noting its pleasant climate, are already fingering it as a future tourist mecca.

Elsewhere in Africa, similar signs of order-in-chaos are evident, including the chaotic giant Nigeria which, as European observers predict, one day could rival South Africa as the continent's major industrial power. A recent Financial Times reported that Africa is a hot-bed for long term economic investment -- evident in the plush new hotels going up in many African countries.

The widespread Africa-in-chaos view has its domestic counterpart in a writing off of American inner cities even by liberal Clintonites who now promote vigorous incarceration as the only solution. Yet amidst neighborhoods permanently idled by 100 percent unemployment, rising poverty levels and drug ravaged families, survival mechanisms are also asserting themselves similar to those that emerged in Uganda. If the nuclear family has broken apart, the traditional extended African family continues to function for many African Americans. If Africans have gifts for market-type enterprise, so do African Americans, though much of it flourishes in the illegal and informal sector. And while the vast majority of African Americans live in cities, not villages, they have a powerful sense of neighborhood and turf. Once great black urban communities like Chicago's North Lawndale thrived -- and they can again if African Americans can tap their heritage as Africans in Africa are doing.

History suggests that the combination of power politics, a chaos world view and demonization of enemies has the easy potential to produce horrors. On the other hand, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was moving toward what arguably became the most chaotic period of this century, World War II, he put forth the most daring, idealistic and successful views of a just and peaceful world heard in centuries. The lesson for politicians is clear: the world-in-chaos view bodes ill for the future. What science knows about the natural world -- that order emerges in chaos even as chaos emerges in order -- offers a better text. According to Shannon, the information that suggests a way out of the chaos is already evident in the chaos itself.