The Reenchantment of the World (44 page)

 

 

Given this extreme elitism, many of William Bateson's scientific concepts
take on a peculiar light. The primacy of form and pattern (Mind) over
matter reflects a mentality that pits the lofty 'Geist' of aristocratic
intellectualism against the grubby materialism of middle-class commerce
and professionalism. The notion that variation comes from within,
rather than from the external action of the environment, may certainly
have a long alchemical ancestry (as we saw in the case of Newton),
but in William Bateson it reflected the aesthetic sensibility of inner
purity and intuitionism: the lotus in the cesspool, the man above the
crowd. A similar type of class consciousness characterized his defense
of the classics, and the notion of true education as an "awakening to
ecstasy" -- a view that assumes that most people are trapped in Plato's
cave. Perhaps most revealing is William Bateson's central holistic
principle, that any variation must result in a coordinate change in the
entire organism being affected. In 1888 he wrote his sister that unless
such correlated variation occurred, a system could not continue to be
a system. Stated in this way, Bateson's principle has strong political
overtones; it reflects a bias against change per se and especially
against any form of disturbance. As one who had succeeded in entering
elite circles, William Bateson did not want the system that had nurtured
him to disintegrate. In his science, as in his politics, the maintenance
of stability became the core of reality, and any but the most gradual and
organic changes were to be viewed with deep suspicion and hostility --
an outlook that put him squarely in the tradition of Edmund Burke. Since
Gregory's own scientific concepts were so strongly shaped by those of
his father, we should not be surprised to find that they have -- or can
have -- political implications that echo this extreme conservatism. In
what follows I wish to focus on the following concepts or aspects of
Gregory's work: the emphasis on communication and information exchange,
the Theory of Logical Types, homeostasis, and Learning III.

 

 

As we have seen, the transmission of ideas around a circuit is central
to cybernetic explanation. It makes possible the refutation of Cartesian
atomism and mechanical causality in favor of something called Mind and its
interrelations with other Minds. We have also seen how superior the latter
is to the former in dealing with schizophrenia, alcoholism, learning
theory, and other areas of research. The problem arises when the notion
of information exchange is applied to situations that are blatantly and
immediately political.23 Anthony Wilden gives the following example:24

 

 

Person A: Please give me a glass of water.
Person B: (Hands water to A)
Person A: Thank you.

 

 

We can, of course, analyze the interchange as an exchange of messages,
and at face value it would seem that A is the supplicant, submissive to B,
or that they are perhaps equals. However, says Wilden, suppose the reality
of the situation is that A's request was in fact a command? Suppose A is
a man, and B a woman? Suppose A is a foreman, and B is a factory worker
or a sharecropper? Suppose B is black, or on welfare? What is truly
operative then can only be found in an analysis of the history of race,
or sexuality, or vested interests. It cannot be found in an analysis of
messages alone, or of disturbed communication. Schismogenesis may serve
to explain the nuclear arms race or domestic strife, but in general it
is doubtful that war is a failure of communication, and I suspect that
the North Vietnamese knew perfectly well what the Americans were up
to. The same can be said of the so-called generation gap of the 1960s,
in which the media were able to avoid taking student opposition to
the dominant culture seriously by turning it into a "communications"
problem. Explanation at this level deals only with the here and now,
with what is manifest, and it presupposes a society of equals, an open
or pluralistic situation in which all conflicts are capable of smooth
resolution once the blocked channels of communication are cleared. Used
in this way, cybernetic theory is not a form of liberation but of
mystification. The relationship of oppressor to oppressed is not
typically a problem of semantics,25 and such an emphasis can easily
serve to reinforce that relationship, though such was certainly not
Bateson's intent.
>> "Cool Hand Luke"

 

 

The Theory of Logical Types, employed so brilliantly by Bateson, shares
a similar political bias.26 In essence, it is a theory of hierarchical
relationships, and it is conceivable that a logic of classes implies a
class society, or at least one in which some groups have a higher social
or theoretical status than others. Logical typing reflects and implies a
top-down attitude toward power, although this attitude is muted in the
social analysis based on the Theory of Logical Types. This political
bias, however, was not lost on one of the coauthors of the theory,
Bertrand Russell, who remarked at one point in his "Autobiography" that
he saw the theory, at the time of its formulation, as a contribution to
the preservation of British hegemony and world order. Although logical
typing is obviously a powerful tool for understanding certain phenomena,
it is not clear that it has a very wide application; yet it is absolutely
central to cybernetic analysis, as Bateson would be the first to admit.

 

 

As it turns out, Russell admitted his doubts about the theory to
Cambridge mathematician G. Spencer Brown in an exchange that occurred in
1967. Brown had developed a mathematical proof that demonstrated that
the theory was unnecessary, and showed it to Russell. Russell agreed,
adding that it was "the most arbitrary thing that he and Whitehead had
ever had to do, not really a theory but a stopgap. . . . "27 An indirect
refutation of logical typing, moreover, was developed in 1945 by the
cybernetic theoretician Warren McCulloch, who argued for a
heterarchy
of values rather than a hierarchy. By means of a mathematical analysis
of the central nervous system, McCulloch showed that values were not
magnitudes and thus that transitivity (inequality of relationships)
could not be applied to them.28 One can, for example, establish a
hierarchy or wavelength of frequency for the colors of the spectrum,
but there is no way to prove that red is somehow "better" than blue,
or the reverse. But McCulloch never developed his analysis further,
probably because cybernetic theory would have been seriously attenuated
if logical typing were invalidated. The fact remains that heterarchy
implies egalitarianism, and hierarchy, a world of classes and orders. But
there is no way one can demonstrate that hierarchy is validated by the
natural world.29

 

 

Third, we have the concept of homeostasis, with its obvious roots
in William Bateson's principle of correlated variation, and again the
conservative implications are obvious. As René Dubos was quick to point
out, taken to its logical conclusion, homeostasis says that "whatever is,
is right." Dubos thus argues for "homeokinesis," or what C.H. Waddington
calls "homeorhesis": "stabilized flow rather than stabilized state."30
Politically, the concept of homeostasis leads logically to quietism,
to passivity in the face of an oppression that is seen to be "in the
order of things" (otherwise it wouldn't have happened!). Bateson's point,
of course, is that interference frequently makes things worse, and that
revolution is often just that -- a revolving door, a change of masters
rather than a change of values. It is an important point, but it is
hardly true that all fight for freedom is futile. Nor does Bateson's
approach come to terms with the totalitarianism that might emerge if
the powers that be were, due to any lack of resistance, given free rein.

 

 

As in the case of information exchange, the issue may be how and where
the concept is applied. Early cybernetic writers used closed systems,
such as the thermostat, as their paradigm. A thermostat may be "alive" in
some cybernetic sense, but it is closed in that it does not exchange any
material with its environment, and its final state is determined by its
initial conditions. Open systems (a forest, a nation) do exchange material
with their surroundings, and their final states are not predetermined. As
a result, they are open to substantive change (whether it occurs or
not). In other words, only closed systems are truly homeostatic,
returning always to their original starting point. Homeostasis is
thus only a special case of open systems.31 The latter can undergo
homeorhesis, change that is part of the overall developmental program
(language acquisition, puberty), or "morphogenesis," change that proves
to be an alteration of the program itselt (Learning III, the Scientific
Revolution, the collapse of the Roman Empire -- all of which can be
"predicted" only in retrospect).32 Bateson is fully aware of the
difference between open and closed systems, but his overriding emphasis
is on stability rather than alteration; for example, how symmetrical
schismogenic situations manage to trigger their complement so as to
mitigate the threat of disintegration, or how an ecosystem struggles
to maintain itself by generating negative feedback. Bateson does say
that the process of maintenance will not necessarily bring the system
back to its initial starting point, but his general emphasis on the
maintenance of internal consistency tends to put change in the category
of an undesirable event. Thus he likens change to a tear, a rent in the
fabric of things, and the process of maintenance to healing or mending.33

 

 

Such an emphasis on homeostasis and stability, of course, can certainly
be seen to be congruent with the small-scale, ecological, decentralized
"conserver" society described above. But on a strictly homeostatic model,
we would never get there, whereas the likelihood is that we are in the
midst of a vast and violent morphogenesis. Furthermore, the cybernetic
model of society is not congruent only with the conserver society, as
several critics have pointed out. It can easily be used to validate the
alternative model of industrial totalitarianism. There is, for example,
nothing intrinsic in Bateson's work that implies decentralization. The
cybernetic model could well describe a mass society managed by social
engineers through a series of "holistic," bureaucratic parameters, and
indeed, precisely this scenario is envisioned by Robert Lilienfeld in
his book "The Rise of Systems Theory." Far from leading to a planetary
culture, says Lilienfeld, the emphasis on communications suggests a
world knit closely together by a system of computerized mass media and
information exchange.34 Such a world would be the
end
of diversity
and freedom, a homogenization of the globe under man's dominion --
or rather, under the dominion of a small, powerful elite. One thinks
here of Interpol, or the data banks that continue to be assembled
on the citizens of industrial societies, soon to be transferred to
silicon chips, microcomputers that could easily be made available to
the police, the government, and even to hospitals and banks. "Systems
science," wrote one of its founders, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, "centered
in computer technology, cybernetics, automation and systems engineering,
appears to make the systems idea another -- and indeed the ultimate --
technique to shape man and society even more into the 'megamachine.'"35
Bureaucracy and centralization could become the order of the day, in which
the concept of hierarchy, or logical typing, would mean that the lower
ranks were "free" to obey the upper ones, to fall into homeostatic step
with them. This situation, with its obvious echoes of "Brave New World"
or "1984," is hardly the vision of holistic harmony Bateson had in mind,
but it is as much implied by his epistemology as the utopian scenario
previously outlined, and the concepts of information exchange and the
rest could be used to rationalize it.36

 

 

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that neither cybernetics nor ecology is
immune to mechanistic treatment. As Carolyn Merchant has pointed out in
"The Death of Nature," the dominant trend in American ecology studies
since the 1950s has been reductionist and managerial. On this model,
she notes, data

 

 

are abstracted from the organic context in the form of information
bits and then manipulated according to a set of differential
equations, allowing the prediction of ecological change and the
rational management of the ecosystem and its resources as a whole.

 

 

The word "ecosystem," in fact, was developed by this school of thought
to replace the more anthropocentric and decentralized phrase, "biotic
community." The approach here is globalist, and computer-based reports,
such as the Club of Rome's famous "Limits to Growth" (1972), which make
recommendations for managing the resources of the entire world, are
the logical descendants of this branch of ecology. As Merchant points
out, the same criticism can be made of much of systems theory. Its
proponents often claim that their approach is holistic, but a gestalt
is an intangible thing. The chances are that once mathematized, it stops
being a true gestalt.37.

 

 

Cybernetic thinking, in short, does not automatically take us out
of the world of Francis Bacon. The cybernetic mechanism may be a more
sophisticated model than the clockwork model of the seventeenth century,
but it is still, in the last analysis, a mechanism. Bateson's experiment
with the dolphin, for example -- driving it crazy until a clear-cut result
was obtained -- is as good an example of Bacon's 'natura vexata' as any.38

 

 

Finally, we come to the issue of Learning III, the "awakening to
ecstasy," or sense of merger with a "vast ecology." As noted above,
Bateson does not explicitly advocate meditation, yoga, alchemy, or
whatever; his is a self-conscious