Think Before You Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing 0954519469, 9780954519469

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Only Connect ... STAFFORD BEER was one of the foremost holistic thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a passionate and compassionate social scientist who fought tirelessly against the forces of reductionism, dualism and the creed of greed. He was dedicated to the unity of all human experience and investigated the many ways in which our languages, models and paradigms fragment perception, separating us from each other and the world. Beer’s whole approach was dynamic and systemic: everything connects to everything else. He pioneered the use of cybernetics and systems theory to increase our awareness and understanding of how complex systems learn, adapt and evolve—or fail. Beer published twelve books and nearly 300 papers drawn from fifty years of experience. These included lectures, essays, forewords and book reviews. Many of these writings are of exceptional importance for such diverse fields as philosophy, psychology, sociology, mathematics, ecology, politics, economics, ethics and epistemology. Quite a few of his papers have been fairly inaccessible if not totally unobtainable—until now, with the publication of this new anthology of Beer’s writings. The editor has selected pieces that exhibit Beer’s major ideas for the transformation of self and society—they have a timeless relevance for a world in permanent distress. In addition to Beer’s own lucid account of the work he did for President Allende in Chile, published here for the first time is his unfinished, but nevertheless revealing, autobiography. There is a generous range of Beer’s poetry and paintings as

well as innumerable photographs not previously seen in print.

Also included is a chronology of Beer’s busy life and an introduction to many of the key concepts of Beer’s philosophy. This stylish book, the largest and most varied miscellany of Stafford Beer’s work to date, brings a fresh perspective to the man and his work.

Caminante no hay camino, / se hace camino al andar (Walker, there is no road, / the road is made as you walk) Cantares Antonio Machado (1875-1939)

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Think before you Think

Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing

Edited by David Whittaker Foreword by Brian Eno

wavestone press g,.""_

2009

Think Before you Think: Social Complexity and Knowledge of Knowing. ISBN: 9780954519469

Wavestone Press, 6 Rochester Place, Charlbury, Oxon, OX7 3SF, UK. Tel: 01608-811435 Email: [email protected] Web: www.wavestonepress.co.uk All Stafford Beer material Copyright © Stafford Beer Estate (or the various sources listed) 2009 Foreword Copyright © Brian Eno 2009 Introduction and Appendices Copyright © David Whittaker 2009 Various photographs copyright the individuals attributed. All attempts have been made to locate the holder’s of copyright material, particularly the photo-

graphs, and I apologize to anyone who may have been overlooked. Acknowledgements In 2000 Stafford and Fredmund Malik founded the Cwarel Isaf Institute in St Gallen, Switzerland. Named after Stafford’s Welsh cottage, the institute is a subsidiary of Malik Management Zentrum and is dedicated to preserving and making accessible the life work of Stafford Beer. In addition Stafford entrusted his Literary Estate to Dr Malik and I thank him very much for allowing me the freedom to acquire and use most of the contents

of this book. His son Constantin and the entire team at Malik Mangement Zentrum were exceptional hosts at a big conference there last March. A big DANKE SCHON to you all. I would also like to congratulate them publicly on the outstanding job of renovation that they have accomplished at Stafford’s old cottage, now an oasis of calm and comfort for those wishing to pursue research in the fields related to cybernetics and systems theory. www.managementkybernetik.com

The following people all deserve an enormous Beer hug of gratitude: Brian Eno took time out from his perennially hectic schedule to respond with much patience to my requests, he also read through portions of the manuscript, before writing his thoughtful foreword; Denis Adams and Doug Haynes provided almost daily encouragement, consolation and constructive criticism that certainly kept me from going under, particularly early on. They are rightly proud of what they have achieved with the Stafford Beer Collection, available to researchers at Liverpool

John Moores University www.ljmu.ac.uk ; Allenna Leonard filled in many essential details; Vanilla Beer and her husband Bob Harris accommodated me with French fare and fizzy nourishment at their home in Esperaza, while allowing me access to family documents; Harry Beer came up with some super photos; lan Beer gave me quality time in talking about his brother, especially Stafford’s childhood; Raul Espejo and his partner Zoraida provided a long day of hospitality, as well as helpful comments on the texts; Robert Bittlestone gave me a lesson in Homeric

Greek; Fabienne Mettler of Malik Management in St Gallen provided substantial assistance with photographing the paintings (as well as tempting me with Swiss cakes!); Liverpool John Moores’ archivist Emily Burningham photocopied reams of material; on the occasions I stayed at Cwarel Isaf it was always a pleasure to chat with Gareth Jones who does a grand job of looking after the place (he also knows a thing or two about the cybernetics of toilet cisterns!); Gui Bonsiepe supplied a photo of Stafford in Chile; Ross Ashby’s family provided the excellent photo of Stafford’s great mentor; Ritva Saarikko contributed one of her many fine portraits of Eno. My wife Penny and daughter Alice catered in every way conceivable for this editor’s needs. While I reeled from

crisis to elation their consistent good humour kept me anchored in hope, keeping the literal and metaphorical glass at least half full. Here’s looking at you kids. Any errors in the text may be traced back to occasional bouts of fatigue, inducing this editor to doze off at the wheel. The editor’s opinions are not necessarily those of Stafford Beer.

In addition, I am indebted to all those who generously answered my call (or cry) for alms: Denis Adams, Robin Asby, Ursula and James Cornish, Roger Duck, Kevin Eden, Budge and Peter English, Ral Espejo, Robert Fripp, Ranulph Glanville, Doug Haynes, Trevor Hilder, Dave Jacobs, Jennifer Mackinnon, Penny Marrington, Martin Maw, José Pérez Rios, Bernard Scott, Neville Shack, Michael and Margaret Snow, John Styles, Simon Whitehead, Mike van de Wijnckel.

The bird design used for each chapter was drawn by Stafford while he was in Chile. Endpapers feature a ceramic bust of Stafford made by his mother Pat Beer in 1965. Main text set in Minion; chapter headings in Brioso Pro Display. Book concept and design: David Whittaker Book production: Keith Rigley—thanks chap for steering another project safely into port.

Printed by Information Press, Eynsham, Oxfordshire

CONTENTS

Foreword Introduction

13

THINK BEFORE YOU THINK 1.

Maths Created

21

2.

Laws of Anarchy

23

3.

Cybernetics of Humankind

36

4.

Requisite Ross

43

5.

Open Letter to Heinz von Foerster

49

6.

Strength

56

7.

Preface to Autopoiesis and Cognition

64

8.

1Said, You are Gods

73

9.

The Will of the People

94

10.

A Reply to Ulrich’s Critique of Pure Cybernetic Reason: the Chilean Experience with Cybernetics

113

11.

The Preposterous Inference

119

12.

The Viable System Model: its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology

134

13.

Recursions of Power

158

14.

Metacomment

176

15.

About Flat Earths

181

16.

The Identity of Organizations

186

Contents

17.

‘I Am the Emperor and I Want Dumplings’

194

18.

On Suicidal Rabbits: a Relativity of Systems

211

19.

May the Whole Earth be Happy

220

20.

A Personal Reflection on the Nature of the Stafford Beer Collection

231

21.

The Culpabliss Error

233

22.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and Women

23.

Think Before You Think: Learning an Outlook

271

24.

Selected Poetry and Paintings

317

248

Too

EDITOR’S APPENDICES 352

B. The Chilean Experience

362

C. Cybernetics in a Nutshell

376

Portrait in oils by Vanilla Beer

A. Threads From a Life: a Narrative Chronology

oreword STAFFORD BEER was an unusual man in a number of ways. He was tall, strong, energetic and, with his huge flowing beard and long hair, somewhat Messianic. He had something he wanted to do in the world, and he was determined and even evangelistic about it. He wanted to put science—and in particular cybernetics—at the service of humanity. What

this meant for him was not the translation of science into new technologies, but into new understandings about how human beings could work together. Although a visionary, Stafford was far from unrecognized during his life. He held several highly prestigious posts in business and academe: it seems that people were awed by the power and originality of his intelligence even if they didn’t really understand the implications of the new social orderings he was suggesting. In terms of recognition, the apex of his career was his appointment by Salvador Allende to restructure the economy of

Chile on cybernetic principles. Stafford put everything into this project: it really deserves a place in history as one of the boldest and most unusual of all experiments in governance. But it wasn't to last: the careful destruction of this astonishingly prescient and futuristic experiment, and the subsequent crushing of Allende and his supporters by the US-backed Pinochet, was a great disillusionment to him. I think it broke his heart. My own acquaintance with Stafford’s writing began with a book from Swiss Cottage Library, borrowed on my behalf by my ever-perceptive mother-in-law Joan Harvey. Permanently baffled by my decision to become an artist rather than a scientist, she plied me with science books in the hope of a miracle conversion. It never happened, and in fact Stafford’s book had the opposite effect—it made me feel, for the first time, that I had the beginnings of some intellectual grasp of what the future might hold, and what place art might occupy in it. The book was Brain of The Firm and it was a cybernetic analysis of how large organizations worked—what might now be called a management book, if it didn’t so far transcend

most of them. At a broad level, the book was concerned with the flow of information and control within human groups. It asked the question: how do you set things up so that the organization is supple, adaptive, productive and evolutionary rather than rigid and impervious? How do you engender purposeful behaviour in the absence of a clear purpose? It took a position which might now sound more familiar, but which was then

pretty revolutionary: it sought to view ‘the system’ as a web of interconnected subsystems through which information flowed in all directions—up as well as down, laterally as well as vertically. It flattened the organizational pyramid and emphasized the need for cre-

ativity and responsibility at all points. This was in sharp distinction to the ‘symphonic’ view of organization, which at that time pervaded most of the business world, with the boss as brilliant conductor passing down instructions rank by rank. It discussed an issue

8

Foreword

which was at that time troubling me: how do you get where you want to be if you don’t in advance know what it is, or where it is? This question was on my mind because I had become fascinated by a particular piece of music: ‘Paragraph 7’ of The Great Learning by the English composer Cornelius Cardew. The piece intrigued me because it had very few instructions, and those were rather imprecise—and yet somehow or other it managed to manifest a recognizable identity whenever it was performed. No conventional musical explanation could account for this. In Brain of the Firm I began to find a language through which I could understand it. This in turn began to connect to a bigger artistic problem I was thinking about: how do I make music which carries on making itself without my further intervention? How do I initiate music which will then construct itself? Without having the language for it at the time, what I was thinking about was selforganization, bottom up creation, a different conception about what it meant to be a ‘composer’. Traditionally, that word carried connotations of composing as a method of translating music that was already heard in the mind out into the world. There was an implication of foreknowledge. I didn’t feel that was the way I could, or indeed wanted to be, a composer. I'd become familiar with the work of composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley and Philip Glass, who had been exploring ways of generating music from very simple initial conditions, and had started to think of the composer as someone who starts things rather than finishes them. I liked the idea of making what the composer Michael White called ‘Machines’—intellectual constructions which produced music, and music you hadn’t specified in advance. Stafford’s book hooked me with one sentence: Instead of specifying it in full detail, you simply ride on the dynamics of the system to where you want to go. This exactly described what I'd been sensing in the work of those composers: it wasn’t only the sound that was interesting me, but how the music came into being. The economy of these pieces stunned me: that you needed to do so little if you managed to design the system well in the first place. The Cardew piece, for example, had a ‘score’ just a half page long. And the lovely thrill of it was that the system could produce beautiful things which you had never even conceived of in advance—which hadn’t ever existed in any mind. I used Stafford’s book in a series of lectures I gave around 1975, and in a long article I wrote about the Cardew piece for Studio International. I quoted him liberally in these, and finally it occurred to me to write to him via his publisher to show him how I'd been using his work. I was very apologetic in the letter, saying, as I recall, ‘’m sure you must

get hundreds of letters like this so please don’t feel compelled to respond’ ... Very shortly afterwards, I received a letter back from him in his extraordinarily elegant handwriting: ‘Would that one hundredth of the letters I receive were one tenth as interesting’. I was very flattered, and with that our correspondence was launched. We exchanged several letters, until, one day, he suddenly appeared at the door of my flat in Maida Vale.

Foreword

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From Eno letter to Beer, 1977

He was all hair and brains: full of life, fuller of opinions, intimidatingly fast and yet encouraging. He spoke to me not as a student (I had been one until seven years earlier) but as a peer. This was demanding: his mind moved quickly. However, I shortly afterwards accepted his invitation to visit him in his little cottage in Wales. I dressed carefully for the

occasion, in smart black clothes, and after a long train journey and a long taxi ride, was deposited at the top of the little drive to his cottage. It was a filthy day—wet, muddy and cold. No sooner had the taxi door closed behind me than I saw two large dogs running eagerly up the lane at me. They were like huge paintbrushes, thick with mud. One by one they jumped up on me, paws on my shoulders. I sat in Stafford’s kitchen-cum-sitting room, covered in mud. The air was opaque with steam (he’d put some potatoes on to boil) and cigar smoke ... he lit each new one from

the previous. It was hard to make him out across the table, such was the fug in the room. He immediately began talking and continued for the next twelve hours with relatively little interruption from me. Occasionally he would get up as though to do something about the potatoes (I was starving), but on his way to the gas stove would begin another

chapter and forget, eventually sitting down again. The spuds continued their atmospheric contribution, and he poured more sherry (he chain-drank sherry). He told me about the furniture, which he’d made himself, and his spinning wheel and about his connection to Vedantic philosophy. He explained to me that cybernetics could be seen as a way of translating the insights of Eastern philosophies into a form that could be used by Western

10

Foreword

minds. Actually, he probably never said those words: this is my recollection thirty-three years later ... it'’s what I heard, but it might not be what he said. And he talked to me at length about Chile, how that experiment had represented for him a peak, and how he’d returned to England just a few weeks before the coup and how America had tirelessly and methodically undermined the revolution which Allende represented. His disappointment was evident, and yet there was little bitterness. He talked about negative and positive feedback, went into a very long soliloquy about requisite variety, and then about closure as a spiritual and scientific concept (he was writing about it at the time). He showed me a lot of mathematics, which I didn’t understand, and read me some of his recent poems. At about ten in the evening, shortly after we’d finally eaten the potatoes (served foutseul) and I'd finally been talked into a huge cigar, Stafford began to tell me about the history of cybernetics. I knew the bare bones of this illustrious history but enjoyed hearing it unfold from Stafford’s mouth. I hadn’t realized how much cybernetics represented to him a way out of the crippling rigidity of Western thinking ... how much it had become an ideological as well as a scientific issue. He saw in cybernetics a resolution of his spiritual and scientific personalities, a way of turning science towards the liberation of humanity. [ was starting to see Stafford’s big picture. Very late in the evening, Stafford stopped talking and looked across the table at me. He was suddenly quite serious. He said he wanted to offer me something. T waited. He then reiterated the history of cybernetics as he saw it, and he used the word ‘torch’. “This torch’, he said, ‘was passed from Wiener to McCulloch, from him to Ashby, and from Ashby to me. Now [ want to offer it to you.” I didn’t know how to react. I was flattered of course, but I was also slightly alarmed. I didn’t know anywhere near enough about cybernetics to take this on—and anyway I was set in my decision to make art rather than science. I thanked him very sincerely for this invitation, and said that I thought it represented the choice between being an artist and being a scientist. ‘Does it?’ he said enigmatically. I said

I had to think it over, and we shortly afterwards retired. I never really stopped thinking it over. The following day we drove over to his wife Sallie’s house—they lived not far apart but I gather hadn’t actually lived together for some time. Their relationship was friendly and straightforward, and at one point Stafford insisted on playing their favourite song to me. It was a single called Toast and Marmalade and Jam, to which Stafford serenaded his wife round the kitchen. There were children present but everyone seemed to take the rather odd scene in their stride. As it happens I was carrying with me the test-pressings of Music

for Airports. Stafford asked if I would play them, which I did. After a few moments he rebuked the family for not paying proper attention, at which point I had to tell him that the music was actually designed to be talked over—I didn’t mind. Stafford and I remained sporadically in touch. I spent some time in Toronto in 1983

and gave a talk in a class he was giving at The McLuhan Centre. By that time I had clari-

Foreword

11

fied my ideas about self-generating music further, and Stafford seemed interested in the intersection between his concepts of self-organization and my application of them. Stafford, in the final analysis, was a passionate believer. This might seem at odds with his gifts as a scientist, but somehow he reconciled them. His belief was not of a supernatural nature—rather the opposite: he thought that, given the right circumstances, humans could be better at being humans. He was convinced of the human potential for ongoing development, learning and fulfilment. He retained and acted upon this belief until the end of his life, which, given his experience in Chile, displayed an extraordinary optimism. Perhaps that’s the torch I inherited from him—not quite the one he wanted me to carry,

but thanks anyway. Brian Eno

August 2009 Editor’s note: Around 1977-78 Beer was engaged in editing a book called Challenge to Paradigm (then to be published by Wiley). This was a compilation of papers in the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, biology, botany, government,

immunology,

management,

materials science, mathemat-

ics, neurophysiology, physiology, psychology and scientific method. The contributors included Maturana and Varela, while Eno was given the job of aesthetics. In an instructive circular issued to each author Beer gave this outline of the venture: “The intention of this book is that it should NOT be merely a collection of interesting papers. It is intended to be a continuous narrative, expounding the view that the ‘systems approach’ actually works. When it works, paradigms are overthrown—and that is what constitutes the Challenge. My role in this is to be the narrator (and at one point a contributor). I want very much to get the synergy out of all the splendid contributions that you have made available to me.’ Furthermore he also provided a sketch of each author’s intention and here is what he had to

say about Eno’s: ‘The Self-Referential Music Brian is a musican. On the one hand he is a very famous rock star (one of the originators, with Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music). On the other hand he is a very original composer and performer— an innovator. Look out for his latest album, called Before and After Science. He attributes his musical development to systems-theoretic concepts. He pursues the idea of a musical composition that is instantly and uniquely created by autopoiesis. This writing analyses the extent to which a work of art produces itself, in the context of a pre-determined but very general programme—which does not contain a single note of music in its score! Could this be a RECAPITULATION of biological self-production as demonstrated by Autopoiesis?’ On Eno’s thirtieth birthday, in May 1978 in New York, he completed a draft of his paper. Unfortunately the very diversity of the whole enterprise proved a challenge to the editor; though

12

Foreword

Beer did his best, there was too much delay in getting some of the papers from various authors, it all became very time consuming and, sadly, was eventually abandoned. Eno went on to become one of the most influential figures in popular music of the last thirty-

five years. He collaborated with David Bowie, Talking Heads, Robert Fripp, Robert Wyatt, Laurie Anderson, Jon Hassell, U2, Coldplay, Paul Simon, to name but a few. It’s impossible to quantify or assess his overall pervasiveness in contemporary music. His presence is to be felt in so much of what

we hear; sometimes

it’s overt, but more

often it permeates

the fabric of sound

as a discreet

tint. As Eno himself has admitted that Beer’s work is deeply ingrained into his modus operandi, it is interesting to speculate on how different popular culture might now be if his astute mother-in-law had not borrowed Brain of the Firm from the library.

Brian Eno, London

1975

ntroduction THE EMINENT and highly inventive Cornish painter Peter Lanyon once said that there are as many types of art as there are artists. For the purpose of understanding Stafford Beer and his place in the history of ideas, as well as his apparent neglect in recent years, it may prove helpful to paraphrase this statement and say that there are as many types of cybernetics as there are cyberneticians. Throughout this book the reader will encounter frequent reminders of the transdis-

ciplinary nature of the science of cybernetics. There are frequent references to the many people who contributed to the development of this holistic science. However, it seems to be so much a part of the human condition to dichotomize, fragment and specialize that even holists can’t escape. Or only a few of them can, and surely Stafford Beer is one of the few.

He has been called a visionary, a polymath, a renaissance man and inevitably, a genius. All of these labels may well apply on some level, but they are so widely overused today in our celebrity culture that they have been rendered meaningless. The fact is that there are no easy labels to apply to Beer that begin to do him justice. Within the fields of cybernetics and general systems theory he was quite distinct from his many illustrious peers. To begin with he was largely self-taught, the war having intervened in his attempt to gain a degree. Perhaps ‘meta-visionary’ would be a more apt title. After

all ‘meta’ was an essential prefix for him (see Chapter 14). As a process philosopher he had a unique ability to perceive whole mosaics where most of us see only fragments. These mosaics were not static, but more akin to kaleidoscopes of shifting patterns emerging and unfolding through time and space. He wasn’t just a lateral thinker—that is too one-dimen-

sional and linear—but a network thinker, long before that word became ubiquitous. He also practised yoga and meditation and this further augmented his insight and awareness as a

holistic seer. The usual academic boundaries simply cannot contain him. (It’s rare to find a Western scientist of Beer’s generation seriously involved with Eastern ideas and practices. Interestingly, in recent years it has come to light that Norbert Wiener was also steeped in the Vedantic philosophy of India, regularly consulting a Swami for spiritual guidance.') Beer’s world-view was also fortified by aesthetics. He believed that the unity of ordered knowledge included science, art, music and so on. The open-endedness and ambiguity of the creative process was vital to his overall thinking, it all contributes to our knowledge of knowing. He remained intellectually curious throughout his life and was exceptionally

well read (including the classics in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), providing him with a vast reservoir of references to draw on, which contribute to his copious vocabulary and his gift as a writer and expositor of complex ideas—indeed he was something of a belletrist or man of letters. This is an important and often overlooked point: he was a writer as well as

14

Introduction

a thinker. The two are not necessarily linked. For Beer the act of writing was an opportunity for intimately engaging with the reader, a means of channelling his vision for better understanding. (It’s worth mentioning that he was a very popular tutor, and in turn always loved the company of young people.) A wicked sense of humour, playfulness and inventiveness pervade his work. This is plain to see in some of the chapter titles in this book. It’s also apparent in the devices he employs in his other books. For example, in Heart of Enterprise the chapters are interspersed throughout with lively ‘conversations’ between imaginary characters in the sections ‘Later in the Bar’. These instalments alternate with the ‘serious’ chapters, providing

provocative conversations highlighting the various misunderstandings that may occur. The same book includes a mock review of itself in a teasing self-referential manner.> Beer also liked to maintain his own calligraphic diagrams. It was all a part of the metagame of life. The Chronicles of Wizard Prang display these characteristics very well—reminiscent of Lewis Carroll—they are like parables or fables, balancing the profound with the absurd.’ In scholarly journals his work can appear refreshing in contrast with a type of academic writing that is insular in the extreme. There are of course other fine exceptions to this intellectual malaise. (Heinz von Foerster for one, springs to mind. He also had a knack for conveying abstruse notions with sagacious stories and images. The fact that he was a professional magician as well, allowed him to cast a further spell on his audience.) This diversity of ability has not always been appreciated by other members of Beer’s peer group who demand a certain kind of dry rigour as proof of some authenticity or credibility. But Beer was doing something quite different to most of them. Let us return to the arts metaphor for a moment. There are painters, etchers, sculptors, potters and so on, each working with different media. We could say that certain of Beer’s critics are similarly employed with achieving their own vision or purpose through their particular agency, indeed some of them are miniaturists whereas Beer was working on a much broader canvas (sometimes

literally). He was also less theoretical and more practical than many others in the field. In a sense he was a pioneer explorer taking cybernetics to terra incognita far removed from the laboratory and the learned journal. He said that he practised ‘applied epistemology’. He was a social scientist intent on comprehending and ameliorating the human condition. He was acutely aware that millions of people are forever starving and suffering cruelties unnecessarily. Beer’s writings manifest an integrity and sense of responsibility in his tireless pursuit of justice for all victims of our organizational inanities. He maintained an optimism that change was possible if only people understood the laws of viability exposed by cybernetics. We could say that his overriding concern was the cybernetics of compassion. For guidance he yoked together Aristotle’s concepts of entelechy (potential realized) and eudemony (well-

being)—the latter signifying a qualitative sense of flourishing distinct from that generated by material possessions. At the end of the day thinkers in all scientific and philosophical fields have to draw on

Introduction

15

language, hence metaphor, simile and symbol—all open to interpretation; in Beer’s lexicon we are dealing with models (mental constructs) and for him models were not right or wrong, but more or less useful. For example, time after time Beer cites Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, most other writers in the field don’t give it much attention. But for Beer’s purpose of understanding organizational complexity, through wrestling with real scenarios, it was very useful indeed. (See Appendix C for an overlap with these comments.) Many people who know Beer’s work well are surprised that he isn’t better known. To a large extent this is down to the curse of categorization. The management and business sections of bookshops are not the first port of call for most people. But the management world has had Beer to itself for long enough, with all due respect. I hope this selection shows that his message is too all-embracing and multi-levelled to be so restrained. The invariances he emphasises are applicable to all manner of human endeavour as well as our understanding

of the processes of non-human ecosystems. It’s time to stop labelling Beer’s work under management studies alone. He called himself a research philosopher (after Churchman). His writings are relevant to philosophical investigations into the nature of language, mind, epistemology, consciousness, learning, evolution, ethics, complexity and so on. Brian Eno for one, as he explains in his foreword, had his own meta-vision for how relevant Beer’s work could be for aesthetics.* These publications remain fresh, transmitting a rich and fertile legacy still awaiting full implementation, too timeless in philanthropic possibility ever to be outmoded.

16

Introduction

The Selection

Editorial freedom is a highly desirable good. . Yet, under the respectable banner of editorial freedom marches also a particularly malign form of censorship. . o It is the ability to excise, change, juxtapose, denature—and in the limit to pervert an author’s intention.

Beer - notebook fragment

This epigraph has haunted me over the last few months working on this selection. Perhaps

at the end of the day this book reveals as much about the editor, in its way, as it does about Stafford Beer. This editor certainly doesn’t possess the requisite variety to do the author full justice. Editing by its nature is an act of attenuation. Nevertheless, the fact that a sig-

nificant new selection of Beer’s writings is now available must mean that awareness of the man and his work is amplified. Having published a small memoir on my friendship with Beer in 2003, I was surprised at the number of strangers who contacted me asking where would be a good place to start reading him. There was no easy answer, partly because Beer’s books can seem somewhat forbidding to the novice, but also the prices are too high to take a chance. This gave me the idea that a new selection of writings for a new audience was long overdue and I have deliberately chosen papers that deal specifically with philosophical and sociological matters rather than the mathematical (once again revealing the editor’s bias). For the most part, with a couple of exceptions, these articles are not too technical. I have also designed

the book to be aesthetically appealing as part of the liberation of Beer from previously confined classification. Beer left nearly 300 papers dating from the mid-1950s up until his death in 2002. With one exception I have selected from 1974 onwards. This is not to say that all of his earlier writings are now irrelevant, far from it. There are still many important papers, particularly from the 1960s. But I felt that his writing took on a newly focused urgency, with more political and ethical clout after the Chilean catastrophe and he started a new lifestyle in Wales. I have made the slightly lazy decision to arrange the papers chronologically rather than try and impose thematic links, which I leave to the reader to discover, drawing from their own experience. Repetitions are inevitable in an anthology of this kind. The papers were all written

for diverse occasions in time and in place. Certain anecdotes and examples get repeated

because they succinctly illustrate a particular point, while certain diagrams recur for the same reason. However, I believe we stand to gain by encountering these replications in different contexts. They act as mementos of salient ideas, echoing not just throughout the book, but also running through Beer’s life. During his last decade Beer was very much taken up with developing a new nonhierarchical model of democracy known as Team Syntegrity. I would like to have included a paper on the subject but Beer himself stated that Syntegrity was easier done than said,

Introduction

17

in fact it’s a bit like trying to explain how to master a Rubik cube in words. This selection didn’t seem the right context for what was available (there is a concise account in Chapter 18). In any case he has given over a whole book to the subject.® Poetry and Painting Beer wrote poetry and painted pictures ever since his teens.

He was very knowledgeable about poetry and could recite by heart many authors including Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice—as well as being strongly influenced by the modernists Eliot and Pound. This was an important outlet for him to explore the perennial human issues of love and loss. He would always be working on some poem, often on long-haul flights, and he relished the challenge of being constrained by some formal structure. Not only did he look to the usual Western tradition of the sonnet, ballade, villanelle and so on, but he also investigated Sanskrit and Welsh in addition to translating from the Spanish. Here is but a tiny selection from his many poems. The sombre beat of Tigers at Play demonstrates the long line of Classical Sanskrit metre also known by that name. Behold a Cry, Tantric Cynghanedd and Cynghanedd Saesneg am Geredigion are fine examples of the way in which Beer immersed himself in the Welsh language soon after he settled in Wales. Cynghanedd (it means ‘harmony’) is a medieval technique of sound correspondences involving alliteration, accentuation and internal rhyme. Its complex rules are fiendishly difficult to apply to writing in English.”* The tragedy of Chile, with the consequent annihilation of hope as well as friends, provoked several moving poems including Si Vas Para Chile, A Chilean Spring Later, and Fare Thee Well. There is one example transmitted from the Spanish (a term he preferred to ‘translated’), taken from Antonio Machado’s Cantares.

(One Person Metagame is Beer’s epic poem. It took four years to write in the early 1970s and consists of 1,000 lines, unfortunately, much too long to reproduce here.?) Beer painted whenever he had the opportunity, which wasn’t as often as he’d have liked. His preferred medium was oil on canvas or board. Once again this is but a small choice displaying some of his eclectic range. His subject matter was often mythical, or explorations in form and colour rather than straightforward life studies. Throughout his life he often identified with the Biblical character of Job, hence I’ve included two studies done in the 1950s. He devoted several years to his Requiem sequence (see Appendix A,

under 1992). They are meant to be experienced as a single installation, thus not easy to reproduce in a book. I have included four merely to offer a flavour. Think Before You Think

I have refused, although I have often been asked, to write an autobiography. The reasons are embedded in that first sentence. It starts with the personal pronoun; its content is boastful in principle, and it is of no interest whatever to anyone in his right mind."°

18

Introduction

So wrote Beer in 1981. At the end of 1996, in a conversation, he told me he was now keen to work on an autobiography but not in the conventional sense and asked did I have any ideas on what form it might take? A few years before, I had given him a copy of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. First published in the 1760s, it remains one of the most eccentric, bizarre and inventive books in English literature. It dawned on me that this could be the offbeat model that Beer was seeking. When I suggested it, he gave a whoop of delight! I gave this no more thought, assuming that his workload and various illnesses meant it had never got off the ground. However, thanks to Beer’s daughter Vanilla, the unfinished manuscript for Think Before You Think has recently come my way. It is over 24,000 words. Frustratingly, for the rest of us, he only gets to the age of four. But the spirit of the work is very much in keeping with Sterne’s ludic masterpiece and I personally believe it to be an important and revealing specimen of writing, worthy not only to be included in this anthology but also to lend the title for the overall selection. It may be uncertain to us quite what he meant by this phrase, but it was significant enough for him to have it painted on the walls of his cottage, alongside other guiding maxims. The layout and style was a challenge to edit and it should be noted that, as an unfinished work, it may well have been changed or revised had Beer lived to complete it. The Appendices It is my sincere hope that this anthology will reach out to a whole new audience (as well

as reinvigorating the old congregation). I have therefore provided some additional background material in the appendices that I hope will be informative. Threads from a Life is a chronology of events giving some bare shape to the trajectory of Beer’s life. It could be added to ad infinitum, but there are limitations that dictate its length as far as this book is concerned. Beer had an exceptionally busy and full life and this chronology merely offers a few signposts or a few little flags waved along the transit of a man’s life. The Chilean Experience is a short account of the application of cybernetics by Beer to the Chilean economy. There is a much longer and more complex story to be told which I hope to publish before long (working title: Stafford Beer and Chile). Cybernetics in a Nutshell is a basic primer of some of the more important terms that recur through Beer’s work. Cybernetics has been notoriously difficult to pin down and I emphasise that the etymology of the word provides the key to its understanding. I also hope that the bibliography proves to be a useful launching pad for readers to pursue further the wide net that cybernetics and systems theory have cast.

Introduction

19

References 1. Conway, F. and Siegelman, J. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert

2. 3. .

.

6.

Wiener—the Father of Cybernetics. Basic Books, New York, 2005. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. Beer, S. The Chronicles of Wizard Prang. Unpublished, but available online at www.chroniclesofwizardprang.com Eno, B. ‘Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts’, Studio International, London, November/December, 1976; reprinted in his book A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, Faber, London, 1996. Whittaker, D. Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir. Wavestone Press, Charlbury, Oxfordshire, 2003. Includes an interview with Eno regarding the insights he gained from reading Beer. Beer, S. Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity. Wiley, Chichester, 1994.

7. Beer,

S. Transit.

Mitchell

Communications,

Prince

Edward

Island,

Canada,

1983.

(Beer provides fascinating notes to many of his best poems.) . Whittaker, D. ‘Tigers at Play: Stafford Beer’s Poetry’, Kybernetes, Vol. 33, No. 3/4, 2004. . One Person Metagame.

Stafford Beer Foundation, Toronto,

1988. Also published in

Transit.

Photo: David Whittaker

10. Beer, S. ‘An Autobiographical Aside’, Teilhard Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1981.

L2500

FAIEY

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On the Mount of Olives

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1982

chapter

].

aths Created

ANYBODY WHO reviews books must subconsciously dread the situation I now face. It is new to me; nor do I expect to encounter it ever again. Intemperate judgements may soon

be proved wrong; but it is too easy to take a world-weary way out. The plain fact is that I suspect I am reviewing a work of genius. This is an extraordinary book. It is about mathematics. But this bold author devises his own mathematics from scratch, and makes few references to the history of that elegant discipline. True, there is reference (in an appen-

dix) to something we knew about: Boolean algebra. Sheffer reduced Boole’s whole logic to five unproven postulates. Spencer-Brown proves all five in a casual couple of pages. As to the famous ‘Sheffer stroke; itself a triumph of mathematical simplification, Spencer-Brown

calmly says that ‘it may be omitted’ He is right—as I now (but could not earlier) see. Nor would I previously have regarded Godel’s theorem as logically trivial. These revised views are the result of spending two delightful days in St Mark’s Square, immersed in this condensed and exquisitely poised argument. Yes, the book is short. It virtually ends after sixty-eight pages with the conclusive words ‘and so on There really does seem no more to be said. But the author allows us an equivalent ration of notes. Sample one of these: “Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself. This is indeed amazing’ To this I respond Amen—in several tones of voice. And all this begins by saying simply: ‘Draw a distinction. From there on, things just happen. We are introduced to an algebra of the utmost simplicity, which a child (if it were thus sophisticated) could Review of Laws of Form by George Spencer-Brown, Allen and Unwin, 1969. Nature, Vol. 223, 1969.

Reprinted with kind permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

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Maths Created

understand, and to a notion of great beauty, because it conveys what it says. When one thinks of all that Russell went through sixty years ago, to write the Principia, and all we his readers underwent in wrestling with those three vast volumes it is almost sad. All credit to Russell, then, who endorses this book with his congratulations. Publishing this review at all is almost a nonsense—you would be better employed in reading the book itself for Spencer-Brown tells his own story in a way that defies exegesis. [ would as soon give an account of a sonnet. Here is mathematics being created in front of our very eyes. My own suspicion is that we are also observing the creation of a science of

design, and the laying down of a proper basis for a new epistemology. It is very difficult to say at such close range. Whatever the author is doing, he is doing something remarkable—

of this I am very sure. And this would remain true, although somebody should succeed in uncovering defects that I have not observed. [ very much hope, for the sake of their own delight, that those who have thought hard

about the nature of mathematics, of logic, of the thinking process, or of the universe itself, will read this book. It would be impertinent for me to try to offer a final judgment here. Now [?] every experience can be placed decisively on one side or the other of a valid distinction, the real meaning of which is not at all the point. So teaches Spencer-Brown himself: ‘Distinction is perfect continence’ The existence of this book draws a distinction; I

Photo: Rex Cole

an

leave no room to doubt on which side of that distinction my experience lies.

chapter 2

aws of Anarchy

THIS LECTURE is devoted to the problem of man in society. It is a topic that has fascinated mankind since the written record began, and you might think that little more could be said by now. But my contention is that something more MUST be said, and said loudly, and said soon. Obviously this contention hints at incipient disaster; and I am very tired of the ‘naming’ fallacy whereby people talk about ‘doomsters, as if that settled anything, and as if disasters do not happen. The fact is that disasters happen all the time; that the history of man could be written,

albeit pessimistically, in terms of the succession of his disasters; and that we may read in the newspapers of new disasters almost every day. It is possibly just because there are so many that people become inured to them; it is possibly just because they are inured that they feel they are immune; it is possibly just because they feel immune that they do not even recognize some disasters when they occur. In my opinion, we are well into a period of gross instability in our society. The econo-

mists of this University might well agree: they would be thinking of economic instability. The social scientists might well agree: they would be thinking of social instability. The ecologists might well agree: they would be thinking of instability in the ecosystem. But I am a cybernetician. I am talking about societary instability: incipient disaster for the way

we are, or (as they say) for ‘all we hold most dear’ This is close to talking about political instability, but it is not quite the same thing. Our society is organized in a complicated network of institutions of many kinds. Some have legal status, others not. Some have ethical status, others not. All are changing under the The Irvine Memorial Lecture, University of St Andrews, 5 March 1975. Previously unpublished.

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Laws of Anarchy

pressure of technological, economic, social and moral shifts of an explosive kind. I do not know whether these institutions can survive. More especially, I do not know whether the

complicated network of institutions can hang together much longer. These are the issues propose to discuss. What is cybernetics, that it should concern itself with such matters? Some people see

cybernetics as control engineering, knowledgeable about transfer functions, feedback, and regulatory mechanisms. Then they would rightly think that all this might be useful in handling societary instability and rightly suspect that the treatment would look rather simplis-

tic. Some people see cybernetics as concerned with computers, which clearly ought to be used properly in society, clearly are not, and clearly represent a massive threat to liberty when they are in the hands of concentrations of power, and of the technocrats who serve these power centres. Other people again see cybernetics in terms of its work in biological systems, and especially in the brain. Then they might rightly suppose that all of this, and the mathematics that goes with it, is sufficiently elaborate to apply to societary issues, and

rightly suspect the integrity of the analogy under which it would seem that the knowledge must be transferred. The fact is that cybernetics is all of these things. I mean that it is all of these things put together and at the same time. It is not so much an interdisciplinary science as a transdisciplinary science. When we take it to pieces, and point to the cybernetic things

that engineers, computer people, neurophysiologists, management and social scientists, psychologists, anthropologists and even philosophers have done, we are misleading ourselves. It is tempting, especially inside any university, an institution which does have a

tendency to ‘hardening of the faculties to go in for this reductionism. But we delude ourselves if, having performed a reductio ad absurdam on cybernetics, we then declare that it is absurd.

I define cybernetics as the science of effective organization. The adjective ‘effective’ at once entails a definition of purpose. But organizations do not have purposes. It is the perception and the purpose of the people who sponsor, operate, use and serve the organization that determine how it shall be deemed effective. We have first to understand the epistemology and the teleology; only then can we get on with the science. When we get to the

science, we shall be drawing on everything we know about regulation in systems—in the flesh, in the metal, in the social weal. And that is how we come to talk about ‘laws! The ‘laws of nature’ are not really laws at all, as any philosopher of science would explain. However, I need a shorthand to say to you something that I have learned. It is that there are fundamental facts about the way that large, complicated, probabilistic systems actually work, regulate themselves, organize themselves, learn, adapt and evolve, which seem to be invariant to the fabric of the system concerned. In this sense, then, there are cybernetic laws. It would be more correct to say that if we model this whole collection of viable systems at a sufficiently profound level, and use the neutral language of mathematics

Laws of Anarchy

25

to describe them, we shall find isomorphic mappings between them in terms of structure, and in terms of the rules that govern their dynamics. When listing the qualities of viable systems just now, I called them self-regulating and self-organizing. There is no ultimate ganglion in the brain that tells the nervous system what to do. There is no thermostat anywhere in the body with a marker set at the temperature 98.4°F. And the Book of Proverbs reminds us that ‘the locusts have no king, and yet they go about in bands’ In short, democratic systems regulate and organize themselves without benefit of dictat or ukase. They do not have hierarchies of command. They are avapyog which is to say without a ruler, and that is the literal meaning of anarchy. I have at least explained by now the oxymoron that constitutes my title. Then what are these cybernetic laws that apply to anarchic systems as defined, and what light do they shed on the problem of man in society? Is it true that British democracy is without rulers, and if so what are all those people really doing at Westminster and Whitehall? Redundancy of Potential Command All viable systems, and that includes societies and societary institutions, have to take decisions in order to keep themselves going. The model we have of this process suggests that, relatively unimportant decisions may be taken low down, and that as the decisions become more important, they are pushed ‘higher up. Thus we generate our concept of hierarchy, like a family tree, with a ruler sitting at the top—and ‘the buck stops here’ This model is all very well for a few formal purposes, such as enacting laws, obtaining visas, authorizing budgets, and sending people to prison. But it is an almost useless model

for understanding how institutions actually regulate themselves. Consider a company that takes a decision to buy a huge computer called Leviathan 14. The board says that it took this decision at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon. What really happened? And why are they ordering a Leviathan 14, and not a 15A? Would the board know the difference anyway? What really happened was that quite a long time ago a few bright young men started to say around the place: What this firm needs is a computer. They knew what they wanted to

do with it. The accountancy people heard, and saw a different point; the research and development people heard, and saw a different point again. And so on. Gradually, there built up something called ‘a climate of opinion. It began to seem likely to everyone that the firm would get a computer. At this point, the computer salesmen found out: they have a nose for it. They also have a nose for sniffing out who is likely to influence a decision. Very gradually again, the general belief that maybe the firm will get a computer, turned into a belief that the firm would either go for a Leviathan 14 or a Datadigestion BURP. The company directors meanwhile had been very busy ‘deciding’ whether or not to buy a cyclotron—an idea that had originated with a twenty-three year old physicist whom none of them had ever heard about. But of course they all knew that the firm had a computer problem; one of them happened to have been on a Leviathan course; and, funnily enough,

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Laws of Anarchy

another had been taken out to lunch by Datadigestion. So one day they took decisive action, which is what the rulers we do not have are for. They set up a working party to report on the merits of the two alternatives. (Someone mentioned a machine called Behemoth,

but no one else had heard of that). The working party eventually reported. They said that Leviathan 14 was half the price of the Datadigestion machine, and could do twice the work in half the time. However, they were careful to point out that their role was purely advisory, and that it fell to the board of directors to take a decision. With due solemnity the board did take its decision, on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock. There are two points to make about this story. The first is that command in a viable system is really a potentiality spread all through that system. Command is highly redundant, that is to say; all sorts of people are capable of taking small decisions which finally add up to a big decision, or to a significant movement in a new direction. The second point is that the potential to command becomes actual in a given instance solely because of the way that information is distributed through the system at the time. Then the role of hierarchies is no more than this, that the formal organizational structure biases the information distribution. If we say of an institution that it is heavily centralized, it means that information is being kept at the centre so that potential command at the periphery cannot manifest itself as actual. And this is highly dangerous, because the system is now robbed of the redundancy in command which offers it protection against crazy outcomes.

McCulloch showed all this in the ascending reticular formation of the brain stem, and the phrase ‘redundancy of potential command’ was his phrase. But we can show the same phenomenon in control systems engineering, and we can show it mathematically. Especially, however, we can show it in the management of societary institutions. For the two years up to September 1973, I was engaged in creating a regulatory system for the social economy of Chile. This system was effectively a real-time computer network,

in which all parts of the economy provided daily information. The information was filtered by complicated computer programs involving Bayesian statistical techniques, and then returned to the senders. It was also assembled into new forms, as an economist would say, at various levels of aggregation, and re-filtered for each one. So there is the notion of hierarchy: if you are going to try and operate a social economy as an effective unit, you

have no alternative but to make aggregations until you can see the whole picture. But what does ‘effective’ mean? As [ said before, that depends on the perceptions and purposes of people. The people could not apply their purpose of worker control throughout the social economy, unless they could perceive how the economy was at any given time. Then this system set out to make that perception available. Because this work linked up the social economy in real-time to computers, and because

people carry in their heads that simplistic model of command that I was criticizing, it was easy for critics to declare that all this must have been centralizing and oppressive. In fact, the whole conception was to disseminate the command function, by supplying informa-

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tion round the network to wherever the potential command could metabolize itself at any given moment.

The system that I describe was not finished, although we got a long way in a mere two years. Even so, the information network with its redundant command potential made a very strong impact. The famous strike of lorry owners (and other small-time private businesses) of October 1972 was broken, despite the financial support that it had from abroad. That was because the Chilean workers kept supplies going themselves, using such transportation as was still available—a small fraction of the normal. To do such a thing means having a lot of information about where things are, and where things are needed; it means having that information fast; it means spreading it around the network so that potential command may be made actual. The Relaxation Time

You will notice from that example how important was the speed with which properly filtered information had to be continuously available. When organization is discussed, there is usually no mention of the time dimension at all. When there is, it usually turns out that folk are concerned with the timeliness of information. They mean, quite simply, that it is not so good to try and take decisions using information that is already out of date. Quite so: but there is something much more important, and far less obvious. Any viable system is dynamic; it unrolls itself through time, ilthough you would not obtain a glimmer of this insight from the organization chart. The organization unrolls; and the information it is using about its own dynamics, and about its relationship with the outside world, has a lag. That is the timeliness factor. But [ am pointing to the fact that there are many different lagging effects. I am pointing to relative lags in the system’s dynamics. Cybernetically speaking, these relative lags are the most important

factors in determining systemic behavior. Consider any of these complex systems that you like, and contemplate what happens when it is disturbed from outside. We might take the taxation system, and the effect on that of a dramatic new finance act. The system wobbles dangerously for quite a time while everyone becomes adjusted to the new provisions. The time that it takes for the institution to settle back to smooth working after such a clout is called (just as it would be called in systems engineering) the relaxation time. Now most of our institutions were designed

some time ago, and even the new ones have zealously relaxation time that was appropriate to the era of their has grown a lot longer as the result of cancerous growth rate at which the clouts arrive has much increased, as

imitated those designs. They have a design, or else their relaxation time in the bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the a result of technological and social

innovation.

If I try to distill my experience (and of course this is a subjective matter, for which I can offer no proof), I should say with some conviction that the interval between the clouts is by

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Laws of Anarchy

that I now shorter than the institutional relaxation time for most of the societary systems have studied. Let that stand as a hypothesis. But if we now use the hypothesis as a premise, I can offer cybernetic demonstrations of the likely results—and these predictions, I find, fit the facts. In the first place, if the barrage of clouts does not allow the relaxation time to permit the system to settle down ever again, it will be permanently oscillating. That is not good at all. It betokens an instability which might at any moment, given an especially nasty clout, drive some critical variable of the system into catastrophic collapse. But there is worse to follow. If the system is permanently oscillating, it has no way of recognizing where its properly stable condition lies. It has no reference points that say: this is how we ought to be. Now if any viable system cannot recognize what counts as stability, it cannot possibly learn. All

our models of learning demonstrate that by continued experience a system may adjust its organization, in order to determine a trajectory that takes it from one definition of stability to another. If you have no notion of where stability is for you now, how can you define that trajectory? I think that this is a problem well formulated for us by psychiatry; and indeed I think that our institutions are mentally ill in just this sense. Oscillatory behavior is a hallmark of psychosis; and government itself, as I saw in Chile, and more recently in the Britain that ran up to the last election, can become manic. After that, the learning stops.

In cybernetics, we have the transdisciplinary model of all this, and we have the mathematics to describe it. What happens next is that the system that is permanently unstable, and therefore fails to learn, loses the capability to adapt. If learning is involved in selfregulation, adaptation is involved in self-organization. And so the sad story goes on. If we

cannot learn, we cannot adapt, because we have not learned what we need to adapt to. If we cannot adapt, we cannot evolve, because we have not adapted to the very flow of our evolution. It happened to the dinosaurs. In fact it happened to most of the species that ever

lived on the earth. It could happen to mankind. Then where do the solutions lie? The answer is so clear for the institution. It needs an appropriate relaxation time. We can say what that is, because we can understand the rate of change in the administration of clouts. This is not forecasting, not prediction in the grand sense. I would as soon consult the entrails of a chicken as engage in some of the tomfoolery that passes these days for technological forecasting. The rate of clouting is with us; it is increasing. Then what are we doing sitting here in institutions that manifestly have too long a relaxation time? Allow me to say what we are doing. We are instituting new procedures, which we call by nice names, such as participation, such as program budgeting, such as computerization, such as social contracts. Now I have nothing against any of those things; I choose to name them just because I am in favor of them all. What worries me are the ‘new procedures’ themselves. That is because when we try to innovate we stick the new proce-

dures onto the existing ones—and make the relaxation time even longer. Just look at the way we introduced Value Added Tax, for example, sticking a new procedure onto a Customs

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and Excise organization that was already archaic when Chaucer was in there worrying about the perennial problem of the adulteration of claret ... There is only one strategy that can possibly work. The relaxation time is a property of

the structure and dynamics of the system. If the relaxation time needs to be shorter, then we must REDESIGN THE SYSTEM. But surely—surely—if we are going to do that, we ought to use the cybernetic science of effective organization. We may not have very much ‘ordered knowledge’ in this field after thirty-odd years, but we do have some. And the recent reorganizations of, for instance, the health service, and the whole of local government, betrayed every canon of that knowledge. The Law of Requisite Variety

Next I turn from the institution to the network of institutions that we call society. Can this network hang together much longer in our society? It is a matter of the laws of anarchy; it is a matter between the democratically elected government and the people.

Suppose that the government works out a new policy. It has to be done in a lot of detail, otherwise it will not work. Politicians may go around uttering motherhood statements on their election platforms, but when it comes to instruments of government a great many issues have to be settled quite specifically. In cybernetic terms, we now confront Ashby’s Law.

The Ashby of this Law was Ross Ashby. He defined a concept called ‘variety’ He said that variety means the number of possible states of the system. And then he proceeded to make his monumental discovery that only variety can absorb variety. It is so obvious that

this is the case—once it has been pointed out. It is obvious that e = mc2 The systems that we are talking about proliferate variety. I mentioned taxation. People live their individual lives, and generate variety. The taxation system has to take note of the

variety of every different citizen, which entails a huge bureaucracy for a start. The sum of the variety of all the citizens has to be absorbed by the taxation system. That means that H. M. Inspector has to go into my affairs in detail. It also means that the Finance Act has to equip him with powers that are sufficiently detailed to deal with me in that detail. Only

variety can absorb variety. The name of Ashby’s Law is the Law of Requisite Variety. Now we could say that it would simplify taxation if everyone were to pay a tax of £1,000. That would not work. We should have to start specifying exceptions. And gradually we should grow the taxation system that is as complicated as the financial lives of the sum of taxpayers. There is no escape from this, because only variety can absorb variety. The model inside the regulator has to be at least as complicated as the system regulated. It is the Law of Requisite Variety. It is obvious. Then if it is so obvious, why do managers and ministers think that they can flout it?

The first thing that a manager says to a management scientist about the regulatory system that he is commissioning from him is (please believe it, because I know): I want it simple,

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and I want it cheap. In an ambience of sufficient ignorance, that will be attempted. But the planning board will grow to twelve planning boards; the visible file will grow into the next room; the planner will grow a staft of fifteen; and soon we shall be buying a Leviathan computer. Ashby’s Law is working itself out. The answer to this is to understand Ashby’s Law from the start, and to design the system accordingly. No one is going to invite a cybernetician to design a taxation system, because that is a matter for economists. But this is a pity, because the cybernetician could save the minister a lot of money—working on whatever basic economic principle the minister chose. The reason for this is that variety, although it must be requisitely absorbed, can be attenuated and it can be amplified. When the people gather in front of the government palace, they represent an enormous amount of variety. When, with one voice, they roar

their approval to the president, that variety is attenuated to some level that he can absorb. And when the president uses his low variety, for he is one man, who cannot meet every citizen, on television, he amplifies his variety to absorb theirs. I am saying that we can do variety engineering. Ashby’s Law will exert itself, whatever happens, because only variety can absorb variety. But we can design a system so that the variety is absorbed expensively or cheaply; by the accretion of regulatory variety (as in the Finance Act or the Companies’ Act) or by variety engineering; by accident or design. Let us please design. And let us return to the question of government policy, which has to be worked out in detail. Here is the new government policy on a certain matter, announced today. It has 500 items in it. That is its variety. I ask: how is this variety to be absorbed by the people? I ask: how, insofar as this variety is absorbed by the people, is the variety that they generate in response to be absorbed by the government?

The answer to the first question is, first of all, that if law is not to collapse then the government’s new policy will be implemented and amplified by civil servants and professionals, and the people will find that their lives are requisitely different. But we were talking earlier about the perceptions and purposes of the people. In our age, the perceptions of the people are mediated mainly by television, and I have a strong fear that television formulates their purposes too. So here is the government’s new policy, with its 500 items. We can give that two minutes of our so precious TV time. We will axe 499 items, and concentrate on one. That is a massive attenuation of total variety. We will now hit the public with this one item with all the force of our medium, because it is ‘newsworthy’—and we should know. That is a massive amplification of local variety. And we shall get Fred Bloggs to do it, because he is good at that kind of thing. No one elected Fred; no one even wanted Fred; but Fred has been around on television for ages, and has a face that launched a thousand crises. Listen to Fred being grave. “The government’s new policy, announced today, is based on the commission’s finding that no less than 40 per cent of school-leavers are illiterate’ Listen to Fred being happy. “The government’s new policy, announced today, is based

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on the commission’s finding that no less than 60 per cent of school-leavers can actually read and write’ We have attenuated total variety, amplified local variety, and now we are into the business of distorting variety. It is nobody’s fault. It is not my crusade to ‘do something’ about television. I am talking about cybernetics and society. May I then commend to your notice that government does not have the means

to communicate requisite variety at a perceived level, although it does have the means—and will use them—to implement variety requisitely through the law. Moreover, the relaxation time of society is quite long, while the impact of the news about government on the people is instantaneous—through television. It is inevitable, to look at that half of the system, that all of this should be destabilizing. The second question I asked was how the government could absorb the people’s variety, in response to their policies. I have made proposals about this to many governments, and hand on the supplementary question: does the government want the people’s response?

The answer to that question, in my experience so far, is NO, with the exceptions of Chile under Allende and Canada today. The government is concerned only with its survival. I shall return to this problem in a minute. In the meantime, let me finish what I have been saying about requisite variety. I have defined a closed loop between the government and the people. Here are the major characteristics of this loop. The government’s policies and practices have very high variety, as they must—because of Ashby’s Law. The people receive an attenuated total variety, and an amplified local variety that is distorted, instantaneously through television. Their means of response, in a democracy, is basically the ballot box, and that opens only once in several years. They have other means of response, it is true, but they are low-variety channels. People who write to The Times do not represent the public, contrary to the apparent belief

of the editor; they represent the class of people who write to The Times. Equally, people who mount campaigns directed at parliamentarians are really saying (as I suspect that the parliamentarians well know): ‘The paranoids are after us’ A system having these variety disbalances; these distortions; these relative time lags, in relation both to relaxation time and to the two halves of the loop; this amount of muddle over requisite variety; this absence of the redundancy of potential command; is about the most unstable system I can visualize. I do not expect it to learn, to adapt, to evolve. I do not expect it to survive.

The Autopoietic System This lecture is beginning to sound very gloomy; but, as you know, I think that there are an-

swers. No one will dare to grapple with the answers, unless the questions are both properly and forcefully put. There is no time here to talk about the answers in detail, which I have done elsewhere (especially in Platform for Change); my message is simply that our institu-

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Laws of Anarchy

but REDESIGNED. tions, and our network of institutions, have to be—not patched up, cybernetic tools, And the hope amid the gloom is that we really do have the tools. They are our governments because we are facing the problem of effective organization, and not (as names real always imagine) a whole collection of difficulties with specialized, reductionist as those difficulties may be. now. So I turn to the problem that I mentioned at the start, and mentioned again just replied What is up with the government of our society that is leaderless, anarchic? And I ics of cybernet the just now: ‘the government is concerned only with its survival, What are that? There is a class of governors within viable systems that we call homeostats. A homeostat is a regulatory mechanism, that holds some critical variable within physiological lim-

its. Body temperature makes a good example. I said earlier that there is no thermostat in the body with a marker set at 98.4°F. Nor, let me now add, is there any way of knowing for certain how far our temperatures may stray from this norm before we ought to be considered ill, or before we are dead. That is the meaning of ‘physiological limit. The limit is a function of the operation of the total system. When the physiological limit of the critical variable is exceeded, homeostasis has failed, and the system is in catastrophe. Again, we have the mathematics of all this cybernetic apparatus: it comes from algebraic topology.

Within the class of homeostats that control a critical variable within physiological limits, there is a sub-class. It is concerned, not with any sort of homeostasis, but with autopoiesis. According to the biologist and cybernetician Maturana, all life is autopoietic: it is his explanation for life itself. An autopoietic system is a homeostat for which the critical vari-

able held within physiological limits is its own organization. Thus an autopoietic system produces itself. Maturana is explicitly NOT saying that it re-produces itself: he considers that a side issue. And this is why he uses the rather ugly word autopoiesis—it is simply the Greek for self-making. You and I have maintained our integrity as the living systems we are over the last ten years. But now, in cytological terms, we are wholly different. We have remade ourselves. I have talked about self-regulating, and about self-organizing. This passage is about self-making. The proposal is that the main business of the government is to produce itself. That is what all those people are really doing at Westminster and Whitehall; and autopoiesis is their special Law of Anarchy. Please suspend your disbelief for the few minutes it will take to examine what effect this view of things has on our model of the world. According to the model of the world most people carry in their heads (which includes the hierarchies, and the greater and lesser decisions, and the centralized and decentralized modes), government sounds like this. There is a stream of input from the people to the government. This input makes demands of every kind, at every level. It says: be capitalist, be socialist. It says: my firm will go bust unless you reduce corporation tax. It says: up, or

Laws of Anarchy

down, accepts makes stream

33

with Concorde. It says: I have no money and [ am ill, help me. The government all these inputs; filters them; computes with them; undertakes operations on them; decisions, political and administrative. Then there flows from the government a of outputs, which results from all this activity, and answers all these questions—for

better or worse.

But if we use the model of an autopoietic system, the government looks completely different. The government is now a living thing, in business to produce itself. What we last called the stream of inputs is now seen to be a succession of buffets that threaten its survival. What the government does to offset these threats is to adjust its position a little. The result of this adjustment is that things are now a bit different at the receiving end, and that is what we last called the stream of outputs. The perception is staggeringly different. You

will have noticed that I have not distinguished between government qua Westminster and government qua Whitehall. That is because I see no need to make any distinction. Both are autopoietic systems, and they live together in an autopoietic symbiosis.

If so, then this is where the anarchy really lies. It does not lie with bomb-producing students, but with self-producing governments. This is why society is leaderless: it has no concern to lead. We also know the laws of this anarchy: they are the autopoietic laws. Maybe it does not matter.

Maybe it matters very much. I think that it does. Because this government, this autopoietic system, is sucking the people into its autopoiesis, and using us as fodder to produce itself. You can see it in the growth of the bureaucracy in Whitehall. You can see it in the appeal for national unity at Westminster. The idea that now is the time for moderation,

for consolidation, for ‘not rocking the boat, for not going either to the extreme left or the extreme right, has taken a firm grip on our society today. This attitude sounds very reasonable to ‘all right-thinking men and women. In fact, it is robbing the people of their perceptions and their purposes. They have to give up. If they have no purpose, let them eat television. I call this movement: the Extreme Centre. It is the black hole from which the light of mankind may never emerge again.

The Agency of Change How do we change all this? I am perfectly clear about my own purpose, which is not to watch (still less appear any longer on) television. My purpose is, as far as the little effort I have can take me, to change the world. So may I end with a personal testament about that. It is based on having actually effected a modicum of change, and I perceive three components in the agency of change. The first component is science, by which I (still) mean simply ‘ordered knowledge’ That could, of course, include music and art, and did for me in Chile. Then I am not advocating technocracy. [ am saying that if in the gigantic task of changing the world we do not use all the knowledge that mankind has accumulated, then we really are the crazy apes that

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Laws of Anarchy

Szent-Gyorgyi declares us to be. And a Nobel Laureate in biology should know something about that. Tonight I have talked about the transdisciplinary science of effective organization in particular, because it seems to me that this is where our society is weakest. It is not by accident, then, that I have operated as a cybernetician. The concepts I have offered you from cybernetics do not of course exhaust the cybernetic repertoire. But the redundancy of potential command, the question of relaxation times and relative lags, the Law of Requisite Variety, and the issues of homeostasis and autopoiesis, are surely conceptual and methodological keys to the door we must unlock. The second component in the agency of change, which has to do with turning the key of that door we must unlock, is instrumentality. Too many scientists who possess the ordered

knowledge, are—frankly—masturbators. They do their work in peace; they write their reports; they lay them on the desk of the man who has to do things; they say: ‘read those, then; it’s all there, and I have earned my vacation. The man who is doing things has no time for the vacation; and no time to read the reports; he may be shot by sunrise.

Anyone wishing to change the world had better get in there and join in the fun. He has to put his arm around the man with the responsibility, whether he is the national president or the worker with a product that he cannot get right, and actually share the burden of responsibility and the hard work on equal terms. So this is the instrumentality; the instrument is not the next page of bibliography. The third component of the agency of change is, quite simply, love. People who go into these difficult situations without love cannot put their arms around anyone, and therefore

cannot share the burden of responsibility. They really are technocrats. They have no real care, no real respect. Unfortunately, most of the institutions that the world has created to

deal with the problems of the world, attract people of this kind. And that is because they are wrongly organized. And that is because they do not use the science of effective organi-

zation. And that is where we came in ... If the agency of change involves these three components of science, instrumentality and love, then the agent of change must operate in places where the conditions of his work permit those components to flower and to flourish. This is why I was in Allende’s Chile; this is why I go to Canada and to India. It is also the complete explanation for my doing almost nothing in my own country. The absence of the conditions, and not my absence, is thoroughly alarming; and I end by trying to uncover the thinking in British management and government that robs us of the chance to redesign the system. As to the first component, the science, people honestly do not know about it. If you tell them about it, they reply: ‘how extraordinary. One day all this may be possible’ If you then say give them the examples, these examples will turn out not to be relevant to their situation at all. One Minister found the account of how the Chilean system operated ‘far too mathematical to be acceptable in the current climate here’ But the ordinary workers of

Laws of Anarchy

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Chile did not have any trouble; and besides, the account contained exactly as much mathematics as this address—precisely none. The Prime Minister, who had been complaining about the huge lags in the flow of economic data, was told that a system had gone into operation where no data were older than twenty-four hours. He replied: ‘that’s good’ In Canada, a whole ministry is currently reorganizing itself on a neurocybernetic model; can you imagine that even being mooted in Britain? There is something in our managerial psychology that takes hold of a new concept and promptly frightens itself to death with it. As to instrumentality, perhaps the difficulties stem from the line-and-staff distinction that is deeply engrained in the managerial culture. This means that the agent of change is labelled ‘staff’, and that virtually tells him not to do anything. Doing belongs to the line. Observe that most innovations that do come in Britain are made inside the staff work itself

(for example, the accountants install a new budgeting technique), and hardly ever in the managerial structure (the by now frenetic practice of engaging consultants to move people round a bit does not count as redesigning the system). The answer is to pin responsibility onto the innovator; but of course that would mean losing some power ...

As to love, I suspect that if that were taken seriously it would be threatening; and then it would be labeled ‘unprofessional’ It conduces to a much quieter life if we have unemotive rules of conduct, and do not transgress them. Rut the longing for a quiet life is just our trouble; and in any case we are not going to get it.

Shoto: Peter Rauter

May I say finally, without a trace of rancour, that hoping that things will turn out all right is not enough. And yet I do hope. Of course, I am British too.

chapter 3

ybernetics of Humankind

WE CELEBRATE here the human potential. ebration; and yet ... how dare one? Under has a heavily negative sign. And although and the abiding dreams of humankind, it

It is indeed uplifting to embark on such a celso many kinds of analysis, that potential today we may justly point to the great achievements would be pure madness to ignore the general

condition of a species threatened by imminent destruction in so many forms—all of its

own making. If humankind is caught in its self-constructed multiple traps, what hope is there of escape? Some work harder, armed with their good intentions. Usually they compound their dilemmas. The reason for this is that to pursue policies that do not work yet more vigorously is likely to make things worse—and it does. Others pray harder, armed with their faith in a particular value-system—not necessarily theological. There is no conceivable objection to that, on the small condition that (surely?) the process ought not ineffectually to segregate an institution caned ‘the faithful’ from their travailing brethren in other institutions—and it does. We could continue a list of this kind, pointing in each case to counter-productive outcomes.

It is more helpful to try and detect what they all have in common; what it is that leads to counter-productive outcomes in the presence of good intentions, and of more and more effort. I believe that the answer to this is that people know they are right. In this case, of course, to be proven wrong is impossible. Moreover, the sneaking fear that proof of wrongness may be just round the corner, results in a very strong feedback which, instead of correcting errors (as it does in engineering systems) by a negative application, reinforces the First published in The Journal

of Human

Reprinted with kind permission.

Potential, January 1976.

Cybernetics of Humankind

37

error by a positive application. ‘I am not only right, but under this threat I shall redouble my efforts to prove it ‘Well, now’, I can hear you saying: ‘Here’s someone who knows he’ right, if I ever heard one!” It is a fair enough crack; but I am not ashamed to share humanity

with you. The Constraint on Potential

It is nice to think of ourselves as ‘a little lower than the angels, and suffused with the vine. [ say nothing offensive to any such self-image that you (or I) may entertain. The remains that you and I, as we stand here on earth, are chunks of machinery— whatever we are. We fall over if pushed too hard, because our centre of gravity is high; that is the

Difact else sort

of thing I mean. In the middle of our bodies is a whole lot of sheer plumbing; and that too

is the sort of thing I mean. But around and about that body are systems of great complexity, such as the blood, such as the endocrine glands, such as the nervous system. Maybe there are others yet unrecognized. This entire apparatus is our machinery for perceiving realty—whatever that may be. Of

course, each of us has a view on this reality; and there is quite a concensus about it in its lower-level manifestations. For instance, if you wave me to a chair and say: ‘please sit down, I do not reply: ‘What do you mean, sit down?’ But there are other levels of perception than

our shared view (shared delusion?) of our physical surroundings, where potent disagreements certainly arise.

It comes about because our brains, which (whatever else they are) are quite complicated electrochemical computers, receive signals from our sensory equipment, and recognize patterns in those signals. It is this facility which enables me to recognize the chair that you expect me to sit on. But how is this brain programmed to recognize a chair? Well, when the brain is young, it puts together a whole set of sensory signals, which (it hears) is to be referred to as ‘chair’ This has to be a very elaborate process, since there are many sorts of

chair; but even a two year old can recognize a new sort of chair, that has never been seen before, as a chair. But—it is a matter of record—young human beings also recognize fairies, see Santa Claus (I did myself, quite vividly), and so on. All right: they are taught, which means that their brains are programmed, that the patterns recognized as fairies or as Santa Claus do not ACTUALLY exist. ‘Actually; please note, is the word. Our definition of reality is provided by such distinctions as ‘actually’ connotes. For we can still falk about fairies, and Santa Claus, and acupuncture, and extrasensory perception, and successful Marxist economies, and failed ‘success, provided that they are not ACTUAL. The brain is programmed by parents (Mother knows best), by teachers (this answer is wrong), by peer groups (we don't do it like that), by

ideologists (all right-thinking people agree), by institutions (we are going to have to let you g0), by governments (your country needs you), and by mystics (we ‘know’ don’t we?), to recognize the ACTUAL all right.

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Let me reduce the temperature I set out to raise, and take it cooly, academically. Aristotle gave us the Principle of Non-Contradiction: A cannot be non-A at the same time. It is obvious: deny it if you dare. Zen Buddhism might deny it. Democritus invented the atom, that which could not be split. Physics found the atom, and split it. Slightly confused, physics went on to say that this atom was not the atom after all; it is now hot on the scent of the quark. Anaxagoras, however, said there was no ‘atom’ in any case ... The hell with Zen, and the hell with Anaxagoras, says our Western culture. The hell, in fact, with anyone who cannot see that we are right.

It is the programming that does it. And the programming reinforces itself. The human potential is precisely to question its own programming. No mere machine has yet done it. Humankind can do it; that is the human potential. But it is difficult, and becoming more difficult all the time, because of those positive feedback systems that I mentioned. The Mechanics of Constraint

Let us understand why, in cybernetic terms. Each of us has an environment of gigantic complexity. There are separate blades of grass, pebbles, and tiny insects; there are the colours in the sky and on the walls of the room; there are the features, mannerisms and complicated personalities of everyone we know. Moreover, our senses are continuously relaying information about all of this to the brain. Once the sheer scale of the computational, data-processing problem faced by the brain is appreciated, the immediate question is why doesn’t the brain blow up? Sometimes it does. An epileptic fit, for example, is associated with uncontrolled tides of electrical activity sweeping across the cortex. And there is the clue: in the concept of control. The vast variety of ‘states of the world” that impinge on our sensory equipment are

brought sharply under control from the moment they arrive. Can a taste bud relay a chemical change that it cannot measure? Can a pressure-sensitive cell in the skin relay an imperceptible change in a touch? Obviously not, by definition. Then although it is right to think of our sense organs as our detectors of the world outside, it is important to see that they are also filters. They begin the process of cutting down variety ‘out there’ into something we can handle. Further, it is becoming increasingly clear that the sense organs themselves,

such as trained, become The

the rod and cone cells in the eye’s retina, are mini-computers that are actually or progressively programmed, in their task of relaying information, so that they selective. story goes on as we work through the nervous system. Every time a nerve fibre

ends, it either will or will not pass on its message to the next nerve fibre. But the pro-

cess is not at all like throwing a switch in a telephone line. Again an enormously complicated mini-computer is at work, filtering, selecting. And the brain itself undertakes the most massive filtration job of the lot. So close your eyes; then try to decide how many objects are on the table, what colour socks your son is wearing ... You don’t know,

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39

although the information was coming in all the time, because your nervous system filtered it out.

All this is very necessary, if we are not to explode; and we hope that the model of reality we have got is fairly accurate. We think that it is, because it seems to work. We get around;

we do not fallout about whether or not the chair is there to sit on. In short, we have good reason to think that the variety-filtration system that constructs our model of reality has come about by an evolutionary process, and that it is conducive to survival. Maybe so. But I want to establish that we do not ‘just know’ reality, but have a necessarily low-variety model of reality to work with. Philosophers long dead have argued the same thing; but today this issue is no longer metaphysical, but a matter of the hard neurocybernetics of physiology. Once it is clear that we are, as people, dependent on a model of reality fed to us by a filtration and selection system, we can also see that any such set-up provides us automatically with a classification system. This is the logical structure deriving from including some things and excluding others (the filtration), and from putting things into different slots (the selection). This classification system for handling our model is also shared, and is what makes linguistic communication possible. But it also makes possible, and indeed inevitable, a way of talking and thinking that gives expression to the model—and to nothing else. Hence, if we hypothesize that something odd is going on in our very high-variety world,

then it is likely that it will be filtered out of our perception, and we shall deny it. Most of our failures as sane people could well arise in this way. We have low-variety models of our family and friends—who themselves have much higher variety. We end up by divorcing our spouses, losing contact with our children, and putting low-variety labels on everyone we know. When they try to explain to us that they do not match our model of them, we do not try to pump up the variety of the model, as we should. We say that they ought to match the model—attributing blame to them, and landing ourselves with a dependence on tranquilizing drugs (which are, in neurocybernetic terms, quite simply

further variety-reducers). Most of our failures as civilized people could well arise in this way also. Here is a strange phenomenon, we say; is it physical or chemical? The science committee that holds the re-

search funds will apply its low variety model of nature, and tell us. But I wonder if God knows the difference between physics and chemistry? And when the art commission applies its low-variety model of aesthetics, to tell us which picture is good and which bad, I wonder whether God knows that difference either. Giants among us arise from time to time, and

smash the models. For Einstein, parallel lines met. Picasso painted Guernica, so there. But the rest of us dare not call in question the low-variety models of our programming. Now the hopefulness of all this lies in the human potential to question the models, to doubt the programming. Every single one of us, not an Einstein, not a Picasso, has this ability. The only prerequisite is to understand that it is an issue of variety amplification and re-

40

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modeling. We are simply rot equipped to deal in ‘ultimate truths, unless we believe that we have them by direct revelation. (The trouble about that is that the model of God through which any such claim is put forward must be a low-variety model, if God is infinite.) How does one, the ordinary individual, get back some of the variety that was (necessarily) filtered out, selected out, classified out? The critical answer is: by taking time. Our lives are lived in such a rush that the slashing down of presented variety becomes more and more urgent, if we are not to explode. The more we allow our bodies and brains to slash variety, the more simplistic and the more rigid our models become, and the less hope we have of advancing our personalities. This is reflected in the advice to take up hobbies

and sports. But such is our culture, that these too have to be pursued relentlessly, and themselves become low-variety activities. This in turn is reflected in the current vogue for ‘meditation’ but that can also become relentless, and a variety sink—exactly the opposite of its intention.

An Allegory of Constraint I have tried to show that our outlook on the world is necessarily a model of reality, and that this model is necessarily one of hugely reduced variety. Then consider how our professional, managerial and institutional activities really work, and imagine this scene ... You are sitting on a tree-stump in the country, surrounded by all the intricate and beautifully coloured features of nature. Along comes a Specialist. ‘Can you understand it all, then?” he asks. ‘No, you agree : ‘it is all a great mystery. ‘Buy a pair of my Truth Spectacles, says the Specialist; so you do. Now as a matter of fact, these Truth Spectacles are simply dark red-tinted glass. ‘What do you see?” asks the Specialist. ‘I see that everything is red. What’s more I cannot any longer see a lot of the complicated details that I saw before’ ‘Exactly! That is our triumph; says the Specialist. ‘What you are seeing is the Truth that underlies all the confusion. The world is really red. And the rules that govern it all are actually quite simple’

Now: if this is true, we must be able to test it. ‘If we added the colour blue to the world’ you say thoughtfully, ‘then everything should turn purple. ‘How wise you are) says the Specialist, spraying your Truth Spectacles with a fine blue mist from an aerosol. ‘See what I mean?’ Economists offer us a model of the world. Once we have accepted the model, once we run our businesses and our government finances according to the model, we find that the blues and the purples alternate quite correctly as the aerosols are manipulated. It works! And if there are people, just people, out there in a complicated, multi-coloured world in which everything is getting steadily worse ...? Well, they really need educating do they not? If we run courses for the poor devils, if we offer them Truth Spectacles at a reduced price, then sooner or later everyone will come to understand. They may starve, but at least they will understand—so something is accomplished.

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41

Social scientists offer us a model of the world. Once we know the models that explain criminality, deprivation, delinquency, and so on, we can handle everything much more effectively. ‘This is a typical syndrome, the Specialist explains to the court spraying its red Truth Spectacles with a yellow aerosol. “Thanks to your wise decisions, as guided by the Truth Spectacles, we predict that everything is now turning orange. Well it is, isn't it?” We have to admit that it is. Why then are criminality, deprivation and delinquency on the steady increase? That, one must admit is rather worrying. ‘You didn't give us enough money for yellow aerosols, answers the Specialist emphatically. Wow: that’s fair enough. We need a new Agency, with plenty of government money, to provide yellow aerosols. But (and let’s get this QUITE CLEAR) those who request this money must prove that their yellow is pure, their aerosols efficient, and their entire spraying technique up to the highest standards. Relax: we know how to do that, at least. We shall appoint to the Agency a Governing Committee, consisting of two Men of Yellow, two presidents of aerosol companies, and an Ivy League Professor of High Standards. So now we can all sleep easily in our beds. Not satisfied, even now? Read in a newspaper of some crank who thinks that criminal-

ity is GREEN? Well, we are honest folk, and our motives are pure. Give him his chance. Insist, absolutely insist, that he is allowed to present his evidence to the Agency Committee. Feel better now? Clearly this will not do. The message of the Allegory is that we need to question our institutional models, and redesign the organizational structures that rely on them. The human potential is there, but hidden by a grotesque bureaucracy with vested interests in the models that do not work. An Exercise

Let us try a small exercise in variety manipulation using a little time for our human potential to ‘question the programming’ Here are some problem characters in our society that you will recognize: alcoholics and tranquilizer addicts, prostitutes, recidivist prisoners, schizophrenics, ‘mindless’ terrorists, drop-outs living on social benefits and dope, suicides. Please think about each in turn. What is the nature of the aberrant behaviour? How well do we understand it? What

machinery has society set up to handle it? Why does it not work? (Pause: take time.)

Now consider that each of these people has a low-variety model of the world that is quite different from your own low-variety model of the world—thanks to a different programming. Next reconsider each behaviour as possibly the only means by which each of those people can make sense of his reality. (Pause again.)

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Then obviously any approach to that person that presupposes some other model of reality (yours) will be irrelevant to his needs. And the fact that you believe that your model

is shared by a democratic majority has precisely nothing to do with it. Disturbing? I think so; which is perhaps why we suppress our human potential, and settle cosily inside our own models of the world. Yet the potential is there to be used. It can

Peter Rauter

change a human life, an institutional nonsense, a civilization’s course ...

chapter 4

equisite Ross

‘SOMEONE 1s boring me. I think it's me’ Thus once remarked the Welsh poet Dylan Thom-

as. Often when talking to people about Ross Ashby I am myself assailed by this feeling; and [ am quite serious in saying that I know that it is Ross himself who sets it up in me. It is open to you to interpret that remark in various ways. The least challenging is to say if you will (though I shall not) that obviously the focusing of memory on a man who hated effusion would prompt the suggestion not to be too effusive. If you were to say this, then I reckon that Ross would applaud your use of Occam’s Razor—and then come at you with a merciless scalpel about that ‘obviously’ you used. Ashby was a man of such precise and incisive thought processes that he did indeed operate as a surgeon of the intellect, whereas he was far too sensitive and gentle a person

to have been the neurosurgeon that this ‘brain man’ of our great affection might otherwise have become. Perhaps he did not always realize that some people have less relish for the dissection of their treasured notions of what-it’s-all-about than for the dissection of their

prefrontal lobes. At least you get a general anaesthetic for that, and not a shot of Ashby’s Special—which could evoke instant hypersensitivity. Ashby’s British compatriots are especially ingenious (so I being me have also observed) in finding ways in which to accommo-

date the most the evidence: know it to be made, and its

irrefutable evidence that their model is wrong. It would be culpable to deny they do not. It would be absurd to alter the model: all right-thinking people right. The basic trick is to acknowledge all aspects of the effort that has been great importance—‘when the time is ripe. Of course the time is never quite

Written mid-1970s for ASC Forum. Previously unpublished

44

Requisite Ross

ripe; meanwhile, certain (undetectable) adjustments to the model are understood to have been made. And so on. Most sadly this lack of recognition in Britain of his discoveries hurt Ross deeply. He felt that his important new concepts (as they were and remain) were being spurned (as they were and still are) both by The Establishment, and by those engaged in managing affairs. He often spoke to me of his outrage as to the impregnability of the first, and of his simple amazement at the incomprehension of the second. So I would engage him in discourse about the pathology of those very mechanisms of viability that he himself had disclosed, and beg him not to suffer any hurt in himself. But although there was hurt in himself, it was not for himself; it was for the loss of the scientific and practical advances which he had conceived and made possible—but which he blamed himself for not managing to ef-

fect. Well, he gave us who study his works all those ideas free of charge. Let us accept that gift and handle it impeccably, for it was passed to us (I have been seeking to show) with exceptional innocence.

At the start [ expressed, though I did not explain, the difficulty I have in speaking of Ross. After many false starts to this note, I managed to get going by firing both barrels of the only critical gun at my disposal, one after the other. Negative effusion, you see. Suddenly (surprise, surprise) they too have turned themselves into a twenty-one gun salute ... Ashby did not want personal plaudits; and, as I said, he hated effusion—although without doubt he recognized and also returned love. It was, in these circumstances, a risky course on which I embarked in the British university where I teach. I nominated W. Ross Ashby for a Doctorate in Science, honoris causa. Now this was after his return from the United States as Professor Emeritus. I wrote an encomium, as required, which I dared not show him. He would have his chance to turn down the honour when it was offered. He

would certainly be cross with me, but might accept it for the sake of cybernetics; and that might in turn secretly ameliorate his hurt. The selection committee met, announced the year’s honorary degrees, and departed. I heard nothing at all. So I made enquiries. I was told that Ross’s name did not appear in Whos Who. Perhaps you have experienced the feeling that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was exactly this kind of twaddle that the honour was intended to put down in principle—and to lay to rest forever in his case. It did not at this point occur again to me that I might after all be doing just the wrong

thing. I was incensed for Ross’s reputation; he was sitting unbeknownst of these entire developments at his home in Bristol, and visiting nearby Cardiff as an Honorary Professorial Fellow. Moreover, I was angry with my own incompetence. The next year, then, his name went forward again. This time it was accompanied by a huge dossier. There were letters of support from every cybernetician in the world whose name would count. In addition there were Nobel Laureates, leading scientists from other disciplines, top managers ... From what I can now remember, I may have cited the Queen. At any rate, this was a dossier to wring the heart of Genghis Khan. Just a few weeks before the selection committee met

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again, the said W. Ross Ashby died. Despite a certain austerity of manner behind which the shyness hid, Ross usually laughed a lot. And I can hear his laughter now—this being the first he has heard of these well-meant fiascos. >

You will have noticed that I am treating the chance to write about my friend anecdotally. Others, more archival in their scholarship than I, will surely write brilliantly about his scientific achievements. I believe in the oral tradition. Anyone can gain access to the official story; but I had a privilege that it is now up to me to answer for. Is this for reasons of self-indulgence, or for dubious delights of gossip-mongering, or what? The answer lies in the what, as I hope you have recognised by now. Hearken then again: I have another good and true friend, to whom I mentioned the project of this very edition of Forum. One of the issues about which he and I have always disagreed is the status of the Law of Requisite Variety (which, in and out of season, I reference as Ashby’s Law—and I hope that you will too). For, argues this friend, it is a mere tautology. Only variety can absorb variety. Always suspect the word ‘mere. Consider: the entire corpus of mathematics is either tautologous— or wrong. Wrong is wrong. Tautologies are right, and that’s a start. What’s wrong cannot be (directly) useful; tautologies may be (directly) useful. Were it not so, mathematics would never be useful—but they are. And no one calls them ‘mere’ (except as do I in too many cases of misconceived Operational Research).

Well, this other friend with whom I disagreed about Ashby’s Law and to whom I mentioned this very edition of Forum, became quite angry. He asked me not to talk to him anymore about this issue or about the contribution that you are now reading. Was this because of his hostility to Ashby’s Law? No, it was not. It was because (my friend said) a scientist had the right to express himself as he chose; and he should therefore, be judged by

his published and authenticated works. It was at best superfluous, certainly impertinent, and potentially damaging to talk anecdotally about the man himself. But, I argued, published works suffer variety attenuation by the rules of the publication game: especially if an author be too diffident to challenge or to circumvent those rules. Only variety can absorb variety, after all—so if we do not have it, we must needs generate it. Was it not possible that the full flowering of the recipient understanding could be amplified by the injection of variety concerning the further nature of the author? Was that author capable of jokes? Did he customarily employ the full pelt of dramatic irony? Were his mathematics suspect? Did he ever publish things (such as on television, where there is a permanent record) on an off-day? And if, as in Ross’s case, he were capable of learning the clarinet at retirement age, would or would not that throw light on his control of his own development and innovative qualities? No (the answers were tetchy by now) it would not. Of the hundreds of concocted or reported examples of the relevance of Ashby’s Law that I have published over twenty-five years, this true story is the one offered here for

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the serious Ashbean connoisseur, because of its tail-eating involution. It seems that laws which express mere tautologies ought to be disobeyed in the very process of declaring them tautologous and therefore not susceptible to being disobeyed, and that variety need not actually be requisite since everyone already knows that it must be. The connoisseur should fee] the patina of the inside surfaces of this Klein bottle, and ‘nose’ the bouquet of its inaccessible wine ... I

I cannot be sure when first we met; but Ross Ashby and I were seeing each other regularly in the second half of the 1950s. I was in the Sheffield steel industry then, and he was in Bristol—were also two other prominent cyberneticians. There was Frank George at the University, then alarming a psychology department, oriented primarily towards monkeys, with biscuit-tins-full of electronics simulating neuronal systems (he is now Professor of Cybernetics at Brunel University in Uxbridge). There was Grey Walter at the Burden Neurological Institute, who was the world authority on electroencephalography—but who was experimenting also with cybernetic tortoises of his own invention. Ashby himself, who was later to become director of the Burden, was Director of Research (he was a psychologist) at Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester—which is where he worked when he wrote both

his books. It was a regular practice for me, not surprisingly, to visit all three in Bristol in those years; and sometimes Ashby came to visit my department in United Steel. It is hard to remember that Ross was a generation ahead of me. It did not feel like that; he would not allow it; he chopped off my awe at the knees. That was something he taught me about. It is more useful to confess to that than to acknowledge that he drew my attention to Bourbakian algebraic topology—although that was his (earlier) doing too, and very useful it proved to be.

Ashby’s later papers involving this kind of mathematics will take many years to elucidate. A large number belongs to the public domain (through the microfiches of the Biological Computer Laboratory publications made available through the University of Illinois in Urbana). There are, in addition, it seems 7,188 pages of notebooks so far undisclosed ... It is predictable that many future doctoral theses lie, inanimately suspended, in this yetfecund soil. Then what can here be said, in this short and anecdotal memoir, about Ashby’s view of algebraic topology? The answer is: he wore it round his neck.

Meticulous in intellect, meticulous in dress: and, unobtrusively beneath his tie, he wore a thin gold chain—consisting of a triple loop. It was in fact a topological knot, and one that fascinated him. I shall tell you how to make it; because he liked to demonstrate its subtle properties, and because I am holding in my other hand than the hand that holds my pen the nylon ropes that Ross himself strung together as the exemplar for the jeweller who made the golden chain. It was kindly passed to me by Mrs Ashby; and if any reader has ever

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seen me wearing a triple string of wooden beads, it is the copy that I made of Ross’s knot. Make three loops of string—just circles. Flatten the second, and hand it through the first. Its two loops hang down like a bloodhound’s dewlaps. Cut the third loop once, pass the end through each of the pendant loops, and rejoin. You now have two completely independent circles, connected by the central circle. If you next shake all this out, you have the triple necklace—in which the crossovers are unobtrusive. If you spread it out flat, and move the loops around, and try to understand what’s happening, you may get into something of a trance. At any rate, that is all the algebraic topology that you will get from me right now—I trust with Ashby’s blessing. >

I think it was in 1957 that I invited Ross Ashby and Grey Walter out to lunch in Bristol. Both wore beards, but there the similarity ended. Ross had on a black jacket and striped trousers—or maybe not: the point is that he wore the most formal of his uniforms. Grey was wearing a suit that appeared to have been fabricated out of a green billiard baize—to-

gether with a string tie (think of the date; think of England!). I can still recall large chunks of the conversation, and so probably can the diners nearby, who were taking in the scene

open-mouthed, as if it were some sort of cabaret. I approach the most difficult aspect of these recollections: the way in which Ross Ashby handled ‘awkward’ situations. This luncheon was certainly one, as all three of us expected it to be. The powerful magnetism exerted by these two older men had opposite polarity. Both behaved with the utmost courtesy, and I was beginning to learn how Ross would operate. Between us we stood together to represent Britain in several international cybernetic

scenes. To provide details of any of these affairs would be journalistic, indiscreet, and—in one word—uncouth. I just want to record that Ross Ashby would never ‘take advantage’; that he was invincibly perplexed by skulduggery (which he was certainly far too clever not to recognize); that he was endlessly gentle and endlessly tenacious—the most dire combination of all living souls. Earlier, I used the word ‘innocent, an operational synonym for which is ‘look out. Such impeccable behaviour took it out of him; and although he was wiry he seemed to acknowledge his physical limits. I was three times with him when he simply stopped. On the most dramatic of these occasions, he not only stopped—but vanished. We had been in a negotiation together, and suddenly I was alone; bogus excuses had to be made ... ‘sudden recall; and so on. Having no idea of the truth, but unworried for him, I limped on; two days later he reappeared—in a café that we had been frequenting. He had driven his car deep into the forest, and locked himself in to play the clarinet. He had had enough, but enough. Ashby knew Ashby’s Law. It is astonishing: few people can thus assimilate what they have had occasion to know.

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Ross was not only honest to the threshold of pain, he was extremely sensible as well. That being so, I realize that he is not going to allow me much longer ... >

Late in 1960, a group of Heinz von Foerster’s friends were together in the evening at Heinz’s home in Urbana, Illinois. A complicated ballet ensued, the choreography of which I do not altogether remember. At the precisely proper—the balletic—moment, Heinz offered Ross

a Chair in BCL. He quietly accepted, without a moment’s pause, and asked to telephone his wife back home in Bristol. It was the middle of the night: thank goodness that the sun moves from East to West. Everyone concerned was totally astonished—Mrs Ashby, I think I may say, especially. And so he changed his life: for the vitally important years 1961-

1970, W. Ross Ashby MD was Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer psychiatrist. We walked back alone together to the Faculty Club, where we had adjacent rooms, across the campus under a full moon. We were strolling quietly and relaxed. I told him that I was amazed at his instant decisiveness. He asked me why. I talked about his scientific acumen, his meticulous methodology, his exactitude: I had expected him to ask for a year to consider, to evaluate the evidence for and against emigration. Surely his response had been atypically irrational? He stopped in his tracks and turned to me, and I shall never forget his TEACHING

me at that moment. No, he said calmly. Years of research could not attain to certainty in a decision of this kind: the variety of the options had been far too high. The most rational response would be to notice that the brain is a self-organizing computer which might be able to assimilate the variety, and deliver an output in the form of a hunch. He had felt this hunch. He had rationally obeyed it. And had there been no hunch, no sense of an heuristic process to pursue? Ross shrugged: “Then the most rational procedure would be to toss a coin’ I wrote in his Times obituary about this judgement that “The first comment came from a man who knew as much about the computer-in-the-skull as anyone alive, the second from a man devoid of self delusion’ Someone is boring me. I think it'’s me. All right Ross. That’s it.

chapter 5

A.n

Open Letter to Heinz von Foerster

My DEAR Heinz,

Ah-ha! What is this fellow up to? That was my first reaction to meeting you, more than a quarter of a century ago, when you leapt out of the pages of your paper ‘Quantum Theory of Memory, and hit me on the head. You did it again only recently, when I read your reported remarks on the nature of self-consciousness. For twenty-five years you have made a habit of it. Whether you were writing about the population explosion, information retrieval, cognition, or (for Heaven's sake) taxation, you leapt out of the pages, and hit me on the head. All that has a lot to do with your incredible flair for illuminating your own bright ideas with the most creative use of mathematics that I have ever witnessed. In every field you have touched, from psychology to economics, there exists a corpus of mathematical theory which is about as illuminating to the complexities of the systemic issues involved as a firefly. I have nothing against fireflies, which constitute such nice little cybernetic communities; but when your floodlights come on those fellows are out of business. I suppose that the Establishment was blinded; but this is not the moment to turn aux royaumes des aveugles ... I have not yet referred, I realize, to our meetings in the flesh, and frankly I cannot remember exactly when those began. They must however already span some twenty years. In any case, the story is the same. Whether you leap out of the printed page or a well-upholstered armchair to hit me on the head, I am reeling just the same. Ah-ha! What is this fellow up to? Well, speaking as the cyberneticist with the sorest head in the business, I have to atFirst published in ASC Forum, January 1976. Reprinted with kind permission from the American Society for Cybernetics.

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test to the fact that an awful lot of sheer love got in there somewhere. I think that it shows. Mutual friends have told me that they find it embarrassing. To which I reply: bad luck. Whatever is the mainspring of my admiration for you, whether the bright ideas, or the brilliant mathematics, or the love, is of no consequence. I want to thank you for being something to me that very few have been. The words are dull and prosaic indeed, and should embarrass no one (except perhaps you, since you will understand them). You have been and long may you remain so, a negentropic pump to me. That is truly a gift of God, and something rare. Well, Heinz, what can I do with this opportunity to talk with you in public? Unlike so many of your friends, I have not been involved with your institutional activities. They can speak for all your fine work at Illinois, and I cannot. I am absolutely on the outside, and absolutely on the inside: surely it is a very special position. There is no point in agonizing

about it, and I am going to discuss just a few things which occur to me in the context of our friendship, and which eavesdroppers may find of some interest. About Neurocybernetics

I go back now a long way, maybe to our first meeting. A group of us were talking about the building of ‘artificial brains. Computers barely existed, and in particular no one was

sure whether the transistor ‘would work’ As soon as you brought a soldering iron anywhere near one of those three prongs, the heat blew the device ... So what would it take to construct an artificial neuron? We would need a box capable of registering pulsed inputs from various sources. These would be used to charge up a condenser to some threshold. Discharge, representing ‘decision’ as the net effect of excitatory and inhibitory impulses, would operate a relay. This action would set an internal switch to provide at least a oneshot storage, and transmit an output pulse to the neural network. But in order to poop that signal on, our box would have to include an amplifier—consisting of a little collection of space-heating thermionic valves. We could not pack all this equipment into a box smaller than (say) a shoebox, nor could we buy the parts for less than (say) $20. I cannot vouch for all these details after so long, but the message was clear. A brain artefact would need 10 of these things. It would cover the whole of Yorkshire. And the cost ... The next bit of the story I can vouch for, since I remember it distinctly. You shook your head sadly and said; ‘Gentlemen, we shall get nowhere with this approach until we have artificial neurons as small as the point of a pin, which you can buy for 10 cents a shovelful’ That appeared to be that. We moved into the epoch of electronic computers conceived as giant adding machines. They became less and less like brain artefacts by any neurocybernetic criterion. For instance, and in particular, they are tools whose nature has conditioned the approach to the regulation of very large probabilistic systems in totally unphysiological ways. Scientists have been led to represent these systems—urban development, demographic development, industrial (meaning pollution) development, global weather sys-

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tems, global economic systems, whole ecologies—as vast arrays of simultaneous equations. They have stuffed these matrices into the giant CPUs of ever larger mainframe computers, and mercilessly inverted them until they squeal. It is said that some of these fellows have

terminals in their bedrooms, so that they may access the inner workings of these models; but he must be a veritable deus pro machina who knows which coefficient to change in a maximizing functional, and by how much. I think that it all comes down to this with these computers. ‘We have ways of making

you talk’; and if you (sad, unphysiological brain) constitute a regulator constituting a nonmodel of the regulated system, your talk is as the reeds being shaken by the wind. And only the computer manufacturers are clothed in soft garments. You well know, Heinz, that these bitter words are not the product of mere hindsight. It is more than twenty years since my keynote address to the second international congress on cybernetics at Namur was called “The Irrelevance of Automation’ It meant to say that if we did not correctly think through the cybernetic issues for the regulation of large probabilistic systems, the capability to handle regulation by computer would avail nothing. It has worked out far worse than I feared.

Most of what is today being expensively and prestigiously done in the areas mentioned in the last paragraph is pure nonsense. Now I would not be wasting print on all of this if it were simply a matter of weep-

ing reminiscent tears into the wine. My story left you calling sadly for ‘artificial neurons as small as the point of a pin, which you can buy for 10 cents a shovelful. At the time, it sounded ridiculous; but it was prophetic. With microprocessors, that is exactly what we hold in our hands today. I have seen a machine, not much bigger than that famous shoebox, and costing peanuts, orthogonally arranged with microprocessing boards on a bus (leading to amazing flexibility), with a random access memory of a megabyte. Link a few of those together, and we are in the brain artefact ball-park. T am sure that you also are alert to these

developments. Then perhaps the time comes to make another huge effort, a quarter century on, to find the physiological approach, illuminated by neurocybernetics, to the regulation of very large probabilistic systems. We were on the way, I think, all that time ago: the Hixon Symposium; the annual Josiah Macy colloquia, which you yourself so painstakingly edited ... but the technology let things down. How could we build von Neumann's redundant networks, or McCulloch’s formal neural nets, on a suitable scale? Now we certainly can. I submit that humankind has a new set of tools in its grasp called microelectronics which makes the whole history of electronic computing to date irrelevant. The risk is that this will not be understood, and/or that understanding will be blocked by the vested interests of the zoo-keepers who are in charge of the existing menageries of computer dinopens in glass saurs. Just as we used the electronic computer to enshrine ledgers and quill

Surely, and wire, so may we now breed a race of miniature dinosaurs out of silicon chips. to renew the now we have the technology for the neuron at 10 cents the shovelful, it is time promise of neurocybernetics.

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How can that promise best be expressed? Since every regulator must be an effective model of the system regulated, it ought to consist of an isomorphic mapping of the system. Such things are hard to come by; indeed, the reason why the current approach is as ineffective as was argued above, is that the mappings are contorted homomorphisms and not isomorphic at all. Well, it is evident but not trivial that the guaranteed isomorphic mapping is the identity mapping. The ocean, for example, is the computer that solves its own Diophantine equations—or nary a wave could break. The same must be true of the brain:

it identically maps itself, and then declares that there is an imputed external reality just like that. Without pressing the full epistemological implications of that contention, however, I think that we can go as far as to say this. If we take hold of a large, probabilistic system (such as one of those previously listed) and innervate it with a network of microprocessors, so that each ganglion of neurons reflects local conditions, and all are interconnected to

form an ultrastable system, then we approach an identity mapping of that system. Then this regulatory network should be as competent to ‘solve’ the system as is the system itself. It certainly has to be borne in mind that such systems do ‘solve themselves’ The reason that mankind is so interested to understand them is that the working out of the natural systemic laws may pay scant regard to the wishes of humanity. It is easy to think of many incipiently unstable systems, ranging from the ecology to nuclear gamesmanship, which will sooner or later achieve a new equilibrium; but it is not easy to find any assurance for

the hope that the new arrangements will necessarily include the survival of our species. That is why we seek to construct regulators, I suppose: regulators that will accept certain constraints on purely natural solutions, or at the worst will provide some warning of lethal tendencies in the systems regulated. About Social Cybernetics Those reflections were based on an anecdote about a meeting between us long ago. Al-

though they are concerned with what we might call a neurocybernetic technology, the applications that occurred to me were immediately in the area of large social systems— because most of my professional work has been in that kind of managerial scene. So now I remind you of another and more recent meeting, when you suddenly walked into my room in Santiago de Chile. To make up for earlier vagueness, I can tell you that this meeting transpired at 6pm on Friday 22 June, 1973! We had different assignments in Chile; my own, which was effectively to provide a real-time regulatory system for the social economy,

appeared so portentous an undertaking that I kept a detailed log for the first and last time in my life. We met several times in those final days before the September coup; and you got to know several of my key Chilean collaborators, who were as overjoyed to be able to attend your seminars as I was to know that you were teaching them. Moreover, you became the only eminent foreign scientist actually to see some of the cybernetic activity in which I was

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engaged during two hectic years for President Allende, in collaboration with his minister Fernando Flores. The idea was indeed to innervate the social economy. Channels for these nerves were soon set up; and we had microwave links and extant telex networks to pull into service, and

to create the so-called ‘Cybernet, which covered the 3,000 miles of the country on a continuous basis. The basic idea was to provide advanced management tools, and computer power itself, to the workers’ committees who were running factories and the industrial

sectors which obviously had to be connected together to ‘solve’ the social economy in just the sense discussed in the last section. Even at the time it was technologically possible to create a network of decentralized minicomputers to constitute the nodes of a neurocybernetic artefact, with teleprocessing

interfaces. Unfortunately, this approach was impracticable: there was no foreign exchange to buy the equipment. Thus there was no alternative but to bring data over Cybernet to Santiago from all over the country, to process them through the cybernetic filters that we

had designed on the only computer facility available, and to send the messages back to the remote origins of the data. That is what we were doing; and I think you inspected the process, and could attest to its innocuousness.

It strikes me as extremely sad that people who have not the least insight into cyber-

netic processes increasingly refer to Project Cybersyn as if it had been a sinister attempt to centralize power, a deduction erroneously drawn from the technological accidentals of the case. Obviously this is infuriating to me, especially because it is wholly contrary to every element of the briefings that I had with the President himself, and is a slur on his intentions

as well as my competence. But much more importantly, it draws attention away from what could yet be done especially by the use of microprocessing, on the lines that I was discussing just now. May I try out an argument in this open letter, which is as apolitical as [ can make it. No

government, of whatever ideology, avoids massive intervention in the life of the country. This is an observable fact. What is more, massive intervention is demonstrably unavoidable if the explosive proclivities of interacting systems (all aggregating into ever larger and more powerful units) are to be contained. There will certainly be political disagreements as to

how massive ‘massive’ intervention may legitimately be; but it is necessarily large. And it is necessarily administered by a bureaucracy. Now to use a word that names a concept that cybernetics owes to the fertile seedbed of your laboratory at Illinois, the most favorable view of this bureaucracy is that it attends to national autopoiesis. That is to say, the national identity is maintained by the preservation of its own (that is, the nation’s) organization, and the bureaucracy facilitates this. What we see in practice, all over the world, can hardly be interpreted thus favourably. The pathology begins when the bureaucracy is concerned to preserve—not the nation’s identity—but its own. And the same diagnosis seems to me to apply to lesser bureaucracies than the na-

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tional. For example, is the health service or the education service mainly concerned with the delivery of these services, or with preserving its own organization? I am always asked how the Chilean bureaucracy reacted to Project Cybersyn, and how we managed to move it. The answer is that we simply ignored the bureaucracy, and set up

our network independently under direct ministerial authority. In two years we had about 70 per cent of the social economy incorporated into the Cybersyn system. And I have often reflected that, had it been necessary to work through the bureaucracy, we should not have had even our initial plans approved within that time. As an indication that this is no exag-

geration, it is worth recording that the Chilean government asked the British government for ‘overseas aid’ support for the work I was doing. Nothing was heard of this proposal for more than eighteen months. I was eventually asked about the work in London some ten days after the coup which brought down the Allende administration, when the work was all over. Only an ingénue could imagine that this was a coincidence. It could have been a straight political decision; but I satisfied myself that it was not. It was pathological autopoiesis.

In short, all radical change is threatening, as both of us and many of our colleagues know all too well. But sooner or later, we have to believe, the understanding so hardly ac-

quired will prove useful somewhere. With the microprocessing technology that makes the artefact of a neurocybernetlc network possible and cheap, with the multiple connexions for richly interactive variety sponges made cheaply possible by fibre optics, and with the general axioms of cybernetics available in the mental tool-box, the mess could be ameliorated. But the proportion of humankind wanting that amelioration is in a terrible minority: I would estimate it at 99 per cent ... So much for our democracies. About a Negentropy Pump

My two discussions have ranged from the cybernetics of the neuron to the cybernetics of society; and yet they have overlapped, and interpenetrated each other’s domains. In this kind of systemic continuity and in this theoretic generality lies the potency of cybernetics as a science in its own right. If the founding fathers, of whom you were and remain one, had not understood from the beginning that cybernetics is a science, nothing much would

have happened to consolidate the subject over the last thirty years. And if the scientific Establishment had accepted in a mere thirty years that this is so, it would have been a miracle. Of course it has not. In this letter T have discussed some of the cybernetic things that I reckon to understand. You will agree that this was a prudential policy; whether you agree or not with what I have said I am avid to hear. It has to be stated emphatically that the views I have expressed cannot be laid at your door. But in closing, my dear Heinz, I certainly do intend to lay something at your door. You

are a negentropy pump for me, as I said, and you had better be clear that you are a negen-

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55

tropy pump for a whole population of cybernetic aspirants as well. Those of us who have been around your influence for donkeys’ years can usually dredge up a recollection or a reference—or know where to get it. But how can all this be communicated to new generations of cybernetic neophytes?

Without apology, then, for I must needs be hard about this, I call upon you publicly (as I have often called on you privately) to prepare an edition of your major writings to date. You will invent a splendid title for such a compilation, of course. But I can tell you the subtitle by which new generations will certainly pass that book from hand to hand. They will say to each other: Ah-ha! What is this fellow up to? And you will hit them on the head. To reverse our roles for one minute: I am your junior, but I am working on my ninth

book. It is my experience that publishing a book gets ‘all that stuff” out of the ways; it frees the spirit for the next episode. Please do not imagine, then, that my demand of you amounts

to a request for your last will and testament. Absolutely to the contrary: when you get that stuff (so sorely needed) out of the way, you will be free to start again. I have the clearest expectations, because I know what I need from you, but I shall not say in public what they are. In the meantime, I transmit to you love and peace from the hills of Ceredigion,

Photo: Gene Youngblood

STAFFORD

Heinz von Foerster 1977

chapter 6

trength

My DEARs,

As I have reflected on so much that has happened to you all during this year, I feel a strange mixture of sadness and joy. You turn to me, and what do I say? Well, I do the best I can. And what has happened to me? Quite a lot: we all continue to learn, let’s hope. Some of you are legally my children, and some of you have adopted me. Some of you have had massive problems of the psyche—all I suspect; some of you have officially been labelled ‘subversive, and some ‘mad’ Others wonder whether they are in fact either or both. Again, I have my own problems of the psyche; and I don’'t want you to find this letter patronising.

It is an act of sharing. You know that I have been thinking things out in systems familiar to most of you; and therefore I go too boring. You see, I want to get this stuff together.

am a ‘systems man’: so it’s not surprising that I terms. The diagrammatic language will be unslowly, with lots of explanation. I hope it’s not With some of you I talk in psychiatric terminol-

ogy, with others in the language of Vedantic philosophy. To some I send poems, with others

play music; sometimes the talk is fiercely political, sometimes we are into yoga and meditation. The scientist in me wants to find the invariant pattern in all of this—and I have tried. Each of you may well be surprised at the implication that there are so many others. I hope so, because the value of each individual is infinite—and I certainly try to behave within the context of that truth. Maybe, however, this knowledge will also be comforting. We are, in the end, all children of the same cosmos.

A letter to some special friends, Christmas 1978. Original version previously unpublished.

Strength

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It follows from this that nothing is alien to us. Thoughtful people often feel alienated; because the world and its societary fatuity, its terror and its anguish, become so hard to bear. If we feel apart from all that, it is a defence mechanism: we want to run away. If we do, then we cannot complain that society has alienated us.

But whether we are alienated from society or not, we cannot be alienated from the cosmos—in which we are all splattered like moonbeams. Even in terms of hard physics, the electron that was part of your carbon atoms a moment ago may now be resident in Jupiter.

That is because this electron was only a probability in the first place. The self that resides within a bag of skin is an illusion: each of us embraces the entire cosmos, and the cosmos embraces us. Then please, and above all, feel at home. No-one can turn you into a stranger in your own home ... ‘When I consider the heavens ... said the psalmist. Does it make you feel very small— or very large? It is truly an alternation, and it is possible to experiment with that ambivalent perception. To be small, like a speck of dust, and in the end to vanish; whichever it is, it is the loss of self—in any self-regarding sense. But it is also the finding of self, as a ‘slice through’ the cosmos: and that is not self-regarding either.

The ability to handle oneself in such a way—like a cosmic yo-yo—demands a high degree of personal insight and discipline. People seem to intuit that; but they conclude that they must become vegetarians, or give up smoking, or sex ... it is all so often negative.

The target is actually joy. But equally, as you very well know, joy is not the end of the rake’s progress. I am talking about Poise, which is not a bad translation of several Buddhistic words. To acquire and maintain Poise is to find and to hold one’s own ‘cosmic slice’ The minute you lose it, accidents happen. Without Poise, you are totally vulnerable to the vicissitudes of

nature. Holding Poise, you belong to nature—and become accident-proof. The secret of poise is personal power. We all know what it is to feel (momentarily perhaps) in total command of ourselves; and we all know the feeling of being a mess—a slagheap of abandoned good intentions. Then I start the systems-analysis by trying to specify the inputs to personal power, and by detecting a relationship between them. Like this [Figure 1]: -

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58

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Love is here made central. If we cannot love the cosmos, and everything in it, we shall have no power for poise at all. Since we are a ‘slice’ of that cosmos, anything less than love, or any withholding of love, is actually self-destructive. It is surprisingly difficult to love whatever is odious to our sensibilities: then that is where the first effort has to be made. ‘Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you’ (always remember Jesus, when you want to think about love).

Most of us find, I think, that the most difficult thing of all to love is oneself. I don't mean that narcissistically, of course. We would like to be what we are not—and with good reason. But we are not other than what we are; and although there is a bounden duty to work on ourselves, and to realize the potential for joy, it is sheer hubris to fantasize about being other-than-myself. The power for poise and for joy is fed by two other human faculties. One is knowledge—of the world and of ourselves. Aristotle said: ‘All men by nature desire to know’. It

is our lot. Knowledge supports power, because it helps us to understand what the hell is going on—particularly within ourselves. It also feeds (as Figure 1 shows) love if we rightly interpret our knowledge in the cosmic context. The same goes for experience, our reaction

to life as we live it. Experience must feed our love—not make us cynical. Experience must build personal power—not deplete it. Why does it so often turn out the other way: that experience leads to

hatred, and to the sapping of our psychic energy? It is because we are not coping with our experience correctly, and usually out of inadequate self-regard. We blame everyone and everything in sight for bad experiences—including ourselves—whereas we are simply out of our depth in cosmic learning. Blaming yourself sounds like humility: it is (more likely) conceit. What makes us so proud as to think that we could have stopped it all, even if we

started it all? We haven’t understood anything; and least of all ourselves, and our own roles in the cosmos. Finally, as far as Figure 1 is concerned, please notice the dotted line—which is systemslanguage for feedback. Experience should enhance our knowledge: it should mellow what

we learned from textbooks, and it should modify our own self-righteousness. Then let us continue. With personal power comes poise, and the approach to joy. How

does that work? There is an increase in the intensity with which we live, and with which we perceive every aspect of the cosmos—from stones to stars, and every living thing. But this intensity may soon become euphoric: it must be balanced by a personal control— otherwise, it will get out of hand. And so we come to this [Figure 2, next page]:

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Intensity and control have emerged as the fruits of personal power, and they lead to

poise and joy—provided that they are balanced (on the double line). And they generate two new feedbacks: The exercise of personal control leads back (dotted line) to knowledge. Knowledge may

indeed transmogrify to wisdom on this loop. (Think it over.) The enhancement of oneself through intensity leads back to experience. Experience may indeed transmogrify into exultation on this loop. (Think again.) In short, each of these loops offers us learning: + Knowledge > Power > Control » Enhanced Knowledge, etc. + Experience » Power - Intensity > Enhanced knowledge, etc.

Finally, for Figure 2, we see that there is a feedback flowing from the having of poise and the awareness of joy to the reinforcement of love itself. Of course there is. We have a machine for spiritual progress. It is self-regulating, and self-encouraging— because it is stuffed with positive feedback.

Then why do we get into trouble? Surely, it all has to do with that double-line that presupposes balance between ‘control’ and ‘intensity’ We all find this very difficult to manage. The enhancement of intensity leads to euphoria, as often as not. It manifests itself as a gross amplification of personal intensity. It degenerates into showmanship. On the other channel, the enhancement of control leads to

austerity, as often as not. And that manifests itself as a gross amplification of containedness. It degenerates into aridity. These two amplifiers (marked —>— diagrammatically) seem to

60

Strength

be endemic to the human condition. The positive feedback machine, which sounded great earlier, is—as usual—overdoing it.

Sometimes we are disgusted at our own showmanship. Sometimes we are desperately put down by our aridity. The balancing mechanism just doesn’t work; and joy is denied, because poise has been lost. Then take a look at a more detailed picture [Figure 3]: | PERsoNAL

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Here we see the basic loop of the previous picture. But the simple ‘balancing mechanism’ has been analyzed. The (pathological) amplifiers of control and intensity lead to aridity and showmanship respectively. And yet the whole system can be regulated, through a comparator (marked ®), and an appropriate feedback arrangement. This one is negative feedback: it is error correcting. A comparator is a sort of meter that compares two activities. In this case it compares

the degree of control available with the degree of intensity deployed. If it finds an imbalance, it will feed back to correct the pathological aridity on showmanship. Diagram 3 shows this: the vertical balancing system exists to remove perturbations in the joy-seeking horizontal system.

In practical language, there are obviously two lessons to learn:

s Beware of the amplifiers—that turn control into aridity, and intensity into showmanship. They are both manifestations of self-indulgence.

The you of the cosmos is not self-regarding. » Nurture the comparator: become aware of it. It generates the regulatory feedback. It dampens down the bizarre contrasts that self-indulgence may so easily provoke. Feed the comparator.

When these devices fail, really serious difficulties develop. The ‘control’ that was pathologically amplified into aridity may be amplified again, to generate a state of clinical depression. The ‘intensity’ that was pathologically amplified into showmanship may also be amplified again, to generate a state of clinical mania. The search

Strength

61

for poise (and don’t forget the earlier diagrams) that provide such powerful positive feedback to reinforce both states (now doubly pathological) generate oscillation. There may arise an accelerating loop between the two final states. In the limit, this will be diagnosed as manic-depressive psychosis. Then watch out. One or two of you, my dears, have run into this—and have borne the consequences

(such being the state of clinical medicine): you have all my solace. Others are worried by their own symptoms. Others are not yet alarmed, and I don’t want to frighten them. What I do want to do is extend the diagram, so that the final lesson that I learned from all of this can be said quite flatly. The diagram goes like this [Figure 4]: TERSoMAL

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poses the failure of comparator C—and most of you are hanging on to that: keep at it! But the warning still holds, and here it comes: Exacerbating circumstances activate and strengthen the amplifiers that lead to this psychosis. They are controllable. There are valves (marked )

to this end. ‘Control’ must be

exercised; ‘intensity’ must be damped. The use of these valves will denature the very dangerous amplifiers marked x and y. You can see this on Figure 4. In addition, it is open to us

all even to eliminate the exacerbating circumstances altogether, and thereby to reinstate the virtue and strength of the comparator loop. Diagram 5 is the entire model. It has taken a long time to develop; it will take you a long time to disentangle fully. If you can’t be bothered, I have already said what seems to me to matter. Summing up [Figure 5]:

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» look at the initial equation of personal power; « look at the enhancement of knowledge, and of experience, and finally of love;

o think about the self-indulgent amplifiers that lead to aridity and showmanship; « nurture the comparator that leads to their mutual regulation;

» be warned about their degeneration into depression and mania—leading to a selffuelling psychosis;

« note that you can control the valves that operate on exacerbating circumstances, thereby denaturing the psychotic amplifiers; » note that those circumstances can be excised altogether—once recognized.

This is a first attempt to express much that is essentially Eastern in Western terms. So don’t be misled by the seemingly glib ‘mechanics’ of the diagram, which is really presented to you as a topic of meditation. For instance: you can use it as a map to reflect on any difficulty you confront in developing strength. A sample difficulty: those paranoid delusions ... Sense how they are generated by the malfunction of the regulatory system, and then reinforced by the amplifiers of the pathological system. Well, T hope this letter may be of some use to you all in your separate and unique

ways. My love,

Photo: David Whittaker

STAFFORD

chapter 7

reface to Autopoiesis: the Organization of the Living

THis sMALL book is very large: it contains the living universe. It is a privilege to be asked to write this preface, and a delight to do so. That is because I recognize here a really important book, both in general and specifically. Before talking about the specific contents at all, I would like to explain why this is in general so. In General

We are the inheritors of categorized knowledge; therefore we inherit also a world-view that consists of parts strung together, rather than wholes regarded through different sets of filters. Historically, synthesis seems to have been too much for the human mind—where practical affairs were concerned. The descent of the synthetic method from Plato through Augustine took men’s perception into literature, art and mysticism. The modern world of science and technology is bred from Aristotle and Aquinas by analysis. The categorization that took hold of medieval scholasticism has really lasted it out. We may see with hindsight that the historical revolts against the scholastics did not shake free from the shackles of their reductionism. The revolt of the rationalists—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz—began from a principle of ‘methodical doubt’ But they became lost in mechanism, dualism. More and more categorization; and they ended in denying relation altogether. But relation is the stuff of sysPublished in Autopoiesis and Cognition, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Reidel, Holland, 1980. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

Preface to Autopoiesis

65

tem. Relation is the essence of synthesis. The revolt of the empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, Hume—began from the nature of understanding about the environment. But analysis was still the method, and categorization still the practical tool of advance. In the bizarre outcome, whereby it was the empiricists who denied the very existence of the empirical world, relation survived—but only through the concept of mental association between mental events. The system ‘out there, which we call nature, had been annihilated in the process.

By the time Kant was devoting his prodigious mind to sorting all this out, the battle was lost. If then, quoting him, unconscious understanding organizes sensory experience into schemata, while conscious understanding organizes it into categories, the notion of identity remains for Kant for ever transcendental. Now the individual has vanished, in practical terms; as to the assemblage of individuals called society, that too has vanished into a transcendental construct. We have no need to legislate through any consensus of actual people, but only to meet needs that might have arisen from the noumenal will. And what of science itself? Science is ordered knowledge. It began with classification. From Galen in the second century through to Linnaeus in the eighteenth, analysis and categorization provided the natural instrumentality of scientific progress. Ally this fact with the background of philosophic thought, and the scene is set for the inexorable development of the world-view that is so difficult to challenge today. It is a world-view in which real systems are annihilated in trying to understand them, in which relations are lost because they are not categorized, in which synthesis is relegated to poetry and mysticism, in which identity is a political inference. We may inspect the result in the structure and organization of the contemporary university. It is an iron maiden, in whose secure embrace scholarship is trapped. For many, this is an entirely satisfactory situation, just because the embrace is secure.

A man who can lay

claim to knowledge about some categorized bit of the world, however tiny, which is greater than anyone else’s knowledge of that bit, is safe for life: reputation grows, paranoia deepens. The number of papers increases exponentially, knowledge grows by infinitesimals; but understanding of the world actually recedes, because the world really is an interacting system. And since the world, in many of its aspects, is changing at an exponential rate, this kind of scholarship, rooted in the historical search of its own sanctified categories, is in large part unavailing to the needs of mankind. There has been some recognition of this, and interdisciplinary studies are by now com-

monplace in every university. But will this deal with the problem? Unfortunately, it will not. We still say that a graduate must have his ‘basic discipline, and this he is solemnly taught— as if such a thing had a precise environmental correlate, and as if we knew that God knew

the difference between physics and chemistry. He learns also the academic mores, catches the institutional paranoia, and proceeds to propagate the whole business. Thus it is that an ‘interdisciplinary study’ often consists of a group of disciplinarians holding hands in a ring for mutual comfort. The ostensible topic has slipped down the hole in the middle. Among

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Preface to Autopoiesis

those who recognize this too, a natural enough debate has ensued on the subject: can an undergraduate be taught ‘interdisciplinary studies’ as his basic subject? But there is no such subject; there is no agreement on what it would be like; and we are rather short of anyone

qualified to do the teaching. Those who resist the whole idea, in my view correctly, say that it would endanger the norms of good scholarship. There is a deadlock. Against this background, let us consider Autopoiesis, and try to answer the question: what is it? The authors say: ‘our purpose is to understand the organization of living systems in relation to their unitary character’ If the book deals with living systems, then it must be about biology. If it says anything scientific about organization, it must be about cybernetics. If it can recognize the nature of unitary character, it must be about epistemology—and also (remembering the first author’s massive contribution to the understanding of perception) it will be about psychology too. Yes, it is indeed about all these things. Will you then call this an interdisciplinary study in the field of psychocyberbioepistemics? Do so only if you wish to insult the authors. Because their topic has not slipped down the hole in the middle. Therefore it is not an interdisciplinary study of the kind defined. It is not about analysis, but synthesis. It does not play the Game of the Categories. And it does not interrelate disciplines: it transcends them. If, because of my remarks about Kant, this seems to say that it annihilates them, then we are getting somewhere.

For there resides my belief in the booK’s general importance. The dissolution of the deadlock within the disciplinary system that I described above has got to be metasystemic, not merely interdisciplinary. We are not interested in forming a league of disciplinary paranoids, but (as Hegel could have told us) in a higher synthesis of disciplines. What emerges in this book is not classifiable under the old categories. Therefore it is predictable that no university could contain it, although all universities can and now do contain interdisciplinary institutions—because, in that very word, suitable obeisance is paid to the

hallowed categories, and no one cares if the answers slip down the hole in the middle. As to the prediction that universities cannot contain this kind of work, I have often seen it fulfilled. In the present case it is falsified, and I offer heartfelt congratulations to the University of Chile.

I say ‘heartfelt’ for this reason. In the mounting pile of new books printed every year that are properly called scientific, one may take hold of one’s candle and search like a veritable Diogenes for a single one answering to the honest criteria I have proposed for a metasystemic utterance. There is only a handful in existence at all, which is not surprising in view of the way both knowledge and academia are organized. And yet, as I have also proposed, herein lies the world’s real need. If we are able to understand a newer and still

evolving world; if we are to educate people to live in that world; if we are to legislate for that world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to a vanished world, as it is well-nigh desperate that we should; then knowledge must be rewritten. Autopoietic Systems belongs to the new library.

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In Particular ...

The authors first of all say that an autopioetic system is a homeostat. We already know what that is: a device for holding a critical systemic variable within physiological limits. They go on to the definitive point: in the case of autopoietic homeostasis, the critical variable is the system’s own organization. It does not matter, it seems, whether every measurable property of that organization structure changes utterly in the system’s process of continuing adaptation. It survives.

This is a very exciting idea to me for two reasons. In the first place it solves the problem of identity which 2,000 years of philosophy have succeeded only in further confounding. The search for the it’ has led further and further away from anything that common sense would call reality. The ‘it’ of scholasticism is a mythological substance in which anything attested by the sense or testable by science inheres as a mere accident—its existence is a matter of faith. The ‘i’ of rationalism is unrealistically schizophrenic, because it is uncompromising in its duality—extended substance and thinking substance. The ‘it’ of empiricism is unrealistically insubstantial and ephemeral at the same time—esse est percipi is by no means the verdict of any experiencing human being. The ‘it’ of Kant is the transcendental ‘thing-in-itself’—an untestable inference, an intellectual geegaw. As to the ‘it’ of science and technology in the twentieth-century world of conspicuous consumption ... ‘it’ seems to be no more than the collection of epiphenomena which mark ‘it’ as consumer or consumed. In this way hard-headed materialism seems to make ‘it’ as insubstantial as subjective idealism made it at the turn of the seventeenth

century. And this, the very latest, the most down-to-earth, interpretation of ‘it’ the authors explicitly refute. Their ‘it’ is notified precisely by its survival in a real world. You cannot find it by analysis, because its categories may all have changed since you last looked. There is no need to postulate a mystical something, which ensures the preservation of identity despite appearances. The very continuation is ‘it’ At least, that is my understanding of the authors’

thesis—and I note with some glee that this means that Bishop Berkeley got the precisely right argument precisely wrong. He contended that something not being observed goes out of existence. Autopoiesis says that something that exists may turn out to be unrecognizable when you next observe it. This brings us back to reality, for that is surely true. The second reason why the concept of autopoiesis excites me so much is that it involves the destruction of teleology. When this notion is fully worked out and debated, I suspect it will prove to be as important in the history of the philosophy of science as was David Hume’s attack on causality. Hume considered that causation is a mental construct projected on to changing events which have, as we would say today, associated probabilities of

mutual occurrence. I myself have for a long time been convinced that purpose is a mental construct imported by the observer to explain what is really an equilibrial phenomenon

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of polystable systems. The arguments in Chapter II appear to me to justify this view completely, and I leave the reader to engender his own excitement in the discovery of a ‘purposelessness’ that none the less makes good sense to a human being—just because he is allowed to keep his identity, which alone is his ‘purpose’ It is enough. But that salute to the authors is also self-congratulation, and I turn quickly aside. If a book is important, if at any time and from any source information is received, then something is changed—not merely confirmed. There are two arguments in this book that have changed me, and one of them effected its change after a profound inward struggle. Perhaps this part of the preface should be printed as an epilogue: if I am not saying enough to be understood in advance of the reading, then I am sorry. It is too much to hope that the reader will return. People who work with systems-theoretic concepts have often drawn attention to the subjective nature of ‘the system’ A system is not something presented to the observer, it is something recognized by him. One of the consequences of this is that the labelling of connections between the system and its environment as either inputs or outputs is a process

of arbitrary distinction. This is not very satisfactory. For example, a motor car in action is evidently a system. Suppose that it is recognized as ‘a system for going from A to B’; then the water in the radiator is evidently an input, and displacement is evidently an output. Now consider the following scenario. Two men approach a motor car, and push it towards a second motor car. They then connect the batteries of the two cars with a pair of leads, and the engine of the first car fires. They disconnect the leads, and run the engine hard in neutral gear. We can guess what they are doing; but how is the objective scientist going to describe that system? Displacement is evidently an input, and one output is the rise in tem-

perature of the water in the radiator. In case my example sounds too transparent, note that Aristotle thought that the brain was a ‘human radiator, namely an apparatus for cooling the blood. Note also that he was right. The fact is that we need a theoretical framework for any empirical investigation. This is the raison detre of epistemology, and the authors make that point. In the trivial example I have just given, we need to know ‘all about motor cars’ before we can make sense of the empirical data. But it often happens in science that we know nothing at all about our ‘motor cars, and sit there scratching our heads over data that relate to we know not what. There is

a prime example of this in current scientific work, which is so embarrassing that scientists in general pretend that it is not there. [ am referring to the whole field of parapsychology— to the mass of data which seems to say: precognition, telepathy, telekinesis exist. But we flounder among statistical artefacts, and lack the theoretical framework for interpretation. This is made clear in the very name of ESP—'extrasensory perception’ which, if one thinks about it, constitutes an internal contradiction of terms. Autopoiesis as a concept propounds a theoretical framework within which to cope with the confusion that arises from the subjective recognition of ‘the system’ and the arbitrary

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classification of its inputs and outputs. For the authors explain how we may treat autopoietic systems as if they were not autopoietic (that is, they are allopoietic) when the boundaries of the system are enlarged. Moreover, autopoietic systems may have allopoietic compo-

nents. These ideas are immensely helpful, because our recognition of the circumstances in which a system should be regarded as either auto-or allo-poietic enables us to define ‘the system’ in an appropriate context. That is to say that the context is the recursion of systems

within which the system we study is embedded, instead of being the cloud of statistical epiphenomena generated by our attempt to study it.

Understanding this changed me. The second change involved the intellectual struggle I mentioned earlier, and it concerns the authors’ views on the information flowing with-

in a viable system. In the numbered Paragraph (iv) of Section 1 of Chapter III they say: ‘The notion of coding is a cognitive notion which represents the interactions of the observer, not a phenomenon operative in the physical domain. The same applies to the notion of regulation. On first reading, this seemed to me plainly wrong. In the numbered Paragraph (v) of Section 3 of Chapter IV they say: ‘Notions such as coding, message or information are not applicable to the phenomenon of self-reproduction. Wrong again, I considered; indeed, outrageous—especially when taken with this remark from the first sentence of Section 3: ‘reproduction ... cannot enter as a defining feature of the organization of living systems’ Finally, in the numbered Paragraph (ii) of Section 3 of Chapter V, the authors say: ‘A linguistic domain ... is intrinsically noninformative’ Surely that is finally absurd?

All of this is totally alien to what we (most of us working in cybernetics) have believed. Information, including codes and messages and mappings, was indeed for us the whole story of the viable system. If one thinks of reproduction, for example, as the process of passing on a DNA code from an ageing set of tissues to an embryonic set of tissues, then the survival of the code itself is what matters. The tissues of each generation are subject to ageing and finally death, but the code is transmitted. The individual becomes insignificant, because the species is in the code. And that is why identity vanishes in an ageless computer program of bits—a program that specifies the hydrogen-bonded base pairs that link the sugar-phosphate backbones of the DNA molecule. The whole outlook turns out to be wrong, and the book must speak for itself on this score. But it is an extraordinarily condensed book, which is why this preface is inordinately long. I do not know whether the authors’ arguments about information led me to understand their concept of autopoiesis, or vice versa. What I am now sure about is that they are right. Nature is not about codes: we observers invent the codes in order to codify what nature is about. These discoveries are very profound. What is less profound but equally important is the political consequence of this crisis about identity. The subordination of the individual to the species cannot be supported. ‘Biology cannot be used any more to justify the dispensability of the individual for the benefit

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of the species, society or mankind, under the pretence that its role is to perpetuate them. After that, the world is a different place. In Contention ...

The authors know it, and they draw the immediate inference. It is to say that scientists can no longer claim to be outside the social milieu within which they operate, invoking objectivity and disinterest; and in truth we have known this, or ought to have known it, ever since Hiroshima. But again this book gives us the theoretical basis for a view that might otherwise shroud something fundamental in a cloak of mere prudence. ‘No position or view that has any relevance in the domain of human relations can be deemed free from ethical and political implications, nor can a scientist consider himself alien to these implications. However, the authors go on to say that they do not fully agree between themselves on the questions this poses from the vantage point of their own work on autopoiesis—and they refuse to discuss them further (numbered Paragraph (iv) of Section 2 of Chapter V). This seems to be because they do not resolve the question (posed a little earlier) wheth-

er human societies are or are not themselves biological systems. At this point, then, I ask to be relieved of the tasks of comment and interpretation; I ask for permission actively to enter this arena of discussion—where the angels fear to tread. For I am quite sure of the answer: yes, human societies are biological systems. Moreover, claim that this book conclusively proves the point. This is a delicate matter, because presumably at least one of the originators of autopoietic theory disagrees, or is less than sure ... None the less, I have read the book many times; and one of those readings was exclusively devoted to validating this contention against the authors” own criteria of autopoiesis at every point.

The outcome, to which I was admittedly predisposed because of my own work, says that any cohesive social institution is an autopoietic system—because it survives, because

its method of survival answers the autopoietic criteria, and because it may well change its entire appearance and its apparent purpose in the process. As examples I list: firms and industries, schools and universities, clinics and hospitals, professional bodies, departments of state, and whole countries. If this view is valid, it has extremely important consequences. In the first place it means that every social institution (in several of which anyone individual is embedded at the intersect) is embedded in a larger social institution, and so on recursively—and that all of them are autopoietic. This immediately explains why the process of change at any level of recursion (from the individual to the state) is not only difficult to accomplish but actually impossible—in the full sense of the intention: ‘T am going completely to change myself’ The reason is that the T} that self-contained autopoietic ‘it) is a component of another autopoietic system. Now we already know that the first can be considered as allopoietic with respect to the second, and that is what makes the second a viable autopoietic system. But this in turn means that the larger system perceives the embedded system as diminished—as less

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than fully autopoietic. That perception will be an illusion; but it does have consequences for the contained system. For now its own autopoiesis must respond to a special kind of constraint: treatment which attempts to deny its own autopoiesis.

Consider this argument at whatever level of recursion you please. An individual attempting to re-form his own life within an autopoietic family cannot fully be his new self because the family insists that he is actually his old self. A country attempting to become a socialist state cannot fully become socialist because there exists an international autopoi-

etic capitalism in which it is embedded, by which the revolutionary country is deemed allopoietic. These conclusions derive from entailments of premises which the authors have placed in our hands. I think they are most valuable. Then let me try to answer the obvious question: why do not the authors follow this line of development themselves, and write the second half of the book (as I hope they eventually will)—which would be about the nature and adaptation of social institutions, and the evolution of society itself? Well, to quote their sentence again: ‘our purpose is to understand the organization of living systems in relation to their unitary character’ This formulation of the problem begs the question as to what is allowed to be called a living system, as they themselves admit. ‘Unless one knows which is the living organization, one cannot know which organization is living’ They quickly reach the conclusion however (Subsection (b) of Section 2 of Chapter 1) that Gutopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to char-

acterize the organization of living systems’. Then they display some unease, quoting the popular belief: *... and no synthetic system is accepted as living. The fact is that if a social institution is autopoietic (and many seem to answer to the proper criteria) then, on the author’s own showing, it is necessarily alive. That certainly sounds odd, but it cannot be helped. It seems to me that the authors are holding at arm’s length their own tremendously important discovery. It does not matter about this mere word ‘alive’; what does matter is that the social institution has identity in the biological sense; it is not just the random assemblage of interested parties that it is thought to be. When it comes to social evolution then, when it comes to political change: we are not dealing with institutions and societies that will be different tomorrow because of the legislation we passed today. The legislation—even the revolution—with which we confront them

does not alter them at all; it proposes a new challenge to their autopoietic adaptation. The behaviour they exhibit may have to be very different if they are to survive: the point is that they have not lost their identities. The interesting consequence is, however, that the way an

autopoietic system will respond to a gross environmental challenge is highly predictable— once the nature of its autopoiesis is understood. Clever politicians intuit those adaptations; and they can be helped by good scientists using systems-theoretic models. Stupid politicians do not understand why social institutions do not lose their identities overnight when

they are presented with perfectly logical reasons why they should; and these are helped by bad scientists who devote their effort to developing that irrelevant logic.

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In an era when rapid institutional change is a prerequisite of peaceful survival in the

face of every kind of exponentially rising threat, it seems to me that the architects of change are making the same mistake all over the world. It is that they perceive the system at their own level of recursion to be autopoietic, which is because they identify themselves with that system and know themselves to be so; but they insist on treating the systems their

system contains, and those within which their system is contained, as allopoietic. This is allowable in terms of scientific description, when the input and output surfaces are correctly defined. None the less it is politically blind to react towards the container and contained systems in a way which makes such a model evident, because at these other levels of recursion the relevant systems perceive themselves as autopoietic too.

This statement seems to be worth making. I could not have made it so succinctly without the language developed in this book. I could not have formulated it at all without the new concepts that Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have taught me. I thank them

both very much, on behalf of everyone.

With Gordon Pask, 1990s

chapter 8

I Said, You are Gods

First: Our Shared Illusions

THERE 1s a concept to which I shall proceed to refer as the Shared Illusion. Please take the first of many imaginative leaps for which I shall ask tonight to understand what I mean by this phrase. In locally circumscribed terms, I point out that we are all here. We share the belief that

we know the place and the time and the provenance of the Second Teilhard Lecture. We share the belief that I am the speaker, and that someone—namely ‘myself” (whatever that may mean)—is peering out through a hirsute bag of skin and bone at a finitely denumer-

able audience—namely yourselves. Then what is the ‘illusion’ about that? I think that you all know the difficulty full well, or you would not even have bothered to come to such an evening. For the demonstration I have given of our sharing belongs to a shared convention whereby this level of description will do for the purpose in hand. It is not necessary to enquire into the physical, and psychological, and political (and so on) status of everyone present in order to share a conviction that we are all here. It would be as disastrous to require in advance that any solipsist present prove that everyone else

was a figment, as that any pragmatist should prove that they were not. We are not gathered together to argue about Marxism; we would not want our meeting to degenerate into a discussion of sexual permissiveness. If one of us is drunk, or asleep, or totally preoccupied, we shall not feel a necessity to deduct a name from the roll of those present. And yet in all

such matters, and in thousands of other parameters of the human mind and spirit, each of The Second Annual Teilhard Lecture, King’s College, London, 2 December 1980. First published in Teilhard Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1981.

Reprinted with kind permission.

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us marks a unique point in a multi-dimensional space. May we license ourselves to call our personal point in that space our ‘reality’? Perhaps no one else knows what it is. Perhaps we do not even know it ourselves. But one thing seems pretty evident: the idea that all of us know well enough what is going on here is an intersection of individual realities—an illusion, then, of reality that we share. I began by saying that I was speaking in locally circumscribed terms. Let us now drop that constriction, and consider ... dare I say: everything? We still talk about ‘myself’, and ‘yourself’ and ‘ourselves, but the Shared Illusion is no longer just the belief that ‘here we aré’ It is that we have been born; that we are alive; that all manner of circumstances surround us; and that we shall die. The thousands of parameters of opinion and action that we just encountered as relevant to the reality named by just this occasion, this very place and time, are infinitely multiplied. Within our Shared Convention of this lecture, at least we know why we are here. Within the larger Shared Illusion, most people are not at all sure ‘why we are here’ There is a variety of teachings about this, and a variety of experiences about this. They may or may not be illusory; but they are not very easily shared. When they are shared, it has to be at the expense of a larger illusion still; for idiosyncratic richness and variety are always lost in finding that intersect which we call attaining to consensus. Such philosophic reflections are fairly commonplace. Perhaps the application of a little science will help to dispel the discomforting notion that our reality is in some way illusory. We may begin with experimentation, and the estimation of what scientists were

once happy enough to call ‘objective facts. Our perception of reality, insofar as it is something-out-there, is mediated by sense organs that may be studied in this way. We can establish the limits of our eyes in terms of measurement of the spectrum of visible light, recognizing that there are many radiations and emanations out there that we cannot see with the optical equipment in our heads. We note that some animals, who are not equipped with retinal cone cells, share a visual reality compounded of black and white, whereas we ourselves see colours; and this may make us wonder if there could be other visual receptors, that have simply not evolved, which would add another dimension to our vision—just as colour adds a dimension to chiaroscuro. There are many other matters to note: for example, if something happens very quickly out there, subliminally to our visual threshold, we shall not know about it. Or maybe we shall know, but not know that we know:

we are alert to the possibilities of using television to manipulate and subvert people in this way. By investigations of this sort, science offers us some sense of security in the matter of

perceptual illusion. Its experimental device in the matter is instrumentation that extends the range and resolution of the physiological equipment that we have. Thus we need not fear that in fact we are surrounded by whistling banshees operating in ultraviolet at sound frequencies higher than bats, because instruments could detect them if they were there. But there is also a theoretical device that science uses to account for our reality. It puts

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together its observations to formulate accounts of ‘what it’s all about’ that can be tested. The language I use here is deliberately casual, since we have no time to investigate the philosophy of science tonight—which is anyway so well documented. I am however anxious to insist that these scientific accounts of reality are best called MODELS. The scientific accounts do not pretend to be reality itself; but like any other models they expect to simulate

it. This means that their utility (as distinct from their truth or their inclusiveness) is judged by their predictive capacity. Now the predictive capacity of a scientific model is very good indeed, so long as certain conditions are fulfilled. Outstandingly, it must be invoked only within the range of its

appropriate instrumentation to experiment and within the range of the theoretical framework to retain coherence. Outside such bounding conditions, the model will break down, because it is no longer a model of anything in particular. And here it must be said that a somewhat incestuous relationship exists between observation and theory, since observers

do not typically take readings of parameters which have no status in the currently fashionable model, while theoreticians generally are interested only in the more precise observations of the variables that their own model recognizes. Here, quite briefly, are examples of each. (i)

The science of economics has fashionable models of both national and global econo-

mies which generate policies that have something especially interesting in common. It is that they do not work. Nationally, we are currently destroying our wealth-creating industrial base. Internationally, the poor countries—which are supposed to be so grateful for all manner of ‘aid’—turn out to be net exporters of wealth to the countries

(ii)

that are rich. Simulations, and indeed real-life experiments, indicate that these outcomes are invariant under any of the fashionable and contradictory models available. It therefore seems very likely that the parametric substrate of them all is based on an observational rubric intended to measure a Shared Illusion. I do not know, for example, of any economic model since Marx’s that has parametrically included the levers of power; then surely this accounts for the continued popularity of Marxism—these 150 years (and a wholly changed world) later. Adventitious observational evidence for an aspect of reality that is often referred to generically as ‘paranormal’ is, in the judgment of many, absolutely overwhelming. But all attempts (again, over more than a century) to make laboratory measurements have at best been highly equivocal. We may look to the absence of a model that has the range to handle, never mind explain, paranormal phenomena for the explanation. Armed with mathematical models of coincidence, neurophysiological models of the brain, and electrical models of field forces—all of which happen to be available— scientists set out to measure the performance of statistical artefacts, the fluctuations

of encephalographic rhythms, and the bending of metal within Faraday cages. All of

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this has been undertaken as a means of investigating such issues as the existence of telepathy or precognition—phenomena which are so subtle, if indeed they exist, that their manifestations are surely likely to be masked by such crude observational instruments. There are, as you see, problems with models. But they are of the essence of the scientific approach. In our epoch, folk will predictably (of course, I am using a model to project this!) share any model quite happily with their friendly television producer—who believes it to be his duty to break through vested interests to reality. With his guidance, especially, people will prefer to talk this scientifically-sounding talk, rather than risk being caught up in Illusion—Shared or not. But here is an odd thing. If what I have just said is true of science, it is also true of philosophy. Do you want to be a logical positivist, an existentialist, or what? There are models of these positions; and well-researched media-guidance is available in glossy supplements, on live television, and on video-cassette. We should not ignore aesthetics either. The possibility that you should declare, quite simply, ‘I like it} has (I am sorry to say) been completely over-ruled. You must buy the model of realism, impressionism, surrealism, pop-art, heartart, or what-not first—and you must underwrite it, as part of your reality. As to Western religion: there is a set of models par excellence; and if excellence is not your prior guide, pray visit the United States, and choose between the multi-million dollar evangelical models of Christianity that television there projects. Not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these; each haircut would feed an African for a year ... We set out, via science, to find something more comforting than Illusion as our gloss on ultimate reality. The word Model, backed by its theory and practice, sounds less pejorative

than the word Illusion. It is the basic, clear-headed, ratiocinative approach used by every sort of Establishment—in science, philosophy, aesthetics, religion—which offers a model as a respectable surrogate for reality. It certainly sounds less risky than Illusion as a nighttime companion.

But reflect. It will soon be 1984. Would you prefer at that moment to be inside the rather special room that Orwell the Prophet forecast would be designed for you, based on a model of you; or would you rather be caught in a cave with Merlin, illusion, and a bottle of wine?

Second: Supportive New Science

Let us now look at the relationship that dynamically exists between the living organism and its environment—briefly and in general. The primitive idea that this constitutes a stimulusresponse system whereby an external stimulus from reality is met by an organic reaction to that reality, so that the two sides come into balance, will not do. As biologists have long since recognized, the homeostasis belongs to the internal environment of the organism.

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Thus when something internally changes that tends to disbalance organic equilibrium, the healthy body can do something about that to maintain stability within physiological limits.! The mechanism deploys loops involving all the sensory apparatus—that reporting on both internal conditions and what we usually call external conditions. But these exteroceptor reports themselves originate in parts of the organism. It seems that the best we can say

for the reality that we began to discuss is that it is an imputation of a model that is determined by the kinds of observations we can make—which are precisely and in turn those which the model can parametrically encompass ... At first, this circularity sounds like either a logical error, or some sort of epistemological

tomfoolery. On the contrary: I shall shortly mention scientific advances made since Teilhard’s death which powerfully support this approach. Characteristically, however, he got there first—though by a different route. It was his understanding of the process of complexification that led him to the insight into reality that involves an enroulement organique sur soi-méme of the universe both locally and entirely. Julian Huxley rendered this in the words ‘the world-stuff being rolled-up upon itself} and called it a metaphor—which I do not think it is. The circularity involved—and the very word sounds pejorative—is something that we should now—and with perfect respectability—call ‘self-referential’ Speaking of precursors of the latest thinking, I think that in Western terms the outlook that [ am now beginning to discuss may well have been adumbrated in the seventeenth century by Leibniz with his monadology. I said a little time ago that it is not so much that we know, as that we know that we

know. The self-reference is manifested in this capability, and it opens the door to a theory of consciousness. We, you and I, would certainly say that we are conscious beings. Part of that consciousness, I suggest, resides in our awareness that we monitor an interaction between what we consider to be ourselves, and what we consider to be a reality in which we ourselves are embedded. Any such monitoring involves regulatory actions. Now there is a proven cybernetic theorem which says that the regulation that the regulator can achieve is only as good as the model of the reality that it contains.” In the context of our personal existence, this is the devastating fact for which my opening excursions were intended as preparation. The theorem is perfectly obvious—once you really understand it, and if you are psychologically prepared to countenance it. It comes down to this: we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our model of reality does not include—whether as to its theoretical range or as to its observational facilities and resolution—because we cannot by definition be conscious of it. Now whistling banshees can be accommodated as a possible component of reality because we perceived them in our consciousness under the definition I gave. They are acceptable to the model, and we know how to observe them. Therefore we are fully entitled to declare whistling banshees so defined to be unreal, and so we do. Please note in passing

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that the distinction between what is real and what is unreal is determined not only by the content of the model, but by the kind of distinction that the model has the competence to draw.

Which leads me to speak of angels—despite the fact that doing just that dropped Thomas Aquinas into so much trouble. If we define an angel, we have squeezed the angel into our model, into the regulatory circuit that links us to reality, and therefore into our consciousness. That is fine. We are now in a position to decide whether or not angels exist. Under these rules, only little children can afford to say that angels exist (thereby winning first prize as usual). But if I define the term angel to mean ‘an entity of higher complexification than my own, then ipso facto I declare myself incompetent—at least in terms of Western science—to comment on the existence or otherwise of angels. Such beings would not fit into the model of reality-regulation, and therefore they could not be recognized. I cannot propose any methodology by which to affirm or deny the existence of something which, though I may define it, I could not recognize if I encountered it ... This example provides a powerful cybernetic introduction to a new biological approach to cognition. This begins by saying quite flatly that: ‘the living organization is a circular organization which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organization that produces them’ This sentence defines a phenomenon of man called autopoiesis: the capacity not to reproduce himself, but to produce himself—self-referentially. In that case,

continues the new biology of cognition, an autopoietic system ‘specifies a closed domain of interactions that is its cognitive domain, and no interaction is possible for it which is not prescribed by this organization. It follows, thirdly, that: ‘the process of cognition consists in the creation of a field of behaviour through its actual conduct in its closed domain of interaction, and not in the apprehension or the description of an independent universe’ Now this is just the sort of biological theory that our discussion of models would lead us to expect; we have it in the discoveries of Humberto Maturana.’

Is it really possible then, as the Subjective Idealists of old contend, that there is no independent universe, but only our own perception (which may be only of ourselves), and our own projected model of a universe that attains to its illusory status only because that [lusion is Shared by equivalently handicapped humankind? There is powerful argument to this end. From cybernetics to biology, we next proceed to social science: the purpose of action is to control the state of the perceived world—on the prior understanding that the only reality is our perception of it. In doing this, argues William Powers it is entailed that we have to learn how to perceive.* We need to learn that angels cannot be recognized—

nor fairies, nor anything else (whether by way of illusion or reality) that is not shared. The mechanism is a physiological feedback control system which teaches us what is allowed to count as ‘real’ Then let us note that if we dispute the consensus, as I shall do increasingly this evening, we shall probably be declared to be ill; but that, on the other hand, running

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this risk is our only hope of cognitive progress. Behaviourism and psychoanalysis have dominated theoretical approaches to perception for half a century and more; at last alternatives appear in Western science to account for volition itself. And just as we may expect the new theories to focus on the self-referential, they also focus on the concept of selforganization—in which field Gordon Pask has made such a potent contribution.’

I have spoken for some minutes of novelties arising in the arena that connects the human sciences through the commonalities of their regulatory systems. It is worth noting that a whole body of equally novel mathematics has arisen, with its own new notation, that can write down and manipulate the formalization of self-referential systems. Probably this had its mathematical origins in Russell and in Wittgenstein. Certainly the latter’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (as long ago as 1922) made clear that a proposition must share the complexity and form of the fact that it purports to reflect. It is, I think, that static logic that subsequently became dynamic in cybernetic theory with Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. I introduce some thoughts about the larger aspects of the physical universe with a quotation from the most fundamental of these purely mathematical texts by Spencer-Brown,* with its echo of Teilhard’s enroulement organique sur soi-méme: ‘clearly the universe is a system for observing itself” ... Itis indeed. Then what happened to the objective Newtonian universe, operating on the laws of motion, the gravitational constants, and so forth, that one of the greatest of scien-

tific men put together in his Principia? The answer is that nothing happened to it, beyond the growing realization that it is ‘only’ a model. As we have recognized, models are relevant and useful within a particular compass. When distances exceed terrestrial distances, and speeds approach the speed of light, the Newtonian model needs some adjustment. We enter the relativistic universe of Einstein. In fact, we have been there, although ill-adjusted

to its implications, for most of this century. By now, the limitations of even this modelmaking are extremely apparent. The physics whereby we undertake engineering projects—

from the exploding of nuclear warheads at the atomic level to the penetration of solar space in distances measured by light years—works very well. But the model starts to break down at both ends of the scale. There is a confusion of quarks, if that is a good collective noun, at

the sub-atomic level of resolution. There are fabrics of time warps at the macro-level from which we weave those sinister black holes. New writings are however appearing in physics,

which are consonant with such other developments as I have mentioned in the biological and human sciences, and for which a new mathematics is emerging.’ It becomes possible to foresee a whole new synthesis of science that will support and

illuminate an enhanced model of the human condition. There has been time to mention only briefly what seem to me to be the major lines of advance; but I hope enough has been said to demonstrate the priority of projecting a systems-oriented scientific model that melds together the self-referential characteristics of the various branches of science that appear to have vested interests in keeping themselves to themselves.

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But there are, thank God, always scientists prepared to take the risks of transdisciplinary interaction, professionally dangerous though this is for them, so that some of the holistic patterns gradually emerge. Once the models are sufficiently enriched, they gain in perspective. Let me remind you of a Teilhardian example of this in terms of terrestrial biophysics. Because of the cybernetic theorem of the recursiveness of viable systems,* whereby each is necessarily contained in another like a set of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, I am

at ease with the concept that Planet Earth is in fact an integral viable system—an organic whole. I long ago wrote that from a systems-theoretic point of view there is every likelihood that Earth will survive as an integral viable system (at least until some 5000 million years from now, when our planet can be expected to be fried by the collapse of the sun into a red giant); but that we have no biological guarantee whatsoever that this viability will include the survival of the human race for even as long as several years from now. Teilhard explicitly did not think that any such lugubrious outcome was conceivable. But outstandingly he did present his famous picture of the geosphere, the rocky mantle of this football Earth, shrouded in the live organic film he called the biosphere. And hence the whole, generating mind around it all: the noosphere—perhaps the planet’s own self-consciousness—with all the evolutionary implications that so vast and yet coherent a vision

entertains. The first photographs of the planet Earth from space were taken by the Apollo 4 mission as late as the end of 1967; and they startled most people—even meteorologists—by their obviously organic cohesiveness. Teilhard’s models were far ahead of scientific models in general: no wonder he divided the scientific world in so dramatic a way. Third: The Invention of Time

Of all the models on which we have so far focused our attention, and in regard to which it is possible for me to adduce powerful and recent scientific illumination in or out of this lecture, there is one more of which I dread to speak. But it happens to reside at the centre of my thesis. It is the model of TIME. It is difficult indeed to suspend belief in the even passage of time, in which we remember all our yesterdays and anticipate all our tomorrows; a time measured by the periodic certainties of the solar system, with its nights and days and its vibrating clocks—all in mutual agreement; a time that records the precise moments of our own birth and death. But this model of enduringness works for us only within the narrow compass of our everyday lives. As soon as we begin to think about an eternity that has no beginning and no end, we are forced to abandon the effort of visualization. There is a vast literature that treats the nature of time from all manner of technical standpoints, but this is no place to review it. I shall use my own words in the attempt to

share what is as much personal experience as a piece of thinking. Deep in the Western culture sits a conviction that a thing cannot both be itself and not itself. This is a principle of non-contradiction which was explicitly formulated by Aristotle, which governs all our rational thinking processes, and which underlies all our logical nota-

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tions in the form of affirmation or denial, of A and not-A. Think please of a wineglass: is it or is it not there? Yes, it is there. But, excuse me, I am putting this wineglass away. So it

is not there. ‘But this is ridiculous, you would say: ‘the wineglass was there a moment ago, but you took it away—now I observe that you have just put it back. What about it?’ Well, suppose that the non-contradiction principle is actually wrong, and that a thing can be itself and not itself. This characterization of reality does not belong within the range of any Western model, and so we call it ‘impossible’ But in practice we have solved the problem: we have embedded our model of simple existence within a spatio-temporal framework, and in particular we have invented time in order to support our cultural belief, if that is what it is, in non-contradiction. (Again, I think that Leibniz got there first.) Obviously I am embarking on a new model of time. I ask you to relax, and to see where it leads. Now we have already noted that our sensory equipment has limitations. Consider

that if a rifle bullet flashed across your field of vision, you would certainly not see it. The neurophysiological apparatus cannot function sufficiently fast. Then please reconsider the wineglass, and the case when it really is there. I now snatch it away (so it is not there) and return it (so it is there) so fast that you cannot see it happen. You will certainly believe that

nothing happened: there is a wineglass. Take the opposite case. You are looking at an empty tray. Onto this I set down a wineglass and remove it again—so quickly that there was not time to register its presence with your eyes. The tray is empty: there is no wineglass. This is fine so far, as an intellectual exercise. But, as we saw earlier, scientific enquiry

can protect us from imaginary whistling banshees by its observational acumen. With the right equipment, you certainly can see the rifle bullet. You can photograph it in mid-air. Similarly, then, the mystery of the vanishing wineglass could be resolved, even if the ma-

noeuvres involved were very fast indeed and, in an obvious enough sense according to this model, we should be catching time in the process of its invention by doing so. But the very insistent question arises: Is there any limit to the speed at which wineglasses may vanish and reappear and still be detectable with ever-improved observational equipment?

It seems that there is such a limit. It is demonstrated through Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which gives a Jower limit for the accuracy with which energy can be measured (AEAt = h) in terms of Planck’s constant (h). This is a universal measure: the ratio of a quan-

tum of radiant energy of a particular frequency to that frequency (and h = 6.547 x 1077 erg-secs). What all this amounts to is that wineglasses going into and out of existence at some limiting speed, which would be a function of the speed of light, would not certainly be there and not certainly not be there. The principle of non-contradiction, at this limit, becomes a fiasco. What is more, by turning the uncertainty equation round, we perceive

the possibility that time is being not so much invented, as created in miniscule packets— precisely in the interest of preventing the collapse of A into not-A. Now this is a far cry from the ‘ever-rolling stream’ of daily experience and Newtonian physics alike. Can any sense be made of it? Indeed I think that it can. In terms of matter

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and energy we have for long had twin theories contrasting smooth waves with discrete particles—and a principle of complementarity to overcome tensions between the two models. Just as photons, conceived of as particles of light, can easily be visualized as a continuum

of light (which is how, at the human level of resolution, we ordinarily experience light) so the continuum of time as we customarily experience that can be visualized as a stream of particles of time.

I earlier mentioned the evident absurdity of seeking to investigate matters of great delicacy with clumsy tools—just because they happen to be handy, and scientifically respectable. The Western world has largely ignored models of reality that come from the East (de-

spite their great antiquity, or perhaps because of it), and worse still has culpably and with much success taught the East to disregard its own outstanding heritage. Despite the various names of the Eastern philosophies, they share much—because they spread historically from India through China to Japan—and I shall not attempt to draw distinctions. Moreover, I am content to refer to the whole approach as yogic. Since I shall make further use of this term, may I say that yoga is not a system of callisthenic exercises, nor is it a means of entering into ‘instant nirvana’ in short bursts of meditation. These seem to exhaust its connotation in the West—with its precision-tools for trivializing anything of importance

and for making money even from the channels of grace. Yoga means union, whether of self and cosmos, man and woman, the different chambers of the mind ... in the limit, therefore, of the A and the not-A. Let us return to our wineglass. Perhaps you would shut your eyes, and accept a very brief moment of guided meditation.

» Imagine the wineglass: it is meant to be real, so make it as solid in your mind’s eye as you can. Now very gently set it aside: slide it quietly out of the picture. « Contemplate the empty place where the wineglass recently was; see that this place is empty. Now gently slide the wineglass back into place. « Contemplate the wineglass again; but focus now on the space it encloses. Do not slide the glass aside this time: just let it go; let the glass slowly dissolve and vanish; contemplate the space that would be enclosed were the glass still present. Thank you. The experience that you have just had, or perhaps would have had after a little practice, is of a not-A defining its A-ness. It is to have observed the wineglassness of empty space. Part of the experience may have been, and I am confident that with proper preparation would routinely have become, that in the moment of perception when the principle of non-contradiction is experimentally falsified, time stops. In subjective terms, time will stop for as long as the contradicted perception is retained—whatever the clocks are doing. This is an obviously tiny example of a wholly different approach to reality from that tak-

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en by the Western culture. Before going further, then, it behoves us to ask what the scientist can make of it. Thirty years ago, had no qualms in describing what was happening, within my own neophyte yogic experience, as autohypnosis. There were fairly respectable neurophysiological explanations available of what was going on within the nervous system in such trance-like conditions. Later on, it became clear to me that sticking labels on states of consciousness explained nothing—either about reality or about the person concerned. To

say: ‘Oh, that is only autohypnosis’ is like saying ‘Oh, you can see the rings of Saturn only because you have a telescope. As to the person concerned in experiencing different states of consciousness, the label he will get will be determined by the context and the models that are currently masquerading as ultimate truth. He may be a mystic to be canonized, or a psychotic ready for convulsive therapy; he may be a profound thinker about the human condition, or subversive scum ripe for the torturer. How strange that the outcome in either

case these days is likely to be electrical damage to the person concerned ... Fourth: ‘Mixtures’ and Godhead

Yoga means union. Let me quickly build a momentary bridge between the particularity of the A/not-A dichotomy and the generality of cosmic union itself, by extending slightly the examples I used to introduce the ‘wineglassness’ of the void. For whenever, and on whatever scale, contradiction is transcended, perception changes, and strange things happen subjectively to consciousness and to time. First of all, I mentioned the different chambers of the mind. It was during the 1960s

that the neurological evidence began to accrue that the two cortical hemispheres in our skulls perform different functions. The dominant hemisphere (usually the left) seems to be concerned primarily with categorization, logical processes—outstandingly language manipulation and speech itself, the whole business of reductionism in response to a high-

variety world. The other hemisphere has a more intuitive basis: it is responsive to aesthetic impulse, it devises patterns which it cannot rationalize, and so on.® These discoveries were

made by such distinguished researchers as Roger Sperry, as a result of surgical interventions in the human brain (which had been undertaken for medical reasons), and of course

they raised the question as to whether the dominant hemisphere was really ‘meant to be’ dominant in evolutionary terms, or whether the two were not on the contrary supposed to be working together in intimate harmony. From the standpoint of the Eastern model, with its five ‘vital airs, the components of our vibrant being, and from yogic practice, the latter position is most strongly indicated. It is also consonant with the concept of ‘mixture’ that we have inherited in the Western tradi-

tion from ancient Greek philosophy, notably Empedocles.!® The characteristics within us, he argued, which are visualized by the Greeks also as ‘vital airs) are not to be considered as functions of a ‘too too solid flesh’ which must therefore be negated on the road to spiritual-

ity. Quite to the contrary, the target is to find the perfection of the ‘mixture’ itself. In this

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proper balance an immanent teleology is defined; and surely this is a notion to be preferred to that of a transcendental purpose beyond this life for which there is no other model than those given in and through poetic caprice. If I seem now to be saying what we knew all the time, namely that the Kingdom of God is within us, that is so; but in pursuing yogic approaches to this reality, I am trying to make it more functional. The secret Christian writings of the gnostics, unearthed in Upper Egypt thirty-five years ago, have had alarmingly little effect so far on the established church— which seems to have connived in their suppression as heretical for 2000 years. Well, they have profoundly affected me ever since I came across Jean Doresse’s initial book'' which appeared in English twenty years ago (see too Pagel’s recent book'?). These gnostic writings often sound as if they had come under far Eastern influences themselves. For example, the Gospel According to Thomas (the apostle who traditionally went to India) declares on this .




>

very point of ‘mixtures’:

Jesus said: ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you’ So, the bicameral mind based on the two chambers of the brain has to operate in the

mode of conation as well as in the mode of cognition. Not only must it synthesize its ‘mixture’ to know what it knows, it must exercise its will to respond to that knowledge—and it does have choices. Now the will exerted in reply to left-hemisphere cognition is recognized in the reductionist language of that side of the brain. It must be; otherwise the regulatory

model (as argued from the cybernetic theorem much earlier) would not be able to exert any regulation. Similarly, if right-hemisphere cognition is permitted to rise to the forefront of consciousness, the mode of conation must change. That is to be expected by these arguments too; because the conative regulator must contain a model of the intuitional rightbrain cognition, and will not therefore ‘speak the language’ of left-brain analysis by which we are wont to introspect on our behaviour, and thereby to control it. Nonetheless, these necessary gear-changes are quite disconcerting to experience. The will is strong to pursue a course, let us say; and ordinarily volitional progress would be

under control in analytical (left-brain) terms. Suddenly to realize that this is not the case, because the conation presents itself in terms of an alien cognition, leaves one bereft of a conscious regulator that can be properly understood. Such a regulator does of course exist:

it is one that right-brain people use all the time. They appear discountenanced, in turn, if their conative processes are brought under analytical scrutiny. Leaving the regulatory skills of the Empedoclean ‘mixture’ poses a behavioural problem for anyone trying to manipulate the mix. Unfortunately, to ignore this challenge, once it has been understood, is spiritually retrograde. Move on with me, pray, from the unification of oneself to one’s unification with others. It is natural to focus on the relationship between individuals of either or both sexes.

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The Western model has made loving relationships basically political and economic, it has distinguished between sacred and profane love, between ‘platonic’ and sexual involvement, between domination and submission in both social and physical terms, and so on. All of this is nonsensical in terms of the tantric yoga, which celebrates union for its very sharinghood—vyet, because of our Western paltriness, becomes the butt of tourist jokes in Hindu temples, and degenerates into pornography in the West.

Let me add to that, moving back again a little to the West of East, that the gnostic gospels throw much light on the theme of institutional arrogance that is reflected to this day within the Christian church. According to the scrolls of Upper Egypt, we may deduce that this is partly a masculine arrogance towards women, partly elitist in any case, and mostly (as I said about politics earlier) the sheer arrogation of power unto itself. There is more, so much more, to say on all of this. But my right hemisphere urges me insistently on to the pivotal point: the union of the self not only with itself, not only with others, not only with institutions, but with the entire cosmos—everything that is ... How daunting a conception is this to envisage; with what outrageous hubris could it possibly be approached ... The Eastern model has an answer to this difficulty, which is essentially a Western con-

tradiction. Some of the ‘occult powers’ in yogic practice are antonyms of the A/not-A variety. Let us consider one such pair. What follows really cannot be called a guided meditation; but it simulates one, to show what I mean; so please listen now in that spirit. The psalmist sang: ‘When I consider thy heavens ..” Yes; against the cosmic backdrop we are very small. Think then, please. We are now all grains of sand, and the ego has gone out of us. (It is not difficult to handle, if you stay in good faith.) And now we get smaller still: we are specks of dust on the highway. Smaller now yet again: is it not possible finally to let go, and to vanish? What does it matter? It is also an occult power to become very large. Extend your personal being to include all your perceptions, all your relationships. You do, after all, embrace the whole of those

entanglements. If some entity or some activity yet larger comes to your notice, its essential nature holds the fact that you have noticed it. Embrace that too. Grow gradually to the size of the cosmos; become the universe. But stay in good faith, please—and vanish. What does it matter?

With this explanation of a meditative drill I have tried to offer a simulation—it is no more than that—of the yogic route to a particular state of consciousness called samadhi, which has a cousinly relationship to the satori experiences of Zen. Consider some consequences, each with a scientific addendum.

+ The denial of non-contradiction, which is the acceptance of contradiction, results in vanishment twice over, the closure of the self onto itself;

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THEN the consequences for the biology of cognition and autopoiesis are (as we already know) vast—and they must spill over into psychiatry and social medicine. + According to our model of particulate time, the self in this state cannot be detected as

existing; in other words, time stops; THEN it is fatuous to imagine that scientific experiments aimed at detecting and defining this state of awareness could in principle be undertaken. + However, as with ‘wineglassness’ in the void, the very cancellation of self in a frozen rather than endlessly protracted ‘eternity’ is an indelible imprint on the cosmos; THEN look to macro-physics to unfold the mathematical topology: for this could be an image (so far as current physics is concerned) of someone falling into a black hole. + Conversely, which is to contemplate the accepted contradiction from its other pole, samadhi is the awareness in oneself of God. So say the raja-yogis. THEN neurocybernetics should continue its search for an adequate account of consciousness in the eigenvalues of self-referential computable functions. To speak of these matters is difficult, because language automatically betrays one into affirmations of what is denied, and denials of what is affirmed—once the principle

of non-contradiction is held in suspense. I am moved to remark on this, since it seems impossible in context not to invoke ‘the self” as if it were an entity, whereas the content of these propositions disregards it. It is because of this difficulty that Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus saying that his propositions were elucidatory insofar as whoever understands

them recognizes them as senseless. It is because of this difficulty that such strange but masterly pedagogic methods developed in the transmission of Zen. But all such quibbles become pedantic indeed beside the recognition of samadhi itself. At the end of the tenth chapter of St John, Jesus declares: ‘I and my Father are one’ The crowd takes up stones, because of a supposed blasphemy. Later, Jesus defends himself against another alleged blasphemy: ‘because I said, I am the Son of God. In the meantime, however (verse 34): Jesus answered them,

Is it not written in your law, [ SAID, YOU ARE GODS? This statement is unequivocal. In the Greek, which some might prefer for St John:

amexpifin abrois 0 "Inoobs, Ovx eoriv yeypappuévoy EV TO VOouw VU®Y OTL 'Eva

etwa,

O¢ot éoTe;

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In the Vulgate: Respondit eis Iesus: Nonne scriptum est in lege vestra quia ‘Ego dixi: Dii estis’?

In pointing out that if the law said ‘you are gods, Jesus was explicit that he himself could hardly be blamed for claiming merely the status of a Son of God. It was what the commentaries call a rabbinical answer. Next: the reference to Judaic law is to the eighty-second Psalm (the eighty-first in the Vulgate): I said, you are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High. Ego dixi. Dii estis et fil ii Excelsi omnes.

The statement is followed, however, by a dire reminder of the mortality of humankind: ‘but you shall die like men ... The psalm was one of those addressed to the judges, and to that extent related to those who had received the Law on Mount Sinai doubtless to their successors also. Perspicuous

commentaries go farther, however, pointing out that those to whom God the Word came were declared to be gods because they had received the divine gift. When I first began to reflect on all of this, it seemed very strange if only because of that strong use, which is grammatically redundant, of the personal pronoun in both the Greek and Latin: ‘Ego said’ But gradually the story became pivotal in the East-West homeostasis of my meditations, so that when the invitation came to give this lecture, the title chose itself. Fifth: Omega Realized in Samadhi

Having begun with much talk of models, in what I consider was a proper analysis of our phenomenological milieu, I have brought together a different model, woven from threads of ancient and modern Western philosophy, from ancient Eastern philosophy and yogic practice, from new scientific insights in physics, mathematics and neurophysiology, and from the intuitive, religious and aesthetic understanding of the right-hand brain. I have not yet said what this seems to me to be a model of. The best answer that I can give is that it is a model of love. In the Teilhardian vocabulary, I think that this is one possible model—of the Omega point—where everything converges, where all meridians meet and fuse at the cosmic pole. But I have not presented my model as an evolutionary outcome, as Teilhard did, and wish

to comment—briefly, but with care—on this issue.

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You are Gods

One of the reasons for my having proposed to you tonight an iconoclastic model of the nature of time, is the inability of the classical continuum models to account for discontinuities in microphysics (where some suggest that electrons may actually move backwards

in time”), in macrophysics (where there will never be enough time to pass through a black hole), in subjective psychology (in which I venture to suggest that ‘everyone knows’ that the passage of time is not uniform), and outstandingly in the arbitrariness of a finite lifetime for anyone (the fact of which life is itself timeless). Similar problems arise in paleontology, and the interpretation of the fossil record. The dinosaurs were apparently eliminated quite suddenly--a fact which our own spe-

cies would do well to bear in mind. The theory that something large, perhaps an asteroid, crashed into our planet—raising such a dust that the sun was blocked off for a very long time, so that photosynthetic processes underwent a long hiatus—is credible enough for such a singular event. But there are many other problems with the fossil record; we do not

unearth half-feathered reptiles, for instance, and the immediate ancestry of Homo sapiens himself is notoriously difficult to unravel. But, for professional reasons, it was inevitably in terms of the geological time model that Teilhard worked as an evolutionist. He produced in The Phenomenon

of Man

a diagrammatic history going back some

150,000 years. It is depicted on an arithmetic time scale, which eats up geological time in equal bites to zero—and zero means ‘right now’ The figure then projects the diagrammatic trajectories that have taken humankind through the neolithic to modern man into an unknown future—where they converge on Omega. He writes of this convergence later (p. 259) that space-time ‘must sormewhere ahead (my italics) become involuted’ to Omega. Remarks of this kind, plus the diagram, plus the geological time model into which the professional paleontologist was locked, all suggest that Omega is a future target of the evolutionary process—ijust as if there were a future, and just as if there were a long-range purposefulness out there in that void (which I am tempted to call a tele-teleology). But Teilhard himself did not believe it. Omega is already in existence. He says it in various forms; ‘Omega must be supremely present” he writes (p. 269). Amen.

Using the particulate model of time, and some schoolboy mathematics, I think apparent ambivalence (if not indeed contradiction) can speedily be resolved. We could, and legitimately could, draw his diagram again, using a logarithmic of an arithmetic time-scale. This means that equal bites at the scale which used us from 100,000 years, to 50,000 years, to ‘now’” (and full stop), will instead take

that this instead to take us from

100,000 years to 10,000 years, to 1,000 years, to 100 years, to 10 years, to 1 year, to one tenth

of a year—and so on. The logarithmic scale is asymptotic to zero: it gets closer and closer to ‘NOW, in equal bites at the scale, but will never ever arrive. Let us go on drawing— extending the diagram all the way to the sun if necessary—until we are so close to zero that the Uncertainty Principle intervenes again: there is nothing to be done, as we saw,

about PlancK’s constant. Then our concept of NOW?’ is that infinitesimally small instant

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in which a particle of time is created. This ‘NOW"’ is the moment of samadhi, the point on the geological time-scale of Omega. And, given the particulate nature of time, Omega can henceforth be dated—even for paleontology, even for evolutionary theory—at each and every moment.

This demonstration is intended to show that Omega is ‘supremely present, and can therefore be entered into by the elevation of consciousness to the state of samadhi; but that it is also (what [ propose to call) a continuous evolutionary product of the cosmos, since it

always lies in the future. There is no contradiction, praise be, at the logarithmic asymptote, because the cosmos itself is so constructed that A is precisely not-A at this quantal limit of discrimination—and cannot be otherwise. Nothing at all, and in any case, can be otherwise: and people down the dreary years of Western thinking have created the bogus issue of determinism versus freewill out of that, simply because they are wrestling with a useless model, a model vitiated and made nugatory through floating in Newtonian time. In this chair last year, Joseph Needham proclaimed that ‘existence itself is a statistical concept’; and in challenging Jacques Monod’s contentions about chance and necessity, whereby no God would (surely?) place such reliance in this so-called ‘chance, Needham said in a beautiful phrase: ‘Supposing the Spirit should say to us “I am the dice”?” Oh yes: it is the Lord of the Dance who says that; and the dance is Shiva’s dance—in which ‘whatever is’ crackles into particulate existence at the rate of the creation of time quanta—and crackles out again—before you can draw even a spiritual breath.

Now if four people were playing cards, and each person were dealt one complete suit, there would be consternation. They would start calculating the tremendous odds against this unlikely event, and might write to the newspapers about it. But the fact is that every hand that is ever dealt is equally unlikely: we fail to notice that, because we do not have a prior expectation as to what the next hand will be, and we notice only the four-suit hand as exceptional simply because the suits constitute the basic model on which the deck of cards

is constructed. “The understanding does not draw its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature, exactly as said Kant (Prolegomena, 36). We have only to change our vantage point on this card game to perceive each hand dealt as a miracle: because the odds against it are so very long.

With this outlook, the angle of each blade of grass, the shape of every stone is miraculous too. What a heady world to live in: no wonder we have sent the miracles packing, and made them travel under the assumed name of ‘randomness. That humdrum world is easier to cope with; and the liberal use of ‘chance’ in the model we construct of it generates the relaxed conviction that whatever happens is not predetermined. But, from this other standpoint, the threat of determinism simply does not arise. The universe is a total, interactive system: by lifting your finger you change the systemic pattern of the cosmos, becoming a

factor in the particulate miracle in which we have our being. ‘I said, you are gods’

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There is of course much yogic guidance available in travelling the path called Seek-andyou-shall-Find that continuously encounters the presence of the divine within the human. This guidance seems to have been suppressed, as far as the Church is concerned, in support of a male and sacerdotal authoritarianism. I pointed to this before in speaking of gnostic ideas, which C.G. Jung thought ‘expressed “the other side of the mind”—the spontaneous, unconscious thoughts that any orthodoxy requires its adherents to repress. Today, in a godless age, the power of repression involved has passed to other hands. One such pair of hands has the name ‘law and order’. Another such pair of hands belongs to medicine, as I now illustrate. A recent book on the bicamerality of the mind" has made some fascinating proposals

whereby the left-brain constituted the executive function for the right-brain—which itself expressed the voice of the gods. Julian Jaynes believes that human beings did not have any consciousness until comparatively recently: for example he seeks to show that the events recorded in the Iliad happened to a bunch of characters who were not self-aware. He does

not make the point himself, but his description of how such folk as Achilles and Hector ‘worked’ very well defines the operation of a computer; and this provokes the question as to what will happen if the bicamerality of our computers should break down: will they become conscious? At any rate, Jaynes believes ‘we are gods’ on the grounds that the god was always part of the man: “The gods were organizations of the central nervous system’ he says; and he goes on to remark that ‘the Trojan War was directed by hallucination’ Now within this kind of

model, it is evident that the experience of samadhi and satori would be classed as hallucinatory. Here are four more aspects of such experiences: consciousness, as ordinarily defined, is dissolved, time stops, so that ordinary affairs are in suspension; the Ego is discounted as it merges into universal love and joy; and the left-hand brain gladly abandons its struggle to rationalize everything, to explain it away. Now these five aspects of the yogic endeavour are listed by Jaynes—not however as relating to yoga (which he does not mention), nor as reflecting central themes of Eastern philosophy (on which he has very little to say). Not at all: this five-point list is offered as a clinical definition of schizophrenia! So—‘orthodoxy requires its adherents to repress, as Jung said; and it seems that I have spent a lifetime’s

spiritual Odyssey in an unknowing attempt to have myself ‘put away’ You see where our models get us. I have one more for you to consider. According to the Eastern philosophies, the model of multiple births—called reincarnation—offers the

paramount explanation of ultimate spiritual homeostatic equilibrium for the individual soul. It makes sense in terms of both the Vedantic and Buddhistic philosophy. It makes sense—as many sober Christians would (although I think heretically) contend—to the Western mind, consumed as it is with a ‘capitalistic’ model of love that demands fair-play

and fair-shares. Spread over numerous lifetimes, insinuates this seductive model, we shall all get equal treatment. Of course this is farcical inside the Eastern model, for which re-

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incarnation offers a path towards enlightenment; as to the Western version, perhaps folk should reflect more closely on the parable of the vineyard ... May I promote a final meditation to you? This is not the time to conduct it, nor even to

simulate it. But here are the suggested rules. Contemplate at length the concept of rebirth, allowing yourself to take satisfaction in its solution of the complicated set of equations that the prospect of multiple lives discloses. Then gradually edge into the meditation this evening’s model of particulate, non-continuous time. What survives? The A and the non-A of fair-play are still there, and they still cancel out in their living contradiction. But there is no time in which to be born or to die—still less in which to be reborn—but only to exist. Then focus strongly on this version of the contradiction, the koan that I discovered and wish to share with you. It says: EACH INCARNATION IS THE LAST. The End

A man whom I knew personally, and thoughtfully regarded, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of General Systems Theory.'* He put forward the concept of equifinality, whereby certain types of system inevitably run to the same end, although by different routes. The notion is scientifically important, and it can also help rescue us from the threat of predestination that I mentioned earlier.

Even so: death is equifinal—for each of us, soon enough; for millions of starving people this very year, because we rich nations do not have the political will to do anything about their plight; for multi-millions, quite possibly, even in the next decade or so, as a result of

nuclear accident or design. The global system is evidently highly unstable; huge amounts of money are spent on sophisticated weaponry so that impoverished nations may expensively tear each other to pieces; and the investment in domestic repression with guns, arbitrary arrests and barbaric tortures is spread over much of the earth.

It is easy to argue that evolution has taken a wrong turning, and has produced in modern man (as the biologist Szent-Gyorgyi said) ‘the crazy ape’ It is easy to argue that humanity will eliminate itself from the planet long before the next ice age, still less the collapse of the sun; and that Teilhard’s own expectation of ‘the immense duration it (mankind)

has still to live’ has already been overtaken by a far more pessimistic likelihood. My own cybernetic judgment is that we have constructed a societary machine on a planetary scale the purpose of which is self-destruction—which makes it almost an irrelevance to ask how

long it will take to do the job. Very well. In the face of all this, it would I think be asinine to insist on ‘hoping for best, or even on mounting a world crusade for human survival. It makes a lot of sense, many people, to trust in God: but it would be an abdication of our shared humanity to in any action that might help beleaguered brethren on that account. Something that we

the for fail can

certainly do, then, is to work on ourselves to recognize the role that is proper to us within Newtonian time. Few people do this: they are under too much other pressure.

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And yet: all of this is not enough; which is why I have tried to share with you a different perception altogether, putting forward a wholly different model. Death is equifinal; and each incarnation is the last. Every particle of time is asymptotic to ‘now, therefore there is no future to concern us, and evolution is—as it always was spiritually complete in the supremely present Omega point of love. To this realization all may attain. It is increasingly difficult to understand, mainly because the world’s great religions, which knew all about the paths to this self-knowledge, have been eclipsed by the power of the self-destruct machine. In sum, four points: there are actions we ought to take within our own time frame to

succour the afflicted; the context of our efforts is dark and threatening indeed; but we may attain to Omega at any instant—and though death shall therefore have no dominion, it still is equifinal. In saying Goodnight, I give you these four points again, for those who feel more famil-

iar with the eighty-second Psalm: Defend the poor and fatherless; do justice to the aflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy; rid them out of the hand of the wicked. They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course. I said, you are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High; But you shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes. References

Passim. Teilhard de Chardin, P. The Phenomenon of Man. Collins, London, 1959. 1. Ashby, W. R. Design for a Brain. Chapman and Hall, London, 1952, Revised ed. 1960. 2. Conant, R. C. and Ashby, W. R. ‘Every Good Regulator of a System Must be a Model of that System, International Journal of Systems Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1970. 3. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, E. ]. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Reidel Publishing, Dordrecht, Holland, 1980. 4. Powers, W. T. Behaviour: The Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing, Chicago, 1973. 5. Pask, G. The Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance. Hutchinson Educational, London, 1975. 6. Spencer-Brown, G. Laws of Form. Allen and Unwin, London, 1969. 7. Capra, E The Tao of Physics. Wildwood House, London, 1975.

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Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. Dimond, S. The Double Brain. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh,

Reiche, H. A. T. Empedocles’ Mixture, Eudoxan Astronomy,

1972.

and Aristotle’s Connate

Prneuma. Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1960.

Doresse, J. The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics. Hollis and Carter, London, 1960. Pagels, E. The Gnostic Gospels. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1979. Jaynes, ]. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Allen

Lane, London, 1979. von Bertalanfly, L. General Systems Theory. Braziller, New York, 1968.

chapter 9

,]:;16 Will of the People

SUPPOSE THAT you were suddenly told: ‘In the pursuit of economies of scale, you have been put in charge of the whole Earth.’ The logic of this appointment is appealing. Now you will be able to create a production plan whereby every living soul will be properly fed and sheltered. The resources exist

for that, quite certainly; and now you will have the authority to contain greed. With the authority, presumably, goes the power to contain greed. Already, you begin to suspect, there is something fiercely wrong. It lies not so much in the logic, as in the psychology. As for the logic, however, it could be mapped out in organizational terms: resources would be allocated geographically, and logistical programmes would be constructed ... Well, yes, that would mean the creation of a vast bureaucracy, into the very fabric of which the termites of corruption would insidiously bore to the ultimate nerve-endings of the information flow: then the messages themselves would be corrupt. You could police it, using guns, the armed forces. You could put it in the hands of business enterprise, and market forces. Now you have institutionalized corruption—

twice over. We are back to psychology again. Moreover, in the outcome, we are back with a bump to what we have already got. Perhaps (what do you think?) you would be well advised to turn this job down. It looks as if, whatever you do, you will be in instant hot water, and the social realities will continue to look just like those with which we are already familiar. It'll all be the same in a hundred years, a hundred years from now. At least, it is tempting to think so; the The Lindsey Sutcliffe Lecture, Middlesex Polytechnic, 1 November 1982. Published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8, 1983. Reprinted with kind permission of the Operational Research Society.

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temptation is to shrug off any responsibility, to disallow the possibility that the individual has any capacity to shape affairs. Stanley Holloway’s monologue faces right up to it: For Ill be dead and you’ll be dead, a hundred years from now. Finally, comes the ironic twist; it almost changes a sad tale into an amusing tale, and its catharsis minimizes personal accountability: And somebody else will be well in the cart, a hundred years from now. Yes, that makes me laugh. The laugh is a product of my own culture, of course. To the vast peasant population of the world there is not much laughter, ironic or otherwise, in the fatalism that says: We’ll all be dead in a hundred years. Nor is there any laughter in its ego-maniacal denial by the group of the frenzied privileged who are determined that cryogenic science shall freeze

them into immortality. Yes: there is a growing number of people who truly believe that science will not allow them to die. But most people seem to proceed on the assumption that the world and our own species will stumble on through our own proximate generations, with conditions very much as they are. I do not know whether to call this the fate

of the people, the expectation of the people, or indeed the people’s will. Looking towards the future scans a philosophical minefield—as well as those we noted, merely in passing, on the logical, the psychological, the logistic and ethical fronts. And yet behind this exceedingly daunting and complex and maybe incomprehensible picture, wherein ‘it’'ll all be the same in a hundred years’, lies a different picture altogether, wherein it will all be quite different. For if I'll be dead and you’ll be dead, those who are then alive will be NEW PEOPLE. And these new people could be markedly different from us. At present, roughly half the world is under twenty. In cheerful disregard of all the philosophical problems involved, I cannot manage to believe that this youthful popula-

tion really does embody a will to continue the march of their recent ancestors towards extinction. These people surely embody a will to survival—in the biological terms of adaptation, and in the spiritual terms of joyful children in a wonderful cosmos. Politics

will be laid on them later; cynicism may get its canker into them; they may be exploited and tortured and killed. But for the moment, and for the continuing moment of our successive tomorrows, half and then more than half of us human beings will be within reclamation and could become a new embodiment of hope. This is something which, amid much and well-justified gloom, we can afford to celebrate. It is why we have a lecture to celebrate the life of Lindsey Sutcliffe, because it was just this hope that she embodied. What is the Problem?

If we could create a ‘firebreak’ in time, so that the Earth were uninhabited until a hundred years from now, and start all over again with a youthful and uncontaminated generation, where would the changes lie? They could not be with the fundamental physiology of humankind: evolution does not work that fast. But we might find men and women

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behaving differently, and even exploiting aspects of the persona that most people have not so far recognized in themselves. We might also expect radical changes in human institutions—because those would have to be newly created. It is surely inconceivable that a new generation, reconstructing affairs after a temporal firebreak, would arrive at the same unproductive and indeed threatening and fearful solutions that we have reached by chance and mischance over the last 5,000 years. At once a new vision of the world is disclosed to our simulating eye, and we could spend a happy evening elaborating our own version of that Utopia. Because in simulations there is an endemic faculty of choice, and

we could hold an auction of our preferences. The problem with the world in which we actually operate, the world without a fire-

break in time, is precisely that it seems to offer us no choice—because all the options have been used up, or are pre-selected. The vast preponderance of available energy is mortgaged by the military-industrial complex, in gigantic budgets for making war—let us disdain to call this ‘defence’—the ramifications of which extend throughout the economy of the entire world. Wars themselves are foisted onto small nations, who fight each other on behalf of their sponsors in various bouts of derring-do. Thousands of people are massacred, crunched up by the juggernauts that still we have no power to stop. In all of this there are the people who make the whole system work. There are the military people and their bureaucracies, who are of course ‘only obeying orders’; there

are the people from whom the orders emanate, who find themselves without alternatives because their options have been pre-empted; and there are the scientists and engineers and workers who design and build the implements of genocide. Most of the scientists

alive, and they are most of the scientists who ever lived, are supported in their work as in their family lives by this machine. If you ask them what on earth they think they are doing, they reply that there is no alternative: almost all jobs in science, including the academic ones, are hooked in to the warfare network somewhere. And these are the very people, robbed of choice, who have often wondered how the fascist family-man can kiss goodbye his wife and children, and set off to a day’s work pulling out fingernails and imparting electric shocks.

Well, it is a matter of distancing oneself from the blood and the agony; and, well, it is a matter of where is one going to draw the line. We are all implicated in an enormous

system, in which no part may choose other than his appointed role, and, should s/he rebel, then not only will life become very difficult for that rebel and dependents, but nothing will change in the big system—because it has instant repair facilities using a plenitude of spare (people) parts. Every kind of specialist sets out to describe the enormous system; s/he fails, because it is too complicated, and because the specialty operates as a filter—allowing through only those aspects that the specialist can recognize or handle. Then perhaps operational research, supposedly interdisciplinary and supposedly problem-oriented, can investigate

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the enormous system, and provide a new set of strategies. But OR has abandoned its interdisciplinary approach and its problem orientation (witness its literature) in favour of mathematical enquiries into the well-formulated problems that we do not have, or at the least which do not figure in the perspective of the enormous system. Then perhaps general systems theory (GST) or cybernetics (which I take to be conterminous topics) can account

for the whole workings of the enormous system. Again, they cannot: no-one’s brainpan has requisite variety to this end, and no-one’s research institute is empowered to change the categories of orthodox scholarly taxonomy (witness, for instance, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis). This has the effect of driving concern away from actual people and towards the world population of abstract nouns such as ‘health’ and

‘education’ and ‘resources’—as if the living person and the viable community in whom all such abstractions find simultaneous embodiment did not exist. Then what can be done? Well, it is certain that what we need to discuss is the way in which the enormous system regulates itself; and it is also clear that both OR and GST know some things about regulation. So I submit that we should firstly enquire, not how the enormous system operates, but how it is regulated in such a way that it fails to reflect the will of the people. Why is there no choice, in short; and above all, can we tell from analysing this question what sort of developments would count as practicable undertakings towards ameliorating the mess that we experience on every side? Well, if anything is to be understood about this, it is also clear from the arguments of this section that the

understanding will involve a change in paradigm. My final advocacy in this lecture will depend on the model now formulated; and this model will almost certainly be unfamiliar; so I hope that no one will take offence at my simple explanations. The Management Process From the cybernetic standpoint, management processes are best regarded non-hierar-

chically. They are not, then, necessarily pyramidal power structures—although they may approach this model in the limiting case of an authoritarian value system. Consider a managerial action, which is the same as to say: consider the present state

of a regulator. Take heed of the fact that this state occurs simultaneously with the present state of the (regulated) environment. Since both states are coincident, neither can be

said to have ‘caused’ the other. Between them, however, they will result in an outcome in the world which may or may not be opportune in the eyes of an observer. The cybernetic

nomenclature' says that the two states are directively correlated, and it seems a good term. Nobody supposes, however, that this correlation is fortuitous; there is a set of factors antedating this ‘present’ moment which influences or perhaps generates both states in the ‘now’. These factors were called coenetic variables (pronounced ‘sennetic’, from the

Greek koinos for ‘common’) by Sommerhoff. So our picture of the management process looks like a diamond. A set of coenetic variables generates two vectors, one resulting in

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a management action, and the other in an environmental condition. These two, being directively correlated, converge upon an outcome in the world. This picture is anti-paradigmatic insofar as there is, at any given time, no apparent connection between the regulator and what is regulated. Ashby’s use of the notion (in the 1950s at least) of coenetic variables was to identify them? with his own (also common) ‘disturbances’; and perhaps that is to emphasize the disjunction, if something as apparently arbitrary as a mere disturbance were the only causatory element that united the regulator and its environment. My own original formulation of the approach® did not derive from Sommerhoff, but from Gdédel. It seemed clear to me (and still does) that

a managerial language would find itself unable to formulate its most crucial dilemmas, because of the Incompleteness Theorem, and that the result would be the confrontation of

managers with logically undecidable propositions. Thus my own theory demonstrated a disjunction between the regulator and the regulated environment, too; but the machinery for mitigating disaster was the recognition of a black box capable of keeping the regulator’s perception more or less in line with reality. This mechanism was originally called Completion from

Without: it was to have its major development and application in the

steel industry.* The world outcomes of directive correlation between a regulated environment and its management constitute a continuum to which the observer may assign values such as good or bad. Now in the case of the human manager, it is very clear that s/he is the observer, and also the one who (in the first place) imports values to whatever is going on. But there are also other observers who impute values to what is going on. It may well happen that these sets of values are inconsistent or even contradictory, as in the case we were discussing, whereby government does not seem to reflect the will of the people. All observers of the continuum of affairs, who are also participants in the continuum of coenetic viability, have problems of filtration in the very act of observing; and each will solve those problems differently. For the fact is that the world is a place of very high variety, and an individual person’s variety is much lower. Note: cybernetics defines variety as ‘the number of possible states of a system’. The diagram in Figure 1 depicts the managerial process as it has been introduced although the diamond has become deformed. The set of outcomes is shown by a box (latterly the final vertex of the diamond) labelled ‘consensual/institutional surrogate world’, which is the only ‘reality’ susceptible to discussion—although it is meant to be a homomorphic transformation of the world potential that can never (too high variety) be fully understood or agreed upon. This is the surrogate world we manage® because our model of the real world is of low variety and always out of date. The circle circumscribes all the point-sets that represent the possible states of this world, and the amoeboid shape called

B is that subset of states that are found satisfactory to an observer. Now the B states are generated by the A states of world potential and are mirrored by the C states of a would-be

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regulator. The precise shapes of the regions of satisfactory states are not accurately known and do not therefore fully agree with each other. The dotted trajectories that complete the ‘diamond’ circuit are shown here as registering in the good outcomes set for A, B and C. Now if the regulatory process fails, then according to the theory with which we began, the representative point in B would be knocked out of its satisfactory set. But this would probably have happened because the representative point in A had left its set; and the

regulator would probably recognize that its own point on C had done so as well. These results are contingent rather than necessary, because the mappings of A on B and of B on C are all homomorphic, thanks to variety attenuation; and therefore antecedent points

cannot be infallibly recognized as the ‘cause’ of any particular change further down the modelling line. The exploration of this Figure 1 model would take a very long time, and we need it now for only one result—although that is of major importance. The model enables us to understand that variety attenuation and the position of the observer will account for any amount of cognitive dissonance in the enormous system, and that ‘the will of the people’ is a function of who wants to know. For any representative point may transmogrify into an unsatisfactory condition without forcing its correlated points to do the same, while a point may regain its satisfactory subset without being able to guarantee that its correlated points have also reformed. And it will readily be seen that observers in different grandstands will offer quite different accounts of the same events, not only because each model of those events will be uniquely perverted, but also because the parallelism between sets

and trajectories has no underlying causatory explanation. In all these ways the language we are developing is appropriate to the description of

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the human predicament with which we began. It facilitates further discussion; whereas the standard notion that management can read the world situation, act upon it and produce results which are susceptible to modification by error-controlled feedback fails to account for the reality that we began to probe. To proceed further with this enquiry, then, we shall need to peer into the black box in the hope of limning out its major infrastructure, and of interpreting the variety attenuators that are responsible for what is in fact a rising entropy in the enormous system. We can then see whether our new cybernetic formulation of affairs throws light on the phenomena that we set out to consider. Perversions of Potential

Human potential to deal with the environment of humankind is diminished in many ways, and in Figure 2 we begin by an opening-up to some degree of the circle by which Figure 1 depicted it. The three diminishing circles are now used to indicate a ‘variety squeeze’ which systematically lowers the perception of choice—whether it be for an individual, or for a human institution, or indeed for a nation. These subjects all see themselves as they do because of the historical trajectory that has brought them to where and what they are: the past has pre-empted their future because ‘that is the way of it’, and few people are able to conceive of liberation from this destiny. In a similar way, if, strangely enough, the future weighs down on humanity with its proposition that it will all be the same in a hundred years: there will be no firebreaks in time. The present, as a result, is for most people and institutions simply a mark bearing a date on a trajectory which has a fully-determined past (despite the egregious ambiguity of recorded history) and a largely determined future (despite an absolute power to act quite differently). In such ways the

variety of human potential, its number of possible states, is in effect squeezed down to a spectrum of options to choose. Assurance that variety is thus cut down in what people often call ‘a real world’ is made doubly sure by the impact of variety attenuation arriving from the consensual/institutional surrogate world discussed in the previous section. All this may be studied in context on the diagram. In its turn, the variety of world potential, which includes all the proclivities of nature and their rearrangement under the benign or malign supremacy of humankind, is constrained to a spectrum of options to act. Variety is here reduced by the outputs of power-bloc interactions which squeeze effective outcomes down to their lowest common multiples. The diagram notes especially the variety attenuating power of political,

military and economic forces, which are generally agreed to exert restraint, and includes the educational and religious forces, which do so also under the guise of expanding the variety which in practice they inhibit. The effect of criminal activity cannot be ignored as attenuators of world potential, both insofar as they act directly on events through mafia-style operations such as drug trafficking, and also because they now account for a huge, though unspecified, segment of all first-world economies. It is, of course (as Figure

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2 shows), the spectrum of options to act that generates the variety-attenuated surrogate world that impinges on the spectrum of options to choose, rather than the reverse—as might at first be thought. That is because it is impotence that defines the boundaries of consensus, under the plea that politics is the art of the possible. Now although there is no regulatory connection directly to link the management of

human potential to the world potential, there is another kind of connection flowing in the opposite direction, which has to do with observation of the actual world. Perception concerns the surrogate world, and we shall peer into its black box of filters shortly; meanwhile it is undeniable that direct observations of physical action are available to the would-be regulator (and to its subscribers or electors). Out of the spectrum of options to act, some actions are selected by players of the world game, and of these some are selected as the focus of action to be transmitted to observers and would-be regulators alike. This selection

is undertaken by the mass media, depicted by a television camera symbol in Figure 2. Although many critics of the mass-media are to be found, and although the criticism itself may be regarded as vieux jeu, the cybernetic mechanisms involved are not properly understood by most people. In the first place it has to be faced that the selection of an item for transmission, which betokens an editorial judgment, excludes other items competing for transmission time or space (for this argument relates to newspapers too). The variety reduction is immense; and for the majority of people, only those items selected actually happened. The item on which the media have focused is, secondly, subjected to

a feed-forward function—f(p) in the diagram—of very high gain. That is to say, the item is invested with glamour simply by being there, and it will have (what editors call) its

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‘sexiness’ enhanced by whatever means are available. Thirdly, all this will happen within the framework of subcultural conformity that determines what audiences are willing to consider, and the feed-forward function proliferates and reinforces those terms. The input of highly selected information delivered with great éclat obviously delimits a range of perceived choice from within the spectrum of options to choose. If anyone doubts the power of this variety squeezer, s/he has only to consider the effect of expensive advertisements on the people’s choice. Clearly those advertisements are not funded in the aid of any charity. There is yet a fifth cybernetic mechanism implicit in this biased and perverted form of compulsory observation. The power blocs which we have noted to operate within the world potential, attenuating its spectrum of options to act, have a heavily vested interest

in ensuring that an event within the aegis of the range of perceived choice is observed in the way in which these dominating actors wish and intend. Insofar as the transmission fails to subserve these purposes, its signal must be taken by them to include an error (e on the diagram). The powerblocs themselves have control of the feedback function F(p) that is able to correct that error in their own interest by modifying what is selected for transmission and its mode of presentation. The comparator (an encircled cross) inside

the ‘camera’ in the diagram shows this modification happening. The interesting result of using this model is that it is easy to show that the signal rapidly becomes dominated (not simply ‘corrected’) by the feedback function.® The five cybernetic effects of modelling media activity in this fashion seem to be consistent with experience. It is usual to hear folk who have some special knowledge of a topic treated by the media complain about travesty. Before dismissing such complaints as paranoid, but also before assaulting the media as meretricious, it is worth noting that things could hardly be otherwise: proliferating variety must always attenuate to match the variety deployed by the recipient. It is an exemplification of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. We now pass to consider the black box by which outcomes are connected to the would-be regulators in Figure 1. This may, as we see in Figure 2, be made somewhat transparent by examining the sub-cultural conformity that responds to the consensual world. It generates habits which constrain the variety of the human potential through the erection of self-confirming low variety models. They are self-confirming because they cannot accept the very data which would modify them: witness the link to the signals that delimit the range of perceived choice. The models themselves ought surely to be learning machines, but they rarely achieve this status. It is because the subculture supplies their categories and values. It is evident that value structures condition the adaptability of the models that relate to perceived choice: experimental ethics are knowingly rejected, for instance, by people whose ethical models are deliberately chosen and on public exhibition. The question of the categories by which we sort out problems, information, solutions, and so on, is another matter.

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They are normally simple features of the subcultural ethos, not deliberately chosen, yet unwittingly influential. For all our models are built from components that are presented to us ready-categorized; and we fail to solve problems that are couched in terms of the very categories which have already proven useless as parameters of recognizable solutions. Thus we accept, and may even boast about, the role of values in our world-view; but we shall not parade the categories whose power to mask solutions is so strong if we do not recognize what they are, never mind admit that they are arbitrary. (In preparing this lecture for publication, I am most struck that a list of key words is put forward, from which a selection will ‘define the essential content’. No such selection would at all convey any such definition; and therefore it can be assumed that the lecture has something new to offer.) Here is a startling illustration of what prior categorization means. Consider the problem of underdevelopment in the Third World, and try to define it. The values you use are

not to be jibbed at: starvation, malnutrition and extreme poverty are offences before God, and no one supports them. But reflect on the categories of your definition. Does not this description’ disrupt them? ‘We understand underdevelopment not as a stage in a historical process preceding development, nor as a situation of stagnation in the levels of productivity and welfare, but as the antithesis of development, that is to say: of the process which results from the expansion of world capitalism which generates development in nations which never were underdeveloped.’

This statement is obviously not value-free, but its categories invite new thoughts under any value structure; and a reconstitution of categories may be illuminating in any context. Media producers, offended by the kinds of comment to which they were subjected here, have often been heard to say: ‘But you were not misrepresented’. The category has been neatly chosen. Somehow the answer: ‘But I was not represented either—you were’ is disallowed. In concluding this discussion of Figure 2, it must be mentioned that many feedbacks are not indicated for lack of space. This particularly applies where no arrows indicate direction: indeed, most of the pathways represent two-way loops, one direction only having been indicated to aid understanding of the general argument. This comment applies especially to the topmost connection, which has received no other comment. If the reader knows how to transcend the variety squeeze of this workaday model, and if he has some conception of what meanings to ascribe to alpha and omega, then the model can accom-

modate him or her. More light may be shed on this obscurity by Figure 3. Exemplifications It is well to try out the worth of this model before seeking to complete it with novel invitations towards the expression of the people’s will. Here are some pointers.

The notion of directive correlation is very powerful. It replaces ‘forecasting’ in the

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sense commonly used. When coenetic variables act, they drive the system and the regulator down disparate paths to a convergence on an outcome that is well-nigh inexorable.

Aeschylus knew this; a poetic insight as well scientific profundity may discern it. Byron (of all men) understood that the development of the engines and instruments of his own

day would inexorably lead to a moon landing, just as it did. We followed our technological noses and our military dictates, and there it was. Consider an issue that concerns us in Britain as I write: the post-mortem on the Falklands or Malvinas war. Anyone who has visited Argentina or has talked with middleclass Argentinians has known the claims and counter-claims over these islands to be both long-standing and irreconcilable. It has been so for a very long time; and of course negotiations had been virtually permanent over fifteen or more years. The directive correlation sees the outcome as war and would call this outcome inexorable were it not for a conviction that so obvious and dire a conclusion would be averted by regulatory action: presumably some mixture of diplomacy and warlike posturing set in the context of international power-politics.

We had all this clearly before us. But the surrogate worlds of the two actors where not consensual. Each shed massive variety—but not the same variety: the models drew

apart. Once this mechanism is laid bare, it is easy to follow through the pathways of the semi-transparent ‘completion-from-without’ box for both sides. The directive correlation leading to war became insusceptible to influence by its regulatory components because

the subcultural ethos with its habits, with its categories and its values (none of which were shared by the two nations) generated very low variety models, quite different from each other, of surrogate worlds that were already wholly separate perceptions. Eventually both the options to choose and the options to act became unitary for each country, even though those final options were ludicrous and lethal: they therefore occurred. It is especially important to notice that warnings of incipient disaster cannot be registered in the language of the low-variety model. The point was made in the previous section in establishing the theory: here is its empirical verification. A year’s worth

of warning was ignored in the case of the South Atlantic, just as a direct three-month alert by Mountbatten concerning the vulnerability of Pearl Harbour was ignored by the United States in 1941. How could this possibly be? What is to be lost by noting an alert?

The explanation is (and must be expected to be) more profound than mere foolhardiness. The admonitions did not map onto the model, and the language expressed undecidable propositions. Once the war was in progress, the effects of the media loop on the whole regulatory system became obvious, and they generated more farce. Government sources

of information became sententious and lagged as the war ministry attempted to dominate public opinion by controlling the feedback function F(p). The television powers were having none of this, and used foreign sources of news to dominate the feedback function themselves—thereby earning the rebuke of fighting on the wrong side. The press, long

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since designated by Aneurin Bevan as ‘the most prostituted in the world’, wishing not to be outdone by the high gain on the feed-forward function occasioned by tele-recorded film of bombs going off and people actually dying, resorted to high gain feed-forward itself in ever bigger and more vulgar headlines. The positive reinforcement given by so much emphasis to people’s low variety models variety-squeezed the range of perceived choice to the point where individuals and their parliamentary representatives were manifestly incapable of drawing the conclusions that the model makes apparent. It has since led to the exoneration of the Government by a Commission of Enquiry, and (according to opinion polls) to overwhelming support for the Government as expressing the will of the people. All this being so, the directive correlation for 1983 still indicates war in the South Atlantic; but the mixture of diplomacy and posturing that is supposedly regulatory in the

face of this threat has necessarily to be based on even lower variety models, categories and values, even more stringently embraced. Thus the policy now called Fortress Falklands is inexorably called forth by the directive correlation; and the problem is no longer how to settle with Argentina, but how to modify the directive correlation of a second war, and how to escape the ruinous financial penalties of all this vainglorious behaviour. Matters of principle (which derive in Figure 2 from the value structure of the subcultural conformity) can be inferred from the Government’s dedication to inequality at home and the sale of armaments abroad—to fascist regimes, and even to Argentina itself. These principles were much spoken about, especially on behalf of this small parish of dependent Falklanders who had just before been denied the status of full citizens by an Act of Parliament. Matters of fact, such as the existence of oil deposits in the region, were not

spoken about at all. So the variety of world potential that becomes attenuated by all the mechanisms depicted in Figure 2 is very large indeed—and this is what makes polarization of the kind just witnessed not only possible but inevitable. If we think of two world surrogates as overlapping circles on a diagram, where the intersect is most of the twinning picture, and if this central portion of world potential represents the variety that both sides attenuate, then all that remains are the two entirely separate sets at the extremes. This polarization produced, sustained and now exacerbates the South Atlantic tragi-comedy. There is a larger, more dramatic, more threatening polarization now looming in front of humankind.

By now we stand knowingly on the brink of a nuclear abyss. Jonathan Schell tries to convey® to us what Hiroshima was really like and tries to get it into our thick heads that a new holocaust would present a difference in kind as well as in magnitude. The magnitudinal difference is measured by the metric that one Hiroshima equals a millionth part of the Armageddon that is already implicit in the warheads deployed today by both sides. To trigger this is to destroy society itself—and that is where the qualitative difference lies. We should not be in the business of patching up the cities and the services. As Schell demon-

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strates: ‘At the outset the United States would be a republic of insects and grass’. You may well imagine that it is the will of the people who inhabit this planet not to engage any longer in these dangerous antics. But the enormous system will have none of that, and nations find themselves dragged into nuclear commitment and technology, if only not to be outdone, or to gratify the paranoid delusions of their crazy leaders. In the United States, a hugely expensive study of the intended evacuation of major cities has resulted in apparently serious proposals whereby the horrors adumbrated by Schell may be mitigated. Families are supposed to leave by car in alternate blocks of hours depending on their number plates, abandoning their pets, for small towns all of 200 miles

away. Remember that sufficient warheads already exist to bomb each US city of 20,000 or more inhabitants to obliteration. Never mind: in this evacuation there are to be no guns,

no narcotics, no alcohol—and no high heels. But people should take a picnic lunch; and if they experience radiation sickness, then (says the Federal Department of Defense®) they should take ‘one or two aspirin tablets every three or four hours’. How people are to act, or to choose, in the face of such disparate surrogate worlds as these two models conjure is a mystery. Some counties have refused huge government funds allocated for the articulation of its ‘survival’ plans, at a time when social service budgets are being cut and even eliminated. But the will of the people should not have to be expressed as a repudiation of its own governmental folly in attempting to redress follies more hateful and more dangerous that were earlier committed in their name: the nuclear strategies themselves. Let us not imagine either that disaster by war is any more likely than ecological disaster. Jerome Deshusses writes of ‘life on the edge of human history’)© The destruction of forests, the spread of concrete over grassland, the dangers of acid rain and toxic wastes, the threat of unreplaced oxygen, the daily elimination of species are all matters that we experience now—never mind the likelihood of mistakes yet to be made in, for example, the experimental development of genetic engineering. The risk of nuclear accident in power stations is staggering: ‘a major accident’ (and we have seen this heralded in Three Mile Island) occurring ‘in a single large nuclear power station in northern Germany could kill thirty million Germans, ten million French, and the entire population of Switzerland in one fell swoop’. Deshusses sees all this quite recent technological enormity in historical perspective when he remarks that, after the world had been made in seven days, the eighth day saw humanity rise to the full flower of its civilization. ‘As we enter the eighth night’, he asks, ‘can we look forward to the prospect of another dawn?’

In acknowledging the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to power, Willy Brandt recently questioned ‘whether we have learned that madness can dictate action, if we do not pre-empt it with reason’. The exemplifications of this section underline his point. The policies under which the world is run are quite literally insane; and the outcomes

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of their directive correlation are staring us in the shroud. There is not the least sign that reason will pre-empt the ultimately suicidal action of a species that has robbed itself of perception and of choice. Instead, as the South Atlantic disaster perfectly well illustrates,

lunatic policies will be reinforced by the positive feedback regulators that always attend adversarial politics. The usual term for the outcome is ‘escalation’. Within such a situation, it is not possible to effect change by tinkering with the existing system. Moreover, dangerous as the existing system may be because of its incipient instability, any suggested interference with the status quo will be represented as rendering it more unstable still. Witness the inevitable reactions to the Church of England’s recent report which favours unilateral nuclear disarmament. Useless as Britain’s nuclear capability has always been, vulnerable as its deployment makes us, ruinously expensive as it certainly is, and morally opprobrious as you-don’t-have-to-be-a-Bishop to realize, the role of Britain in the enormous system makes its possession a fact.

Towards Realizing Potential

If it is useless, as argued here and elsewhere, to ‘tinker with the existing system’ it remains to indicate cybernetic approaches to expressing the will of the people that might yet work to resolve these sad dilemmas. A map is provided in Figure 3 to aid this final discussion. It should immediately be noted that this is a completion of the diagram in Figure 2. Only lack of space forbids the replication of that diagram within the top loop of Figure 3. As it is, the continuing diagram begins on the right hand side by noting the existence of ‘the class of viable systems’ generated by the world potential (whose triple circles are now reproduced in miniature). A viable system is one sustaining the capability for independent existence as a recog-

nizable identity. Thus a person is a viable system, and so is a firm. In particular for the current purpose, the institutions that humanity has devised to express the will of the people (from government departments and social services to the agencies of the United Nations) are supposedly viable systems. They do not work at all well, and so their future viability is in question. This fact lies at the root of our problem, whose mechanisms were mapped out in Figure 2 and whose exemplifications were reviewed in the previous section. There is no space in this paper to propound the full theory of the viable system, which is available in book form.!" There are, however, three major characteristics of viability to which attention is now drawn. First of all, any viable system (and this includes the animate and inanimate, as well as the social) is characterized by five subsystems which express the necessary and sufficient conditions of survival. It is because of this invariance that the redesign of (not tinkering with) existing institutions is a practical possibility rather than a utopian dream. Whole rafts of management systems, and especially those expressed in computer software, can be put together to float on the communication channels of any institution, once it has been described in terms of the viable system model (VSM). This

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means that the trouble, time and expense of redesign is trivial compared with the current practice of ad hoc redesign, since the latter is done on the basis of a redistribution of political power by compromise, and an assessment of alternative effectiveness by guesswork. This advocacy stresses the appropriate theoretical basis of the cybernetic VSM—which includes the human side of the management process. All this is discussed in the book just quoted; but a different account® incorporates the case history of a nationwide application

to the whole of the social economy. Secondly, the VSM theory demonstrates the recursive property of viable systems. One of the five subsystems mentioned above is necessarily a set of viable systems itself. So this

is another invariant property which, like the first, absorbs variety—without the sorts of attenuation depicted in Figure 2’s loops at the top of the current diagram. This kind of characteristic is the property of closure, whereby the fifth of the five subsystems of the VSM embodies the purposes of the first, thereby administering closure to the whole and avoiding the teleological fallacies of mere asseveration. That is to say, the VSM is what it does, rather than what it says it is. These three are the crucial properties of viable systems that enable us to use the VSM

model to redesign institutions as self-organizing systems, rather than as creatures of a central autocracy. Only through autonomy can the institution retain requisite variety to stay viable: but in present experience, undue centralization, with its inevitably low-variety models, generates surrogate worlds ... Then questions arise as to how the performance of

the institution is to be monitored. In the first place, what matters is not whether an institution answers to some criterion of effectiveness determined by authority “for its own good’, but whether the will of the people is satisfied—and this is an expression of well-being. Because that term itself is loaded with materialistic connotations drawn from Figure 2 style low-variety models of ‘standards of living’, it is replaced® by Aristotle’s word eudemony, meaning an I-likeit-here kind of happiness, that does not prejudge the nature of the well-being that the people’s will seeks to express. Note from the diagram that eudemony derives from world potentials made explicit in viable systems (rather than surrogate worlds), and that eudemonic measures impinge directly on the range of choice perceived within human potential (rather than on low-variety models carrying the expectation that success will belong to the categories and values—such as GNP per capita—of subcultural conformity). The second kind of signal generated by viable systems and not normally registered in low-variety models is the signal denoting pain or pleasure—or otherwise causing arousal in the organism. This signal, called algedonic after the Greek words for pain and pleasure, operates in the institutions we know only when a very high threshold has been breached (‘the roof has fallen in, sir’), or when the media choose to make an issue of some event and put high gain on a current focus of attention. What we need is a signal designed to cause arousal routinely when the physiological processes of the viable system are being

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overstretched. As the diagram shows, this signal impinges on the spectrum of options to choose. It enlarges the human potential that has been accepted at this point by virtue of the diminished variety of the surrogate world, by a clamant demand to find an alternative course. When redesigning institutions via the VSM algedonic signals can be arranged to travel up the levels of recursion, if they are not ‘cancelled’ as a result of timely response where they occur—until their causes have finally been dealt with, and assimilated into the

learning experience to which they gave rise. The fact of closure as characterizing any viable system takes on heightened effect when it is of the essence of the viable system to be self-referential: that is, the viable system is

an observing system that includes observing itself in its activity. Big discoveries may be expected from the study of self-reference, beginning perhaps with the mathematics of Spencer-Brown,'? with its notational innovations and theoretical brilliance, and the new

biology of autopoiesis,'* whereby self-referential systems are identified as producing themselves. A theory to explain self-awareness—the consciousness of one’s own being—lies at the end of this road; it may well prove to be the major scientific discovery of the second half of the twentieth century, comparable in importance with the discovery of the theory of relativity in the first half. I draw on these prospects now with the model of selfhood depicted in Figure 3. The diagram in itself is a powerful image, because it seems to evoke many denotations. Mandalas were uppermost in my mind when designing the symbol for selfhood, and one mandala in particular; but all mandala-like symbols are powerfully evocative. This one has made others think of insect colonies and of alchemies; it looks very like the pattern in a

I l

COENETIC VARIABLES

l I

}

The class of VIABLE SYSTEMS ® Structure of

ALGEDONICS

¥

pain/pleasure’ o

Recursive

o

Closure

property

PRAXIS ‘doing with toots’ The class of ELF-REFERENTIAL

EKISTICS ‘of human

jettiements’

YSTEMS

[ ENTELECHY —1'making actual’ SELFHOOD

FiG. 3

NS

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The Will of the People

liquid medium generated by a pure sound tone; a distinguished historian thought it was ‘the perfect design of a Renaissance city’. There is no doubt that many cybernetic invariances discovered in organizations find topological expression. First let us consider that quintessential entity of human potential, the self that is a living human being. Let the innermost ring stand for the envelope of skin that forms the apparent boundary of his or her physical presence. This ring is irradiated with lines emerging from the Still Centre that represents the self-conscious ‘I’ of each of us. These lines stand for self-regulation in the body: the nervous system, the endocrines, and so on. Insofar as the body is fully innervated and healthy, we expect no regulatory problems. Think now, however, of the human being who seeks to extend his prowess. He trains himself to run the marathon, or to obtain high qualifications at the limit of scientific knowledge. Any such pursuit requires the extension of this person’s self-regulatory capacity of both body and mind (these two constituting a unity more literally than the low-variety models of education, of medicine, and so on seem to grasp), and it becomes questionable

whether the person will achieve such mastery. This stage of selthood diagram by the next-to-outer ring; the tendrils of the regulating system reaching out towards the tiny circles that are linked together to express self that aspirations have set forth as targets of attainment. It is evident system may fail the enterprise: it will itself need training. In particular,

is marked on the are observed to be the higher state of that the regulatory it must learn how

to express models of its own activity that have requisite variety for control.

What has so far been said about the selfhood diagram as applied to a person happens to apply to a community or institution as well. For there is a way of looking at these social units in terms of their most familiar and agreed upon format, in which regulation already works to the general satisfaction; but there is always a better version of the system con-

cerned lying beyond the familiar, which may be well-formulated as the goal of activists or may be a more vague hope of the forlorn. In either case, the attainment of this better mode of being or behaving will require special attention to the regulatory system: that will have to be enhanced if it is to display requisite variety. And again it will need new models of itself to express itself to itself in this more elaborate guise. We are talking here, once again, about formal invariance between certain features of viable systems of various kinds. If a community seeks to improve its quality of life, or a city wants a better transport system, or a society wishes to undertake a different order of health surveillance, it faces the same cybernetic issues as does the individual bent on self-improvement. Qutstandingly, regulation to the desired ends will be effective only insofar as the regulator contains a model that exactly reflects the complexity of the system intended—and that is the meaning of the diagram’s tendrils and their tenuous hold on the penultimate ring of selfhood. The formal proof of this contention is available in a theorem devised by Conant and Ashby.** The final ring of the diagram of selfhood expresses what Aristotle called the entelechy, which is the full realization of potentiality in actuality. For the individual, the group,

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the institution and society alike there may be a final (or perhaps ever-receding) state of advancement that we cannot specify. What we know about its attainment, however, has to do with the process of expanding and exploring what is here called the regulatory mode of existence. The discussion of utopian societies is the outstanding political case; the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment (to choose a term) may be an appropriate interpretation

for the individual. In either case, self-regulation and its cybernetics is the prerequisite of attainment, as both social and religious teachers know—and exemplify in such combined persons-and-societies as monasteries. Because of the Conant/Ashby theorem, any other approach is doomed: we should find ourselves or our social units moving blindly and incontinently in unknown

territory. This is exactly what happens to people who seek

their nirvanas through untutored drug taking, and to communes who cannot understand that a ‘loving principle’ is inadequate to the resolution of human conflict. So this is why the little model of selfhood in Figure 3 is tied into the transcendental loop of the diagram which first appeared in Figure 2: it is there for the sake of completeness, and the attention of anyone who realizes the meaning of his or her own alphas and omegas. As far as the will of the people is concerned, however, reflection on the nature of selfhood as here categorized has led me to postulate three concepts which might give it new effect at all levels of recursion, from the individual to the state. First comes praxis: the doing of things, the ‘progress of a business’, which (let us note) is a function of the available tools. Microprocessors change everything for our generation in this respect, precisely because they permit the total redesign of all our regulators, and make readily available (for the first time at the level of large social units) full-scale autonomy without the loss of cohesion. Praxis therefore impinges on the human potential ‘before the squeeze’, breaking with subcultural conformity and inviting a new society that really could express the people’s will. Only on the understanding of praxis can a suitable new approach to human settlements—the communities, villages and cities—be propounded. This aspect of life is dealt with by ekistics, the Greek

roots of which

are in house-building,

the establishment

of

settlements and the peopling of countries. The ekistics that newly arise could also fulfil the human potential of the big circle, reopening the delimitation on options to choose. Finally, the concept of entelechy itself ought to be liberating in this same domain. The notion belongs to the projection of selthood around the circuits of our total diagram, whether or not it needs to be nurtured by a fresh understanding derived from some or other transcendental loop. And so this introductory thesis closes its own loop and offers a route to satisfy expectations that it raises—that we may yet make real in our society the people’s will. At least, I have proposed a model and a language for its discussion. As to that language, I have added to the terms ‘eudemony’ and ‘algedonic’ (which I have used for many years) the terms ‘praxis’ and ‘ekistics’ (which are words in fairly general use among social scientists),

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and the term ‘entelechy’, keeping all five all-Greek. The reason for this is that the way the concepts named are here used is determined by the structures of the model; the concepts’ names are meant to connote all that the model gives to them by way of systemic enrichment. Then perhaps if they are used in any discussion of this theory, they will facilitate and not impair communication. Theoretical though this paper be, however, it is my own intention to use it as a practi-

cal tool in trying to solve real problems, and to open new routes to the realization of the will of the people in terms of the potentials discussed. Readers are invited to use it in a similar creative way, rather than as fodder for academical disputation. It is not that I mind this, but that we really do not have all that much time to spare. As to the perennial accusa-

tion that the background to this lecture is ‘just another prophecy of doom’, I can only say that the dooms of over-population, of pollution, of starvation, of worldwide tyranny and torture, and of war, are all existing realities—not prophecies at all. People tend to forget that. As to the results that I offer, I say again do please use them. People keep adding to the pharmacopoeia; they forget to swallow the medicine.

v

o

N

e

AR A

References

Sommerhoft, G. Analytical Biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1950. Ashby, W. R. An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London, 1956. Beer, S. Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press, London, 1959. Beer, S. Decision and Control. (Especially Chapter 13) Wiley, London, 1966. Beer, S. ‘The Surrogate World we Manage’, in Platform for Change, Wiley, London, 1975. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. Wiley (2nd edition), Chichester, 1981. Marifa, M. Doctoral Thesis, Brunel University, Uxbridge, 1982. Schell, J. The Fate of the Earth. Picador, London, 1982. Federal Department of Defense (USA). Protection in the Nuclear Age. Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Washington, 1977.

10. Deshusses, ]. The Eighth Night of Creation. Dial Press, New York, 1982. 11. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. 12. Spencer-Brown, G. Laws of Form. Allen & Unwin, London, 1969.

13. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1980. 14. Conant, R. C. and Ashby, W. R. ‘Every Good Regulator of a System Must be a Model of that System’, International Journal of Systems Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1970.

chapter 1 O

A

Reply to Ulrichs Critique of Pure

Cybernetic Reason: the Chilean Experience with Cybernetics

WHEN DR ULRICH was kind enough to send me a draft of his paper, I consumed a lot of audio tape in trying to convince him that in filtering our Chilean work through a Kantian epistemology he had badly misled himself as to what we actually did. This attempt was unsuccessful; so the first point is to say that the last five Chapters of Brain give an account of the work, and also references to other such accounts written by other members of the team. As to Dr Ulrich’s critical methodology itself, I in turn do not understand why anyone should today find himself answerable at the bar of the Critical philosophy. If Kant found himself desperately seeking an eclectic balance between dogmatic rationalism (say Leibniz) and sceptical phenomenalism (say Hume), his was a fascinating problem. But systems

people ought long since to have discarded such ‘academic’ dualism, in which philosophy for so long floundered, because of discoveries in physics (the participating observer), in physiology (the neurological nature of that participation), and in the philosophy of science itself (for instance in the latter-day eclecticism of Churchman). Next: the Critique

First published in Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, Vol. 10, 1983. (JASA

was

published

at the University

of Lancaster.

The

editor at the time

was

Peter

Checkland, and he invited Beer to respond to a trenchant argument written by Dr Werner Ulrich that had appeared in Volume 8. The questions were set by Ron Anderton.) Reprinted with kind permission.

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of Pure (“Theoretical’) Reason deals with a priori principles of knowledge (you call this ‘explaining what is’), the Critique of Practical Reason deals with a priori principles of will (you say it ‘guides us as to what ought to be’), and the Critique of Judgement (which you do not mention) deals with a priori principles of feeling. Are we all speaking of the same Kant? Already I am reminded of A. D. Lindsay’s remark that Kant should be read first for the fourth time. But aprioristic he is (‘every event has a cause] for instance, regardless of experience), and this I reject. I reject the Procrustean bed of his categories, an invention, in favour of a relational formulation that would take into account logic since Frege and psychology since McDougall, not to mention philosophy since Hegel. As studying phenomena, systems scientists should be taking account of the cybernetics of cybernetics, the self-reference of observing systems, rather than Kant’s things-in-themselves. For these are another invention, lifted perhaps from the substance-accidents taxonomy of the Summa Theologica. Presumably it was also from Aquinas that he borrowed the transcendental notion that goes with all this: the critical examination of components logically prior to, or beyond, experience. I need hardly continue in order to show that taking all this metaphysical furniture on a modern cybernetic journey is likely to result in trouble—and it does. Nor can I be expected to account for myself in these terms. In fact, I respect Kant; and one of his better thoughts was that ‘obligation implies possibility’ What then is my own position? (i)

The two books you quote, Brain and Heart, are the result of my thirty-year quest to

establish how systems are viable, that is, how are they ‘capable of independent existence’—as the dictionary has it. Note then that the problem addressed did not include juggling with ‘isms; nor did it commit me to a survey of organization theory, nor have tried to prescribe how organizations should be designed—although I have been heavily censured for failures in all these departments. (ii) The methodology I use is the methodology propounded in Decision and Control, and especially Chapter 6. The earliest comprehensive version, which includes its mathe-

matical foundations, was put forward in the Stevenson Lecture at Newcastle University almost twenty years ago, and was published in Nature. In summary, the methodology begins by recognizing systems that have something— and in this case viability—in common. We notice resemblances firstly at the literary levels of the simile or metaphor (‘management communications are like a nervous system, ‘the real muscle of the plant is the cogging mill’). But we may pursue such thoughts into serious conceptual modelling, and may come to propound a scientific analogy that can be tested (using, for instance, the experimental methods first formulated by John Stuart Mill). The

more rigorous we make the comparison, the more we may approach the specifics of homomorphism: that is, each system is represented by a many-one mapping on to a mathemati-

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cal model. Now suppose that these two models can be related to each other isomorphically: that is, by a one-to-one mapping. Then we shall have a scientific model demonstrating those aspects of the two systems that are invariant. What are commonly called ‘laws’ in science are statements about systems of various classes that are content-free. That is to say: regardless of any particularity that is unique to a given system, such-and-such a property always obtains—it is an invariance of the process concerned. I continue by answering your specific questions against this background. 1.

Ulrich uses the Kantian distinction between Practical Reason’ which guides us to what ought fo be and “Theoretical Reason’ explaining what is. He clearly regards the Chilean work as an attempt to use ‘Practical Reason’. Your account of ‘Viable Systems’ is ‘theoretical’—what must be. At what stage in your view does the work of this kind become norma-

tive? The ‘laws of viability’ as announced in Brain and Heart are offered with the status just explained. If the work of discerning how systems are viable is well done, then any viable system may be mapped on to the model that the work has projected. It is not a question of alleging that this system has to be like the model, or should be like the model. To say that it is like the model is a tautology: of course it is, because the model is a way of talking about viable systems, and has been validated as such. So the italicized is is a logical copula, and does not belong to the Kantian system of imperatives that the other two existential statements seem to adumbrate for it. “Validated’ in turn is a very ordinary statement: the model is derived from scientific investigation, and seems to hold; it is ‘falsifiable’ in the Popperian sense, but

has not yet been falsified. In fact, however, my methodology owes more to Braithwaite than to Popper. Such a model does not expect to be ‘proved; although the theorems that give it internal coherence may be proved. Such a model attempts to account for phenomena of viability, and does not make transcendental allegations about noumena. The use of the model is essentially diagnostic. All viable systems exhibit the characteristics of viable systems (mirabile dictu), but some of them creak. Their viability is therefore in question. Comparison of the actual system with the model provides a commentary on

vulnerability. Now ‘normative’ means ‘establishing or setting up a norm or a standard’ (OED). Who or what has done this in the case of the class of viable systems? Clearly, they have set up the norms of viability themselves. The model is the outcome of trying to recognize what this norm actually is. The ‘work’ (of applying the model, and so on) is best defined as conversation between the model and the system to which the model is recognized to be relevant.

2. A similar consideration emerges from Ulrich’s contrast between purposive (tool-like) and purposeful (exhibiting intrinsic self awareness of ends) systems. He writes “Teleology, (cyberneticians) say, can be reduced to causal concepts of feedback-monitored behaviour”.

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“Hence, for these cyberneticians, ascribing purposes to a system represents a ‘teleological 3 fallacy (Ulrich). Is this your view? The Ulrich quotations look like the result of passing my views through his Kantian filter. I do use the term ‘teleological fallacy, because the originators of systems and the people who operate systems are accustomed to impute purposes to them which are not confirmed by observation. If the observer himself detects purposes, he may be importing them or imputing them to the system. All this makes me nervous, and I prefer to define a system’s purpose as ‘what it does.

Obviously this has nothing to do with reducing teleology ‘to causal concepts of feedback-monitored behaviour’ which is itself a teleological fallacy in my opinion, although some cyberneticians (e.g., Gregory Bateson) write as if it were so. It comes to this: if all the patients always leave hospital in coffins, I shall declare that this hospital is a machine for killing people. If you prefer to say that it is a machine for curing people that is not working properly, or that the medical staff is highly motivated, or that the board of governors is dedicated to good works, or that we know (the Kantian a priori) that the hospital’s purpose is therapeutic, then naturally I shall question your teleology. The connotations of the words purposive and purposeful are ridden with the imputations of many observers, and we can do without them. Insofar as they have valid denotations such as self-reference in a given system, we shall be able to point them out and to declare from which observation platform they may be sighted. The next answer illustrates this. 3.

Where in the terms of your model does responsibility for ‘purposes’ lie: in System Five? at the next level of recursion? with the system designers? or doesn’t the question make sense?

This is a question of, great profundity, and has been shrewdly put. According to my pre-

vious answers, it translates into this: ‘where does responsibility lie for what the system is observed to be doing?’ then the answer is relative to the observer. Let me give actual examples.

(a) Here is a woman in a teashop in the centre of Santiago, 1972. She voted for Allende. For her working class family, income has risen (in real terms) by a factor of four; she says that she never dreamed she would be able to take her little son into such a place. What the system is doing is to enhance her well-being, and not only in terms of tea-and-buns. Who is responsible for this? She is: she belongs to the electorate who embraced Allende. So purpose in a democracy may be generated in System One; System Five embodies that purpose, and supplies logical closure to the viable system. Of course it falls to System Four to help articulate the purpose in the first place; and if System One is to understand and embrace it, then System Three will need to propagate it first—with

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the help of strong damping from System Two, or a revolution may be provoked before the election can take place. (b) Here is President Nixon in the centre of Washington, 1972.

What the system is doing is ‘going commie, and intervening in the US hegemony in Latin America. The responsibility lies with Allende, who is a rebellious System One in the hegemony (Allende said to me: ‘what can a socialist state do to survive in a capitalist milieu?’). So this is a higher level of recursion. The Chairman of the Forty Committee

(part

of System Four) is Dr Kissinger. He decides to destabilize Chile (as documented by the subsequent House of Representatives enquiry). In formulating this purpose within this hegemony (that is, in the Americas) he invokes still another level of recursion, the USA itself. For what he is doing in the hegemony derives authority from System One of the USA, which has its closure in the White House. Responsibility for purposes in Chile had been with its President-and-people up to 11 September 1973, and had to do with the enhancement of life for the majority of Chileans. At this point, responsibility was (illegally) assumed by the hegemony, USAand-treasonable-junta. Hegemony System Five in the USA did not discover the truth until the congressional enquiry of 1975. This truth does not properly percolate through to the consciousness of System One in the sovereign USA (for which another version of System Five represents logical closure) until years later—with, to take a focus of concern, the release of the film Missing. Thus it takes nine years to span three recursions; and the issue never formally reaches the fourth recursion of the United Nations, although Allende—foreseeing all this—had appealed to this supposedly second level of recursion (Chile being a member state) in 1972. (c) Here is a Yugoslav in the centre of Manchester in 1983. What the system was doing was condemning the Chilean people to decades, one at the least, of fascist tyranny, “The historical responsibility belongs to Allende, and his associates —who specifically include me—because we must have known what would happen, and took no military steps, either to emasculate the armed forces in Chile, or to arm the workers, or to involve the USSR in a collision with the United States. This analysis raises the level of recursion yet again, to that of planetary viability, and does its cybernetic talking in the language of realpolitik. As well it might. We have certainly come a long way from the good management of limestone crushing in Africa—which is the sort of system that was Cybersyn’s building block. Perhaps these brief and arbitrary notes will convince readers of the complexity of the situation, of the dangers inherent in the Ulrich analysis, of the value of the viable

systems language as a means of discussion, and of the teleological fallacies into which all observers blunder.

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4.

Ulrich refers to the “alleged goal of devolving power”. Was this a system goal or was it seen as a desirable consequence of the maximum autonomy principle you intended to use? It was both. Had it not been so, Allende would not have wanted me, and I would not have gone. Why ‘alleged’? 5.

What was the next highest level of recursion to the economic one you worked on? Was this to be made subject to cybernetic design, had the project continued? We were working at all levels, all the time, as my answer to question three implies. I think that the national weal is indivisible. 6.

How important are the possibilities of subversion of the rather general ‘artificial nervous systent’ such as is produced by a project of this kind? Can they be guarded against, perhaps by something analogous to an immunological system? The risk of subversion is great, since what amplifies regulatory finesse may do so for good or ill. In this, cybernetic approaches mirror advances in all other branches of science. But,

yes, ‘immunological’ systems can be incorporated, and they were. I have written about this insofar as Cybersyn was concerned in Brain. At the next level of recursion, and in the next historical epoch, you may have noticed that the Pinochet government did not use Cybersyn ... 7.

What are the limits to the role and responsibility of the cybernetic experts in a venture of this kind? As I have argued in Brain, I do not believe that there are any limits. As to the role, the science of effective organization will always have knowledge to share in the practice of management. As to the responsibility that sharing involves, it is inescapable. ‘Act as if by your will the maxim of your act were to be made a universal law of nature’ Thats right. Kant said it. References

Ulrich, W. ‘A Critique of Pure Cybernetic Reason: the Chilean Experience with Cybernetics, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, Vol. 8, 1981. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Wiley, Chichester, 1981. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. Beer, S. Decision and Control. Wiley, London, 1966. Beer, S. “The World, The Flesh and the Metal, Nature, Vol. 205, January 16, 1965. Braithwaite, R. B. Scientific Explanation. Cambridge University Press, 1955. Churchman, C. W. The Design of Inquiring Systems. Basic Books, New York, 1971. Kant, I. (Various editions.)

House of Representatives, USA, United States and Chile During the Allende years, 1970-73. Hearings, US Government Printing Office, Washington, 1975.

chapter 1 1

I;le

Preposterous

Inference

For a Start

DURING 1983, RUNNING up to 1984, Archbishop Emanuel Milingo of Zambia was forced to resign. The charges against him were the practice of exorcism and of faith-healing. Oh. But just a moment: were these not just the practices in which the Founder of the Archbishop's religion was especially adept? He went around casting out devils, and curing by faith—that we surely know. I cannot tell you where the Archbishop went wrong, because reputable newspapers did not tell me: nor did they evince surprise. Presumably nobody was expected to be astounded by the news, and presumably no-one but me was indeed astounded—at least I did not hear him say so. George Orwell’s exposé of 1984 society, and particularly of practices with information manipulation at Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, demonstrated both how (Newspeak) and on what basis (Doublethink) people came to accept such slogans as ‘War is Peace, ‘Freedom is Slavery;, ‘Ignorance is Strength’ (is all this not quite ridiculous?), ‘Exorcism is Anathema’ and ‘Faith-healing is unChristian’ But I apologize: the last two are for the real 1984; they did not appear in 1984. We shall later take a closer look at exactly how it happens. For a start, it is clear that the attenuation of detail underlies the process. We are not given any details about this ecclesiastical case, but it is ecclesiastical (and those fellows know what they are doing); therefore

the lost details do not matter; therefore the essence of the story has been edited for us—it is

First published in So This Is 1984. Edited by D. Parkhill and P. Enslow, Elsevier, Holland,

1984.

Reprinted with kind permission.

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The Preposterous Inference

revealed as truth. No-one probes around in the truth to look for contradictions: come on,

there are other things with which we may be busy. The paring away of detail from multifaceted issues will soon pervert their fundamental nature: it represents a loss of variety. Shall we take another example, from Britain in the run up to 1984, when (June, 1983) there was a general election. Well, anyone might say, we expect that issues will be oversimplified at the hustings. Yes; but this is not my point. It is because the mass media, abetted by the politicians, always make over-simplifications that Britain relies on government by representation rather than by plebiscite. For the rep-

resentative is free to study issues; s/he may and does vote in parliament against the known bias of the constituency. It does not take a great deal of delving into this theory, however, to perceive that it can operate only if the representatives nominated carry with them a high variety capacity for response in the first place. The candidates may well do so; but in the election taken for my example those candidates were driven to distraction by the attenuation of their personal variety by the selection committees. (So often in systems-thinking one needs to penetrate no more than one layer

of subterranean subtlety to lay bare a most unpleasant or a thoroughly farcical truth.) Thus in this election: ‘are you a monetarist?’ required the answer yes, if you were of the party of the Prime Minister. ‘Are you a hanger?’ (that is, someone in favour of the restoration of capital punishment) could settle the selection issue, regardless of party, on its own. These gross attenuations of variety, grim denials of the inherent complexity of issues, are at the root of the problems that we face in 1984. That great philosopher and cybernetician, Heinz von Foerster, said: “The more profound the problems that you ignore, the greater your chance of fame and success’ It is true, and we shall go on to look at the mechanisms whereby it happens to be true. Meanwhile, a consequence needs to be noted. The stress occasioned by the attentuation of variety, the paring down of necessary detail, means that debate—and more tense varieties of social stress than that—will predictably propose ever more extreme

solutions. Dialogue, the civilized version of fighting in the streets, comes not to count when it discusses a surrogate world of inadequate variety for the human spirit to bear. It was this threat to the human spirit, [ believe, that Orwell laid most bare. We can come to understand Big Brother later, as the embodiment of spiritual impoverishment. But, just

for a start, let us at least provisionally accept that 1984, in both its senses, is with us now. The oversimplification of issues means that, as C. H. Spurgeon said, ‘a lie may travel round the world while truth is putting on her boots. Outstandingly, the proposition that nothing is going wrong, that Orwell is upstaged by intervening wisdom, is, as Archbishop Milingo understands, a preposterous inference. Newspeak as a Language With just this introduction we may turn to the machinery involved. Newspeak, wrote Or-

well, was to make modes of thought that did not conform to political doctrine impossible.

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A divergent thought should be literally unthinkable. To this end, the Newspeak objective was ‘to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum’ So here is a basic technique for the attenuation of variety, of which I have just been speaking. In vocabulary A, therefore, parts of speech became almost interchangeable, irregularities were suppressed, and prefixes and suffixes took the place of both grammar and empha-

sis. We are surely watching this happen in the USA. ‘Hopefully’ used to be an adverb, and to mean that some action was being performed with hope. Now it means ‘I hope that, and

subtly evades responsibility as to who is actually doing the hoping. ‘Momentarily’ used to mean ‘lasting for a moment; as in ‘I shall be with you momentarily’ Now it means ‘within a short while) as in ‘we shall take off momentarily’ a phrase

that I always hear as ‘we are going to crash’ The word ‘protest’ and other cognate words, have been turned into transitive verbs, as in ‘we protest the new law) instead of ‘protest against’; and since ‘we protest our rights’ means to affirm them, the road to doublespeak is wide open. The same applies to strike action, where (also in the USA) a discarded pre-

position usually fails to appear, as in ‘management is being struck by the union. One hopes not: but with this induced ambiguity to underwrite personal assault, anything may happen.

Quondam Secretary of State Alexander Haigh became famous for several A vocabulary words, most notably ‘epistemologicallywise. He then advanced to doublespeak with his famous ‘T'll have to caveat my response’ And although he won the 1981 Doublespeak Award from the US National Council of Teachers of English for his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, this statement about the nuns killed in El Salvador involved Orwell’s duckspeak as well: “This could have been at a very low level of both competence and motivation in the context of the issue itself’ Duckspeak, meaning quacking, set out ‘to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all’ Unfortunately, not only ex-Secretary Haigh

among world leaders qualifies as (to use vocabulary A) a doubleplusgoodduckspeaker. The B vocabulary was designed for political purposes, while the C vocabulary ‘consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. Orwell foresaw that scientists would evolve words that would not be common to all scientific lists, so that the integral notion of ‘Science’ itself was lost, and there was ‘no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind’ In the real 1984, thanks indeed to these unfolded prognostications, the wise counsels of science in affairs of state have not been able to emerge. Instead, and on every side, we find technocracies fundamentally unwise, fundamentally priest-ridden with the technique-crazed elect, and fundamentally undemocratic—their pretensions to freedom being doublespoken. Thus Orwell did not altogether foresee that the political B vocabulary would become sodden with scientific gravy from vocabulary C.

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For example, the environmental threat of acid rain, which Prime Minister Trudeau described as the United States most important export to Canada, becomes ‘poorly buffered precipitation, which makes it sound harmless (especially in French). The euphemism for the meltdown of a nuclear reactor uses all three vocabularies A, B and C in just three words: it is a ‘superprompt critical disassembly’ Matters become even deliberately lethal

with some of the more notorious terminology. Only the sort of folk who can accept the doublethink underlying the name ‘Peacemaker’ for the genocidal MX missile could have come up with the Vietnam instruction for a death mission: ‘Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, or with the civil equivalent whereby targets for assassination are clients of the ‘Health Adjustment Agency’ It is possible to keep lists of all such Newspeak terminology, to make jokes, and to trivialize what is happening. Orwell clearly meant to be sinister when he reduced the

name of Winston Smith’s Department in the Ministry of Truth from ‘Records Department’ to ‘Recdep, and of the Fiction Department’ to ‘Ficdep, because he uses the example of ‘Comintern’ from real life to show that people do not then dwell on its full title of ‘Communist International. None the less, Washington calls the Secretary of Defense ‘SecDef’—and admits to a ‘DepSecDef’ too. Great fun, for sure; and the British ‘Mintech’ of yesteryear did not sound so exactly Orwellian as ‘Ministry of Technology’ might have sounded in its place. When congressional Newspeak calls vacation: ‘district work period;, or when the President’s ‘Task Force on Food Assistance’ is so named because “Hunger” sounds so down’ everyone but the disenfranchised and the starving can afford to laugh. And then, of course, the critical faculty gets lost in the tide of amusement; and familiarity with so much rubbish inures the citizen to what is going on. This is outstandingly the case in international warfare, which itself is downgraded by Newspeak; but before turning to war I give an instance of doublethink composed in doublespeak terms which took away my breath when I saw and heard it on US television. It was on 8 March 1983 when President Reagan made a speech’ that has since been much quoted, because he called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’ and said: ‘they are the focus of evil in the modern world. But these were not the sentences that caught my breath. That passage reads: ‘There is sin and evil in the modern world, and we are enjoined by scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might I read many comments on the ‘evil empire’ part, and heard many public and private judgments on the correctness and the wisdom of those remarks. But nowhere at all did I see or hear a single question as to the validity of the high au-

thority invoked. Are we already brainwashed to believe that Jesus said we must ‘oppose evil with all our might} just because this is the basis of US foreign policy? I read to you from St Matthew:

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“Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you that ye resist not evil.’?

—my italics, as they say. This is not to bandy quotations with the President, for the whole teaching of Jesus is consonant with these particular words of his. Nor is it a question of whether the pacifism enjoined by Jesus ‘would work. What matters is that pacifism, and not mighty resistance, was enjoined; and no-one should have said otherwise, least of all to a meeting of evangelicals. Over-riding all of that, however, is the terrifying fact that no-one noticed the flagrant use of Newspeak (or if s/he did, it must have received scant attention). Doublethink Itself

According to the American Declaration of Independence, it is a self-evident truth ‘that all men are created equal’ Orwell wrote of the remark: ‘this expressed a palpable untruth, i.e., that all men are of equal size, weight or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal’

So, I should suggest, has another secondary meaning been purged whereby men are equal in the sight of God. This meaning would not have come to Orwell's mind; but it may well have been in the minds of the Founding Fathers, who considered that men ‘are

endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights’ On the very day that I write, the Mexico News,? carries the syndicated Ann Landers column in which ‘Doubter in D.C’ questions that ‘all men are created equal, and asks whether Ann Landers believes it. Here is the whole of her reply: ‘Dear D.C.: No, I do not. Individuals born physically or mentally handicapped start out with an added burden. Also, the genetic material we inherit can place definite limitations on our physical and mental health’

So: both the political and the spiritual connotations of the word equal have been purged. There is not even a hint that there are social inequalities which are not the result of genetics, and which could be corrected: half of Brazilian families for example earn less than is necessary to feed themselves, and, according to the

FAO,* Third World countries in general

suffered a drop of 50 per cent in per capita income in 1982. As to equality in the sight of God, there is not even a hint that people have any intrinsic spiritual value at all. Well: please

remember

that this is the Age

of Communications.

So I hope

that

no-one will respond to this devastating indictment to say that this is ‘only’ the mass media speaking, and not the Supreme Court. It would be embarrassing to have to weigh the readership world-wide of judgments handed down from the Bench, or indeed from the Curia, against the internationally syndicated authority of Ann Landers. After all, the sentence ending the previous answer (dealing with homosexuality) to that quoted ends with

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thanks to the enquirer for giving me another opportunity to educate my readers’ Yes indeed. It is this massive contraction of variety in the connotation of terms that makes doublethink possible without people realizing that they are virtually insane. Said Orwell: ‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’

Outstandingly today, we find the contradiction between ‘it is wicked to kill people’ and ‘it is perfectly all right to kill people’ as a quite generally held doublethink statement. The explanation that this is because we are right and the other side is wrong is suppressed, assimilated into Newspeak, and therefore never made explicit. Then obviously it will not be questioned. Certainly this doublethink underlies the general strategy of the escalation of armaments, in that each side proposes exactly that aggression, and poses precisely that threat, of which it holds the other culpable. On a more intimate tactical scale, it is evident that ‘our’ freedom fighters and ‘their’ rebel guerillas are indistinguishable except in the ‘our-their’ dimension. These unfortunates are mere tokens in the international game, and have only to be labelled to count for points. The doublethink is implicit all the while, and nobody will care if it becomes explicit too. Witness the caption to a photograph in the Soviet weekly New Times: ‘Nicaraguan border guards constantly on combat preparedness against US-backed counter-revolutionaries’ and the Army newspaper Red Star on the following day: ‘US armed Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries who have returned to their native land with the sole aim of over-throwing its lawful government’ It was the same photograph, of course. But we can find doublethink everywhere in our culture, regardless of international skullduggery. Again it depends upon the Newspeak variety reduction in the connotation of terms. Those who oppose abortion are called ‘pro-life] just as if anyone were simply ‘antilife’ without further qualification. Those who think that parents should be free to decide

about abortion are called ‘pro-choice] just as if anyone disfavours personal responsibility without further qualification. Thus all the varietal interaction that makes this issue so critical, and especially critical for the foetus who is the embodiment of that variety, is lost to Newspeak over-simplification. So most people doublethink that they are both pro-life and

pro-choice (because how could one be anything else?), and embroider any actual situation so as to avoid any moral stand at all. The casualty of doublethink is truth. As soon as having-it-both-ways is actually built into the language, then what is the truth will be determined by the speaker’s own convenience. Nothing remains outside the doublethink to gainsay it. Everybody laughs about President Reagan’s happy little phrase that termed taxation ‘revenue enhancement’; they do not always remember that he first denied that the particular new impost proposed was in fact a tax. But it was. More seriously, what is anyone to make of Vice-President George

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Bush’s remark to President Marcos of the Philippines (1981): ‘We love your adherence to democratic principles and to democratic processes’? People have come not only to accept but to expect lies from their own governments. The British government lied in its teeth about the invasion of Suez in 1956, and about the Falklands in 1982; the United States lied about Chile and Cambodia; and so on. Before

long, people are actively engaged, as was Winston Smith in 1984, in rewriting history. As one who was intimately involved in the Chilean debacle of 1973, and close enough to President Allende to love him, I can say only that I am shattered by the lies recently emanating from US writers, all shiny and new for 1984. Certainly ‘the truth’ about even these sample incidents is not known to the average person. And no-one really cares. Before the spurious Hitler diaries were exposed as such, Newsweek magazine wrote that whether they were genuine or not ‘almost doesn’t matter in the end’ Is that a fact. Technology Intervenes

We have seen that the tools of Newspeak and Doublethink were correctly adumbrated by Orwell; they were designed to diminish response by cutting down alternatives, and making

those that remained either ambiguous or internally contradictory. Thus thoughts unacceptable to authority were to be actually unthinkable. Behind all this apparatus lay the sanction of the ubiquitously intrusive Big Brother, which is but a name for the isolating power of a

reduced ecology of thought, sensation and environment. We know that sensory deprivation induces hallucinations; and social deprivation, according to 1984, reduces the individual to a minority of one. His induced paranoia leads to the conviction that he is probably insane. I emphasize that it is the environment in which we allow our bodies, minds and hearts to be placed that makes all this possible. If powers, such as Big Brother, are using surveillance, arrest and torture to reinforce personal disintegration, so much the worse. But the evidence is that powers can achieve as much by manipulation, suggestion and intimidation if only the individual can be persuaded to operate in a reduced environment. Franz Kafka’s

The Trial,® antedating Orwell’s 1984 by a quarter of a century, made this appallingly clear. Kafka’s genius made his story credible with a minimum investment in technology; Orwell’s 1984 used more; in the 1984 of today’s calendar we are enguifed by it. In the first place, technology has inundated our society with reading matter and technocratic publishers have then been enabled (by computer-driven photo-composition, by word-processing, by computer graphics, and so forth) to make the selections which deprive people of genuine choice, which restrict insight, which stereotype response. To look at examples: the Reader’s Digest Bible claims to eliminate repetition, ‘tautology, reduced relevance and dispensible rhetoric’ As a London paper remarked: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was too long’ In Japan, the reading public is being overtaken by comics—on a scale that even North Americans with their penchant for comic strips will find amazing. The reduction of variety and the withdrawal from reality sound alarms as

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they squeeze out and pour away the spiritual juice of this miraculous world. The Japanese comics are huge tomes; they sell 1.2 billion copies a year, thereby accounting for more than 27 per cent of the total publication of books and magazines. More than a hundred erotic comics exist, their contents devoted to the depiction of extremes of violence and sex. Of course, these comics are intended for adults. But anyone who has felt some concern to observe the rapt involvement of a child in a comic can believe that adult Japanese are tending to increasingly autistic activities. One nation ought not however to be isolated for insult. It would ill become an Englishman to ignore the vast circulation of the popular newspapers in Britain, which seem to be aimed at half-witted children but are lapped up by almost the whole adult population.

If we increase our perspective to include broadcasting, the argument becomes overwhelming. United States citizens average six-and-a-half hours a day watching television, and its quality (in terms of lowered variety) is truly abysmal. Consider the tragic oversimplifications of the two-minute news-on-the-hour on radio, and the hugely slanted news reports on TV. The bias is bad enough; but the limiting range of insight and response as settled by soap operas and puerile games is a desolation of the human spirit. One game, for example, gives expensive prizes for guessing correctly what is the average response to a set of fatuous questions. It sets one family against another, and the men involved stand by while a sleazy compére with a flower in his button-hole paws their women-folk. The values of conspicuous consumption (whereby the game institutionalizes keeping-up-with-theJones), and of conformity (whereby the game rewards the average response and not either excellence or personal expression) are promulgated with great force. And to whom? Some US citizens will be shocked to hear that the quoted programme may be seen, along with several similar shows, every single day on Mexican TV. But optical imperialism is not the immediate point. The fact is that editors attenuate the variety of the public’s understanding, and that they in turn—anonymous in the public mind as they usually are—are manipulated by the owners of the mass media themselves. The concept of ‘editorial freedom’ is a hoax to anyone who has seen the reality (as I have in both the written word and in broadcasting): nothing particularly nasty occurs—it is simply that non-conformist editors and producers do not for long have access to their chosen medium. Do not be misled by spectacular cases where this would not seem to appertain; thanks to Newspeak and Doublethink, an occasional knock at later-vindicated authority can be as purging as blood-letting was assumed to be. There is no space here to do more than indicate the machinery of intellectual, emotional and spiritual oppression used by contemporary powers—which of course are exemplified by the state and by capitalism (whether private or public), harnessing respectively

the deep-rooted human motivations toward security and of greed. The contribution of institutional education to these nefarious ends cannot be over-stated, especially as enhanced communications technology is brought to bear.

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The intention to educere (in Latin fo lead out) is persistently betrayed, not only by the tendency not to lead out but to stuff in, but more ominously by the determination to decide what counts—again, then, to select. To take examples from the two ends of the educational spectrum: my youngest children are unable to learn both music and statistics; and if that sounds a sad fact of timetabling {(which it is not, since there is plenty of time for everything, properly taught), then change the subjects to woodwork and needlework and guess how the class is egged on to divide itself between the two. Secondly, consider the fate of a doctoral student who (wishing to conform to the classic ambition and also duty to make an addition to knowledge) has the effrontery to propose a thesis covering ground that is not already within the purlieu of the Supervisor. And how have computers aided this absurd and counterproductive search for standards of excellence that merely reduplicate an excellence so far unattained? They enable the doctoral student to churn out a whole volume of relevant references, which exist on properly key-worded machine-readable tape, but unfortunately not in the protein memories of brain-readable cortex. On International Outrage

Of all the prognoses in 1984, however, none surely is more devastatingly accurate than that dealing with wars and rumours of wars among the nations. Our world is one on constant alert against intraplanetary assaults of a grotesque and genocidal order. If this were not the case (I speak in Doublespeak) we could not in fact survive. The economies of all nations are pegged to armaments, and their policies are determined on the industrial-military axis. Democracy and freedom are empty words in this context: we are dealing only with relative degrees of oppression expressed in terms of greater or less violence. There is no foretelling this future any more. It is now 1984; and this is exactly what we have got. The prediction has come to pass. Orwell was writing in 1948, that is to say, in 84 reversed. This was close to 1945 and Hiroshima; there was no thermonuclear reaction yet. But Orwell foresaw the intention ‘to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand’; he expected that bombs would be continuously produced, and that the superpowers would have them ‘stored up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later. He incorrectly thought that there would be atomic wars in between 1948 and 1984, which would stop when they proved to be counter-productive. We did not endure those wars, but they were simulated: this is what the spurious arguments concerning so-called ‘deterrence’ are all about. Otherwise Orwell was right, and we have

reached the edge of the Orwellian cliff of mutual destruction. Against this background, Orwell’s book paints the sinister picture whereby people are never sure with whom they are at war, nor why; and they have the feeling that allies and enemies change places without their understanding the reasons. Well, again he predicted correctly. When he wrote, the Soviet Union had just emerged as one of the mighty and vic-

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torious allies of the West: the general public had no inkling then of the Stalinist terrors yet to be exposed. Since then, has the public comprehended on whose side they were, and why, in Africa (the public did not even know the names), in South America (the public is now

receiving the full blast of freshly rewritten history), in the Middle East (the public has had to work its way through several doublethought Peace Prizes there)? And now, as the year 1984 actually dawns, does the public understand the situation in Central America? Someone once hauntingly remarked that “Wagner is not as bad as he sounds’ By the same token, perhaps Western policy in Central America is not as bad as it works. At any rate, an August 1983 poll in the United States (taken, then, just after the July action of in-

timidation against Nicaragua and in support of El Salvador), showed that less than half the people knew that the government was supporting El Salvador, and only 30 per cent knew that the government was opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

What the public knew of the human rights records, or of the legitimacy of the government in either place, was not recorded. It takes a Newspeak spokesperson to explain why the Nicaraguans should have bullets and mercenary troops assaulting them, while the dire regimes in Chile and Argentina receive goodwill and boundless credit. The biggest farce of all in recent times, generated by Britain in the Falkland Islands, is a perfect example (isolated for ease of examination) of the way these incidents occur and are manipulated to nefarious ends. Britain is spending some three million dollars per islander on the war, its aftermath, and the ‘Fortress Falklands’ policy. No-one knows why, except that a principle is at stake: a jingoistic principle, for which half a dozen contradictory principles of good conduct have been abandoned. The role of the media in the whole affair, exercising the blatant reduction of informational variety and the imposition on the public of those editorial models that the government was willing to sanction, is worth a score of doctoral theses in itself. At any rate, today, when the Family Welfare Association in London says it is ‘inundated with appeals’ from people who cannot afford fuel, clothes or food for their children, Britain is ferrying drinking water to the South Atlantic at $1.20 for each couple of gallons. The very strange and Orwellian thing is this: people sustain it all. They keep quiet, and re-elect their oppressors. Britain has four million unemployed. In the United States, 15 per cent of the population of the world’s richest country has fallen below the poverty line. The government, with its vast deficit budget for armaments (which ex-Secretary Robert McNamara recently called ‘mere junk’ and ‘quite useless’), responds by cutting food stamp spending by two billion dollars. In four years, the Administration will have cut that budget by 13 per cent. But it is not at all uncommon to find the systemic response of social systems counteravailing. People in the rich world do ask, and their international representatives have voted, for aid to poor countries to be made effective. But the net flow of wealth continues in the wrong direction. I mentioned the appalling

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results for living standards under the earlier heading of Doublethink. In fact, the issue cannot be effectively addressed without striking at the very roots of the problem, where lurks the international banking system. To speak of usury is the mildest of epithets: the rates of interest charged alone justify this term. Moreover, the rates are so calculated that the ‘aided’ nation has only a remote chance of keeping up the interest payments, and cannot amortize the debt itself. Hence, as soon as some unexpected event happens, not even the interest can be paid. So the banks loan more money for this purpose, a practice that would not for an instant be countenanced in a private bank account. They are then so kind as to ‘reschedule’ the original debt, which involves extra expenditure of course. To cap it all, the costs of undertaking all these manoeuvres, which devolve to the gigantic profit of the banks, is charged to the unfortunate victim of the usury himself. Neither is this cost within any conceivably fair and reasonable range. It provides a usurers’ bean-feast for all the professionals involved—not only bankers, but lawyers, and accountants, and economists, too. I have personally seen a case where these charges were equal to the rescheduling adjustment loan itself. To qualify these outrageous

rackets as ‘aid’ is doublespeak, and to tolerate them must involve doublethink on the part of all the legislators concerned in supporting such institutions as the IMF . Legislation is always being contemplated to stem this gangsterism, and some may yet reach the statute book. But doublethinkers are past masters in interpreting statutes in doublespeak; and the banking system will continue to win, because it commands the power— and compels the adoption of its own economic (and therefore also political) ideology. I am sure that some will find my choice of words too strong, because they will regard the ‘aided’ nations as glad collaborators in their own downfall. Thanks to human greed they may well be glad, but they are not necessarily altogether willing. The rich nations exercise all kinds of leverage on the poor, which must provide their raw materials and also their markets; moreover must they submit to a process of ‘development’ as defined by their exploiters (and not as the evolution of their own historic culture which they will be trained to despise might suggest), whether they like it or not. Perhaps the most outstanding Orwellian characteristic of this sorry machination is that the literature of the ‘sovereign debt problem’ as it is called, completely ignores the nutrient medium of disaster in which the people of the poor nations flounder. This is the rich

mixture of notorious corruption at all levels in society and the conspicuous incompetence of civil servants. A truly vast proportion of the money that finally becomes available never reaches the underprivileged people at all. Of course, the international financiers will claim

that these are internal matters, which they note with sorrow but cannot help. This is an evasion in the eyes of anyone who understands the nature of systems. The policies foisted on governments by the IMF inevitably reinforce the antisocial element in society. For example (as Professor Lord Bauer has pointed out), the policy of import substitution must operate in small domestic markets; there will have to be protective tariffs; plant capacity will be

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too large if state-of-the-art technology is used; hence we arrive at an inefficient monopoly. Then manufacturing licences, import licences, foreign exchange permits, and so on, ‘often amount to cash gifts, part of which may have to be handed back to politicians and civil servants as bribes’ says Professor Bauer. Quite so. And the financing authorities cannot evade responsibility for creating pressures whose outcomes are perfectly foreseeable. Big Brother Himself

I have left until last the ogre who presides over Oceania 1984 because, as I argued earlier, he is ‘but a name for the isolating power of a reduced ecology of thought, sensation and environment. The early readership of 1984 seized on the instrumentality of computers

and intrusive electronic monitors that constituted Big Brother because he presented a peculiar horror: the personification of a completely depersonalized tyranny. Most of the world suffers under such a tyranny at this moment, with the fear the arbitrariness, the abuse of law, the incarceration and torture, and the disappearances and deaths that go with it. The instrumentality of this tyranny is surely secondary to its existence in the first place; but Orwell (writing with amazing foresight in exactly the year when the ENIAC

com-

puter first ran at the University of Pennsylvania) was pointing to the abuse of information and communication, however it comes to pass. We may well smile at the pneumatic tubes which passed information round in small canisters at the Ministry of Truth; but it is more to the point to realize what the information content was, and how it matches that circulat-

ing today. The most obvious abuses of contemporary informational networks concerns access to personal information, and legislation all over the world lags far behind the threats inherent in current practice in manipulating computer data banks. The determination of credit

is the outstanding example in a market-driven society, while the determination of guilt in societies ridden by secret police sounds more as Orwell wrote. However, the claim that the market-driven society is a ‘free’ society is Newspeak for a process that culminates in world domination by thermonuclear weapons, and we should

be ready to wipe off the cosmetics that obscure its ugly but everyday-familiar face. The function of the ordinary police in our ‘free’ societies becomes increasingly suspect as the power of information is increasingly realized in the law-and-order system. The

development of electronic mail, a sweetness-and-light boon to commerce, involves the storage of these communications in computers. Then surveillance happens. The electronic mail will be tapped, as the Telex has been tapped, as the telephone is tapped. And so on. The namby-pamby legislation that is addressed to these abuses in no wise comprehends the immense power that communications wields, for information is control (see the experience in Chile recounted in Chapters 16-19 of Brain of the Firm).* Our legislators do not understand it. The most ominous example casually to hand, and the more ominous because its expres-

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sion is so bland, comes from the New York News reporting on the Internal Revenue Service thus: ‘IRS is running tests to see whether computerized information about the life styles of American families can be used to identify individuals who fail to pay income tax. The information includes the neighbourhoods in which the families live, how long they have lived there, and the model and the year of the cars they own’

Whether Big Brother is best thought of as a principle of oppression, or as an embodiment of this evil in silicon chips and ever higher-level, user-friendly, interrogation languages, may be beside the point. He is certainly flexing his muscles and twitching his limbs; and the myriad clones of Dr Frankenstein look innocuous in their standardized offices throughout the bureaucracies of the world. The tendency to which I most want to draw attention is that the potential for harm lies less in those governmental computer systems to which legislation is directed (though this is terrifying in itself), as in privately held systems to which legislation is so far irrelevant. The latest developments span both the public and private sectors, and will therefore be

almost impossible to outlaw by legal processes. The prime example, which ought to come as a shock, is that the IRS intentions just discussed are based on information bought from private marketing firms ...

As long ago as 1970 I gave precise details of how private computers could take over society, to a House Committee of Congress in the United States.” Some leading congressmen were impressed, and became intent on action at the time. But now it is 1984. Advertising firms direct their research to ensuring that their advertisements are more appealing than the routine television fodder in which they are interspersed, so that people will go to prepare their snacks while the programme is telecast, and make sure that they do not miss the ads. It is in such profound advances as this that our civilization may rejoice, if it so wishes ... ... and if it knows what is happening. The belief that everything was in fact all right was the major feature of everyday 1984 in Orwell’s book. It is a major feature of contemporary belief in calendar 1984. We stand on the brink of disaster, whether it shall be Armageddon, or environmental collapse, or revolution, who can say. Read The Fate of the Earth,®

The Eighth Night of Creation,” The Turning Point," the reading of which should be a condition of exercising the 1984 electoral franchise, and decide. But please do not pretend that Orwell got it wrong. The comforting and self-deluding idea that we have reached 1984 without reaching 1984 is Doublethink extrapolated from the vision that Orwell himself was forced by his political and humanitarian insight to entertain. He expected (I repeat) that we should manage to convince ourselves, as did the society of Winston Smith, that nothing is amiss. This is the preposterous inference.

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There are messages of hope that can be given at moments when the endorphins are flowing in the brain to the exclusion of reasoned and therefore ominous prognosis. In Plat-

form for Change T uttered most of mine, prior to 1975.” But now it is 1984. Perhaps hope can be regenerated. Orwell’s lesson is that it would be unwise to foster hope until the truth has first been faced. Part of it is that power lies with the information system that people do not control or even comprehend. And as St Paul said:

‘Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners’!! Acknowledgements Living a simple and non-institutional life, I am not at all equipped for desk research. The

examples that I quote have come my way, since I was asked to write this piece, by happenstance. Unless otherwise referenced, they have been casually collected from experiences in my own work, or from reading (always and thoroughly) the Guardian Weekly, from Britain, or the Washington Post itself (it is abstracted in the Guardian), on occasion. This statement is not an apology: it serves to emphasize the appalling dangers into which we are being led, if so much awfulness turns up without being asked to illustrate my themes. The copy of 1984 from which I have worked was published by Signet Classics, and contains an Afterword by Erich Fromm to which I am indebted."? I also acknowledge the article by Elisabeth Bumiller which was published in both the newspapers to which I have referred. Next I should note the Harry Johnson Memorial Lecture given in London in 1983 by Dr Goh Keng Swee, in which Dr Goh quotes with approbation Professor Lord Bauer’s remarks which I have also quoted, therefore adding the very practical authority of the quondam Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore to the over-riding importance of corruption in Third World affairs. References

1. President Reagan’s speech on 8 March, 1983, to the National Association of Evangelicals, at Orlando, Florida (from the official transcript) .

2. Matthew, 5: 38, 39. 3. The syndicated Ann Landers column, Mexico News, Sunday, 25 September, 1983. 4, World Nutrition: Situation and Outlook of Basic Foodstuffs, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, October, 1983. 5. Kafka, E The Trial. Penguin Books, London, 1983. 6. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm, 2nd ed. Wiley, Chichester, 1981. 7. Beer, S. ‘Managing Modern Complexity, in Platform for Change, Wiley, London, 1975.

8. Schell, . The Fate of the Earth. Picador, London, 1982. 9. Deshusses, ]. The Eighth Night of Creation. Dial Press, New York, 1982.

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10. Capra, E The Turning Point. Bantam Books, New York, 1982. 11. 1 Corinthians, 15, 33.

12. Orwell, G. 1984. Signet Classics, New York, 1961.

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chapter 12

,I;le Viable System Model: its Provenance, Development, Methodology and Pathology

IT TOOK the author thirty years to develop the Viable System Model, which sets out to explain how systems are viable—that is, capable of independent existence. He wanted to elucidate the laws of viability in order to facilitate the management task, and did so in a stream of papers and three (of his ten) books. Much misunderstanding about the VSM and its use seems to exist; especially its methodological foundations have been largely forgotten, while its major results have hardly been noted. This paper reflects on the history,

nature and present status of the VSM, without seeking once again to expound the model in detail or to demonstrate its validity. It does, however, provide a synopsis, present the methodology and confront some highly contentious issues about both the managerial and scientific paradigms. Provenance

At the end of my military service, I spent a year from the autumn of 1947 to that of 1948 as an army psychologist running an experimental unit of 180 young soldiers (a moving population, twenty of them changing every fortnight). All these men were illiterate, and all had been graded by a psychiatrist as psychopathological personalities. They could not

First published in Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 35, No. 1 1984. Reprinted with kind permission from the OR Society

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write a letter home, nor read a newspaper, and such sums as 4 + 3 = ? often had them fooled. But they could debate with great energy and verbal facility if not felicity; they could

play darts—21, that’s 15 and a double 3 to go’; and they could state the winnings on a horse race involving place betting and accumulators with alacrity and accuracy, and apparently without working it out. They had their own conception of discipline, involving terrorism

and violence in the barrack room, which met every desideratum of a military unit in its ends, though not in its means. I had a background in philosophy first and psychology second; the latter school had emphasized the role of the brain in mentation and of quantitative approaches in methodology. The analytical models that I now developed, the hypotheses set up and tested, were thus essentially neurophysiological in structure and statistical in operation. The behavjoural models derived mainly from experience: I had a background in the Gurkha Rifles too. What made these people, unusual as they were, tick—and be motivated and be adap-

tive and be happy too (for most of them were)? And how did the description of individuals carry over into the description of the whole unit, for it seemed so to do: everyone of many visitors to this strange place found it quite extraordinary as an organic whole. It simply was not just a unit housing a population of unusual soldiers. The first regimental sergeant

major asked for a posting. This was the empirical start of the subsequent hypothesis that there might be invariances in the behaviour of individuals, whether they be ‘normal’ or not, and that these invariances might inform also the peer group of individuals, and even the total societary unit to which they belong. In the early 1950s this theme constantly emerged in my operational research work in the steel industry: I used then to refer to the structure of ‘organic systems. So the viable systems model (VSM) dates back thirty years. I pursued it through neurocybernetics and social science, through the invention and study of cybernetic machines, through the mathematics of sets and stochastic processes, and at all times through the OR fieldwork in industry and government. The quest became to know how systems are viable; that is, how they are ‘capable of independent existence’—as the dictionary has it. By the time my first book on management cybernetics was published, I had also mapped a settheoretic model of the brain on to a company producing steel rods, and published the basis of the whole approach.'?

The set-theoretic model proved difficult for people to understand, and eventually a streamlined version of the model appeared called Brain of the Firm,® using neurophysiological terminology instead of mathematics. Some commentators were offended by this and called the model analogical—despite my denials and explanations (see later) that this was so. Hence, in a still later book a new version of the VSM was developed from first principles, called The Heart of Enterprise,* in the belief that the necessary and sufficient conditions of viability had by now been established. The invariances that I had finally unearthed were stated; and the central principle of

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recursion (that every viable system contains and is contained in a viable system) stood duty as the explanation of all the observational evidence that had begun to accumulate from the military experience onward. Moreover, I developed a topological version of the original set theoretic algebra that it seemed no one would study properly. The drawings were now rigorous mathematics in themselves in that they offered explicit homomorphic mappings of any one VSM recursion on to the next—as may be seen in the simplified version at Figure 4. (In 1972 the drawings had given an indication of the recursion theorem and relied on the independently published mathematics.) Throughout its development, and to this day, the VSM has been in a process of continuous testing and verification. Meanwhile, however, the whole approach had its most

significant and large-scale application during 1971-73 in Allende’s Chile. As an outcome of this experience, five new chapters were added to Brain, and the overhauled and extended text was republished.’ Thus (the new) Brain and Heart stand, as complementary volumes, for the theory of the viable system and its ‘laws’ in management cybernetics, and a trilogy has been completed with Diagnosing the System.® Commentators often imply that I am obsessed with this model. Well, the quest to establish how systems are viable and its thirty year pursuit have certainly been demanding. Even so, the three books mentioned are only three out of ten. The philosophy of science that I was simultaneously developing is expounded in Decision and Control,” and it is from this that I draw the following methodology and apply it to the VSM. The Methodology of Topological Maps

When we notice similarities between two different systems, for instance between the regulatory system of an individual and a group, or between a brain and a firm, the comparison often begins in a literary manner. There is the simile: ‘management communications are like the nervous system, in that ... There is the more direct metaphor: ‘the real muscle of the plant is the cogging mill. Such comparisons may help to convey insights, although everyone knows better than to take them too seriously. But as perception of the two systems deepens, and perhaps observations are taken, we may come to hold conceptual models of

both systems that become exciting and helpful. This stage is easily recognized, because we find that some circumstance that we understand in one system throws light on a parallel circumstance in another. It is now worth ‘drawing analogies’; on the other hand, everyone knows that ‘analogies may be carried too far’ The process continues, and begins to have the marks of a scientific method, when we try to develop rigorous formulations of the two conceptual models. (Figure 1 refers.) These will each be a homomorphic mapping, insofar as many elements in the system that is conceptually modelled will map on to one element in a rigorous model. All falling apples, and not only the particular falling apple observed by Newton, obey the law of gravitation: we select those mappings that exhibit mathematical invariance. And if we travel to Pisa, we

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INSIGHT

Scientific situation

Rigorous formulation

Figure 1. Beer's account of scientific modelling

find Galileo (who died in the year that Newton was born) supposedly dropping not-apples from the leaning tower, but determining a constant none the less. Now what happens if we map the two rigorous formulations of orchard systems and Pisa systems on to each other? If we find invariances between the two systems, then these are isomorphic mappings, one-to-one in the elements selected as typifying systemic behaviour in some selected but important way. The generalized system that comes out of this process, which applies to all systems of a particular class, is a scientific model—in the case just considered, a model of gravitation. The generalization of some behaviour invariably and invariantly exhibited by the system as interpreted through this systemic model we usually call a law. Nonetheless, we have made a selection; we have reduced systemic variety through our homomorphisms. But that is the very business of scientific discovery. In fact, every system can be mapped on to any other system under some transformation; thus

Ashby was wont to say that the Rock of Gibraltar makes a good model of the brain, if your interest is exclusively in spatio-temporal extensity. Considering these matters coolly, and handling them in a world which upholds a particular paradigm that does not compare rocks to brains, is not an easy matter. The precise

difficulty that most people have arises when a breach of taxonomy is offered as between social systems, individual people and artifacts. The amalgam is seen as essentially different from the unity, and the animate as essentially different from the inanimate. But these were

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among the major paradigmatic distinctions that were explicitly questioned by the founders of cybernetics in the 1940s. Certainly my own methodology, especially as it relates to the class of viable systems, makes its mappings quite happily across these boundaries. Witness the very title of the most formal statement of the method: The World, the Flesh and the Metal® An extract from this paper, giving a group-theoretic analysis of the modelling methodology, will be found in Appendix 1. Having said all this, there is no way of ‘proving’ a model: the by now classical criterion of ‘falsifiability’ remains instead. As experience of the VSM grew, as its format was made tidier, and as others became involved, more and more viable systems were mapped on to

the model: the invariances held. The methodology at this point may be described as the yo-yo technique. That is to say: we have constructed a VSM by mapping (let’s say) a brain on to a firm and now wish to test a second, third, and so on viable system against the scientific model. We run down the chain of similes, analogies and homomorphs with one of these fresh systems until the isomorph is reached, testing the insights and invariances as appropriate on the way; then we return up the chain with another fresh system; then down again, and so on—hence the yo-yo metaphor (rather than model, note). Other scientists around the world have confirmed the VSM in various modes and situations, most but not all of them managerial. A note about these activities appears at Appendix 3. On Mapping and Measuring Complexity

Although we may derive a model in the manner shown, and although we may develop confidence in it through many applications over a long period, practical activity requires

more than this. The management of any viable system poses the problem of managing complexity itself, since it is complexity (however generated) that threatens to overwhelm the syster’s regulators. This is very obvious in biological systems, wherein there are no self-proclaimed ‘managers’; but in social systems too complexity tends to overwhelm those managers whose activities are not seriously directed towards viability but to short-term goals such as profit. A precise measure of systemic complexity had been proposed as variety, meaning the number of distinguishable elements in a system, or by extension the num-

ber of distinguishable systemic states.” The problem of controlling this variety is daunting indeed, if all distinguishable states are equally likely. But they are not. We are used to suppose the variety in social systems is kept under control by a legisla-

tive mode of regulation that restrains variety proliferation. But, as Ashby learned from biological systems, something more subtle underlies any such technique. The notion of a ‘coenetic variable” explains the delimitation of the variety of environmental circumstances and of apparently regulatory responses at the same time.'"” Sommerhoff wrote (see Figure 2): Coenetic (pronounced ‘sennetic, from the Greek meaning ‘common’) variables

simultaneously delimit variety as shown, so that trajectories of the system converge on to a subsequent occurrence. Sommerhoff called this ‘directive correlation. The schematic

The Viable System Model

/

Coenetic

variable

139

Response

\

Subsequent occurrence

Environmental circumstances —

Time Figure 2.

Sommerhoff's account of ‘directive correlation’

diagram exemplifies what I later called ‘intrinsic control: in the very process of disturbing environmental circumstances, the coenetic variable evokes a response that converges on an adaptive outcome.

Ashby for his part had developed a schematic treatment based on Shannon’s notation (see Figure 3)."" D stands for disturbance, and is equated by Ashby with the coenetic variable. E is still the outcome set, which is exhausted by good and not-good subsets (in relation to viability). T is a table of the transformations which D will undergo to generate E, and is equated by Ashby with the environmental circumstances of Sommerhoff. But now

Ashby is taking note that R may, after all, directly influence T in its task of modifying E.

Figure 3. Ashby's account of ‘requisite variety’

He argues thus. If R’ state is always to have the same effect on T, whatever state D may adopt, then the variety of E will be the same as the variety of D. But if R may adopt two

states, then the variety at E can be halved. And so on. ‘If the variety in the outcomes is to be reduced to some assigned number, or assigned fraction of D’s variety, R’s variety must be increased to at least the appropriate minimum. Only variety in Rs moves can force down the variety in the outcomes. This is the famous Law of Requisite Variety.

Now it is clear that if D is a coenetic variable, so that R and T are directively correlated, then the variety of the outcomes E will be constrained. Since in both biological and social systems there may be coenetic variables that are unrecognized as such, this would account

for a more regulated pect. Even so, and as which threatens the E. This part must be gene-pattern, can be

system than the unrecognizing observer would have any right to exAshby says: ‘variety comes to the organism in two forms. There is that survival of the gene pattern—the direct transmission by T from D to blocked at all costs. And there is that which, while it may threaten the transformed (or re-coded) through the regulator R and used to block

the effect of the remainder (in T).

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The model of any viable system, VSM, was devised from the beginning (the early 1950s) in terms of sets of interlocking Ashbean homeostats. An industrial operation, for example, would be depicted as homeostatically balanced with its own management on one side, and with its market on the other. But both these loops would be subject to the Law of Requisite

Variety. Since the variety generated by the market would obviously be greater than the industrial operation could contain, then ‘this part must be blocked at all costs, as Ashby has said. This became in my first book:' ‘Often one hears the optimistic demand: “give me a simple control system; one that cannot go wrong”. The trouble with such “simple” controls is that they have insufficient variety to cope with variety in the environment. Thus, so far from not going wrong, they cannot go right. Only variety in the control system can deal successfully with variety in the system controlled’ This understanding came from down-to-earth experience as the production controller of a steelworks. By the same token, just as proliferating incoming variety must be blocked at all costs, so must outgoing managerial variety be enhanced—by transformation or recoding through the regulator R, as Ashby said. Looking at the variety-disbalanced homeostats of the VSM, I wrote: ‘Each part-system provides unlimited variety ... It is the function of intelligence to tap that variety, to organize it, to select ... What is needed, is the amplification of the primary selection’ It has always seemed to me that Ashby’s Law stands to management science as Newton’s Laws stand to physics; it is central to a coherent account of complexity control. ‘Only variety can destroy variety! People have found it tautologous; but all mathematics is either tautologous or wrong. People have found it truistic; in that case, why do managers constantly act as if it were false? Monetary controls do not have requisite variety to regulate the

economy. The Finance Act does not have requisite variety to regulate tax evasion. Police procedures do not have requisite variety to suppress crime. And so on. All these regulators could be redesigned according to cybernetic principles, as I have argued passim.'? For present purposes, however, I seek only to show how Ashby’s Law was derived, and

how it at once suggested to me that if variety were not requisite in a regulatory homeostat, then either the greater variety must be attenuated, or the lesser variety must be ampli-

fied, or both. This conclusion does not appear to be novel, as has been suggested, but to be sanctioned by Ashby’s own words quoted above. Certainly my own applications and extensions of homeostatic theory in management went beyond Ashby in treating the box called T, supposedly a ‘table, as a black box—that is to say that the box contains a table

that is not available to inspection (something that I had learned in military OR, for foes do not care to make their transformation rules manifest). But Ashby was the doyen of black boxes too. What was perhaps novel, for the record, was the recognition that in the VSM homeostats requisite variety applies in three distinct ways: to the blocks of variety homeostatically related, to the channels carrying information between them, and to the transducers relay-

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ing information across boundaries. Statements about these came to constitute my first three Principles of Organization® (see Appendix 2). Ashby saw his Law as bearing particularly on the second question, that of channel capacity, probably because he had derived it from Shannon’s communication model—which deals with the transmission of information. In-

deed he comments that Shannon’s Tenth Theorem is a special case of the law of Requisite Variety. Next, and unsurprisingly, he had no difficulty in accepting the identification of transduction as a particular aspect of transmission, and one especially important in man-

agement work. But Ashby was not satisfied that requisite variety could be contemplated in terms of relative blocks of variety generators, as my First Principle proposed. Again, it is probable that only information transmission gave operational meaning to requisite variety in his eyes; but in arguing (as he sometimes did) that therefore he had done no more than generalize the Tenth Theorem, I think that he seriously under-rated his own discovery. Since Ashby was a psychiatrist, I put the counter-case thus. We have a set of mental illnesses, evidently of very high variety—since maybe no two people ever had exactly the same syndrome. There arises quite naturally, and this is an example of requisite variety

exerting itself in informational terms, a vast number of ‘names’ for these illnesses; that is, if we allow that descriptive qualifiers for such generic terms as ‘schizophrenia’ abound. Unfortunately, however, there is no more than a handful of treatments available: psychoanaly-

sis, convulsive therapy, tranquilization, deep narcosis, surgical intervention ... it is difficult to continue. It follows that all the amplification of channel and transduction variety in the naming is not to the purpose when it comes to managing the illness. Since the syndromes must be mapped homomorphically on to a low-variety therapeutic map, Ashby’s Law as-

serts itself regardless of the operational format that is followed. The point is important in any management process. For just as large numbers of strategies for regulating a firm or an economy can be invented to provide requisite variety, only to be proven useless because they cannot be conveyed through low-variety channels and transducers (and Ashby liked to point this out), so high-variety channels cannot enhance low-variety inputs—unless they contain the intrinsic generative power to be amplified because of the way they are organized inside the block. A map reference has this quality, for instance, and so does a personal file; the policy to ‘cut all stocks or costs by 10 per cent’

does not. Limitations

Analogies have limitations; but in a real sense a scientific model as defined should have few—because the transformations it covers are listed and are exactly specified. The problem with analogies is to delineate the contexts in which they are supposed to hold, and then to run the risk that elements will unexpectedly turn up in one system that have no analogues in the other. These dangers are not encountered with scientific models that are properly mapped.

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To take an obvious example: Newton’s theory of gravitation works very well inside the solar system, give or take the perihelion of Mercury. In a spatiotemporal system that is much larger, Newton must be adjusted by relativity theory. We have, in short, to nominate the context, to fix the boundaries. Now a viable system survives under considerable pertur-

bation because it can take avoiding action, because it can acclimatize, because it accommodates, because it is adaptive, and so on. But put a human in a box, suck out all the air, and s/ he dies. We know this, and do not make a lot of fuss about it, because it is an agreed aspect of the definition of viability that there should be a rather closely controlled environment. If we send an astronaut into space, therefore, we equip him with a space suit. We shall certainly not say that our whole conception of viability is faulty because s/he must wear one. On the contrary, one of the most useful products of the manned space programme was its exact specification of a life support system; this indeed fixes the physiological boundaries of viability, though (interestingly) not the psychological boundaries. Secondly, as to elements which may be recognized in one system and not in another, let us remember that the methodology deals with formal homomorphic mappings and nominates invariances. Anything not so mapped, and anything not determined as a constant,

will not be a topic of concern. If it becomes such a topic after the modelling has been done, then its mappings will have to be tested. Two limitations of the VSM are matters of importance, but they propose no serious

misgivings when examined in context and under invariance. The first is often brought up, sometimes in hysterical fashion, by those who notice that people may be the basic elements of a so-called viable system under the VSM rubric. People (they say) have free will. Yes, maybe; but people also have constraints laid upon their variety by upbringing, or by the roles that they agree to play in a social unit like a firm. It is true that, for example, the liver cannot resign and be replaced by one less gnarled, but what about it? What matters is the functioning of an element, under whatever constraints that the job entails: not the identity of the element itself. And this is just as well for freedom-lovers—let them by all means get out, if the system is oppressive towards them, and they can. It will make no difference to the viable system, unless the element has special properties that cannot be replaced. Well, this is simply a matter of nominating what elements in the mapping are to count as invariances.

I have known businesses fail because one man was lost, and he accounted for 85 per cent of sales. There is nothing surprising in that. So if the heart of an employee stops beating, that finishes him as a viable system. At the next level of recursion, whether that is considered to be his firm or his family or his church or anything else, his loss as an element of this next viable system may or may not be important to its viability. He may simply be replaced; or perhaps that system will die too. Obviously, all this will be of high significance to those concerned; but it has no methodological significance to the scientific model within which invariant mappings have been specified in advance.

The second limitation is of more interest, although it can be handled by similar argu-

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ments, because it seems to me to be a limitation of society itself rather than a limitation of the model. In either case, it has never been raised with me by anyone at all—at least, not in the terms that are used here. A major battle in biology concerning the possible inheritance of acquired characteristics in the individual, as conceived by Lamarck, seems to have been settled in recent years by microbiologists. There is no such inheritance, for genetic

information is always carried by nucleic acid to inform the protein molecule—and never the reverse. In society, however, that is in the social group, there clearly is an inheritance of acquired characteristics. Therefore a major difference emerges as between the VSM of the individual and the VSM of society to constitute, at least on first sight, a limitation of the model. However, as we saw earlier in discussing Ashby and requisite variety, there must always be a barrier (at T) to block the effects of proliferating variety (at D); otherwise results (at

E) will reflect the full input variety and are likely to be quixotic. It seems that in the case of the individual, the gene pool is protected by the encoding of the transformation table (at T). In the case of society, stability in subsequent generations must be ensured by the collaboration of the response with the transformation table (Ashby’s R-and-T interaction).

Experience shows that this always happens. There is always an element of tradition in the directive correlation of society—that is to say that the transformation table is acting as a block; and there is always an element of novelty coming through from recent outcomes (at E) by regulatory feedback (through R)—that is to say that the response function is acting as an amplifier. So the model can cope with these divergences. The question is whether society itself gets the (R, T) admixture right. Even if it does, it appears to be short of damping mechanisms to prevent uncontrollable oscillations—but that is another story, covered later in System Two of the VSM itself. The Viable System Model (VSM) According to the cybernetic model of any viable system, there are five necessary and suf-

ficient subsystems interactively involved in any organism or organization that is capable of maintaining its identity independently of other such organisms within a shared environment. This ‘set of rules’ will therefore apply to an organism such as a human being, or to an organization consisting of human beings such as the State. The comparison is made not by way of analogy, but, as has already been explained, because the rules were developed to account for viability in any survival-worthy system at all. In very brief, the first subsystem of any viable system consists of those elements that produce it (they are the system’s autopoietic generators, to use Maturana’s terminology). These elements are themselves viable systems. In the limit, the citizens constitute the System One of the State. I say ‘in the limit, because the citizens first produce communities and firms, cities and industries, and other viable agglomerations, which are themselves all elements to be included in the State. So a full account of the matter (see The Heart of

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Enterprise) will show how systems of increasing complexity are nested within each other

like so many Russian dolls or Chinese boxes to produce the whole. Mention was made at the outset (under ‘Provenance’) of the discovery of the theorem of recursion, and this is where it belongs. ‘In a recursive organizational structure, any viable system contains, and

is contained in, a viable system’ Out of a five-fold systemic set constituting a viable system, says the model, System One is always a viable system itself. The topology is clearly visible in Figure 4, where (in the first place) one complete viable system fills the page. Inspection will show the five interacting subsystems labelled ONE, TWO, and so on, in capital letters. Among these may be discerned two Systems ONE (there could be more), each of which contains a complete viable system displayed at a 45 degree angle. The whole-page viable system is shown as interacting (see above) in a precisely defined way with its environment through both its Systems ONE, and through its System FOUR, and not otherwise. Equally, the embedded viable systems are shown as interacting in ex-

actly the same way with local environments that are peculiar to each of them—although they are (inevitably) subsets of the whole-page environment. It is vital to understand that the topology of recursion demands an exact replica in each case. In the drawing, the only discrepancy is that the connection between System 4 in the second System ONE and its sub-environment has not been completed, as its twin in the first System is correctly completed, for obvious graphical reasons.

Brief annotations are made in the diagram to indicate the roles of the five subsystems. To enlarge on these within the compass of this paper is not possible without trivializing the elaborate functions of every box and every line, and the reader wishing to investigate the theory itself must be referred to the companion volumes Brain and Heart previously mentioned. Some conventions of the diagram as such can, however, be noted. Whenever a line appears that is delimited at each end by a dot (and that means almost everyone of them) a homeostatic relationship is intended. That is, each of those lines stands for a pair of arrows looking like the pair that connects Systems THREE and FOUR, or the pair con-

necting the two operational circles of the Systems ONE (where the squiggly line indicates a dependency which may be strong or weak depending on the purposes of the viable system concerned). It follows that the three Principles of Organization listed earlier must apply to each of hundreds of them. In practical enquiries it will not be necessary to investigate every such homeostat more than perfunctorily; with experience, the consultant’s attention

becomes drawn to those that are defective or unstable, and then detailed analysis is essential. It is largely from the insights thereby derived through the Principles and Axioms (of Appendix 2) that the power of the methodology becomes apparent. Two-directional arrows in the environmental areas also indicate homeostasis, and the same criteria apply. Finally, as to the iconic conventions, it should be noted how the subsystems of the embed-

ded recursions are related to the matching subsystems of the parent viable system. These relationships were discovered in the neurophysiological phase of my work, and first for-

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TOTAL

Thihis box 77 is One of next recursion

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Figure 4. The Viable System Model (VSM) showing recursive embedments

mulated set-theoretically (as may be understood from the earlier sections of this writing). The diagram displays them with an elegance in which I take pleasure but with a consequent simplicity that often misleads. At any rate, anyone who has taken a really good look at Figure 4 and its infrastructure is surely in a position to understand why purely hierarchical models of management are useful for little more than apportioning blame, and why the familiar debates about centraliza-

tion and decentralization (based as they usually are on ideology) are powerless to resolve

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vital questions of autonomy. As I have argued elsewhere and at length through the laws of the viable system, the optimal degree of autonomy (given that we have the measure called variety to deploy) is in principle a computable function of the system’s purpose in relation to its environment. If that conclusion appears outrageously to delimit freedom for those within any organization, so it does. The answer is not to pretend that the laws of viability do not exist or do not function, but not to join enterprises that have inimical purposes. In some countries, of course, people have no choice—which is why politics is more about the capacity to choose than anything else. If the eye is now accustomed to the embedment of a second recursion within the wholepage viable system of Figure 4, then it will be understood that the methodology proposes to treat the examination of any organization, however large, in pairs of recursions. In each pair the second level consists essentially of black boxes. Thanks to the Recursive System Theorem, however, each of these black boxes can next be elevated to ‘whole-page’ treatment—whereupon a new recursion of viable system embedments will be disclosed. The methodology resembles the movement of a magnifying glass and an illuminating spotlight down the chain of embedments so the accustomed eye of which I was speaking may now review Figure 4 with its pair of recursions so far described, and discover the outsize square box at the top right-hand side which is the management element of System ONE of the next higher recursion; it may also discover the rudiments

of the level of recursion

next

below the embedment originally discussed. Thus Figure 4 can be regarded as indicating

four levels of recursion out of an arbitrary series (which descends to cells and molecules and ascends to the planet and its universe), of which the middle two recursions receive complete iconic representation. This is not a claim that an account of a viable system’s recursive embedment is ever unique, despite its progression to infinity in both directions, because each viable system figures in an infinite number of chains. Rather is it a manifestation of Hegel's Axiom of Internal Relations: the relations by which terms (or in this case, recursions) are related are an integral part of the terms (or recursions) they relate. Incidentally, if we put the Self as a viable system in the centre of the sphere generated by the infinite set of its recursive chains, then we have a model of selthood that both expands to embrace the universe and also shrinks to a vanishing grain of sand—a model familiar in oriental philosophy.

This thought leads us conveniently to the recognition that the boundaries of any viable system are arbitrary, as is the number ‘five’ of its subsystems. The ‘fiveness’ was due to my efforts to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions of viability, and five was their number; it might have been otherwise, if I had used a different rubric. What could not have been otherwise is the fact of the logical closure of the viable system by ‘System Five, whatever its number: only this determines an identity. Nominating the components of System Five in any application is a profoundly difficult job because the closure identifies selfawareness in the viable system. ‘What business are we in?’ asks the Manager. But who are

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‘we’? Shareholders, employees, managers, directors, customers, taxmen, environmentalists ... all these have different answers to offer. ‘What business is the self in?’—see above. I have repeatedly told the story (for instance, see Brain) of how President Salvador Allende in the Chile of 1971 told me that System Five, which I had been thinking of as himself, was in fact the people. Then perhaps the president embodies the people; or perhaps the presidency is overtaken by a gang of thugs, as was to happen in 1973. (For some recent

discussions of this example, see Beer.'*) At any rate, it is clear that the determination of closure, and thus the recognition of identity and self-awareness, in any viable system is an outstanding example of the observer’s imputations of purpose to that system that are probably idiosyncratic. There are ideological traps: for example, the biggest confusion in which I was ever professionally involved concerned the purpose of a health system, to which there are as many answers as interests involved. There are teleological fallacies: think once again of selthood ... These difficulties are not indications that the VSM ‘doesn’t work’: the model does not create the problems that it makes explicit. Rather does it enable managers and their consul-

tants alike to elaborate policies and to develop organizational structures in the clear understanding of the recursions in which they are supposed to operate, and to design regulatory

systems within those recursions that do not pretend (as do so many of those we employ) to disobey the fundamental canons of cybernetics. The Pathology of the Viable System

Many people dislike to see the word ‘pathology’ written in such a context as this, because the theory of the viable system may be dealing with societary units, or even with such entirely inanimate systems as computer-based communication networks. Some of these people would be placated if the word in the title were set in inverted commas. The fact is, however, that either we have a theory of viability, meaning ‘capable of independent existence, or we have not. The possibility of such a theory is anti-paradigmatic within the subculture, true; but that paradigm is overdue for change: see Capra.'* The risk of making mistakes under any methodology of analogy is great, true; but we have been at pains to show that an heuristic such as the yo-yo technique is in search of a mathematical invariance that transcends analogy. A viable system made of metal could be melted down, true, and one made of people could be disbanded, true; but the foetus of eight months is the

classic example of a viable system, and many conditions of existence are attached to its capability for independence too. In short, the opponents of ‘biological analogies’ are often

the first to misapply them when they try to make their own case, thanks to an uncritical belief in the properties of protein-based machines which in fact work only within rather narrow physiological limits. According to these cybernetic enquiries, practised, as has been said, in many countries

over many years, viable systems of all kinds are subject to breakdown. Such breakdowns

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may be diagnosed, simply in the fact that some inadequacy in the system can be traced to malfunction in one of the five subsystems, where in turn one of the cybernetic features that compose the rules (cf. Appendix 2) will be found not to be functioning. To continue unabashed with medical-sounding talk that is in fact wholly appropriate to the cybernetics of viability: the etiology of the disorder may be traced, a prognosis may be prepared, and antidotes (even surgery) may be prescribed. Subjectively speaking, confidence in the VSM as applied to societary systems derives not so much from the fact that the pathology of the viable system can be investigated with ease, as from the speed with which the diagnosis can be made. The knowledgeable user may expect to ‘home in’ on (say) half-a-dozen causes of concern within a day or so of exposure to the real-life system, and it is a frequent experience to find such danger points when they have been deliberately concealed out of embarrassment or self-serving: they tend to signal themselves. Interestingly enough, such incidents tend to enhance the confidence not only of the VSM-er, but of the client management itself. A question often asked is this: if we are dealing with an organization that exists, that is actually there to be investigated, then surely it is by definition a viable system—and nothing remains to be said? This is where the pathological vocabulary becomes so useful. The

fact that the societary system is there does not guarantee that it will always be there: its days may well be numbered, and many have been the ‘buggy-whip companies to prove it. The fact that it is there does not prove that it is effectively there, witness universities, nor efficiently there, witness hospitals. Monoliths and monopolistic systems in particular (such as these two) often operate at the margins of viability, creaking and choking like the valetudinarian organizations that they are. Moreover, many such are operating at such an

enormous cost that they are becoming less and less viable in front of everyone’s eyes. One of the main reasons for this, particularly in the social services, is that people looking for cheaper ways of doing things attempt to repeal the Law of Requisite Variety itself. Policing, for example, whether by the police themselves in terms of crime, or by environmental agencies in terms of pollution, or by health scanners of pre-symptoms, often fails to recognize that only variety can absorb variety. A great many examples are reproduced elsewhere.!? Next, there are four diagnostic points made in a learned journal.'® All four have been expounded in my own writings, but not I think with such pith; therefore I take leave to reproduce them here as direct quotations. 1. Is management presiding over a ‘viable system’? If any of Beer’s five necessary functions are removed from, say, a subsidiary, then its abilities to operate successfully may well be killed. This could perhaps involve taking away a subsidiary’s freedom to invest its financial surplus or removing its sales function, for example.

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Does subsystem Five truly represent the entire system within the context of larger, more comprehensive and more powerful systems? If this function, or subsystem, is unable to find a way to represent the essential qualities of the whole system to the larger meta-system, then the system’s survival is in question.

2.

3. Do managers often fail to understand the need for subsystems Two and Four? Business people have little difficulty recognizing the need for subsystems One, Three and Five. If Two is missing, activity in One can turn deadly and self-defeating as units fight for resources and against entropy; if Four is missing, Three and Five can collapse into each

other, leaving the critical Five subsystem a mere functionary. 4.

Do the Three, Four and Five subsystems need to form a Three-Four-Five subsystem to encourage ‘synergy’ and interactivity?

Without a constant interaction and exchange of information between these three func-

tions, Three is vulnerable to ‘narrow tunnel’ syndrome and Four is exposed to the perils of ‘flights of imagination. Not only are these points extremely cogent and penetrating, they well illustrate how the structure and the language of the model make possible the expression of elaborate and/ or subtle comments in very few words. Let me add a few remarks on each of the indicated pathologies, drawn from experience. (i)

Subsidiaries that are ‘taken over’ are always painstakingly assured that their individu-

ality will be preserved, their autonomy respected, and so on. After all, the argument (very plausibly) goes, your individuality, your reputation, your goodwill, your people

are all assets for which we have paid hard cash—naturally we shall nurture them. This is poppycock—although it is often believed by the takeover bidder himself. A study of the embedment of the new System One in terms of the Law of Cohesion (see Appendix 2) will reveal how the interconnectivity between the subsystems of the two re-

cursions inevitably takes up variety from the new subsidiary. In the VSM, ‘autonomy’ is a precisely defined term, and it does not mean zero interference. Incidentally, if the taking-over company makes the mistake of leaving intact all the new subsidiary’s variety (or of handing over too much variety to an old subsidiary), this company is very

(ii)

likely to be the subject of a reverse takeover bid. This is an issue of identity. The work here reported has repeatedly encountered situations in which all manner of adjustments have been necessary to make the viable system secure in a changing environment. That is, adaptation is evoked (in those situ-

ations) as a key characteristic of viability, and much change ensues. Will the system still be able to recognize itself? More particularly, will others be able to recognize it? Philosophers used to ask whether ‘this apple’ were still ‘this apple’ after a large bite had

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been taken out of it ... The Heart of Enterprise includes a highly sophisticated Test of Identity with this point in mind. (iii) The collapse of Five into Three (in the effective absence of Four) is made particularly

likely insofar as Five people have usually been promoted from Three. They are uncomfortable as demi-gods with no clear duties beyond being wise and pleasant. Thus, when something goes wrong in System Three (or even One), they are likely to dive

down into the problem that they understand so well—never to emerge again. They may be seen around, but only as their previous Three incarnation—erratic and abrasive as ever. But the collapsed metasystem is a special pathology. It is a decerebrate cat, pinned out, intravenously fed. It responds reactively, from the autonomic command centres at Three, and is incapable of planning and foresight (Four) and will and judgment (Five). But it will react to prods by a reflex kicking-back. With no apologies to those complaining about biological metaphors, who knows an organization that is a decerebrate cat?

(iv) The attention drawn to this problem is well merited. It is the intellectual springboard for recognizing the value of an operations room, or (a better term) management centre. In such an ‘environment of decision, as I have called it, the Three-Four-Five meta-

system has a chance to find its own cohesion, and to operate in a nutrient medium. Obviously it would be possible to comment on every feature of the viable system from the standpoint of its pathology. But that would be boring; and perhaps the above discussion

of some already profound points sufficiently gives the flavour of the pathologist’s commentary.

But it may be worth ending with a suggestion which this discussion seems naturally to propose—in medical practice, there is such a thing as post-mortem examination. Much knowledge of viable systemns has been gained by the study of those that are viable no more. I have done some work of this kind, but only as the result of being fortuitously present at the deathbed. The suggestion would be that a small team of organizational pathologists should be formed, ready to rush to the scene of any incipient organizational demise. Of course, these people would not be loitering about, waiting for something to happen. They would be organized more like a lifeboat crew. The first imperative would be to resuscitate the moribund victim. Failing that, however, a post mortem would be performed before rigor mortis had set in, and before those nearest to the deceased had closed in like the vultures they often emulate. I have certainly noticed many times how history is rewritten in these circumstances with breathtaking speed. It happens with people too.

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Appendix 1: The Theory of the Model in Operational Research

(Extract from The World, the Flesh and the Metal, The Stephenson Lecture, 1964. Published in Nature, Vol. 205, 1965. Reprinted with kind permission of Macmillan Publishers) If we call the set M of elements a the totality of world events which we propose to examine, then the systemic configuration of events which we know about is a sub-set A of set M. If we call the set N of elements b the totality of systemic science, then the configuration of system which we ourselves understand is a sub-set B of set N. The process of creating a systemic model may then be described as a mapping fof A into B. By this I mean that for every element a € A C M there exists a corresponding element b € B C N, and thus b = f(a). The image of the sub-set A, namely, f (A) C N, is the model. If we are able to exhaust the elements of A and to nominate their images in B, we have every hope of creating an isomorphic model. This means that there exists a complete inverse image of B under mapping fin M, so that f(A) C N = f!(B) C M. This is the state of affairs, expressed group-theoretically, which the operational research man is trying to reach. Now an isomorphism is important because it preserves the structure of the original group in the mapping. Typically, if it is possible to perform additions inside set M, those additions will remain valid when the same operations are performed on the images of their elements in set N. It is this persistence of relationship when the mapping is done which makes a model operate as a model. So, if @, and a, when added together equal a_in set M, it can be shown that f(a,) plus f (a,) must equal f (a ) in set N. Now comes the interesting

comment. The conditions can be set up in which the same answer f(a

) in set N is obtained

from the mapping f whether the transformation is effected before or after the mapping occurs. That is to say, we may either add the original elements in M and transform the answer under f, or we may transform the original elements first and then add them. The result will be the same. Formally: f (a, + a,) = f(a,) + f (a,). When one group is mapped into another group and this condition is generally fulfilled, the mapping is called homomorphic. These elementary definitions are included so that the argument can be made quite clear. Because it is possible to coalesce elements of M before transforming them, without losing the capability of a mapping to preserve structural relationships as discussed, it is clear that a homomorphism may have fewer elements than its inverse image. In the case of the model, then, the mapping of A into B turns out to be a mapping on to a sub-group of

B. Isomorphism turns out to be a special case of homomorphism, in that f (A) C B turns out to mean f (A) = B: the one-one correspondence of elements with which we begin is maintained. But for any other sub-group of B other than B itself, homomorphism involves a many-one correspondence, and the inverse mapping f!(B) will not exhaust the elements of A. It is suggested, then, that the models of big systems that we entertain are homomorphisms of those systemic characteristics of the big system that we can identify. The homo-

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morphic group f (A) C BC N is the particular model we use. It is in practice extremely difficult to include in this model all the features recognized in A, and typically we do make the many-one reductions mentioned. Thus, for example, we undertake production costings as if the behaviour of all three shifts in a works were indistinguishable, and as if two similar products were identical, and as if materials were consistently uniform—although we actually know that none of these simplifications is true. Then the effectiveness of the model as predictive depends on the choice of an effective transformation by which to map. If we add up the outputs of three shifts and then transform the answer by some mapping into the model, it is no use supposing that any calculation, comparison or prediction undertaken in the model can be worked backwards through an inverse mapping which will distinguish between the shifts. On the other hand, it is necessary to handle only a third of the elements we know about inside the model. A definite choice has been made to jettison modellingpower in favour of economy in the recording and handling of data. This is acceptable, so long as the choice is deliberate rather than accidental, and so long as it is remembered as a limitation in the model. Secondly, however, there is a further loss of modelling power in the facts that A is a subset of M and B is a sub-set of N. Now an interdisciplinary team of scientists can minimize the losses of modelling power due to B < N. Because such a team can examine all the major

sub-sets of N before deciding to use one specific group B; it may even experiment with other groups too. But the losses due to A < M are more serious, and may be disastrous to the exercise. For if what we recognize in a big system is not what is really important about its systemic character, the ability to predict A may not help much in M. In other words, A is

itself a homomorphic mapping M, and one which by definition we cannot properly specify. Remember that M-A was acknowledged to be systemically unrecognized from the start. We may know that our knowledge of a big system does not exhaust it, without having the faintest idea of the character of the knowledge that is missing. It is hoped that this attempt somewhat rigorously to formulate what goes on in modelbuilding will prove helpful in pin-pointing what we can and cannot do. The ordinary operational research exercise works, and we can see why. It is possible to advance what we

understand about a stockholding system, for example, to the point where A approaches M asymptotically. It is possible to examine most B of N, which is to say most scientific approaches to the scientific totality of understanding about such systems. If we know what the stockholding system has to do, if (as the operational research man would say) we can define its criteria of success or objective function, then we can define a homomorphic mapping fof A = M on to B = N which preserves the stochastic relationships in which we are interested. More especially, we can do this in a way that the inverse image of B under mapping fvields a set f' (B) of elements in the real system M which are useful. The difficulties about doing successful operational research in various circumstances can now be made quite specific. First, the modelling will not on the average work well if

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N-B s large: this happens if the operational research team is not corporately versatile. Secondly, the modelling will not work at all unless fis well defined: this entails good empirical research into what the system really has to do. Thirdly, the predictions of the model will be of no actual use if a modelled outcome ¢ (b,----b ) turns out to have a pragmatically undiscriminating inverse f'(o) in A. This also entails good empirical research into the forms of many-one reduction. Fourthly, the modelled predictions though useful will not exert what could be called control unless the M > A homomorphism captures the systemic character

of the big system in extenso. This again appears to be a matter for good empirical research, although there is more to say. Contrary to increasingly current belief, then, operational research is empirical science above all. The mathematical models dreamed up in back rooms are useless unless they can meet the four kinds of difficulty enumerated, and this cannot be done remotely from the world. Appendix 2: Glossary of Rules for the Viable System

(Extract from The Heart of Enterprise, to which book the page numbers refer.) Aphorisms The first regulatory aphorism

It is not necessary to enter the black box to understand the nature of the function it performs. (p. 40) The second regulatory aphorism

It is not necessary to enter the black box to calculate the variety that it potentially may generate. (p. 47) Principles

The first principle of organization Managerial, operational and environmental varieties, diffusing through an institutional

system, tend to equate; they should be designed to do so with minimum damage to people and to cost. (p. 97) The second principle of organization The four directional channels carrying information between the management unit, the operation, and the environment must each have a higher capacity to transmit a given amount of information relevant to variety selection in a given time than the originating

subsystem has to generate it in that time. (p. 99) The third principle of organization Wherever the information carried on a channel capable of distinguishing a given variety crosses a boundary, it undergoes transduction; the variety of the transducer must be at least equivalent to the variety of the channel. (p. 101)

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The fourth principle of organization The operation of the first three principles must be cyclically maintained through time without hiatus or lags. (p. 258)

Theorem Recursive system theorem In a recursive organizational structure, any viable system contains, and is contained in, a viable system. (p.118) Axioms

The first axiom of management The sum of horizontal variety disposed by n operational elements equals the sum of vertical variety disposed on the six vertical components of corporate cohesion. (p. 217) The second axiom of management The variety disposed by System Three resulting from the operation of the First Axiom equals the variety disposed by System Four. (p. 298)

The third axiom of management The variety disposed by System Five equals the residual variety generated by the operation of the Second Axiom. (p. 298) Law

The law of cohesion for multiple recursions of the viable system The System One variety accessible to System Three of Recursion x equals the variety disposed by the sum of the metasystems of Recursion y for every recursive pair. (p.355) Appendix 3: Some applications of the Viable Systemn Model

Applications of the VSM by its author during the evolution and verification of the model have been so many and so widespread as to defy a proper listing. For the record, however, the range of amenable organizations ought to be indicated, leaving case histories to the published papers and books. Small industrial businesses in both production and retailing,

such as an engineering concern and a bakery, come to mind; large industrial organizations such as the steel industry, textile manufacturers, shipbuilders, the makers of consumer durables, paper manufacturers are also represented. Then there are the businesses that deal in information: publishing in general, insurance, banking. Transportation has figured: railways, ports and harbours, shipping lines. Education, and health (in several countries), the operation of cities, belong to studies of services. Finally comes government at all levels— from the city, to the province, to the state and the nation-state itself—and the international agencies: the VSM has been applied to several.

In this opening paragraph we have been talking of one man’s work. Obviously, then, these were not all major undertakings, nor is ‘success’ claimed for massive change. On the other hand, none of these applications was an academic exercise. In every case we are

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talking about remunerated consultancy, and that is not a light matter. The activities did not necessarily last for very long either, since speedy diagnosis is a major contribution of the whole approach. On the other hand, some of them have lasted for years. Undoubtedly the major use of this work to date was in Chile from 1971-73: five chapters ending the second edition of Brain describe it in full.® As this is written, however, a new undertaking on a similar scale is beginning in another country. On the question of what constitutes ‘success’ in consulting; reference may be made to part Four, Note One of Heart.* Of other people’s work in the field of managerial cybernetics that has made application of the VSM, first mention must go to Raul Espejo. He has given his own account of the 1971-73 Chilean application that we undertook together.'® Since then, his teaching and

research at Aston University in England has been centred on the VSM, and outcomes have been published in several articles and papers.'”" His diagnoses have been profound, and he is adding to the corpus of theory. The number of senior degrees, including doctorates, that have employed the VSM under Espejo’s direction is already in double figures. Professor David Mitchell’s teaching has generated a similar number of postgraduate theses using the VSM at Concordia University in Quebec, as has that of Professor Manuel Marifia at the Central University of Venezuela. Several more have emerged from Brunel University, under the direction of Professor Frank George. In the United States, Professors Richard Ericson and Stuart Umpleby (at George Washington University), Professor Barry Clemson (at the Universities of Maryland and of Maine), and Professor William Reckmeyer (at San Jose State University) have all

made extensive use of this teaching, and others from Australia to India have reported similarly. At Manchester University in the Business School, Geoffrey Lockett (directing the doctoral programme) has sponsored whole-week ‘experiences’ of the VSM; and Professor Roger Collcutt has invented a unique pedagogic framework whereby MBS students undertake projects to apply the VSM to functional management, subsequently to merge the insights gained into a general management picture. Another novel development has been made by Ronald H. Anderton in the Systems Department of Lancaster University: practical applications of the VSM in the form of project work have for some years been an important part of his undergraduate teaching. A veritable kaleidoscope of applications of the VSM has been presented by Dr Paul Rubinyi in Canada. From penological systems to health services in the public sector, from

oil companies to wheat cooperatives in the private sector, and from provincial planning to air transportation in federal government: every kind of organization has been mapped, in virtually continuous work over the last thirteen years. Other separate applications in Canada include the work of Walter Baker, Raoul Elias and David Griggs on the Fisheries and Marine Service, which took unique advantage of managerial involvement, and that of Raoul Elias for Gaz Metropolitain. David Beatty has

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used the model for educational planning in Ontario, and I believe that it has been in independent action on the West Coast as well.”® In Latin America, Professor Jorge Chapiro is a leading exponent of the VSM who consults over the whole spectrum of industrial and governmental management in several countries.

In Australia, applications in an insurance company have been made by J. Donald de Raadt; in Switzerland Dr Peter Gomez has used the VSM in a publishing company, making an interesting experiment in melding this methodology with the ‘root definitions’ of Professor Peter Checkland.” In wider fields still we find a useful VSM application in Finland by Dr §S. Korolainen to ekistics;’' and David Noor has published ‘A viable system model of scientific rationality’ as a working paper from the University of Western Ontario.

On the strictly biological side, but not from the original neurophysiological perspective, Dr Richard Foss in England has made many mappings: for example, on the Eukaryote cell, the annual plant and the honeybee colony.”? He has found the VSM to hold in such diverse systems; and he is extending the work to the slime mould Dictyoltelium, to lichens and to vertebrates, considering both the evolution and ontogeny of each system. It does appear that the VSM has sufficient generality to justify its origin as an attempt to discover how systems are viable; and that it also generates considerable power to describe and predict, diagnose and prescribe. No systematic archive of applications has been kept: perhaps it would be helpful to start one. These notes are compiled from such recollections and records as happen to be to hand. References

. Ashby, W. R. Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London, 1956.

O

s

. . . . .

N1

Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer, Beer,

S. S. S. S. S.

1972.

0

. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. Allen Lane, Harmondsworth,

O

W

1. Beer, S. Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press, London, 1959. 2. Beer, S. “Towards the Cybernetic Factory, in Principles of Self Organization, ed. von Foerster and Zopf, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1960. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. Brain of the Firm. 2nd edn. Wiley, Chichester, 1981. Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Wiley, Chichester, 1985. Decision and Control. Wiley, London, 1966. “The World, the Flesh and the Metal, Nature, Vol. 205, 1965.

10. Sommerhoff, G. Analytical Biology. Oxford University Press, 1950. 11. Shannon, C. and Weaver, W. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, 1949.

12. Beer, S. Platform for Change. Wiley, London, 1975. 13. Beer, S. ‘A reply to Ulrich’s “Critique of pure cybernetic reason: the Chilean experiment with cybernetics”, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, Vol. 10, 1983.

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14. Capra, E. The Turning Point. Bantam Books, New York, 1982.

15. Brain and Strategy, Vol. 4, No. 9, 1978. 16. Espejo, R. ‘Cybernetic Praxis in Government: the Management of Industry in Chile 1970-1973’, Journal of Cybernetics, Vol. 11, 1980. 17. Espejo, R. ‘Multi-organizational Strategies; an Analytical Framework and Case] in Applied General Systems Research: Recent Developments and Trends (ed. Klir, G.), New York: Plenum Press, 1978. 18. Espejo, R. ‘Information and Management: the Cybernetics of a Small Company’, in The Information Systems Environment (ed. Lucas, H. et al), North Holland, 1980.

19. Baker, W,, Elias, R. and Griggs, D. ‘Managerial Involvement in the Design of Adaptive Systems,, in Management Handbook for Public Administration

(ed. Sutherland, J. W),

Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1978. 20. Gomez, P. ‘Systems Methodology in Action, Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, Vol. 9, 1982.

21. Korolainen, S. On the Conceptual and Logical Foundations of the General Theory of Human Organizations. Helsinki School of Economics, 1980. 22. Foss, R. “The Organization of a Fortress Factory), in The Viable System Model: Interpretations and Applications of Stafford Beer’s VSM, ed. Espejo, and Harnden, Wiley,

Photo: David Whittaker

Chichester, 1989.

chapter 1 3

ecursions of Power

MR CHAIRMAN and the new President, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

First of all I apologize for disfiguring this beautiful place with my flag (see below for schematic diagram, which was exhibited in large-scale and colour). It is a flag under which I wish to sail a voyage this morning and I invite you to come with me on what could be quite an exciting adventure. You will have to be brave and adopt such a system’s notion as I lay before you. Now I have surveyed the proceedings of the conference which, of course, these days are published in advance (it is something which always amazes me, because the proceedings are supposedly a reflection of what happened at the conference). First of all, I would like to congratulate the authors of so many diverse and deep analytical statements in many dimensions. I think it is very proper for us to investigate so many diverse things in such detail, and I don’t want anything I shall go on to contradict that. After all, the history of scientific developments in our civilization and our era displays a reductionist methodology. It has been extremely profitable to us. It has taken us to the moon, and it has given us huge advance in many, many fields: in medicine, as well as in atomic physics, and so forth. But the price of all this scientific advance, I suggest to you, is that we have finished up with an essentially reductionist model of the universe. And the universe for us, for our civilization, now turns out to be just what science can explain.

Keynote Address to the 7th European Meeting of Cybernetics and Systems Research, University of Vienna, April 1984. First published in Power, Autonomy, Utopia. Edited by Robert Trappl, Plenum Press, New York 1986.

Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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framework for condition.

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I think myself, and I suggest to you, that it is actually quite evident that there is another reality than this one. It is a reality in which we shall not be frightened to face evidence of other things than those things that science can explain. For instance, if you wanted an example, the evidence for what is usually called telepathy is overwhelming; but we don't know how to put it into the reductionist model of the universe that we have. And therefore scientists are frightened to talk about it. I very well remember what happened when the first people walked on the moon and personally conducted an unofficial experiment in telepathy because nobody dared to say out loud that this is what was going to happen. I have spoken with those concerned. There are many other examples ranging from genetics

to alternative medicine. Then what I am saying is that we must expect to find, before we are much older, a new synthesis in science. It is being pioneered, as usual, by physics. The account of particle physics and the mathematics that goes with it that is now emerging, not to mention the macrocosmic firmament of black holes and their mathematics too, is going to give us a very different kind of universe. It is one that is not going to be quite so reductionist as the old one. Now what about the systems sciences? In all of this development we have, I think, a very, very special input to make; because after all our spirit is contrary to reductionism. I have said quite enough polite things about the successes of reductionism, let me now say that if we are going to have a new model then it will be a systems-directed model. It will

use the prefix ‘syn’ a lot: synthesis and synergy outstandingly. Well now, if you will accept, at least for the purposes of our voyage of discovery under this flag, that what I have said so far is at least possible (although it may be a little disturbing), then I next want to suggest

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Recursions of Power

to you that the clue to this new scientific search that is systems-directed lies in the nature of invariance. When I said that I could congratulate the authors of the papers in the proceedings for good scientific work of an analytical kind, I was also conscious (and this is a criticism of

everybody, not anybody) that progress in science has always rested in the detection of invariants in systems. This is how we come, epistemologically speaking, to discuss what we loosely call the ‘Laws of Nature’ We detect in gravity, we detect in entropy, and so forth, invariant properties of systems. Now I am submitting to you that we have been very slow because of our reductionist methodology to determine invariance in the systemic world we are looking at. And I think that our great new thrust has got to be in this direction. Now what do I mean by invariance? Just to explore it a little: you know very well what [ mean if I say: this expression, e = mc?, will hold throughout a particular domain of the universe. Boyle’s Law holds, Ohm’s Law holds, the laws of gravitation hold, entropy laws hold. These are the invariants. But let me put to you the question that Ross Ashby, one of our very beloved grandfathers of cybernetics, used to pose to illuminate this question about invariance: To what extent is the Rock of Gibraltar a model of the brain? Do you remember him

saying that? He says it in one of his books. Now that is a very strange question to most people. But of course the answer is: If you are interested in physical or temporal extensity, and that is your interest and your only interest, then the Rock of Gibraltar will make a very good model of the brain. That is what I mean by invariance. We are not just concerned with the great laws of nature, but with the things to which we can point and say: “This always happens.

Now, I believe a whole mass of discoveries awaits us in this area. The other thing I want to say by way of introduction is that I have noticed that in our treatment of social systems—not only cyberneticians but other kinds of social scientists—we have very largely neglected the very difficult issue of power. People write about political systems from a scientific point of view as if they had never heard of guns and torture and oppression; just as they write about economic systems as if they had never heard of economic repression and exploitation and alienation. Why is this? Is it that we feel we are clouding science with politics if we address these matters? Well, I can't help it, because if these notions of power are endemic to social systems, as clearly they are, then we have to discuss them. And it is just like stumbling over the evidence in physics for paranormal activity, as I mentioned earlier for telepathy, for strange goings-on within the model ‘science’; because in social systems we equally have these facts of power staring us in the face and we don't discuss them. What is power? Elias Canetti, the great social scientist, has a very simple statement. He says that ‘power is the will to survive’ Now, that has an interesting connotation because it implies a notion of identity that we do not often face up to, either. If we are going to have

a will to survive, then what is going to have a will to survive? Something, someone, some institution? We have not spent much time discussing what we mean by power perhaps

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because we have not spent much time on discussing what is identity. And if you are going to talk about survival—and I have spent most of my life discussing the nature of viable systems, which are systems capable of independent survival—then, I am submitting to you now, we have to start thinking about the identity that is to survive. It is the idea of self I am talking about. And we must expect that identity is one of the invariants that I was mentioning earlier. I have called this talk ‘Recursions of Power’ simply because, believing that we have to include power in our equation, in our understanding of the universe and

especially of social systems—then I am suggesting that the identity that underlies the need to survive and to exert that kind of power will be an invariant that we shall find at every level of recursion. Now [ am using ‘recursion’ in the mathematical sense of one system implying and being included in the next. It brings me straight to what this symbol is that I would have called my flag for this address. What do you think of it? Would anybody like to say what this is? A mandala! Well done; thank you. It is obviously a mandala. (And do you know that C. G. Jung wrote that he had studied mandalas for fourteen years before he dared say or write a word about them?) So we have some kind of mandala, and it is one I designed myself, but it works on certain very fundamental principles. But, you know, it looks like a lot of other things too. Surely we have rather restricted ourselves with our systems-diagrams, with little boxes and arrows and so forth. I wanted to give you a richer symbol. For instance this

mandala here is a very good diagram of an insect colony. It is a very good diagram of what the alchemists were doing. If you disturb a surface of sand by generating a pure, sound tone, you will make a pattern in the ‘liquid’ which looks very much like that. I showed the

diagram to a very famous historian who said: ‘Ah, you have modelled the perfect design of a Renaissance city’ I could give you many more examples. Another one I like very much concerns the famous double helix of DNA which you usually see from the side looking like a spiral. If you generate a computer view of the double helix of DNA from the end, it looks like this mandala. Now, of course, these invariances are literary devices. I am offering you an imaginative leap here, not a scientific demonstration. What becomes interesting about this kind of diagram if you really work on it, whether you analyze it as if it were a servo-mechanism, or meditate in front of it as if it were a man-

dala, the sort of thing that comes out of it is this: that the properties of a system that has identity—and that is what it is really a model of—are such things as self-regulation, self-organization, self-awareness, and in general then self-reference. In consideration of the characteristics of life we added self-reproduction (or so we used to say); but since Maturana and Varela I hope we are concentrating more on self-production than on self-reproduction. Well, these are the kinds of ‘self’-things, the ‘auto’-things, that we are going to find in our development of notions of identity, and therefore in notions of the power that maintains that identity, whether in the individual or in the social system. So that’s where the recursion idea comes in, and I will demonstrate its application in a minute. Meanwhile, I hope you

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all know the work of Maturana that I was referring to under the heading of self-production which, to use his term, defines autopoiesis—the business of ‘making oneself” perpetually. This is central to my theme today. As to self-awareness: I believe that many branches of science are pointing to the fact that our big new conceptual breakthrough in science (for

which I hope perhaps before the end of the century) will be a proper understanding of consciousness. And I think that physics and biology and the social sciences and perhaps aesthetics—why not?—are likely to join hands together with philosophy and the rest of us in trying to understand what that is. Well, whatever it is, am urging on you now that this is very much our field, a major field for the advance of our subject. This is the keynote address, and so I feel the urge to lay before you where I think that we can go when we have set aside for the time being all the individual work that you have done and I have done on individual systems and parts of the systems. Here is the picture that is emerging: power lies in the issue of self for individuals and for large social systems. Scientific power in discussing that lies in the notion of invariance, where our findings will apply to both. And that is why I am talking about recursions. Well, that was by way of introduction. I now want to use this diagram as a model of four levels of recursion. Arbitrarily four: there are thousands. Let us start with the individual, You and Me, the Person. This is a model of such a person. Then we should go to a higher level of recursion of the group of people, whether as a community, like a village or a town,

or as an institution like a hospital or a firm, a business. That will be our second level of recursion, and our flag symbol is a model of that too. The third level of recursion will be the nation. Nations turn out to be very, very central to the issue of power in our age. It seems a tragedy really, because philosophers and people of good will of all kinds have offered us the idea of a whole planet, of one world, or a people. But we end up with nations who fight each other in a lethal fashion, both economically and with weapons. And it seems that we have a cybernetic problem here of the reduction of variety; there is just too much variety generated by making in total, not to entail the subdivision of mankind into various separate identities. So we are stuck with the historical process that has produced nations and nationhood, that is my third level of recursion, of which this is also a model. Then my fourth level shall obviously be of the planet as a whole. I shall briefly tell you how this model applies at all four of those levels of recursion. That is my second task now. I think a

huge amount of cybernetic talk could be made about invariances existing between those four levels of recursion. But we only have an hour here to have our opening session, and [ am going to concentrate on just one cybernetic aspect of this model. I hope to make its recursive invariance stick. Let us first of all consider this model for the individual. The individual—who is this fellow, or this girl? Let us start with the naive definition of a person as what is enclosed in

an envelope of skin. If you look at the diagram you will find that represented by the inner, heavily drawn, circle. This big strong inner circle is meant to represent that envelope of

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skin. Now as good systems people we know straight away—do we not?—that the boundaries that we use to define systems are critical, and also arbitrary and conventional. Most ordinary human beings would accept the envelope of skin as a boundary. We know better! The physicist in us knows perfectly well that a particle that was part of the definition of MY boundary only ten minutes ago may now be in Jupiter, because we know that this particle is a probability smeared across the universe. That’s physics talk. Social scientists might say: ‘Well, the boundary is not the envelope of skin; this is just a subset of a family which is part of something else’ and so forth. So, having made those reservations, let us nonetheless take the heavy circle as the envelope of skin. Now, you will see if you look, a radial splurge of lines filling this inner circle, filling it! In the centre is a blob, and then a radial complex of lines. Now I am taking the blob to represent the autonomic nervous system, and the radials of lines to represent the central nervous system as a whole. And those radial lines, you notice, go right up to the edge of the circle. That means to say that the ends of my fingers and toes are innervated, the nervous system gets there, the nervous system is in charge of this whole thing that [ call my body. Now that is a very interesting fact. It is an exemplification of the law in cybernetics that

I want to remind you of and draw your attention to today. It is called the Conant-Ashby theorem, and says that ‘the regulator of a system must contain a model of what is regulated’ The theorem is a manifestation of the Law of Requisite Variety. Now you might say:

‘Well, that is self-evident’ But the funny thing is, you see, that when we get to our other levels of recursion, when we begin to look at social systems, we very soon find that we do not obey the cybernetic rules. The individual, however, considered as the envelope of skin with a nervous system—do note!—is capable, and does obey the theorem. It is capable of containing the variety generated by the body. So if I fling my arm out there I can still move my fingers. My central nervous system does not say: ‘I stop here; you fingers are on your own out there’ The brain, in short, has the model—not only the brain, the whole nervous system has this model in it. As I said, it is very useful to distinguish between the autonomic nervous system and the rest of the nervous system. The reason why it is so interesting is this: If you are going to have a very high variety model in your regulator, then much of it must be autonomic, which is to say: it’'s self-regulating. Otherwise, of course, we would have to put most of our conscious effort into keeping the system going—keeping the heart beating; stopping from falling over; bringing the hand back when you have thrown it out; and so forth. I repeat that when we get to social systems we shall see how much this principle is disobeyed, the principle that we use and exemplify in the body. Meanwhile, however, let me progress to the next level. I have been talking about the

heavy ring and the radial lines that reach its circumference. Look next at the second circle within which all this is embedded. This is the part of the individual which is not fully realized. It stands for the capacity to do something. For example: you want to run a mar-

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athon—can you run a marathon?—it is twenty-six miles, you know, it’s a long way—I bet, not many people in this room could run twenty-six miles. But they could if they trained. I can't play golf, but I probably could if [ practised. Now, these simple examples of things that one might do with oneself can be extended to much more serious matters. You could all learn Sanskrit, if you gave yourself the time and the motivation to do that. There are physical things to do, there are mental things to do, there are, indeed, spiritual things to do. You can set yourselves spiritual goals as well as mental goals as well as physical goals: that is the individual defined by the second circle. S/he is no longer just the envelope of skin, but the aspiring individual. The tiny circles on the ring’s circumference stand of course for the goals themselves. Now then, where is the Conant-Ashby theorem in this? Please, think about it very hard. Your model of yourself and the regulator that you have for regulating yourself does not include the things I have just mentioned—until you put them in. And if you devise a circle of aspiration for yourself and say: ‘T am going to aspire to do this, that and the other’ then you will have to change your model of yourself, will you not? If you want to run a marathon race, you are going to have to take up jogging in the mornings. Right now you do not jog in the morning; so the model of yourself has to change in order that

you become a jogger to yourself. Now we are already beginning to find some very important lessons out of this analysis. They will serve us in good stead as we move through the ‘Recursions of Power. Remember that I am going to talk about invariance alone this morning. It is invariant in an identity, in a system of self, that the things the system is capable of, but is not yet realizing, are not initially included in the regulatory model. And then people try to do things without changing the regulatory model. Now, how have I depicted that in my diagram? You will see that the lines radiating out from the centre, which went to the edge of the envelope of skin (and therefore provided adequate regulation for the corporeal body) do not quite extend to the edge of the second circle. This is a diagram to represent the fact that we know that we can control ourselves further than our existing way of living, but we are not quite certain how to do it. And if I set about running a marathon, I am not at all sure about how I would control myself, recreate the model of myself, and push those radial lines out to discipline myself (we would say, in the case of the marathon). So we have a control problem of requisite variety as soon as we leave the ostensible self. The ostensible self is the inner circle, the capable self is the expanded individual. Take a further look at the explicit goals, the tiny circles. The capacity to run the marathon becomes a goal, the wish to learn Sanskrit

becomes a goal; and we can define those goals, and we can say ‘damn it, I'll do it!” The most beautiful book ever written on calculus, 'm just remembering, begins by saying: ‘what one fool can do, another can’ So you decide to learn calculus if you can't already do calculus, and that is an explicit goal. And now you will see those black lines, tangential to the ostensible self, which are relating your goals. Notice how powerful this model is becoming. If you want to go from the ostensible individual self to the expanded self, then you will have

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to increase your regulatory model as exemplified by the radial lines, and you will also have to build—what do we say— strategies’ for your life, which are the black relations between explicit goals. But you are already in considerable cybernetic difficulty, because of the Law of Requisite Variety. This is why most people, I submit to you, fail. I am talking now of psychology, if you will. People fail in their goals; they join correspondence courses to learn Sanskrit and then don’t do it, having spent a lot of money. They buy golf clubs and so on and say: ‘I am going to play golf’ and then don't do it. Their model of themselves is defective, and the regulatory system is trying to disobey cybernetic laws. Now I come to the outside ring—the third ring of power. What is that? Well, it’s simple. Having discussed the goals we can distinguish and therefore make explicit at the second level, this level says: ‘well, there are goals that we can’t detect, because we don’t know what our ultimate capacity is. And for this final ring I use Aristotle’s word, which I would like to bring back into circulation in science. It has been mostly out of use for 2,000 years. Aristotle’s word was ‘entelechy, which means the fulfilment of promise, of potential—the total fulfilment of potential. The final circle of the diagram is incomplete; that indicates our uncertainty about the boundaries of entelechy. So leaving psychology we come to the area where preachers and gurus, all those kind of people, are saying: ‘Look, you, Sir or Madam, have much more potential than you know; do something with yourself, beyond the goals that you can distinguish, and grow to your full selft’ Now I am using the word ‘ostensible self” for the inner ring, and ‘potential self” for the second ring where you can distinguish goals, and ‘entelechy’ for the final affair. Most people live through their lives without ever contemplating entelechy, as you know. And who shall scorn them for that; most people are starving or rotting in jail. We need to look at the statistics of this planet, as we speak here in comfort and ease. The mass of humanity is in terrible trouble, and they, perhaps, do not have time to contemplate entelechy. We do; and maybe we have a responsibility to think about it on their behalf as well as our own. Now, before we leave the individual, I want to say that I am a scientist despite a lot of philosophic talk here today. And, of course, whatever we do with ourselves and however mystical we may sound in discussing to what heights the human being can aspire, what the human being does is mediated by a control system. Outstandingly, this is the central nervous system, as | mentioned at the outset, the brain. One of the things I would like to leave with you out of this part of the discussion concerns the way we discuss the brain. The brain is always discussed—have you noticed this?—in terms of the available technology of the day. This is a rather ominous thought. We seem to use the latest technology we have got to talk about the brain because the latest technology looks so new and so good and it appears to be at the forefront of scientific understanding. It is very far from being ‘absolute’ Let me remind you. Aristotle thought that the brain was a machine for cooling the blood. Well, it is, you know, with all that surface area. But that’s not its primary purpose. Let's move on rapidly. Descartes discussed the brain in terms—do you remember?—of the fountains in

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the King’s gardens. His technology was hydraulic; so the brain was squirting juice all over the place. You get to Locke—and the great age of the advancement of mechanics. Locke talks about the brain in terms of nerve processes having little tiny wires inside them which run over invisible pulleys, and that whole thing is a mechanical artefact. You get to von Neumann, at the time when computers were becoming THE thing, and everybody then used the phrase of the ‘electronic brain’ So the brain now became an electrical switchboard, and certainly bits of the thalamus look a bit like that. Warren McCulloch, my beloved mentor, used to say that the brain was a three-pound electrochemical computer running on

glucose at twenty-five watts. That was another way of confronting people with a physical rather that a metaphysical reality, using the kind of technology that was available. Warren was that kind of analyst of the brain. I consider that our discussions of the brain are going to be crucial to our understanding of selthood, of consciousness, of identity and of power. My theme is building up, isn’t it? I want to leave a special blessing, therefore, for neurocybernetics. This field must advance, and I am conscious that [ am speaking in Vienna where the Cybernetic Society is founded in the person of Professor Trappl in a medical school. As to my own role in this—I feel I

must mention it—my own mathematical model of the brain was done in the late 1950s. Very few people here, I think, will know that model; it was published in 1960. It depended on the following idea that, since causality in the brain is a very difficult thing to follow, what we should try and realize is that the sensory part of the brain and the motor part of the brain—whatever the causal connection between them—must in some sense map onto each other. This mathematical model was set-theoretic: it made no attempt to indicate

transfer functions that nobody understands. The interesting thing about that, when we are talking about the technologies that we use to describe things, is that the model generates the notion of the brain as an interface pattern. And this was in the late 1950s. I had not then heard of holography. By now, not surprisingly, I cannot think of the brain as anything other than a hologram. I will return to that later. Well, so much for the individual, given that I am just using this model as descriptive of particular invariance: Now let’s pick this up at the next level of recursion and ask about a social system such as a community or an institution. Have we, in fact, got some invariances

out of our discussion of the Conant- Ashby theorem for at least another ten basic principles of cybernetics, but we haven't got time. The point is only to demonstrate that there ARE invariances. Now, in a social system, what is our heavy inner ring? The ostensible system, the accepted system, which depends on the definition of functions and boundaries that ‘everybody knows, is the answer. Take a system of travel. You want to run a railway? Everybody knows that the railway has some tracks and has some cars on the tracks and engines and stations and things; so this is what you have when you have a railway. That’s the ostensible system. However, I said about the body, well, if you are particle physicists, particles in the envelope of skin will soon

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turn out to be on Jupiter. Equally it turns out, if you are a management scientist, which I have been for a lot of my life, then the ostensible system of the railway is not as obvious as you would think. When I found myself advising the Canadian Railways, I certainly expected that all the hardware I just listed would constitute their ostensible system. But 1 soon found out that the one thing they didn’t have was any of these things. They had to hire them. Now there is a very great surprise; but anybody who has done managerial cybernetics comes to know that the system that the management think they are operating is not the system they are operating at all. Many of them never discover this.

You take health. ‘Everybody knows’ that a hospital is a place for curing people. What would you say, systems-ladies and systems-gentlemen, if you found a hospital whose whole output was a succession of coffins? I tell you what the authorities would say about that situation. I am giving you a caricature to make my point: Here is a hospital and all the people coming out are dead. Hm? What the establishment says is: “Well, we have had a bad day or a bad week, or a bad month. But this is an imperfection in the system. We shall put it right! They never ever think of saying: ‘My God, we have a machine for killing people!” It is because everyone knows that ‘this is a system for making people well: When I joined the world’s biggest publishing company, I asked them what business they were in and they said: “You fool, we are in printing and publishing’ But if you look at the assets of the company, as I said to them, they are in the business of real estate. They owned ninety-two of the prime sites in London; all their assets were tied up in buildings. Nothing to do with printing or

publishing. This is the kind of thing that you find out if you do research in cybernetics in the management field of communities and institutions. You discover a lot of difficulty in defining the inner circle of the ostensible self. And, if that is so, you discover even more difficulty

in defining the radial lines. What of the radial lines? Where is the regulatory model? If your epistemology is such that fundamentally you do not recognize the system you've got, what is your hope of defining the regulatory system that will control it? Very little. That has maximum bearing in the case of the second recursion of the community of the institution when we come out to the second circle, because that is the self to which the institution is aspiring. And these days it has a whole technical apparatus to get it there, called planning. New technology, planning, Year 2000 ... all of this, waiting to take us out to the goals we are setting out to reach. The trouble is, of course, the Conant-Ashby theorem. If we don’t have the model of the system we are now regulating right, how much less do we have the model of the radial lines that are reaching out to the second circle. It follows that most of our planning is directed to building a system that could not possibly work if we had it. I speak from a lot of very tortured experience in this regard. But I must press on, What about the entelechy in the case of the community or the in-

stitution? Those of you who have studied the field of planning, I am sure, will know Ackoft, who is one of the doyens of Western planning, and his theory of idealizations. Now, he says,

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if you were in a university and wanted to know the future of the university, the entelechy of the university, then, by all means, don't start from here and say: ‘We will improve this building, we will add courses, we will push outwards’ That is part of the aspiration level of activity. The entelechy is concerned with saying: Just a minute. This university is a historical accident. What do we want of a university in the year 2000?’ This is the idealization that you design and then you say: “Well, that’s what we want. This is what we have got. How do we get there?” Notice that in using this approach the regulatory system gets to be designed intrinsically with the institution itself, and is not therefore the necessary victim of ConantAshby. Those are some of the considerations that apply to the second level of recursion. Let’s take a quick look at the next one, the nation, as I mentioned it. You should be getting familiar with this method of arguing by now. The ostensible nation is the historical nation that we have, the accepted and recognizable national ethos. Now, I have worked in about seventeen countries, and the first thing everybody tells you is: ‘Our country is quite

different from any other country. We are like this—and proud of it Well, I am used to that, because any company will tell you the same thing. They say: ‘Don’t come here with a lot of business theories, our company is unique’ And of course these dear people, they are all unique. But it does not alter the fact that there are a lot of invariances, such as you go out

of business if you don’t make a profit. In the national case, if you don’t obey the capitalistic rules of the IMF, you don’t get the next loan to pay your interest on the last loan. So at the national level the first question is: does the Conant-Ashby theorem apply within the inner circle? Do we have a model of what the nation is included in the regulatory apparatus? Can you not by now see how this arguing goes? The law is a product of history—is perpetually out of date—is perpetually incapable of providing the regulatory model. So legislators spend all their time propping up the law, passing new amendments to the law. The finance act in most countries is a great big mess of amendments. We try to disobey basic cybernetic principles even at the level of ostensible selfhood. When we get to the second circle in the nation, we find the nation talking about its goals—and it is doing that, of course, all the time, because that’s what national politics is about. This is how presidents and prime ministers get themselves elected, they say: “‘We are going to do this!” They have no hope of doing what they are saying, you know that, the ordinary citizen knows that. We cyberneticians, for goodness sake, have the precise reasons why they cannot do what they

are saying. It has little to do with the cut and thrust of political debate as displayed endlessly by the media. It is because they don’t have requisite variety; they don't have the regulatory model to do it, still less the regulatory machinery. I mentioned to you the importance of distinguishing between the autonomic and the volitional parts of a nervous system. You think about that in the nation. The constant tendency of people interested in power, which has to do with their own and their party’s self-survival as against the national good, causes them to rob the system of autonomy systematically and to centralize. We have got this going on in my country, in Britain, right

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now in the most preposterous fashion, whereby local autonomy is being lost and the whole nation is getting run from the middle. This is very—if you want political words, you start talking about fascism and things like this—it’s very uncomfortable, but if you want to stick with cybernetics, you say: “This cannot work, because ...!" But unfortunately none is likely to listen in Britain. I spent nearly all last year in Mexico, and the invariances were very

apparent—for different reasons, of course, because the national ethos is different. I made a systems analysis of the current president’s political intentions, and I isolated seven major objectives of his presidency as revealed in his speeches and his book. Then I made a sys-

temic model of that, and I found out just what cybernetic principles needed to be applied in order to achieve these ambitions. They simply do not have those things in place, and they must fail. I do not care how newspaper people presently conceive this. It is possible to

demonstrate cybernetically that the current ambitions of Mexico will not work—and this is before you get to corruption. Now, you know, corruption is a problem in many of our countries, and I just want to say this about it, that I regard corruption as a systemic failure. I do not believe that men and women are worse in one country than another, I mean in a moral sense. In India, any good cabinet minister will tell you that the Indian people are corrupt as individuals. And if you ask them ‘How?), they will say things like: ‘If you filled a train with grain in Bombay and sent it to Delhi, I guarantee, it would end up empty at the other end. We are morally corrupt people! To which my answer very strongly was: ‘Don't be ridiculous, this is a system!

You have got lots of starving families beside the railway lines, and they will take the stuff on the train; that is wholly predictable, that is a system in operation. And to quote to you now one of the aphorisms that I always use and hope to make famous: “The purpose of the system is what it does. So don’t ever let anybody tell you that the purpose is something other that what you see. If a hospital is producing dead people, remember, then it is a machine for killing people. And if everybody takes the grain off a train, then that is because they are starving people. In Mexico, if you have massive corruption, it is because the system dictates that is what there should be. The reason for that in Mexico is very evident, it is right before your eyes. There has been a permanent revolution for seventy years, and a party which actually calls itself the ‘institutionalized revolution’ It can remain in power only—and this is a systems point—Dby fixing the elections, So you are going to talk about moral corruption?

Especially when the president has a personal campaign for moral renewal. This is how national systems—I am giving you only a sketch—get themselves into such a mess, because their ‘tiny circle’ goals conflict with the actual system of regulation in the model of the regulatory process, which is itself embedded in the constitution and in the law. Constitutional laws are powerful, and you have to change them, not try and go around them. I could talk at very great length about that, but I must not. We need here obviously in the ‘aspirational’ circle a new model of progress. In developing nations, it is extremely important that those definitions of progress are made by the nation itself and not by the

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people who want to exploit that nation, which is what has been happening. The paradigm

for progress and the regulatory system to go with it has been prescribed by the very people who want the raw materials and the markets of that nation. And they are the very last people who should be allowed by that nation to make those specifications. At least, that is my suggestion to you. As to the entelechy of the nation, well, I was already coming to that

in what I just said: The thing is that the entelechy now does not stand for idealizations as it does with the institution,; it stands for the loose collection of things that we call utopias: better societies. And they and the final circle, you see, are not defined at all. You can have a national goal at the aspirational level to build a dam or change the educational system, but as to the entelechy you don’t know. And so my appeal here to the Third World people is: ‘Please, don't import a whole lot of philosophic rubbish along with the plastic rubbish that you find yourselves importing from the rich world’ I watch with great despair the wonderful cultures—to take the two nations I have mentioned—of India and Mexico, dis-

sipating in the fact of the importation of plastic and computers and refineries and things of this kind. I turn now very quickly to the planetary level of recursion. And here I will make a very fast mapping indeed of this model—from Teilhard de Chardin. Do you know him? Many of you do, I'm sure: The Phenomenon of Man. His model will map straight onto this model. The ostensible controlled self of this planet is the geosphere, as he called it; that is to say, the ball of rock with a molten interior that we call Earth. And, of course, that does have a proper regulatory system: the gravity, the waves, the wind, the way water and air behave— all of that is a very firm regulatory system. It has its own model, and obeys the ConantAshby theorem. The next level, the second circle, is what Teilhard de Chardin would call the biosphere, which is the green envelope of living matter that covers the geosphere. And that itself, of course, has the most wonderful regulatory mechanisms—in homeostasis, and all of those kinds of things which support that, and have supported it for millions of years until we came along and perverted it. And I don’t have to preach to this kind of audience about what we are doing to the biosphere through lack of understanding of the regulatory models. We create the dustbowls, we use too much DDT; and, above all, we use too much napalm and too many bombs. We are disrupting the beautiful regulatory mechanism that nature has. May I remind you of the Gaia hypothesis, which says: “The world is actually a big living system’ We are breaking that up through lack of application of the knowledge we people actually have. Think of the responsibility, my friends! And as to the entelechy: Teilhard talked about the noosphere—from the Greek ‘noos’—mind—where he envisaged my final circle, an entelechy of an expanded consciousness, of perhaps a world-consciousness,

rather like the Jungian universal consciousness, only much more than that in Teilhard’s case because of his very great spiritual overtones. So now: I have shown you how we can use this model at the individual level and the communal level and the national level and the planetary level, and how we can perceive

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invariances. [ am not writing the book about all this in an hour. I am showing you only that this is possible, and the sort of thinking needs to do it. Now, I want to end by making good use of this. I see that nobody is leaving me to lunch—so perhaps you will bear with me for a few more minutes. Because having set up this multiple model, ladies and gentlemen, I want to talk to you about the nature of change—in a very unusual fashion, because I am using my mandala here as my guide. I have been a student of Eastern philosophy for close to forty years. I am beginning to say out loud now what I have long suspected: that the Eastern philosophies have been based on the notion of system for 5,000 years at the very least, and we people are only just discovering it. So let us be a little respectful of that. I want to end with a different analysis of my four levels, and it begins with the notion of change. Now in the West, how do we think of change? First of all, our change is time-dependent. We have a theory of causality

which, as a matter of fact, was blown to shreds by David Hume hundreds of years ago, but nobody seems to have noticed, for we still have a causal model of change. So what do we do? We make an analysis of the facts. Think! We make a personal inventory, we say: ‘T am like this; I wish to change, I wish to go to the ‘tiny circle’ goals, and to run the marathon; or I wish to expand my consciousness. In a community, we say: “‘We must change this,

that, and the other’ You see—how it fits. So we find out the facts, and then we prescribe our intentions and we say: “Well, we will make this change; it's going to cost a lot of money. So we must make a budget! And then we find that the other things that are happening in

society mean—Ilike having to have bigger bombs—it turns out that we suspend that budget. We don’t actually make the change at our personal human level either. We put it off; we are too busy, and the family makes demands on us; so we don't do it. So, the change is timedependent. It amasses facts, it says: “We are going over a period of time to be different-—and it is going to cost, it’s going to cost time and care and attention and probably a lot of money’ And then we don’t do it, as I say. Now, what is the confrontation there? We say one thing and we do another. But the purpose of the system is what it does. So all of this is so much nonsense; most of what we put into our plans, and especially the good intentions for ourselves and for our society—

all of this is time-dependent. We never have the time. The Eastern approach, on the other hand, speaks of change quite differently. It is not a time-dependent phenomenon. Change is a way of realizing yourself. It involves immediate and total confrontation of reality. An Eastern thinker would say: ‘We don't talk about change, and generating plans, and all of that stuff because—if we centre ourselves properly and confront the truth—then the truth is thereby different; ipso facto Now, we have heard of Heisenberg. We should know that

this makes a lot of sense. The confrontation of what is, changes it. I want to run through my four examples in this light. I mentioned that I see the brain as a hologram. Now, a hologram, you know, does not obey ordinary spatio-temporal laws.

And the very first thing that anybody who has done work in yoga or any other spiritual

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discipline—Zen, for instance—the very first thing that he knows is that he is outside the spatio-temporal distinction. An experience called ‘satori’ in Zen-Buddhism is essentially that. It is a glimpse of the reality that does not have these Newtonian bounds on it. Now you will see why I started by saying that we were confronted with certain things like telepathy for which there was a mass of evidence, but which did not fit our model of the universe. So I am saying that at the individual level you are going to find—if you use this model—a completely different account of yourself and a completely different way of handling yourself. You want to give up smoking; you want to give up drinking? The Western model of change says: You get the facts, you know how much you are spending, you know how much damage you are doing to yourself. You say: ‘I must change this!" You don’t do it. Most people

don’t do it, because—why? Isn't it perfectly simple if you look at those systems persons—it is because they like it! It’s that easy! So the intellectual part of them, saying: ‘Let’s give this up!’ is not the real part, which just continues as before. The Eastern way, for the individual, is to confront the toxicity of the alcohol and the tobacco and just—stop. If you want the evidence that this thinking is correct, do realize that Alcoholics Anonymous (using a model essentially from Adler—we are in Vienna) perceived that if you say: ‘I am going to change, I am going to give up drinking!, you instantly create in yourselves all the resistance required to overcome that good intention. Something in you is fighting it and saying: ‘The hell with that! I am not going to do it!"” You have a battle, and you lose the battle. Whereas, if you confront the issue in the Eastern fashion, there isn't a battle at all. There is realization. That is quite a different experience, and some of you must have had it. I hope everybody will have had it, but I think, not. What happens if you apply this Eastern kind of thinking for the individual to the other levels of recursions and the other fields that I have been talking about, the other selves:

community; nation; planet. I will give you just one example of each because I really ought to stop fairly soon. Within the community, take the example of penology. What do you do with criminals? Now, we are all citizens; all of you must have some knowledge of what we do. You know, for instance, that the talk about deterrence is fictitious; there is no scientific evidence that the ways we treat criminals deter them—unless you actually execute them (that deters them). So we know that what we do, does not work. We know that it is appallingly expensive. We know other things about it too. So we keep on saying: ‘We will reform the penological system!” It’s going to cost a lot of money, and then the budget goes down some other drain. Typically in our society, it goes into the industrial-military complex. So criminality persists, and penology persists. Now, I want you to try the experiment of using the Eastern way of looking at this, which I have been talking about. What would happen, if as a society we managed—not to talk about budgets and resistance, this is a way of not getting change—but to say: ‘Let us confront the reality!” What happens? I don't know anything about Austria. But I have just come back, I was at the end of last year in California, and I know about the penal system

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there. The first thing that happens to a young man sent to prison in California is that he is raped. And that is quite general. Because we put people in one-sex prisons, then that is a systemic consequence. But it is also a fact. Now, supposing we use the Eastern method and, instead of saying: ‘We will change this!” and not changing it, supposing we said: ‘Now let us confront our reality!” What would happen, my friends, if a judge said to a young man: “You have been caught stealing $20; I sentence you to be raped!” Because that is the truth if you

want to confront the reality. We should have a bit of an outcry, I suspect. We should have California up in front of the court of human rights. It’s a very different perception, isn't it? I have been trying out this way of Eastern analysis of our social problems and getting all sorts of shocks like that, and I wanted to share them with you. Take it at the level of the nation. I was talking about Mexico just now. What happens if we confront the reality? Big government contracts: let it be confronted. Now what do we do? We ask for tenders. Tenders must specify amounts to be spent on materials and machinery and labour and so on, and how much on bribes. If you did that in Mexico right now, you would have a third of the money tendering for bribes. What a confrontation that would be! And quite a useful one, too. Because it would indicate that the system does not work without being oiled with this particular oil. Maybe we would learn a whole lot from that instead of wailing about the moral consequences. I told you how suspicious I was of the moral argument. The moral argument can be applied only to the individual, ethically. It is not a recursive invariant—at least, I don't think so. At the international level, by using this approach, we should get new models of selfregulation. Then we would see—and I believe I can see, but I find it very difficult to express in Western terms—why it is that we have got a system which transmits wealth from poor

nations to rich nations, although the rich nations keep passing resolutions want to make it the other way round. They want to make it the other way do not have the regulatory model to do it. The regulation is in the hands tional Monetary Fund, and, in general, of banks. And their model is going

saying round, of the in the

that they but they Internaother di-

rection. The last loan that I saw being negotiated while I was with the Mexican government

had a cost attached to it. There is the money for the loan, right. Then there is the money for rescheduling the debt, right. There is the money to pay a whole bunch of lawyers, experts, accountants, economists—you name it—publicity people. The net result of that loan was— without coming to the question of interest—that the cost of getting the loan was exactly the cost of the loan. Can you credit this? I mean, we are collectively responsible for this kind of thing; then we blame Mexico, having made them do it. If you went to your own bank, I don’t care which nationality you are, and said personally to your bank manager: ‘T cannot pay the interest on the loan you have given me, please give me a loan to pay the interest, he would throw you out. And yet all our international affairs are conducted on that basis. Usury is not a strong enough word for all of this. My dedication to the Third World comes

out of knowing it at first hand.

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Well, the entelechy for the nation: I have said a little bit about it already. It has to be selfreferential. It is no use taking on some model from somewhere else. Here is a very small example of that which the Canadians here may recognize: There was a very interesting project on the poor Eastern seaboard of Canada, where everybody was sitting on the doorsteps of their houses saying: ‘Look at us! We are in despair, nothing can be done’ And a film team went around with video cameras and filmed everybody and asked them what was the matter. So everybody said: “Well, look at me; I can’t do anything. They edited this film, and they showed it to the whole community in the village hall. Can you imagine the impact? Now, this is the Eastern approach again. It fits my Eastern model because it involves selfconfrontation. If you were sitting in the hall and the film was running, and every single person in the room was sitting there saying: ‘I can’t do anything) you suddenly realize that, perhaps as a group, you can do something—because you have confronted a reality. That happened in that pilot project. But, you see, the thinking is so different—people don't take off and do these things, as they should. The example I would like to give you at the planetary level concerns unemployment. Again, if we really confront things, what do we find? There are about twelve billion people going to be on this planet at the turn of the century, about a billion of them unemployed. A billion people! Now, what I have to say to you is that there is literally no way in which jobs can be created for those people. It is just no use pretending that we can do it. Confrontation of reality! We cannot do that! In 1955 we amplified technology, that is to say, automation, by twenty times with labour. By 1970, it was ten times. Microchips say that a third of the present labour will be required—even with the need to service equipment— by the year 2000. 60 per cent of European youth will never have a permanent job. These are factual extrapolations of the regulatory system we actually have; not the one we would

like to think we have. Well, those are the sorts of facts that lead me to say that we will have insurrection if we don’t get a new perception. We simply can't afford to continue with the concept of employment, however many models we have based on work ethics and all that moralistic stuff. We don’t need that degree of employment, and we must stop putting a social stigma on unemployment quickly! Immediate realization! These are the things that we have to work for. Summing up, we can see the range of needs. In the individual it is for the redefinition of life-style for himself; in the community it is for the redefinition of the purpose of community, in the nation for the redefinition of progress, and in the planet for the redefinition of such basic things as employment and the inevitability of war. Let me end by saying that I hope that we will try to put these choices back in the models of regulation from which we have taken them out. It is a priority to get back choice. Now I would like you to know

that the great Eastern teachers whom I have evoked today say that there is no choice really; that a clear spirit has no debate with itself. But I can give you a scientific explanation even of this dilemma, this apparent conflict between the teaching and the facts. You know, we

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have game theory. In a game of complete information there is no choice. At the entelechy, we would have complete information. Meantime, we have not got it. We have complete information in the game of chess, so theoretically we should be able to say: “You are white, I resign. But we can't do the sums. So here we are, poor people, unable to do the sums and looking again for choice. So my message is: We have to do some of these things—not just think and research about them. We have to try and put this whole big stuff together in ac-

tion, somehow. Now I don’t know how we are going to do that, but I do beg you to think about it. You know, it is not enough just to be a professor. I have all my life tried to keep half of my activity in the domain of action, and I recommend that course to you. The great teach-

ers I am evoking again said a lot about this. They didn't much like professors. Jesus said: ‘By their fruits you shall know them!” The Buddha talked about professors as ‘the herdsmen of other men’s cows. Mohammed said that a professor was ‘an ass bearing a load of books’ (though this is a bit rude). So I want to leave you with the thought: “We have to do some-

thing!” And I hope that one of the products of this conference will be some prescription for action—as well as the collection of theories—in the context of my Recursions of Power.

Photo: Allenna Leonard

Thank you very much!

chapter 14

etacomment

How poks the brain work? It would be nice to know. Aristotle noted all the convolutions in the cortical surface, and said that this was a system for cooling the blood. Descartes, aware of contemporary hydraulic technology, thought of the brain in terms of ‘the fountains in the King’s gardens’. Technology had changed by the time of Locke to the strongly mechanical: he postulated invisibly thin wires running in the tubes of nerve processes. Then came electrics: and the brain was a kind of telephone exchange. Today, of course, because we are still victims of our own current technology, the brain ‘is a hologram’. Where in particular has forty years of neurocybernetics led? The doyen of the field, the late Warren S. McCulloch, described the brain as a three-pound electrochemical computer, running on glucose at twenty-five watts. He went on to develop models of the workings of the neuron and of assemblies of neurons.' Now the individual neuron receives such a vast number of excitatory and inhibitory inputs that it is tempting to think of it as an analogue device. McCulloch said that the transfer function is a seventh order differential equation. (Not everybody knew that this was because he could get only seven probes into a Purkinje cell.) But certainly the neuron has a digital output. Either the axon that emerges from the neuron fires, or it doesn’t. Thus brain models tend to operate in binary logic, and their descriptions to employ Boolean algebra.

From this basis, I myself came to entertain the hypothesis that a brain so constituted might have no option but to dichotomize any issue it addressed. We would end up with good and evil, black and white, and so on. Then degrees of indifference, shades of grey, Foreword to Decision Making About Decision Making: Metamodels and Metasystems. Edited by John P. van Gigch, Abacus Press, 1987.

Reprinted with kind permission.

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would be intellectual constructs trapped along a scale closed by polar opposites at each end. It looks like that in practice, as we hear fundamentalists rave in religion, in morality,

in politics. For many years, then, [ tried to prove this neurocybernetic postulate about the brain. The nearest [ came to a demonstration preserved in print was in a critique of a research machine called the Perceptron made at a conference in 1958.2 In subsequent personal discussions, McCulloch airily said, ‘yes, of course’: but it meant that the brain must use at least a tertiary logic. And this from the architect of binary neural nets! This comes down to speculating about a physical basis for the problems generated by our humanity. For if brain operations are well described in binary logic, then we might have an in-built propensity to dichotomise, and the brain will need at least a third term over and beyond its system of polarities to make sense of world. The Greek word for ‘over and beyond’ is meta. When the story is followed into theoretical logic, it loses its speculative character and becomes a serious business. Polarizing concepts, the A and the non-A, result in paradoxes of many kinds. ‘“This statement is false’. If it is, it isn’t, and if it isn’t, it is. Even so, paradoxes can be resolved. But they lead on into the region of absolute undecideability, where Godel’s Theorem about the incompleteness of formal logics undermines the nature of reasoning itself. The escape from these problems always lies in logical recursion: languages have to be devised that are ‘over and beyond’ the language in which we happen to be trapped and these are therefore called metalanguages. Metamodels and metasystems come along

by extension, because models and systems are both logical structures that exhibit special properties in the mode of their mapping what is empirically presented, and fall foul of exactly similar logical traps. Now consider the enormous power of ‘the meta’ by thinking about this extremely counter-intuitive assertion:

At the metalevel any two contradictories are one thing, because they choose the same distinction from the void.

I should argue that Eastern wisdom is based quite fundamentally on this assertion, whereas Western wisdom has put the reductionism of polar categorization into high gear to do its donkey work. That has resulted in an ‘advanced’ civilization, which unfortunately carries with it all the disadvantages of the dichotomy trap. No-one who understood my assertion would want to burn his opponent at the stake. Anyone who wishes to consider this way of looking at the world more carefully should study Eastern philosophy, and also make sure to read Spencer-Brown who invented a mathematics of great power and beauty precisely to handle these matters.?

Let us turn to the practical consequences. This story is perfectly practical, though maybe apocryphal. A little girl surveyed my long white beard for a time and then asked: ‘Were you in Noah’s Ark? I replied that I was not. ‘Then why weren’t you drowned?

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Notice the precise point. These are polar opposites in a universe of discourse that happens to be irrelevant. The irrelevance can be detected only metalinguistically. When a head of state justifies having done something irretrievably silly, it is usually because his categorization of the problem did not permit it to be newly defined. When another head of govern-

ment declares that ‘there is no alternative’, it is usually because the structure of her logic vouchsafes none. To redefine problems and to redesign systems are our only recourses when things manifestly do not work. To do either of these entails detecting a metasystem and learning the metalanguage that it speaks. The readings printed in this book address these issues from various points of view in various styles. Professor van Gigch introduces them with an ‘Overview’—which necessar-

ily speaks the language of the book. This metacomment does not need to do that. I want to declare my belief that the problems here addressed are at once real and important: that the ‘method of meta’ for their resolution is not only valid but the uniquely possible approach: that the practical consequences of getting such ways of thinking adopted would be little short of sensational: and that therefore the book is both important and timely. In this way I exemplify the advocacy of the book: it is not necessary, it is not even relevant, for me to discuss the readings or to take up the occasional disagreement that I might have with an author. Because this is a metacomment: it is a comment on the book, and not on the contents of the book. In this example we have indeed an exemplar for the ‘method of meta’. We should be looking at problems themselves, and not at their content. The likelihood is that the content

of the problem has been generated at root by limitations of the brain as a machine for reasoning, and by the limitations of the logic which that reasoning-machine is able to create. But the problem as such is a pathological symptom of a societary system. The discussion of that pathology is metalinguistic to the internal language of the problem, which everyone is avidly discussing in parliament, in the media, and in pubs alike. Consider arguments about pay and conditions between unions and management. All participants, all commentators, burrow about in the details of the problem: they examine the content. But the social pathology has to do with the distribution of wealth, and the adaptation of whole neighbourhoods and brotherhoods. These issues are metasystemic to the content of specific problems where output is lost, where strikes occur, and arbitration speaks the problem-language by rote. The trouble is that metalinguistic discussion twenty years ahead of the wholly predictable problem is usually regarded as likely to precipitate

that problem. Responsible people on all sides hope that the wholly predictable problem will go away, not happen at all or at least will not happen until they personally have retired. I am not theorising here. I was personally involved in these affairs in steel, in cotton,

in shipbuilding. Outstandingly, I was involved (as a senior manager) in printing. Twenty years ago I was having amicable discussions and making practical progress with the British printing unions about the inevitable automation of the industry. These discussions were

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metalinguistic: what is a safe and sure process to ensure adaptation in the industry under a changing environment whereby the livelihood of everyone and the profits of owners

could both be secured? But management (and not the unions) would not grapple with the metasystemic problem because they saw it as provocative, and the systemic problems as such were more-or-less under control (at exorbitant cost). This week, as I write, I have

watched newsreels of policemen charging print-union demonstrators on horseback and beating them with truncheons. The problem was allowed to polarize at the systemic level, whereas the meta-problem had shown itself to be tractable. Here is the next sample problem that is urgent today. The big nation states exert enormous economic ‘clout’ and highly threatening military power over small nation states. In cybernetic terms these are variety amplifiers of high gain: the variety by which the small nation can express its identity at home and in the foreign councils of the world is overwhelmed and absorbed by the variety which counters its every expression with variety

overkill. What can the small nation state do? It has to try and restore the equation of requisite variety by some method of variety amplification of its own that cannot be absorbed and nullified by the variety blanket of the super-power. The name of this answer is terrorism. It is another wholly predictable problem. It is manifestly impossible for a surveillance system to generate protective requisite variety in

face of the assassin and the aircraft hijacker, because it cannot discriminate between all possible states of the system. Therefore it is necessary to handle the issue at the metalevel, whereby the initial super-power stance is shown to be generating the succession of actual

problems that result in so much havoc. It further follows that to increase the variety amplifications of the super-power yet further by armed assault on the small nation is necessarily counter-productive. It must produce escalation, another wholly predictable problem lying

ahead. As usual, we need to redefine the issues at the metalevel and to redesign the system that generates predictable problems. My final example shall concern the nation states themselves, and the aspiration to world governance

enshrined

in the United

Nations

Organization,

the Declaration

of

Human Rights, and so on. Now the network of sovereign states is a multidimensional set of polarized relationships. They confront each other in pairs, dichotomizing issues between them; they confront each other in groupings of various sorts, dichotomizing again as in East/West and North/South, not to mention rich/poor. We need to remember that most of these nation states exist in conditions of great poverty and therefore malnutrition. At least half live under oppressive dictatorships, where human rights are largely disregarded. Others live under ‘elective dictatorships’ where democracy is warped and inept. Suppose we assume that most people on the planet would like to live in peace and contentment, fed

and sheltered, in collaboration and with concern for others. It is evident that the network of sovereign states cannot give expression to these hopes. Rulers are paranoid and their administrations are corrupt in all their various ways: it

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is not systemically eignty to another, its own parts. The system is with us problem language, about: armament/

possible that any nation state will voluntarily yield any degree of soveror to the total system because that can be manifested only as a subset of stream of wholly predictable problems that flows out of this inoperative all the time. As usual, the world is condemned to discuss them in the which reifies and entrenches the dichotomies that the problem is all disarmament at the head of a very long list.

Is anyone speaking the metalanguage that makes all of this exceedingly dangerous

absurdity an irrelevance? Of course. They are the majority of planetary citizens whom we supposed wish to live in peace and contentment. Their inarticulate aspirations are metalinguistic to the Janguage of sovereign states, and they themselves are the metasystem.

This is not the place to try and express the consequences that ought to follow from this example. However we should note the existence of a movement which tries to embody the

metasystem that already exists.* This is surely the insight that metasystems, being logical constructs, already exist. This is what matters in this as in the earlier examples. The task

is not to preach Utopia, not to hanker after reforms in existing systems that will always be blocked (if they really matter) with all the skill, resources and determination that the status quo can muster. Rather it is to give expressions to metasystems that render the problemgenerating systems irrelevant. There will be new problems no doubt, generated at that level of systemic design. Ah! But metasystems are recursive ... we do not have to be trapped by

our own logics unless we enjoy it, and to know that is the beginning of spiritual progress. We have technologies now that are capable of linking all the world’s peoples in a network which I have called the Technosphere following on the Geosphere and Biosphere (and before reaching Teilhard’s Noosphere). The term is meant to convey the pervasiveness, rather than the point-to-point nature, of communications. So the metasystem even has its own technology to hand. What is left is the ability of folk to see the point. It can happen only by the laborious process of rethinking, of changing paradigms. May I commend this book to its readers for its endeavour to work through the ‘method of meta’ in the various ways of its many authors, thereby provoking new insights and challenging stale beliefs. So far our practice has been to try and solve a societal problem within

the system that generated it, using the language that defines the system to be as it is—and not otherwise. The solutions therefore have one thing in common. They do not work. References

1. McCulloch, W. S. Embodiments of Mind. MIT, MA, 1965. 2. Beer, S. discussion of “Two Theorems of Statistical Separability in the Perceptron’ in Mechanisation of Thought Processes, National Physical Laboratory, HMSO, 1959. 3. Spencer-Brown, G . Laws of Form. Allen and Unwin, 1969. 4. World Service Authority, 1012 14th Street, N.W. Washington D.C. 20005, U.S.A.

chapter 15

out Flat Earths

I ADDRESS YOU on this important and joyous day on the Nature of Unreality. Unreality I define as the world in which we consider that we live. And I explain. It is a recent development in human understanding to accept that our Earth is roughly spherical. Not so long ago, most people believed it to be FLAT. Indeed, the Flat Earth Society had a considerable membership—until the Russian satellite Sputnik went aloft. What is the cosmic situation today?

Let’s look at the heavens. Surely that is the real universe out there, with the Constellation Orion (one of the two

that I can recognize) marching across the sky. But consider: + The light we see reflected from the moon took little more that a second to get to us; « but the light we recognize as Jupiter is already seven hours old. o The Orion Nebula appears as it used to be—1500 years ago; » while the Megallanic Cloud Galaxies, which we can see without a telescope, looked like that once ... but that was 200,000 years ago. The night sky looks to us like a snapshot—a simultaneous presence of reality. In fact, what we see represents a slice through time.

Convocation Address to Concordia University on receiving the degree of Doctor of Laws (honoris causa), 9 June 1988. Original version, previously unpublished.

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The Universe out there is absolutely not as it appears—never was—never will be. It is

manifest unreality. That is, if you can ever find it. » Do you think that you new graduates could overcome your embarrassment at

being asked to join in a moment of audience participation? » Would you please point to the stars. Let the record show how many hands are pointing to the ceiling! We just agreed that the Earth is not flat. The stars are in whatever direction that anyone cares to point. But ... We are stuck with an acceptable illusion of an unrecognized unreality. Let’s bring that—literally—down to Earth. « Our planet is our home. It has finite resources. « We are systematically destroying Gaia, our Mother, Earth, and all her species—at the rate of many-a-day. » Everyone here knows this well-researched reality. But in our Unreality we find ourselves demanding more ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ for despoliation o —and to support the military-industrial complex that points the road to Armageddon. o It is because this unreal world is our familiar world, and people do not have the insight the courage

the ability the zeal to question and confront it. We do not allow ourselves to dwell on facts of war, of famine, of torture. It is not con-

ceivable, in our Unreality, that 40,000 children are actually dying every day. As Buddhists know, there are burdens of common suffering that not everyone is able to bear. We live in Unreality instead.

o Let’s take a local example: The facts of acid rain are clear enough, but the unreality of practical politics has firm hold. So: the maple sugar industry in this Province is dying now, and soon it will be dead— before the problem is addressed to scale on the unreal calendars that politicians use.

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So how can each of us take responsibility for the models of unreality in which we live?

They are prisons from which we can burst. I’'m afraid that the first of these prisons is the education that we have received. It will be rough on brand new graduates—and on their worthy teachers!—to hear that said. But not only technology is changing fast; so too are its validating sciences. We are subject not only to amazing socio-political change, but to underlying philosophic change as well. « Philosophy has been fitfully asleep for some 200 hundred years; but — in liaison with a fast-evolving physics, - and an adolescent neurocybernetics, [ expect a phenomenal breakthrough on the philosophic front by the turn of the century. Look especially for revelations on the epistemology of the SELF-AWARE. So I want to congratulate you all on gown and hood—not because of past achievements that they represent, but because you have earned the rights and duties of updating the models that are the best that we can teach today. Now what about the problems that this responsibility unfoldst Why should it be so difficult to ‘update models’ (as I put it)—which sounds like simply ‘keeping abreast of your field’? Oh no, it is not just a question of models of Unreality. It is a question of paradigm. I define a paradigm as a model that exhibits a closed logic. It means that our attempts to

break out of a fixed pattern of thinking are constantly defeated—by running headlong into our own premises. Here is a delicate example:

+ A small boy came up to me. He looked pointedly at my beard and said: ‘Were you in Noah’s Ark?’ I repudiated the suggestion.

‘Ther’, he said, ‘why weren’t you drowned?’ I have worked in eighteen countries now. If you do that, watch out for cultural distinc-

tions—for different models of society, for difficult techniques of political adroitness. But look out the more for PARADIGMS

that RESIST CHANGE.

They are common

to all humanity. » ‘We cannot do as you propose, because our society is corrupt.’ After you have heard this eighteen times, you come to realise that all societies are corrupt—including those who feel free to lecture the others. They are constitutional liars and hypocrites as well. The universal paradigm this represents is one which says:

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About Flat Earths

+ ‘We cannot do as you propose because—you don’t understand—that’s not how we do it It is the Noah’s Ark Syndrome. IF YOU WANT TO CREATE CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them. Dangerous work. Out of my eighteen countries, I choose my homeland Britain to make what I am saying exact.

The Unreality in which people live is a newly prosperous, booming economy. The reality is that since 1979 the numbers living below the Poverty Line have increased by 85 per cent. So today one third of British people subsist below Poverty.

What then has been done about that? Money has been taken out of social welfare at a catastrophic rate, and dispensed to the rich in tax rebates. I am often asked why this has not yet led to revolution. Well: two thirds of the people are not in poverty, and the top half are doing very well indeed. All that’s left is to find a way to sustain belief, at home

and abroad, in the Unreality

of Success. Easy: + The measure of Poverty has been officially abolished;

« there will be no comparable statistics about which to complain after this year. Let us celebrate the fact that the vital place in which to initiate change, to break the prison walls, to destroy paradigms, and question models, is a private place where it can certainly be done. « It is within your own spirit; o It is within your own understanding;

o It is within your love for this miraculous life. Withdraw from the Unreality we live, and find reality itself. If you can find it within, then you have a chance to project it to others and the world. Not otherwise.

That has been said by every great spiritual teacher ... But to renew that quest, consciously, every day, and to question paradigms at every

turn, is a peculiarly modern need. And to embrace that challenge is perhaps more difficult for the older among us than for the young.

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First, you have to resign publicly from the Flat Earth Society. That might mean resigning, as it has for me on several occasions, from some prestigious and lucrative affiliations. « It’s not good going on with paradigmatic nonsense—claiming to be a liberal —if being liberal means conceding the right to a contrary opinion—on the understanding that it is absurd. o It’s no good going on with paradigmatic nonsense—if it involves a compromise that evades the issue (that will return next year), by calling that compromise ‘a victory for common-sense’. « It’s no good nominating as ‘principles’ a morality that simply determines that I am right and you are wrong— « and calling ‘facts’ those observations of the world that validate one’s “principles’. Yes, qualifications are fine, even if they need to be updated. But you cannot sit for a degree called CONTRAPARADIGM. There are no qualifications in Insight, Courage, Ability or Zeal. And you, and I, are going to need all four. The acronym for Insight, Courage, Ability and Zeal is ICAZ. And I wish it were more memorable! + (Someone doing this Convocation job at Yale spoke for twenty minutes each on Y for Youth, A for Achievement, L for Leadership, and E for Endeavour. When he finally sat down, one mother turned to her spouse and said: ‘Thank God we didn’t send the kids to the Massachusets Institute of Technology.”) I have tried to steer you instead towards ICAZ and the inner strength. It’s all you've got in the end. I said at the start that we deal in Unreality, that we are stuck with Hlusions. In his book of that name Richard Bach says this: “The simplest questions are the most profound. o « « «

Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing?

Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change.’ Thank you.

chapter 16

Tle

Identity of Organizations

THIRTY YEARS ago I witnessed a verbal onslaught on the venerable philosopher Bertrand Russell by an uncouth newspaper reporter from the tabloid press. ‘Lord Russell, he yelled, ‘what has all this intellectual stuff got to do with the practical man?’ Russell replied urbanely: T define the practical man as the man who has no idea what to do in practice’ Since that day there has been a vast expansion in management training and in the literature available to managers. We may study the curricula at the business schools, and browse in the management sections of bookstores. The observable trend is alarming. Problems are becoming more and more intractable, because the systems to be managed are larger and more interactive as the years pass. Environmental management is an outstanding example. The scientific facts are established: but Russell’s practical man is everywhere in charge, and nothing happens—nothing, that is, on a scale that would count as having real bearing on the issues involved. How can this be? The evidence is that as the problems become worse and more complicated, the approach to management becomes more and

more reductionist and simplistic. We have had pop art, and we have had pop music. It seems that the age of pop management has dawned. Once-reputable publishers are gleefully producing best sellers written at a level of appeal that in another genre would be called pornographic. They titillate; and it seems that managers love it. But while pop art and pop music have something to offer in their own right, in that they are not merely simplifications of classical Prologue to Identidad de las organizaciones, invariancia y cambio,

by Jorge Etkin and Leonardo Schvarstein, Paidos, Buenos Aires 1989. Previously unpublished in English.

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works, pop management is dangerously misleading—because it sets out to make a difficult job look easy. We have the books that deal with trends, or the future made simple. Then there are the books that offer the secrets of excellence, or management by slogan. A particularly unpleasing example argues that by attending to goals, praise, and blame, each in one-minute outbursts at ‘subordinates, everything may be accomplished. This is management by operant conditioning: and the book’s discussion of the ethics involved would disgrace a secondary school debating society. Obviously it is alarming that we have a generation of managers who are prepared to go along with all this—a blend of nonsense and fantasy and reassurance. But the issue of this current managerial culture is raised here for two much deeper reasons. Management by its nature is the profession of regulation. Science knows a lot about regulatory systems: in particular, we may encapsulate this knowledge under the heading of cybernetics. There we may find a rigorously argued mathematical principle known after its discoverers as the Conant- Ashby theorem. This states that a regulator is only as good as the model it contains of whatever it is that has to be regulated. So, if we have a thermostat in the

house, let’s say, we need to measure the house’s temperature continuously. If there is only one thermometer, and we put it in the kitchen or the cellar, we do not have a very effective representation of ‘the house. The thermostat will be ‘misled into thinking’ that the house as a whole is much warmer or colder than in general it is. So people often put the thermometer in the hallway. That may give an approximation to the mean temperature, but it is still not an adequate representation of the house. Thus, if the owners can afford it, there may well be thermometers in every room. In that case, please note, they will be useless unless there are thermostats (that is, actual on/off switches) in every room as well. The regulator now contains a workable model of the house itself. Like all good theorems, Conant-Ashby is rather obvious once you think it through. And yet, managers constantly try to operate without its wisdom. For instance, some try to

manage a complicated business through the model called the balance sheet, and this model is not adequate. It does not have requisite variety, to use the terminology of Ashby’s Law

from which the theorem was derived. Consider as an example of what happens in practice—and to Russell’s ‘practical man’ at that—the issue of centralization. Expensive consultants arrive in an organization and argue that it needs to be centralized. A central buying department, they say, could make a much better deal for the purchase of 20,000 ballpoint pens than can twenty separate buy-

ers ordering 1,000 each. And so on. When all this has been accomplished, the next firm of expensive consultants arrives to explain that over-centralization has rendered the company bureaucratic and insensitive to local needs. Many of us have watched such swings occur

back and forth: the arguments are based upon a regulatory model which is chronically over-simplified—much as is this brief commentary on the experience! And yet the reality

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is that managers, and ministers too, grasp at ‘solutions’ which have no better or more credible name than fads. The balance between centralized and decentralized regulation in a viable system is complicated and subtle. After all, if we human beings were centralized, we should have to remember to tell our hearts to beat. The concentration required to absorb this paragraph would result in our demise. So we need an autonomous nervous system to deal with such matters as blood supply and respiration when we are concentrating on other matters—and even when we are actually asleep. Conversely, if the autonomic nervous system had full control, we could not exert the volitional power to take a deep breath and run for a bus. But the interplay goes on. If the running overtaxes us, another autonomous element will override the conscious volition: we shall feel exhausted, cramped and dizzy—and ‘decide’ to let the bus go without us. What is it about our physiological selves that gets these answers right? For a start, the Conant-Ashby theorem assures us that our internal regulatory system is able to reflect the whole complexity of what we are in the full context of what we do. This fact does not really surprise us: in a sense what we are is our regulatory system, and what we do is its product. I am living in that my heart beats: I am thinking in that my brain is awake. It is not just that the regulator has a good model of me—the one to be regulated: I simply cannot separate the two facets of my integrated self-hood. It is like striding down the road, gazing around, and saying: ‘What a marvellous map this is! Every tree, every bush, even each blade of grass is marked. The systems to which I am drawing attention are self-referential. This property is wholly remarkable. It means that there are systems that define themselves as they go along. They iterate their own identity. And they are self-organizing because the reiteration of identity is a continuous creative act that has to be directed by the regulatory blueprint to which the Conant-Ashby theorem attests. We are used to this idea by now at the cytological level of organization. Every one of the body’s cells—to whatever specialized function it is directed, as blood, as muscle, as liver, as neuron—contains the unique DNA protein that characterizes the individual person. We are moreover used to the agglomeration of cells that constitute that person’s identity itself. Thus, although the individual cells are replaced in cycles of about seven years, the relationships between those elements are preserved throughout life. We gradually come to look older, but we remain recognizably ourselves. It has to be acknowledged at this point in the discussion that many people disagree with the contention that what is true of cells and of integral human beings can also apply to social organizations. However, I believe this to be the case. Organizations do iterate their own identity: they are self-referential and self-organizing. Oxford University is different from Cambridge University—and not simply because it is easy to distinguish between Balliol

and Girton as buildings. A thousand years of identity iteration has confirmed a character,

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a flavour, a way of doing things, of very high variety indeed. We casually call all this the maintenance of tradition. But it is more than that, because it includes the ability to learn— as an institution—and thence to adapt, and thence to evolve.

Please bear with this allegation for a moment while the initial statement about pop management and its fads is completed by the second of the two points I promised to make.

It answers the question why, if the managerial culture is as childish and unreflecting as its regulatory models and literary tastes entail, organizations ever manage to survive at all. The answer says that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that the system is primarily self-organizing. In Cybernetics and Management, written in 1958, I put forward the powerful distinction between processes which submit to regulatory procedures that can be circumvented, and those which are regulated by the very act of going out of control. The Watt steam engine governor is the prototypical example of such an intrinsic controller, while the governor of a prison stands for the manager whose variables (namely convicts) may well go out of control (and even vanish) before the regulatory procedure even discovers the fact. Systems exhibiting intrinsic control in this sense are self-controlling; and therefore what the manager does (or has no idea what to do in practice) is of marginal importance to the outcome. This at first sounds outrageous. We are all able to name managers and ministers who take a new and different stand, who seem to embody a thrust to radical change. But have they ever wholly redesigned the regulatory machinery and its included model of the system under control? It seems that they have not. So the systemic regulator changes merely the emphasis of the systemic parameters within the existing regulatory paradigm, and announces radical change.

Consider even extreme cases, in a democracy, the ultimate sanction of the law is violence; but with any luck, it is not much in evidence. Suppose a military coup. The potential violence becomes actual, and the populace lives in fear. But the infrastructure of the

country continues as before. If there was no iron, even a dictatorship does not start making steel. If there was viniculture, even a dictatorship does not suppress wine-making. Education continues, health practices continue, and so on. Please do not misunderstand: the life experience of people may change utterly. For example, education and health may be

denied to the poor, and become the privilege of the well-to-do. But what is going on? The high-variety, self-organizing societary identity that calls itself by this country’s name is still there; and it is learning to cope with new edicts, adapting to them, and quite typically circumventing many, often at great risk to individual patriots who become auto-immunity agents to preserve this national identity. The notorious difficulty that reformers of the best intentions experience in seeking to induce organizational change derives from the same self-referential strength that renders pop management nugatory. The power of intrinsic controllers determines the cybernetics

of self-organization, made manifest in a surviving identity.

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The nature and force of self-reference is difficult indeed for minds attuned to reductionist science, not to mention ‘bottom line’ management to grasp. The former has understood the parts of man and of matter, in intricate detail, but has lost the holistic vision of

both. The latter has understood that money is a constraint on aggrandizement, but does not know the scope of the system in either space or time whose bottom line will put a cap on greed, and has almost wrecked the planet as a result. Let us for a moment seek a feeling for the self-referential, which frightens us in our contemporary conventions by its seemingly circular terminology. Very recent thinking arising from cognitive psychology, the analysis of the role of language, hermeneutics, and the focus of attention known as artificial intelligence, has led to some powerful insights. ‘We are what we think. All that we are arises from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world’ This quotation might easily have come from the latest work just mentioned. It is a selfreferential statement, which (maybe) avoids the traps set in the eighteenth century by British empiricism—those traps which can easily swallow everything but the self itself in solipsism. But the quotation is not from Berkeley, California, and not from Berkeley, the Bishop. These three lines are the opening lines of the Dhammapada, the teachings of Buddha, who lived from 563 to 483 BCE. I turn to the Sanskrit. Nobody knows how old are the Upanishads, the Vedic scriptures: JdHfar pronounced tattwamasi, is a crucial utterance. It says: that you are. Savour the

context, from the Chandogya Upanishad: “That subtle essence which is the self of this entire world, THAT is the real. THAT is the self.

THAT you are’ Coming to what we know as ‘modern’ philosophy, let us try to contemplate the monadology of Leibniz in the light of those early teachings. The monad was conceived as entirely self-referential, it was closed on itself, it had ‘no windows. No wonder that the monadology has been so little understood, since Leibniz springs from the tradition of Continental Rationalism and shares the same philosophical breath as Descartes and Spinoza. It is not generally noted that Leibniz made profound study of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching.

Can these oriental hints and subtleties, as the Westerner regards them at best, be brought home in our contemporary ambiance? Heinz von Foerster, that most scholarly yet innovative man (who was one of the founders of cybernetics), has demonstrated so in

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various mathematical ways. Always, however, he is showing how values which when operated upon, compute themselves. These are the mathematical eigenvalues (and eigen means self) that suggest how it is that the brain becomes self-aware. Again we note a circularity which has ontological significance, and is not simply the logical fallacy we heard about at school. Then, still talking of ‘getting the feel’ for self-reference, here is the simplest formalization that can be imagined. It concerns the structure and the meaning of propositions about the system we call an organization. Clearly these are interdependent. We may declare that they are (different) functions of each other. So where the meaning m is expressed as m = f (s) and the structure s is expressed as s = f* (m) we may substitute for = in the second expression as s = f* (£ (s) ). Structure has become a self-referential recursion of itself, and the now isolated concept

of meaning has altogether disappeared! And speaking of what is contemporaneous: you will find the authors’ original from which this example is adapted here in this book. It is well to face up to our disquiets about circularity in self-reference. Maybe you recall (some version of) this demonstration: Leta=b=1 Then a? = ab a?-b’=ab-b? (a+b){(a-b)=b(a-b) a+b=>b 2=1

The problem here of course is not that we have defined identities as functions of each other, but that we have defined them as each other. The result is that when one is subtracted from the other, no identity remains—or, as we say arithmetically—‘we divided both sides by zero. But because this makes the last two lines a mistake, it does not follow that the missing m for meaning is a mistake. The point on which to reflect is whether it makes m (or alternatively s) an illusion, so that what we were discussing is simply that—or as some usages run, ‘suchness’ Suchness, which I suppose is a word for indivisible identity, is a topic for meditation

rather than analysis. Analysis requires that we break a topic down—and behold, it often seems to break down as a dichotomy, so that we have a pair of polar opposites. ‘Order and disorder, stability and instability, certainty and uncertainty (among others) coexist simultaneously and antagonistically’ declare the authors. So do they undermine each other’s identity, like a and b, or somehow complement each other, like m and s? Here is the answer: “These pairs imply different ways of acting and thinking which do not eliminate each other, but are associated in a symbiotic way. Fine: what is more, symbiosis is a perfect example

of self-organization.

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It has been known for years that the 10,000 million neurons that constitute the brain are analogue devices with digitized outputs. That is to say that the vast confusion of dendrites which attaches to a neuron each delivers a stream of either excitatory or inhibitory impulses (i.e. binary digital), and that the complex chemistry of the neuron then has to determine (i.e. analogically) whether its axon should fire or not (i.e. binary digital again). Consider then: a machine that thus transmits all of its signals in binary code might have to be so structured that it automatically dichotomizes its output. (I believed I had a mathematical proof of this at one time, but in more than thirty years have failed to make it stick.) Be that as it may, it is characteristic of human affairs that outputs are dichotomized, and that in practice it is hard to introduce a tertium quid. For example, when a political arena

is characterized as the Left against the Right, those seeking to hold middle ground will be called a Leftist by the Right, and Rightist by the Left, so that they find it impossible to maintain identity. However, a middle ground exists, not because a territory has been allocated to the illusory identity, but because most people are not extremists. So although they may wear the conventional Left or Right party colours, they in fact wander about in the middle ground themselves. Thus it comes about that instead of these polar opposites being (as the scholastics would have said) logical contradictories, or (as the Hegelians would have said) dialectic

contraries, they are nominated in this book as ‘dialogical relationships. With a logical contradiction, you assert one of the pair and deny the other. With a dialectical contrariety, you assert a thesis and an antithesis, and expect a higher synthesis. But our authors take a dialogical relationship to express a symbiotic dualism within the organizational reality. They cite knowledge/ignorance as a dialogical pair within a school. ‘How a teacher behaves towards his pupil’s ignorance is a structural manifestation of the pair’ So, we might add, is

his behaviour towards his pupil’s knowledge, and so is the pupil’s behaviour towards both the teacher’s knowledge and ignorance, the last of these four relationships having special importance. In fact the authors illustrate how many sets of dialogical pairs may intersect in any institutional identity: how rich that interaction proves to be. It will not reveal itself to pop management occultism, nor can its frailties be succoured by simplistic fads. In sum, we observe an organizational identity, having an autonomous

structure co-

terminous with a subjective meaning, which is complex in itself because it feeds upon complexity, and which is self-organizing because it computes itself instead of reacting to external stimuli. All this is just as well, if its ‘manager’ is a Russellian Practical Man. >

Now it is all very well for the writer of a Preface to sit comfortably by a lake in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec, and to enjoy a book. He formulates some allegations; he digs into some profound issues; he reflects on the philosophic importance of it all; he fulminates against the inadequacies of a managerial culture that has no ostensible understanding

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of Organizational Identity, its Invariance and Change. He goes indoors, and painstakingly

writes the whole thing down. When is the author of the Preface detail how it all works; in particular, how can Impractical Man in practice? Well, the author of the Preface is in luck. The book This book is an expository triumph. It takes ideas that are

going to explain in precise have some idea what to do does all that for him. difficult to grasp, because

they dare to range beyond the trivial pursuits of our pop-management culture, and makes

them plain. We learn what makes an organization itself, and how it does it. We understand concepts of autonomy and self-organization, which do not submit the survival of identity either to the impact of perturbations and assaults from outside, or to the whims of managerial ignorance within. Suppose that someone swept the pop-management manuals and cookbooks off their shelves into one pan of a scale and placed this book in the other pan. The machine has to weigh their relative effect. Then I would say that it would take twice as much effort to read

this book than all the others put together—and be ten times as rewarding. Auberge du Coq de Montagne Mont Tremblant Quebec

Photo: David Whittaker

June 1988

chapter 17 (

am the Emperor—and [ Want Dumplings’

FERDINAND I reigned in the Vienna of the 1840s. It is recorded that he issued only one coherent order. It was: ‘T am the Emperor—and I want dumplings. Despite much published evidence to the contrary, operational research (OR) people are primarily—as they certainly were historically—problem solvers, rather than mathematical masturbators. What would you have done, had you been the Lord High Chancellor for OR in Vienna to the Emperor at that moment?

Would you have undertaken a product-mix type of linear program to discover the optimal proportions of flour and suet and worked out the answers on your nice new Arithometer (courtesy of Thomas de Colmar)? Would you, having a master’s dissertation to consider, have devised a way to include small but variable quantities of baking powder in the equation? Or, with a doctoral thesis in the balance, would you have thought of adding in a complicated mix of aromatic herbs?

But had you been a ‘leader in the field, you might have got away with enlarging your study to include the Emperor’s other weaknesses and have invented cost-benefit analysis within about five years. I doubt that, though. To achieve this breakthrough you would have needed a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council: they would have turned you down, because they would have had no peer research on Dumplings for Emperors on

Banquet Address to the Silver Jubilee Meeting on Operational Research and the Social

Sciences, Queen’s College, Cambridge, 12 April, 1989. First published in Systems Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1989. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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file. (It has always seemed to me a triumph of common sense not to fritter funds away on topics that do not already exist.) So much for the nitty-gritty problems that are second nature to OR practitioners. But we are also professionals, not mere academics; and that fact raises matters of serious purport. In the first place, suppose that you knew full well what is the Emperor’s medical condition. You calculate, obviously by Bayesian statistics, that one more dish of dumplings might lead to the Emperor’s demise. Naturally, you do not say ‘cause’ the demise, a phrase that leads to anarchy in statistical circles, although you may footnote a reference to the lethality of a surfeit of lampreys on a comparable occasion. Well, I can tell you that such matters of professional ethics can really get in the way of scientific problem-solving in the human domain. I have known people who assert that you cannot even have scientific problem-solving in the human domain. If you point to cases where problems of this sort have indeed been so solved, such people may admonish you that (and I am quoting from experience—what else is there?) ‘the very notion of a fact is a positivist fallacy Actually, of course, this kind of bickering is intended to achieve only theoretical ends: such as promotion, or tenure, or another contract, or your replacement as the Emperor’s Lord High Chancellor for OR by the bicker-person. There is a much deeper ethical issue lurking in the background, and it is this. Maybe you regard dumplings as morally reprehensible. Processed dumplings probably deplete the ozone layer, after all. Or maybe it was that they are associated (note again my statistical delicacy) with haemorrhoids—and they are not so delicate, let’s face it. What are you supposed to do now—resign?

Only the most mature and sophisticated among us will know how to cut the knot of this confusion of moral imperatives, ethical double-binds, mathematical labyrinths, and practical glitches. I propose to you the devastatingly insightful conclusion. ‘Bring the old devil lots of dumplings, p.d.q” I have to tell you that this advice really works, whereas arguments about morality, about ethics, about mathematics, and about on-the-ground snags really do not work. Two caveats follow. If you really do believe in good conscience that dumplings are morally reprehensible, leave the Emperor’s service—emigrate, for instance, to Canada. But if

you do not have this problem, just make sure you leave your devastatingly insightful conclusion until the deadline, let’s say the hors doeuvre before the dumplings are or are not coming on. Only brilliant intellects working through the night until their heuristics are sweating algorithms can come up with stuff like this—if, that is to say, they expect to get paid for it. Well, I have really stressed your powers of simulation, given that you do not have your

hardware with you, your software is by now soggy, and heaven knows what happened to your systemic underware. Besides, all this business about Vienna was all over 150 years

ago. Tam the Emperor—and I want dumplings’ indeed. It’s all quite different now, and this is Britain.

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‘T believe, the present Prime Minister has said ‘that we can take Britain through to the preeminence and pride which is hers by right.? Anyone for dumplings? If so, shout hooray, move six squares forward, and collect a knighthood. If this kind of arrogant nonsense in the societary domain is to be replaced by the scientifically oriented problem-solving capability that we OR people are supposed to purvey, I would ask your attention to a three-point plan:

First, a policy research orientation and facility is vital. We need operational research teams of outstanding ability working on problems of decision and control at the national level. Because these problems are usually discussed in economic terms, they are current-

ly assumed to be purely economic problems: but they are not. Interdisciplinary scientific teams are needed to evaluate issues subject to conflicting criteria. + Secondly, a new kind of administration is required that can encompass these advanced methods of management. The tradition of cultivated minds is inadequate to cope with the needed quantification of value judgments and with large scale computer operations. « Third, we need ministers who can demand and use these facilities in resolving problems. Surely we have had enough of ministerial sermons? Ministers should be acting, not preaching: explaining to us the point of their actions in a way that shows that the hard work has been done. The answers to complex modern problems will not strike a minister as he sits in the bath, just because he is holding the Queen’s Seal. Nor can those answers be picked up as bright ideas on American tours. I commend my plan to you, the readers of Systems Practice, and the British Nation. But I must give you its provenance, like the honest fellow I am. The three-point plan above is extracted from a lead letter that I wrote to The Times

newspaper, published at the Operational Research and Social Sciences Conference a quarter of a century ago: on Tuesday 15 September 1964. I can stick by it now. The practice of international consultancy does, I recognize, tend one to paranoia. But I

do find it amusing, in the light of recent revelations about Harold Wilson’s tenure of Downing Street, that the Manchester Business School librarians could not trace this letter and were assured by The Times newspaper that it had never been published. Having worked in eighteen countries, often at moments of greater tension for them, I know very well that history gets rewritten. In my days with Allende in Chile, it was often rewritten between my

leaving a government office in Santiago and confronting newspaper headlines—and even photographs, wrongly captioned—in London twenty hours later. In fact my letter to The Times was published; as discovered for this occasion by researchers at York University in Ontario: you may inspect a photocopy if you wish. I thank them. But what of the letter? It had been written in support of Mr Wilson’s famous pledge in his ‘Scarborough speech’ to harness the white-hot heat of modern technology. The letter

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argued that, since no other party appeared to know that any kind of technological change at all was in process, we ought to chance it with the Labour Party. We did chance it—but

not for long. Lord Wilson forgot the way back to Scarborough. As far as the conference was concerned, I discovered how many Operational Researchers stood to the right—not even of Genghis Khan—but of Tony Benn himself. What was my allegory about dumplings really meant to say in genuine OR language? I give you this in the words

of our Australian

colleague on the social scene, John Mat-

thews.? There is such a thing as an integration principle. It says that integration is a mathematical process whereby a picture is built of a whole function, or relation, from its moving point

of change: that is, this is inverse differentiation. Similarly, a change in the social order can best be achieved by integrating local changes—where the change is already occurring at the wish of the parties involved.

And so I say, don't work with dumplings if you find them immoral. And if you can’t find the Emperor whose demand for dumplings is acceptable to you, then desist. But if you have the right Emperor, with acceptable dumplings, then off you go to help him. ‘Dear heaven, people often say to me, and often far more intemperately than that, ‘Don’'t you know that science is objective? Don’t you know that you must not be personally involved in your work?’ First I reply, “‘Where have you been since Heisenberg? “Objective”? On the contrary, science is as subjective as it comes, for science defines the universe in its own image. Any-

thing, however potent and however powerfully attested, that does not fit our beloved science’s narcissistic self-image is superstition, or crooked, or ... shall I sum up the absurdities? ... “pinko”. Why on earth do you think that President Nixon declared, “What are our schools for—if not indoctrination against Communism?”

So much for the myth of objectivity. My reply to the question about my involvement in my work is of an opposite flavour. I am not involved in my work—not because I am supposed to be objective, and certainly not because I do not care for the people affected in the outcome. In fact, my care for them will likely be the death of me, one way or another. And that in turn may be because I do not take refuge in academic license. The reason for my lack of involvement is something that I learned from the Bhagavad-Gita: that ego involvement in success is wholly improper. Our actions ought to be correct so far as we can judge them. The outcome of those actions should not concern us at all, one way or the other, in the egoistic domain. That is the Eastern ideal; that I accept; it is the philosophy of non-attachment. God help anyone, probably enough a politician (or an OR-political time server?), who has an egoistic attachment to his outcomes.

Salvador Allende, whom I mentioned earlier, did not have an egoistic attachment to his outcomes. He let himself be killed. In saying that he was not an egoist, [ do not deny that he was an egotist: that is merely the price one pays for having a public identity. In entering

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the political arena, which one does in the act of deploying science toward societary goals, the ethical issue must be uppermost. Maybe you also will be killed; so let that not be accidental. But as I watch the troop of ‘experts’ who cavort around the world’s capital cities, I see very little ethical commitment. That therefore seems to me an abuse of the name of science, as I described it; and it is an abuse of the honored status of professional, if anyone can recognize it.

My Chilean work was fifteen years ago. I have told the story at length in the last five chapters of the second edition of Brain of the Firm,* which, interestingly enough, has just come out in Russian. I mentioned just now how that history was rewritten. It could be that younger people here today do not know that Dr Kissinger used Allende’s Chile as an experiment in what he called ‘destabilization] although the whole story is thankfully documented in hearings before the United States House of Representatives.® They tell the truth, but they do not happen to quote Dr Kissinger’s statement that ‘power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. And it is from another source® that I can tell you what the United States Ambassador to Chile said to then-President Eduardo Frei, when Salvador Allende was democratically elected. I quote: ‘Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty’ What a success the

United States made I was not there, to Allende ten days erals in the City of

of that policy. I was there. however, on that crucial day, 11 September 1973, having said goodbye before. In fact I was talking to Mr Jeremy Thorpe and his fellow LibLondon about Chilean needs. When I left the meeting place it was to

confront a newspaper plaque saying ‘Allende Assassinated’

That night I sent a telegram to the Foreign Secretary, begging him not to recognize the terrorist insurrection of General Pinochet that had been engineered by the CIA. Sir Alec Douglas-Home did not reply, except by making us the first country in the world to recognize Pinochet the next day. Lord Hume has recorded that someone once sent him a telegram, and I wish that I could say that it was mine. It said: “To hell with you. Offensive letter follows. Well now I would like to tell you about the basic principles that lie behind my recent endeavours—although they are not much different from those that I advocated in Chile. This refers first to Mexico in 1982/1983, when I responded to the then-Minister of Planning, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is now his country’s president. Next it refers to Proyecto Urucib in 1986/1987, when I co directed a government project for President Sanguinetti in Uruguay. Finally, it refers to last year’s work, and with any luck this year’s too, for President Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela—where times are indeed hard, thanks this time to the IMF rather than the CIA, although I cannot tell you how anyone on the receiving end is supposed to know the difference. The first affront that I offer to inherited wisdom is to say how idiotic it must be to pay armies of econometricians good money to forecast ... where we are now. On the average,

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our data are nine months out of date. When Lord Wilson, whom I have already mentioned,

was President of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), he boasted how he and Sir Claus Moser had brought the lag down that far. When on the night of his presidential address to the RSS, I brought him fraternal greetings from Salvador Allende, he asked me what I was doing in Chile. I told him that I had installed a cybernetic system whereby the President was guaranteed that the information on which he had to base socioeconomic decisions would never be more than twenty-four hours old. To this Harold Wilson, as he then was, replied, TJolly good. I have never fathomed the meaning of this reply, because it is somewhat ambiguous. But of course we have the technology to report information instantaneously—if we know

how to select it, how to collect it, and how to handle it. We can do so, once we give up the nonsensical ideal of massive databases that cannot be made accessible—because the rules that govern access gradually outweigh the space given to the storage of the data themselves.

[ am talking about real-time data, and [ am talking about statistical filtration on-line. Let me lend a little factual credibility to what I have argued over forty years. President Sanguinetti was overjoyed by the contention that properly filtered real-time data would help him govern his country. But he was ahead of me. He showed me the reports that he

received about all the usual matters—and I ought to say publicly that these reports are models of their kind. The problem was only that they were out of date, as all such data always are. And so the President had inaugurated a real-time reporting system of his own. Government machinery could not crank out the state of the deficit, of money supply, and all that stuff in the short term—nobody can. And so the President had picked out simple measures: the daily consumption of milk, the number of bus tickets issued day by day, and so on. He demanded these diurnal figures, and he got them, of course. ‘T am the Emperor’, please remember; but please also note that these are dumplings of enormous value, se-

lected by an insightful man. My partner and I came into his office one day, and he was jubilant about the morning newspaper. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked. In fact we had. Splashed across the headlines

was a statement of enormous economic progress—a step function, no less. We had seen it. The President explained that the bureaucratic machinery had at last caught up with the success of his program. It had all actually happened, he said, six months before. Therefore, he continued, his whole civilian (please note) government had been under threat for six

months without reason. No wonder that he thought well of my arguments for real-time. I was most content to hear it. My partner, Dr Leonard, however, had a very shrewd question to ask: ‘Excuse me. But if your information system did not deliver this news until six months later, may I ask how you knew about it at the time?’ President Sanguinetti

laughed and pulled across the table the dumplings for which he had asked his staff—milk consumption, bus tickets, and so on. There was a graph of the daily—I mean real-time— consumption of electricity. Six months ago it had taken a huge leap, and that advance had

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been maintained ever since. ‘T knew that the economy was flourishing, said the President, ‘because of this change. And I have had to hang on for six months to find success by the system confirmed. That is what I always call a real-time algedonic signal, filtered by the ascending reticular formation of the brain stem. And it does not sound any better in Spanish either. What all of that comes down to is the need to design new measures that will instantly detect incipient instability. First we have to model a process, rather than to record reduc-

tionist tabulations of ancient history. Last year in Venezuela we modelled the processes whereby milk is produced and collected and warehoused and retailed. By taking daily— effectively real-time—data and subjecting all data flows to the statistical scrutiny of a Kalman filter, incipient instability in the distribution system could be detected. We were doing

the same for meat, and maize, and the provision of educational services, as pilot examples. A couple of years earlier, we had done the same job for oil in Uruguay: a critical system, since Montevideo is entirely dependent on imports of oil to run the country. In Chile, long

ago, we had to look to exports of copper, for the inverse reason: Chilean copper accounted for over 90 per cent of hard-currency accrual. So there it is. The recent disaster in Venezuela had to do with incipient instability for sure. Unfortunately the proposed system for Proyecto Cibervenez is so far in a wholly preliminary phase. I want to add two comments to these practical matters. First, the design of regulatory models of process in real time had better take account of the Conant- Ashby theorem. This gives a detailed mathematical proof of something that you might regard as intuitively obvious. ‘Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system’” In other words, a

regulator simply will not respond to incipient instability in a dimension that it has not been designed to recognize. [ have observed that it is becoming fashionable to repudiate Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, of which this theorem is a corollary. The worst one could possibly say about

Ashby’s law is that it is tautologous—but then so is the whole of mathematics, if it is not actually wrong. Recent attacks appear to me totally to misrepresent what Ashby said, and Ross is dead. I have no hesitation in standing in his stead, because his notion of requisite variety has been more useful to my practice than all the free lunches that I have ever eaten put together. Second, and immensely practical, models must become operational at the lowest possible level of dissemination. This is not the place to explain my whole theory of autonomy,? but centralization is anathema to it. Ross Ashby is not the only one in our field to be systematically misrepresented. A new book on the viable system model, by many authors, is due from Wiley this summer,’ and I hope that it will make this situation more clear. Once upon a time I had many, many arguments, in private and in public, and on both radio and television, with a wonderful gentleman, the late Sir Geoffrey Vickers, VC. He was a systems man; he was the very man who devised the devastatingly powerful phrase

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that ‘the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped. But he passionately believed in the reductionist philosophy of science. I could not convince him that after you had taken the radio apart, and accounted for the role of every single component, your inability to find

Bing Crosby’s voice was a systems’ science disaster. There are two aspects of a system that especially repay our study. They both have to do with mathematical invariance. What will happen if someone chops off the stem of the chandelier that is hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles? It is likely to descend. Which of you, meticulous scientists though I am sure that you are, will complain; ‘Hold it, Stafford. That was not a chandelier, it was an apple. And (forgive me, old son) you are no Newton'? We understand invariance in this case, and within prescribed limits, and we call what is going on the Law of Gravity. I think that Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is

the managerial Law of Gravity; and that means that the design of a vast regulatory system, competent (let’s say) to run a country, hangs together through and because of Ashby’s law. Forgive me, Sir Geoffrey, but that is an invariance.

The second invariance has to do with the mathematical concept of recursion. How do you explain recursive number theory to managers and ministers? Well, what is a wall? Lay a course of bricks—that’s straightforward enough. Now erect a wall on top of that. What's the algorithm for building this wall? Lay a course of bricks: now erect a wall on top of that. And so on. Is it not interesting that the residual problem has to do not with building a wall but with how to stop the process? A wall is conceptually two-dimensional. A whole system is like a series of three-dimensional Chinese boxes, or Russian dolls. Each one of these is embedded in a larger version— but the format of the box or doll is the same. Therefore we have another mathematical invariance. So this is another trick I use. And it would be nice if you remembered it next time you hear that I have claimed the impossible. Every device that is devised works right through n levels of invariant systemic recursion, and the # recursive levels are held together by the Law of Recursive Cohesiveness. That’s my law; but of course it derives in turn from Ashby. To put these points another way, I have written a great deal about the need to study the metasystem in which a system under study is embedded. Some people have told me that,

as a result, I seem to be advocating governance from a higher level as a means of solving problems. But I have already told you that the reverse is true. It is simply the case that you cannot have a successful solution to a systemic problem that does not take its embedments into account.

A parallel case of misunderstanding to mine concerns the notion of suboptimization— a common enough term in OR to this day. How many people remember who coined the term, I wonder? It was, or so he told me, Charlie Hitch, then at the Rand Corporation—and

later to be McNamara's Assistant Secretary of Defense. By the time of this conversation, ‘suboptimization’ was a completely pejorative word. It meant, and still does I think, that by optimizing part of a system one had lost the power to optimize the whole thing. But Hitch

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told me that he coined the term to define a methodology for optimizing the whole thing by a systemic resolving of its parts—a mathematical process of decomposition, if you will. Then before consideration of the metasystem, in my methodology, is taken by critics to mean a continuous and automatic ‘appeal to a superior court, let me record what I mean by it myself. Here is a homely example. There are various ways of resolving a little problem within what is nowadays called a ‘relationship. One partner leaves dirty socks lying about the bedroom. The other partner rummages through drawers and leaves them open with garments protruding. Either may be prone, to the other’s discomfiture, to leave the top off the toothpaste tube. What should be done? There may be bickering that results in a deal. Those who are upset may train themselves not to be upset, by perceiving their own reactions as overreactions or as vaguely neurotic. A third solution within the system of the relationship is simply to pick up the other’s socks, to close the other’s drawers, to put the top back on the toothpaste, and to clear the mind of any sense of complaint. Now consider a metasystem of this relationship—which will actually be a ‘superior

court’ if the relationship should break down in divorce. We see with sorrow how people will solemnly list matters as seemingly trivial as these as evidence of incompatibility, if not of cruelty, and cite imagined slights from years before. I recall mention of a failure to serve Brussels sprouts on a special occasion, when they had specifically been requested, from more than twenty years before the papers were filed. Other metasystems than the legal in which these systemic problems used to be embedded consisted of the family and the church, each of which provided a framework which might help in persuading people to ‘cool it’ in such trivial yet potentially lethal matters. Discarding metasystems other than statutory ones has resulted in an absence of context for problem-solving and means that the system must solve the problem internally or submit to legislative metasystem regulation which is probably repugnant. In short, I advocate study of the metasystemic embedment precisely because it enables a social system to understand and accept its own responsibilities. Far from proposing to vest regulatory power in a metasystem, the methodology concludes that regulatory power should always be vested in the system wherein the problem exists, but the chances of resolving it are minimal unless the systemic embedments are taken into account. Consider some consequences of this thinking. What is the meaning of marriage as an institution? It is entirely a question of metasys-

temic sanction. The legal metasystem used to be required essentially to protect the woman’s rights. But her property-owning status, her income-generating status, and her command over her own body have all radically changed. Do we need the legal institution of marriage if it merely defines a method of divorce—and a most unsatisfactory one at that? I answer, no: that merely diminishes the likelihood that the relationship will take the responsibility of problem-solving upon itself. In times of stress a simulation of outcomes is going on, and each party has put the judge into the model as being insightful and wise enough to know

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that I am right. What a recipe for disaster! Besides, a marriage agreement (if that is thought desirable) has requisite variety for the parties concerned, which general legislation has not. What is the theological position? At least in the Catholic and Anglican Communions, marriage is undertaken between two people, not the church. It is a union blessed, not conferred, by the priest. Therefore, unless both parties are fully committed to the social and sexual as well as the eschatological implications of the metasystem, the church marriage is actually counterproductive for the relationship. It is tacitly devolving the responsibility that it ought to accept onto a metasystem which has been made powerless to undertake it by the couple’s own lack of commitment to the church. I do not suppose that the Vatican or the General Synod would accept this analysis; they are alarmed by the secularization of society enough as it is. But good OR on their part would recognize that their regulatory power has

been all but lost because of the dissipation of requisite variety—monotonically decreasing since the middle ages. The internal regulation of the family belongs to the family and its parish priest, where alone the provisions of the Conant- Ashby theorem can be manifested.

It is the ultimate argument in favor of devolution of religious authority. While, as I said, prelates are unlikely to accept my analysis, because they operate at the wrong level of recursion, I know many priests who would. As to your own reactions, and

those of your partners within relationships, I feel I should say that these views are not just put together as a textbook illustration but are based on much heart-searching over many years—in that I have eight grown children and have even given pain by not appearing at a wedding or two as a result. I started with a homely example of my contention, and it soon turned into an explosive issue of general societary relevance. This is indeed what I mean when I talk about the embedment of recursive systems, and why it is nonsense to claim that each social system is unique and ought to be studied in a reductionist spirit. I repeat that all societary regulatory systems begin inside the individual, at least cytologically and neurophysiologically and endocrinologically, then psychologically, and in my own understanding mystically too; and they extend according to cybernetic principles of regulatory processes through many recursions and many dimensions of embedment. Those we know how to examine and measure, which is to say that which today define the scope of science, do not stop short of the global economy; the mystical ones, not even then. If, then, we start again with the individual, and (instead of focusing on his/her ‘relationship’) this time consider his/her role in the State, we do not need to recapitulate the arguments. We have exactly the same process, mutatis mutandis, that [ have just taken your time to analyze. We are exactly in the apple-and-chandelier situation—which (as [ argued) is what science is about. The approach requires a generalized model, and I have already written three books about that.**!° That fourth book, called The Viable System,’ is a commentary by many authors on applications and implications—it is edited by Espejo and Harnden and is due out in July 1989.

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Let us take an example of the individual-in-the-state in this country. By the arguments for devolved responsibility that I used in the case of relationships, we immediately see that the degree of centralization and the denial of autonomy in today’s Britain are pathological. The Government systematically and increasingly denies to the individual, and to the neighbourhood and regional peoples, the autonomy to discharge his and her and their systemic intro-regulatory responsibilities on which stability (in the first place) and learning and adaptation (in the second and third places) depend. Therefore we are actively generating dissipative structures exemplifying turbulence—the natural conditions which the process

we call ‘civilizing’ evolved to contain—by replacing civilization with authorized anarchy— the creed of greed. And it is a short step in this analysis to argue that the containment of authorized anarchy under conditions of turbulence can be only authorized force. ‘It couldn’t happen here’ is the phrase. But as Orwell plainly put it, when it does happen it is so manipulated that no one can see that it is happening. In the same way, a new

generation is at a loss to understand how their progenitors could have been so blind as not to see ‘it’ coming. I myself cannot understand why my grandparents could not see a total societary, economic, and indeed political collapse overtaking Europe in the first fourteen years of this century. German students of today tell me that they cannot understand why their grandparents could not see what Hitler was actually doing . . . I repeat my recipe for getting this right. You must uncover all relevant systems of embedment and look to the self-regulatory power of each level of recursion to find a stable autonomy.

For instance, this conference is in itself well organized and can doubtless handle its own incipient instabilities (although I have attended conferences which could not even do that). However, we have come from far and wide, and therefore this conference is embedded in a transportation system that starts with a Cambridge recursion and eventually includes the globe. A massive strike anywhere could have killed the meeting. We are embedded in

a political system too: maybe some people could not get visas to come. Maybe when I have finished what I am saying tonight I will not have a passport to go. And so on. In the case of a country, this analysis is most rewarding. President Allende said to me,

‘How can Chile be a socialist state in a capitalist milieu?” That is dramatic, but it makes the question sound ineptly idealistic. We need to discover a whole range of recursive embedments, to do with investments, with marketing, with all the apparatus of exploitation, with military infiltration, and to discover whether there is self-regulatory power in autonomy at each level of recursion in each system of embedments. Then you have a chance of perceiving the workings of the machinery of power in all its inglorious complexity. People do not see it now for two main reasons. Our culture is not multidisciplinary, as the OR kind of problem-solving supposedly is, and therefore each set of embedments is described and dominated by a particular set of models that are in turn the proprietary tools of a particular set of professions.

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It is a prescription for tunnel vision on all sides, and the tunnels have no intersections. But we are supposedly systems people. Second, follow a professional tunnel, and see how thinly described are its models. The most outrageous example, because it is the religion of our creed of greed, is economics. Requisite variety? You really expect to regulate an economy that has government embedments with n levels of recursion, industrial ditto, financial ditto, and so on, all interacting, by fooling with the money supply and interest rates? Apologize to Ashby, and use the Conant-Ashby theorem I described. Our age-old system of regional and local government has been demolished, because crude attempts to intervene in local autonomy destroy variety, and the system has to be shut down. Our industrial base has been eroded by draconian interventions, starting with coal and steel, which rob autonomous units of the power to adapt. This was not helped by either management or union attitudes, I know; but any restitution of societary homeostasis

became quite impossible when legislation based once more on a ludicrously oversimplified and authoritarian model was enacted. The asset-stripping of our production and now our social services goes on, and because

there are no recursive embedment models, no one can quantify anything or measure the monies involved any more. The economic statistics that are flung about in the House of Commons

change every day. Forecasts of deficit, of the value of whole industries, of tax

expectations—these are not merely subject to ‘adjustments, they are altered by orders of magnitude. Clearly this is not because Whitehall can no longer add up. It is because underlying structures are being radically changed, no one has studied the consequential shifts of recursive embedment, and therefore the whole system has lost its predictive power. It

is denatured. The results are perfectly foreseeable, I contend; and the cataclysmic decline of education is an example that will surely and soon be followed by health. With the loss of measure comes the loss of predictive power comes the loss of regulatory autonomy comes—inevitably—the use of force. Is there any evidence for this? Of course there is. The economic and social disaster that

is the 1980s will become clear as the stripped assets run out, and as the attempt to run an economy on the strength of ‘funny money’—where bits of paper replace a basis of natural

wealth—will lead to immense societary stress. I think that some sense that this is an entailment of its policies has led to government enactments which mark the decade of the 1980s as a major threat to freedom itself. It is a long time since the progressive loss of rights led the then-Lord Chancellor (Hailsham) himself to dub Britain as an ‘elective dictatorship. Last week he called him-

self appalled that after 700 years of evolution the whole justice system was to be changed without any prior consultation with either the judiciary or the bar. Well, one expects high dignitaries to be highly dignified, perhaps. But when the Lord Chief Justice declares the intended legislation to be a move toward totalitarian government, we had better take note.

And surely when the answer to last year’s statistics showing a third of our people below

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the poverty line was to abolish the statistics, that also has something to do with human rights. Everyone, I think, should read Peter Thornton’s small book recently issued by the Council for Civil Liberties and called Decade of Decline: Civil Liberties in the Thatcher Years.! It is spine-chilling; and so is TechnoCop a book of which OR Society quondam president Jonathan Rosenhead is a coauthor.'? The instruments of oppression that I have seen working elsewhere in the world are sadly all in place. The equipment is there. The powers are there. Muscles are variously flexed. One of the subtleties of what was once ‘the British way of doing things’ was the subtlety of not having a written constitution, but of having Walter Bagehot’s book on the subject instead.”” This was skillfully updated by Richard Crossman. I have been used to defending this basis for our democracy, because the common law and case law as practiced are variety

generators. But today I most regretfully put it to you that this has to be changed and that it is a job for problem-solving interdisciplinary operational research. We need a Constitution and a Bill of Rights before it is simply too late. The task is very difficult: look what has

happened to Canada. .. When the group of gentlemanly intellectuals got together to do a similar job in the United States of America, the seminal thinking of social philosophers John Locke and Tom Paine was to hand. My mentor Warren McCulloch had the first edition of Locke that persuaded his grandfather to release his slaves. Today, we let bureaucrats, lawyers, and economists squabble over the details. Let’s have one of each of those in the interdisciplinary team, and let’s have other people too—starting with the citizen in all of his/her minority forms, and let’s get the cybernetics right. Last October, on a single day, the broadcasting of IRA viewpoints was banned, and the right of an accused to silence was abolished. If the President of the United States had tried to do that, he would instantly have been struck down by the Supreme Court. The banning

of the broadcasts is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which is the first of the ten Amendments known as the Bill of Rights; losing the right to silence is in breach of the Fifth Amendment. Let us never forget that it was only the Fifth Amendment that stood between Senator Joseph McCarthy and tyranny itself. It would be most appropriate of all if it could be taken up by the Leader of the Opposition. I refer to the Prince of Wales. What I have been saying is a depiction of an epistemological crisis which recurs in all recursive embedments—and I beg you to recognize that. Look for the invariance as we progress. It goes something like this. At the vital level of the individual, the regulatory problem is rooted in the dualistic fallacy, as I would call it, of the mind-body problem. Recently, one of the world’s leading neurophysiologists, Sir John Eccles, addressed the British Cybernetics Society in the

Fifth Dennis Gabor Lecture on a Unitary Hypothesis of Mind-Brain Interaction. This

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sounded to me like a restatement of Leibniz’s theory of psychophysical parallelism, where the monad was replaced by a quantum—if (that is to say) there is a difference—although it was based on a deep analysis of networks in the striate cortex. And Leibniz is about 300 years old ... Note that the field of Artificial Intelligence, which does increasingly clever things, sheds no light on this epistemology whatever. At the level of the firm, corporation, or service, people are in epistemological crisis because they are at last abandoning the hierarchical model. Automation has sliced out several levels of middle management (which many of us were called mad for predicting in the 1950s); and the phenomenon of ‘plateauing’ is recognized, whereby no one will be promoted because there is no rank left to achieve. Someone will have to think about a ‘promotion of merit’ and that would be a change. My own models for effecting this epistemological change, which by 1970 I was calling the ‘multinode, have moved from the brain model of the 1950s to the geodesic tensegrity model of Buckminster Fuller, which I have recently developed as a management tool. I have already spoken of the nation-state, using Britain as an example of the national

level of recursion. But methodologically this also requires a study of the nation’s embedments. First we have the European Community, which I regard as a regulatory disaster of magnitude. Bureaucrats and politicians know about regulation as rules of good order and of power, respectively. It is an unholy mix. Neither of them knows about the science of cy-

bernetics or the methodology of OR. The result is a mass of absurdities: wine lakes, butter mountains, and that fatuous agricultural policy. This is an epistemological crisis all right, since nobody knows what kind of conversation could have any effect. Then, also recently, along comes President Gorbachev and changes all the epistemological rules of the world leadership conversation—by declaring against nuclear arms. Can it be that a world leader has emerged with a bit of sense? God bless him. But it will take a long time to make any modification to the Prime Minister’s epistemological reflexes. Oh no: ‘Nuclear Arms have given us forty years of peace’ This argument is such a perfect case of fallacia post hoc ergo propter hoc that I hope it goes straight into all the logic textbooks. Say rather that we have all been exceedingly lucky to sit in the middle of a technological nightmare for forty years without the whole thing going off by accident. Anyone knowing some control engineering and having a clue about probability theory, not to mention human fallibility, ought to know that these nuclear policies are insane. Again, it is remarkable that Britain, which has been held by Amnesty International to condone torture, should feel free to lecture the Soviet Union about human rights. We have censored both the press and the BBC. We have highly repressive fresh legislation on government nonaccountability—called ‘official secrets. We have the invasion of personal privacy, and we have the erosion of minority rights. We have the worst of everyone’s record at the European Court of Human Rights. It is enough to be going on with. It is a pity that the Prime Minister’s strong sense of duty forbids her the luxury of

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even a moment’s ignorance. Indeed, the political return for keeping an open mind is negative.

We move toward a global level of recursion. The nation states do not work any more as the world contracts—and is more and more threatened. ‘Year 2000” predictions used to

be regarded as ‘way out’; but now we have barely ten years left, and the ‘prophets of gloom and doom; as we were known in the 1960s, were so timid that we wildly underestimated the damage. By 2000 a third of the world’s productive land will have turned to dust ... a million species of animal and plant life will be extinct’'* That’s if we do nothing. A world government becomes imperative.

That does not mean a League of Nations, which failed, or a United Nations, which fails—both for the reason given why the EEC fails. The epistemology is wrong. ‘What do we know and how do we know it?’ is what epistemology means; and conversation (starting

with internal debate in our own minds) is a big part of that. Nothing happens. As Garry Davis, the first World Citizen, declared in 1945, and has been shouting from the housetops ever since, the people themselves empower world government. People belong to this planet, and the planet belongs to them—as long as we do not wreck its amazing powers of self-repair. But it is not those ordinary people who are creating the problem: it is the nation-states, under the creed of greed and under pathological leadership. We shall know when self-empowerment, which is an epistemological realization, has begun to take hold globally. It is when a national leader who orders the murder of a foreign national, however bad his books, is automatically arrested on behalf of world citizenry. And that criterion applies not only to Middle East fanatics, but to governments who sink a ship and kill a man in the Antipodes or to governments who decide to please themselves by ravaging Central America.

The individual, the firm, the nation, the world ... please pick up the invariances once again. Britain needs redesigning—if democracy is to survive to the least degree. The EEC needs redesigning—before there is much more waste and loss of political will for develop-

ment. My analysis showed why the infrastructure of Britain has already collapsed (and I mean for the most part irretrievably, because both so many structures and also so many units of crucial expertise have been irreversibly destroyed), and we are desperately over-centralized in London. It is for the same reasons quite illogical to hope that London will not be swallowed by Brussels without a redesign. How can a system of recursive embedments focus all power on one place—or I should say, one person—from both directions? We have instead McCulloch’s Principle of the Redundancy of Potential Command, as learned from the brain, and from management, and from society itself —and society does exist, despite denials. Another system at this level of recursion would be some kind of alliance of democratic Latin America. President Carlos Andrez Perez of Venezuela would like to use his presidential term to explore this. No doubt he sees it as a political union in principle. I must say

that I see it straightforwardly as a means of supplying requisite variety to the absorption of

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the power of the North American hegemony, as exemplified by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. I am devoting effort to this plan. And since this seems to be an article for sticking my neck out, I might just as well add this. Having traced IMF dealings on specifics in Latin America, and especially in Mexico un-

der de la Madrid, T cannot comprehend how a decent, Democratic Congress in Washington can solemnly underwrite this mega-usury. The poor world are net exporters of wealth to the rich world. About half the hard-earned income of Latin America is sucked straight back in interest payments. Please do not say, as bankers do, that these people should not have borrowed the money in the first place. The rules have turned them into resource

economies {(which is why, in general, half the population of a country lives in the port of exit) and they have no choice. It is an abuse of language, as well as of these peoples, to call them ‘developing’ nations: not under these rules. Please do not talk to me about corruption either: I could probably tell you funnier stories myself. Just remember that corruption is an output of a system. In Latin America that system was designed by the hegemony, and at least it relates only to money. In Britain, corruption is far more seditious than the merely

monetary—and whom do we have to blame? Please go away with a sense of epistemological crisis that exists wherever you look. It is mistaken for general though ad hoc local unease but is, in fact, the hope of the world, if we can handle it and unlock the paradigms that have generated its dysfunctional conversation sets.

Please hear the assault on these crises that I have mounted: the recognition of recursive embedments, for whatever system you have, leading to new measures of incipient instability; the sophisticated filtration of data flows in real time to detect that instability and, thereby, to prevent disasters before they occur. How to proceed, however, for anyone of us? I declare in Latin: populus vult decipi ergo decipiatur. But in demotic English I translate freely: people are conned because it suits them. For the final time I say that the epistemology for a new age is not yet in place. And when the whole system you inhabit is under threat, most people quite sensibly enough are bent on personal survival, not reform. It is our job to attend to that. Are you personally prepared to reconsider your own role? Are you valiant enough to question the epistemological framework of your own recursive embedments—as a person,

a citizen, an employee? The system you are in is crashing: are you prepared to see that, to work on its redesign? There is, I fear, a high risk that our multidisciplinary effort of forty years has been castrated, and we ourselves as professionals are by now eunochs. Are you settling for being liegemen and handmaidens of the mighty? Whatever your response, I have tried to lay bare the fact that it will be a political decision. Because of recursive embedments you cannot help it: we hold the structure up. If all scientists and engineers refused to work on military work, how could the world spend a trillion dollars a year on armaments?

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As for me, I do my best in whatever context the dumplings I am asked to prepare are

wholesome, and wherever the Emperor I am asked to serve is properly intentioned. It is a restricted market, but it is worldwide, and it includes most of the downtrodden in the rich world as well as in the poor. As to my political decision, I see my country being systematically destroyed by a whole government that is not in the national interest—not least in the firmness of its grip on power. It makes no consultations; it brooks no argument; it overrides objection. It is ideology made manifest. And so, I cannot myself collude in the outrage that I have taught myself how to see. I am a British dissident. I live in chosen exile. We shall see if I survive. References

1. Koenig, C. The Guardian Weekly, 22 January 1989. 2. Young, H. The Guardian Weekly, 2 March 1986. 3. Matthews, J. Personal communication. But see his Tools of Change, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1989.

4. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. 2nd edition, Wiley, Chichester, 1981. 5. The House of Representatives, USA. The United States and Chile During the Allende Years 1970-1973, US Government Printing Office, Washington DC, 1975. 6. Kolko, G. Confronting the Third World, United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980, Random House, New York, 1989. 7. Conant, R. C. and Ashby, W. R. ‘Every Good Regulator of a System Must be a Model of that System, International Journal of Systems Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1970. 8. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. 9. Espejo, R. and Harnden, R., eds, The Viable Systemn Model. Wiley, Chichester, 1989. 10. Beer, S. Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Wiley, Chichester, 1985. 11. Thornton, P. Decade of Decline: Civil Liberties in the Thatcher Years. National Council for Civil Liberties, 1989.

12. Rosenhead, J. et al, TechnoCop. Free Association Books, London, 1983. 13. Bagehot, W. The English Constitution (1867). With introduction by R. H. S. Crossman, Fontana, London, 1988. 14. ‘Inside Looking Out, WWF pamphlet 1989.

chapter 18

n Suicidal Rabbits: a Relativity of Systems

Introduction

‘AckOFF’s FABLES are fabulous. Is this statement a tautology? Or should such a statement be reserved as a metasystemic comment of some kind? The fables I wish to recount are

non-Ackovian in some such sense, because they concern an intergalactic alien scientist (called therefore Igas) who is a commentator upon fables of every kind—and especially those that we weave ourselves around experience to call it fact. Even so, Igas knows an Aesop or an Ackoff when he meets one, and, herewith, doffs his hat.

One pleasant day in England, Igas was sitting on a grassy hill that sloped downward to a distant river. Halfway down the slope a hedge ran across the foreground, left to right. Igas, for cultural reasons of his own, thought of it as running right to left—a matter that need not detain us here. The rabbit, on the other hand, which was hopping along the hedge, moved (without dint of culture) left to right.

Just below Igas, a gamekeeper lay face-downward in the grass. He had a gun. For many long, slow seconds, the muzzle of the gun (as Igas carefully observed) moved to the right, aimed below the hedge, some seconds of arc ahead of the wandering rabbit. ‘No wonder; Igas thought, ‘they call this man a gamekeeper. Although he is obviously prepared to fire his gun, he does his best to avoid the wandering rabbit! And yet, for all the gamekeeper’s efforts to preserve wildlife, when the gun eventually went off, the rabbit quite perversely

Festschrift in honour of Russell Ackoff. First published in Systems Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2,

1990. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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hopped straight into the bullet and lay dead. Terrestrial rabbits, wrote Igas sadly in his fieldwork notes, are suicidal. That fable goes back maybe fifteen years, although it has not seen print before. The second that I want to relate is maybe twenty-five years old and came out of a discussion with Grey Walter, whom T wish also to salute. He was an English neurophysiologist and electroencephalographer of high renown. He was also a cybernetician: the inventor of machina speculatrix, a mechanical tortoise. For Grey, Igas was a Martian—but we knew less of the inhospitality to life on Mars in those days than we do now. Igas was living incognito in a typical household of our consumer-oriented world. He noticed that a small room in the house was set aside for the private use of individuals. That is to say, that each person in the household made visits to this room alone. Once inside, each person locked the door. Igas, rendering himself invisible, was able to observe the strange and complicated ritual that ensued. The social anthropologist in Igas understood this to be a religious observance of some kind, and the liberal use of water as a libation on each occasion was wholly consistent with this conclusion. But Igas knew his cybernetics too. A regulatory system even or especially one that involved a theocratic loop, must surely hold steady some critical variable: that would indicate its fundamental purpose. ‘Beyond

the superstitious beliefs of these people, wrote Igas in his notebook, ‘is the unrecognized societary requirement to keep the water levels in their cisterns constant’ From the earliest days of the system sciences it was clearly in mind that, as Heisenberg had taught us, the observer is part of the system. But having taken the lesson from so

well instrumented a science as physics, maybe our expectations of our observational tools were too high. Microscopes and telescopes perform extremely well-defined functions, and their optical limitations are thoroughly understood. In biology, however, the limitations of the perceptual apparatus introduce serious epistemological difficulties into any observing system. In the social sciences, the situation is even worse: the observer is an Igas—namely, someone laden with a self-imposed ideology masquerading as a corpus of scientific knowledge.

To observe the observing system requires a new level of logical recursion. What often seems to happen instead is the protagonists of various ideologies (positivists, structuralists, phenomenalists, and so on) abuse each other’s descriptions of what is going on. It is like saying that Igas comes from the wrong galaxy and should not have been given a visa in the

first place. One moral of my fables is that Igas is one of us too. Should you wish to illuminate the point that name-calling at one level of recursion cannot substitute for insight at the next, your fable is already written long ago. When Alice asked the White Knight what song he proposed to sing, he replied that the name of the song was called ‘HaddocK’s Eyes. Alice, of course, objected that this was a funny name for a song. The White Knight was kind enough to explain that it was not the name of the song, only that the name of the song was called this.

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The relativity of systems has to do with both the state and the status of included observers. The state has to do with the perceptual competence of the observer in relation to the observations made. Not only do our eyes and ears fail to register beyond their threshold frequencies, but the limits of discrimination may be internal to the very structure of perception itself. For example, aural events less than a twentieth of a second apart cannot be

distinguished: therefore if recorded speech is broken up into units of this length, and if each unit is actually reversed, we have a product that really ‘ought’ to sound incomprehensible but which, in fact, sounds perfectly all right. As to observational status, this has to do with the level of relative recursion from which the observation is made. The two sections of this paper that follow are, like this first section, hinged upon notable approaches developed by Russell Ackoft. All three, nonetheless, are concerned with the theme that they share in common: a relativity of systems. The Amelioration of Messes

It is an extraordinary fact that Ackoff should more or less single handedly have secured acceptance into the technical vocabulary of management science so unusual a term as ‘mess.

It is, after all, not a precisely definable word; rather it would seem to denote (fashionably enough) a fuzzy set. But practitioners, as distinct from theorists, know all too well how fuzzy their problem sets can be. They recognize, in particular, that were it possible in that context to generate well-formulated propositions about well-defined problems, their worries would be over. It is so often in the nature of the problem that it should defy satisfactory description. In that case how could anyone ever determine what would count as a solution?

One of the ways of treating a mess is to poke it with the stick of enquiry until it reacts and then to reinforce behavior that answers to some criterion fixed at a next-higher level of logical recursion. To this methodology belong the heuristic techniques: ‘hill-climbing} Box-Jenkins, and in general, ‘evolutionary operation: Many of us have undertaken our share of these approaches. There is, however, an approach so radically different that it runs

the risk of defying the whole psychology of change. It involves ignoring the mess as currently presented and redesigning the whole system from the first principles of its intensionality—from its teleology, if you prefer. The Ackovian methodology for doing this, based on

idealized planning, is mentioned in the next section. It involves asking the question, ‘How do we get from here to there?” But I wish to consider the case where there is evidently no such feasible route. It is a situation that I have encountered a number of times, but one on

which I have been entertaining some fresh thoughts. The first encounter with the problem happened thirty-five years a totally original system for controlling production in a steelworks. means of gradual adaptation whereby the old arrangement would be by the new ones: there were simply no points of contact between the

ago. I had designed There could be no replaced eventually two methodologies.

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Moreover, there was the constraint (and it is common enough) that the new system did not yet enjoy any credibility. So the possibility of embarking on a retraining exercise for all the staff involved, and then suddenly switching ‘on Monday morning’ from system A to system B, which I have successfully used elsewhere, was excluded. There was no alternative but to create the second system separately from the first and then to run it in parallel until agreement was reached that the new approach could take over and the original

system be scrapped. Predictably enough, this strategy caused all manner of difficulties in staffing, office space utilization, and so on. But worst of all was the crucial question as to when the critical decision to change over had to be faced. As time progressed, the account of ‘reality’ presented by the two systems steadily diverged; if the crucial decision were left too late, a proper judgement would be hard to make—and moreover, the new system would be badly placed to take over as a result of the discrepancies introduced during the interregnum. When the problem was encountered on a truly massive scale twenty years later in Chile (Project Cybersyn), the circumstances were different. There were no existing means for controlling the social economy, so the newly invented ones had no methodological rival. But there certainly was an organizational entity in place, namely, a very large and heavily institutionalized bureaucracy, which had the expectation that whatever systems of management and social regulation would be adopted would be operated by it—after investigation and approval, of course. The Allende government was perfectly aware that it had no time for these manoeuvres; and in any case, the reform of the bureaucracy itself was on the political menu. The project therefore proceeded almost independently of the establishment, and for a long time virtually in secret, its outputs being taken into use by ministers and their staffs and agencies, together with the managements of the nationalized industries in whose aid the project was basically designed for service at plant level. The story has been told at length elsewhere (in particular in the second edition of Brain of the Firm). The point here about the implementation of change, especially as compared with the previous example, is that the new system went into control as fast as it could be installed, there being no comparable system beyond bureaucratic monitoring of a market economy to declare

defunct. Had the Allende government not been overthrown, however, the establishment reaction to the surreptitious introduction of these revolutionary techniques would doubt-

less have been difficult to handle. But it would have been impossible to evaluate the situation, as a management scientist would wish to do, independently of the political threat to bureaucratic survival which the political program anyway posed and which Cybersyn undoubtedly facilitated. The point of these two case stories, to which others could repetitively have been added, is that the implementation of massive change is difficult not only because of systemic inertia, managerial timidity, resistance to novelty, and other familiar scapegoats, actively four-legged as these may be, but also because of the perfectly genuine problem of how to

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make the switch—given all the goodwill in the world. This goodwill presupposes that the system designers, management, and trade unions are working together to the common good. Although the public believes that no two of these three are ever on speaking terms, a likelihood that steadily increases the more the mass media inform the public so, I have often experienced collaboration. This leads to the speculation that maybe it behoves the management scientist to come up with an approach to the implementation of change that

actually takes account of the misgivings experienced by the other two sides—not only of the proposals, but of each other. (So much is purely ironical in the ears of Ackovian OR people, let it be clear; but it may be quite shocking to a later and more academic genera-

tion.) Well, let us expect the goodwill that we ought to be able to engineer and then see if we can suggest another way into the problem under discussion. The following is prompted by the recollection of conversations with the neurocybernetician (the late) Christopher Evans, who did much to further our understanding of the nature of sleep. He had an especially interesting theory as to the role of dreams. As is generally agreed, dreams occur during the relatively short bursts of REM sleep (that is sleep characterized by random eye movements). Evans came to the conclusion that during REM sleep the brain goes off-line, in order to rewrite its programs on the strength of the day’s

experience. Surely this is a most appealing hypothesis. If the brain did not have a compiler capable of recasting its executive programs at several levels of logical recursion, why the brain’s data processing would be in as big a mess as that of the average corporation, which has so little to do that is at all comparable to cerebral activity. The question is: How can the

brain perform this task without devastating routine operations? To take the three broadest levels of cerebral recursion, we cannot afford to fall down (old brain), to see double (midbrain), or to associate policemen and custard pies (cortex), just because the pink Jell-O computer is ‘swapping’—still less recompiling a compiler.

Suppose that Evans was right: the brain goes off-line during REM sleep. In case the idea offends any psychoanalytic susceptibilities as to the role of dreaming, and gets in the way of what is being said here, there seems to be no conflict between the Freudian interpretation of dreams (should one wish to maintain it) and the recompilation of programs—although it has been argued that there is. In fact, it seems to be quite unsurprising that the detritus of images, chopped up and churned about as they would be by reprogramming, should become the raw materials for dreaming displacements, symbols, and all the other impedi-

menta of the Freudian endopsychic censor. Be that as it may, we cannot dream ourselves into institutional change; but maybe we could handle it off-line. The new thought, evidently, is midway between the heuristic that might well rewrite programs at the end of each day in order to maximize adaptational advantage (and without having any teleological ideal in mind) and a predetermined plan that is supposed to ‘get us from here to there’ (without having much regard to the day-to-day exigencies of the situation or of the need to learn on the way that the ‘ideal’ has in fact changed). Thinking in

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principle as to how this could be done, we must invoke again a relativity of systems, and this time explicitly for the amelioration of an Ackovian mess. We should take the mess’s control system off-line ‘every night'—or whatever is the appropriate operational analogue of that. Then we should implement a recompilation of that control system, in which process two separate principles would necessarily operate, as they would have to do in the brain if Evans was right. The first principle would undertake a heu-

ristic search of the day’s operations and rewrite the control program so as to take advantage of the day’s learning opportunity: that is to say, to reinforce success and to extinguish failure on the basis of a probabilistic model of effectiveness. The criteria of that operational effectiveness would be set at the next-higher level of logical recursion, in accordance with an idealized plan. Now comes the tricky part, which is a species of second-order learning. The operation of applying the plan criteria would now itself be subjected to a process of heuristic learning, the criteria for which would be set as the outcome of the next logical recursion of the idealized plan. And so on. The outcome ought to be that the ‘ultimate plan’ would change daily, in

order to converge asymptotically on some actually unrealizable ideal, and that operational effectiveness at each level of recursion in the criterion mode would seek a heuristic optimum. There is no doubt whatever that this approach would be difficult to accomplish in a practical application, but two comments may be made which reflect the introductory arguments. It has always been my own teaching and practice to develop (at whatever expense in time and money) the deep logical infrastructure of a regulatory process. It is because of that approach that we were able to mount a real-time control system for the social economy of Chile in less than two years—only to be denounced by some in the EDP community

who are unable to think in logical depth below the ‘massive data base’ beloved of data processors. If we were to put in this kind of effort to other processes of institutional change, we might be able to accomplish them. I do not add ‘more effectively), please notice: this is

not a matter of marginal differences. I mean, to accomplish them at all. Hence the second comment. It is that if we had so profound an instrument of change, learned of the brain, we might the more readily convince our managerial and labour colleagues that what we recommend is not only right but actually feasible too. Organizational Tensegrity

Now I turn to some current thinking based essentially on the Ackovian planning principle of idealized models. It arose because the appearance (it is not more than that) of my own model of the Viable System is hierarchical. Useless to protest, I have found, that Systems Two through Five are merely service functions of the embedded viable System One: the higher structures look like ‘the boss; and it is difficult to explain the sense in which System Five reflects the operational reality—the only reality we have. Nonetheless, the lowest autonomic functions in the human body have representation in the cortex, and the leadership of a democracy supposedly embodies the will of the people ...

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To “idealize’ this state of affairs we need a model that ubiquitously manifests the whole in each of its parts. The immediate choice lay in holography, since any piece of a broken holographic plate will regenerate the original image entire. For some years I experimented

with lasers and toyed with the mathematics of Denis Gabor. Only recently, while thinking about Buckminster Fuller in quite another context, did I remember his dictum: ‘All systems are polyhedra. And nothing structural could be less hierarchical than a regular

polyhedron—or, as he devised it, a geodesic dome. There is another dictum of my own that says, ‘Every system can be formally mapped onto any other system under some transformation’. We might well postulate that a management team could be represented, together with its connectivity to other teams, at one of the nodes of a regular polyhedron. What Fuller discovered was that a polyhedral structure (such as a dome) may be held together by what he called ‘tensile integrity’—or tensegrity for short. Accordingly, he ran struts between the faces of his polyhedral domes in such a way that the whole gained its cohesive strength from the tension induced between the faces. This is structural synergy with a vengeance, and something virtually impossible to analyze by orthodox engineering techniques. When I started to construct physical polyhedra with my own hands, it was truly a revelation to follow Bucky’s route. An unwhole-

some mess of wooden dowelling, panel pins, rubber bands, string, and glue, strengthened with gratuitous contributions from skin and beard, quite suddenly transformed itself into a polyhedron so strong that I could actually stand on it. I wanted to explain how I came to set forth the next hypothesis by following through an Ackovian idealization procedure: and here it is. Let us typify an organization as an icosahedron. Its twenty sides are triangles. It has thirty edges. Let each edge represent a person. Now an icosahedron gathers itself together in twelve nodes, each connecting five edges. If each node stands for a management team, there will be sixty team members. Since each edge (equals a person) has two ends, each

of thirty people belongs to two teams, and no two people belong to the same two teams. Already it is apparent that not only do we have a complete democracy within our organizational globe, in that the twelve teams have identical structures, connectivities, and relative

position, but we have a network that exhibits total closure. The setup is, in logical terms, self-referential. This does not, of itself, mean that it is a ‘closed’ system in the von Bertalanffy sense (it may or may not be open to exotic inputs of either energy or information), only that it is absolutely and regularly cohesive. Moreover, it exhibits no global, but only local or nodal, hierarchy. This is a good start for a model of an idealized or perfect democracy. Even so, the real power of the model is supposed to lie in its structural strength. It is tensegrity that holds up the geodesic dome; it is tensegrity that made it possible for me to stand on the physical model made out of bits and pieces. In a dome, the tensile members join the centers of adjacent triangular faces, providing a thick two-dimensional skin, and

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hence the necessary rigidity to maintain the overall shape. But in a theoretical structure of an organization with tensegrity, we can improve on a rigid skin, by running tensile members straight through the central spaces that would be required to be open in an architectural artifact. Obviously this driving through the centre of the organizational phase space provides a binding cohesion of tremendous strength. Then what could be the organizational correlate of the tensile member? According to this hypothesis, or perhaps rather idealized design, each member of a team becomes an appointed critic of another team, distant across the phase space. The idea is that the critic would not be accountable for the decisions of the management group to which he/she is appointed critic, but that he/she would offer constructive advice from two points of view:

that of a relatively disinterested member of the total organization and that of someone having detailed specialized knowledge of one other but unadjacent team. The tension induced across the icosahedral phase space in this way would be balanced by appointing a critic from the receiving team to another distant team—none other than that second team of which the original critic is also a member. Let me now translate the geometric model into

a managerial statement, which may well be easier to follow. An Icosahedral Organization with Tensegrity

+ There are thirty people, divided into twelve management teams. « Each person belongs to two teams, which he calls his/her left-hand and right-hand teams. Thus there are sixty team members. No person may belong to the same two teams as anyone else. » Each person is appointed a critic of that team of which he/she is not a member. The team to which he/she is thereby appointed a critic will appoint a critic to his/her right-hand team.

« Similarly, each person becomes a critic in that team of which he/she is not a member, but of which a right-hand teammate is a member. And that team will appoint a critic to his/ her left-hand team. « Since each person has two critical appointments, there are sixty critics spread with

tensegrity over twelve teams. So each five-member team has five more quasi-members who are critics as defined. This arrangement exhibits requisite variety, which is to say that it obeys Ashby’s Law. The critical team is called the ‘antithetical management group. Then note: The idealized model predicts that an actual organization operating according to this protocol would exhibit not only ‘perfect democracy’ in structural terms, but tremendous cohesion. The title that heads this inset statement would not need to be bandied about! Obviously experiments need to be run in order to investigate the usefulness of this hypothesis and idealized model, and they are easy to envisage in terms of games whereby

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twelve independent teams would attempt to solve a variety of problems—to have their results compared with an equivalent organization based upon the principle of tensegrity working through the instrumentality specified. It is necessary to add that if any ‘real’ organization, as distinct from one that has been idealized in icosahedral metric, should not happen to have exactly twelve nodes, or should not happen to embody exactly five members per node, then we should seek the transfor-

mation under which the ‘real’ organization matches the notional one. Finally, under this heading, it should be recorded that the very term ‘antithetical management’ was the innovation, some decades ago, of Lord Shackleton (son of the explorer), when he set up critical managerial groups within one of Britain’s major retailing businesses. These were not, however, based on the theoretical considerations advanced here.

Epilogue

I have enjoyed the between us that we just as well, for we Thus my friend

friendship of Russell Ackoff for over thirty years. We have a convention rarely consult in advance about the content of our writings. And this is have a proneness to disagree about almost everything. is not in the least responsible for anything that is written here, though I

hope that some of it will please him. For example, he will be thankful to be spared yet fur-

ther discourse (despite a brief reference) on my Viable System Model. It is a topic of which I myself am heartily sick, but it was only last year that I tripped over a most efficacious technique for suppressing calls to lecture about it. At Preservation Hall in New Orleans, there

is a modest entry charge; but once inside, special requests are entertained by the venerable old jazzmen. The notice on the wall says, ‘Requests $1, Saints $5’ Evidently the jazzmen, in their turn, were tired of marching in. Using this model, I have also priced my ‘Saints’ out of the market—none too soon. On the positive side, however, I hope that, for example, the architect in Russ will be attracted by the model of structural organization ... At Russ’s birthday party, I was the only delegate who lived in Wales. Hence I came armed with a motto for the retiring (!) man in Welsh: ‘Nid oes ar uffern ond eisiau ei threfnu’ May it serve him well in his continuing life’s work. The translation reads, ‘Hell only needs reorganizing’

chapter 19

ay the Whole Earth be Happy

Invocation

WEsT CHURCHMAN and I have been friends since we met at the first international conference on operational research in Oxford in 1957. About twenty-five years ago, he was stay-

ing at my house in Surrey outside London, and roamed around my library. After he had left, I found that he had written on the flyleaves of my copies of his own books. In his influential book Prediction and Optimal Decision' he thanked me touchingly for my critical review essay, which had appeared in the American journal Philosophy of Science.” Let us recall that his subtitle was Philosophical Issues of a Science of Values. This is a far cry from the technique oriented aridity that we have later come to expect under titles concerned with either forecasting or optimality. Churchman is surely the outstanding modern philosopher of systems theory; and his concern with ethical questions has never been an academic preoccupation. His book appeared as the turbulent 1960s began—a decade of

grave moral disquiet: civil rights, Vietnam and ‘free speech’ were all matters that split the American nation. Churchman the activist emerged from behind the dreaming spire of the Berkeley campanile to run personal risks which others will catalogue but I remember.

His (then) new book was The Systems Approach: I dare say that it became equally influential.> Churchman wrote in my copy of this a brief testimonial of friendship ‘without the necessity of frequent “feedback” because of love’ And so it has worked out ever since. What do we know about any such mode of communication? It has nothing to do with e-mail, for certain: psi-mail, maybe. What do we know about the brotherhood of love itself? Very Festschrift in honour of C. West Churchman. First published in Systems Practice, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1994.

Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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little, it would seem, as we look around the devastation of our world today. But Churchman has devoted much of his practical effort to the causes of love and peace. As the Churchman oeuvre attests, West is a great expert—appropriately enough—on Western philosophy. In this essay I put forward some recent thoughts that are based on

ancient Vedantic philosophy. They are transmitted from East to West in the hope that he may enjoy them, in the spirit of his messages to me. It is appropriate to take as title an ancient invocation® of which he would surely approve: ‘May the whole earth be happy’. In the Sanskrit: Loka samastat sukhino bhavantu. Lokham

refers to the world—to Gaia herself, as we might say, and taken to include all

living species whose habitat is here. Sukham, ‘happiness’ in brief, is close to what Aristotle later called eudemonia, well-being: but it encompasses the satisfaction of needs that are not only physical and mental, but aspire to spiritual truth. It seems to me that the dictum offers a comprehensive invocation of what we sanctimoniously call the Quality of Life. We may even link these ancient Eastern ideals to our (less) ancient Greek heritage through the words satyam (truth) sundaram (beauty) and sivam (goodness), upheld in both cultures as

cynosures of civilization. I apologize for knowing neither the Sanskrit nor the Greek for ‘gross national product per capita’ Management as Action

Each of the three approach lanes to my remote cottage in the Welsh hills runs through a small farm, each of which in turn is guarded by sheep dogs. As my battered old truck comes near, dogs rush upon it, barking, and chase it off the territory on the further side. They drop off the chase after a hundred yards or so with their tails in the air—quite evidently satisfied with a job well done. I was just going home anyway, fellows, but never mind. There was a successful company once whose staff constituted a real team. The workforce was hard-working and well-organized. They had a wonderful relationship with both suppliers and clients, and made steady profits. When the annual general meeting approached each year, there was a big party for the press: the company had done very well, and would be doing even better next year, announced the man who organized the party. The published accounts confirmed it all, and revealed that the party organizer had collected a large bonus. This was in order because he was the CEO. The Bhagavad-Gita says:® ‘In reality, action is entirely the outcome of all the modes of nature’s attributes: moreover, only he whose intellect is deluded by egotism is so ignorant that he presumes ‘T am doing this’

This is the philosophy of holism writ large in terms of management action. Managers often claim credit for the details of outcomes that are actually systemic products, a credit from which they are disqualified by Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety.

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When first offering the Gita quotation in that context thirty years ago, I wrote that it reveals ‘an insight into the nature of system, secondarily into the proliferation of variety, and thirdly into the generation of spontaneous control activity. The first clause, translated directly into cybernetic jargon instead of English might read: “output is a self-regulating

black box function of input variety”. But the sting is in the second clause. It speaks of the self-determination of the system from its own nature, of the implicit control which cybernetics purports to discover in nature 5,000 years too late to count as original’

There is much more than this quotation that recommends the Gita for management studies, because this scripture is wholly concerned with the nature of right action and is a monumental rebuke to the Creed of Greed which has lately characterized our era. The world is imprisoned in its own activity, says the Gita: yes—that is how we lose sight of the concept of social good, and are latter-day Philistines into the bargain. “There is no such thing as society’ said Prime Minister Thatcher’s notorious dictum. So all that is left is the individual and selfish desire. She/he is the slave of his/her own activity, says the Gita— whose authors had never even seen an executive wrestling with the laptop computer’s appointments and jobs-to-be-done program.

You might think from this that the recommendation might be to take less action, or to remove from the fray altogether, in adumbration of workshops on Executive Coddle, and ‘death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down’ slogan-mongering. On the absolute

contrary, the Gita teaches that there is a positive duty to act. But the action must be in harmony with the whole situation, not an imposition. Above all, it must be disinterested. The

duty to act does not carry rights to the fruits of action, and ‘only the petty-minded work for reward. So much for the 1980s Ethic of the First World. Consider a manager who seeks to perform right action for its own sake, and (as the Gita says) is like the leaf of a water-lily that rests unwetted on water: ‘she/he rests on action, untouched by action’ Such a person will try to refuse the credit for success, which is difficult; what is more difficult still is to refuse the blame for failure—so long as the action was right.

Our manager will find it wearisome to operate on so lofty a plane, and might well consider withdrawing his effort. Interestingly enough, this was exactly the predicament of Prince Arjuna before the battle of Kurukshetra, which is the scene of the Bhagavad-Gita. He was not at all happy about fighting in a battle against his own kith and kin. However, Arjuna was fortunate to have the divine incarnation, Krishna, as his charioteer: and thence flows the philosophic discussion of the ethics of right action. Not only is there a duty to act, but personal disinterest in outcome must raise one above it; not only must one not run away

from distasteful action, but ‘only action can free you from the obligation to act’ That last sentence can stand a second thought. These arguments are of a subtlety and nobility unknown to the Creed of Greed. Recently there has been a spate of conferences under the title of ‘Business Ethics’ It is sad to turn from the Gita to confront the fact that these important meetings concern simply the

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prevention of fraud. There should be more to business ethics than that. It is sad too that the

Gita has sometimes been used among Hindu extremists to justify violence—just because the argument draws its high dramatic effect from a scene of battle. But Krishna is not alone in this misrepresentation. The teachings of another Prince of Peace have with equivalent perversity been manipulated—in the cause of a multitude of heinous crimes. The 4,000 year old samkhya philosophy, part of the Vedantic tradition, is the basis of Raja Yoga. It teaches that belief is nonsense. Only direct experience counts. This would

make a powerful aphorism for modern management, and one that might find approval in the Business Schools. But they would need to follow through. They would find that the ultimate meaning of their new motto lies in the direct experience of self —which few people ever confront. They would also have to face the lesson of direct experience in the

implementation of the techniques of socio-economic management that they teach. This is that they don’t work. A School of Vedantic Management would teach the eight-fold path to wisdom of Raja Yoga through direct experience of self. In managerial terms it would come out as the Gita says: Wisdom is right action—‘the two are one’ The Creation, Recursion and Closure of System

All great cultures have supported creation myths. Our own is sponsored by modern phys-

ics: the Big Bang Theory. This, of course, is no more a statement of ‘objective truth’ than any of the others. Its most well-known exponent, Stephen Hawking, himself says: ‘We see the universe the way it is because we exist.” And this is a view taken even further by some physicists in the anthropic cosmological principle,® which sees humankind as the centre of or indeed the reason for the universe. Others have not hesitated to advance to “The Theory of Everything’ that emerged from the ten-dimensional constructs of superstrings.’ All the myths, including that of the Big Bang, are fundamentally interested in the origin and nature of time itself. While our own culture uses concepts and measures such as Hawking’s we still have fundamentalists among us who accept the seven days and seven nights of Genesis; although some of those concede that an Old Testament day might be longer than the terrestrial day. Otherwise, the two myths have much in common—except for the order

in which the earth and moon appeared. Both contemporary myths, let us note, involve not only a primary Big Bang, but an eventual Big Crunch. So does the oldest creation myth in the book. It is the Vedantic theory of yugas, the world ages. There are four world ages, and between them they last for 4,320,000 years. It takes 1,000 such cycles to account for a day in the life of God (Genesis enthusiasts please note). At the end of the day (thus defined) ‘all matter in the universe is reabsorbed into

the universal spirit.'* During the night, which is also some four trillion years long, ‘matter persists only as potential for reappearance’ (ibid). All this refers to one day in a year of 360 days in the Life of Brahma; and he lives for 100 years before the Big Crunch. The whole of

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this immense cycle then renews. So time is not itself an episode suspended in nothing, In short, the Vedantic philosophy of the yugas is structurally recursive in its treatment of time, matter and energy. It exhibits closure, both within its recursivity, and also metasystemically beyond it. Modern systems theory is better equipped to reflect and foment such Vedantic notions in our times than is contemporary physics—and to more satisfying

philosophic outcomes. A full treatment of this cybernetic contention would consider especially the constructivist theory of Heinz von Foerster and his associates,' and the theory of autopoiesis advanced by Maturana and Varela.'? But in a short writing perhaps I might be

permitted to use illustrations from my own work, in this and the following sections. The problems encountered in discussing creation, and thereafter of its contained created systems, begin with the logical incompleteness of the language in which they are cast. They are in their nature rambling Goédelian sentences in which some propositions can neither be proved nor refuted. This is exemplified in physics by asking questions about chance and necessity in the universe, and is epitomized in Einstein’s agonizing over his belief that ‘God does not play dice’—held in the face of new discoveries in quantum theory that required a random basis, and seemed to imply that He did. It was exemplified in the context

of management by a discussion of production planning in my first book."* To deal with this, I offered the principle of ‘Completion from Without, which proposed to give closure to a Godelian sentence by a device which could not be understood—except insofar as it did

indeed make the closure. The managerial cybernetics later propounded was based upon this principle.® But instead of using my inelegant form of words, Einstein’s spirit might be quieted by ostensive definition: ‘God is the dice’ The Black Box is what it does. Returning to the most revered of the Vedantic scriptures, we find the device in frequent use in the Gita. Among the examples comes a dictum of the Lord Krishna: ‘Tam the discussion among disputants; or in a poetic translation: Tam the logic of those who debate’™ The principle has been available for thousands of years, had we or Einstein but recognized it. Vedanta and the Viable System

During the 1950s and 1960s I was preoccupied with the development of a cybernetic model of any viable system: the created component of a more inclusive viable system—identically and therefore recursively, defined.'® This is a holistic model involving the intricate interaction of five identifiable but not separable subsystems. Only recently have I made comparisons between the Viable System Model, VSM, and the Vedantic Creation Model, Sristi. This tabulates the results:

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Sristi: Vedantic Creation Model

Description

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VSM: Cybernetic Viable System Model

Mahashakti

is the power behind creation and the establishment of identity

System Five

Mahaswari

lays down the large lines of

System Four

development for the whole

Mahakali

drives the energies of the autonomous components

System Three

and guards them with a powerful

System Three Star

vigilance

Mahalaksmi

highlights and guides the rhythms of autonomous components with grace and harmony

Maharaswati

presides over the detailed organization and execution of autonomous

System Two

System One

components

The account of the five subsystems that holistically elucidate the VSM is spread over three books, two of them very thick, and it is difficult to give a brief description of them.'® " !* There are profound reasons for this. In the first place, a viable system is not a

hierarchical structure: all components are mutually interdependent, and reflect each other (as it were) holographically. Any diagrammatic layout, any listing of components, has the appearance of hierarchy: something must be mentioned first, or be drawn above something else. Secondly the characteristics that underwrite viability are the managerial phenomena connoted by such words as regulation, control, communication, coordination— not to mention the word management itself. But the essence of the cybernetic discoveries embodied in the VSM is that these phenomena are generated by the holistic performance

of the entire system. They do not reside anywhere at all; least of all can anyone of them be identified with any one subsystem. The nearest that I have come to such specificity is to identify various ‘regulatory loops. The force of such a view derives from the neurocybernetic studies in which the VSM has its origins:'® the localization of function in the brain is an intractable topic, because of the redundancy of potential command—and the impediment applies to all viable systems. Thus I have consistently evaded demands to ‘explain’ the five VSM roles, to make them ‘more understandable; because the cybernetic insight is denatured in the process. This is also the reason why I gave the subsystems numbers (and paid the price among those who

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insist this infers hierarchy), instead of simple but misleading names. We should not do well to nominate the loudspeaker as ‘the voice’ in a radio, nor to label the moving piston of the

engine as a vehicles ‘speed’ Users of the VSM may wish to consider the descriptions given in the above tabulation against this background. They are (at least) satisfactory in that they are highly informative for their length, do not fall into the localization trap, and are recursively effective via the component systems. The interesting thing is that I did not write them. They are Vedantic statements, drawn from the ancient creation model called Sristi. According to this, the Great Power, Mahashakti, is attended by other ‘magnificent powers, all having the prefix meaning great. Each has a responsibility, rather than a technique or an office, which obviously interacts with the other responsibilities. I particularly like Mahalaksmi’s wording, which in the inelegant parlance of VSM Systemn Two, is ‘anti-oscillatory’ I have taken only one liberty with the Vedantic descriptions,'” in using the term ‘autonomous components’ where my original says ‘created forms’; but I should be surprised if the (not available) Sanskrit does not equally support that reading. According to the VSM, every viable system contains and is contained in other viable

systems: this is why the model is called recursive. Exactly the same is true of the Sristi model. Mahashakti is conceptualized as a goddess, the divine mother; and she is in herself recursive. The great sage Sri Aurobindo writes of three modes of her being:® ‘the tran-

scendent supreme, original Shakti, who is above the worlds and serves as a link between creation and the still unmanifested mystery of the supreme; the universal, cosmic Mahashakti, who creates all beings and contains, penetrates, supports and directs the millions of processes and forces; and, lastly, the individual, who personifies the power of the two most vast aspects of her existence, makes them alive and close to us, and interposes herself between human personality and divine nature’ As Larousse comments, she is: ‘at the same time, the whole of divine power, yet this does not prevent her from being entirely incarnate in the mother of the family of each household, and in the Kundalini at the base of the vertebral column in the case of each human being’?' Similarly, the VSM has been mapped

onto body cells, the central nervous system, the family, townships and the country, as well as to all kinds of industrial and service enterprise worldwide. Of Fork and Measure

Results of the foregoing analysis were deeply surprising to me, despite a lifetime’s conviction that knowledge is perennial. Often its expression is contingent on current technology—and this provokes confusion between the two. Worse still, it may brand the notion of transcendental wisdom, which is called prajna in Vedanta, as superstition rather than knowledge at all. Perhaps this applies to ideas about underlying forms and energies that are not directly susceptible to empirical investigation. Has our own culture lost sight of the ‘mixture’ of Empedocles and of Aristotle’s ‘pneuma’; and was the ‘ether’ of a quondam phys-

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ics so readily to be dismissed? At any rate, the Chinese ‘chi’ has recently been admitted to Western society via acupuncture, and the moving meditation of tai chi chuan. It is hardly surprising that there is a Vedantic version of all of these in the form of prana, a word used for breath in breathing control—but having more profound and immaterial connotations in ontology too.

Bridging thought from East to West needs to remember that the word ‘science’ means knowledge; and that knowledge is ageless, not an instant reification of the latest technological gimmickry. For example, our contemporary approach to quantification is governed

by ‘state of the art’ computers, and the brands of mathematics that are most useful in their service—beginning with binary logic and passing on to the inversion of matrices and all kinds of iterative processes. It is algorithmic (dare we loosely say ‘left-brair’) at root. What of the origins of number in Vedantic mathematics? It is seriously suggested in India that ‘VM; as its protagonists refer to it, might change approaches to the teaching of mathematics to children.

No-one can deny that the Western approach is frequently counterproductive; and if many children shy away, it could have to do with the denial of intuitive (let’s say ‘right brain’) entry. Perhaps the sudden emergence, and subsequent success of set-theoretic pedagogy owed much to an intuitive component, as well as to its Open University pioneers in person. A story is told of the great mathematician Gauss at the age of about six. The teacher, seeking respite from a rowdy classroom, told the children to sit down and add up the numbers from 1 to 100— ‘that will keep them quiet for a bit’ The juvenile Gauss raised his hand and said 5,050. It may not be immediately obvious how he did it, but it was not by the pedestrian route that most ‘properly trained’ people adopt. Earlier this century, Jagadguru Shankaracharya created quite a sensation by writing a book called Vedic Mathematics. There is of course a technology involved, and there is no room to explain it here; but essentially results were obtained by meditation and visualization rather than by reckoning as we normally think of it. See the note on Gauss. See also the extraordinary history of Srinivasa Ramanujan.** He was an unschooled boy from outside Madras—born in 1887, and dead at the age of thirty-two. He was installed in Cambridge by the preeminent mathematician G. H. Hardy. Ramanujan used Vedic visualization, and

declared that ‘an equation has no meaning for me unless it expresses a thought of God’: this, then, had to do with the pranas. And although his language was not (shall we call it) ‘academically correct, this man was called ‘the one superlatively great mathematician whom India has produced in the last thousand years’ Although one usually hears it said that the Arabs invented calculation modulo ten, together with the absolute value of zero per column, it seems that they had learned the system from ancient India in the first place.” The Tuittiriya-Samhita, dating from before 1000 BCE, gives a Sanskrit name to each order of magnitude up to ten to the nineteen. Other Vedantic sources provide names in groups of five orders of magnitude up to ten to the sixty.

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Numbers were classified into even and odd, yugma = pair and ayugma = not-pair; and the same classification appears in distinguishing between even and odd arithmetic series.* We

can hardly fail to note that modern physics divides particles according to discrete, quantized spin values, which arise because of their quantum-mechanical nature. The bosons (such as photons) have full spin, while the fermions (such as electrons) have half-spin. As

have suggested before: coincidence is the inability to see what really matters. As to the possible relevance of all this to perennial knowledge, mention has already been made of potentially new teaching methods for children. Sri Abhay Kashyap has gone so far as to suggest a new type of computer based on Vedic mathematical insights,

which would go to very high speeds of number processing, and would thereby improve on number-intensive research in AI and pattern recognition.?® His proposal appears on page sata of the cited work, pleasingly enough; that is to say page 102 Has the computer industry made such a huge investment in established equipment and operating systems that it cannot change? Has Al itself too great an investment in its own paradigms to countenance it?

Throughout its existence management science has bemoaned the entrenched positions of management; today it is itself vulnerable to its own favourite criticism. Preparation for Action

We began by considering management as right action, the importance of direct experience over unfounded belief, and the focus in yoga of direct experience of the self. People prepare themselves for most forms of action, from playing squash to climbing mountains, by toning-up their bodies, by ‘getting into shape’; and such preparations may even extend to tutored autosuggestion that prepares the mind to succeed. We hear nothing however, about preparation for right action in management. Thus 1 mentioned in passing the eightfold path, which is founded on the Vedantic

aphorisms of Patanjali, and should be taught as a necessary aspect of any programme in Vedantic management. The Gita describes ‘closing the gates of the body, drawing the forces of the mind into the heart, and by the power of meditation concentrating vital energy in the brain’ This is evidently formidable preparation for right action. Attention is drawn once more to what is profound. Already medical people have started to recommend meditation as a palliative for executives who have survived their first in-

farct. But doing that is not profound. It is simple enough advice, and likely to help in controlling high blood pressure. But it is not preparation for right action. Raja yoga means the royal toad to union—with the cosmos and with oneself. Again, the modern executive is admonished to be abstinent: s/he frets about weight and

cholesterol, calories and salt, goes jogging, pumps iron. Says the Gita: ‘the abstinent runaway from what they desire, but carry their desires with them’. Contemporary attitudes are a royal road to frustration, anxiety and probable collapse. There is no space here to evolve an integrated plan for teaching Vedantic management

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as an intellectual discipline, and yogic practice as the discipline of self. In all religions prescriptions exist that strive for that integral result; Tantric yoga integrates sexuality too. So a great deal remains to be said, if there is interest in these preliminary thoughts. At least an image of a balanced manager is evoked. Such a person, please note, is calm rather than frenetic, happy amid all the adversities of our age. If meditation generates that state of being, it is not on account of mystical

claptrap, but for good scientific reasons that were understood in the Vedas. Today they can be expressed by saying that the eighth step on the yogic path, called samadhi, floods the

brain with endorphins. You may observe the same characteristic smile on the painted and sculpted faces of sages and saints in every culture in the world as a result. Loka Samastat Sukhino Bhavantu May the Whole Earth be Happy References

1. Churchman, C. W. Prediction and Optimal Decision: Philosophical Issues of a Science of Values. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1961.

2. Beer, S. ‘Prediction and Optimal Decision, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1963.

00

NN

U

[N

3. Churchman, C. W. The Systems Approach. Delacorte Press, New York, 1968. . Murthy, P. N. “Towards 2000 and Beyond, 30th Sri Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya Memorial Lecture, Institute of Engineers, India, 1988. . Beer, S. Translation from The Bhagavad Gita. . Beer, S. Decision and Control. Wiley, London, 1966. . Hawking, S. A Brief History of Time. Bantam, London, 1988. . Barrow, ]. D. and Tippler, E. ]. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford, 1986.

O

. Peat, E. D. Superstrings. Scribners, New York, 1991. 10. Hope, M. Time: the Ultimate Energy. Element Books, Dorset, 1991. 11. Segal, L. The Dream of Reality: Heinz von Foerster’s Constructivism. Norton, New York, 1986.

12. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. ]. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1980. 13. Beer, S. Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press, London, 1959.

14. Prabhavananda, S. and Isherwood, C. (translators) The Bhagvad Gita. Vedanta Society of Southern California, 1944.

15. Beer, S. “Towards the Cybernetic Factory, in Principles of Self-Organization, ed. von Foerster and Zopf, Pergamon, London, 1962.

16. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Wiley, Chichester, 1981. 17. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. 18. Beer, S. Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Wiley, Chichester, 1985.

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19. Murthy, P. N. ‘Some Philosophical Perceptions about Design as a Creative Process, Address to the 4th Indian Engineering Congress, Bhubaneswar, 1989. 20. Sri Aurobindo, The Mother. Aurobindo Ashram, India, 1970. 21. Herbert, J. ‘Hindu Mythology; in Larrouse

World Mythology, ed. Grimal, Hamlyn,

London, 1965. 22. Kanigel, R. The Man who Knew Infinity. Washington Square Press, New York, 1991. 23. Parambhans, S. A. ‘Glimpses of Mathematical Tradition of Ancient India and its Trans-

mission, in Vedic Mathematics, ed. Khare, Rastriya Veda Vidya Pratishthan, Delhi, 1991.

24, Shukla, K. S. ‘Vedic Mathematics: the Deceptive Title of Swamiji’s Book], op. cit. 25, Kashyap, A. “Vedic Mathematics: Some Ramifications) op. cit. NOTE ON GAUss: In case the form of the answer failed to indicate the infant Gauss’s visualization of the problem, the pairs 1 and 100, 2 and 99, 3 and 98, and so on, of which there are fifty, each equals 101. Thus the total is 5,050.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am much indebted to Professor P. N. Murthy, who heads the Systems Engineering and Cybernetic Centre of Tata Consultancy Services in Hyderabad, for rewarding conversations and his gift of lecture transcripts; also to Dr. Ashok Jain, Director of the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies in Delhi for

Photo: Allenna Leonard

inviting me to discuss these topics at a staff seminar in January 1993.

At the Manchester Business School in 1990, unveiling his Syntegrity Model

chapter 20

Personal Reflection on the Nature A of the Stafford Beer Collection

I was FIFTEEN when I decided I wanted to be a philosopher. But I was still at school, and the official syllabus for me was mathematics. This already placed me in some difficulty, because I was also intent on studying both literature and classics and that put me into three different departments of the school. I could have only one and chose mathematics. That meant studying arithmetic and the theory of numbers, algebra, and geometry, under three different tutors. I still remember the tremendous shock and excitement when I realised that all three of these topics were one and the same. No one had ever suggested to me that they might be intimately related, because they were all separated by their wholly different methodologies. Still less had anyone thought of referring to my other interests as part of a unified educational experience; I simply was not allowed them, and had to operate on my own. Having got away from all this to go to university, I set about the study of philosophy. One of the fields of interest was formal logic—both the ancient Aristotelian kind, and the modern mathematical logic of Russell and company. I was well into these studies when I realised that logic, and what I had been calling mathematics, were also one and the same field of inquiry. All this started a conscious process whereby I began to resent the separation of disciplines, and it prepared me for a later career in inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary work. But it was not without its resentments on the part of my wouldbe tutors. After all, my excited discoveries were quite offensive to the established order.

The Stafford Beer Collection is housed at Liverpool John Moores University. Privately published May 1996.

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A Personal Reflection

Quite soon I was accused by each separatist block of fraternising with the enemy! These difficulties clouded my early professional life; now at the age of seventy, I am no longer on the defensive. I speak instead of the ‘hardening of the faculties’ in universities, and preach an unmitigated holistic philosophy. Long before the discoveries of Roger Sperry about left and right brain dominance. I had become aware in myself of different modes of operating. This is why I insisted on painting and writing poetry throughout my scientific career. On a spiritual level, much the same set of discoveries were made over a large number of years. I was launched as an Anglican and by my teens, was considering a priestly vocation. But studies in theology led me into the Catholic Church—in which I stayed for twenty-four years. The experience was rich and rewarding; but I felt, as many did, that publication of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae under Paul VI squandered the opportunities that had been provided by John XXIII and the Vatican II Council, and I formally left the Church that I had formally joined. That was in 1968; but I had been studying eastern religions in parallel since 1946 when I was in India and been practising yoga all those years. The transition I now made seemed natural enough and, from the holistic point of view, I was no longer seeing dogmatic faiths as relevant to the spiritual experience itself. The problem with holism as a way of looking at the world is that it is just too easy to talk about the ‘big system’ and to claim that everything must be taken into account. The plain reality is that people may say this but simply do not do it, with the result that all talk of holistic attitudes begin to sound glib—because it is glib. The true holistic experience is beyond cognition; it is the experience of cognition itself. We do not prepare ourselves for communicating this kind of knowledge. Then the whole point of storing such a collection as this begins to emerge. It is far from being a museum. It is possible for students who have the time, to discover processes that lie behind the exhibits. Particular concepts and ways of looking at the world may be manifest in books—also in a poem or a painting. The evolution of ideas may be traced back into early papers and even manuscripts, and the strange machines that were used to explore

them. So the hope is that by following the threads through a many faceted life a deeper understanding will be developed. In the collection, you will be able to observe a letter dated June 1981 in which I state ‘T particularly dislike the archive ...’ It is not a museum; it is an invitation to enter a process. And why should we wish to engage in the process? Is it to obtain a deeper understanding

of Stafford Beer the man? I have scoffed at the hubris of such an idea. The hope is that by experiencing some element of such a process it might become metabolised into the future. There is a wonderful story about a student who thanked his professor profusely for what he had been taught. He said: ‘It has been a privilege to stand on the shoulders of giants” The professor replied: “Tell us what you can see’

chapter 2 ].

,j[;ie Culpabliss Error: a Calculus of Ethics for a Systemic World

Sources of Our Present Discontents

SOME FORTY years ago, the management of the largest departmental store in London’s Oxford Street had a tremendous idea. If we divide the profit of each department by the floor area, we can determine the optimal use of floor space, they said. All we need to do is to copy the practice of the department that generates the most profit per square foot. So they did the exercise; and the most profitable area per square foot turned out to be the suite of rest rooms, with its coin-in-the-slot cubicles. For some reason, however, Selfridges was not turned into a gigantic public convenience. I published that story in my second book. Decision and Control,! exactly thirty years ago (describing it even then as ‘well known’)—and the book has remained in print ever since.

Alas, the lesson of that story, and dozens of others like it, has not been learned to this day. Perhaps people file it away as a funny story. But it is actually an archetype of the reductive technique in action. This is the approach that expects to understand wholes, which are integral systems, by breaking them down into smaller and smaller parts. We need to remember

that the basic technique of Western thinking, and of the whole body of science itself, is reductive—or to use a term more readily understood to be pejorative, it is reductionist. I need a pejorative word; because the technique of thinking we use, despite its spectacular successes, is also responsible for the appalling mess in which we find ourselves on every

Memorandum marking his 70th birthday, Liverpool John Moores University, 25 September, 1996. First published in Systems Practice, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1997. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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The Culpabliss Error

side. The technique is not systemic. Indeed, it is anti-systemic. The world however is very much systemic. It always was, of course; what I mean by ‘very much systemic’ is that our recent technologies have made the world effectively smaller and vastly more interactive. So there is now a strong emphasis on system. Thirty years ago, even the word ‘systemic” was

not in currency. People often asked me what it meant. Editors of my articles would routinely change it to ‘systematic’—which word was regarded as the adjectival form of system. We know better now. Or do we? I think we do not; and this talk is dedicated to enquiring

into the origins and the outcomes of a mammoth mistake. When explaining this difficulty about the reductive technique to youngsters, I usually point out that if you take a radio set to pieces you can certainly understand how it works,

and even build a duplicate that works. But although you may survey all the components, neatly spread out and labelled, you never seem to find the voice. And the same thing happens when you dismantle an engine: you cannot find the speed. But the voice and the speed are just the things that matter. We are using a technique of enquiry that causes the very attributes of the radio system and the engine system in which we are the most interested to disappear. Children had no trouble with this demonstration that something must be wrong forty years ago, which was when I started to use it, and today’s children have no trouble with it either—providing I remember to say Oasis instead of Bing Crosby. But that is all that has changed. The first lot of children had themselves educated, and can therefore explain to the new lot that the problem is fictitious. But it is by no means fictitious. We talk all the time about systems, but the systemic

attributes of the system are not represented in our descriptions. The notion of a system in the public mind is quite static. As a check on this claim, we may observe how the word system has become an in-word—but its usage usually carries no systemic connotation. There was recently a spate of advertising, for example, for ‘the complete shaving system’'—which turned out to be what we used to call a razor. In the academic context, we often speak of ‘dynamic systems. Whatever else would a system be but dynamic? When we inspect a flow diagram, we observe that the lines are marked with directional arrows. But they seem to indicate dependencies rather than movement; and if the diagram is at all complicated it is impossible to see what the consequences of making a change in the system will be a little further down the line without mounting a full scale simulation. My complaint is that a root cause of our present discontents has to do with the reductive character of scientific explanation, and a resulting epistemology that regards consequences as inherent qualities

of static systems. For a second time I risk having a diagnosis perceived as fictitious, and its illustration with the razor as a joke. And yet: « This is the flawed process by which we have flooded our planet with more than 100,000 industrial chemicals that have been tested for carcinogenic effects—but not as mimics of oestrogen. Unfortunately, the body is a total system. The consequences we are

The Culpabliss Error

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already seeing in lowered sperm counts are not fictitious, nor are they particularly funny. o There again, I can easily recall being shocked to learn that ecological mismanagement was wiping out a species a day; but now the latest United Nations report has 150 to 250 species becoming extinct every twenty-four hours. That adumbrates the mass extinction of life. The logging companies are doing fine, and so are the oil companies. Unfortunately, the Earth is a total system. o The people who are maximizing return on capital in the business of armaments are

doubtless doing a good job for shareholders, but they are not building gigantic public toilets. Would that they were—it would be more sanitary. For some reason people are

blind to the fact that to keep the production of profits going, more and more armaments need to be sold—and in turn exploded. But the financial returns are perceived as qualities of the share portfolio, and not in the systemic context of death. I was just now talking

about the mass extinction of life: in this context it is called genocide. About Surrogate Worlds It is easy enough to accept that we live in a culture in which terrible—possibly fatal—

mistakes are endemic. It is fairly easy to see that one root cause of the problem lies in a reductive technique that is virtually powerless to handle an integral system. But now I draw your attention to a second root cause, which has to do with the kinds of models that we use in managing our world.

I am not talking here about mathematical models or other formal or esoteric statements. I am speaking quite simply about the image of something that we hold in our minds—the idea we have selected from a myriad sensory impressions, endowed with coherence, and elected to call ‘reality’ Probably no-one here would mistake such models of social, political or economic systems for ‘reality’—if only because the models do not work very well. But they are the only entities that we have to work with; and with the passage of time, the familiarity of persistent usage, and the professionalism of the experts who profess them, they come to be treated as

if they were real, and respected as if they did work. These models are not systemic, as we have seen. Worse still, they are flawed in two other ways. Firstly, they are over-simplifications—in cybernetic terms, they do not exhibit requisite variety. Secondly, they are usually out-of-date. I described the whole problem in detail just twenty-five years ago when I named these models ‘surrogate worlds’? I hope it is obvious that if we are managing merely surrogate worlds, there is a great deal of scope for making mistakes. So much for what is no more than a reminder of a long-established diagnosis of our present discontents: let us choose a couple of examples. [ start at home, with the family. ‘Johnnikins is not at all himself these days, said of a son. Oh, really? Then who is he? The parents who said this to me were loving and concerned.

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But they were concerned about a surrogate son; and whether they would still love the actual son if they updated the model is a moot point. Who is this Johnnikins anyway? John is seventeen years old, for heaven’s sake. They are using the model that worked quite well when he was five, which means that the model is twelve years past its sell-by date. As to the

model’s not exhibiting requisite variety, a lad who has given up protesting about still being called Johnnikins as a lost cause is unlikely to seek parental discussion and advice about his raging testosterone. What happens next? Such models are not geared to adaptation,

so the mismatch is handled qualitatively. These parents will be quite satisfied with a small addition to the static, non-evolutionary, non-systemic model they have enshrined, once they are provided with a label for the mismatch. The label will be inscribed: The Generation Gap.

Here is a second actual example. Two relatives were discussing the condition of Granddad in his presence and pretty offensive terms. ‘Should you be saying these things in front of him?’ I asked the question sotfo voce. ‘Oh, his mind is wandering nowadays, and besides he’s as deaf as a post’ When

[ was left alone with the old man, and standing behind his

chair. I asked in the same soft voice: ‘How are things?” He chuckled, and knocked out his pipe into the fire. ‘Very entertaining’ Of course, he had heard every word; and of course there was nothing wrong with his mind. We finished off his crossword puzzle. This time the model was a convenient extrapolation into a forecast surrogate world, which was relevant neither in time nor in requisite variety. Let us leave the intimacies of family life at that, drawing the curtains gently on the surrogate models that spouses typically nurse of each other and of their marriage. Perhaps a little more cybernetic insight and a little less psychoanalysis would help there ... But whether we can afford to ignore exactly parallel situations in the Third World I should seriously dispute. Anyone who has actually been involved in the socio-political

scene there well understands that governments have to operate according to models set up by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This means that everything is steadily improving in the surrogate world of the bankers, while in the mouths of the poverty-stricken they are getting steadily worse. I have verified this statement for Mexico

as an example within the last month. The Example of Education I shall now make a first excursion into public policy by relating these thoughts, albeit briefly, to education. Here are a few characteristics of the models that between them appear to me to constitute a surrogate world, against which my diagnoses might be tested. Firstly, it is constantly said that education is the prerequisite of all social advance. Secondly, this education must be ‘relevant’ which seems to mean that it should be adapted to the job market. Thirdly, society has become deskilled, and huge efforts are needed to raise the level of skill to 1979 levels—in order to stop the rise in unemployment.

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The argument then is: the world is a mess, and this mess can be ameliorated only by education. Pray consider the following scenario. In a hundred years from now, which is a virtual split second in the history of humankind, pretty well everyone alive today will be dead. It follows from this that in a mere hundred years from now, since the planet is by no means short of resources and the technology is already available, it might be possible to have an equitable society, in which truth, beauty and goodness prevailed; hunger, poverty, war and crime were outlawed, and the currency of life was love. Education exists to make sure that does not happen. After all, we can teach only what we know. What we know is

how to generate the mess that we have. The models of management that we espouse are disastrous. As to making education strictly vocational, why should our models of the job market

suddenly become predictive and adaptive? They are neither. The concept of what should constitute employment in a post-industrial society has been mooted,’ but the political climate that pertains belongs to the end of the eighteenth century. There are huge inequalities

in both wealth and income; there is widespread job insecurity—an unregulated employment market whereby short-term contracts and freelance activity provide no continuity and there is a consequent lack of protection. These are the very conditions into which the Trade Unions were born. They fought for decent conditions, became overly powerful,

and thereby have since fought their way down into desuetude—so that today membership comprises only a third of the workforce. They will have to be reinvented. The argument about the deskilling of society is tangled to say the least, as Will Hutton has recently pointed out.* First of all, it seems likely that this factor contributes only 20 per cent to the long-term increase in unemployment in Britain. Secondly, job creation schemes have no effect on the problem. And thirdly, even if it were effective to re-skill society by educational means, we could not possibly afford it. To bring the lower half of the US popu-

lation up to 1979 levels of income in equality, according to research at the University of Chicago, would cost two trillion dollars. I have been messing with the models and finding them confused and confusing, which is because they refer to surrogate worlds. Outcomes, as this implies, are full of contradic-

tions. We wish to grant access to education to every individual, which means broadening the catchment base, which means that the proportion of exceptional students will go down—and then we penalize the institutions that do as we ask because they score too low

on a scheme of points that measures precisely the wrong thing. This applies to A-levels and goes on through the whole system, beyond graduation, to include points awarded for post-graduate research. This uses positive feedback to concentrate the monies available for research with elite institutions, while at the same time complaining that less fortunate places fail to build research teams using the money that no-one will provide. We seek to give responsibility for educational advancement to the individual, and then take our best and brightest and refuse to fund them properly. Doctoral students often

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give up, and then they are blamed for not displaying brilliant thinking while in the process of flipping hamburgers to eke out derisory grants. We do not like to fund research for matters that are not of obvious and immediate benefit, whereas the whole history of science demonstrates that the discoveries that make all the difference are seen as value-

less by the generality—and even by those specially appointed in quangos to detect them. Please understand that I am not simply moaning about the under-funding of education: I am still firmly on the track of the original enquiry into wrong models and their consequences. The misunderstanding about the value of basic and apparently ‘pointless’ research stems from a bad model of how progress happens, and that comes up for discussion next. Meanwhile, let us make sure that we take due note of experience. It has been endlessly repeated, from Hero of Alexandria’s invention of the steam turbine in the first century,

right up to lasers today. Hero’s invention was banned; and when I had a laser installed in my office in Holborn in 1966 in order to demonstrate the principle of holography, my colleagues scoffed at the contention that it had practical value. In between came computers. A few years ago in New York I met an old lady who said that she had been Alan Turing’s only doctoral student fifty years before. When I then referred to her as ‘Doctor; she shyly apologized and said that she was not entitled to more than Miss. It turned out that she was awarded only a Master’s degree; the doctorate was refused on the explicit grounds that the computing engine she was writing about was unworthy of serious attention. Mind you, the university concerned was one of those two sleepy old places out in the boondocks to the North of London.

But it is much the same in industry, unhappily. I wrote in 1972 that you could be sure that the only people who had the vision to save a threatened company would be the first to be fired as an economy measure.’ In the spate of downsizing, resizing and general mayhem that we have been witnessing in the last ten years, this has been a repeated experience worldwide. Of course, if the individual student were seen correctly as embedded in the community, and if the community were seen correctly as embedded in the wealth generating context of industry and business, we should be embarking on a set of viable systems recursively working up to a newly empowered nation.® Instead, we are stuck with an inarticulated collection of dislocated bad models, the mighty clashing of their respective surrogate worlds—and of the mighty egos that inhabit them. Finally in this example, let me suggest that inside this set of embedments that my work on viable systems has tried to make explicit, at the level of the city, should be found a university; a university that prizes scholarship and novel ideas as well as ‘relevance’; a university that understands and is organized around the holistic principle of universus—whence comes its name—and which is therefore immune to the dire disease called the Hardening of the Faculties; a university led in societary terms by a business school acting as a powerhouse for change—while at the same time venerating those values and propagating them

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within the community. Needless to say, I long ago designed one of those too—a business school fully integrated within its environment.” The design has never been implemented— and for the usual reason: ‘We don't actually run a business school like that? No we don't; and as a US legislator once said of the need to teach foreign languages, ‘If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me. Sources of Our Models

If the models we use are so inept, and if our decisions are therefore so defective, how has this mismatch come about? What we call ‘progress’ turns out to be a recognition of advances in technique, and has little to do with advance in understanding. In short, we have become very good at following our technological nose—regardless of where we shall end up. But understanding is a product of modelling, and the useful models change very little over the millennia. Of course, and because we believe in progress, we disregard early statements of crucial models. This is technological hubris, and I believe that it should be abandoned. It seems to me that the crucial models arise from experience as mediated by a central processor—the brain—which has not changed in millennia, and that therefore understanding is timeless. Thanks to fads in the usage of technology, this does not look to be the case. Thanks to fads in the language of philosophy, this does not sound to be the case. But it is the case. Take the atomists of ancient Greece, for example, working in the golden age of the fifth century BCE. Their intellectual progenitors had already modelled the universe in terms of an infinite mass in internal motion: this was Anaximander, in roughly 600 BCE. Lest you should think that his detailed theory of how the universe evolved was probably nonsense, you should hear that he knew that the moon is lit by the sun, and that the earth is round. Possibly you have been attributing that discovery to someone else. On such foundations as this, Empedocles declared that the four basic elements of earth, air, fire and water must be in complex combination to construct the universe, and that therefore billions of very tiny

particles of each of those elements must be available, from which to fabricate the universe by a combinatorial dance. Anaxagoras went on to contend that in that case the traditional four elements ought to be replaced in the model by billions of elements. Then bone, for instance, would be formed as the result of billions of bone-elements coming together. Such thinking paved the way for the atomic theory proper, usually associated with Leucippus and Democritus. Matter is not made of tiny particles of bone, or hair, or whatever, but of tiny particles—period. That is,

the atoms are devoid of quality, which is just what physics ‘discovered’ at the turn into this century. Whether you regard what the Greeks did as an extraordinary feat of the mind, or modern physics as a shared limitation of the brain, is a non-trivial question.

This is not a history of philosophy, but an enquiry into the roots of our present discontents, so forgive me if I take a thousand years’ holiday before picking on a second example

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of this thesis. By about the year 400 ck, and having had some 700 years to digest not only the pre-Socratics but the further advances of Plato and Aristotle concerning the union of matter and form, we find St Augustine contemplating the universe. The form of the universe existed before the beginning of time, he said. At a given instant, an act of creation started time going. Matter was created out of nothing in the same instant, bringing with it the space into which that matter could explode. No wonder the process made a Big Bang, as its recent ‘discovery’ was named. Augustine also had a name, with a similar denotation, which was God. Now physics is hard at work on the Theory Of Everything, T-O-E, which I suppose will be called the Big Toe. So it may turn out that the forms that Augustine needed to make impressions on matter are superstrings. Anyway, 1,600 years further down the line, physics is coming close to an Augustinian universe: providing us with a complete

theology—minus God. You may have noted that these crucial models usually come equipped with the key

concepts arranged in antagonistic pairs: matter and form, substance and accidents, waves and particles, not to mention good and evil. The pairs stand in need of Hegelian higher synthesis, as for example Einstein’s equivalence of matter and energy; or the complemen-

tary principle that handled the wave/particle contradiction; or the frequent appearance of trinities in theologies. Perhaps a brain in which every neuron is at all times either firing or not with a uniform spike potential is committed to the dichotomy of its outputs. This would suit my thesis; but I have several times tried to prove the point mathematically, and failed. It does seem however, that a diadic logic is not adequate to account for the brain’s performance: a triadic logic is required. Be that as it may, pray consider our problem about the roots of contemporary malfunction in terms of a contradictory pair of concepts: it is

one of the oldest such pairs pervasive through time and it remains one of today’s hottest topics: the question of change itself. The pre-Socratic philosophers spent about 250 years examining the matter—remember. Plato was not even born. The most famous of the believers in change was Heraclitus, working in Ephesus, best known for teaching that everything is in constant flux. It was he who wrote that you cannot step into the same river twice. But just down the road the philosophers of Elea were contending that change is impossible. Parmenides, for example, taught that all change is inconceivable—its appearance an illusion. All this in 500 BCE. The argument rages on. Today’s management scene is typified in my experience by people fervidly preaching change to people who fervently embrace change on condition that nothing alters. But change as defined by events is a main feature of our contemporary world. In that

we deny creating it is the menides

it by inaction it happens to us—instead of our working with it, planning for it, and a better world, a viable future. That is the very reason why we don't like change: name of a stasis that is by definition not adaptive. Society is Heraclitian; but Paris in charge.

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A Commonality of Error

We have uncovered some of the sources of difficulty in handling change sensibly, in that the models underlying action do not exhibit requisite variety, are not timely, and therefore do not recognize change that is actually occurring—while seeking forms of change that are inappropriate because they refer to surrogate worlds. All this is bad enough. But it is

no more than a preamble to the key notion which requires elucidation. It is embedded in these four stories—all true—and I ask you to try to detect what such dissimilar scenarios have in common.

+ In one of the prairie provinces of Canada, legislators became concerned for the safety of solitary women hitch-hiking for long distances on their own. If a solo male driver were to give a woman a lift, then there was a risk of assault—some incidents had indeed come to public attention. In the nature of the case there were no witnesses. A law was therefore passed that if a charge of rape were laid, the testimony of the woman must be accepted. There is biblical precedent of a sort. We may read in Deuteronomy (22; 24-27) about the situation of betrothed women alleging rape. A distinction is drawn between an incident that occurs in the city, in which case if no screams are heard the woman is assumed to be complicit, and one that occurs in the fields. Since there is none to hear a scream, the woman is assumed to be not guilty. It makes all the difference to her, since she will not be stoned to death; the man is done for either way. The man in the modern example is

also in deep trouble—so much so that only an idiot would risk offering the lift in the first place. So in the effort to protect their womenfolk, the legislators left them abandoned by the roadside.

o Let us lighten the atmosphere for the second story. A man taking daily medication for diabetes used to tip his tiny pill out of a bottle onto the palm of his hand. Experts in hygiene then came along and improved the packaging. Each pill was now encased in its personal cocoon within a blister pack, the whole backed by heavy metal foil. This was a very expensive innovation, but no expense is spared when a pharmaceutical company wants to assure a health service about its product. Now diabetics typically have peripheral neuropathies that make them clumsy with their fingers. So nowadays, in the interests of hygiene, I frequently take my pill—not straight from the bottle, but straight from the floor. + I move from the trivial to the far from trivial. Two of the major objectives of domestic policy in the United States, which are shared by both parties, are the reduction of the

fiscal deficit and the reduction of atmospheric pollution. A small step towards both was taken earlier this year, when Congress passed a law increasing the tax on gasoline—albeit by a trivial margin. The President, in election year and for obvious reasons, vetoed the measure. Now suppose that the United States paid a gas tax equivalent to the British

tax—which is far from the heaviest in Europe. The deficit would be wiped out in a single

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year. Secondly, a tremendous incentive would be imparted to the automotive industry and to its market to make smaller cars with more efficient engines, which would rapidly and significantly reduce pollution. Remember that these are bi-partisan objectives. » The fourth true story concerns various states in America, perhaps also if less extensively in Britain, and the young men who violate the law in fairly small offences. When he is committed to prison, such a young offender will himself be violated. Everyone con-

cerned in penology knows that this is a certainty. But we may imagine the public outcry, national and international, if a judge passing sentence on a persistent minor offender ordered three months of daily gang-rape. I invited you to detect the common characteristic in these four stories. It is of course that in each case a decision is taken or a decision is neglected with unacknowledged but perfectly predictable consequences. These consequences are disguised by the models in use: the consequences are not apparent in the surrogate worlds generated and supported

by those models. Blame and the Guilty Mind

When someone takes a wrong decision, then, is s/he to blame? Perhaps most people would agree that we are quite evidently living in an absolute morass of wrong decisions, for which no-one seems to be to blame. It has to be said that modern

management, whether in in-

dustry, business or government, has made a specialty of avoiding responsibility. From the disingenuous naivety of ‘I knew nothing about it, through the sophisticated demonstration that ‘It was not my responsibility; to the deeply sinister ‘I was only obeying orders, the excuses are all to hand and more than to hand, since they come straight out of the mouths of anyone accused of anything these days. So long as the claim can be made that due diligence or due process has been observed, anything is acceptable—but these concepts themselves belong to a model of decision that is inoperable. The excuses are accepted, because decisions are no longer taken by individuals, but by institutions working in committee, and because the institutions to which the accused belong can well afford expensive lawyers—who themselves come in teams. Thus is responsibility dissipated into a miasma of corruption. This is not idle rhetoric. How about a general who did not know that documents had been suppressed, although his handwritten memo on one of those very documents attested to the fact that he did? How about the managers of a mine that exploded killing twenty people who did not know that a report had been submitted to them declaring the mine unsafe? Or the safety inspectors who confirmed the fact, but did not consider that it was

their responsibility to see whether any action was taken? How about the ghastly serial murders in which the female partner was accorded lenient treatment because she was dominated by the man and ‘had no choice —whereas later on it begins to look as though she was the leading spirit? These are all current matters of concern in Canada, and under

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my daily scrutiny as I prepare this speech. And I read equivalent stories when the British papers arrive.

Well, I used the word corruption just now. It is not too strong. People think of corruption as the collection of illegal acts, and respectable people do not commit illegal acts. [ was in Columbia in June, and renewed for the government there a definition of corruption that I had offered to the Mexican government some years before: Any act that does not validate the system of values that we support is corrupt. Which decisions that are made by ostensibly respectable managers can survive that harsh criterion? If this is true where is the onus? Ethical philosophy has for a long time argued that it lies with intention. In theological terms, it is not possible to commit a sin of which you are unaware that it is sinful. You must intend to do this wrong. And so the notion passed from theology to law. The concept of mens rea, which means a guilty mind, derives from

criminal law. What does it mean to be guilty? Modern thinking about this seems to begin with the social philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham who was living about 200 years ago. He distinguished between direct and oblique intention. There is little problem about assigning guilt to someone who directly intends to commit a crime. But suppose we are dealing with an action that carries with it consequences that the subject argues that s/he did not foresee? For this is precisely the question to which this enquiry has led. Bentham talks dismissively about the ‘mere foresight of consequences, and does not consider ‘inseparable consequences. But this is just what concerns us here. And of course it

is obvious that if there is an hiatus between action and consequence, then we are dealing with something that may be just a bit separable ... In other words we are dealing with a probability. Now the law does not like probabilities. When I offered evidence in a landmark criminal libel action, it was based on a variety of different statistical techniques for assessing the probability that a given statement was true. It used the argument that since all the methods indicated that the likelihood was approaching certainty, the court could have confidence in the statement as veridical. Counsel threw this evidence out with some vehemence. He said that the law deals only with facts. I replied that judges often asked juries to consider the ‘balance of probabilities’ He countered by saying that I was neither a judge nor a jury, buta so-called expert witness. And a scientist who did not know for certain what the facts were,

or even what was the correct technique to use to reveal the facts, thereby demonstrated his incompetence!

Back to the fabric of the criminal law itself: The doctrine surrounding mens rea began with the introduction of the term itself some thirty years after Jeremy Bentham died. The only place in which the notion of separable but genuine consequence seems to have entered

into it is with the imputation of constructive malice. Here is the very notion that we have been trying to track down, since it allows that the intention to do wrong may in principle

be inferred as a probability. But as I said, the law does not like probabilities. The availability

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of argument from constructive malice was abolished in Britain by the Homicide Act of 1957—and we are back to requiring evidence of direct intention. The ethical question of whether or not a decision-taker or a policy-maker should have known the disastrous outcome of that decision or that policy may or may not be a criminal matter. So it is easy to understand why lawyers do not want to admit elements of argument

that might well have the effect of becoming entangled in their basic categories. Let us then move on to the difficulty that the enquiry so far has uncovered. I am thinking about the direct and indirect consequence distinction, and the issue of inseparable consequences— which turn out to be just a bit separable after all. The notion is horrifyingly imprecise. Let us see if the history of thought can come up with relevant ideas that might remove the horror. The Core of the Error

We have already had occasion to talk about the pre-Socratic philosophers, and I remind you now of Parmenides, who considered change to be impossible. A colleague in that view was Zeno. Six Zenos figure in Greek philosophy, and this is the eldest of them—Zeno the Eleatic, who was both pupil and friend of Parmenides. His technique of argument was to draw contradictory conclusions from the premises of the opposition, thereby demonstrat-

ing the premises to be unsound. And so he came up with Zeno’s Arrow, which never can move because it has to reach the mid-point of its flight before it can reach the target, and before that it must reach the mid-point of that half-flight—and so on indefinitely. Even better known is the model of the hare that could not overtake the tortoise for a similar reason: the hare is perpetually trying to halve the lead that the tortoise was given. In the original, it was not a hare condemned to this fate, but Achilles himself—not that this made any difference. When Aristotle got his teeth into Zeno’s paradox, which must have been 100 years later, he knew that something was wrong, but pronounced himself unable to say what it was. So Aristotle was content to nominate Zeno the inventor of the dialectic—thus paving the way for Hegel and Marx. But he also left the field wide open for Newton and Leibniz to invent calculus, and by failing to do it himself there and then held up the development of human insight by some 2,000 years. I have always wondered what difference it would have made if Aristotle had not let himself down in this way. He should have realized that to freeze a changing variable artificially, and then to debate the status of that variable as if it were characterized by its very stasis rather than by its relative rate of change, is an inoperable model. What is needed is a calculus of variations, in which finite differences converge on a limit as the increment diminishes toward zero. That leads to the concept of an instantaneous rate of change of the function with respect to the variable, which is to say the derivative of the function.

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What has all this to do with the problem of recognizing consequence? I submit that society is trapped in an ethical version of Zeno’ fallacy. It treats an intervention in a changing situation as if that intervention had coupled to it something known as a consequence, and handles the evident uncertainty attached to the coupling in terms of likelihood. Unfortunately, no actual measures of likelihood, statistical or otherwise, are applicable. So in order to give the likelihood some semblance of rigour or respectability, society has invented the ethical concepts of The Prudent Man, of The Reasonable Man, and of The Practical Man,

which are operated as ethical norms in accountancy, in law and in business respectively. In a given situation, how would these gentlemen be likely to react? There are no measures involved, but there ought to be some social consensus about their meaning in actual situations. But is there? Very recently my partner, Allenna Leonard, looked up from a study of auditing that she

had undertaken, and exclaimed in exasperation: “The Prudent Man is out of his depth. I replied: “Well, The Reasonable Man is a bigot. This interchange triggered an immediate and fond recollection of hearing Bertrand Russell say to someone who was thumping the table and shouting about practicality: T define The Practical Man as the man who has no idea what to do in practice’ All this being so, I cannot help thinking that it is just as well that there seem to be no prudent, reasonable or practical women. Discussing the issue recently with my friend Don Burrill, he summed up with a generic character—The Hypothetical Man. His definition needs to be shared: The Hypothetical Man is one who has explicitly

and willingly suspended disbelief about something that is inherently implausible. These concepts, in short, on which so much law and ethics depend, are not very much use outside their own dysfunctional models; they could easily be lumped in with The Calculated Risk,

which I realized early in my business career means a risk that no-one can calculate. It is not surprising that these ethical notions are defective, because they belong to a model in which consequence is actually coupled, however insecurely, to a decision or policy. But the insecurity of the coupling is not due to intrinsic properties, as the ethical models imply, but to future uncertainty. The model that society is using by no means recognizes this. It is making the mistake that Aristotle made when he failed to account for incremental change. And this comes down to a failure to perceive a decision as an instantaneous rate of change, which is to say a derivative of a function formulated with respect to time, instead of as an event—defined as frozen in time, like Zeno's arrow. To recognize consequence in a policy or decision, we need not to analyze the worth of its construction, but to synthesize its systemic evolution. The Error Identified: Culpabliss

About 250 years ago, Thomas Gray completed his poem occasioned by a distant view of Eton College with words that have become famous over the years. They declare:

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—where ignorance is bliss,

“Tis folly to be wise. This is sad but true; and I dare say that the practical wisdom the remark enshrines has been treasured by Etonians ever since. We have however been discussing a very special form of ignorance. This is the ignorance of consequence which, according to my examples, has really no excuse. That this kind of ignorance is so common is due, I have been contending, to the pervasive use in society of a faulty ethical construct—one which has no systemic referent. And whether it was Aristotle’s fault or not, the fact is that the faulty model is deeply ingrained. So a huge effort will be needed to dislodge it. An understanding of the way systems behave, and of the underlying principles they obey even when they are probabilistic systems, has to be developed in the public consciousness. It is not that the knowledge does not yet exist: it is called cybernetics. I myself have been an advocate on its

behalf for forty years. So perhaps the way forward is to make it clear (as I am attempting to do here) that although ignorance is bliss it may yet be indefensible. Thus I offer you a new word: culpabliss. It means culpable ignorance of consequence. Culpa is the Latin word for fault, and ignorance is bliss—an acronym for Blind In Systems’ Sensibility. Perhaps Thomas Gray will forgive me for adding a metrical foot to his metre—and for reversing his meaning—in order to say: —where ignorance is culpabliss, “Tis folly to be less than wise. Or else you may end up in jail. As I said before, society must bring it home to managers and ministers that the culpabliss error will not be tolerated any longer. As we have seen,

there is no professional regulatory machinery in place in the overarching disciplines, not in law, not in ethics; nor is there any sign that individual professions themselves recognize culpabliss—by any name. We took a quick look at education, and have mentioned several

other activities in passing. A whole book could be written about culpabliss in medicine. After all, many have realized that far too high a percentage of disorders is iatrogenic—caused by the doctor. Moreover, and because of this, the whole shape of the profession is adjusting to the threat of litigation. If you don’t know what to do, order tests. The cost is crippling health services, and the likelihood that test results are wrong is higher than the risk that the patient has the condition that the test purports to detect: that is culpabliss squared. It is in the absence of hope that the professions will detect their vulnerability to culpabliss that I call upon the free press to establish public recognition of this particular category.

A weekly column, for example, instancing the worst examples, under such a heading as “They should have known’ might do the trick. Only the journalists concerned need to understand the editorial principle involved, and there is no need to explain any underlying

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theory as I have tried to do. The public would gradually learn, by repeated ostensive definition, the connotations involved and the editorial criteria for selection. We repeatedly see the public as autodidactic when its attention is captured and finally captivated. Even so, the whole idea might seem too intellectual for the tabloids and the Practical Man. I don’t think so. Try the alternative heading: ‘They shoulda damn well knowr. Surely that has some verisimilitude. But the media may have to swallow hard in pursuing this proposal—they are hardly strangers to culpabliss themselves ... Besides, it is now the free press that is being invited to make a change involving actual alteration. Oh dear. In closing, and because we are here in an academic setting, and despite my expressed misgivings about the current academic scene, I must point out a major conclusion. It is that

the culpabliss error derives from a failure to understand cybernetics, which is the science of the regulation of large, probabilistic systems. Especially needed are a cybernetic insight into epistemology, with its emphasis on the role of models, and a mastery of cybernetic technique in respect of systemic consequence. This criticism, happily, does not apply to this institution—or I should not be here. In the customary absence of this discipline however, it is fair to say that a university, and especially its business school, is a Professor short of a Faculty. References

1. Beer, S. Decision and Control. Wiley, London 1966. 2. Beer, S. “The Surrogate World We Manage, Presidential Address to the Society for Gen-

eral Systems Research, December 29, 1971. Published in Platform for Change. Wiley, London, 1975. 3. Beer, S. “The Future of Work, Keynote Address to 55th Annual Couchiching Conference, Ontario. Published in Futures Canada, Vol. 8, Nos. 2 and 3, 1986.

4. Hutton, W. The State We're In. Cape, London, 1995. 5. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. Allen lane, London, 1972. 6. Beer, S. ‘Recursions of Power, Keynote Address to the 7th European Conference on Cybernetics and Systems Research, April 1984. Published in Power, Autonomy, Utopia. Ed. Trappl, Plenum Press, New York, 1986. 7. Beer, S. The Organization of the Manchester Business School from Nineteen Seventy. Uni-

versity of Manchester, 1970.

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1. Centenary Celebration for Warren McCulloch A Thumbnail Sketch

I HAD THE privilege to know most of the founders of cybernetics, and three in particular I honour as mentors: Norbert Wiener, Ross Ashby, and Warren McCulloch. This year there is special reason to celebrate Warren Sturgis McCulloch, for it is his centenary year. He was born on the 16th of November 1898, in Orange, New Jersey. Warren was a philosopher and scientist. As a freshman at Haverford College he told the Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones that all he wanted to know was: “What is a number that a man may know it; and a man, that he may know a number?’ To this the Quaker famously replied: ‘Friend, thee will be busy as long as thee lives! Warren acknowledged in his last days that the prophecy had been fulfilled, and had helped him to invent cybernetics on the way. Warren was a physician and psychiatrist. He graduated from Yale in 1920, and took in a period of service in the Naval Reserve. Then he went to Columbia University where he qualified as a physician, attaining his MD

in 1927, and became known for work on

Address given to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Orlando, Florida, July 1998.

First published in Systems Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1999. Reprinted with kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

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experimental epilepsy. You might well ask what he was up to in the early 1930s, then, doing graduate work in New York University on mathematical physics ... But in a year or two he was back at the Alma Mater in Yale, and working on the central nervous system.

Throughout the 1940s, he was professor of psychiatry and clinical professor of physiology at the University of Illinois. Warren was a logician and neurophysiologist. He can properly be called responsible for

the field now widely known as neural nets (where for some years he had Walter Pitts as a significant collaborator). Perhaps it now appears more plausible why a psychiatrist in IIlinois, should suddenly turn up in 1952 in Cambridge Massachusetts—running a research laboratory in electronics at MIT! He remained in that small but influential room until his death seventeen years later, in 1969. In 1963 he became consultant to the presidential office of President Kennedy. Warren was a blacksmith and poet. He enjoyed physical activity and working as an artisan. He undertook crazy schemes—from constructing a sizeable dam (referred to as

a ‘pond’), to building a quasi-cathedral (referred to as a ‘barn’) on his estate at Old Lyme, Connecticut, where Einstein was a neighbour. And when the Chicago Literary Society invited him to speak, I am not sure that everyone was entirely prepared for him to spend the entire evening reciting his own poetry ...

Philosopher and scientist, physician and psychiatrist, logician and neurophysiologist, blacksmith and poet—those are a few of the categories that Warren in fact transcended. That is because he was above all a polymath: an all-purpose intellect, and a liver-of-life on a grand (some would say profligate) scale. In the Small Conference Mode

The notion of meeting in conference as a small group of powerful intellects—with no outside audience—had a vogue during the 1940s and 1950s to which I fervently wish we might return. It was outstandingly successful; but it does however require substantial funding. The theoretical basis of such an ‘evolutionary cluster’ came from Margaret Mead, and a

persistent advocate was Frank Fremont-Smith. Warren McCulloch was a forceful if often manipulative chairman.

The outstanding series of these conferences was sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation. Each lasted for two full days. They began in 1946, and continued on an annual basis for ten years. Unfortunately, formal publication did not begin until the sixth year: they were a tremendous boost to those of us who received them as they arrived. Towards the beginning of this series, in 1948, a cognate conference was held at the New York Academy of Sciences under the heading of teleological mechanisms—again with Warren presiding. It was a favourite topic of his. “Teleology” comes from the Greek root, meaning end in the sense of purpose. It is concerned with the science that asks how things come to be as they are—how regulated, shall we say. Or shall we not say this, on the

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grounds that we might be incriminated by any of a hundred canons of philosophy. The term sounds like an oxymoron, after all, as did Wiener’s original definition of cybernetics as being concerned with the animal and the machine—all-in-one-breath as it were. To this day, confusion about the intentions of the founders of cybernetics is widespread, on the part of people who do not refer to original sources. Here is Fremont-Smith introducing the conference of 1948 : “The concept of teleological mechanisms ... may be viewed as an attempt to escape from

... older, mechanistic formulations that now appear inadequate, and to provide new and more fruitful conceptions and more effective methodologies for studying self-regulating processes, self-orienting systems and organisms, and self-directing personalities ... So for those who are prone to reinventing wheels in different sizes, please ruminate over those different sentences—and the fact that they were written just fifty years ago. In the Mode of Scientific and Papers

A major collection of seminal papers may be found in Warren’s book Embodiments of Mind,! and there is a complete set of his works available in four volumes.? Here, however, we must remain within the scope of the thumbnail sketch ...

The first major work that he wrote in the field of cybernetics was surely: A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity (1943) Observing that activities in the nervous system are made up of discrete events, it was pro-

posed that the relations between them could be treated through propositional logic. Using a rather outdated symbolism devised by Carnap, and the ungainly notation of Russell, Warren succeeded in showing that nervous nets could be rigorously represented in mathematical logic. The regenerative activity of constituent circles so described, however, leaves the brain with no concept of either space or time. This means that fact, sensations and ideas must be generated within networks, and are not determined by them. Walter Pitts was the co-author of this paper, and Warren was generous in referring to his improvement of the

mathematics. This brief comment gives the clue to the philosophical importance of these ideas. The extent to which the organization of the brain determines its mental outcomes is not clear to most people even today. The rigorous logic of the Logical Calculus began for the first time to elucidate the difference between brain structures and mental contents. The development of this model also made it clear that there must be inhibitors in nervous nets as well as excitors— a fact not yet conceded in neurophysiology at that time, although later taken for granted. Many arguments with orthodox psychology were generated by these results, and even

more so in psychiatry. Warren was a vigorous opponent of the psychoanalytical schools. Indeed, we had several major disagreements about the importance of Freud himself.

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Agathe Tyche of Nervous Nets—the Lucky Reckoners (1958) Still pursuing the topic of nervous nets, I refer to another formal paper, this time dealing with reliability. The substance of which the brain is made is notoriously unreliable: neurons are extinguished without warning, synapses change their thresholds capriciously, and a single shot of alcohol changes the whole cerebral ecology. And yet we humans continued to operate fairly smoothly through it all. The success of this is due to redundancy—of a sophisticated kind. I mean that it is not simply a matter of replicating fallible components,

until some of them fortuitously work, but of generating complicated logical structures within them. I have written extensively about the redundancy of potential command, for example, which involves just such a strategy. In the present paper, we are presented with

an early example of the formal treatment whereby unreliable components achieve reliable outcomes. But this time I want to use this example to talk about Warren the man. I had the good fortune to be present on the occasion when he gave his original paper on the Lucky Reck-

oners in 1958. The chairman announced that as usual the paper would be taken as read. Silence fell as Warren arose, clutching a set of manuscript pages. He surveyed the audience with a rather intimidating mien, looking up and down the packed rows. ‘Who has actually read the paper ¥ —the tone of voice suggested that he might well decide to cross-question anyone with the temerity to reply. Half a dozen hands were raised. At that Warren tossed the whole sheaf of papers high in the air. The pages fluttered down among the front rows. It was true that without detailed prior study the difficult arguments and complicated diagrams of the paper would have been virtually incomprehensible, and surely the author was correct to abandon the enterprise. However, I have never seen this happen before or since—whereas hardly a conference passes without listening to some luckless speaker with

a similar problem mumbling through incoherently to the end of his allotted span. It was so typical of Warren to be thus direct; but of course it was also typical of Warren to deliver an impromptu speech on some other subject that interested him at the time—and acquit himself with brilliance. What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain (1959) There is no time to discuss this elaborate research, which elucidated among other things that there are four distinct parallel distribution channels whereby the frog’s eye informs his brain about the visual image. Even so I have picked on this third example for a good reason. In many ways this work adumbrated an era in which systems thinking would become incorporated into an earlier biology of the old school. A significant early founder of this development was Sommerhoff, who published Analytical Biology in the year 1950.% It is sufficient, perhaps, to invoke the great cybernetician Ross Ashby, who told me that the whole development of his own work in Design for a Brain derived initially from there.* The Frog’s Eye, in turn, became recognized as a milestone.

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The authors were, in the order cited, Jerry Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts. Notice first that the order is alphabetical. Not every eminent person extends that courtesy. Notice second the name of Maturana, who was at the time a

graduate student of McCulloch’s; he has since become a world leader in the field of cognition—and also the originator of autopoiesis. Some Personal Memorabilia

When I think of Warren, I think first of my mentor. We met each other first in the mid1950s, and adopted that relationship from the start. We had no formal connection in academia or in any other milieu we were simply friends, but he was thirty years older than L. We had something profound in common; we could joke and argue and hassle as friends do; but underneath he must have been aware of something akin to veneration. We stayed at each other’s houses and each other’s labs. Especially I relished staying at the estate in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

Next I think of his incredible output of writings, which I studied so assiduously, and I became addicted to his whimsical titles. Their style is impossible to resist (at least I have found their imitation irresistible, to the annoyance of some more bibliographically prudent). Two papers published when I first knew him were listed adjacently in the bibliography: ‘Mysterium Iniquitatis’ of Sinful Man Aspiring into the Place of God followed immediately by Central Effects of Strychnine on Spinal Afferent Fibers—this gives some feeling for the effect. Seized with many of his sayings, I can offer only a few at random—the first having ef-

fected an observable change: ‘get your elbows away from your sides, you bloody Englishman’ ‘we must learn to fight fair in our shirt sleeves’

‘don’t bite my finger, look where it’s pointing’ ‘all impersonal questions arise from personal reasons and are best understood from their histories’ Finally, I frequently have occasion to remember the story that dates from 1959 when Warren was talking to a conference in France about the mathematics of neurology. The discussion was halted by an ‘antique president, who thanked him for his obscurity. Adds Warren: ‘The next time they hear it they will say, “it is not news”, and the third time, “it is obvious” I myself was last formally thanked for my obscurity as recently as two years ago, though the location had changed to South Africa. I trust that the rest of the story will follow to Pretoria in due course. In the meantime, no one should ever be disturbed by this kind of reception—it is a necessary precursor to any change of paradigm.

For the moment this thumbnail sketch ends my celebration for Warren McCulloch on his one hundredth birthday. He was a man with scant respect for pedigree or academic honours. His personal accolade—not lightly bestowed—was to say of someone that s/he

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was ‘brighter ‘n hell: He had magnanimity—but did not suffer fools gladly. I shall present a last and precious word from Warren when I close.

2. Views from the Bridge I began by celebrating a man who is a hundred years old, and shall end by celebrating a woman who is still vibrantly alive. Let me take leave to make a bridge between these two extremes, through a number of reflections about my own experiences of cybernetics ... It seemed to me from the start that our field was very weak in an understanding of epistemology. This I fear is true of the whole of science, but cybernetics has less excuse than other disciplines—since, according to Wiener’s original definition, it deals with regulation in the animal and the machine. This refers us directly to the interaction between brains on

the one hand and other kinds of system on the other. What do we know about systems, and how do we know it? This identifies the cybernetic domain—and offers a handy definition of epistemology too. I have already said a good deal, through McCulloch’s work, about the nature of the brain. But how specifically is the bridge to be built between that kind of knowledge and everything else? About Understanding Models

The first bridge on which we need to reflect concerns the nature of models. Models are mental constructs of what we rather uncritically call ‘reality. The term reality makes intellectuals uneasy, however, and we often waggle a pair of crooked fingers impotently in midair to designate quotation marks—thereby demonstrating unease if nothing else. When it comes to physical models though, we feel happier. We talk about scale models of buildings for instance, or mathematical models of the stresses that buildings display. And these two kinds of model are surely constructs of actual buildings. The truth is, however, that anything at all that comes to our attention is a construct—and so a model in this sense. Starting from sense data themselves, which are constrained by the physiological apparatus of ears, eyes and so on, our models of reality are only as good as this equipment. (This is a direct consequence of the Conant-Ashby theorem.”) Models are not to be confused with the reality of which they are the models—if indeed there is such a further reality, which is open to question. If something is illuminated by ultraviolet light, we shall not see it. If a sound occurs at 25,000 cycles, we shall not hear it. These basic limitations of sensation are by definition defective, so any models based upon them will be defective in the same degree. More elaborate constructs are doubly so. Suppose we consider an angel, and define it as a being of higher complexity than ourselves. Then of course we shall not be able to recognize it. So ontology is the slave and victim of epistemology; and our highest achievements are no more than inferences. This makes even the best of scientific judgments less than secure; it makes the best of artistic masterpieces sublime. A second and inevitable defect of models has its roots in inadequate variety. If we can-

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not distinguish all the possible states of any supposed reality, we are restricted to modelmaking using the constructs that we can distinguish. Then all images are restricted to the visible spectrum, and all music is restricted to the spectrum of audible sound. Ratiocination itself is restricted by the neurophysiology of the brain. As to angels as defined, they cannot be recognized in just the same way as you must inevitably fail to tie a knot in a four dimensional piece of string. Because any subject of our attention is limited in these ways, and because individuals differ in acuity of perception and in pattern penetration, any system is a subjective phe-

nomenon. We cannot have an objective system—which means that no system is ever right or wrong. A system is a model that is more or less useful for some purpose. If that purpose is not defined, then there is no criterion of utility.

It is time perhaps to lighten the atmosphere of these weighty considerations by choosing a more jocular example of the range of variety as a restraint on model-making. Suppose that you want to understand the nature of music. Unfortunately, because of low variety in your repertoire, the only basis for model-making available is an experience of Wagner’s Parsifal and another of a rock-and-roll concert. Can you construct a useful model of music on that basis? If so, what would it look like? Let us first ask what these two experiences share. Three things, perhaps: they are both too long, both too loud, and you cannot understand the

words of either. If these things were all that mattered, and you yourself had made the judgments, it is easy to see that you might have created a valid, because a useful, model. The models we use can be as arbitrary as that—and I did say that all models are subjective! About Not Understanding Jokes That example made its point legitimately—but it turned out to be funny. That is because of the context in which it was put forward, and because the variety admitted to the system of

music was absurdly low. Here are a few selected examples that are not in the least funny, because the context is different. As to the variety, a strange embedment will be discerned ... « For every dollar of aid vouchsafed to the poor world by the rich, eleven dollars is exacted from them in interest.

o Forty thousand children in the poor world die every day from easily alleviated illnesses, notably those of malnutrition and contaminated water, while 600,000 women die as a result of complications arising from pregnancy and childbirth. « In poor countries one in ten pregnant women do not survive—it is one in 5,000 in Britain.

o Year after year the model of Canadian society is held up as a cynosure by the United Nations as the best in the world. The Prime Minister continually refers to this with pride— but 21 per cent of Canadian children live in poverty.

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« In Britain, much exercised as it is by the abuse of animal rights, the percentage is much higher—more like a third of children live in poverty there. s Indeed, on the United Nations poverty index Britain ranks almost the worst among the world’s industrial nations. But the top slice of the wealthy grows significantly richer every year. I stumbled on these examples by happenstance, and I hope that you find them outrageous. They do not happen because they are willed by vicious policies. They happen because the models that uphold them do not have requisite variety to discriminate between the policies that generate such results. When a large system is recursively embedded in a smaller system, the large system often includes entailments that constrain discrimination

of variety at the lower level. We saw this happening in each of those examples. In general, the model of Western capitalism includes entailments of the model at lower levels of recursivity which are not in practice susceptible to dispute—because to call them in question

would deny the paradigm obtaining at a higher level. Here is an example: the dogma of privatization is an instance of a policy that belongs to the paradigm. It is also a policy that generally fails. Instances abound, here are a few from Britain: o The private ownership of water was a disaster of scandalous proportions. Management emoluments skyrocketed, while water quality went down—in some cases even the provision of piped water failed, and supplies were transported by truck. « Following the privatization of the national railway system, complaints showed an increase of 103 per cent—topping a million last year. + Time tables and fares were in disarray, thanks to the carving up of franchises, and the unwillingness of newly competitive entities to talk to each other. The Consumers’ Consultative Committee referred to appalling delays and cancellations.

But although this policy of privatization in the public domain is a manifest failure, there is no requisite variety within accepted politico-economic theory to argue the point. It is an intrinsic component of the macro-model and must therefore be pre-judged a success.

It would take a new paradigm within which either to assert or deny any of the statements relating to actual events such as the examples mentioned. In the meantime, would-be rebuttals constitute undecidable (Godelian) sentences. This is not to say that the previous

system did not require overhauling. It is to say that privatization expressed as the raw exploitation of greed within the robber-baronies is not the best way to do it. I said at the start of this section that science is weak in epistemology. The great Isaac Newton famously alleged ‘Hypotheses non fingo'—I do not form hypotheses. He simply did not recognize that he did so. Yet his dictum has certainly survived, and latter day scientists

continue not to recognize the point. Science is supposed to amass ‘the facts, and then to form hypotheses based on those facts. But the hypothesis is already covertly implicit in the

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selection of the facts, and further selection of a less than overt nature occurs during the process of elaborating the hypothesis further. The continuing operation is circular. That is why cybernetics takes ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, as a suitable logo, and talks about circular causality. It is from within the circular model of Western capitalism that monstrous results are

generated at lower recursive levels of variety which are inevitably undecidable. Attention to this kind of absurdity is often dissipated by changes of terminology so that contradictions are accommodated. Witness for example the more than twenty changes made by the British

government to the definition of unemployment during the 1970s and later—until the definition matched its paradigmatic expectations. A more fundamental circularity concerns a truly tenaciously held belief, which means that contradictory evidence will be attributed to

quite different causes. Witness the contention that market forces in free competition can be expected successfully to regulate an economy. This policy is inherently unstable, and can cybernetically be guaranteed not to work. But if we are assured by authority that it does work, instability will be put down to other factors. Because of the underlying instability, there will be many contenders. The Hardening of the Categories

Various taxonomies have been used to classify human knowledge, the most general based upon the practical needs of libraries—or possibly librarians. The library is organized by subjects. As new knowledge accrued, it was allocated to the ‘correct’ subject in the shelves. The past tense is important: those judgments were written in stone, although later knowl-

edge makes the categories less than optimal. So here is another illustration of circular causality: a book is allocated to a subject, which is defined as a university department, which determines what books will be allocated. The growth of knowledge so defined is an accretion of past decisions about the categories to which books belong. This raises problems

when hitherto separate topics become multidisciplinary: biophysics, for example, or socioeconomics. These problems are not always satisfactorily solved. In the case of a new subject that is multidisciplinary, such as cybernetics, no satisfactory solution is found. Research papers feed and exacerbate the system. Under a university regime in which the number of publications is the only criterion of success, and more important to advancement than quality, or careful teaching, or the nurture of human potential, a predictable system develops. It involves the circular causality of publication, fresh submission, journal

editor, anonymous referees (but guess who?), reinforcement of the topic and of its kind of handling, and publication. The character of the journal consolidates. Before long, everyone knows the pecking order of journal prestige. If you are getting used to circular causality by now, you will instantly recognize who will review a new book, and why it is that an innovative book will not be reviewed in a journal whose reader would gain most from it. By the same token, a new author is lucky to publish an innovative book in the first place ...

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If the learned taxonomies we use have had the dire consequences so briefly indicated, it behoves us to ask whether there could be an alternative approach. It would be idle to imagine for an instant that the whole rationale of knowledge as now organized could be supplanted. But I am arguing for something more subtle—an augmentation of the existing

practice by taking account of whatsoever insights we may draw from the Theory of Models. It would seem (judging from the jocular example) that any system would serve as a model of any other system, if precise conditions as to purpose are specified. Suppose that we look at a managerial situation that is reminiscent of a system already understood in scientific terms.

That might then suggest that a useful purpose might be served by pursuing such a metaphor—the hot flow of metal through a steel works, say, as referred to the blood coursing through the body. This metaphor was actually deployed in a steel works in Sheflield fifty years ago. The common ground of energy—expressed in one model as latent heat, and in the other as dor-

mant cash flow—led to some interesting ideas. Think of the distinction between arteries and veins for example. But those ideas reposed on insight, on the metaphor, even though they were elaborated by further similarities. The air soon became dense with similes. I recall a manager who said at some point that he felt like a piano that was playing in the wrong

key ... It seems likely that by now the word analogy has come to your mind. And if it has, the threat of false analogy will not be far behind. Then comes the well-known phrase: ‘you have pushed the analogy too far’ Yet the approach through model-building was opening exciting possibilities, and in particular liberating creative alternatives in both policy and

practice. Could a more rigorous treatment of models embracing models be devised? I re-read the earlier work of Victorian logicians such as John Stuart Mill, who had made

noble efforts to import rigour into analogy, but they seemed to be not rigorous enough. The answer I eventually proposed came in 1965, with an epistemology based on the theory of groups. The mathematical treatment was published in the journal Nature,® and was transposed as usual into a diagram (published in Decision and Control.”) This later passed into the general literature as the Yo-yo Model.

Here we see an insight or a metaphor connecting some fairly well understood scientific situation to a managerial situation less well understood. The two situations are each reduced to conceptual models, providing a carefully argued comparison of the kind Mill had in mind, and taking care to stop short of false analogy. The two conceptual models are then reduced to a rigorous formulation, involving homomorphic transforms—a many-one reduction to one-one that sacrifices variety in the cause of rigour, please note. The original two models are now isomorphic with each other, and can therefore be generalized into a scientific model. This must by now be expressed in a lingua franca, probably mathemat-

ics. At this stage, we may ask whether the scientific model, developed from this particular pair of perceptions, represents a generally applicable systemic behaviour. That is where

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INSIGHT

Scientific situation

/

|Rigorous formulation

Figure 1—Yo-yo Model

the yo-yo comes in. On the central line of the diagram, extra samples of the class being considered are tested for validity and utility. We might look in the original case, for instance, for other flow systems that store kinetic energy. Always assuming that the model formulations are rigorously maintained in each throw of the yo-yo, value in the model will grow. Let us call this systemic invariance. Scientific progress has always depended upon recognizing the invariant properties of systems. They used to be called laws of nature, but to use such a useful term nowadays would be a postmodernist solecism. The Yo-yo Model builds an inductive case of mounting confirmations of the model concerned in action. As it does so, it will gradually trim irrelevancies and find the essence of the invariance. For example, we have encountered the systemic invariance of gravitation so often that we now take it for granted—these irrelevancies have disappeared. If I drop my glass on the floor we all except that it will shatter. No one will warn me that my name is not Newton and the glass is not an apple. Systemic invariance works in gravitation within a defined purpose— give or take the perihelion of Mercury for instance ... Remember, ‘models are neither true nor false, only useful for a purpose. We are not proposing planetary travel on this particular afternoon.

On the Potency of Invariance

Systemic invariance is widespread in cybernetics, and a most potent tool. The topic ought to be central to any course in cybernetics—but it seems not to figure in that cohesive way.

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Instead of a course on systemic invariance, teachers seem to be content with pointing out mere instances of an idea that proved to be relevant to some case history. Historically, the systemic invariance first noted by the founders of cybernetics was the ubiquity of feedback mechanisms—in particular the role of error controlled negative feedback. That kind of terminology has led many people to the conclusion that cybernetics is fundamentally deterministic in character, just as if we knew nothing about stochastic processes, fuzzy logic, or any other way of handling outcomes that are not determinate. In particular, many have been led to ignore this feature in societary systems, far from ‘mechanistic’ though they be. An instance: high-gain error-controlled negative feedback systems rapidly become dominated by the error signal.® Evidently the model used derives from servo-mechanics. But the methodology of the yo-yo has been used in multiple applications to generalize it. The relevance of this high-gain error signal to the domination of societary agenda by the media is then inescapable. The model that demonstrates this, together with many other features of societary invariance, is to be found in the paper The Will of the People® High on the importance scale of systemic invariance comes homeostasis. The origin of this term goes back to 1927, and Walter Cannon’s Wisdom of the Body—which has always been recognized as a precursor of cybernetics. To this should be added Sommerhoft’s 1950 book Analytical Biology, which I mentioned earlier. But Ashby himself was the man who most importantly formalized homeostatic theory, and recognized the self-vetoing homeostat. Out of his work, which

included a famous experimental machine, grew his under-

standing of the Law of Requisite Variety. In my opinion, this law has the same stature in the

world of affairs as the law of gravity has in the world of physics. It is not recognized as such, because people do not apply the yo-yo methodology. As scon as anyone tests requisite variety in any real system at all, s/he perceives its relevance—and is also likely to discover

something important. Let us pause for a moment here to remark on the current fashion to misrepresent Ashby. It has been suggested that because he discovered how to measure variety, he thought it was an absolute measure. He knew perfectly well—none better in fact—that any nominated system depends upon its definition, so the variety measured must depend on the arbitrary selection of factors included in it. Do those people imagine that because it is possible to divide folk into male and female, that Ashby would thereupon declare ‘objectively’ that humanity has only two states? Again, have people who say that he did not understand

that the observer is part of the observed system failed altogether to understand his notion of the self-vetoing homeostat? Before he wrote about that, I was myself using the cognate term ‘implicit control. That was because each of us knew from Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy that the intrinsic and ultimately decisive role in any observation is that of the observer. The universal validity of the examples I have just been using of systemic invariance is

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well encapsulated by the food web and its intricacies. Consider the cabbage aphis. That is the tiny bug that feeds on cabbage leaves. It weighs very little indeed. The New York Academy of Sciences many years ago quoted some research which calculated what weight of aphides would accrue in one season if this single aphis (s/he is hermaphroditic) was supplied with unlimited quantities of cabbage and no predators assaulted either population. The answer was 822 million tons, about five times the human population. We do not expect that to happen, and know in principle why. The principle is properly called the self-vetoing homeostat, and it operates through complex systemic interaction according to the Law of Requisite Variety.

Yo-yo-ing through the world of affairs, and reflecting on similar problems to do with the environment, we rapidly find out what to do about many problems—but no one will believe it. And we may reflect on how managers would typically deal with the explosion of aphides. Overwhelmed by variety, they would first divide the country into hundreds of amenable zones, and appoint zone commanders with supporting staff, consultative com-

mittees, and so on. That’s the appropriate way to deal with high variety. Research would be started at great expense to examine the feasibility of contraception among hermaphrodites—hmm ... better double the research grants. That’s the appropriate way to deal with intractable technological problems. The legal department would have its own feasibility study to look at the licensing situation ... there are bound to be appalling pitfalls, but fortunately there are enough lawyers to go round to study each of them. Meanwhile, inadequate insight is likely to render the aphis extinct. I shall not go on with this analysis, although it is fun, because that situation cannot actually arise. In any case, nature already knows the answer. The serious point, however, is that managers and ministers behave all the time as if that is exactly what they would do. They do not understand cybernetics; they unilaterally attempt to repeal the Law of Requisite Variety without knowing that it exists; they act in accord with the received managerial paradigm.

The next critical idea that I mention links with homeostasis, and it is closure. Much of systemic invariance features closure, and we have already seen that circularity—which is a form of closure—is a cybernetic phenomenon. When I first studied philosophy, circularity was anathema: it was the name of a logical fallacy, or it was a kind of argumentation that got nowhere. Through cybernetics, however, came the realization that circularity properly understood is a critically valuable building block of system. This perception is not limited to cybernetics. The latest candidate as the basic and smallest building block of all matter is not the atom, not the electron, not the quark. It is the eleven-dimensional superstring, conceived as a vibrating loop. This may be too small an entity to contemplate; the perception of closure of which we are intuitively aware is our own knowledge of selfhood. This is the notion of a defined entity thought of as self-contained, and in principle bounded by that containment. On examination, this will never prove to be absolute but rather a convenient convention, but convenient it certainly is.

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2SN AW ;

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B Figure 2—The Sunburst Model of Selthood

The Sunburst model began by describing the selfhood of a human being. The blob in the center of the diagram stands for the autonomous nervous system. The inner circle is the envelope of skin—within which the radial lines take in the rest of the nervous system. The larger complete circle outside the inner circle is the rest of the conscious individual. The

radial lines now do not always reach where they looked as if they were going ... these are the goals of life, the strategies of attainment. The final circle, which is incomplete, is what Aristotle called entelechy, which nowadays might be spoken of as human potential. The model is set in an enneagram—the nine-pointed star which has held much spiritual significance in many cultures from the Sufis down. There is no time to say much more about this here, although you should not find it difficult to discern resonances of everything so far mentioned in this talk. All the radial lines represent discriminate varieties as the circle

expands: we know the Law of Requisite Variety, we know the Conant-Ashby theorem, we know about closure, implicit control, and so on. The nine small circles represent loops ... recall the superstrings.

The reason for quoting the Sunburst Model here is simply to emphasize the importance of systemic invariance. As far as human selfhood goes, I have used this same model—with

different emphasis—to discuss the central nervous system with students of neurophysiology on the one hand, and the spiritual path with Jesuit seminarians on the other. With philosophers, the Sunburst model was extended to examine Leibnizian monadology. But the notion of selfhood does not end with personal selthood. 1 defined the notion earlier as an entity thought of as self-contained, relatively bounded. It has been used to talk about Gaia, the planet Earth, and its survival. It was used to examine the politics of the nation state in Mexico. It was extensively developed in working on the planning system of a major city in Ontario. I hope very much that delegates here will accept the challenge to build

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significant university courses based on systemic invariance. I have made dozens of models in my life as a consultant, many of which could not be published for commercial reasons. Never mind them. These have served their purposes well. What matters is the search for invariance.

The Viable System

Model —VSM

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There are three whole books and many other writings about the VSM, and I cannot begin to describe them here.®'*"* This occasion is devoted to the basis of cybernetics and the voyage of discovery it invites. What follows is something about motivation, something about development, one new principle of systemic invariance, and an unpublished application. To make this possible, the complete diagram of the VSM is appended—not so that the newcomer could possibly understand much of what is going on, s/he will find it virtually incomprehensible. I hope it will remind those who already know, but the real purpose is to demonstrate the new principle.

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Figure 3—The Viable System Model

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The model of the brain that I developed throughout the 1950s is a closed system. There is no way of knowing what is owed to my three mentors in this respect, since discussion was volatile. However, I believe I was the first to set down a formal closed model of the brain: it used a topological algebra derived from Bourbakian set-theory. Two of those mentors were present when the paper was presented in 1960, and did not demur.!? This closed model was neurophysiological. I used the Yo-yo Model as far as ever I could, and tested other biological systems against it. The conclusion was that I could never find anything that was inconsistent with what the neurophysiology was saying about regulation—in particular what was newly becoming known of ecological systems was supportive. But this was a weak outcome in terms of the inductive power of the yo-yo. It worried me deeply that other major systems of the body’s regulatory processes could not successfully be mapped, especially the endocrine system. To a holist, it was self-evidently reductive to be

modelling even so large a system as the neural brain in isolation, when there were so many biochemical pointers left unaccounted for. This was surely because too little was known about the internal interactions of the definable components. I knew about neurons and

their nervous processes. As to the rest—even at the cytological level there were mysteries. To this day, I feel convinced that too little is known about the glial cells for instance ... I spent much time, covering the decade of the 1950s and beyond, in trying to develop a systemic model of the endocrine system. But little progress was made, and I have since found out that the questions I was posing were unanswerable at that time. I had to be content with the fact that at least new things were being discovered: for instance, when I was a student in 1943 nobody knew that the pituitary gland was innervated—or at least they wouldn't tell me if they did! You do not need convincing that this gland is all-important, and withal a large structure, so the omission seems incomprehensible. But then we recall the hardening of the categories. Why in the 1940s would endocrinologists be hunting nerves? Well, I was working with an authoritative book on endocrinology which began ‘the endocrine balance of most people is probably about normal’ I have never forgotten this pearl. It was some kind of solace. In Brain of the Firm I expounded what I had learned from the VSM in terms that the manager might understand. First of all, there was closure. And in order to re-open that bounded concept, I had drawn on mathematics again. Number theory supplied definition by recursion: the bounded system could be re-opened by including recursive models of itself inside itself. The image of Russian dolls was a help. So the diagram of the VSM contained icons of itself. Next, using the yo-yo methodology, the VSM was shorn of its neurophysiological connotations. The Heart of Enterprise re-created the work to yield a model of any viable system. The diagrammatic version was enhanced so that the included recursions were no longer icons, but faithful copies. However, it was not until Diagnosing the System

for Organizations was written that I finally solved the problem of diagrammatic recursion with a degree of elegance. This is what you see in Figure 3. The model is complete but, as

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mentioned before, it is included without further explanation simply to illustrate the new principle of included recursivity, like this. By focusing on the two included circles, and turning them through 45 degrees, you will see that small-scale but exact reproductions of the total model are presented. A very large circle to match the very large square in the upper right hand corner is omitted as too ungainly to draw, with no internal connections attached to it. Otherwise the topology is exact. Moreover, a lower recursion still is implied, just as a higher recursion is implied by the large square—making four levels of recursion visible on the diagram, two of them complete. So please note this dictum: Every viable system contains and is contained in a vi-

able system. The recursions of the VSM are indefinitely extensible—there were eleven recursions in the VSM of the socioeconomic model of Chile developed in 1971 to ‘73 for President

Allende (see Brain of the Firm). Much emphasis is placed upon the faithful reproduction of the VSM at every recursion, because these are mathematical theorems reproduced topologically. They are not arbitrary illustrations. The validity of the methodology—especially its recursive features—depends on them. It follows that attempts to represent the VSM to make it ‘easier’ sadly lead to invalidity. Applications of the VSM have been made over the last forty years all over the world, and they have ranged from the eukaryote cell and a bee colony to the nation state and the globe. They have included every conceivable enterprise both public and private in between. Sometimes applications have amounted to little more than creating pretty pictures, and

writing names in the boxes. But so much more can be done, in particular via the quantification of variety. The VSM constitutes profoundly interlocking networks of five subsystems, to which the balance of variety is central. It hinges on the maintenance of homeostasis between the horizontal and vertical axes of the model. Let me draw on advanced thinking here for the benefit of VSM adepts. According to the VSM’s First Axiom of Management, the sum of horizontal variety disclosed by the operational elements—System One—must equal the sum of vertical variety disclosed on the six vertical components of corporate cohesion. The Law of Cohesion itself relates rather similar equalities for each pair of multiple recursions. (See The Heart of Enterprise.) Here now is the promised application. About fifteen years ago I was commissioned to re-design the Canadian Red Cross, with the support of a leading company of management

consultants who made available staff to carry out investigations on a national basis from their provincial offices. This involved a very extensive study, and incorporated a large number of recommendations, which were adopted—with one exception. The most dramatic of the visible changes made meant moving the main office from Toronto to the national capital, Ottawa. Evidently, the study was comprehensive: it was built on the VSM, but it took account of sociopolitical factors too—as is essential in the practice of consultancy. However, the one recommendation that failed was a casualty of that sort.

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Most unusually, the Canadian Red Cross ‘owned’ the national blood supply. In most countries, blood is treated independently of any institution. Here it was one of the many operations—System One—of the Red Cross, alongside all the others, ranging from First Aid through to appeals in support of international emergencies. Now the organization required to administer most of these activities is quite different from that required to admin-

ister blood supply. Everything else is based on voluntary effort, with whatever is involved by way of philanthropy and the committee structure required to organize on the part of ‘the great and the good’ The blood supply conversely is science-intensive. It also requires administration of technology of a high order. You might think that these activities would make strange bedfellows. But Canada did not think that, and the reason was this. Blood is

a serious economic commaodity. In the Red Cross, it accounted for much more than half the budget—on the credit side. To put it bluntly, the Red Cross made a great deal of money out of blood. Talking to committed Red Cross people, one could see that most thought it entirely appropriate that the lucrative activity should support the altruistic. The argument is highly debatable—until you consult the variety equations of the VSM, and discover it to be a matter of assessing varieties.

The First Axiom of Management simply does not hold. The horizontal variety committed to regulating blood is vastly incommensurable with the horizontal variety which is based on voluntary regulation. Moreover, collecting blood on a decentralized basis—there is no alternative—means that the incommensurability of variety crosses metasystems for every pair of recursions in a way that denies the Law of Cohesion itself. In the circumstances it was idle to engage in semantics. The cybernetics left me no option but to recommend the complete withdrawal from the Red Cross of the responsibility for the blood supply of the nation.

'The recommendation was denied—not as you might think because no one could understand the argument, which in context I had the time to explain: the matter hinged entirely on the economic consideration. The senior consultants vehemently opposed the plan. They were partners in a famous firm of accountants, and felt that I threatened to

destroy the financial viability of the Red Cross. The Canadian Secretary-General seemed torn, but in the end was constrained to support ‘prudence’ It is by now well known that the

blood supply in Canada eventually turned into a tainted blood scandal, and recently led to a Royal Commission. As I give this address today (July 1998) there is talk of potential

liabilities amounting to more than five billion dollars in lawsuits, and of seeking bankruptcy protection for the Red Cross. ‘Prudence?’ The replacement agency, Canadian Blood Services, starts its independent existence on 1 September 1998. There have of course been

problems in other countries with tainted blood supplies, and I do not know how they were organized, or what led to their difficulties. Long before any of these difficulties in Canada surfaced, in fact quite soon after the re-organization, which were in other respects success-

ful, the Canadian General Secretary went to Geneva to head the International Red Cross.

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The two accountants who had been assisting me at the consulting company resigned to start an independent firm of their own.

3. Celebration for Candace Pert I have never had the honour to meet Dr Pert. When I asked from the hall who had heard

of Candace Pert—the name was printed in huge letters on the screen beside the podium— two small knots of a few people in an audience of hundreds raised their hands. Then followed a little laughter as each knot was observed to centre on two well-known professors, each of whom is my friend—and some of their students. Well, we had the celebration for Warren McCulloch, and here is another celebration—for Candace Pert. Why? Some twenty-five years ago she discovered the opiate receptor. This is a site in the cell that can recognize an opiate, typically a protein molecule, which is then anchored in the outer cell membrane to bind with substances such as neurotransmitters. There was confusion and disagreement at the time, as to whether the biochemical components even existed in the body naturally to create such outcomes. The search to find the opiate receptor was one of dogged endurance reminiscent of the search for radium.

Other scientists were searching too, but it was she who

discovered a

pair of amino acids constituting the critical peptide. This in itself was a discovery of major importance, significant people in the field expected Candace Pert to be awarded the Nobel Prize. The non-story of that, and of how the hardly less significant Lasker Award for medical research—often endorsed by a later Nobel Prize—was awarded to three men—men heavily underlined—will appall but not surprise egalitarian scientists, especially if they remember the shocking events surrounding Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the DNA molecule. You may read about all this in Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion, and very entertaining and exciting you will find it.”? Informational Substances

However, I do not expect a cybernetic conference to celebrate this discovery with particular enthusiasm. Please bear with me as I follow the peptide story a little further. All sorts of peptides were shortly discovered, and a whole new era was to begin. I suggest that we focus what was to happen on Candace Pert’s own comments. Where about in the body would you expect to find opiate receptors? Obviously you would look in the brain itself—the

hypothalamus perhaps. Alternatively you would look in the limbic system. But when she looked comprehensively for ‘her’ peptides, she found them all over the place in the body. Think of finding concentrations of such peptides in the colon, as she did ... so that’s where

‘gut feelings’ come from! We move to the early 1980s. The neuropeptides, it had reasonably been assumed, communicated across synapses in the nervous system. The assumption proved untenable. Many of the neuronal receptors were inches away from the neuropeptides: how were they com-

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municating, if not across the synaptic gap? A co-worker called Miles Herkenham found that, counter to the assumption of people working in the neurosciences, less than 2 per

cent of neuronal communication actually occurs at the synapse. This seems so absurd that for several years the result was ignored, and put down to errors of one sort or another. But Miles Herkenham was right all the time. He reckoned that the connection did not reside in the synapse-brain cells, but was determined by the specificity of the receptors. Candace Pert wrote: ‘the way in which peptides circulate through the body, finding their target receptors in regions far more distant than had ever previously been thought possible, made the brain communication system resemble the endocrine system, whose hormones can

travel the length and breadth of our bodies. The brain is like a bag of hormones!’ At about this time, Francis Schmitt, who had originated the neuroscience research program at MIT, introduced the terminology of ‘information substances’ to describe ‘a variety of transmitters, hormones, factors, and protein ligands'—ligands are various small

molecules that specifically bind to a cellular receptor, such as the opiate receptor, thereby transmitting an informational message to the cell. This was exactly the concept that Candace Pert needed to advance her own work, and she embraced it enthusiastically.

Now there are three classically separated areas of medical biology: » »

Neuroscience—dealing with the brain and central nervous system, Endocrinology—dealing with the glands,

+

Immunology—dealing with the spleen, bone marrow, and lymph nodes.

If you have taken my homily about the hardening of the categories to heart, and recall my Jong battle in the 1950s to incorporate the endocrine system into my brain model,

you will understand the excitement with which I received the discoveries that Molecules of Emotion unfolded. Instead of those three sciences demarcated by their library shelves and dedicated journals, and following them into separate laboratories, we have a unified system. It consists of a multidirectional network of communication, linked by informational carriers at the molecular level. It is surely delightful to contemplate the continuous molecular busy-ness that achieves wonders of intricate homeostasis—while quite indifferent to the pompous definitions of academe. And Quo Do You Think You’re Vadis ?

May I urge you to read the book. At any rate, I do not have the effrontery to dissertate at greater length, thereby spoiling the author’s own account—and a thoroughly good read. Instead, I return once more to the bridges that [ have been trying to construct all the way through this address, which began by celebrating Warren McCulloch. In speaking of him, I referred to rather serious quarrels with him about Freud. He contended that the unconscious mind was not only illusory, but a delusion—there was no neurophysiological basis for it, and he accused Freud of deliberate duplicity. For my part,

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I had found the notion so useful in the practice of clinical psychology that I was happy to accept it as a model. Please imagine my squeal of joy to read Candace Pert write that the unconscious mind of Freud is no less than the body! Perhaps we could both have settled for that. Many of the discoveries made by Candace Pert are pointing to the kind of holistic emphasis on the unity of being that is familiar in Eastern philosophy. I see her helping to cross that East-West divide—and that other chasm existing between science and philosophy. Surely these are matters for high celebration. By the end of her book she is openly hypothesizing about connections not only between body and mind, but between body, mind, soul

and spirit. Predictably, she will have a rough ride as do all holists. I should like to wish her well in those endeavours, and that she continue with the same brave-heartedness with which she confronted so much prejudice in the past. Meanwhile, her scientific demonstration of the molecular reality of informational substances—the neuropeptides—in continu-

al interaction between body and mind is, at least in my view, a great cybernetic triumph. But hardly anyone in this audience knew of Candace Pert, still less of the cybernetic triumph, when I started this talk. How can this be? Surely it is because each of us here is pursuing the next step in the agenda s/he has elaborated within the confines of the paradigms that are already understood. This comment is not meant offensively. The research we are all doing, the development of the thinking we so far understand, are all worthy pursuits—the backbone of scientific advance indeed. But as system scientists, are we constantly in search of systemic invariance? Do we ever consider taking time off to play the

creative yo-yo? If not, we are tacitly accepting the established paradigms of system, tacitly resisting change and the hope of new visions. I doubt if anyone present actively want to appear in that role.

That is my reason for linking this second celebration of Candace with the original one for my old mentor and cybernetic founding father, Warren. They look well together. What they had in common was a holistic sense of system, being ‘brighter ‘n hell’ and the fortitude to challenge existing paradigms and win. I close as I promised with some final words of closure about Warren.

Centenary Valedictory for Warren McCulloch

Although this is a valedictory for his centenary, it applies to this year alone: there will never be a last goodbye—not for me, not anyone who preserves his words. The last recorded words I know of were printed by Cathie Bateson, I think. They occurred during a session in Austria during 1968, in a meeting presided over by her father Gregory Bateson. Warren was speaking: «

Now, the difficulty is that we, who are not single-cell organisms, cannot simply divide and pass on our programs. We have to couple, and there is behind this a second requirement”

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Warren began to weep. “We learn ... that there’s a utility in death because ... the world goes on changing and we can't keep up with it. If I have any disciples, you can say this of every one of them, they think for themselves.” ‘Very softly Gregory said, “sure, Warren!

»ig

As in many other matters, I have tried to adhere to Warren’s attitude towards people

coming behind. They are I intend to conclude know, published. First of his sixty-fifth birthday in

surely precious words of advice. with a piece of poetry written by Warren but never, as far as I all, here is a Sonnet from me to him. It was written to celebrate 1963:

Sonnet for Warren

Days that are cherished, moments that persist, Reverberate in neural circuits, catch In the throat of recollective calm, attach To sensory recall. And so enlist: The lobsters at Old Lyme; and English mist; The snap of seminars; nocturnal scratch Of pen on paper; your disdain to match The paltriness of an antagonist. The stature and the public awe exist— While secretly the twinkling friendships hatch. Warren, the neurons crackling in his head, Sparks fire at nature. Others may insist That science is serious. But we shall snatch Our laughter from the universal dread.’

And here as promised is what Warren had earlier handwritten to me, in the fly-leaf of his own poems The Natural Fit, published in 1959: Since of that loveliness I know is you which in quick having holds me quite content love could not gather what could not have grown or what from my poor gardening never grew I to the frenzied and immortal few turn hungry home References

1. McCulloch, W. S. Embodiments of Mind. MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1965. 2. McCulloch, R. (ed.) The Collected Works of Warren McCulloch. Intersystems Publications, CA, 1989.

3. Sommerhoff, G. Analytical Biology. Oxford University Press, 1950.

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4. Ashby, W. R. Design for a Brain. Chapman and Hall, London, 1952. 5. Conant, R. (ed.) Mechanisms of Intelligence: Ross Ashby’s Writings on Cybernetics. Intersystems Publications, CA, 1981. 6. Beer, S. “The World, the Flesh and the Metal, Nature, Vol. 5, 1965. 7. Beer, S. Decision and Control. Wiley, London, 1966.

8. Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed. Wiley, Chichester, 1981. 9. Beer, S. “The Will of the People, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 34, No. 8, 1983.

10. Beer, S. The Heart of Enterprise. Wiley, Chichester, 1979. 11. Beer, S. Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Wiley, Chichester, 1985.

12. Beer, S. “Towards the Cybernetic Factory, in Principles of Self-Organization, ed. von Foerster and Zopf, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1960. 13. Pert, C. Molecules of Emotion. Scribner, New York, 1997.

14. Bateson, M. C. Our Own Metaphor. Knopf, New York, 1972. 15. Beer, S. Transit. Mitchell Communications, Canada, 1983.

Warren McCulloch at MIT in the 1960s

chapter 23

,t[—;link Before You Think: Learning an Outlook

dedicated to you OBESA CANTAVIT Three Sequential Reflections on Approaching Autobiographic Writing

First reflection WarreN McCuLLocH was staying at my house in Sheffield, when I asked him to spend the day at Cybor House. This would have been about 1958, and my interdisciplinary management team had declared themselves fed up with endless anecdotal talk about my celebrated mentor. They wanted to discover him for themselves. During a tour of the place,

the five of them were introduced: mathematician, philosopher, operational researcher, computer scientist, production engineer. We had a good and well lubricated lunch, then cleared the table for discussion.

Warren told a story about two medieval monks, selves a brass head—a Golem—and waited for it to When the monks were too tired to continue, they watch with instructions to awaken them should the

whom speak went brass

he named. They built themto them. Nothing happened. to bed, leaving a novice on head speak. In the morning,

(An experiment in autobiography, far from finished at the time of Beer’s death.) Previously unpublished. (Obesa cantavit can be rendered as “The fat lady has sung’.)

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they awoke to devastation: the Golem had shattered. What had happened? The novice explained that the head had remarked ‘time was’—but it seemed pointless to bother the friars with that information. Next, the head had pronounced ‘time will be’—again, that had seemed truistic. After a further wait, the Golem had shouted ‘time is’—and exploded.

It was now pointless to rouse the sleeping friars. Taking his story as a text. Warren discoursed brilliantly for more than an hour. He spoke about the nature of time and how its passage is sensed, of the neurophysiology in the brain that supports this perception, of the relationship between being and knowing, of the relevance of all this to the world of affairs, to theology, to relativity physics—weaving in illustrations, experiences, and jokes. It was captivating. We joined in animated debate for another hour or two. At least, most of us did. The exception was the philosopher,

who said not a single word. His silence became embarrassing, and finally I asked for an explanation. The philosopher answered courteously and carefully, as he always did. He gave the dates of the two friars who had been named, and explained that their lives did not overlap. Therefore they could never have met. The hush in the room was deafening. Warren turned to him with eyebrows raised and said ‘So?’ Second reflection I well remember that glorious summer afternoon when the Queen laid her hand lightly on my arm and said quietly: ‘If there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s name-dropping’. Third reflection Should the term ‘anal retentive’ be hyphenated? THE PATCHWORK

QUILT

An evolving outlook is pieced together, like a patchwork quilt that has no prior design.

The artist who assembles the quilt works with whatever materials are available for much of the time. S/he incorporates in the evolving work whatever is attractive and seems to fit. Sometimes the work cries out in the artist’s vision for something special—a scrap of red silk to sew in, some metallic gold thread with which to stitch. This may be found later, and recognized. Or the want of it may be holding up progress, when it may demand to be hunted down. To some degree all this is time dependent. Patches cannot be completed until the smaller passages they contain are ready—and are recognized as belonging to the patch.

They may be set aside until later, then. Indeed whole patches that seem satisfyingly complete in themselves do not yet appear to belong in the quilt as so far made. They too are set aside. In this way, what began as a steady progress, as measured by clocks and calendars,

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becomes decoupled from these objective instruments. What is going on becomes too subjective an experience to be wholly shared—even perhaps to be entirely understood. The seeming inability to integrate exciting new patches with whatever else is happening in the quilt may seem mildly tiresome, or it may provoke anxiety. If that concern becomes dominant, then other work may be disrupted until the question of suitable fit is resolved. That may in turn promote wholesale redevelopment of the evolving pattern, and even the unpicking of patches or the fresh configuring of component passages. This will involve effort, and disquiet; it will take courage. If everything has to be dismantled and reassembled, effort becomes heroic, disquiet may turn into agony, and the courage to undertake all this may take the deep breath that runs the risk of recklessness. Polycarp: What about the people who are watching? There you go, ruining your quilt, while they are begging you to stop. Have you no thought for the feelings of other people? Some of them were pleased with what you were doing, and taking pride in their roles in your achievement. Selfish bastard.

Once upon a time the quilt in this metaphor was a jigsaw. But it was a jigsaw without a picture of the completed puzzle on the lid. The solver understood the whole thing only when every piece was in place. But although this would give the solver the impression that

his understanding was evolving as time passed, the along. The design of the quilt, on the other hand, is opportunities, in a word to learning. The outcome Calvinists perhaps, but only because everything is.

outcome would be predetermined all freely adapting to circumstances, to would be predestined in the eyes of If such a belief is not axiomatic, then

the precious hope of continual revelation and final insight remains.

Why final? That reverts to the sequential time throughout which the quilt is fabricated. And it offers some definitions—of which use will be made henceforth. In this elapsing

time, epochs lasting five years are nominated. Within the epochs there are episodes of significance and arbitrary length. But the patches making up the quilt, as was seen, slip in and out of the time frame. They are developed, set aside, resewn—as outlook changes

and becomes mature. Maturity itself may be attained one day. But only after all the other options are exhausted.

1: THIS BLESSED PLOT Setting the first epoch

A little girl ran shrieking down the road. Close behind her, a small boy was in hot pursuit. He was brandishing a white mouse. The two were not the best friends. At least, that’s what

she told me. Even so, they had something peculiar in common. They had been born on the same

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day of the same year, and now lived on opposite sides of the same street. That’s quite a coincidence. Each of them was born somewhere else—but here they were, on opposite sides of the same street. With a birthday they shared in common. They belonged to two families of devout church people—in the parish of St Peter’s in Fulham, which is in the Southwest part of London, near the river. St Peter’s was known

as ‘high church’. The denomination used to be called Anglo-Catholic—that involved lots of incense, then, banners, rich vestments for the priests. Other men wore cassocks, and surplices trimmed with elaborate lace—even for the choirboys. Women and girls were kept to the congregation. The boy’s father was a character. One Palm Sunday he had been carrying a candle, and managed to set fire to a huge ceremonial palm. At midnight mass one Christmas Eve he

was carrying the heavy processional cross. He moved up the nave swaying alarmingly. On approaching the chancel, the cross hit the ornamental red votive lamp that hung high in the middle—with upsetting results. She told me that as well.

She told me many racy stories. She had a naughty streak, you see. As she grew into adolescence, she started going to confession. The young priest was very handsome. She confessed to a wide range of surprising sins so as not to disappoint him. She could not discover whether he was shocked, which was rather a disappointment, but I could have told her that priests are not supposed to react like that. Anyway, the parish was the centre of social activity. Music was a major activity. Even if females were not allowed in the choir, they could sing in the congregation. Then there was the scout troop—all male again. They were called Boy Scouts after all.

One keen scout, thought to have abandoned white mice by this time, was (inevitably) growing up at the same rate. He was by now a King’s Scout, which meant a lot—especially to him. It spoke of responsibility and security, I think, given that his father was prone to careening around churches bumping into things. The scoutmaster was another priest, and therefore addressed by most people as Father. But the senior scouts called him Massa— which stands for Master. It seemed to me that strong racial overtones attended scouting in that parish. But then, scouting in those days was not yet ecumenical, being close to its

imperial origins in Africa, and to the person of its founder, Baden Powell. Doll found the high tone rather over-bearing, one suspects, as no-one ever called her Doris; though maybe her father did when comments connoting disapproval were in order. That may have happened quite often too, as she was already setting about having

fun. Fair enough, she was rapidly turning into an ebullient and attractive young woman full of enthusiasm and dash. She was also full of high expectations. Life never seemed to live up to these, but she was never put down by disappointments. Given half a chance, she would rebel against an unkind fate. Take the incident of the doll’s pram for example—it

was probably still in the era of the white mice. She wanted a doll’s pram for her birthday, and that was expensive. But her father

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was a cabinet-maker, and in secret and at night, over several months, he built the pram. Knowing him, it would’ve been sensational—because her father was a perfectionist. It would’ve been like a coach for a tiny princess, with elegant curves patiently fashioned with

spoke-shaves, and mahogany paneling finished with French polish. Trouble was it was nothing like the simple mass-production prams owned by her friends. Her expectations lay with her peers. When she grew up, she would also grow to value both the craftsmanship and the uniqueness of her father’s gift. As it was, however, she hurled the pram down

the stone cellar steps in a fury. It was smashed to smithereens. The pram’s maker steadfastly refused to repair the pram, and it was never resurrected. This says something about both Doll’s tantrums, and her father’s obduracy. But she never forgot the incident, because she learned to be shocked by her own behaviour. It is surprising how often there can be a net gain from experiences that on the face of things are only pain and hurt. Anyway, she overcame her youthful tendency to tantrums—her mother was prone to rages in these early years too, so for a time they must have made quite a pair. Kitty,

officially Katherine, was Doll’s elder sister by eleven years, and probably began by spoiling her, which wouldn’t have helped. After she got married, it would have been rather late to exert much influence. In any case, she doted on her younger sister for the whole of her life. Joe was devoted to Doll as well. He was her brother, and seven years older. He had created a sensation soon after Doll was born by disappearing for a long day—glad quite possibly to get out of the way of all the fuss. A major search was instituted, but he had got all the way to Kensington before he was found. It turned out that Joe had happily joined a procession involving the Salvation Army marching band. Later on he grew to be a particularly handsome young man, so the adolescent Doll was a close observer of the mysteries that attended on courtship. According to his mother, the King’s Scout’s name was Will. There were many Williams

in the parish, and people kept tripping over the many variants on this name. Will had an elder brother called Harry, after his father Henry, as often used to happen with the first born son in those days. Henry was the painter who also kept tripping over—in church. He had Bohemian habits, and Harry used to relish describing his father to me. He was extravagantly dressed, wore a frock coat and a top hat, and chewed cheroots the whole time. He was a fitness fanatic, and a patron of someone called Sandow, who was a well-

known body-builder of the day. Presumably because of these enthusiasms, it once took no less than thirteen policemen to escort him home. Harry was fond of boasting about this and similar exploits on his father’s behalf. Will, on the contrary, strongly disapproved. He used to dread a goodnight kiss when he was a boy. Moreover, as with most painters, money was scarce. Henry made most of his by restoring old paintings rather than by painting new ones. I think he must have been a better craftsman than he was an artist. Anyway, Henry would arrive home (with or

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without constabulary escort) and regale his wife with expensive boxes of chocolates and flowers when there was nothing in the larder. This must have built up Will’s rather severe attitude to life. Despite her own fun-and-games outlook, Doll found that rather splendid.

It was more masculine. So, overcoming the bad start with the white mice, and negotiating various other vicissitudes that I have heard about, at the joint age of twenty-four, on a mandatory Saturday in June, Doll and Will were married in Peter’s church. They celebrated their first married birthday in October, at twenty-five. The century was twenty-five years old as well. By the time it came for Doll to be married, her two siblings had long left the parental home, and that made it possible for the newly-weds to move into 48 Fernhurst Road. Her mother and father turned the upper half of the house into a self-contained flat, leaving the ground floor free for the purpose. On the opposite side of the street, at Will's house, noth-

ing so convenient could have been arranged. The bridegroom’s mother was working out of her house as a seamstress, and the status of her painter husband was obscure. At least it was obscure to me. He was much older than his wife, and had been in and out of Paris around the turn of the century—as was quite appropriate at that time. Where else but in Paris should a painter have been? Harry was also much away—also on obscure errands. But he had come to the wedding, to be the best man, which his father had not.

Now Kitty’s husband was also called Will, and had so to speak got there first in terms

of the family hierarchy. So Doll called her husband Bill. She might have found it more euphonious, or less severe and therefore more affectionate, or she might have done it to annoy his mother. Anyway, almost everyone outside the family followed suit. But because his mother still called him Will, Kitty’s Will turned into Bill for some intimate family purposes. It would I think be possible to specify just which of the two Williams would receive which name in which circumstances, recognizing that in some but not all of these Will would have to be substituted for Bill, and vice versa, in different contexts. But I ask you—is it worth it?

While I have been describing these domestic matters, the First World War happened. Doll’s brother Joe was commissioned into the Kensingtons, a machine gun regiment, as a Second Lieutenant, while Kitty’s husband Will went into the same rank in an Infantry

regiment—the East Surreys. They disappeared into the mud, gas and gore of the trenches in Flanders, and neither would say much about the experience afterwards. What I can tell you is that Will was sitting in a shell hole opening a parcel from home when a new shell

arrived. After that, one leg was two inches or more shorter than the other. His brother Walter was posted as missing presumed killed in action. Joe survived everything safely until the Victory parade in Hyde Park. His horse stumbled, and the sword he was presenting at the salute pierced his eye. That was his sister’s account at least. Anyway, I can myself certify that he was blind in one eye. Doll’s Will was younger than the others, and had to lie about his age to get into the

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action. He joined the Royal Transport Service of the Navy, a corps that no longer exists, and became a wireless operator. He was fond of recounting adventures with land crabs, being stung by a Portuguese man-of-war in the Mexican Gulf, and a visit to Valparaiso.

The outstanding excitement, however, was the first transatlantic crossing by Alcock and Brown in a Vickers Vimy bomber. It was to take off from Newfoundland, and Will met the intrepid aviators—collecting a ration of valuable airmail stamps into the bargain, which would join the flight. The idea was that a number of ships would be stationed at different points in the Atlantic, and monitor the journey by wireless telegraphy. Will was an operator in one of the ships. In the event, the plane’s radio did not work, and the plane crashed in Ireland. The flyers were OK, though, and so were the precious airmail covers. And of course a famous record was established—you can see the statue of Alcock and Brown at Heathrow airport to this day. The most astonishing feature of the whole story of his naval adventures, however, was

that Will maintained a blissful ignorance of matters sexual throughout. I had that from him directly, years later. Mind you, he was busy writing to Doll everyday throughout. What I heard from her, years later, was that she was too busy to give the letters more than perfunctory attention. But perhaps his letter writing served her well even so—it must have

kept him busy. During the First World War Kitty worked in munitions—she was in fact engaged in inspecting aeroplane propellers. Guess who was making the propellers on their way to being inspected? To have a hope of being right you need to know that in those days pro-

pellers were made of wood. So yes, it was Kitty’s own father. It was a tricky job, worthy of his cabinet-maker skills. As to Doll, she was working as a cashier in the Midland Bank.

And she was the captain of the bank’s netball team by the time she was married. So, yes, the Great War had ended in 1918—and the six years that had passed were

a hopeful time for newlyweds, even though they had to start off in the parents’ house. Husband Will, having left the Navy, had also tried a stint in a bank before joining the institution in which he stayed for the rest of his career: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. To start with, he worked in the Drawing Office. Doll of course left the bank—it was unheard of for a married woman to work in those days, so the onus was all on Will to earn the bread. He had done well at school, and his naval record was good, but there was no money

available for further education.

Lloyd’s was a strange organization. It all started in a famous coffee shop a couple of centuries earlier. Merchants of the city of London foregathered at Lloyd’s to transact business, which centered on the port. The risks associated with seaborne traffic were considerable, and ships often foundered—taking their cargoes with them. So ‘Lloyd’s of London’ was born as an insurance business, and to this day it is said that a Lloyd’s underwriter can be found to cover any conceivable risk. Obviously enough this is an entrepreneurial

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undertaking. But traders needed standards on which to assess their risks. And so Lloyd’s Register was created—not to insure ships, but to record them and their seaworthiness. Lloyd’s surveyors were soon to be found in every port in the world, and were universally accepted as independent arbiters.

Will’s attraction to the sea, and his strong sense of probity and respectability, made him well suited to the institutional life: it seems very unlikely that he would have been happy in business. As to Doll, she put everything into marriage itself, and learned to cook and to sew—and there was much to learn. She had been a business girl, after all. The first day back at work after the honeymoon, she asked what her husband would like for din-

ner. The menu included cabbage. Doll looked up cabbage in a cookery book, which told her how long to boil it. So she bought a big Dutch cabbage resembling a cannon ball, and tossed it into the pot. No one had said anything about cutting or shredding the cabbage.

Too bad, such incidents tend to stick in family memories. The new household settled down, and would soon be building up to the next great event—Christmas. From the start of Advent, it was normal for everything to be centered on this celebration. Moreover, this was the first occasion when Will and Doll would take their places within the larger family. Christmas was more than a celebration, to be honest it was more like a ceremonial rite.

Christmas

Everyone concerned spent Christmas Eve in frenetic last-minute preparations. Final touches had to be made to decorations. There were presents to pack in gaudy boxes and parcels; and somehow it always seemed that a present or two was unaccounted for

and had to be conjured up at the last minute. The presents were piled around a huge Christmas tree, itself decorated with baubles and mini-gifts such as cigars and little gold bags of chocolate covered pennies. And then there were candles. Such a fire hazard is by now hard to imagine. But there it was: the display of twenty or so twisted coloured candles, three or four inches high and a quarter-inch thick, mounted in sprung clips among the branches of the decorated fir tree. There was a vast variety of food and drink to prepare. The elaborate planning, covering two days of operations, would have been much easier if computers had been invented. But the people involved each knew their own roles, and timings were associated with each

role. In the early days of music, before modern scoring was devised, each musician had his own part, but no-one (except one hopes the composer’s own head) knew the simultaneous composition. Christmas was just like that. Doll’s family Christmas Day converged on the home of Kitty and Will. Kitty was after all the eldest of the children, and she was happy to host her parents and her siblings. Thus Joe and Ivy came—and now for the first time Doll was here with her Will. You haven't

been introduced to Ivy until now. She belonged to the Wills family, another well-known

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family in the district, and had a sister called Violet. It was a strange thing, considering how much older the two of them were, that neither of Doll’s siblings had acquired children. There had been a stillborn child to Kitty and Will, but this was never mentioned, nor was the possibility of another attempt—it could be that this was by now impossible. Ivy would

conceive, years later. As time moves on it becomes more and more difficult to imagine the details of such a jollification, with not a single electronic gadget in sight. Every home had a piano however, and someone who could read music, unless that home were totally penurious. In that case, there was invariably a piano in the nearest pub. But Christmas was not really the season for the solemn ballads that were otherwise so popular—no, but there were endless carols to be harmonized. Remember that all concerned were serious churchgoers, and all the men sang in the choir. Joe sang tenor and the new Will sang bass, with Kitty’s Will

supporting the womenfolk who were singing the basic tune. Everyone knew all of the words for at least two verses, after which a carol could be kept going by the prompting of whoever happened to remember the next line.

Apart from the singing there was a considerable number of party games to play—from games of the pencil-and-paper sort, such as consequences and similar cerebral puzzles, to the more vigorous ones that involved hiding, or changing chairs, or rushing up and

down. Sooner or later someone would suggest card games of the whist variety. Despite all this activity, the role of eating and drinking remained dominant. The Christmas lunch of turkey and all the trimmings, announced for two o’clock, would never start until three. That made teatime rather late, but tea was a serious ritual that had to be performed. A Christmas cake, richly made of raisins, sultanas, cherries and crystallized fruit—with a healthy dose of whisky to keep out the cold—was covered in thick marzipan and then coated with icing. This would be accompanied by a huge assortment of supporting cakes, sponges, scones and sandwiches.

Meanwhile, in the other half of the family, an even larger orgy was in preparation for Boxing Day—which Doris would attend for the first time. Her new husband’s mother, Rhoda, was the eldest of a family of six. Her own mother, Ann, was a widow of advanced years. Having been born in 1837, she was rooted in the Victorian age, and always wore

widow’s weeds of black bombazine. The fourth of the six children was Myra, married to Thomas Broombhall. Their home, at 2 Finlay Street, offered the most convenient venue for the party. The oldest of the boys had been Arthur, but he had been killed in the South African

wars in 1902. His death was commemorated by six identical signet rings, one for mother Ann, and one each for the remaining children, bearing the crest of Arthur’s regiment, the Enniskillen Dragoons. The next son was Jack, who was now recognized in the Victorian way as the head of the family, and he was married to Hettie. They had a variety of children, dear to all, who were otherwise engaged during Christmas. That leaves the two youngest

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girls—Mary and Nellie. Mary was and remained a spinster, and a dedicated nurse. We noted earlier a surfeit of Wills in the family, and now encounter an extra Jack in the person of Jack Bignall, who had married Nellie. The second Christmas lunch for the newlyweds was a rather awesome affair for them. There were no other young people in sight, and Uncle Jack inducted Will—now suddenly perceived as a man instead of a boy—as the only other male around. Of course, Uncle Tom Broomhall and Uncle Jack Bignall were treated seriously (they were admittedly men), but the dynastic line passed to Will. He was the senior son of the new generation, and moreover the junior son Harry was not in evidence ... The turkey was carved by the

host of Finlay Street, Uncle Tom, but the accompanying York ham was set up on a side table where Will was permitted to carve it. Of such niceties as these were the middle-class protocols of the Edwardian age created and perpetuated. The monarch was by now King George the Fifth, but even the cut of his beard preserved the feel of his late thus father Edward VII. But Christmas time, as emphasized before, was a religious event, and family members attended either midnight mass on Christmas Eve or the early mass on Christmas

Morning. Those who had no culinary duties, and especially the choristers, also went to the Sung Eucharist in mid-morning at St Peter’s. But the culinary duties should not be minimized. Potatoes were peeled in a tin bath prior to roasting, boiling or mashing. A whole sack of Brussels sprouts was prepared, and parsnips were cut up. The turkey of 28

to 30 pounds weight had to start its roasting in the middle of the night, and the whole York ham set boiling early in the morning. Bread sauce and sage and onion stuffing were all prepared in advance in large quantities. Speaking of advance preparations, numbers of Christmas puddings were made in Finlay Street by Rhoda (keeper of the family recipe) and Myra well before Christmas, and set to reheating by simmering during the day. The puddings were chock-full with fruit, and were laced with brandy—and tasted much as they do to this day by people who still

make their own. But most contemporary people who rely on the supermarkets have really no idea of the taste of a homemade original. Moreover, they are deprived of both the excitement and the risk of breaking a tooth on a lucky three-penny bit. There is no such

coin today, though some will remember the chunky brass-coloured twelve-sided version that was the last of the breed. In 1925, however, the three-penny bit was a tiny round coin of real silver. They were not much used perhaps, but they were certainly hoarded, to be

sprinkled into puddings at Christmas. To keep the puddings out of the way of the main work in the kitchen, they were relegated to the cellar. There they simmered on a gas ring, in which warm environment four black cats were also keeping out of the way. When the time came to serve the puddings, the host drew the heavy velvet curtains, and the two family men each carried a pudding aloft into the dining room—sprinkled with a snow of icing sugar, surmounted

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by a sprig of holly with a cluster of berries, and alight with flaming brandy. The scene was Dickensian, and interestingly enough there were no servants. Life below-stairs was reserved for the well-to-do. O what a tangled web we weave

When first we practise to conceive Apologies are due to Sir Walter Scott for the deception built into this heading, but it fascinates me that the coincidence of two quite different tangled webs are themselves entangled in the internal environment of the womb and the external environment of time and place. Let’s take a quick look at the tangle of coincidence—while bearing in mind that ‘coincidence is the inability to see what they really matters’. (I originated that assertion, and wrote it into two different books that I also wrote—which was a coincidence.)

There is now no way of knowing which one of the days among the jollifications described for Fulham in 1925 gave rise to me. Since I was born on 25 September in the following year, it is fun to imagine that the event took place on 25 December itself. Anyway, it must have been around that Christmastide that Doris Ethel (née Rose) and William

John Beer graduated as my potential parents. I have thought a lot about that first cell—the admixture of mother and father chromosomes that determined my DNA. Surely that instant is the most critical event of my life, and much more significant than the exact hour of my birth at 0800 hours. When astrologers cast horoscopes focusing on that exact time and day, are they in fact discounting backwards to the previous nine months? And if so, what exact amount of time is allocated to the gestation period? Then what about babies who are spectacularly divergent from the official thirty-eight weeks? The single cell ... it had a unique nucleus, containing 100,000 genes—my genome. The genes were grouped as twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and with perfect gender

equality one pair derived from my mother and one pair derived from my father. The twenty-third pair determined my role as a man rather than a woman (despite a suspicious

number of rather yin-ish traits), which was settled by my father with his Y chromosome. Each gene, made of DNA, manufactures a particular protein, competent to create flesh and bone, blood and organs, brain and nerves—and the genome has three billion of them. The complexity of information thereby compacted into a single cell is dazzling. The 100 million, million cells that will constitute my body must copy this unique nucleus faithfully for every single cell. In the end, the self-organizing capacity of that cell must generate the total architecture of the body, and distinguish correctly between each of its parts as it goes and as it grows. Reflective people must always have marveled at the creation of a new life. But the

detailed understanding of the biochemistry involved, which is quite recent, has highlighted a special feature—the quantifiable complexity that has to be handled as a problem

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of communication and control. This is not to say that the process has become less magical, but I think it has added another dimension. Perhaps that dimension is hinted at as including any process that is of itself integrating. A working definition of a dimension is a condition of existence. In general, our way of talking about things isolates them into separate identities that can be analyzed as separate and then declared to exist. Almost the whole of science has operated on that basis—getting into considerable difficulty over such an attempted dichotomy as the particle-wave equation. We call the method reductive. Even philosophers, Kant anyway, refer to a thing-in-itself, and try to handle the world of ideas as if they were entities. From the Scholastics with their syllogisms to twentieth-century Oxford Analysis, the procedure has been reductive—getting into even worse difficultly than physics when it comes to the social fabric. Logic, for the most part, deals in entities too—and the few attempts at relational logic didn’t really get off the ground. So anything that is said about wholes is at once analyzed into parts by the traditional tools of science or philosophy or logic, and loses whatever is important about its wholeness. Mathematics

has connived in this—fair enough,

it is rightly called the queen and

servant of the sciences. But mathematics has also been leaving a trail of valuable clues to potentially integrating procedures in the arid desert of reductionism. The field of set theory treats of wholes in preference to isolated parts. A version was brilliantly developed by the French as Bourbakian algebraic topology—but is generally, and unfruitfully, considered an abstrusely intellectual curiosity. The concept of ‘critical size’ is met with in empirical applications of many disciplines, but has not yet resulted in a coherent theory. In epidemiology, we have statistical tools that deal with the spread of infection, and the notion of percolation through a population. And especially there is the essentially commercial undertaking of networking, where the desperation to avoid constraint and regu-

lation leaves everyone floundering in a morass of financial tomfoolery, and deprives the technosphere of sane development. The time will eventually come when the dimension of communication-and-control is recognized as the missing clue to holistic thinking.

These factors come into the picture whenever anyone is born. But each of us arrives in this world at a particular moment in history and a particular place on the map. This is the

second entanglement. Would I be the same person that I am today, even with an invariant genetic structure, if I had not been an Englishman? Sir Peter Ustinov claimed that he had picked up a second-hand book in the Charing Cross Road recording a father’s letters to his son (these were not the famous letters of Lord Chesterfield). The book began: ‘My Boy, you have been born an Englishman, and as such have won first prize in the lottery of life’. This made me laugh a lot. Nobody said this to me. Surely not—Oh, I don’t know though: there was a flavour of this in my upbringing. Then how about the more specific circumstances. Would it have made a difference if Mister Stanley Baldwin had not been the prime minister when I arrived? He was the

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man of whom Winston Churchill said that he occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up as if nothing had happened. George Orwell said that one could not even dignify him with the name of a stuffed shirt—he was simply a hole in the air. Not a very propitious start one might think. But probably we should be looking at a wider scene. Remember that the First World War had been over only seven years when [ was conceived, and it took me a long time to put that into focus. Because of the war, the world had seen the very first stirrings of internationalism. The United States had come into the war at the end—as they were to do again in the Second World War—generating a good deal of bitterness among some people on both occasions because of the delay. At any rate, the Treaty of Versailles would soon have to be negotiated, thereby laying the foundations for the second war. But politicians were beginning to raise their sights, at least, and some would eventually come up with the League of Nations. The United States was a major factor in my British life from the word go. So what of the President of the United States? He was Calvin Coolidge, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth said he looked as if he had been weaned on a pickle. But the story that later endeared me to him concerned a dinner party. The lady sitting beside him at a formal banquet was gushing. Eventually she said to him: “They bet me, Mr President, that I shall not be able to get three words out of you all evening.” To this the President replied: “You lose.” Splendid repartee this may have been, but as with the stories about Baldwin, less than inspiring in a national leader. Polycarp: If this is the level of insight into major issues of polity that you are going to offer, I don’t think much of it.

You seem to have forgotten all about the tangled web. I was asking simply whether I would be the same person, whatever the tangling of chromosomes, if the circumstances of history and geography had been different. And I was supplying deft touches to remind people of what those tangled circumstances were—nothing more. However, given that I

have been talking about the first quarter of the twentieth century whereas by now we’re into the twenty-first, I will offer you an insight based on my age which most people will be too young to formulate. There used to be something called the British Empire. The world map in those days was largely covered red—signifying British, not Communist. The adjective ‘imperial’ moved systematically from connoting the best of everything—law and order, cartography, railroads, irrigation, incorruptibility~—to connoting the worst—dependency, brutality, exploitation, ruthlessness, philistinism. Imperialism that began as a matter of pride, became a pejorative word. It took the best part of the twentieth century to do it. The United States took over, and covered the course in a quarter of the time. I’'m ashamed of my imperialist past. The United States has not yet recognized imperialism in itself. The form of the domination is rather different, although the greed is the

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same. Imperialism is now optical (via television) and electronic (via computer technology). It foists tacky values on the rest of the world, and is profoundly hypocritical in its ethics. But in one outstanding respect, beyond hypocrisy, it is true to the original model of the British Empire. It knows it is right. Some cynical person said that the United States went from barbarism to decadence without passing through the usual phase of civilization in between. But of course it had all the advantages of superior technology. One of the characteristic marks of the two countries who in their day knew they were right is a majestic jingoism. In the United States today, the wording used is invariably unutterably banal. So let’s use Shakespeare

instead—the concept is the same

mutatis

mutandis. It comes from Richard II, written in 1595, when such lofty speech was more

acceptable. But I hope that you notice that the last line prompted the title of this chapter, and as befits Shakespeare, contains a double pun. I knew this passage off by heart by the time [ was about ten, and have already confessed to the nationalistic reactions it tends to induce in me. If its recitation were accompanied by Vaughan Williams’s Variations on a

Theme by Thomas Tallis, the most English music ever written by a Welshman, I should even now be in tears. But I have also been introducing the plot of my own life; and it was blessed—in the vernacular sense, akin to the word blasted ...

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England ... 2: THE MINUS

TIME

Various Beginnings

Queen Victoria graced the imperial throne when it started for me. The year was 1900. Mary Ann, known as Polly, was pregnant in that year. The foetus she carried was my mother. In that first year of the century Polly’s baby already contained the ovum that became one half of me chromosomally. This half hung around for a quarter of a century before officialdom acknowledged my existence. You can’t blame officialdom. No father for me was in prospect, and a couple of potential miscarriages—my mother’s and mine—stood in the way. On the other hand, after my

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birth many other risks, summed up as ‘infantile mortality’, were also in the way. Neither these particular risks, nor the absence of any scientific proof of paternity, bothered officialdom now. The precession to 1900 is a fact, however. And why stop there? No wonder some cultures pay such close attention to ancestors, with degrees ranging from respect, through veneration, to worship.

But I was talking earlier about the conjunction of ovum and sperm as defining a unique event. The truth is that I have always felt suspicious of the very concept of unique events. In many ways it is best to think of the unique event as a likelihood within a concat-

enation of circumstances which spreads outwards—the likelihood diminishing as it goes. I started with a focus on Queen Victoria to illustrate such arbitrariness. Coming right up to Christmastide of 1925, when it proved impossible to supply the actual date of conception, much of what we think of as definite ought to be recognized as probabilistic. One day (want to bet?) officialdom will say that [ am dead. Well, that will be according to somebody’s viewpoint—and certainly not mine, because I shall not be there to give it recognition. Perhaps I died when I was born—not enjoying the trauma, assault by forceps, thermal shock: maybe retreating, leaving a mere biological gesture behind. Or maybe I died when someone broke my trust, or because of abandonment, or perhaps because of a collection of assorted disloyalties, or maybe the cumulative effect of the whole lot. More obviously, declining physical and mental powers are likely to raise in observers questions

as to whether I am still ‘myself —though if I am not myself, who shall I be? At any rate, and once again, a concatenation of circumstances surrounds the issue of death, and the date on the death certificate serves only a convention. Let us suppose that all these speculations are proving tiresome, and that we ought to

be content with the defining moment of conception. Then we are considering a single cell that is uniquely me, and which began dividing exponentially. In a week it became a paperthin disk, held like a sandwich between two fluid-filled sacs. One, the smaller, was the amniotic sac. The other was the yolk sac, which started making blood during the second week. The embryo implanted itself within the uterine wall during that second week—and there I was. The tissue that became the placenta had already established the link with my mother’s blood supply. And so more building materials were being provided for cell division—and accelerated growth.

I was well on the way by now, after two weeks. Of course everything was in place from the first moment, the generation of the first cell. Plenty of things could have gone wrong— but we know that it did not, and I am here to prove it. So whenever I hear, as I frequently do, passionate arguments between such people as theologians and embryologists and lawyers about the number of weeks that are to count as certifying human existence, I can only laugh at the casuistry.

It may suit all these professional worthies to pontificate, for all the reasons one can easily imagine, that there is a moment in the pregnancy before which abortion should be

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held to be legal. Nothing can alter the fact, however, that the first cell is programmed, and the mother is programmed, to take the child to term. That will happen if nothing goes

wrong—and if nature aborts the process nature knows what it is doing. But if another agency deliberately causes that abortion, s/he must answer for the ethical outcome— regardless of when the intervention happens. No-one ever seems to take that view. Maybe

that is a failure in insight into the process concerned, coupled with a purely sentimental reaction to the situation. For instance, a mother who experiences the ‘quickening’ is likely to feel differently from that point. And many in anticipation of that experience will regard new life as sacred from the beginning. My mother knew virtually nothing about what was happening to me during January 1926. But I was her first-born, and she was vividly aware of that. She discussed her reactions with me on a number of occasions in later life. She felt that what happened to her was totally unusual—and after all she had every opportunity to compare notes with other

mothers. For instance, she told me that she retained no recollection of my father’s presence throughout the nine months, although he was there all the time and proceeding as usual. Her every waking moment was focused on me, in a mystical way. I first talked with her about this when I was having children of my own. In my own case, I was fascinated by what was happening to the growing foetus, but that derived primarily, I think, from understanding the process and following it through. Not so in her case: it was essentially a spiritual experience that she went through. She performed the recommended regimen of pregnancy meticulously, I understand, but did it all as though on automatic pilot, in a dream state. The human body is basically a tube. That tubular structure quickly develops from the flat disk of cells. And soon I had the foundations being prepared to initiate the allimportant spinal cord. It happened by opening the neural groove in the forming embryo, initially as a slit. One end started to bend, to prepare a home for the brain. Along both sides of the groove, cells began to collect in clumps, getting ready to become vertebrae and muscles later. And the heart made a first appearance, in the form of the lump that would soon fashion the tube required to create the blood supply. Meanwhile my father was also dedicated to the process, but with a heavy attention to intellectual rather than spiritual concerns. I never reported to him what my mother had reported to me, but I did obtain subjective information from him. He himself was a mathematician manqué, and mathematics was the proxy for intellect itself. Because of this, my father started to recite the multiplication tables to my peaceful embryo. I don’t

know when the process started, nor with what frequency, but it began before I was born and continued into early infancy while I was asleep. In the fourth week my blood began to flow, by contracting and expanding, pushing back and forth. I think of this as having learned something for the first time. For by the twenty-fifth day the slushing motion was tipped over to work in one direction—in the

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channel now created through the umbilical cord. So I now had what could properly be

called a heartbeat, even though I had no heart. Similarly, although there were no genitals, the sex cells had migrated to the location where they would eventually be needed. Since the neural tube had also zipped shut, neurological events were occurring, although there was no brain. So the arrangements for making the heart to beat, the brain to think, and the genitals to replicate, were all in preparation by the end of January 1926. What’s more, all three of these functions were organizing themselves simultaneously—so it doesn’t make any sense to ask which of the three has biological priority. Well, it makes me laugh anyway. Of course this analysis says something about my own subsequent outlook. It did not immediately occur to me, in offering this description, to think also of my physiognomy. But the delineation of that was also happening simultaneously. Bits and pieces of the

physical me were being limned out as if in a preliminary sketch. The head was clearly the head, determined mainly by the clear shape of the incipient eyes. The buds of the four limbs were visible too. To someone who knew where to look, all the main innards were discernible as well. But of course in those days none of me could actually be seen at all, because the technology had not yet been invented to reveal it. The knowledge of what I was like at the time was inferential. And sadly enough the inferences were drawn from studying embryonic children who had died at the relevant age. Realizations of that sort are always prone to give me sombre reflections.

Here is a different kind of reflection. Just as I was to be the first child of my parents, I was also to be the first grandson of two lots of grandparents. The mystery surrounding the family tree came home to me later on in life. I don’t mean that there was anything particularly mysterious about my family, although it proved quite difficult to trace the family tree back to 1731—which was quite far enough, thank you. No, the mystery I mean revolves around the basic picture that I had of ancestors—the list of my own lineage tracing back into the distant past, every one of whom had two parents, four grandparents, and so on indefinitely. I never questioned that mental image, or model as I would prefer to call it,

and probably most people share that model, and like me never give it another thought. It was only when a classic piece of parliamentary badinage had most of the nation laughing that I started to think seriously about the meaning of family trees.

In order to become the prime minister in 1963, Sir Alex Douglas-Home had to renounce his peerage, because the Prime Minister must be resident in the House of Commons, and only a commoner can sit in the Commons—as

seems only reasonable.

It was an ancient and senior title that he held. He was the 14th Earl of Home. Harold Wilson, as leader of the opposition, was making fun of his lineage. In the course of his reply, Sir Alex remarked: ‘As far as the 14th Earl is concerned, I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson.” It brought the house down, as we say. This incident set me thinking about the model of lineage that we all generally accept.

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It took 8,192 people to generate Sir Alex—starting from when the Earldom was created. So it took the same number of people to generate the 14th Mr Wilson, and also to get me into this womb in fourteen generations. But neither Mr Wilson nor I have any particular

reason, like getting an earldom, to mark the start of our lineages. Suppose instead of the arbitrary fourteen generations marked by the earldom, I look back for an equally arbitrary thirty-four generations. Then allowing the standard twenty-five years to count for a generation, the beginning of my family tree would take us back a mere eight hundred and fifty generations, which at first blush does not sound so very long. But when we work out the simple arithmetic of my family tree, using the same rules of two parents, four grandparents, and so on, I end up with eight million-million ancestors. For comparison’s sake, that’s more than the population of the entire world. We can see that the truth cannot possibly be as simple as the model seems to imply. Moreover, if each of us adopted the same simplistic model, then the total number of

people in the world today would be eight billion times eight billion, because each of us has a family tree like that ... And all that would have been accomplished in the last 21,250 years! If anyone is feeling sober and serious, s/he could say that the model is seriously flawed. Otherwise we could simply say that the whole thing is a hoot. It is perfectly obvious in any case that each individual cannot behave as if s/he had a unique family tree, and that the branches intermingle. Indeed, they must intermingle a very great deal to make any sense of the arithmetic. There are two quite different reasons for drawing attention to this preposterous story.

One is methodological, and makes me ashamed that I had not reflected on the matter of family trees until the sparring match Home v. Wilson. It says that it is in the nature of a model to be flawed, and that we ought to be careful to probe the nature of the flaw before we go too far and too thoughtlessly in adopting it as given. My personal embarrassment over this comes from discussing the nature of models thousands of times, in and out of season, in writing and in speaking, before the incident led me to examine the image of the family tree properly. Secondly, if I was right to propose that most people think about their ancestry in the discrete and egocentric fashion suggested by the model, then we are unconsciously moving ourselves towards a model of society itself that fails in principle to recognize that we are ‘members one of another’. Of course this complaint is directed towards the Rich World, which is individualistic and selfish. In the Third World the sense of community is overpoweringly strong. Polycarp: That’s neither that we got a strong lead wrote: ‘There is no such families.” So there you are. And

here nor there. We look to the leaders. I don’t suppose you've noticed as long ago as 1987. Writing in a women’s magazine Margaret Thatcher thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are she was the Prime Minister.

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Quite so: and perhaps you have not noticed the quotation I just gave you. That was St Paul writing to the Ephesians. Anyway, you've made exactly my point, but as usual not understood it. In a village in India or Latin America, everyone is intimately conscious of

mutual independency. So it doesn’t matter that lineage is important there as well—the two notions are not mutually exclusive. Think of the Old Testament Jews, and all that begetting; think of Hinduism and the Mahabharata; think of the Koran and the rules of inheritance. But think also of those people in the villages who automatically accept a share of responsibility for the village children. Orphanages are unknown, and you don’t need social services. Let’s see how the embryonic myself has been getting on during February 1926. Half way through, the skeleton began to condense out of the muscle tissue. But this was still not bone. It was a cartilage construct, like a sculptor’s armature, around which bone started to be laid down. Bends developed with a view to forming elbows and knees. More body parts became identifiable: eyes, nose, mouth, upper lip and nostrils, and a mini nose. The neck lengthened to make the lower jaw, and my ears and eyes—becoming pigmented—both moved to the side of the head. My tail reached a tenth of my body length: a real oddity that, and of course it will have to go by September. Although my mother

could feel nothing as yet, my muscles began to contract spontaneously. Tiny as I was, I was recognizably human, and could properly be called a foetus. Meanwhile my brain was growing rapidly ... Filigree Sculpture

In March 1926 I was getting more baby-like than ever. I got eyelids. Then with the wellformed hands and feet, came fingernails and toenails withal. But what happened early on

was surely one of the defining events of my whole life. It was written, not in the stars, but in that crucial X-chromosome donated by my father. A hefty shot of testosterone fired by the X-programme, resulted in the fusing of the crease that had hitherto left my sexuality ambiguous, and the phallus won out. No wonder I kicked my feet and curled my toes ... I

should have done the same thing if that had not happened, the crease had remained, and a week or so later the phallus had retracted to form a clitoris. The point is that either way the month was preprogrammed to celebrate sexuality—and vive la difference.

But I am anxious to move onto April. Starting on the eyebrows and the upper lip, my body began to cover itself with a fine wool, the lanugo, and my head—which had been half the length of my body—was now only a third. However, in the meantime that head had achieved the astonishing feat of completing the compliment of my nerve cells, the neurons. There were neurons present from the beginning in that embryonic disk, which early on folded over and formed into a tube. There are several billion neurons in the completed

brain, and the things I want to discuss are made difficult by such mind-boggling numbers.

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Anyone of talk about magnitude. pretty well difficult to

a mathematical cast of mind might find it easier to think of 10', or we may a one followed by ten zeros. One way or another, it’s important to grasp the And anyone of an electrical cast of mind (and in a computer age that includes everyone) will find himself thinking about circuits. As if it were not sufficiently envisage wiring up about 10'° neurons, there are two massive further complica-

tions to the problem.

Contrary to the image you might have, it was not a matter of the poor old embryonic brain busting a gut to generate enough neurons to pass muster. Like every other baby of the fourth month, I had about double the requisite number by the end of April. But nature is often profligate: think of a tree’s broadcast seeds, or a cataract of spermatozoa.

Secondly, it is not enough to talk about neurons themselves. Each one comes with a connection, called an axon, which may be tiny or may span several centimeters. A network will need to be formed out of these linkages, called synapses. In the completed brain (estimates Charles Stevens of the Salk Institute) there are at least ten trillion synapses. Let

that sink in for a minute. Next, the cabling for the synaptic net will spread over, wait for it, several hundred thousand miles. The pathetic expression ‘mind-boggling’ has already been used up, which shows the dangers of sloppy syntax. Just focus for a minute: several hundred thousand miles—packed into one small head.

The problem of addressing such a complex and difficult image as the brain takes us straight back to modelling. We do not have the tools to do other than model, and will not have until the neurosciences are far more advanced. And the kind of model that people use familiarly is determined by the dominant technology of the day. Aristotle could see little further into the brain and its purposes than to note its highly crinkly surface. He drew the reasonable conclusion that the brain was meant to cool the blood. In the seven-

teenth century, and the context of continental rationalism, Descartes drew the analogy of the fountains in the king’s gardens—and talked in terms of the hydraulic technology of the day that was both ingenious and subtle. The British empiricists at a similar age were basing everything on mechanics, and John Locke, despite awareness of the fineness of nerves, envisaged invisible pulleys pulling invisible strings running inside the nerves. In

our own age, during the 1950s some folk, though not I, started talking about ‘electronic brains’, and made some very plausible but quite unhelpful, as it turned out, comparisons with telephonic switchboards.

It is easy to talk glibly about the genetic programme that organizes development starting from the first cell. But the total information content of the whole body is only about a hundred thousand genes. It is quite impossible that the whole ‘wiring diagram’ could be speci-

fied in its intimate detail. Information theory proves that mathematically. To penetrate the apparent paradox, we need to distinguish between algorithmic and heuristic procedures. An algorithm contains a comprehensive set of instructions for reaching a known goal. A heuristic contains a set of instructions for searching out an unknown goal by exploration

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and experiment. The developing brain uses both techniques in combination. There is a substrate of tissue in the cortex made up of glia cells. This tissue is non-nervous; it offers a sort of ‘scaffolding’—although that word is inappropriately mechanical: the Greek root of ‘glia’ is glue. The nervous system grows within the substrate according to the genetic pattern: the pair of cerebral hemispheres, the brainstem, the cerebellum, and so on. This is the algorithmic part. But the cortical cells themselves are born deep inside the brain, from the original stock of some 125,000 that were in the closed tube. The back two thirds of that population were needed to form the spinal column. But the front third dragged themselves upwards and outwards heuristically, creating synapses as they went, climbing through the medium of the glial substrate, and formulating the rind of cortical grey matter at the end—the known goal. On the way, the rich network was forming too. It did not matter which particular axons were built in, nor which particular neurons made which particular network connections. What really mattered was the richness of the total process—a richness in which every neuron connected with a great many others, and not on a one-to-one basis, but on a many-to-one basis of connectivity. Some of my individual neurons probably acquired as many as 200,000 connections each on the way towards the cortex. Seeking a model of the way this heuristic process works, I choose one from conditional probability. Imagine a large field covered in virgin snow. Someone sets out to cross it, leaving a trail of footprints behind. The next person may choose another route—or s/he may start a new route. And so on. If the snow is very thick, it will be attractive to use one of the existing routes, and in doing so make it yet more attractive. The probability that any route will be used is thus conditional on its use. The model has already outlived its usefulness. It is not a single entity that is moving towards the goal of registering in the cortex, but an assortment of bits and pieces that assembles itself as it goes along. Tiny filaments of network-like processes build themselves in, or exclude themselves, during the journey. But the conditional probability network remains central to the heuristic. Here is another model useful for just one sentence: when

assembling a jigsaw puzzle, we happen upon a few pieces that fit together—and can then manage to select a few more in short order, because we can recognize a chunk of the larger picture. Having seen the point that this image makes, however, we must discard that model. There is no master picture on the lid of the box. Please excuse just another moment on the question of models. We are not used to making anything, in the sense of fabricating it, without a set of instructions. It is quite difficult to get to grips with the notion of self-organizing systems. They seem to be made out of bits which have purposes to become wholes. Why did I just say ‘seem to be’? It is for the same reason that we had to discard the models of the snowfield and the jigsaw puzzle. There was no person tracking through the snow; there was no picture on the lid. Now we are forced to add there is no baby to formulate a purpose, because unborn babies

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have as yet incomplete brains. In all of this, we are trying to guard against teleological fallacies. Attributing purposes involves a metaphysical stance. We may or may not wish to do this at some point, for some reason, but it just isn’t relevant to understanding how the embryonic brain is put together. If some purpose is involved, then that purpose must be a genetic purpose deriving from previous generations. It cannot be the purpose of an uncompleted brain.

I have said that we are unfamiliar with fabricating anything that is self-organizing, hence all this wrestling with the models meant to explicate them. But there is one human activity available to throw some light on this. This is art. It seems to me that the highest forms of art—in any medium, painting, music, poetry—are basically heuristics that develop through conditional probabilities. At any rate, only artistic design is exclusively beholden to algorithms. In a great work of art, there may be an algorithmic element: the selection of a framework, or freely selected set of rules. For instance, the dimensions of a picture might begin by specifying a golden rectangle. In music, there could be an intention

to write a fugue, rather than a concerto. A poet might set out to write in iambic pentameters. But the profundity of the work will evolve on the basis of what happens to the artist’s sensitivity on the subsequent journey. It is unlikely that any wonderful artistic outcome is

ever entirely predetermined. We often note that ‘perfection’ in art is uninspiring, precisely because it is algorithmic. Elizabethan sonnets, for example, took the genre to such a pitch of perfection that the impression is of courtiers churning them out over breakfast. The artistic impulse is heuristic. The major difference between ‘making something’ of the fabricating kind, and generating something as we go along, lies precisely in the excess of available components. In

fabricating, we know that to have twice as many components as we actually need, and simply throwing the superfluous half of them away, would inevitably mean a financial disaster. But that is exactly the situation of the embryonic brain, so it is just as well that no one is costing the components. Let us try to assimilate a model in which there is an excess of material—and no one cares. Well, we have already had some success in using a model from great art. Please consider a sculpture. There is, let us say, a big block of marble. This sculptor is going to hack chunks of marble off, and to disclose the creation that is hidden inside. Does he know the result in advance? Certainly not in any detail. The very substance of the material will react with the artist’s chisel. This is even more obvious in the case of a wood sculpture.

A Patch for the Quilt—Date: 1950s In the 1950s when some of us who already had computers were, as I mentioned earlier,

resisting the model of electronic brains complete with intricate electrical circuitry, my mentor Warren McCulloch used to speak about biological systems that could design their own filters according to immanent pattern. This is an accurate way of referring

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to the bits and pieces of neural stuff that float around the embryonic brain. They have been discovered since Warren’s time. My close friend Gordon Pask and I tried to realize

such filters—in his case using inorganic substances, colloidal cells, and in my case using organic substances such as Euglena. Pask’s cells consisted of a little dish with an open top, which contained a colloid—in the case I mention it was ferrous sulphate. Ten or so platinum electrodes were dipped into the cell, and an EMF was generated across the electrodes. Fine threads of metallic iron were deposited on the floor of the cell. We undertook many experiments using these self-organizing networks, and on a famous occasion persuaded them to generate an artificial ear by heuristics—there being no plan to include hearing in the design algorithm. By breaking up threads, which remember were bathed in a colloid surrounded by an electromotive force, we studied the circumstances in which pieces of thread would combine themselves into complete circuits. Forty years or so later, when so much more had been discovered about the embryonic brain, I recalled the work with Gordon, and wondered about that other bathing process that occurs in the womb ... Foetal Politics The middle of the month of May was the midpoint in my pregnancy. Had anyone been there to see, a great change in my appearance would have been noticed. In the first place, in an exaggerated effort to take care of my skin, I was basted with my own dead skin cells in a liquor provided by the sebaceous glands, and the lanugo was there to make everything stick together. My Mother was there of course, and she was newly aware of me—aware of the quickening. By the end of the month I had adopted a schedule of sleeping and kicking.

Well, after all it had been known since Shakespeare’s time that ‘rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’, although Will the Quill himself would not have been thinking about a pound heavy baby kicking its mother around when he penned the phrase. At one minute to midnight on Monday 3 May, the General Strike began, and it lasted until 12.20 in the afternoon of 12 May. Those nine days constituted a civil conflict that marked the denouement of the industrial revolution that had been developing throughout the eighteenth century. And I was there, halfway through the minus time. As I said that, I stifled Polycarp’s comment before he could make it—because it was boringly predictable. Even if I had reached full maturity as a human being, say at five years old when nobody could deny that I was alive, I should not have understood the issues, so what difference does it make that I was still in minus time? The General Strike certainly affected my Mother, because she told me so. Should I argue that my Mother’s anxiety affected my cerebral development? I should not dare, not with Polycarp around, although for all I know it may have done. Whenever it was that I was finally aware that there had been a General Strike, I was quite young, and the event was sufficiently recent that it mattered. So the knowledge of

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the event grew slowly into my conscious life, even if it had no impact on my embryonic physical brain, and modulated my emerging outlook on society from the first. Given that what I am talking about happened in 1926, it’'s most probable that anyone reading this will have no idea why I'm attaching any importance to it, and it might be a good idea to explain in a little more detail. At the end of July in the previous year, 1925, the coal miners of this country had

refused to accept terms demanded by the coal owners that would reduce their wages in the range of 10 to 25 per cent. The government kept the industry going against the obduracy of the owners, by supplying a subsidy to last for nine months, in the hope of reaching an acceptable agreement by the end of that time. When the subsidy ended the following May, there was no agreement. So the coal owners locked out the miners. At a meeting of the Trade Union Congress on 1 May 1926, therefore, the TUC committed the workers of Britain as a whole to support the locked-out miners, in the defence of wages and working hours. The trade union movement as a whole supported the general strike for twelve days,

when the sympathetic strike action was cancelled. But no guarantees covering wages and hours had been reached—and not even a promise that there would be no victimization had been exacted. There were one million miners in those days, and one and three-quarter

million other workers came out in their support. It may sound like a small affair. But the nation was bitterly divided by the strike along class lines, and stayed that way. The strike did not last very long. But it entrenched the ‘them-us’ mentality that endured for most of the twentieth century. The negotiations soon ended in failure. But the strike fundamentally changed relations between the TUC and the British Communist Party. Interestingly, the students did not support the strike, as might have happened just forty years later—but at the time the majority of students still repre-

sented a small elite of aristocratic and middle-class money and values. The national Union of Fascists supported the government, regarding the strike as a Bolshevik plot, while the Communists liked to see the situation as auguring a revolution. The Communist MP for Battersea was the only coloured member of the House, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The issue of racism was already adumbrated. Lord Hardinge organized middle-class volunteers to form an Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies, in support of the status quo. Those stoically doing their bit for England included Lady Astor, who was much photographed along with a number of aristocratic women in Hyde Park, where the great food and distribution centre was located. These aristocrats were seen preparing vegetables and cooking food for the transport workers. It was surely characteristic of Britain that photographs such as these became a kind of logo depicting the General Strike. It was also not surprising that I grew up interpreting the logo as meaning that the aristocracy had come out in support of the strikers. Of course this was not so. The aim had been to keep the country going so that the strike would be ineffective. The extraordinary behaviour of the British aristocracy, or at least those most often in

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the public eye, extravagant in life style, eccentric in manner, the point of dottiness, were an entertaining mystery to most life—and not least because foreign friends could not make tion. It certainly slowed down my political insight, however,

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idiosyncratic sometimes to Englishmen for most of my head nor tail of the institubecause I was brought up to

respect the upper classes. New Labour abolished most of the hereditary House of Lords just in time to herald the third millennium—by which time I was thoroughly enjoying

the place. Fortunately they did not also abolish the non-hereditary peers, so it is still possible to draw rich amusement from the spectacle of watching old-time comrades, former general secretaries of trade unions and supposed fellow socialists, draping themselves in ermine and adopting the style and would-be dignity of Lord. The early socialist leaders, at the start of the century, were not yet corrupted. The leaders of the General Strike had names of course, but they will not be easily recognized. Let me typify a stalwart old MP who figured largely in the failed General Strike—George Lansbury. I pick on him because, as I ruffle through old photographs, I am struck by the family resemblance to his granddaughter Angela. Whereas so much of what I am trying to evoke will sound like ancient history, and the names will not be accessible, people may more readily relate to the actress who has made Murder, She Wrote a household name. Everyone is connected to everyone, if we can only perceive what is relevant, as I argued

before. In the United States of America, there was a paucity of aristocrats, though not necessarily of eccentrics. That country was not having an easy time with the working classes either. President Coolidge made a heavy utterance. He said: ‘When large numbers of people are out of work, unemployment results.” That sounds like the beginning of wisdom ... Meanwhile, Mr Baldwin, who had come to power in 1924 with the explicit intention

of reducing wages, and tackling the political levy that supported the unions, pleaded in a national broadcast that the nation could ‘trust me to ensure a square deal to secure even justice between man and man’. That sounds like the beginning of wishful thinking ... In fact a much-quoted passage of Baldwin’s had declared that ‘the General Strike is a challenge to Parliament, and is the road to anarchy and ruin’. It imperiled the ‘freedom of our very constitution’. For the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Bourne, the strike was a sin against God. In other words, the model we have is the truth—and therefore not open to negotiation. Whatever anyone says in disagreement must be an outrageous lie. Even as my brain was being put together in the womb, it was hearing the English predilection for dogma and hypocrisy with which it would become depressingly familiar.

In God’s Pocket Children do not formulate questions in abstract ways, and questions about the nature of existence and of time are fortunately seldom posed by them as ontological conundra.

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What does happen is that an actual event occurring before the child’s birth is mentioned by someone else, prompting the child’s question ‘Where was I when that happened? A common answer is ‘You were in God’s pocket waiting to be born’. I have always found this reply satisfactory in practice, while wondering why the obvious riposte ‘What's God then?” has never arisen. This is just as well, since the notion of deity is baffling, and I have often wondered how it manages to insinuate itself as early as it does into the child’s vocabulary without much explanation. Perhaps it is simply that children formulate nei-

ther questions nor answers in abstract ways ... Well, I had been in God’s pocket for just half of my stay there when the General Strike collapsed, and I moved towards the month of June—when I must have encountered the strange phenomenon of memory for the first time. I was likely to have been startled by loud noises, and it seems that the storing of primitive memories began. These would have included my mother’s voice—and the sound of music. The sense of rhythm surely belongs there too, because of the maternal heartbeat. There were other signs of becoming awake. By the end of June my eyes opened again, and my brain waves already resembled those of the newly born. The foetal lungs were making surfactant, the detergent-like molecule that helps them to expand and take in air. It is June. With three months more to go, a significant change in my own inherent nature has occurred. I have been unique from the moment of conception, because of the DNA blueprint that is mine and belongs to none other. But the primitive beginnings of memory mean that I am now starting to acquire my own experience. It is the beginning

of learning an outlook. That means that I must never deliberately inhibit experience as life continues, but always explore it. That is what I am doing now, in the final months of minus time, and shall be doing for a few months thereafter—because it is laid down by the blueprint. After that, it is a matter of choice. [ shall choose to spend my whole life learning an outlook. On the whole, people seem

to give up the process sooner or later, often as early as puberty, and that is a tragedy. For myself, by the time in my teens that I had seen the point, I made a conscious decision never to regard the process of learning an outlook as completed, but actively to pursue that activity to my dying day. There now: ‘What I tell you three times is true’, as Lewis Carroll remarked in the context of snarks. And my little phrase certainly does need to be reiterated.

Why am I making a fuss about these three words, and linking them together as a phrase by italicizing them? The answer is that I'm not talking about learning itself—as might have been supposed. It is a truism to say that it is necessary to go on learning— otherwise we should not know that the timetable had changed, or the name of the Prime Minister,

quite apart from

discovering

profundities.

No,

learning an outlook means

incorporating experience as it happens, formulating and refining it continuously. It means adjusting the model of life itself while it is being lived. As a result, T have changed

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my views about every serious issue at least once in my life. ‘Inconsistent’, folk have often contended and complained. I should hope so. Experientia docet.

A TV talk show host once

asked me whether I should do anything differently if I had my life over again. I asked him if that was meant as a deliberate insult. After all, that would mean that I was incapable of learning from experience. He didn’t get the point. Once the point is recognized and assimilated, the question arises of the extent to

which it would be good policy to maximize experience. Many people take the technological advantage of touring the world in a hurry, without examining the quality of the experience. ‘It’s Thursday—we must be in Rome.” Then again, the plethora of data can

easily mean that they are skimmed rather than digested. As life becomes more and more frenetic, the apparently increasing wealth of the experience may be getting so shallow that the frenzy is not worthwhile. Then there is the question of the extent to which one needs to scrutinize in depth what is in any case going on. I've already mentioned that both my parents were born on

7 October 1900. On that very day, it so happened, Max Planck wrote a letter solving the puzzling problem of blackbody radiation. His solution entailed consequences which we now recognize as the origin of quantum mechanics. I stumbled over this story, and find it amusing to record it; but I use it to illustrate the question whether my parents should have

made it their business to discover this unexpected birthday present—and maybe to go on to work on quantum theory. In fact, I have little doubt that they never knew anything

about quantum theory—in common with almost everyone else. The question is to know how far we need delve into what happens in the cause of learning an outlook. Polycarp: This story is over one hundred years old. What has quantum theory to do with anything? We still don’t know anything about it. Why not?

That’s another story. Polycarp: Can’t you keep your stories separate?

No. You have to learn that everything is connected to everything else. Put it another way: trails cross and re-cross—just keep following the scents. Insight is not based on ratiocination. If only you would follow your nose. Polycarp: Huh. Then show me how the nose fits in.

All right, T'll ignore the heavy sarcasm and try to do just that. My nose was identifiable as such back in February, remember? But the organ is intended for smelling. Do you think that the nose has a bit of wire on the end of it attached to a smell? Obviously not. Somehow the foetus must put all the apparatus in place that makes the identification of smells possible. It’s worth thinking about the complexity involved. Forget about wires. Think about a smell that is permeating consciousness. Obviously an odorous substance is diffusing into the air. Molecules of this substance dissolve in the

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mucous in the upper part of the nose. These molecules bind to specific receptor proteins. Now there are many thousands of olfactory neurons—each containing one, or perhaps a few, of the thousand or so different receptor types. And each of those responds only to a specific chemical group. Hence we may distinguish between about 10,000 different smells—even though there are only 1,000 different olfactory receptor types. The emergent brain already has the trick of combinatorial elaboration and discrimination. Probably we don’t think much about this incredible complexity. It is nothing like as obvious as is the complexity of the visual field. But in terms of subtlety it is apparent through the emotional effects of fragrances—not to mention the repugnant reaction we instantly feel at a ‘bad smell’. The point is that this incredible complexity is being systematically built into the growing foetus. The brain will have to reach more maturity, a good deal further down the line, before the olfactory system is completed. But the preparations for that achievement must all be made in advance—such as now. Having come this far in talking about the developmental process, it is worth one more paragraph to comment on how information is being passed on—in this case from the olfactory bulbs on the undersurface of the frontal lobes to the limbic system. (The limbic system is associated with emotion, with foraging for food, with sexual activity.) On the way through the afferent pathways, there is much refinement and enhancement of the incoming information. Localized little computers differentiate between smells based on different patterns of electrical activity. And the developmental pattern that has just been traced—with its baby computers spreading through afferent pathways—is typical of all

sensory systems, not just smells. Consider the question of taste and the issue of complexity. Now there are traditionally only four modalities: the groups labeled sweet, sour, salty and bitter. In this case, the receptor cells of each group has its own distinct transduction system. Think of the salty taste. When sodium enters a cell through ion channels, the plasma membrane depolarizes. That causes neurotransmitter release from the receptor cell to interact with synapses with afferent nerve fibres. This seems much less complex than in the case of smells—and yet there is surely an equally subtle palette of taste. Yes indeed. There are independent coded pathways to get into the central nervous system. But obviously most of the tastes that we can discriminate are mixtures of the four modalities. Single receptor cells respond in various degrees to the mix, and every specific taste

experience depends also on the pattern of firing in relevant groups of neurons. Then both temperature and also smell contribute to the finished results. So smells and tastes result in subtle fragrances and subtle flavours—all undeniably complex—in very different ways. But all of them must be organized through the blueprint, and all must be prepared in advance at the embryonic stages. [ have been moved to enter into this dissertation because of a television advertisement which has been greatly annoying me recently. It depicts a newborn babe, and alleges that

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mother is stuck with this extraordinary creature—without any operating instructions or guidance. The picture is skillfully created of a tabula rasa, and the child will have to be ‘created’ by careful parenting (involving the assistance of hosts of expensive products no doubt). But in reality, as we are seeing in the course of watching my own development, we're not dealing with a clean slate—quite the reverse. We're dealing with an extremely involved mechanism that is being geared from the very beginning to handle a particular set of sensory modalities in a particular way. Why? It seems inescapable that the process

we call evolution has found it expedient to survival. If we go along with that uncritically, we are placing enormous faith in the robustness of a specialized process on the grounds that it seems to have worked effectively. Two issues emerge—even from this perfunctory glance at the human condition. Firstly, if this is the best that evolution can do, it implies acceptance of perpetual suffering on a vast scale. All of the world’s religions and ethical systems perforce address the problem. From the dogma of the imperfectibility of human nature, the breast-beating of miserable sinners, through the doctrine of the atonement,

Christian ethics have elaborated

complicated theologies which seek to explain—even to glorify—suffering. Oh happy fault, 0 felix culpa, Augustine ingeniously proclaimed, arguing that the sin is happy because it makes forgiveness possible. The Eastern religions and ethics have a more subtle approach,

but both acquiesce in the pain and destruction we see on every side. Indeed, as the population has grown to dangerous proportions in terms of overcrowding, acceptance appears to extend to genocide. The elaborate non-solutions, whatever they may be in a given culture,

are ingrained. To question them is conceived as naive, leading to utopianism. The second issue that emerges concerns the rate of technological change. However one perceives evolution, it has always been adapted to a rate of change that we might call a product of nature itself. If there has been genetic change, and there has been little sign of it since homo was recognized as sapiens, it is imperceptible. Today, however, there is every sign that potent economic interests operating on a global scale are hell-bent on effecting genetic change artificially. It is a new and profound possibility, and as usual humanity is not in the least prepared to confront it. The limited group of those who wield both the knowledge and the power radically to alter the very nature of humanity and its environment, are beyond the reach of either the intellects or the institutions that previously attempted to understand the former and to constrain the latter.

But it is now only July 1926, and what I have just been talking about is completely beyond the imagination of even the most insightful science-fiction writers of the day. Jules Verne seemed to predict the atomic submarine, but the nearest H. G. Wells could

approach to genetic engineering was The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, I can now regu-

late my own body temperature, which is a cybernetic achievement—without the adjective’s yet being available to name it so. The brain is beginning to wrinkle, which will allow more grey matter to pack into my skull—and, as we noted before, once allowed Aristotle

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to conclude that the organ exists to cool the blood. The lungs are capable of expanding to a good surface area. I spend 70 to 80 per cent of my time in rapid-eye-movement sleep. That sounds a bit excessive.

I'd certainly be wondering why that is—if the brain capacity were adequate to consider the matter. Evidently though, if I had that much brain, the REM ratio would no longer be true ... Many self-organizing systems are similarly difficult to discuss, because they are subject to a form of what logicians call undecideability. Usually that expression is explained in terms of propositional logic (all Cretans are liars, as said by a Cretan, and so forth), but we may encounter the difficulty directly in physical terms. For example, we have discussed smells, and ought to be able to explain how to find the smell of nitrous oxide. We cannot do so. When the substance is exposed to air, as required by the olfactory machinery, it changes its chemical form ... The fact is that the fiendish puzzles of epistemology, which sophisticated people imagine are founded in language, have profoundly physiological bases. How about another of the orthodox five senses—touch. Perhaps the most primitive

form of touch is that of one human body impinging on another. The most delicate form we might agree to call a caress. The lightest touch on the skin we can imagine is probably made by the breath—and at once we are mired in complexity. Was the sensation of touch the mechanical though minuscule movement of downy hair, or was it the perception of a slight change in temperature? Perhaps we cannot tell—and already another sense than

touch is or might be involved. Let us next increase pressure, so that there is no doubt that skin is touching skin. Now we may start talking in terms of roughness and smoothness—initially of the skin quality itself, and then of the nature of the caress. There is no need to continue classifying, once it is clear that, as usual, high complexity informs such tactile gestures. But if the pressure is increased, we shall reach the strong type of caress, a firm grasp or perhaps

it’s a tap. How far does that tap have go before it should be called a slap? And if it is a sharp enough slap, the ‘caress’” will hurt. If it does, albeit in play and without causing real discomfort, then a completely separate set of nerves is engaged—the pain nerves. So let’s be quite clear: pain is a sensation. Anyway, even in this small example, say of touching

another person’s body in ways that appear to both parties to involve merely a gradient or spectrum of touching, a number of different modalities and even distinct neural networks have made their appearance.

Next comes the question of location. Some parts of the body, for instance the lips and the tongue, are highly innervated. In other locations, for example the small of the back, it’s impossible to distinguish between light touches that are inches apart. (You may test that simply with a pair of dividers, by touching the two points together simultaneously. You may be amazed to discover how poor the discrimination on the back really is. I was.) A rapid method of appreciating the reality of these sensory distortions is by find-

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ing a diagram of the homunculus. In this picture, which I believe was originally due to the Canadian neurologist Wilder Penfield, a transverse slice is taken through the sensory cortex, and the body parts are mapped on to the drawing in proportion to the space allocated. It is interesting that, although seriously distorted, the body arrives in the cortex in the correct order—with the startling exception of the male genitalia. These are positioned adjacent to the feet. I have never seen it mentioned, but that sounds like a plausible explanation for the quite common foot-fetish often encountered by psychiatrists. In any case,

the discussion is still pressing the architectural fact that the body is designed to perceive the world in a highly specific way, with built-in biases that draw physiological attention to certain aspects. I have not even mentioned the erotogenic locations in general—nor is

there much need to do so, because their importance is self-evident, and because I can do without a salvo from Polycarp. The almost all-encompassing feature of touch (is it touch at all?) concerns kinaesthesia or proprioception—which is more readily recognized if we call it the sense of musclesand-joints. This was not listed in the classic five senses, although I have heard attempts to pretend that it can be fitted into the sense of touch. That would need a Procrustean

bed. Suppose that you let yourself into your house in the dark. You run upstairs, without bothering to switch on the light. If you have lived there for any length of time, you would not find that at all difficult. That is because you have a stored memory of how your legs operate to get upstairs, True, you will be verifying progress by touch each time a foot makes contact with a step, but in touch-terms the feeling is minimal—and unconscious.

It’s the pattern of the angles and muscular dispositions that are stored and that you feel. The same thing applies when you are in bed and awake in total darkness. You find your way around the night table with minimal fumbling, and are probably perfectly able to get up to visit the bathroom without turning on the light. So far I have spoken of touch as affecting the skin, but it is in bed and in darkness that one becomes most aware of touch inside the body. Unfortunately, the feeling is often of discomfort. Indigestion will do it, so will cramping or a stiff neck, and of course a headache is a possibility. All these involve the pain nerves, but there are other activities of the

internal organs of which one may be aware, There are palpitations, and grumblings of the colon, for instance. So we have reached a difficulty. We began with the classic sense of touch, and have realized that other things are entangled within that simple idea, notably kinaesthesia and pain. It is probably best to substitute touch with a phrase that will cover

all of these, and refer to it as the somatic sensory system. The somatic system in general was occupying all the attention of my own development during August 1926. The major body systems themselves, never mind the neurophysiological aspects, needed major work, and the muscles were constantly contracting and relaxing to prepare them for physical action. I should need to breathe before too long. So 80 per cent of my time was engaged in learning how to do it by simulation, ‘breathing’ the amniotic fluid.

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Polycarp: You have made the point—all too often—about the degree of complexity built into the foetus, and the degree of limitation imposed from the start by the design of the developing embryo. Enough! Of the five senses we’re still missing vision and hearing, and there is a limit to how much lecturing I can take. I know perfectly well that hearing is all mixed up with balance, and that vision uses up the whole of the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. Okay: more builtin complexity. Agreed. Any more of this is overkill, and I'm getting bad vibes.

Fine—TI’ll not labour those points. But vibes, well, we could talk about the whole universe in terms of vibrations ... Polycarp: Not the whole universe, thank you—definitely not. What’s vibrations got to do with completing the process of getting you born?

I wanted to talk about the electromagnetic spectrum—quite briefly. Polycarp: Get on with it.

I think the lowest note on a few cathedral organs is eight cycles per second. I've never heard that, but I have heard sixteen cycles. I say ‘heard’—it’s closer to ‘counted’. When [ put my hand flat on the pew, I felt the vibrations, and felt that in principle they were countable. Anyway, we can increase the range to between 1,000 and 4,000 cycles, and then we experience keen hearing for a vast range of sound. After that, a lot depends on age. With any luck, we may reach 20,000, but a dog will do much better. There’s still a great

deal of complexity, and no doubt the sound available to the human ear is very rich—but it is limited, and the limit is set by the auditory machinery. The evolutionary hypothesis is that in terms of survival humankind would receive no

advantage in perceiving higher frequencies. Now modern traffic is a very recent development. It might well suit the vanishing subspecies of pedestrians to be able to receive batlike radar. The radar frequency is something like 10*' cycles. It’s obvious that a completely different kind of auditory machinery would be required to receive it—in fact we should not call it “auditory’ at all. There is no feasible biological way of pulling off this adaptation within the time range. It probably will not matter—the subspecies of pedestrian is probably doomed anyway—but I don’t know how many attributes would be useful to contemporary humans, because I cannot imagine them. And that’s because the very words we

are able to use, like ‘auditory” in the example, are constrained by the genetic inheritance geared to an ancient sensory system.

The situation and the doubts about adaptability are both exacerbated in the case of vision. The brain is dominated by the visual cortex, and the complexity involved in

imaging—in getting through the jelly-and-neuron porridge to pictures—engages myriads of the baby computers mentioned earlier as inhabiting afferent pathways at the synapses. This only leaves us wrestling with the most intractable qualitative change in the whole of subjective experience. There is nothing remotely like a screen in the brain, so even after

we have realized that we are talking about complicated informational coding, the puzzle

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remains. We know about the formation of a picture through digital coding—but we still need a screen on which to be project it. There isn’t one. Secondly, although it is easy to be dazzled by the neurophysiological complexity of vision, what are we to make of the very limited range of visible light that engages the sensory system? Going back to the question of vibrations, the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation ranges from long wave radio at about 1,000 meters, going down to gamma rays at 102, Visible light is tied to the narrow band of wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. The complexity within the spectrum is still to be found, however. Rod cells respond to very low levels of illumination, cone cells are less sensitive, and respond when

the light is brighter. The palette is composed of four photo pigments absorbing different wavelengths. As a result, we are properly amazed by the richness of visual experience, from spectacular sunsets to the emotive power of art. And again we are left to put our trust in the evolutionary solution. Is the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum that we cannot directly sense really useless in the modem world? Clearly not, or we should not have invented x-rays, radio, and the rest. Equally clearly, what we know as ‘vision’ could not as such accommodate those extra facilities. It is risible to think of our friends walking about with visible skeletons, for example. Looking back to the past for guidance, we find how instrumentation changed visual capability, while still remaining within the visible spectrum. The microscope and the telescope enhanced the unaided eye-scope itself. But there has been no evolutionary adaptation. Is that because a few hundred years is not enough, or because extra facilities would not be useful? It is so easy to say that we do not often need a telescope or a microscope, but that might simply be because we are the sort of creatures that cannot see unaided things that are very far away or very small. The discussion works its way around, as usual, to circular perceptions: our genetic

architecture and its physiology entail a worldview to which we are committed before we are even born. Contemporary ethics make the argument about free-will familiar. The deeper issue turns on the question of free-know contemporary philosophy, particularly in its postmodern phase, floats freely about without reference to any physiological facts— the central nervous system that determines the limitations not only of the sensory system

but of the brain itself. Perhaps artists more readily than philosophers grapple with freeknow, because art is founded in sensation, not abstract thinking, and is therefore closer to physiological reality. Surrealism, in the limit, grapples with free-know. But the artist M.

C. Escher—who drew those amazing ambiguous patterns, and especially the ‘impossible objects’—said: ‘T can’t help from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties.” That is the problem that I have been talking about: we cannot go very far with that fooling around

before being written-off by those who are less adventurous, if not actually adjudged insane by those who are more narrow-minded. The sensitivity of the artist points to the recognition that some people are more sensi-

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tive than others. There’s no need to invoke ‘artistic temperament’, or impossible people as well as impossible objects. In fact, artists appear to be intensely practical—perhaps because their medium is very difficult to handle, and they need to be practical to control it. No, this is still a matter of physiology. The sensitivity of sensation can be measured—

in terms of the thresholds within which discrimination is possible—and individuals show wide variations. Hypersensitive people find many stimuli difficult to bear, even verging on pain, while there are considerable differences in the thresholds of tolerance to pain itself. Hypalgesia involves a particular neuropeptide (substance P), so maybe other transmitters

affect other senses in ways not fully understood. At any rate, differences in hypersensitivity add substantially to subjective complexity—and still at the level of neurophysiology. The Sparks Fly Upward The last of the complicated processes that moved into action in September were the ones

that determined both the body and brain to be physically ready to give birth. Little seems to be known about how this mysterious process works—which is an indication that we are no longer dealing with the relatively isolated systems that have made it possible to distinguish aspects of development in this chapter, but with the totality of events that now impinge on a single moment in time. We cannot say exactly when the birth will occur. Obstetrics does not have an adequately predictive model. The anxieties of parents-in-waiting must be a common

human

experience in the

developed world, where people find uncertainty well nigh intolerable. Not so, perhaps in the less developed world, where the planning of time is not yet mandatory. Not so, either, if the uncertainty can be eliminated by arrogant intervention in a natural process. At one stage in the United States of America, | remember noting with shock that most births to middle class parents were by caesarean section. Whether this was for the convenience of parents subject to the dictatorship of the calendar, or of doctors seeking to optimize their social diaries, it seems unlikely that it was for the convenience of the newly born. It is easy, if specious, to rationalize the contention that it is. I suspect that a key factor in the US is the absence of midwives. In England, non-medical factors altogether may supervene— thanks to the way in which our affairs are so tangled—so that a still notional child could cause a financial crisis.

Episode: England 1952 A child was due to arrive in the last week of March

1952. The British tax system is

not geared to the calendar year, but to 5 April in any given year. If there is a cogent reason for this, I do not know what it is. Today I am taxed in both Britain, 5 April, and Canada, 1 January. A boon to accountants on both sides of the pond and to two revenue offices who have never agreed with each other in twenty years, constituting another accountancy boon. At any rate, since the middle of 1951 my financial plan-

ning was based on the expectation of my having two children in the tax year 1951/52.

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My salary was exiguous—about £850 a year. The child had to be born before 5 April to quantify for the second child allowance which alone would make the financial system viable and on which my very careful accounting procedures had been based. When nothing had happened by 1 April my wife and I were in a state of panic, and speaking wryly about All Fools’ Day. Old wives’ remedies were attempted. As part of our Christmas presents to ourselves we organized every year a bottle of Scotch (for me) and a bottle of gin (for her). These bottles were carefully rationed, because they had to last until the next Christmas. We had a ceremonial shot every month—I drank my whisky neat, and she mixed hers with the free ration of orange juice provided by the government for nursing mothers. (Orange juice—and bananas—were still not available in Britain, although the war had been over since 1945.) My wife drank the second half of her gin-ration in one go. It was supposed to jolt the baby. The baby was unmoved. My wife went for a ride on the notoriously rickety Sheffield tramcars (first vintage—the second vintage, forty years on was luxurious), with similar expectations and similar results. The baby arrived on 10 April. It was too late. Otherwise, thank God, everything was fine. The story returns to September 1926. The warning signs began on a Friday night in 48 Fernhurst Road, home base, where I would be delivered. The midwife was to be my great-

aunt, Aunt Mary. She was a spinster dedicated to nursing—who I think became a Matron in one of the London hospitals. She was the sister of my grandmother Rhoda, so one of the Stafford family. The family doctor who had been in charge of the pregnancy was Doctor Anthony. Thus it was that my Father set out running through the darkness. It is strange how that midnight sprint became a central image for me. I suppose it was because my Mother often spoke of it when I was young, and she was walking me around in the pram. No one in the family had a telephone in those days. Maybe she had been worked up about my Father getting back in time. But I used to think of his doing the trip, and remember in particular, almost fifty years later, standing for a long time outside number 48 thinking about him soon after he had died in 1976. He would have gone to the end of Fernhurst, turned up into Filmer Road, and on into the Fulham Road; then across Fulham Palace Road, and straight over Putney Bridge. On then to the top of Putney High Street, and left down Richmond Road to Oakhill Road where Aunt Mary lived at number 69. I should think that the whole journey would be about two miles. Good for him. I suppose there must have been a taxi back: no-one ever referred to that bit of the journey.

My mother may have been anxious that Aunt Mary would arrive in time, but she was also preoccupied over the more serious question whether I would turn out to be a girl or a boy. It seems unlikely that anyone could possibly guess why it mattered. Well, if I should be a boy, then—according to the currently fashionable medical opinion—I ought to be circumcised. Now the doctor would come to verify that I had arrived with major parts intact, free

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of charge, as one of the duties of a family practitioner. But a circumcision involves a procedure for which there would be a fee. There was no money for such niceties. All her life my Mother maintained that, as a result of her concentration on this problem, I was born without a prepuce. At any rate, there was no fee ... I was born at eight o’clock in the moming on Saturday, 25 September 1926, in the main downstairs room of 48 Fernhurst Road, Fulham. The weight was recorded as eight and a quarter pounds. The length was a slap-happy ‘very long’. I was named Anthony after the doctor, and Stafford ... as the most significant family name. In sketching out the circumstances of my arriving in this predicament, the uniqueness of my fabrication—and indeed that of every other human being—has been stressed. If it were not so downright provoking, I should say that it is self-evident that all men are created unequal. That is because of the uniqueness of DNA in the first place. And for every conceivable reason of inheritance and upbringing people become increasingly unequal

with every hour of life. The famous phrase about equality and inalienable rights, gained its currency from the American Declaration of Independence, but it is routinely trotted out all over the world

whenever the status of the human condition is discussed. It seems to have been coined in a draft by Thomas Jefferson. It was underwritten by Honest Abe in his Gettysburg address getting on for a century later. In the first Article of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights promulgated in 1948, there comes a subtle modification: ‘All human

beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This nomenclature is marginally more defensible, but the rotund rhetoric continues to echo. In Article 3 there is a further echo: ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” In the 1776 original in this case, there were alleged to be inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have never been able to work that out. Life is cheap through most of the world, and liberty is everywhere a relative notion—often tantamount to subjection. So neither of these can be an ‘inalienable’ right in a strict sense—it is more like a wish list for the rich world. As to the selfish hedonism of the pursuit of happiness, that constitutional right has made the United States of America an ugly place. We were well rid of it in Article 3, though ‘security of person’ loses something in poetry. Antedating American

Independence by two hundred years, the metaphysical poet

John Donne said in one of his sermons: ‘Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.” That seems less contentious than flat statements about the equality of birth, though 'm rather surprised by Dr Donne’s ignoring the eschatological future— he was after all a theologian, and classified as a metaphysical poet. But really I am making fun of the very concept of equality, which in my view has misdirected so much human thinking—starting with that perennial children’s cry ‘It’s not fair’. Nobody ever promised that life is going to be fair, and it manifestly is not. One of the first things I ever learned came from studying the New Testament, which began systematically when I was nine

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years old. The parable of the vineyard, in which the master paid the same wages to everyone regardless of the time spent, was extremely difficult for me to come to terms with, but it taught me something—for the first time—that was counterintuitive. Moreover, [ came to recognize that Jesus’s teaching was fundamentally revolutionary, whereas most of the things I heard preached in church calmly pretended that it was not. They went further:

Jesus’s teachings were presented as the England to which I was born. It was a con trick of the first magnitude. When the time came, I was ready for this episode: Episode: Abergele, North Wales, 1942 The curate at Saint Michael’s church was a good man and a scholar. He announced from the pulpit that he wished to form a Bible study group, and the first meeting would be held on a given date in the church vestry. I answered the call. Seven or eight people turned up, all male. All were serious scripture addicts, as was soon discovered

when we debated which book of the Bible would form our subject of study. The oddity about this group was that all but one were retired professional men, typically septuagenarians. As the odd one out, I was fourteen years old. No one seemed to mind. The whole of the first session was devoted to deciding the book to be studied. I remember that Isaiah was a favourite candidate, while some of those mentioned left me quite cold. I don’t know whether the group deferred to me because of my advocacy, or because of my youth, but the final conclusion was what I wanted: the Book of Job. The sad story, and the contentious issue of Job’s Comforters as they were known,

had fascinated me—but I could make little of it. The discussions in Abergele, which went on for about a year, meeting every two weeks (although the group gradually lost half its members) was to ensure that I would continue to be fascinated for the rest of

my life. Job was the somewhat obsessive subject of a dozen or so oil paintings done in the 1950s (two of which are preserved), and one of Job’s characters, Elihu, received

a dedication from me for the most important poem that I have so far written, One Person Metagame. Let me explain what is going on in this section. 'm trying to dispel expectations as to

the way this story will develop. I explained in this chapter why I think of myself at birth as an elaborate fabrication; I have been trying to explain in this section why I think of myself at birth as having no rights. What I have or do not have in addition to human poundage,

such as for instance a soul, remains to be worked out when my brain begins to work. I try not to consider the question in terms of abstract nouns that have no existence before they are formulated in the brain. As they are increasingly formulated, the story of my life is increasingly told. The story of my life, too, is a fabrication. When I was born, the empirical fact is that I was afflicted by a massive thermal shock, and I think of affliction as the

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operational human inheritance—not equality, not rights, not an immortal soul. I knew affliction from the thermal shock, and cried out. I have been aware of that inheritance ever

since. But I'm not paranoid about it. It is simply endemic in the human condition. ‘For affliction cometh not forth from the dust

Neither doth trouble spring out of the ground But man is born unto trouble

As the sparks fly upward. Job 5

3: ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL

The Shared Delusion Writing

Chapter

Two

was

rather exhausting

(be quiet, Polycarp), but not nearly so

exhausting as actually living through those nine months for the unit that was Motherand-me. Even so, the first yell heralded a fresh start. I was now an autonomous unit, but by no means independent. Autonomous ... not independent ... it sounds like a contradiction. How could anyone

have imagined that I would spend so much of my life trying to understand and to delineate the distinction autonomy/independence—whether in babies, or in communities, or in corporations, or in provinces, or in countries—all of which turn out to have formal

identity. The issue is central to organizations of every kind, and of every political system, to this day. Also to this day, people do not understand it. As my pram is wheeled out every morning, my Mother is aware that it will take several years of intensive care to develop me into myself, and that it is up to her to do it. She has

no idea how to set about the task, but an unbounded confidence that she can and will succeed. Her step is light and her heart joyous as she walks down to the Thames, and soon turns into Bishop’s Park to show me the ducks. It is my earliest memory. I cannot date it, because it must have been some time before the memory consolidated sufficiently to know that the ducks were somehow summoned by our arrival. Anyway, a bit of bread would be pressed into my newly grasping hand. Probably the first learning I experienced was being taught to release my grasp so that the bread fell to the ducks below. It was a very complicated piece of learning. The physiologi-

cal movement itself is one thing, but it will automatically generate a commotion among the ducks—and begin the process of learning by association. Moreover, this was also the first lesson in understanding a reward system ... Whether the ducks receive the reward (in bread), or I do (in observing the commotion), or my Mother does (it works!), is unclear.

Any number of similar entailments could be traced: they expand like the ever-widening circle of ripples in the duck pond. Fortunately this is not the subject of enquiry on a crisp autumnal morning in Bishop’s

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Park. We have to proceed by experience, Mother-and-I, without knowing why things are happening as they do—or even what is happening. For instance, by about my first

Christmas in 1926 the hitherto open range of sounds will have become specific to those phonemes that my Mother uses. If I were Japanese, the fundamental confusion between r and [ would be established now. But I'm not Japanese, and am committed to the dreadful vowel sounds and glottal stops of Sahflunn’n instead. There is a vast amount of basic learning to do in the first two years—walk at one, talk at two is the standard expectation. And the brain has to learn to stabilize its neural struc-

ture as it goes along. This it does by hard-wiring circuits that work effectively, enclosing them in sheaths made of the fatty protein, myelin. This makes it possible to clear away redundant brain substance, using chemicals that dissolve whatever neural tissue is not protected by the myelin. This kind of housekeeping is a continual process, and makes

possible what I referred to in a previous section as filigree sculpturing. The elegant beauty of the process that secures learning so effectively is appealing, particularly since it has never been copied industrially. The reason is evidently that nature is profligate with raw materials and with partly made components: in industry, we could not afford the cost. But I am haunted by the degree to which I was gradually turned into a

near-automaton in my first couple of years. Like you and all the rest of us, we are systematically learning a way of looking at experience—and the experience was modifying itself in the process. Circular causality is involved. No wonder that we tend to refer to ‘reality’ inside those apologetic quotation marks.

A little more than a month after I was born, on 31 October 1926, I was baptized a Christian. Here was the start of a psychological conditioning, to match the physiological one. I know that the dramatis personae in St Peter’s Church all took the ceremony with due solemnity, and early on it generated strong effects on me. Indeed, my earliest recollections are of the stillness in the church, a combination of silence, semi-darkness, candles and incense. I referred earlier to the high- Anglican nature of St Peter’s, and the priest who christened me was known as Father Cole-Robinson. I had two godfathers: Uncle Tom Broomhall, the husband of Auntie Myra, the younger sister of my Beer grandmother, and Uncle Harry, my Father’s brother. My godmother was Auntie Kit, my Mother’s sister. She was to become very important in my life, especially in the context of the church. I was very fond of the two godfathers—but in their capacity as uncles. They had no particular significance in my religious development. The learning of outlook continued ... I have emphasized how long it all takes. That length of time always seemed reasonable, because there is so much to accomplish. But I

used to wonder why it took significantly longer for humans than for other species. The solution has to do with the complexity of the human brain. The core brain (sometimes but stupidly referred to as the ‘reptilian’ brain) has to be consolidated—myelinated for instance—before the development

of the limbic brain can be successfully developed.

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Similarly, the neo-cortex has to join the developmental queue. Of course these three brain levels are not separated. But the core brain takes about seven years to be fully con-

solidated, and the limbic brain does not begin to catch up until the end of the first year. The right hemisphere of the neo-cortex does not get seriously moving until later, and the left hemisphere later still. The fact that all these brain structures are layered in this way explains the baby’s long period of helplessness—and its corresponding need for care. Even so, by the age of four some 80 per cent of the primary worldview is complete and myelinated. In that time is created the recognition of self-hood, of relationships, and the language needed to create a basic knowledge base. There are recognized spurts of growth in the womb, and then at the ages of one, four and six. These spurts are supplied in turn with their own new neural materials, essentially axon-dendrite substance. Thus there is plenty of material available to undertake the sculpturing process. At the age of six the brain has five to seven times the ratio of axons and dendrites that it will have as an adult!

[ think I was less than two when we left Fulham. But we often returned to Fernhurst Road. My Mother was seeking support, of course, from her close family—and friends, especially those from her old sports scene in the Midland Bank. I can still visualize to this day the chief of these, her name was Violet. So around this time I became familiar not only with Bishop’s Park, but with Putney Bridge and Putney High Street, with its then famous teashop called Zeta’s. I was notorious for having thrown my bonnet over Putney Bridge into the river. And I was constantly being reminded of my Father’s sprint across the bridge, with its two distinctive churches, one at each end. Although I have no recollection of throwing anything into the Thames, I do have recollections of the pram in which I travelled everywhere. This pram was commodious.

It had three leather panels as a platform for the baby to sit on. Whoever was pushing the pram could open a panel, drop in the shopping, and close the panel again. However, when I was the passenger and my Mother was busily talking to friends, I learned how to raise one of the panels, and deposit the shopping in the road item by item. It seemed like a good

idea at the time. Anyone who wonders why my Mother did not notice what was going on, has no experience of her conversational powers. Before saying goodbye to my first home, I must mention the garden at 48 Fernhurst.

It contained a large apple tree, a huge waterbutt for collecting rainwater, and a garden roller. This had been made by my grandfather. It consisted of a cylinder made of concrete, mounted on an axle with supporting wooden handles. It was not very large. At the age of about eighteen months, I had endless fun trundling this roller around to general approval.

However there was consternation when [ vanished. My Mother spotted me at the very last minute, as I disappeared into the waterbutt. I don’t remember this incident, but I was fascinated by water from the very start—and remain so. Something to do with negative ions I expect, or maybe Freud ...

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Aristotle said that all men by nature desire to know. True enough—and we try. But it is just as well to end up with a degree of flippancy. Each of us has gone through the kinds of early experience that I went through, and there is no knowing which of these should be counted trivial, and which profound. The extent to which we shared them identifies our humanity. The extent to which we have been schooled to learn an outlook, means that we share the same delusion.

He Ordered Their Estate Any young London couple in the 1920s who wanted to set up an independent family home had to move out of the centre and into the suburbs—it was a question of cost. My father picked on Croydon, which was then a relatively small town, but only fifteen min-

utes from London Bridge by train. Lloyds Register of Shipping could then be reached on foot, by crossing the bridge and then walking down to the office at 71 Fenchurch Street. Croydon, moreover, had a number of well-known secondary schools in the area. The idea that my parents nurtured was to ‘live in the country’, whilst working near London. They were thinking in terms of half an hour. It seems quite risible now, but that was a possible goal in the 1920s. The solution was found in Shirley, a village on the 194 busroute direct to East Croydon station. In Shirley, property development was going on apace, and with the help of a ninety-plus mortgage, my father bought 37 Spring Park Avenue. He called the house Petroc, named after a saint, and associated with the area where my parents had spent their honeymoon in Beer.

The house was on the right hand side of the road. It was unpaved when I first remembered it, and there was only a field on the opposite side where number 38 now stands. That house, when it became available, was bought by my Mother’s brother, Uncle Joe. But as I knew it first, the muddy street turned, without fences, into a field. This ran down to a brook, which ran parallel to the new road. At the top of the road was the recreation ground, known to us as the Rec. In the spring, the field facing Petroc was covered in long

grass and dotted with dandelions. I was tipped a penny for stuffing a quart milk bottle full of dandelion heads. When the road was made up, I remember crossing the wet tar on planks. I can still smell the stench of the tar boiler: my Mother believed that this smell was good for the bronchial tubes, and I was customarily admonished to breathe deeply whenever we passed one. It doesn’t seem to have damaged me too much. But speaking of carcinogens, neither does the perpetual pall of cigarette smoke with which I was kippered from birth. In Petroc, an elegant, veneered, walnut cabinet had been installed by the cigarette manufacturers. It contained packets of twenty cigarettes accessed by slot-machine. The householder put a shilling in the slot, and a packet of cigarettes emerged. A shilling was then twelve pence, or one twentieth of a pound, but the packet cost only eleven-and-a-half pence. Therefore

a halfpenny coin in change was included inside the cellophane.

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My earliest memory, which really is vivid, is of repeated attempts to look over the window sill in the front room. I constantly tried to do this, day after day—standing on tiptoe, and trying to lever myself upwards with my hands. Equally vivid is the profound

sense of triumph when I realized that I could see the front gate, which in those days was wooden. I doubt that I have enjoyed a greater sense of trinumph since. I have no idea how old I was; and I had no idea how high the window sill was from the floor. In 1997, thanks to the courtesy of the present owners, I got the answer to the second question. The window is twenty-seven inches and one quarter from the floor, and the wooden sill adds three inches more. However, among all the details recorded about my birth, the only mention of my own length is an unquantified ‘very long’. There are other obvious unknowns to the puzzle. Attempts to work out the age of my earliest memory, despite the assistance of grandchildren in simulation, have therefore too much experimental error to be worth quoting. Polycarp: Why then was it worth quoting that in the 1920s the change from a shilling of twenty cigarettes was a halfpenny, while a quart milk bottle full of dandelion heads was worth double that? Talk about experimental error—these things are incommensurables. Remember how old I was. Reliable data are in short supply. Perhaps it will help to say

that by the time I was old enough to go out alone—I think four—I was often sent around to Mr Bostock’s grocery shop to buy a tin of pineapple rings, to which, my Mother was very partial; and the cost of that was four-and-a-half pence. I was also often sent to the

garden nursery to buy double blooms of bronze chrysanthemums, the cost of which was contained in the purse put into my pocket. Polycarp: A calculus of household prices for the late 1920s will be constructed in no time at all

at this rate. What the hell did your Mother want the dandelions for?

My Mother made dandelion wine. Auntie Kitty on the other hand made rhubarb wine. [ cannot tell you the relative alcoholic strengths, but both seem to have been quite potent is not exactly potable. Any further questions? Good. My Mother made a page or two of notes each year. At age one I could walk beautifully. At age two, [ was showing a precocious interest in words and could recite all nursery rhymes. At age three, people stop her in the street just to hear me speak ... When I first had access to these notes I was terribly embarrassed by these kinds of admiration. It was not until much later, and observing the embarrassing behaviour of other parents, that I came to understand the reason. In those early years, there is no acceptable standard for discovering whether the experience of parenting is successfully working. People know so little about the intimate workings of the child’s brain and nervous system, that they are forced to treat the child as a black-box. Checking on the working of the internal organs is, at this age, relatively simple. The brain and nervous system, however, is in practice judged only by performance—and

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the parents are constantly looking for verification that they are doing a good job. There is a further reason why my Mother would have needed such support. I passed

to have been a holy terror. For example, I had some leggings that I hated with passion. They buttoned up all the way down the leg with tiny buttons. My Mother used to sit me on the hall seat, and attempt to do up my leggings. This usually ended in my streaking down the garden path with one leg done up, and the other flapping. My Mother would become totally frustrated. But she herself had made a wooden plaque with a copper apothegm engraved upon it. (She created letters with a modeling tool, and set the letters in bass relief, blocking them from inside with a modeling paste.) The statement read: NOTHING MATTERS HALF AS MUCH

AS YOU THINK IT DOES. Years later, when I was in my

forties and had taken my Mother out for dinner, I asked her where this quotation came from. She was incensed enough to kill a couple of courses. She claimed that it was her own devising. One or two other entries in Mother’s notes might conceivably be more relevant to my

development. For my third birthday, I was given a train set. There was very little money in the family, and I believe the practice was to pass small sums to my Mother, in order to give me one more substantial present.

The train set consisted of a circular track, and

a clock-work engine plus tender. The spring was wound up, and the engine set onto the track—thereupon the train ran for several circuits until the spring ran down. Apparently, I watched this closely, and then asked what happened next. I was told that you wound it up again, and the process was repeated. The record says that I replied: “Thank you very much. I've seen that'—whereupon I wandered off, and never opened, the train set again. Sensible boy, and polite withal—though as yet lacking the sensitivity to realize what a shocking affront it must have been to my Mother.

The other unintended affront she recorded happened in a bus. Another passenger had amused herself by talking to me, and as usual I had responded politely. But after some time she rummaged in her handbag and produced a large collection of used bus tickets.

She presented them to me with a flourish. I was genuinely puzzled: ‘What are these for? They only make a litter.” I can tell from my Mother’s notes that the incipient stirrings of a definite personality made her rather uncomfortable. In the case of my own children, I was looking out for those stirrings at a similar age, and recognized them with pure joy. The criterion I used was: could I conceivably do this myself? Uncomfortable or not, perhaps

the fact that my Mother took the trouble to write her notes betokens a similar reaction. I'm quite amused that she did not write down something that profoundly rattled my Mother and Auntie Kitty when they were shopping in Harrods, and were carting me along by the hand, I can recall it perfectly well, and it may stand as formative in various ways.

I hated being dragged around in departmental stores, with or without leggings, because all I could see was a thicket of adult legs—it was both unpleasant to endure, and also I was quite frightened of getting lost. If I made enough fuss, Auntie Kitty would pick

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me up. What I observed on this occasion when she did, was a range of dolls. It may sound odd, but I don’t think that I had ever seen a doll before. There were no gitls in my family, after all. These dolls were clearly intended as presents for children, and I wanted one. It was patiently explained to me, repeatedly, that only girls had dolls. But, you see, I was not only ignorant of dolls—I was ignorant of girls as well. It would be nice to claim a precocious insight into the values of feminism, but that would be stretching things a bit. Every time they tried to get me out of that department, I refused to go. If you have ever been in

the custody of a recalcitrant child, I shall not have to draw you a picture ... Knowing the two ladies as well as I do, it is easy to reconstruct the argument. My Mother would have been adamant: trying to tell my Father that she had connived in

buying me a doll would have been inconceivable. This would not have been a matter of money, although there was none. It would have been about gender stereotypes. It would have been obvious who would have to pay for this solecism—dolls would not have figured in my Father’s budget. But that would have been trivial compared with the issue of my masculinity. Elder sister would duly have offered to pay, and would have thought that I should be indulged. In the end, there was a compromise. I got the doll—but it was a boy doll, on my Mother’s insistence. I think that those then-young women must have been somewhat naive about the politics of gender. Heaven knows, the gayness of half the celebrities in the London scene of the 1920s was notorious. What the two husbands made of the gift I don’t know; I clearly remember the solace I gained at the time, and I kept the doll long enough to pass it on to my eldest daughter.

The next clear memory was of my very first powerful religious experience. This might have occurred in my parish church in Shirley, with which I was perfectly familiar, but I suspect that it was on one of the frequent visits to Fulham and St Peter’s. I have no idea at all what the occasion was, but it involved a liberal use of incense. I was arrayed in minia-

ture robes—a black cassock and a lace cotta—and performed the function of a boat boy. This meant that I had to follow the priest wherever he went carrying the boat—the vessel holding the incense in both hands. The priest himself held the thurible, the vessel holding red-hot charcoal, and manipulated by an assortment of chains. The priest would raise the cover of the thurible, using the chains, and bend down so that the boat boy could spoon

incense onto the coals. The thurible would then be swung to and fro, creating a forced air current, making the charcoal glow, and burning the incense. As I followed the priest, I would walk on into puffs of the incense and my delight. Such a ceremony was shrouded

in mystery, and I acquired a sense of the sacred. Soon after that experience, I encountered another solemn moment. I went with my parents to Sheen, a place near Richmond—another venue outside London. In Sheen, my

grandfather had built two houses. One was destined for himself and my grandmother. The other was for his eldest child, Auntie Kit and her husband Will, and they were already living there. My uncle was waiting at the gate as we arrived coming off the bus. I remember

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the strong smell of creosote that day—he had just finished painting the fence. “‘Where’s Bob? I cried. Bob was my favourite dog, an old collie, who always greeted me enthusiastically on arrival. But Bob was not there. I was taken gently inside the house, and it was equally gently explained to me that Bob had died. I knew about death, but this was the first time it reached into my life. I found it difficult indeed to grapple with. We are told stories about Bob. The ones I recall all concerned 5 November, bonfire night. This commemorates the failure of a Catholic plot by Guy Fawkes to blow up King

James 1 and his parliament on that day in 1605. I suspect that these days people are rather shaky about the politics of this event, but the day is still celebrated in Britain with bonfires and grand displays of fireworks. Fireworks, notoriously, make a lot of noise and that drove Bob crazy. He went berserk. Every year he tried to escape, and once vanished for three days. This loving conversation was my introduction to the grieving process, and I understood it to be so. Bob had already been buried in the garden, and the place was marked with a wooden cross. It was obvious to me that a special ceremony ought to be held. So it was that I led the procession of my folks around the garden, carrying a cross and singing hymns. My Mother borrowed a boy’s surplice from a local church to lend dignity to the affair. I was still four at that time, and it is so clear to me how my outlook was already being formed. The church was quite central to me, and I had been well taught the basic gospel stories. But in particular, I knew many hymns off by heart, and naturally I took them on board as gospel too. The standard hymn for children was All things bright and beautiful. I’'m not sure if this verse is well-known these days: I know that it was expunged from the hymnbook ... but only relatively recently, and long after I had left the church. I know very well the verse that I want to quote, and I do not need to check whether I have correctly remembered it:

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.’

It is hard to believe now that I was brought up on this stuff, or that it lasted as long as it did: it is high Victorian sentiment, a product of British world domination that lasted throughout that era. It took me many, many years to throw off that legacy. The only useful result has been that during the twentieth century, when it became the role of the United States to rule the world, it made it a little easier for me to understand the appalling arrogance—and outrageously unethical policies with which the USA hypocritically

proceeded. We had done it first. When I was four and a half years old, my brother Ian was born. I was carefully prepared for this, with many protestations of continuing love and support for me. Obviously,

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I thought, people expect me to feel abandoned in favour of my new sibling. What I was actually feeling was overwhelming relief that there was a good chance that the heat would be off me! I was already feeling the need for long stretches of solitude, and I was not left alone for a moment. Beyond that, I cherished the vague hope that Ian would be a sister, so that I could find out what a girl actually was. Apart from that, I was quite happy. I had been writing nice letters to my Mother every day in her nursing home, and eventually I got the news. My Father and I set off by train. We arrived where we were going,

and my Father alighted first. I was still getting off the train when my Father slammed the carriage door onto the middle finger of my right hand. So that is what I most remember about the unfortunate fellow’s birth. I was pretending not to be in agony, and certainly never held it against the new baby. But I watched my nail turn black over the next few

days, and drop off. The nail bed was permanently damaged, and I have been splitting that nail regularly ever since. At four and a half, most conveniently or by masterful planning, I was able to start school at a kindergarten.

Stafford and baby lan, ¢. 1933

chapter 24

elected Poetry and Paintings

Tigers at Play Sea birds stand on a rocky wall evening is here. Farewell to sunshine today.

Walk please walk with me now and come into the gloom

Where sea and wind counterplay. Talk dies hard in the mouth in that

resident’s lounge. They haven’t that much to say. Come please come with me now and walk over the sand

Out where the tide turns at bay. From

Transit

Taken from the collections Transit and the previously unpublished Gallimaufry, On the Move and Residues of Joy.

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Nightfall in Ceredigion The magpie on his last call struts about dressed in fine linen and brocaded coat; governor-general of the territory makes inspection; nit picker. Dark airs gather round this layered slate, this habitat.

Many have died. Their separating shades squat without licence in the countryside

gathering substance for the migratory resurrexion. Bats flicker

depleted by deaths an owl in silent shroud takes up abode. From On the Move

Cwarel Isaf: Winter soon soonest soon runs river down to the raw now

ends gravid night rain-rattled slate

fresh hewn in new dawn hover shreds of mist

stalks of rose bay willow stand skeletal in shrouds

steam arises from icy earth

where the hot jet strikes to mark this territory and the dropped foal of day From Gallimaufry

Selected Poetry and Paintings

The Cost Benefit Analysis Song How many bricks constructed this prison And how many grapes went into the wine How many illusions were lost for the vision

Of how many angels advancing in line? How many lifetimes were ended in torment

And how many people this day would resign How many bank balances just for this moment And how many grapes went into the wine? How many units of human compassion

And how many grapes went into the wine How many illusions were sacrificed wantonly How many people have looked for a sign? How many women are needed to fashion

The how many men who are forced to assign How many excursions to bed were for passion And how many grapes went into the wine?

How And How And

many men have been killed by our soldiers how many grapes went into the wine many insurgents are listed in folders how many children are shot through the spine?

How And How And

many truths have run through our fingers how many credos ... Believing in mine many have led into unthought of dangers how many grapes went into the wine?

From

Transit

319

320

Selected Poetry and Paintings

A Mild-and-Bitter Despair Silken roundness soft to touch, another warmth; the new face even in the street consuming; who would have thought it all insatiable;

who could have expected the shuddering orgasm to last for fifty years—and yet go on beyond every earth-clamped horizon, feet aching, beyond every sky-bound atmosphere, wings tired now.

It is like stretching beyond cramps and dislocated bones waiting for the frame to fly apart: it does not happen.

It is like waiting It is like beyond

breathing deep beyond the lung capacity for the skin to burst: can’t go that far. willing down the heartbeat to the death: unconsciousness the brute revives.

The dissolution of the subtle body is one trick: Cosmos expands to catch the bits (flying faster than light, worming round holes in the universe, shooting through mirrors, bouncing off voids) and yields its tumultuous night’s peace. That takes a little courage, can be done. The going of the flesh itself’s another matter: the real scare being (given the pub, the noise, the incestuous fun, stark loneliness among unnumbered women more) that the old fool stumbling drunken to the door, forgetting assignments, may be death himself become too clumsy to perform his conjuring. From Transit

Selected Poetry and Paintings

321

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322

Selected Poetry and Paintings

My Fair Lady

Selected Poetry and Paintings

323

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324

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Pine Tree at Arcachon

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Moose Startled in Thicket

325

326

Selected Poetry and Paintings

2D

327

Quetzalcoatl

Selected Poetry and Paintings

328

Selected Poetry and Paintings

LERT ¢ Flave

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Ping i ELIKE My Fn

Requiem

(2)

Asss

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Requiem (4)

329

330

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Detail from Requiem (1). Recoradare Quod ... (Remember that I am the cause of

your journey)

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Detail from Requiem (7). Dies Irae ... (Day of wrath, that day the world dissolves in glowing ashes)

331

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Apwey aqusy Ayl jo Ksaumony neiod joag

0104

Ross Ashby at Stanford, 1955

%) (v}

2

Selected Poetry and Paintings

333

At Cwarel Isaf, 1992

IRN AL PIARCT (0104

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Photo: Allenna Leonard

[’y

4

In Toronto, mid-1990s

Receiving an Honorary Degree from the University of Valladolid, Spain, 2001

9 (92}

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Selected Poetry and Paintings

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Tob of Uz II

336

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Non Lament For Bucky You can afford to wait now for your due acknowledgement for yet another hundred years or twoindifferent to follies that once made you so impatient. Folk recognize the geodesic domethere to be seen; and scientists at least have made a home for Fullerene;

but these are foothills in a ranging mountain scene. So I give thanks for a non Nobel prize. You have escaped

that dumb taxonomy: cut down to size, squeezed and shaped. (Though youd be vain enough to want the videotape!) The culture starts to shift its paradigm bit by bit; and you’'ll one day and at the proper time fit into it— meta-enNobelled then, affirmed, and made licit.

You'll love it, sure; but I perceive you revel in fresh disgrace among astonished angels, you old devil, in reckless race throughout nth-order hyper-icosahedral space. Envoi

Let us not too much miss the truly great or those held dear: it is their latter lot to permeate the atmosphere of living, loving, striving every-when and -where.

337

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Selected Poetry and Paintings

And you with genius, and novel tools grasped in hand, inspire some wisdom in this age of fools to understand the endlessly evolving mission you once planned. (For Buckminster Fuller) From Gallimaufry

Behold a Cry The soul’s begging bowl, branded with its greed or singular need, renounces alms; rage collapses its ribcage: who can seek peace, escapes ... Now as the tyrant knows that truant and has mastery of his mysterious will to prize the epoch to oppress the picked out hostage with his two-edged sword, tremble, stem the stream

of blood, the flood of flowing words. In the silence is more anguish than for dying: dumb agony could see that saints who deflected death’s arrow had afflicted this sorrow. Curb in still blood your carbon steel blade. From

Transit

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Tantric Cynghanedd The skein of hair; the skin of her

live velvet under fingers; male myths pretend control of her;

scent lingers. Goddess exacting worship displays soulbody: white, smooth across bed; waits mouth-caress of her incarnate vibration, the whole undress of her.

A goddess understands the role of her submission—all pretence, pride-ridden, mild dove in a tense mould. Divinity, once her boast, hidden.

Apotheosis, self-aware, renews in her: manliness recognizing that the pulse of her womb inly knows womanliness. The skein of hair; the skin of her body: white, smooth across the bed; waits mouth-caress of her. Mild dove in a dense mould: divinity—once her womb inly knows womanliness. From Residues of Joy

339

340

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Cynghanedd Saesneg am Geredigion I: GYTSAIN

Ceredigion cared again for you in soul, and for your new seal these years too late, and those your style uttered, spent in void ... Now you spin to invaders of your private space. Pray vote us peace who came, and come again,

to this new home, to these nigh hamlets. II: SAIN

The solace-laden precious-maiden month shines down sun and thunder, thus to keep the patchwork, and to watch the morning

light across the fields: gloriously yields all yesterday’s deep hurt, grimed dirt, up to the distance of the Ceredigion hills, in merry-making with a quiet sound. And all the ground is growing. III: LUSG And you who have been hit in the cities,

still had a head to reel, and wounds for healing, entered the magic place: the streams were racing. But the blood’s pulse is calm, its harmful tides subside. The moon riding a black sky lights heaven highlycompasses this fate, but only lately. From

Transit

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Antonio Machado’s Cantares As sung by Joan Manuel Serrat

(transmitted from the Spanish to preserve the rhymes and rhythm) Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar

Everything passes, everything stays.

Our lot is to pass—always to be making pathways in passing a road on the sea.

I never chased after glory nor hoped that mankind’s story would immortalize my song. I love my world’s subtle: weightless worlds, gentle ... soap-bubbles floating along ... I like to see them dispersed in sun and scarlet: they fly under an azure skysuddenly tremble and burst. I never chased after glory ... Walker, your footprints are on the road -nothing else.

Walker, there is no road: the road is made as you walk. As you walk the way is opened.

Glancing back, you'll see the path you'll never tread again. Walker there is no road

only a wake on the sea. There was a time, just hereabout— forests now with brambles clothed-

the voice of a poet was heard to shout:

341

342

Selected Poetry and Paintings

walker there is no road:

the road is made as you walkknock after knock verse

after verse.

The poet went far from home to die;

foreign dust is his abode. As he left they heard him cry: walker there is no road:

the road is made as you walkknock after knock verse after verse.

When the troubadour can’t sing the poet lifts a pilgrim’s load, when prayer becomes a useless thing ... walker there is no road:

the road is made as you walkknock after knock verse after verse

knock after knock verse

after verse

knock after knock verse after verse

Caracas, Venezuela From On the Move

Selected Poetry and Paintings

A Song of Love Where did the morning go, you ask; It went into you, my darling. What happens at night when we’re asleep? The thick black firmament claims to keep Objective watch through its stellar ports On you and me and the universeFor it goes into you, my darling. Where did the evening go, you ask; It went into you, my darling. And quickly night is raging wild Outside our home, and the unborn child

Is not conceived for the sake of love Nor spared just yet for the universe— For it goes into you, my darling. And what of the night itself, you ask; It went into you, my darling.

The daylight licks at the distant hills While the valley between grows shape, and fills With character that soon alerts My own response to the universeAnd it goes into you, my darling. From

Transit

343

344

Selected Poetry and Paintings

Pine Trees at Arcachon Grotesque now shapes supple once

like my thoughts this black summer are records of experience Gaunt and terrible, transfixed.

Ideas like unseen sap hammer into knotted heads. Ransacked

For meaning and discarded, they are burnt up in the sun, glimmer by starlight for a moment, go At dawn as daylight fills the room. Only the shape, a spare comma to punctuate the void, will come Back to question the emptiness

of a bleak sky in a black summer like a grotesque utterance of pines. From

Transit

Si Vas Para Chile In strife I have precisely known economies of human care. Friends could not underwrite alone my spendthrift love for them, nor share in pain they did not understand. We are not called upon to lay Our lives down for each other more than once. So what’s the test today, tomorrow? For God’s sake ignore the rituals, the helping hand,

Selected Poetry and Paintings

and all that crap. I speak of love, laid on the line. I did not know the common hope for man that governs all that action, all that show

of crass inaction, hope has fanned. So if you go to Chile friend you will not find my woman there but take my second heart to spend

on those who shared with me their care and tell them now I understand. (for Humberto Maturana) From

Transit

A Chilean Spring Later numbed love responds again now to those discarded the floaters in the river chattering through Santiago

or found in thickets girls whom I had known touched with their hands cold heads and found life different even the blood was cold

piles of cut hair left in the streets

were meant to indicate how it all went too far

to explicate with histrionics why they killed a man I loved

345

346

Selected Poetry and Paintings

others in filthy camps or stuck in priest-holes of the brain

beleaguered partly dead are also cold bereft of warm purposes

now the gorillas have taken laughter, hugs of huge delight and love from wide soft eyes measured out gaiety

and lusty evenings pounded them in mortars

dourly thudded them to residues of alchemistic dross in recipes compounded for the master-death, and pouring

them like ordures onto the rotting heaps of dreams retch with that stench numbed love responds again now

to the dead hears also the caught breath of aspiration

once there was earnest talk angled through plush and ormolu around great rooms of state walking once by tinkling water near El Arrayan dangled cold legs in rushing melted snow noted gold flecks in panther eyes once entered hidden private rooms of restaurants with a sufficient small nod

Selected Poetry and Paintings

and by the sea hurled imprecations at waves

as high as houses higher than the risks they tumbled over those black rocks

once got unspeakable thoughts through to that unspeakable best friend a Chilean spring later his maybe death grips my head with iron spikes while the drains still run

with other blood panthers crouch in darkness waiting

no river dalliance now the restaurants are closed to us there is no crashing oceanic diapason

to support a silent flute blackened shells of state rooms echo cavernous words

all empty for that other man I loved

they killed him let them take each of the short foul loutish words once threaded in permutations on the long strings of these lines as a bullet in the chest

leaving an inarticulate remark made dumb with outrage meant to discuss reduction of variety in soul

347

348

Selected Poetry and Paintings

such metaphysical feasting companeros compaiferas as must wait

on many resurrections From

Transit

Fare Thee Well Allende Allende

el pueblo te defiende

Snow on the Andes this young night pink wine

against the light built on this scale mountains hear

news from the sun

telling the hour shadows move rose minutes

Know the hour in the heart read the time mountains tell in this dark €yes

see

part in a brave hour

Selected Poetry and Paintings

349

the people will defend you

Sail the sky

climbing the hour height enough to piss on ‘concagua the city sprawls

its light around where every soul knows you by name compaiero presidente huevon

(For Roberto Canete who was there) Author’s note on huevdn: all countries permit the use of

otherwise scurrilous terms to betoken friendship, and Chile is no exception. Transit

Photo: David Whillaker

From

350

2VEETLA

YOAVT X bYM

R YOAVT X bwi

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APILBNY AUO [ 1010y

EDITOKS

APPENDICES

A. Threads from a Life—a Narrative Chronology B. The Chilean Experience

Photo: David Whittaker

C. Cybernetics in a Nutshell

appendix A

/t[;n”eads from a Life: A Narrative Chronology

(Beer’s own words are interspersed throughout this section in italics.) 1926 — Anthony Stafford Beer born in Fulham on 25 September. First son of William Beer and Doris ‘Pat’ Rose (both born on 7 October 1900). Soon after, the family moves to Shirley in Croydon. His father was the chief statistician for Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. He had been an amateur boxer and was a prizewinning shot with a rifle (perhaps because he had only one eye!). His mother worked in a local bank and had a great talent for art, especially sculpture. 1931 - Brother Ian David Stafford Beer born. Ian goes on to play rugby for England. He has a distinguished teaching career, including Headmaster of Harrow School. At some point in his later teens Stafford dropped the Anthony from his name, making it clear to Ian that he must never use his third name! Henceforth only his mother dare call him Tony.

Threads from a Life

1937

- Stafford

sits an

353

entrance

exam to various schools and is accepted by all of them. The family choose

the Whitgift for its proximity. The school was founded in 1596 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. 1939/42 - War breaks out and during the blitz the family is evacuated to Abergele in North Wales. His father stays behind to maintain fire watch duty in Fenchurch Street in the City of London. For his valour he was later awarded the Freedom of the City of London. The school at Abergele provides an excellent all-round education. Stafford discovers philosophy through a bequest of books in the tiny public library; he joins the home guard as a bugler, also paints posters in aid of the war effort. A girl called Cynthia Hannaway claims a good deal of his attention.

1942 - Back to London. Stafford feels thwarted at the Whitgift by the rigid categorizations of subjects. Spends the summer

in Croydon

public library reading Principia

Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead. Nevertheless, does well at school. He also hones his debating skills and is a keen swimmer. 1943 - Leaves school. Obtains matriculation to the University of London and entrance to University College London to read philosophy. UCL is flattened by a land-mine before he gets there. Aberystwyth (Wales again) becomes host to the London Faculty.

354

Threads from a Life

There were almost no students, and two lots of professors. The chance was heaven-sent. Without respite or vacation, I worked non-stop. The psychological teaching embraced experimentation, and took my old love mathematics into statistics. Formal logic took me back into mathematics, on one enlightening day. I lived alone on wartime rations, but determined not to neglect myself. I swam, debated, played chess for the University, took part in the Foundation play, and published drawings and poems. I was in trouble with the Dean of Arts over my interest in physics. He becomes a Roman Catholic much to the dismay and exasperation of his solidly

Anglican father. His swimming ability comes into serious play when he saves the life of a man who was swept into Aberystwyth bay by a freak wave.

1944/45 - After one year at university enlists on his eighteenth birthday. Enlisting allows him the choice of where he wants to serve: India. This happens to be the end of his formal education. Enrols at Llanelli into the Royal Fusiliers—their HQ is at the Tower of

London. Posted to Lanark in Scotland, then Wakefield in Yorkshire. August 1945 he is sent to India where the Royal Fusiliers are seconded to the 9th Gurkha Rifles. Stationed in Bangalore—India is a revelation to him. He totally immerses himself in learning the

various languages as well as studying yoga and meditation. Prefers to hang out with the locals rather than in the officers mess. He sees Gandhi speak on two occasions (the Mahatma remains an inspiration throughout Beer’s life). Becomes a tertiary of the Order of Franciscans. It seemed clear to me that cultures could be bridged, and that all worthwhile ethics mapped onto each other under some transformation. While retired Indian Army men were still lecturing in England about ‘the natives’, and how Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs could not mess together (in case

Threads from a Life

355

an infidel shadow fell across the cooking pot, and so forth) I was sitting round camp fires with all of them, eating sweetmeats and singing: masjid, mandir aur gurdwarake khuda ek i hain. Masjid is a mosque, mandir is a Hindu temple, and gurdwara a Sikh temple. This line of the song says that the gods of the three places are one. I always wanted to get in the word girja, meaning just church, but it did notfit the music ... The hookah we passed round had a four-foot bamboo stem, and burnt a kind of black sludge—the ingredients of which were suspect in several ways, but doubt if they included cannabis.

Preparing for the invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring the war to an end, stays on for the final years of the Raj.

1947 - Returns to England as Staff Captain,

Intelligence

(looking

emaci-

ated). He had made methodological advances and later discovered he was already doing operational research. (A notebook entry reads: A statistician is a man who draws a mathematically precise line from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion.) Appointed Army Psychologist, for a time is in charge of Personnel Selection for the Royal Engineers at Beverley in Yorkshire. Commands a special unit for

training illiterate soldiers, this includes research into personality disorders allied to the disability. Becomes attached to the Human Factors Branch of the Operational Research unit at the War Office. Marries Cynthia at St Matthew’s Church in Liverpool. They go on to have five children: Vanilla (née Jane), Simon, Mark, Stephen, Matthew. Honeymoon

in

Enniskerry, Ireland. (At the age of eleven he had bet his mother £1 that he would never marry. He presents her with her winnings at the wedding reception; she duly returns it to

him as a wedding gift.) 1948 — Demobbed in September. Informed that he needs to study for two more years to complete his degree, decides he hasn’t got the time and joins Samuel Fox, makers of alloy and stainless steel. Soon after, they are taken over by United Steel. He undergoes a

356

Threads from a Life

year long management training programme. As Production Controller sets up one of the first civilian Operational Research groups in the world. 1950s - Reads Wiener’s

Cybernetics in 1950. He invents the Stochastic Analogue

Machine, introduces simulation and calculation techniques using manual and nomographic processes. 1956 — The parent British Steel Company (United Steel) invites him to found the Department of Operational Research and Cybernetics to service the entire firm. It has an interdisciplinary staff of more than seventy, with Cybor House in Sheffield as HQ. Installs a Feranti Pegasus computer, one of the first in industry. Also in 1956 attends and addresses the First International Congress on Cybernetics in Namur, Belgium. Receives the Silver Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy for Engineering Sciences. The figure of Prometheus is pictured on a medal that was presented to me in Sweden in 1958, and the late Edy Verlander, who was in charge of the event, asked me what this figure portended. Of course I replied that Prometheus stood as a figure of science, since he brought down fire from heaven. ‘No, no’, said Edy. ‘The medal is indeed for innovators, but the point about Prometheus is that he was chained to a rock and had his liver pecked out.” I did not think at the time that he was exactly joking; but now I am sure that he was perfectly serious. The reward-and-penalty structure in management heavily disfavours innovation ...

Publishes first book Cybernetics and Management in 1959. 1960s - Starts the decade with an exhaustive six-week tour of North America, including East and West coasts. Lectures and attends a major symposium on self-organization

where he delivers his paper Towards the Cybernetic Factory. Spends time with the founding fathers of cybernetics, systems theory and information theory, including Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster, Ludwig von Bertalanfty, Claude Shannon and the great man himself, Norbert Wiener at MIT (Wiener was already well aware of Beer and had even read his new book). Comes back to the UK full of confidence and hope. 1961 - Leaves the steel industry and, on behalf of Metra International (Paris), sets

up SIGMA Ltd (Science In General Management)—the first operational research and cybernetics consultancy in the UK. Sigma grows into a large organization with worldwide

activities. Cybernetic modelling is its specialty. 1964 - In March, Norbert Wiener is due to stay with him as part of a European tour, unfortunately Wiener dies of a heart attack in Stockholm the day before he was due to arrive.

1966 - Publishes Decision and Control for which he wins the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America. The same year he leaves Sigma and becomes Development Director of the International Publishing Corporation, then the largest publishing company in the world. 1967 — Publishes Management Science. 1968 - Marriage to Cynthia dissolved; marries Sallie Steadman, who has a young

Threads from a Life

357

daughter, Kate. They have two children: Polly and Harry. Leaves the Catholic Church. 1969 - Sets up as a freelance independent consultant. 1970 - Awarded

Freedom of the City of London. Receives the Warren McCulloch

Plaque of the American Society for Cybernetics. 1971/74 - Chile and immediate aftermath (see Appendix B). 1972 - Publishes Brain of the Firm. 1973 - November, delivers, on radio, the prestigious Massey Lectures for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (six talks).

1974 - Publishes Designing Freedom (texts of the Massey Lectures). 1975 - Publishes Platform for Change. The drama, trauma and intensity of the preceding few years in Chile take their toll

(also impacts on his family). It was clearly a time to reflect and take stock (at one point he thought of moving to India).

Photo: David Whittaker

The notion that I had been programmed ‘to succeed’ became dominant. At different times I had occupied three large houses, had a swimming pool, a variety of impressive cars ... I did not want any of these things; they were in my way. However, I was not wealthy—my politics had precluded equity investment. By arrangement with my family, I was going in future to live as I thought best; and I renounced material goods in their favour. The residual problem, which meant that I still could not make the change total, was the need to maintain both families. The plan was to adopt a lifestyle consistent with the national weal. I acquired a stone cottage in the hills of Ceredigion. It is very small, and has no piped water, but it is robust. I made my own furniture, except for a spinning wheel—for I wanted to spin wool. For transport I bought an ancient Land Rover (c. 1951). I set out to live on the average per capita income of the country. All this was finished in time to spend my fiftieth year in this way. To my joy, the family eventually came to live in Wales, and I am able to visit them.

358

Threads from a Life

The cottage cost £8,000 and is called Cwarel Isaf, meaning ‘lower quarry’. It has about an acre and a quarter of woodland attached with a small brook running through. Arrives initially in his Rolls Royce, much to the dismay of the local farmers. Here he gradually undergoes a personal process of metamorphosis, as if he is shedding an old skin and for a time he manages to duplicate the life of a hermit in the Himalayas. The spinning is not so much utilitarian, but more integrated into his meditation practice (recalling Gandhi). Over the next few years he produces some of his finest writing, all done long hand with a fountain pen presented to him when he left the steel industry. For this cybernetician, no typewriter or computer was in evidence in the cottage until near the end of his life. (In the late 1990s, following a stroke, he used a voice recognition machine for dictation.) To conduct his global business affairs he needs to visit a remote phone box armed with a bag of change. Though he lives alone, the family moves to a house in Wales allowing regular contact. Keeps various plastic tubs in the Land Rover and fills them with water wherever

Photo: Michael Ben-Eli

he can.

With Gordon Pask in the cottage, 1976 1979 - Publishes Heart of Enterprise. 1981 - Publishes revised edition of Brain of the Firm, with an additional 150 pages devoted to what happened in Chile. Meets Allenna Leonard, based in Toronto, who becomes his partner. He increasingly divides his time between Wales and Canada. 1983 - Working with the Mexican Government. Publishes Transit. 1984 - Awarded Norbert Wiener Gold Medal of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics. 1985 - Publishes Diagnosing the System for Organizations.

Threads from a Life

359

1986 - Publishes Pebbles to Computers: The Thread. An illustrated history of computing, with photographs by Hans Blohm. 1988 — Receives Honorary Degree of Doctor of Law (honoris causa) from Concordia University, Montreal. Working with the Venezuelan Government.

1990 - In January launches Team Syntegrity at the Manchester Business School. It is a new non-hierarchical model of participative democracy. Devotes much of the decade to developing Syntegrations around the world. You may remember the ‘agendaless’ meetings that I have held for twenty years—meetings which evolve their own agenda. Disliking the negative term, I now call such a meeting The Problem Jostle. A brand new social invention I call Team Syntegrity (after Bucky Fuller’s ‘tensile integrity’). This is a protocol whereby thirty people are called upon to use the Problem Jostle technique in order to identify twelve issues that they would like to discuss. Perhaps you have immediately spotted that the model is an icosahedron and that the protocol is geodesic ...

1992 - In September his large installation of paintings, Requiem, opens at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King (aka ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’) in Liverpool. The scene was the City Hall, Sheffield, on Friday 27 January 1956. We awaited Sir John Barbirolli to conduct the Jupiter Symphony. A stillness had descended on the audience after the performance of Mozart’s Requiem. In the awe of that silence I began to think in images ... So many composers gave us musical versions of the Requiem after all—why could I not think of a single visual rendition? It took more than thirty years to develop an answer, and two more to finish the work ... Eventually the idea came to create a ring of paintings that would resonate across the space they enclosed. So the indivisible experience would come from inspecting each picture in turn—and then standing in the centre of the circle to absorb whatever reverberations might be generated within the space.

360

Threads from a Life

The composers had selected elements of the Requiem liturgy to set to music, and I made my own selection too. I worked with the Latin text which had meant so much to me before the vernacular Mass was introduced, and translated into English myself—to escape cliché as far as possible ... As the images formed and dissipated and formed again over the years, the complexity that I was trying to resolve at the centre was proving beyond my powers to handle. Some way had to be found to reduce the enormous complexity of the interaction. At some point I had encountered the enneagram, from the Greek word for nine ... Many mystics have studied it, from the Sufis through Ouspensky to the Jesuits, and all manner of interpretative schemes are on offer ... The paintings were finally executed in Toronto between 1987 and 1989. They are principally oil on canvas, with some acrylic and some enamel. What is the style of these paintings? They are embodiments of non-figurative icons. They should not be called abstract, therefore, and they are not illustrations either. Do not ask what they mean: they are visual meditations. Do not worry if they do not match today’s idiom: they were thirty years in gestation.

The paintings are each five feet by three and a half feet, except for De Profundis which is seven Seet high by four and a half feet wide. They were made to the accompaniment of a continuous tape of four Requiem Masses—by Mozart, Fauré, Bruckner and Duruflé, which music accompanies the exhibit ... Mathematically inclined viewers may become aware of golden rectangles, Fibonacci series, and a Mandelbrot set ... Those with Eastern knowledge will recognize the Chakras ... I have no wish to conceal such allusions—but they require no analysis ...

1994 - Publishes Beyond Dispute and How Many Grapes Went into the Wine, the latter a volume of various writings and talks. 1995 - Suffers a stroke and loses feeling in his fingertips, this spells an end of his superb calligraphic handwriting. 1996

- Nominated

Honorary

Professor

of Organizational

Transformation

by

Liverpool John Moores University. 1999 - Has water piped into the cottage, courtesy of LJ]MU. 2000 - Receives Honorary Degree Doctor of Science from University of Sunderland. 2001

- Receives

Honorary

Degree

Doctor

Honoris

Causa

from

University

of

Valladolid, Spain. 2002 - Receives Honorary Degree Doctor of Letters from the University of Glamorgan. Has a bacterial ear infection, malignant osteo otitis externa, which goes untreated for six months due to an incorrect initial diagnosis and treatment. This eats into the bone and nerves as well as an eye and his trachea, destroying his swallowing reflex. Liquid pools in his lungs causing much difficulty in breathing. Dies 23 August in Toronto, and is buried there at Mount Pleasant.

361

Photo: Allenna Leonard

Threads from a Life

Books by Stafford Beer

First publication date given. Cybernetics and Management. English Universities Press, London, 1959. Decision and Control: the Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics. John Wiley, London, 1966. Brain of the Firm. Allen Lane, London, 1972. Designing Freedom. John Wiley, London, 1974. Platform for Change. John Wiley, London, 1975. Transit. Cwrw Press, Lampeter, Wales, 1977.

The Heart of Enterprise. John Wiley, Chichester, 1979. Brain of the Firm. 2nd edition, John Wiley, Chichester, 1981. Transit. 2nd edition, Mitchell Communications, Prince Edward Island, Canada, 1983. Diagnosing the System for Organizations. John Wiley, Chichester, 1985.

Pebbles to Computers: The Thread. (with photographs by Hans Blohm) Oxford University Press, Canada 1986. One Person Metagame.

Stafford Beer Foundation, Toronto, Canada, 1988.

Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity. John Wiley, Chichester, 1994. How Many Grapes Went Into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management. (ed. Harnden, R. and Leonard, A.) John Wiley, Chichester, 1994.

appendix B

PI;e Chilean Experience The genesis of Beer’s involvement with President Allende and Chile can be traced back to 1962.

At this time he was in charge of SIGMA (Science in General Management), the

first OR consultancy in Britain, when they were approached by the head of Chile’s steel industry (they would also do work for the railways). Beer was a busy Managing Director, and was involved only vicariously from the UK base. It so happened that a young Chilean student, Fernando Flores, from the Catholic University of Santiago, was included in the work. Flores gradually became enamoured with Beer’s books and ideas, and it was on 13 July 1971 that he wrote to Beer with an intriguing invitation.

An ambitious Flores was now Technical General Manager of an institution called CORFO

(Corporacién de Fomento de la Produccién) and president of INTEC (Instituto

Technolédgico de Chile). Under the hopeful and forward looking mood of the recently elected Allende administration, Flores explained that a programme of nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange was now under way and managed by CORFO and he wished to implement Beer’s cybernetic thinking to reorganizing the public sector. Beer’s book Brain of the Firm had just gone to press and he had also completed most of Platform for Change. His response could hardly have been more enthusiastic. On 29 July he wrote: When I was at Sigma, I always looked upon the Chilean Corporations who used our teams as the very best of our clients: the people we met were invariably sensitive and charming— but above all they really implemented the results of the work! You can imagine, then, that I have followed political developments in Chile fairly closely ever since. It seems to me that your country is now better placed than almost any other in the world to make the sort of advances in which I believe. Permit me to congratulate you personally on the central role you will be playing in all of this ... May I explain that I am now working alone as a free-lance consultant, and I operate mainly on a ‘retainer’ basis. It is not feasible for me to be out of this country for very protracted periods, but what I have done in similar circumstances is to work on a steady stream of papers being produced by foreign clients—keeping up a running commentary as it were. Believe me, I would surrender any of the retainer contracts I now have for the chance of working on this. That is because I believe your country is going to do it.

They met up just a month later at the Athenaeum, Beer’s club of choice. Flores explained that he had assembled a team of friends, associates and former students and they were desperately keen for him to become their helmsman. Beer agreed to visit Chile as soon as possible, and so it was that he arrived on 4 November, the first anniversary of

The Chilean Experience

363

Salvador Allende’s election. This first visit—there would be eleven in all—lasted for ten days. Beer was armed with proofs of Brain of the Firm and the terminology of that work became the lingua franca for the project. The whole group involved were resolved that this would be something different and fresh in government, this would be Chile leading the way on a peaceful road to socialism. There was also strong awareness that the govern-

ment was under intense economic pressure, therefore time was of the essence. In fact Beer nicknamed the whole process ‘Beat the Clock’. Thus Project Cybersyn, an abbreviation of cybernetic synergy, was born. On the evening of 12 November it was time for Beer to meet the President. While the team waited in a nearby restaurant he was taken to La Moneda, the presidential palace, by Roberto Caifiete who would act as translator. Here is Beer’s account of that momentous meeting: Dr Allende had been forthright on this occasion, as he always remained. He particularly wished to be satisfied that the plans were decentralizing, worker-participative and antibureaucratic. Since these very intentions had been fundamental to our work, there had been no difficulty at all in convincing him. It is also noteworthy that he exhibited an intellectual serenity in the process of grasping a vast new concept in a very short time that I found amazing. It was contrary to all previous (and subsequent) experience. Of course, he had been prepared; but other top men have also had their briefs. Of course, he might not really have understood; but a consultant learns to judge that by the questions. He did not waste a single one ... I took half an hour to rough out, on a piece of blank paper between us, the model of any viable system—and its recursions ... Dr Allende had been a pathologist. Without hesitation, I embarked on an account of the viable system in neurophysiological terms. Again, his questions were probing ... Gradually, I built up, on that piece of paper between us, Systems One, Two, Three, Four ... I drew the square on the piece of paper, labelled Five. He threw himself back in his chair: ‘at last’, he said, ‘el pueblo’.

Beer with his new team, the evening he met President Allende

364

The Chilean Experience

What follows is Beer’s own basic account of the enterprise taken from his Zaheer Foundation Lecture, Cybernetics of National Development, given in India in 1974.

Project Cybersyn The main proportion of the effort we made in Chile was to install a regulatory system for the social economy. The project aimed to acquire the benefits of cybernetic synergy for the whole of industry, while devolving power to the workers at the same time. It was called Project Cybersyn. Thanks to the way in which the whole world of government discusses these matters, there appears to be a straight conflict between centralization and decentralization. That is to say, people hold a model in their heads that has a single scalar variable called ‘percentage centrality’, on which a point must be fixed. I reject this model completely, because neurocybernetics shows that so simplistic a concept is useless to account for viable behaviour. We need a model that is not a scale at all, but a structured space. In this, there is a horizontal dimensionality, listing (like the lines of print on a page) all sorts of activities that are in principle free to do anything they like. And there is a vertical dimensionality, representing authority that is in principle capable of stopping the horizontal activity from doing what it likes. In this space we may precisely define the nature of autonomy. We may measure variety (which is defined as the possible number of states of a system) for any horizontal component in

the space. We may then measure the variety subtracted from this first variety by interventions on the vertical plane. If, in a given case, almost the whole horizontal variety were left intact, then this situation would correspond to the simplistic notion of decentralization; the simplistic notion of centralization would correspond to the subtraction of most of the horizontal variety. Using this model, we are now able to define autonomy, whose societary name is freedom: Definition If a system regulates itself by subtracting at all times as little horizontal variety as is necessary to maintain the cohesion of the total system, then the condition of autonomy prevails. Now we can see why the scalar centralization-decentralization model does not work. Our definition entails two features that cannot be represented on the scale. Firstly, intervention will prove to be selective as between horizontal components, and secondly both its selections and the amount of variety abstracted will continually change. In both cases this is because intervention is responding to a criterion of overall cohesion, which is itself a variable responding to the degree of pressure exerted on the total system to blow it apart. In times of great stress, there will be more net intervention than at other times: this is a self-organizing property of the system. In the Chilean situation, the basic horizontal components were all the enterprises of the social economy. But the enterprises were grouped into industries. Now an industry, such as textiles, encompasses many textile firms. The relationship of an industry to its component firm is, of course, a vertical component of our model. And yet there are many industries, and they are horizontal components of the economy. Thus we reach the important cybernetic concept of definition by recursion. (I use the word in the exact sense defined by recursive number theory.)

The Chilean Experience

365

Enterprises are horizontal components of an industry, itself conceived as a vertical component. Now advance a level of recursion. Here there are industries as horizontal components,

and something called a branch of industry (such as ‘light or ‘heavy’) is the vertical component. Advance to the next level of recursion. The branches are now horizontal components, and the vertical component is total industry itself. (At a further level of recursion, industry joins agriculture, transportation, health, education, and so on, as a horizontal component of something called the economy.)

This conceptual modelling is not just fun and games. I mentioned earlier that I went to Chile armed with a basic model of organization, based on neurocybernetics. Then the point about definition by recursion is this. We can apply exactly the same model at every level of recursion: to total industry itself; at the next level of recursion, to each of the four industrial branches; at the next level of recursion, to each of the industries in each branch; at the next level of recursion, to each of the enterprises in each industry. That adds up to a huge number of models. But they are all the same. They nest inside each other; and they are linked by the definition of autonomy, which is guaranteed for each level of recursion by the one above. These concepts have to be understood before anyone could possibly believe what was accomplished in Chile in less than two years. Because we used the same neurocybernetic model everywhere, we could standardize our procedures: of communications, mensuration, filtration, exposition. Above all, we were able to prepare a single, vast, expensive computer program to

operate everywhere, at every level of recursion. I shall discuss that later. Then let me return now to the two problems identified as critical just now. What exactly is going on? How quickly shall we know today’s results. We trained numbers of operational research teams in the use of the neurocybernetic model, and sent them right through industry. Guided by the model, and constrained by its conventions, their task was to discover the detailed content of operations, at all levels of recursion. This meant making a new sort of model, in order to express this content uniquely for each enterprise, each industry. Remember that we were dealing, except in the case of primary industries such as steel and energy, with workers’ committees; and that, in any case, we adhered to a political decision to transfer power to the workers. Then the standard techniques would not help. Workers do not understand input-output analysis, nor linear programming. Instead, we developed the notion of a quantified flow chart. This depicts the operations under review as a systems diagram, in which the operations themselves are boxes whose relative size quantifies their relative roles, and in which the width of the lines of flow quantifies the amount of flow. Such diagrams portray quite vividly the nature of the plant; and no one is more qualified than the worker himself to join in the task of preparing them. He works there; he knows what really happens. As these quantified flow charts began to come in, we set our design team the task of fixing the artistic rules for such iconic representation. The use of colour, the radius of bends in the flow lines, and

so on, were standardized on ergonomic principles, so that any such chart, whatever its source, had a familiar, and readily understood appearance. The further task of the operational research teams was to identify a preliminary set of critical variables in each system under study. For example: we needed to identify the size of stocks, input, output, and inter-process; we needed to identify bottleneck operations; in all cases we identified the level of absenteeism as a critical variable, since there is at least some evidence

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that this is a measure of social unease. But I must emphasize that this was the preliminary picture that we sought to create. Plans were well advanced to provide courses, to make films, to publish booklets, that would make the techniques we were using readily accessible to the workers themselves. We wanted them to enrich our preliminary models, and to add anything they liked to the list of measured variables for which (as you shall see) we were providing them with huge computer power to monitor. This programme was beginning, with the participation of the President himself, when the end came. So to the second question: the speed of response. Why do the overdeveloped nations tolerate a statistical system that embodies time lags of six months and more, since this is the age of telecommunications? Having been deeply into this question in one such country, I think the answer is that they are frightened. Businessmen do not want an effective and especially a transparent economy: too many profit opportunities would be exposed as fraudulent—or at the least, not in the national interest. Bureaucrats are terrified to set up such a system, lest they are accused of trying to bring about exactly that result. But this was Chile. We saw no reason why the economy should not move into a mode of regulation operating in real time. This was the first time that any such thing has ever been attempted. There was no problem at all, because we had

the models, and the theoretical cybernetic underpinnings. Of course Chile could not afford to buy modern teleprocessing electronics. You know, I am sure, that the country was under economic siege—and worse—whereby another country firmly intended to bring down the government of the Unidad Popular. Meanwhile, therefore, we used the Telex. Now there is a wasted facility. Telex is used all over the world to convey news, to make purchase enquiries and quotations, and to send birthday greetings to men in the outposts of commercial empires. We used it in Chile to provide the economy with a nervous system; nerves to activate the sinews of government. Within four months of the start of our work, our telecommunications team had established Cybernet. This was a network of Telex communication extending, by some means or other, to every enterprise. The big firms had Telex already; small ones had never heard of it of course. But Telex machines were moved around so that every enterprise could transmit the state of its critical variables, as identified by the models, to the switching centre in Santiago every day—even if they had to be taken to the machine by telephone or by messenger. It is clear why I was accused of centralizing the economy! Yet still I was not. We had only two computers at our disposal, and both were in Santiago. That is all there is to it. There are much better ways of doing the job, using a disseminated network of mini-computers, but the facilities were not available. At any rate, we soon had Cybernet live, extending from Arica in the far north down to Punta Arenas—the southernmost city in the world. The linkages were by microwave, already installed, except for the last lap from Puerto Montt southward, which were by protected RF transmission. Quantification and the Cyberstride Program We are now confronting the situation in which Cybernet is alive with critical economic data, flowing on a daily basis. Of course, the figures themselves represent all manner of different things: thousands of tons, hundreds of people, millions of escudos ... Writing computer programs to accommodate such variety is a daunting prospect.

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The answer is to reduce every input datum to a triple index, in which all numbers range simply between 0 and 1. When the operational research teams touring the plants had made their models and identified the critical variables, they were asked to agree two values relating to each variable with the management. The first value was capability. This means: how should this variable perform under existing conditions, when the whole system is running in the smoothest way we have ever experienced or can envisage? So capability is not the same as traditional ‘capacity; since many processes work below their theoretical limits—because they are embedded in a productive system. Capability takes account of this systemic reality, using the quantified flow chart to understand it. The second value to be agreed for each critical variable was potentiality. This stands for a better performance than capability, based on the realization that if only we had one more machine in a bottleneck section, if only we had a better lubricant, if only we could install a conveyor belt, and so on, then we could do this much better. It is evident that the values for capability and potentiality will not change frequently. They can be stored in the computer, and their ratio provides an index called latency: the latent performance that could be released by new investment. The datum arriving daily over Cybernet is called actuality. The ratio between this actuality and capability yields the classic index of productivity, while the ratio between actuality and potentiality yields an overall performance index. Performance can also be computed by multiplying together the indices for latency and productivity. The computer program called Cyberstride operates in the following way. On arrival, the actuality figure is examined for plausibility. This is done by statistical tests to ensure that it belongs to the population of which it is supposedly a sample. When the datum has been accepted, the capability and potentiality associated with this variable are drawn from the store, and the three indices are computed. In setting up the system, we created statistical distributions of 100 days’ input for each index, and studied their characteristics. Since any ratio has a finite upper bound, such distributions are usually badly skewed; whereas it is convenient in a system of this kind if Gaussian distributions are available, so that whatever one later decides to do will be statistically robust. This is accomplished by making a trigonometric transformation, such as the inverse sine to the index, which has the effect of moving the distribution towards the centre of its scale, thereby simulating a Gaussian curve. On the strength of the 100 days’ sample, each enterprise was informed of the mean level of productivity, and the latency, associated with each critical variable in its quantified flow chart. These values were then used to quantify the charts developed at the next level of recursion, and so on to the total industry level. Please note that this is a form of aggregation of economic statistics that has a lot more to commend it than aggregation by totals in the customary way. For each level of aggregation is related to a system; and the critical variables being measured combine information according to the systemic characteristics revealed by the model at that level of recursion. We now had a static picture of the state of productivity, latency and overall performance for the whole of industry—or, to be accurate, we had the picture for about 75 per cent of nationalized industry by the time of the government’ fall. Let us return to the computer program Cyberstride, and its daily operations. An actuality figure for a critical variable has arrived, and has been accepted by the program as plausible. The triple indices have been calculated, and

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normalized by the trigonometric transformation. Now this value is the latest in a time series of the values that have been computed for this variable day by day. The question that the program must now answer is: does this new result matter at all, or is it to be understood as a chance variation in the ordinary course of events? Answering this question is the heart of the Cyberstride program. We did it by the use of Bayesian probability theory, building on the truly elegant and powerful work of Harrison and Stevens. For each new point computed, the program calculates four probabilities: that it is a chance variation in the time series; that it is a transient; that it indicates a change of slope; that it indicates a change by a step function. The first two outcomes are unimportant: nothing happens. But either of the indications of change matter very much, and therefore the enterprise is immediately and automatically informed. A truly cybernetic feature of this complicated program is that it uses more or less of the time series, and undertakes more or less statistical work, depending on whether its assessment of these probabilities suggests that they are likely to be important or not.

In this way we sought to endow the humblest Chilean enterprise with computer power, not to calculate its payroll or update its order books—on which and similar trivialities most of the world’s computer power is frittered away—but to be a new lobe of the management’s own brain. We found that Cyberstride could track the course of the critical variables, and sound alarms about potential trends, far more reliably than can the brain itself. There were many practical difficulties. The greatest was the need to ‘tune’ Cyberstride so that it would not over-react. A special tuning program had to be prepared for the purpose. But the effort involved in this is predictable from the neurocybernetic model: we were designing the very filtration system that will not overload the cortex, and yet will make the cortex aware of everything it should know. No wonder the task was difficult. Reports back to the enterprises from this monitoring facility were not available to anyone else. In this lay the devolution of power. When we came to the higher levels of recursion, the daily data were aggregated through their systemic models. Then at each higher level of recursion there would be a new set of critical variables, newly activated every day by systematically aggregated statistics, and producing a new stream of indexical responses appropriate to each level concerned. Of course, these streams of data could, in turn, be submitted to Cyberstride. In this way, as [ argued earlier, the entire industrial economy could be monitored in real time, using sets of nested models, quantified flow charts appropriate to every level of recursion, and a single ingenious computer program for filtration and short-term forecasting. May I remind you again of the provision that the workers’ committees would be entitled to add any variables that they liked to our basic few. They would not even have to declare what they were. Cyberstride would monitor them. Anyway, this total picture was incomplete: it was within the five-year, not the two-year, time horizon. What is much more interesting than the facts about timing is the experience gained in using these tools as they were developed. The conceptual framework we were using changed the way that both the government and industry looked at their problems. As the practical tools became available that enabled us both to deal with the tasks of allocation and distribution, and to face up to emergencies occasioned by local shortages and even widespread strikes, the people responsible found that the basic

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model made sense in active service. The process of Here is a very extraordinary truth. We may sit in full—what is the meaning of modelling, and of recursion. But when it comes to doing these things,

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innovation became a dynamic drive. here together and understand—deeply, and linking together models at several levels of to practising cybernetics, the quality of our

enlightenment changes utterly. It is not easy to acquire skill in the use of sophisticated tools, even when they are properly understood: that much is obvious. But it was not obvious that the use of the tools imparts new dimensions to the management process. I think that it ought to be obvious, because it is clearly true of physical tools. The equipment that men hold in their hands governs their whole perception of the task they confront. It is true of management too, as we discovered in Chile. And if this was not our expectation in advance, it shows how little genuine innovation ever penetrates management—else the truth would be obvious to all. How many managers have ever felt that, as a result of a computer innovation for instance, their perception and purposes were totally changed? Very few, I believe; because we use computers, and indeed cybernetics, to do silly things.

At Vina del Mar, 1972

Algedonic Regulation There is now something to be learnt from the this filtration is vitally necessary, or we should with great tides of electrical activity sweeping with great piles of irrelevant computer output

brain, and it is of critical importance. Clearly all be in a perpetual condition of epileptic seizure— over the cortex, or with management inundated (an all too familiar situation; modern manage-

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ment is epileptic). But when the filtration system is really working smoothly, and eliminating a great deal of this irrelevant input, we run the risk of simply falling asleep. Neurocybernetics has penetrated the mechanism whereby, as I mentioned before, the organism is alerted to danger. I call this the algedonic system, meaning the apparatus whereby pain and pleasure provide a qualitatively different set of filters from those that monitor sensory input. We copied the brain’s tricks for algedonic response in the Chilean system in the following way. So far as you have heard, each level of recursion has its own set of critical variables, moni-

tored at its own level. None has any direct information about imminent crisis at the level below: because the alarms have been sent back at that lower level, and only the raw data have been transmitted upward, in order to quantify the higher level systemic models. Now we use the vertical dimension of our original phase-space to make an algedonic, and not an authoritarian, linkage. For the last time, I refer back to the work of the operational research teams. They made the

preliminary quantified flow charts; they selected the critical variables; they obtained agreement on the capability and potentiality values. But they were also asked to agree with the workers’ management on two things more. For every critical variable a weight had to be assigned, because some critical variables are more critical than others. And for each critical variable they

were asked to assess how long it would take, given the type of technology involved, to restore productivity to normal—if it showed a statistically significant decline. This time interval, duly weighted by the importance of the variable, was then set up within the Cyberstride program as a kind of clock. When a signal forewarning a change for the worse was sent out, at any level of recursion, the clock for that variable was started. Cyberstride would then look out for a recovery of this indicated variable. If the recovery did not appear before the clock ran out, then an algedonic cry of pain would automatically pass up to the next higher level of recursion—announcing a need for help. In this way, it is possible in theory that the President’s economic committee would eventually hear of the ineffectiveness of a limestone crusher somewhere in the far north. It would hear of this if the clock ran out in the plant, then in the cement industry, then in the materials branch—because the algedonic signal would have been passed on. This facility belongs to any industrial system, although it is usually informal. Algedonic signals are passed by word of mouth. But they become distorted in the process, and often result in hasty adverse judgements being passed on the human beings involved. By building these algedonics into the electronic system, I believe that we made another big advance. Some critics have called this mechanism oppressive; it depends on the motivation behind it. I think that the Chilean workers were not in the least concerned about being ‘found out’; rather they were anxious to have their problems brought to the attention of those who might be able to solve them as soon as possible. The system was set to do just this in an objective, clear-cut way; a way that from its inception was in any case under their own control. The Operations Room The next question concerns just how all this information ought to be presented. For a long time I had been anxious to create an environment for decision, a place where a creative group of people really could undertake creative thinking—with all the aids to that process that science

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could give them. Our boardrooms, committee rooms, and cabinet rooms are shrines to institutional pomp and circumstance; and the latest and greatest scientific aid that they can boast is the ball-point pen. We built in Santiago an operations room, conceived as a decision environment for a creative

group that would certainly include workers. There are no tables, and no paperwork in here. The people in the room (who might be the key people at any level of recursion) constitute the brainpower. And they are served, as the brain itself is served, by a nervous system innervating the whole of the relevant body—in this case the whole of Chilean industry. You know how that was done. So to this room came the daily, filiered, sensory inputs from Cyberstride; to this room came the algedonic signals; and from this room went the questions, and ultimately the decisions. The room I describe was built and was working. But it was simply a prototype, and the economy of Chile was never actually commanded from there. Instead, smaller and less pretentious rooms were constructed at other levels of recursion, to act as foci for information and regulatory activity. On the first wall is an illustrated, animated, screen—eight feet high depicting the neurocybernetic model. The content of this model can be changed by the Room Manager, so as to depict the correct components for the level of recursion that the meeting has to consider. Into this screen are slotted iconic representations of the mean triple indices—so that one can see at

a glance how low is the productivity here, how high is the latency there. The flow lines do not bear the conventional arrows: they actually move, and each can be set at one of three different speeds. This screen provides the backcloth to the meeting, reminding those present (and they certainly do need reminding) of the level of recursion with which they are supposed to deal. If an algedonic signal is present, this is shown flashing. On the second wall are two screens. The first carries today’s Cyberstride output, as appropri-

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ate to this level of recursion; the second carries details of the algedonic signals, if any are present, from lower levels of recursion. In this actual room, those signals had to be hand-posted; but it is obvious that, if we had proper interface equipment such as is perfectly available, the screens would have been activated directly by the computer. On the third wall is an equipment called Datafeed. It is obvious that once the creative group has checked up on its general position, using the first screen, and noted the alerting signals emanating from Cyberstride on the second wall, it will want supportive information. Now I do not believe in the concept of computer data banks, which says that providing one stuffs every iota of relevant information into a computer, somehow or another the answer you need will always be there. There is a little problem in the way, and it is called retrieval. Millions of dollars have been spent on the problem of selective retrieval. It has not been solved. I think that there are good cybernetic reasons for judging that it cannot be solved. Therefore, adhering to our belief in iconic representation as being fully acceptable to the human brain, Datafeed is a visual data bank. Datafeed incorporates three active information screens, surmounted by a huge index screen. Each of the three active screens is supplied, by back projection, with five carousel projectors, each containing eighty slides. Thus the three screens between them command 1,200 separate pieces of visual information. These carousels are selected from store by the Room Manager, ready to serve the meeting at its appropriate level of recursion. All the relevant quantified flow charts are available here. Photographs of plants are available (and how much information the experienced brain can gain simply from looking at a photograph of a works). Investment plans and projections are also available, also in iconic form. And so on. In the room are seven swivel chairs. The fact of seven is drawn from experimental psychology; it appears that this is about the largest number for a creative group. After seven, the inter-personal reactions break down, and formal procedures have to be devised. In the arms of the seven chairs are fixed a set of buttons. Anyone can slam home a button, and gain control of Datafeed. Then by using the index screen, and another set of buttons, he may display to the group any information that he wants to call up. The digital logic for doing all this is quite complicated, but it certainly worked. Well, the room is octagonal: it is a room, ten metres wide, inside a larger room—the annular space being filled with technical apparatus, such as the sixteen projectors and the digital logic racks required for Datafeed. The fourth wall is an access door to all this. The fifth wall is set aside to contain an algedonic meter to which I shall refer later. The sixth wall is the main entrance. On the seventh wall is a huge, animated model of the whole economy. Now I must emphasize that in the two years that we had, this was never made to work. It certainly worked visually; but the computer drive behind it was experimental and fragmentary. We used the Dynamo II compiler, emanating from Forrester’s work at MIT, because it was so free of programming defects—it had been thoroughly ‘debugged’ The idea is that the creative group, aware of their situation as they are from the equipment so far discussed, should be able to simulate the effects of alternative decisions. They are able to change the animated model of the economy, and to obtain ten-year projections of the likely effects on the screen built into the eighth, and final, wall. As [ said, we did not achieve this result. This is the moment to say that the President had five years left to run when I arrived, and this was our time horizon. Constitutionally, he could not

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be re-elected; constitutionally, he could not be evicted. We had two of our planned five years; and we were ahead of schedule. You now have a total, albeit not fully detailed, account of Project Cybersyn. Even within its short life, it had its uses to government. So much so, that the last instruction we received from the President—just a week before his death—was to move the whole operations room from its experimental location right into the palace, La Moneda. This was a strong decision. It meant ripping out some historic rooms, because the total area required was large. By 11 September 1973, the plans were nearly ready. Instead La Moneda itself was reduced to a smoking ruin. >’

It is important to underline the fact that even before Salvador Allende became the world’s first Marxist candidate to be elected president in 1970, the United States, under Richard Nixon—with Henry Kissinger as National Security Advisor—were determined to sabotage any more socialist experiments in Latin America (it was bad enough having Cuba in their back yard). To this end Nixon awarded $10 million to the CIA to ‘make the economy

screamy’. In other words, the Project Cybersyn team was pitted against a superpower with limitless funding for promoting destabilizing tactics throughout Chilean society. The wider context of Chilean society and history also needs to be understood to real-

ize that there were powerful and wealthy conservative forces closer to home that resented Allende’s attempts at creating a fairer society. In retrospect we can see, that under such extreme circumstances, the project never stood a fair chance in developing its promise for worker participative reform.

But there was one example in particular when it did manage to demonstrate its efficacy. In October of 1972 there was a very serious strike, coordinated by opposition groups—but financed by the US—that attempted to cripple the supply of goods throughout the country. The large entrepreneurial group that went on strike was known as the gremios, they were the owners of fleets of lorries, the very transportation on which Chile’s distribution of necessities depended. Allende declared a State of Emergency. But thanks to Cybernet with its 2,000 telexes a day, the Cybersyn team was able to monitor where available resources could be called into use: these were lorries, trucks and railway carriages

lying redundant all over Chile. By the end of the month the strikers were outwitted and some degree of normality returned to the country. (As a direct consequence of Cybersyn’s success, Flores was now made Minister of Economics.)

There was also a very human side to all of this technology as Beer attempted to communicate its potential benefits to the layman, as well as allaying any fears that freedoms were being threatened. For this he looked to the popular folk movement. As well as working hard (his incredible energy galvanized those around him) he also played hard. There was much singing and dancing into the early hours and Beer co-wrote songs with Angel Parra including one called, in English, ‘Litany for a Computer and a Baby about to be Born’.

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It is impossible to say how the whole project would have unfolded if the military coup that installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet had not happened. But there can be no doubt that it certainly would have developed and evolved. Built into its structure it had the flexible capacity for learning and self-organization. The technology would have advanced too, allowing more computers to be allocated throughout the country. The new regime attempted to understand the system that was left in place, but it was dismantled and became forgotten. In the end Project Cybersyn was too democratic in

essence, with its organization promoting distributed autonomy, to be Beer was back in London when the end came and he immediately ing to rescue various members of his team, via academic channels. He but Flores remained in a concentration camp for three years. For the

of use to a despot. set about attempthad some success, rest of his life Beer

remained scarred by the tragedy, while he continued to maintain a great love and respect

for Allende. In November he gave the Massey Lectures on Canadian radio and took the opportunity to convey not only his despair at what had just occurred but also to round off with this vigorous message of hope: Let us use love and compassion. Let us use joy. Let us use knowledge. These qualities are in us, obscured though we may let them be by the lethal strategies of our dinosaur society. And let us use that acquired and ordered knowledge: science. This too is in our heritage. If it has been seized by power, then seize it back. Expect it of statesmen and politicians who represent us that they should, on our behalf; or demand a new breed of statesmen and politicians. Expect it of educators that they should change the institutions of education not to train crazy apes; or start new schools and universities instead. Above all, let us all expect it of each other that we find ways to use the power of science in better cause. It is no more sensible to say that we cannot, because ordinary folk do not understand science, as it would be to say we cannot sail a boat, because we cannot understand the wind and the sea and the tide-race. Men have always navigated those unfathomable waters. We can do it now. Further Reading

Beckett, A. “Santiago Dreaming’, the Guardian G2, 8 September 2003. Beer, S. ‘Fanfare for Effective Freedom: Cybernetic Praxis in Government’, in Platform for Change, Wiley, London, 1975. Beer, S. Designing Freedom. Wiley, London, 1974.

Beer, S. Brain of the Firm. 2nd ed., Wiley, Chichester, 1981. Beer, S. ‘Cybernetics of National Development: The Zaheer Foundation Lecture’, in How Many Grapes Went Into the Wine, Wiley, Chichester, 1994. Espejo, R. ‘Cybernetic Praxis in Government: The Management of Industry in Chile 1970-1973’, Journal of Cybernetics, Vol. 10, No. 3.

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Espejo, R. ‘Complexity and Change: Reflections upon the Cybernetic Intervention in Chile, 1970-1973’, Systems Practice, Vol.3, No. 3, 1990.

Medina, E. ‘Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile’, Journal of Latin American Studies, No. 38, 2006.

Medina, E. Cybernetic Socialism. MIT, MA, forthcoming. Ossa, C. and Rivera, E. (ed.) Cybersyn: Sinergia Cibernética. or_am, Santiago, Chile, 2008.

Schwember, H. ‘Project Cybersyn: An Experience with New Tools for Management in Chile’, Computer Assisted Policy Analysis, Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 1977. Whittaker, D. Stafford Beer and Chile. Wavestone Press, Charlbury, Oxfordshire, forth-

Photo: Gui Bonsiepe

coming.

Working at INTEC, 1972

appendix C

Cybemetics in a Nutshell Stafford Beer gave his last public address in October 2001 at the University of Valladolid, Spain. The title was “What is Cybernetics?’ and as part of his speech he told this anecdote: If I may be allowed one joke in a dignified discourse, it concerns three men who are about to be executed. The prison governor calls them to his office, and explains that each will be granted a last request. The first one confesses that he has led a sinful life, and would like to see a priest. The governor says he thinks he can arrange that. And the second man? The second man explains that he is a professor of cybernetics. His last request is to deliver a final and definitive answer to the question: what is cybernetics? The governor accedes to this request also. And the third man? Well, he is a doctoral student of the professor—his request is to be executed second.

Clearly, and sadly, the field of cybernetics has a poor track record in the public domain of ideas. But I believe the beginnings of clarity can be achieved by delving back into its history. The first example, in recent times, of the word itself to be found in print was in 1834. The French mathematician and physicist André Marie Ampére, as part of his general

classification of all knowledge, proposed ‘la cybernétique’ as a term for government. Soon after in 1843, the Polish philosopher Bronislaw Trentowski published his book Stosunek filozofii do cybernetiki (‘The relation of philosophy to cybernetics’). For him the term

referred to the pragmatic art of navigating the waters of historical circumstance. It was to be just over another hundred years before it re-emerged as the title of Norbert Wiener’s book in 1948 (the subject was actually named the previous year). He traced its etymology to the Greek kubernetes, meaning ‘steersman’, with its emphasis on applying a rudder to maintain direction and balance. It is used in this sense by Homer in the Odpyssey, and this indeed is the very first use of the word on record, circa 700 Bce. The word later transformed into the Latin gubernator, meaning ‘governor’. It pops up again in Plato’s Laws, where it means ‘governance’, fourth century Bck. It is important always to

keep these basic definitions in mind to keep the word anchored to its true meaning and application (at least as far as Beer’s work is concerned). The full title of Wiener’s epochal book is Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The subtitle indicates that being in a state of control depends on information flow as well as the fact that the laws inherent in this control are invariant to organic and non-organic systems.

Control has always been a contentious word in human affairs, with overtones of oppression, but as far as cybernetics is concerned it has totally to do with steersmanship rather than dictatorship. Self-regulation is of its essence.

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We need to go back a few years to the Second World War to appreciate where Wiener gained his insight. He was engaged to assist in developing the efficiency of anti-aircraft accuracy (specifically aimed at German bombers over England). He fostered a mathematics that helped to improve the gunner’s prediction of the enemy plane’s future position, and in so doing he came to understand the significance of feedback. This is an essential term in cybernetics. The basic concept has been known about and applied by human beings for thousands of years. The earliest known self-regulating device was a float valve controlled water clock designed by Ktesibios of Alexandria in 250 BcE. James Watt’s steam engine

The operation of Watt's steam governor. At the set speed the governor operates to let just the appropriate amount of steam to the engine (1). Should the engine speed up, the weights on the governor (driven by the engine) would fly further outward, cutting down the steam (2). If the engine slows up, the weight of the revolving balls will cause the valve to open further and restore normal speed (3).

Hlustration: Stafford Beer

with its centrifugal governor from the 1790s is perhaps the most famous example. This elegant device proved crucial to the efficacy of the Industrial Revolution. In recent times the thermostatically controlled heating system in the home is familiar to many of us.

Simply put, feedback is when part of a system’s output returns as its input, thereby

changing the input and creating a continuous loop. All regulatory systems have some standard to be maintained, negative feedback is inherently stabilizing as it decreases any deviation, while positive feedback is inherently destabilizing as it increases the deviation, generating explosive oscillation (hence the term ‘vicious circle’). Unfortunately the word

is widely abused colloquially simply to mean a reaction, with positive feedback seen as encouragement and negative feedback as criticism. But in their correct sense ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ are not value laden, they are more akin to ‘increase’ and ‘decrease’. We can look again at the steersman for a clear example. If he wishes to steer his craft safely towards a port in difficult conditions he must constantly readjust the rudder to

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match those conditions. Manipulating the rudder, a cause, engenders an effect: the correc-

tion of the course. But in turn this effect is now the cause of a further deviation, the effect of which is another adjustment towards the target, and so on. Early on in cybernetics this was known as circular causality.

Closely linked to feedback is the principle of homeostasis. In the nineteenth century the French physicist Claude Bernard spoke about the ‘milieu interne’ of the organism. The word was coined in the 1920s by Walter Cannon. It refers to the capability of an organism to maintain critical variables, within physiological limits, in the face of disturbance or perturbation. For example blood pressure, body temperature and sugar levels. This principle was further developed by the cybernetician Ross Ashby, when he constructed a machine called The Homeostat. This device could survive a disturbance unforeseen by its designer and return to its equilibrial state. He named this concept ultrastability. Ashby also introduced the word variety as the measure of complexity, or the total

number of possible states of a system that requires regulation. It is managed, via feedback loops, through channels of amplification and attenuation. His Law of Requisite Variety became pivotal for Beer in his application of cybernetics to real life scenarios. It states that

control (self-regulation) can be obtained only if the variety of the controller is at least as great as the variety of the situation to be controlled (only variety can absorb or destroy variety). Throughout his career Beer compared the importance of Ashby’s Law for complex systems with that of Newton’s Law of Gravity for physics. As a holistic science, cybernetics is concerned with understanding the dynamic laws of interaction that maintain any large probabilistic system in a state of adaptive poise, and how these can fail or go out of control. In turn this can give a better understanding of how these systems produce themselves, evolve and learn in time. Be it an economy, an institution, an ecosystem, a family, a nervous system or whatever. As an interdisciplinary subject, Beer would say transdisciplinary, cybernetics has been remarkably difficult to pin down. We hear of engineering cybernetics, neurocybernetics, biocybernetics, management cybernetics and so on. But these are all singular applications

of a much wider principle. In more recent years the waters have grown muddier by the widespread use of the prefix ‘cyber’. This has been applied to nearly everything under the sun, the most well known being ‘cyberspace’. This new vocabulary is associated with all

things virtual and digital. It is therefore all the more a travesty of the original meaning of the word because cybernetics, at least as far as Beer is concerned, derives its very potency from its manifestation in time with some activity of embodiment. (In recent decades environmentalists have become more aware of this potency partly through the Gaia hypothesis, developed by the chemist James Lovelock, which shows how the atmosphere and biosphere interact cybernetically to maintain life on earth.) Parallel with the beginnings of cybernetics was the advent of General Systems Theory by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. This was a broad movement that grew in reaction to the frag-

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mented tendencies of various scientific specialisms. For many, including Beer, cybernetics and GST were co-extensive disciplines sharing a search for universal patterns in biological, social and technical systems alongside a belief that the synergy of wholes is far more than the sum of their parts. There was a further important development to the original cybernetics movement in

1968 when the anthropologist Margaret Mead came up with the phrase ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’ to indicate that the system under scrutiny by an observer must also include the observer. This provided a significant leap in epistemology and it was Heinz von Foerster who distinguished first-order cybernetics (‘cybernetics of observed systems’) from second-order cybernetics (‘cybernetics of observing systems’), thereby bringing circular causality into the cognitive realm. Henceforth all descriptions of the system under observation must be understood to a greater or lesser degree as self-referential. Beer was particularly alert to these ideas earlier on, not just from his cybernetic mentors and peers but also from his close studies of certain Eastern philosophies that emphasised the participatory nature of consciousness in perceiving the world and the traps inherent in

mistaking the descriptive language for the thing described. It has to be said that Beer was uncomfortable that a distinction had been constructed between first-order and secondorder cyberneticians (in the hands of certain authors it created a sense of ‘them and us’).

It seemed a false dichotomy to him and he maintained that the early thinkers in the field were always aware of the role of the observer, though it may have been less emphasised at the time. New and subtle concepts continued to evolve over the years from various cybernetic thinkers. Perhaps none more so than that developed in the 1970s by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and his student and collaborator Francisco Varela. This was autopoiesis, a word from the Greek, meaning ‘self producing’. It deals with the fact that the critical variable of an organism that is held constant is its own circular organization. In these biological terms its reference is on the operational closure of the nervous system. Beer extended the application of the concept to all complex systems and coined the term ‘pathological autopoiesis’ to describe a system that functions purely for its own existence regardless of its context. Various bureaucracies are all too familiar examples of this. In Germany Niklas Luhmann has used autopoiesis as the basis for a wide-ranging sociol-

ogy. However, there is not a consensus on the universality of the concept and Maturana himself refuses to apply it beyond biology. >

Over the course of sixty years Cybernetics has developed its own unique terminology. This nomenclature is common to all researchers in the field. Nonetheless, different emphasis is given to the various terms depending on the personal slant of each individual. For example, McCulloch and Ashby were mainly concerned with brain and nervous sys-

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tem activities of adaptation; Maturana and Varela concentrated on the biological domain; von Foerster worked in the areas of self-organization, epistemology and latterly ethics

(he coined the term ‘cybernethics’); Gregory Bateson was an anthropologist whose main interest was in communications and psychiatry (he invented the term ‘double-bind’, particularly relevant to the family therapy movement); for Gordon Pask it was primarily

learning and education (Conversation theory). Of course the interests of these individuals were not exclusively specialist, they all overlapped. In the rough and tumble area of management Stafford Beer actually did roll up his sleeves and apply many of these concepts to real-time problems involving the transformation of organizational structures. His own definition of cybernetics was ‘the science of effective organization’. He therefore found certain ideas from cybernetics of more practical use, rather than theoretical. Ashby’s Law has been mentioned, but he also developed, from experience, his own laws relating to viability that evolved into his Viable System

Model. The OED definition of the word ‘viable’ says ‘able to maintain a separate existence’. Although an organization may have a separate identity and enjoy some autonomy, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Each viable system is in turn embedded in another viable system. In contrast to the hierarchical organization charts, these embedments generate a recursive structure where each viable system is contained in the next higher-level viable system like a nesting of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes. ‘Higher’ does not necessarily denote authority or seniority. It is a metasystem using a metalanguage and a metalogic

(meta from the Greek ‘over and beyond’). We are talking of a higher order of logic (for example the school timetable is metasystemic to the timetable of a single class). The metalanguage and metalogic are capable of expressing decisions and propositions about regu-

lation that are inaccessible and inexpressible in the lower recursion’s language and logic. From his old mentor McCulloch, Beer found the notion of the redundancy of potential command especially valuable. In common parlance the word ‘redundant’ has a negative or derogatory meaning, usually suggesting that someone is ready for the scrap heap and

is often synonymous with ‘obsolete’. But in cybernetics it indicates more a state of waiting like a substitute on the bench. In a self-organizing system capable of learning, adapting and evolving, distributed groupings of various entities can play a central role if and when it may be necessary—contrary to a strict hierarchy. (Though McCulloch developed this idea from neurophysiology he also saw it implemented in his studies of old battle plans, particularly Nelson’s, as well as the English defeat of the Spanish Armada.) The terminology of the various sciences, as well as the so-called humanities (why the distinction?) are as subject to the vicissitudes of fashion as every other human endeavour.

And cybernetics, in the main, has certainly suffered some neglect in recent decades. But historically speaking we can now clearly discern that it adumbrated so many currently fashionable ideas such as catastrophe theory, chaos theory, fractals, complexity theory, emergence, critical mass, fuzzy logic, self-organized criticality and so on, valuable as these

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concepts are. It seems that every generation, partly due to sheer ignorance of one’s debt to a cultural tradition and lineage, but also partly due to individual professional ambition, insists on reinventing the wheel and patenting it as a new invention.

This is a great pity. As Bateson wrote in 1966: ‘I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years.” Quite a claim. He then goes on to add: ‘But most of such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible—usually for cybernetic reasons.” There was an integrity to the original approach of cybernetics and general systems theory that cannot be encompassed by our educational institutions which continue to carve up knowledge and disconnect what we are from how we know.

Further Reading

Ackoff, R. and Emery, F. On Purposeful Systems. Aldin-Atherton, New York, 1972. Ashby, W. R. Design for a Brain. Wiley, London, 1952. Ashby, W. R. An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall, London, 1956. Barnes, G. Justice, Love and Wisdom: Linking Psychotherapy and Second-Order Cybernetics. Library of Psychiatria Danubina, Croatia, 1994. Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine Books, New York, 1972, Bateson, G. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. HarperCollins, New York, 1991.

Bateson, M. C. Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. Knopf, New York, 1972. Bertalanffy, L. von. General Systems Theory. Braziller, New York, 1968. Brockman, J. (ed.) About Bateson. Wildwood House, London, 1978.

Capra, F. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. HarperCollins, New York, 1996. Churchman, C. W. The Systems Approach. Delacote Press, New York, 1968. Clemson, B. Cybernetics—a New Management Tool. Abacus Press, Tunbridge Wells, 1984. Conway, F. and Siegelman, J. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener—the Father of Cybernetics. Basic Books, New York, 2005. Espejo, R. and Harnden, R. (ed.) The Viable System Model: Interpretations and Applications of Stafford Beer’s VSM. Wiley, Chichester, 1989. Espejo, R. and Schwaninger, M. (ed.) Organizational Fitness: Corporate Effectiveness Through Management Cybernetics. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt, 1993. Espejo, R. (ed.) Kybernetes: Tribute to Stafford Beer. Vol. 33, No. 3/4, 2004. Flemons, D. G. Completing Distinctions: Interweaving the Ideas of Gregory Bateson and Taoism into a Unique Approach to Therapy. Shambhala, Boston, 1991. Foerster, H. von. (ed.) Cybernetics of Cybernetics. Biological Computer Laboratory, Illinois, 1974.

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Foerster, H. von. Observing Systems. Intersystems Publications, CA, 1984. Foerster, H. von. and Poerksen, B. Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics. Kluwer/Plenum, New York/Heidelberg, 2002. Foerster, H. von. Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003. Gerovitch, S. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. MIT, MA, 2002.

Glasersfeld, E. von. The Construction of Knowledge: Contributions to Conceptual Semantics. Intersystems Publications, CA, 1987. Hoverstadt, P. The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model. Wiley, Chichester, 2008. Hayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heims, S. ]. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. MIT, MA, 1980. Heims, S. J. The Cybernetics Group. MIT, MA, 1991.

Hughes, P. and Brecht, G. Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978.

Jantsch, E. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. Pergamon, Oxford, 1980. Keeney, B. P. Aesthetics of Change. Guilford Press, New York, 1983. Kelly, K. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines. Fourth Estate, London, 1994. Livingston, 1. Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics. University of Illinois, 2006.

Lovelock, . Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 1979. Macy, J. Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory. SUNY, New York, 1991.

Malik, F. Managing, Performing, Living: Effective Management for a New Era. Chicago University Press, 2009.

Malik, F. Management: The Essence of the Craft. Chicago University Press, 2009. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Reidel, Netherlands, 1980. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. The Tree of Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala, Boston, 1987. Maturana, H. R. and Poerksen, B. From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. Carl-Auer, Heidelberg, 2004. Maturana, H. R. and Verden-Zoller, G. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. Imprint Academic, Exeter, 2008. Mayr, O. The Origins of Feedback Control. MIT, MA, 1970. McCulloch, R. (ed.) The Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch. Intersystems Publications,

CA, 1989.

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McCulloch, W. S. Embodiments of Mind. MIT, MA, 1965. Mindell, D. A. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 2002. Moeller, H-G. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. Open Court, Illinois, 2006. Muses, C. Destiny and Control in Human Systems. Kluwer-Nijhoff, MA/Netherlands, 1985. Olds, L.E. Metaphors of Interrelatedness: Towards a Systems Theory of Psychology. SUNY, New York, 1992. Pask, G. An Approach to Cybernetics. Hutchinson, London, 1961. Pask, G. The Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance. Hutchinson, London, 1975.

Pert, C. Molecules of Emotion: Why you Feel the Way you Feel. Scribner, 1997. Pickering, A. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. University of Chicago, forthcoming.

Powers, W. T. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine, Chicago, 1973. Prigogine, 1. and Stengers, I. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature. Heinemann, London, 1984. Rappoport, R. A. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. 2nd

ed. Yale University Press, 1984. Richardson, G. P. Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory. University of Pennsylvania, 1991. Rudall, B. (ed.) Kybernetes: A Special Issue Dedicated to Stafford Beer. Vol. 22, No. 6, 1993. Segal, L. The Dream

of Reality: Heinz von Foerster’s Constructivism. Norton, New York,

1986. Sieden, L. S. Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: An Appreciation. Plenum, New York, 1989. Spencer-Brown, G. Laws of Form. Allen & Unwin, London, 1969.

Spencer-Brown, G. (Writing as James Keys) Only Two Can Play This Game. Cat Books, Cambridge, 1971. Varela, F. Principles of Biological Autonomy. Elsevier, Netherlands, 1979. Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT, MA, 1991.

Vickers, G. Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing Values in an Unstable Society. Allen Lane, London, 1970. Waddington, C. H. Tools for Thought. Cape, London, 1977. Watzlawick, P. (ed.) The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know?

Norton, New York, 1984. Whittaker, D. Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir. Wavestone Press, Oxfordshire, 2003. Whittaker, D. Stafford Beer and Chile. Wavestone Press, Oxfordshire, forthcoming. Wiener, N. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT, MA, 1948.

Wiener, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1950.

—

—~ hLansaiLed

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GgERacs

—~

STAFFORD

BEER

(1926-2002)

was

an

international consultant and the founder of management cybernetics. He devoted his life to developing innovative models of non-hierarchical organization. Born

in

London,

his

studies

at

University

College London and Aberystwyth were disrupted by the war. He was posted to India and served with the Gurkhas. There he stayed to witness India’s independence from the Raj in 1947. On his return Beer joined the steel industry where he advanced inventive techniques from operational research and cybernetics to greatly increase productivity. He held posts as company director, managing director, and Chairman of the Board. He was also Development Director for the International Publishing Corporation. Beer’s work as an international consultant ranged from small businesses to national governments

(in

twenty-two

countries).

In

particular he was called on by President Allende of Chile to apply a decentralized real-time regulatory system to the whole social economy. He was Visitiné Professor at many universities

throughout the world and received Honorary Doctorates from Concordia University, Montreal; Liverpool John Moores University; University of St Gallen, Switzerland; University of Sunderland; University of Valladolid, Spain and the University of Mid Glamorgan. Stafford Beer was also a poet, a painter and a teacher of meditative yoga. DAvip WHITTAKER was born and bred in Drogheda in Ireland. He is a bookseller, writer and independent researcher. He has published and lectured on twentieth-century Cornish and Irish art as well as contributing various obituaries for the Guardian; he has also written for the journal Kybernetes. He has held several exhibitions of his photographs. In 2003 David published Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir. David has lived for many years in Charlbury in rural Oxfordshire with his wife and daughter. Bri1AN ENO is a musician, visual artist, cultural theorist-cum-activist

and

foremost record producers.

one

of

the

world’s

Stafford Beer is an unsung genius whose ideas deserve very wide circulation and 1 hope that this anthology will be a major stimulus for readers to dig deeper and adopt some of his thinking and perspective’ David Mitchell, Professor Emeritus, Concordia University, Montreal

Russel L. Ackoft, Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Stafford Beer has worked terribly hard over the years—a kind of modern day Isaiah—to develop technologies, in the broadest sense of the word, that can be employed within any organization to create better outcomes with minimum harm to people. He has always hoped that these technologies would empower people to action in the service of others. John H. Proctor, Secretary General of the World Academy of Art and Science

‘The British wunderkind of management cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster, former Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois ‘Very few people are able to see into the world of metaphysics on more than an intellectual level. This is my interest in Stafford: his act of seeing is more important to me than what he sees. In a sense the act of seeing is the seeing’ Robert Fripp, Guitarist Cover painting: Fractilla by Stafford Beer (oil on board)

£20

Photo: Pete Davis

‘Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world’s most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers ... and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science.