The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  Although Bateson learned about cybernetic theory in the course of the Macy Conferences, his understanding and elaboration of the theory developed in the context of concrete human situations. Curiously enough, Bateson chose to explicate the theory in an essay on alcoholism, "The Cybernetics of 'Self'" (1971), for his research revealed that the "theology" of Alcoholics Anonymous was virtually identical to cybernetic epistemology. Before summarizing Batesonian holism in formal terms, then, let us follow him through one more concrete investigation.4

  It may at first seem strange that alcoholism could have anything whatever to do with epistemology. Yet as I hope is by now clear, philosophy and epistemology are not topics confined to academic circles. Wittingly or not, we all have a world view, and the alcoholic is no exception. As Bateson showed, our world view is, in effect, our "self," our "character," because it is the result of our deutero-learning. In the case of alcoholism, he discovered that in the oscillation between sobriety and intoxication, the alcoholic is actually switching back and forth between a Cartesian outlook and one that might be termed "pseudo-holistic." Bateson's point of departure was the attempt to uncover the dynamics of this oscillation.

  With the exception of the efforts of Alcoholics Anonymous, all attempts to cure a drinking problem are based on the model of conscious self-control. The alcoholic is told to be strong, to resist temptation, to be "the master of my fate . . . the captain of my soul" (as William Ernest Henley wrote in "Invictus"). When sober, he agrees with these exhortations from his wife, his friends, his employer and others who supposedly seek to help him. The problem is that such advice represents pure Cartesianism; it is based on the assumption of a mind/body split. The mind (conscious awareness)is the "self" that is going to exert control over a weak and wayward body. But cure by self-control throws the entire situation into one of symmetrical schismogenesis: the conscious will is pitted in an all-out war against the rest of the personality. As in Freudian psychology, the unconscious (or body) is excluded from the self, and then seen as a collection of (evil) "forces" that the conscious self must struggle to resist. The alcoholics resolution, "I will fight the bottle," "I will defeat demon rum," is a type of pride which derives directly from Cartesian dualism.

  Why doesn't this approach work? As Bateson notes, the context of sobriety changes with achievement. There is a challenge involved in symmetrical struggle, and after the alcoholic manages to steer clear of liquor for a while, his motivation drops. Cartesian mind/body dualism, being schismogenic in nature, requires continual opposition in order to function, and that is the world view to which the alcoholic is committed. Not-drinking is no longer a challenge. But how about some "controlled drinking" (as AA mockingly calls it)? How about "just one drink"? This is indeed a challenge! And of course, he "falls off the wagon" and in short order is drunk once again.

  What does the alcoholic perceive when drunk? At least in the initial stages of intoxication, a different personality emerges, and hence a different epistemology is ostensibly at work. In fact, the alcoholic switches, temporarily, from Cartesian dualism to what appears to be a holistic outlook. The mind abandons the attempt to control the body, and the struggle between them collapses, the result being, Bateson argues, a more correct state of mind. Getting drunk is a way of escaping from a set of cultural premises about the mind/body relationship which are in fact insane, but which society, in the form of husband, wife, friends, and employers, constantly reinforces. In a state of intoxication, however, the whole symmetrical contest drops to the ground, and the feelings that emerge are complementary. As the alcoholic begins to get drunk, he may feel close to his drinking buddies, to the world around him, and to his own self, which is no longer treating him in a punitive fashion. The abandonment of the struggle with himself and with the world around him comes as a welcome relief. Cartesian dualism exhorted him to be "above it all," to be above being weak and human. Now, he seems more a part of the human scene. The psychology of contest ('agon,' in Greek, from which we get our word "agony") gives way to what appears to be the psychology of love.

  The problem, however, is that this state of "love" is an illusion, almost as illusory as Cartesian dualism. In reality, the new state of mind is the pathology of submission. The alcoholic has but two strings on his guitar: rigidity (the "Invictus" posture) and collapse, or total vulnerability. He has no other behavior in his repertoire besides "triumphant" egotism and total capitulation. It was the genius of the founders of AA to recognize that these choices were two sides of the same coin, that a third way might be possible.5 This third way did capture the "truth" of the drunken state, the notion of surrender which is involved in it; but it was a surrender that conferred on the individual not maudlin impotence but power. In other words, it rendered him active in the world; it was not an illusory state, or a short circuit, but a circuit that was dynamic and continuous.

  How did AA manage to do this? Consider the first two steps of its program: (1) we admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable -- and (2) we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. The first step undercuts Cartesian dualism in a single stroke. That dualism pits "sober" mind versus "alcoholic" body, implying that demon rum is somehow outside the personality, outside the body. The "decent," "pure," "noble" conscious will -- which is "in here" -- is trying to control the "weak," "dirty" alcoholic body -- which is "out there." Once the alcoholic comes to an AA meeting and says to the group, "My name is John Doe, and I am an alcoholic," he places the alcoholism within his self. The total personality has admitted to being alcoholic. It is no longer a case of the alcoholism being "out there." Once you surrender, admit that you are powerless over the bottle, abandon the sloganeering of "Invictus" -- which AA in fact uses as a point of ridicule -- the symmetrical battle evaporates, without your getting drunk.

  AA's second principle provides the basis for an alternative epistemology that is genuinely holistic. By definition, you can only be in a dependent relationship to a Higher Power. This admission seems like a surrender, says Bateson, but in fact it is really a change in epistemology, and therefore in character orpersonality. This Higher Power -- "God as you understand Him to be," as AA says -- is of course the unconscious mind, but is more than this as well. It is also your social reality, the other members of AA, and the struggle that their lives represent. The individual ego (conscious will) leaves the field in favor of a more mature form of self; one that is both intra- and inter-personal. Such a surrender is not a collapse, but a renewal. For the alcoholic who has finally "hit bottom," as AA calls it, the first two steps of the AA program in effect constitute Learning III, and the alcoholic frequently experiences them as a religious conversion.

  What does this analysis have to do with cybernetic theory? The metaphysics of Western science deals with atoms, with single individuals, and with causes that are direct, conscious, and empirical. The Cartesian paradigm would, for example, isolate the alcoholic and attempt to ascertain the "cause" producing the undesirable "effect." The theory is one of direct linear influence, based on the model of seventeenth-century impact physics in which mind is viewed as explicitly conscious and external to matter. In Descartes' view of things, God is outside it all; He merely set the whole arrangement in motion. Similarly, the balls on a billiard table have no inherent mind; mind comes to them in the form of a person with a cue stick.

  In cybernetic theory, on the other hand, the unit to be considered is the whole system, not this or that individual component. Consider the ensemble of a steam engine plus its control unit, commonly known as a "governor." As in the case of a thermostat controlling the temperature of a house, the governor is set in terms of an ideal -- in this case the optimal running speed of the engine. Should the actual speed fall much below the ideal, the armature slows down until the fuel supply is triggered, bringing the speed up to "normal." Conversely, if the engine starts moving too fast, the swinging armature triggers the brake, and the system is once again brought
into line. But what influences the governor, or self-corrective feedback mechanism, is not some Cartesian impact, some billlard ball or concrete entity, but only information. And a "bit" of information, also known as an "idea," Bateson defines as "a difference which makes a difference." In other words, the engine, governor, fuel supply, brake, locomotive, and other components form a complex causal circuit. A change, or difference, in the operation of any single component is felt throughout the system, and the system reacts with something that might be termed awareness, if not consciousness. In this sense, it is alive. It possesses mental characteristics, and can be regarded as a mind (Mind) of some sort. We assert, writes Bateson, "that any ongoing ensemble of events and objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics." In other words, it will make comparisons (be responsive to differences), process information, be self-corrective towards certain optima, and so on. Furthermore, adds Bateson, "no part of such an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part. The mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in the ensemble as a whole."

  Now a mental system, a Mind, can exhibit one of three possible types of behavior: self-correction (also called steady state), oscillation, or runaway. Here is the link between schismogenesis and cybernetic theory. A schismogenic situation is one without a governor; the system is constantly slipping into runaway. In a self-corrective system, the results of past actions are fed back into the system, and this new bit of information then travels around the circuit, enabling the system to maintain something near to its ideal, or optimal state. A runaway system, on the other hand, becomes increasingly distorted over time, because the feedback is positive, rather than negative or self-corrective. Addiction is the perfect example of a runaway system. The heroin addict needs an increasingly larger fix; the sugar addict finds that the more pastry he eats, the more pastry he wants; the imperialist power starts out seeking particular foreign markets, and eventually winds up trying to police the globe.

  Although the ethical implications of these alternatives will be discussed later, it might be appropriate to point out an obvious corollary of this cybernelic analysis. Given the fact that schismogenesis is so pervasive a phenomenon in Western culture, we are forced to conclude that the institutions and individuals of that culture are in various degrees of runaway. Addiction, in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial society, down to the lives of individual members. Dependence on alcohol (food, drugs, tobacco . . .) is not formally different from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious bombs, or the need to exercise conscious control over everything. Any system that maximizes certain variables, violating the natural steady-state conditions that would optimize these variables, is by definition in runaway, and ultimately, it has no more chance of survival than an alcoholic or a steam engine without a governor. Unless such a system abandons its epistemology, it will hit bottom or burn out -- a realization that is now dawning on many individuals in Western society. There is no escaping self-corrective feedback, even if it takes the form of the total disintegration of the entire culture. A mental system cannot remain in permanent runaway, cannot maximize variables and also retain the characteristics of Mind. It loses its Mind; it dies. On the individual level, we experience cirrhosis, heart attack, cancer, schizophrenia, and what has to be called living death. The ethics of the system are implicit in its epistemology.

  The example of alcoholism enables us to understand the status of the "self," or conventional "mind" (Cartesian ego), in cybernetic theory. As we have noted, Bateson claims that the mental characteristics of a cybernetic system are immanent not in some particular part, but in the system as a whole. The conscious mind, or "self," is an arc in a larger circuit, and the behavior of any organism will not have the same limits as the self. Alcoholic "pride," or determined sobriety, is the attempt to maximize the variable called conscious mind, to have this little arc somehow get control over the entire circuit. Such pride is the foolishness of "Invictus," at least as applied to addiction, for there is more to a steam engine than its governor. Being drunk, or in a state of collapse, is a shortcut to complementarity, and a short-term solution. The wisdom of AA is to switch the system from runaway to self-correction by introducing complementary elements into a symmetrical situation, and introducing them in such a way that the resulting recognition of circuitry becomes self-sustaining.

  Bateson uses the example of a man chopping down a tree to demonstrate the circuitous nature of Mind. According to the Cartesian paradigm, only the man's brain possesses consciousness: the tree is of course alive, but it is not (in this view) a mental system of any sort, and the axe itself is dead. The interaction is causal and linear: man takes axe and operates on tree trunk. He may say to himself, as he does this, "I am cutting down this tree," the thesis being that there is a single entity, "I," the self, which is undertaking purposive action upon a single object. The fallacy here is that mind is introduced in the word "I," but is restricted to the man, whereas the tree is reified, seen as an object. But the mind winds up being reified also; for since the self acted upon the axe, which then acted upon the tree -- a perfect application of Cartesian impact physics -- the self must also be a thing, and therefore dead. Moreover, when we try to localize the self in such a system, we find we cannot do so. In another Batesonian example, that of a blind man making his way down the street with the help of a stick, there is no way to say where his self begins or ends. Isn't the stick really part of his self? He is not simply acting upon it, as an object, which then acts upon the pavement. The stick is really a pathway to the pavement, to his environment. But where does the pathway end? At the handle? The tip? Halfway up the stick? "These questions," writes Bateson, "are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man's locomotion." The mental system of the blind man -- or any of us -- does not end at the fingertips. To explain the man's locomotion, says Bateson, you need the street, the stick, and the man; and the stick becomes irrelevant only when he sits down and puts it aside.

  The same argument applies to the man and the axe, Each stroke is modified according to the shape of the cut left by the previous stroke. There is no "self" "in here" cutting down a tree "out there"; rather, a relationship is occurring, a systemic circuit, a Mind. The whole situation is alive, not just the man, and this life is immanent in the circuit, not transcendent. The mind may indeed be the man's frontal lobes, but the larger issue is the Mind, which in this case is "tree-eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree." More precisely, what is going around the circuit is information: differences in tree/differences in retina/differences in movement of axe/differences in tree, and so on. This circuit of information is the Mind, the sell-corrective unit, now seen to be a network of pathways which is not bounded by purposive consciousness, or by the skin, but extended to include the pathways of all unconscious thought, and all the external pathways along which information can travel.

  Clearly then, large parts of the thinking network lie outside the body, and the statement that Mind is immanent in the body, which I made (more or less) in Chapter 6, can now be seen as a stepping stone to this discussion. Tacit knowing is not merely a physiological phenomenon. The study of alcoholism, schizophrenia, and deutero-learning has demonstrated that such phenomena are not matters of individual psychology, but of Minds, or systems, not bounded by the skin of the participants. "Self" is a false reification of a small part of a larger informational network, and we make the same mistake when we introduce such reification into the relationship between a man and the tree he is cutting or into any other interaction or understanding we might have with, or of, "inert" objects. In terms of a cybernetic interpretation of what constitutes an event, and a Mind, the world view
of Galileo and Newton is literally nonsensical, and the world view of the alchemists, which was posited on the absence of a subject/object distinction, profoundly correct.

  We are now ready to consider cybernetic epistemology as a formal system, which can be done by making explicit those items that can be regarded as criteria of Mind, or mental system. These are as follows:6

  (1) There is an aggregate of interacting parts, and the interaction is triggered by differences.

  (2) These differences are not ones of substance, space, or time. They are nonlocatable.

  (3) The differences and transforms (coded versions) of differences are transmitted along closed loops, or networks of pathways; the system is circular or more complex.

  (4) Many events within the system have their own sources of energy, that is, they are energized by the respondent part, not by impact from the part that triggers the response.

  Before discussing each of these points in turn, let us note that according to this set of criteria, a social or political structure, a river, and a forest are all alive, and possess Mind. Each has its own energy sources, forms an interlocking aggregate, acts self-correctively, and has the potential for runaway. Each knows how to grow, how to take care of itself, and should these processes fail, how to die. As Bateson says, all the phenomena we call thought, learning, evolution, ecology, and life occur only in systems that satisfy these criteria. Let us elaborate on them briefly.