The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  This, then, is the llberatory version of a planetary politics that is congruent with the epistemology of Batesonian holism. It is my hope that the social and political developments of the next century move us closer to such a world. However, as indicated earlier, things are not that simple, because a number of Bateson's concepts are double-edged. I do not mean to suggest that consciousness by itself makes history (there is no consciousness by itself!), but that the two form a gestalt, and that Batesonian holism is potentially congruent with political configurations less benevolent than the one outlined above. In fact, should political developments make ideological use of holistic concepts, and wind up emphasizing certain aspects of these as opposed to others, we could be victimized by a rather grim twist: the specter of holistic consciousness as the agent of even more alienation, more reification, than we have at present. This possibility merits further investigation.

  The original context of Batesonian holism was hardly (in Theodore Roszak's phrase) the "Taoist anarchy" sketched above, but the rigid hierarchical society of the British aristocracy. We have seen that most of Bateson's scientific concepts were adumbrated in the work of his father; and in his exposition of William Bateson's work, William Coleman correctly identifies the ingrained political conservatism that characterized the context of that work.22 The England of the late nineteenth century was in the grip of a profound pessimism: a disenchantment with utilitarianism, democracy, and parliamentary politics. The glittering promise of Crystal Palace (1851) had not materialized, and the pervading mood was one of civilization in collapse. The intelligentsia and the upper classes reacted by returning to traditional values, notably aesthetic sensibility, intuitionism, and an organic conception of society. These three traditional conservative themes, says Coleman, were central to William Bateson's thought. His emphasis was on the genius, the exceptional person, whose developmnt would never be encouraged in an egalitarian society. William Bateson's interest was in vision and inspiration, not in ambition and calculating reason, hence his revealing remark at the end of the Great War: "We may have made the world safe for democracy, but we have made it unsafe for anything else." As Coleman notes, he saw the world of commerce and democracy as a veritable dark age. For the elder Bateson, the natural hierarchy of function in the biological world validated class society, and he held that correct political solutions were those that managed to preserve inequality, to coordinate the different and unequal parts of society in the performance of their proper job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Finally, we come to the issue of Learning III, the "awakening to ecstasy," or sense of merger with a "vast ecology." As noted above, Bateson does not explicitly advocate meditation, yoga, alchemy, or whatever; his is a self-conscious mimesis that does not dispense with cognitive knowing. But in lieu of such practices, how is the insight or breakthrough of Learning III to be achieved? The alcoholic hits bottom; the "trans-contextual individual" agonizes over his double bind until, in a supportive environment, he finally makes it to creativity. But since Bateson himself argues that "no amount of rigorous discourse of a given logical type can 'explain' phenomena of a higher type,"39 it is very likely that the deliberate triggering of Learning III can take place only by way of traditional archaic practices. In other words, the intellect generates yearnings for a larger type ot mental experience, a wider consciousness, but it can only take you to the edge of such an experience. The actual perception of subject/object merger, of the world as being totally alive and sensuous -- in short, the "God-realization" -- is a purely visceral event. If Bateson is not advocating traditional practices, it is unclear how anyone can have this insight; an
d if he is advocating them, then Learning III is going to be fraught with the same sorts of political problems that these practices typically bring in their wake.

  What are these problems? The major one is that of transference, blind devotion to the guru or teacher, which seems almost inevitably to accompany the experience of "having one's mind blown." In all such practices, the techniques of meditation, breathing, chanting, and so forth serve to reduce external sensory input so that ego-consciousness starts to take itself as its own object of scrutiny. To use cybernetic terminology, the program (Learning II) goes into overload; it begins to appear to itself as an arbitrary construct. The individual loses his or her sense of reality, which now takes on a kind of floating quality. Terror may set in, for the ego perceives itself as dying and cannot imagine what will survive its dissolution. It is at this point that the guru, or teacher, becomes crucial, because his existence is living proof that something does in fact survive. His goal is to help the novice negotiate the Abyss, the gap between mind and Mind. Finally, the wall between conscious and unconscious breaks down completely, and the sensation is that of being swamped, of being carried along in an ocean of God-realization. This perception is experienced as one of immense clarity, of suddenly waking up to what one feels is fully real. If the process is successful, the student who makes it to Learning III continues to experience a gap between mind and Mind, but now without terror or ecstasy. Instead, he sees ego-consciousness as a tool: useful, but hardly anything to stake one's life on. He knows that reality is much larger than this; that, as Laing put it, the ego can and should be the servant of the divine rather than its betrayer.