Los dos acontecimientos más importantes de la historia del siglo XX, según Gregory Bateson

STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, EVOLUTION AND EPISTEMOLOGY

Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

From Versailles to Cybernetics [1]

I have to talk about recent history as it appears to me in my generation and to you in yours and, as I flew in this morning, words began to echo in my mind. These were phrases more thunderous than any I might be able to compose. One of these groups of words was, “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Another was the statement of Joyce that “history is that nightmare from which there is no awakening.” Another was, “The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children even to the third and fourth generation of those that hate me.” And lastly, not so immediately relevant, but still I think relevant to the problem of social mechanism, “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.”

We are talking about serious things. I call this lecture “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” naming the two historic events of the twentieth century. The word “cybernetics” is familiar, is it not? But how many of you know what happened at Versailles in 1919?

The question is, What is going to count as important in the history of the last sixty years? I am sixty-two, and, as I began to think about what I have seen of history in my lifetime, it seemed to me that I had really only seen two moments that would rate as really important from an anthropologist’s point of view. One was the events leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, and the other was the cybernetic breakthrough. You may be surprised or shocked that I have not mentioned the A-bomb, or even World War II. I have not mentioned the spread of the automobile, nor of the radio and TV, nor many other things that have occurred in the last sixty years.

Let me state my criterion of historical importance:

Mammals in general, and we among them, care extremely, not about episodes, but about the patterns of their relationships. When you open the refrigerator door and the cat comes up and makes certain sounds, she is not talking about liver or milk, though you may know very well that that is what she wants. You may be able to guess correctly and give her that—if there is any in the refrigerator. What she actually says is something about the relationship between herself and you. If you tras*lated her message into words, it would be something like, “dependency, dependency, dependency.” She is talking, in fact, about a rather abstract pattern within a relationship. From that assertion of a pattern, you are expected to go from the general to the specific—to deduce “milk” or “liver.”

This is crucial. This is what mammals are about. They are concerned with patterns of relationship, with where they stand in love, hate, respect, dependency, trust, and similar abstractions, vis-à-vis somebody else. This is where it hurts us to be put in the wrong. If we trust and find that that which we have trusted was untrustworthy; or if we distrust, and find that that which we distrusted was in fact trustworthy, we feel bad. The pain that human beings and all other mammals can suffer from this type of error is extreme. If, therefore, we really want to know what are the significant points in history, we have to ask which are the moments in history when attitudes were changed. These are the moments when people are hurt because of their former “values.”

Think of the house thermostat in your home. The weather changes outdoors, the temperature of the room falls, the thermometer switch in the living room goes through its business and switches on the furnace; and the furnace warms the room and when the room is hot, the thermometer switch turns it off again. The system is what is called a homeostatic circuit or a servocircuit. But there is also a little box in the living room on the wall by which you set the thermostat. If the house has been too cold for the last week, you must move it up from its present setting to make the system now oscillate around a new level. No amount of weather, heat or cold or whatever, will change that setting, which is called the “bias” of the system. The temperature of the house will oscillate, it will get hotter and cooler according to various circumstances, but the setting of the mechanism will not be changed by those changes. But when you go and you move that bias, you will change what we may call the “attitude” of the system.

Similarly, the important question about history is: Has the bias or setting been changed? The episodic working out of events under a single stationary setting is really trivial. It is with this thought in mind that I have said that the two most important historic events in my life were the Treaty of Versailles and the discovery of cybernetics.

Most of you probably hardly know how the Treaty of Versailles came into being. The story is very simple. World War I dragged on and on; the Germans were rather obviously losing. At this point, George Creel, a public relations man—and I want you not to forget that this man was a granddaddy of modern public relations—had an idea: the idea was that maybe the Germans would surrender if we offered them soft armistice terms. He therefore drew up a set of soft terms, according to which there would be no punitive measures. These terms were drawn up in fourteen points. These Fourteen Points he passed on to President Wilson. If you are going to deceive somebody, you had better get an honest man to carry the message. President Wilson was an almost pathologically honest man and a humanitarian. He elaborated the points in a number of speeches: there were to be “no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages…” and so on. And the Germans surrendered.

We, British and Americans specially the British—continued of course to blockade Germany because we didn’t want them to get uppity before the Treaty was signed. So, for another year, they continued to starve.

The Peace Conference has been vividly described by Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

The Treaty was finally drawn up by four men: Clemenceau, “the tiger,” who wanted to crush Germany; Lloyd George, who felt it would be politically expedient to get a lot of reparations out of Germany, and some revenge; and Wilson, who had to be bamboozled along. Whenever Wilson would wonder about those Fourteen Points of his, they took him out into the war cemeteries and made him feel ashamed of not being angry with the Germans. Who was the other? Orlando was the other, an Italian.

This was one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization. A most extraordinary event which led fairly directly and inevitably into World War II. It also led (and this is perhaps more interesting than the fact of its leading to World War II) to the total demoralization of German politics. If you promise your boy something, and renege on him, framing the whole thing on a high ethical plane, you will probably find that not only is he very angry with you, but that his jovenlandesal attitudes deteriorate as long as he feels the unfair whiplash of what you are doing to him. It’s not only that World War II was the appropriate response of a nation which had been treated in this particular way; what is more important is the fact that the demoralization of that nation was expectable from this sort of treatment. From the demoralization of Germany, we, too, became demoralized. This is why I say that the Treaty of Versailles was an attitudinal turning point.

I imagine that we have another couple of generations of aftereffects from that particular sellout to work through. We are, in fact, like members of the house of Atreus in Greek tragedy. First there was Thyestes’ adultery, then Atreus’ killing of Thyestes’ three children, whom he served to Thyestes at a peace-making antiestéticast. Then the murder of Atreus’ son, Agamemnon, by Thyestes’ son, Aegistheus; and finally the murder of Aegistheus and Clytemnestra by Orestes.

It goes on and on. The tragedy of oscillating and self-propagating distrust, hate, and destruction down the generations.

I want you to imagine that you come into the middle of one of these sequences of tragedy. How is it for the middle generation of the house of Atreus? They are living in a crazy universe. From the point of view of the people who started the mess, it’s not so crazy; they know what happened and how they got there. But the people down the line, who were not there at the beginning, find themselves living in a crazy universe, and find themselves crazy, precisely because they do not know how they got that way.

To take a dose of LSD is all right, and you will have the experience of being more or less crazy, but this will make quite good sense because you know you took the dose of LSD. If, on the other hand, you took the LSD by accident, and then find yourself going crazy, not knowing how you got there, this is a terrifying and horrible experience. This is a much more serious and terrible experience, very different from the trip which you can enjoy if you know you took the LSD.

Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level), to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.

We older ones know how we got here. I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, “By golly, they’re going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace,” or something of the kind. And I can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn’t printable. So I know more or less how we got here.

But from your point of view, we are absolutely crazy, and you don’t know what sort of historic event led to this craziness. “The fathers have eaten bitter fruit and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” It’s all very well for the fathers, they know what they ate. The children don’t know what was eaten.

Let us consider what is to be expected of people in the aftermath of a major deception. Previous to World War 1, it was generally assumed that compromise and a little hypocrisy are a very important ingredient in the ordinary comfortableness of life. If you read Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited, for example, you will see what I miccionan. All the principal characters in the novel have got themselves into an awful mess: some are due to be executed, and others are due for public scandal, and the religious system of the nation is threatened with collapse. These disasters and tangles are smoothed out by Mrs. Ydgrun (or, as we would say, “Mrs. Grundy”), the guardian of Erewhonian jovenlandesals. She carefully reconstructs history, like a jigsaw puzzle, so that nobody is really hurt and nobody is disgraced—still less is anybody executed. This was a very comfortable philosophy. A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oil the wheels of social life.

But after the great deception, this philosophy is untenable. You are perfectly correct that something is wrong; and that the something wrong is of the nature of a deceit and a hypocrisy. You live in the midst of corruption.

Of course, your natural responses are puritanical. Not sensual puritanism, because it is not a sensual deceit that lies in the background. But an extreme puritanism against compromise, a puritanism against hypocrisy, and this ends up as a reduction of life to little pieces. It is the big integrated structures of life that seem to have carried the lunacy, and so you try to focus down on the smallest things. “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” The general good smells of hypocrisy to the rising generation.

I don’t doubt that if you asked George Creel to justify the Fourteen Points, he would urge the general good. It is possible that that little operation of his saved a few thousand American lives in 1918. I don’t know how many it cost in World War II, and since in Korea and Vietnam. I recall that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified by the general good and saving American lives. There was a lot of talk about “unconditional surrender,” perhaps because we could not trust ourselves to honor a conditional armistice. Was the fate of Hiroshima determined at Versailles?

Now I want to talk about the other significant historical event which has happened in my lifetime, approximately in 1946-47. This was the growing together of a number of ideas which had developed in different places during World War II. We may call the aggregate of these ideas cybernetics, or communication theory, or information theory, or systems theory. The ideas were generated in many places: in Vienna by Bertalanffy, in Harvard by Wiener, in Princeton by von Neumann, in Bell Telephone labs by Shannon, in Cambridge by Raik, and so on. All these separate developments in different intellectual centers dealt with communicational problems, especially with the problem of what sort of a thing is an organized system.

You will notice that everything I said about history and about Versailles is a discussion of organized systems and their properties. Now I want to say that we are developing a certain amount of rigorous scientific understanding of these very mysterious organized systems. Our knowledge today is way ahead of anything that George Creel could have said. He was an applied scientist before the science was ripe to be applied.

One of the roots of cybernetics goes back to Whitehead and Russell and what is called the Theory of Logical Types. In principle, the name is not the thing named, and the name of the name is not the name, and so on. In terms of this powerful theory, a message about war is not part of the war.

Let me put it this way: the message “Let’s play chess” is not a move in the game of chess. It is a message in a more abstract language than the language of the game on the board. The message “Let’s make peace on such and such terms” is not within the same ethical system as the deceits and tricks of battle. They say that all is fair in love and war, and that may be true within love and war, but outside and about love and war, the ethics are a little different. Men have felt for centuries that treachery in a truce or peace-making is worse than trickery in battle. Today this ethical principle receives rigorous theoretical and scientific support. The ethics can now be looked at with formality, rigor, logic, mathematics, and all that, and stands on a different sort of basis from mere invocational preachments. We do not have to feel our way; we can sometimes know right from wrong.

I included cybernetics as the second historic event of importance in my lifetime because I have at least a dim hope that we can bring ourselves to use this new understanding with some honesty. If we understand a little bit of what were doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves.

Cybernetics is, at any rate, a contribution to change—not simply a change in attitude, but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is.

The stance that I have taken in choosing what is important in history—saying that the important things are the moments at which attitude is determined, the moments at which the bias of the thermostat is changed—this stance is derived directly from cybernetics. These are thoughts shaped by events from 1946 and after.

But pigs do not go around ready-roasted. We now have a lot of cybernetics, a lot of games theory, and the beginnings of understanding of complex systems. But any understanding can be used in destructive ways.

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. But most of such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible—usually for cybernetic reasons.

Cybernetics has integrity within itself, to help us to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin.

For example, the state departments of several nations are today using games theory, backed up by computers, as a way of deciding international policy. They identify first what seem to be the rules of the game of international interaction; they then consider the distribution of strength, weapons, strategic points, grievances, etc., over the geography and the identified nations. They then ask the computers to compute what should be our next move to minimize the chances of our losing the game. The computer then cranks and heaves and gives an answer, and there is some temptation to obey the computer. After all, if you ***ow the computer you are a little less responsible than if you made up your own mind.

But if you do what the computer advises, you assert by that move that you support the rules of the game which you fed into the computer. You have affirmed the rules of that game.

No doubt nations of the other side also have computers and are playing similar games, and are affirming the rules of the game that they are feeding to their computers. The result is a system in which the rules of international interaction become more and more rigid.

I submit to you that what is wrong with the international field is that the rules need changing. The question is not what is the best thing to do within the rules as they are at the moment. The question is how can we get away from the rules within which we have been operating for the last ten or twenty years, or since the Treaty of Versailles. The problem is to change the rules, and insofar as we let our cybernetic inventions—the computers—lead us into more and more rigid situations, we shall in fact be maltreating and abusing the first hopeful advance since 1918.

And, of course, there are other dangers latent in cybernetics and many of these are still unidentified. We do not know, for example, what effects may ***ow from the computerization of all government dossiers.

But this much is sure, that there is also latent in cybernetics the means of achieving a new and perhaps more human outlook, a means of changing our philosophy of control and a means of seeing our own ***ies in wider perspective.

Pathologies of Epistemology [2]

First, I would like you to join me in a little experiment. Let me ask you for a show of hands. How many of you will agree that you see me? I see a number of hands—so I guess insanity loves company. Of course, you don’t “really” see me. What you “see” is a bunch of pieces of information about me, which you synthesize into a picture image of me. You make that image. It’s that simple.

The proposition “I see you” or “You see me” is a proposition which contains within it what I am calling “epistemology.” It contains within it assumptions about how we get information, what sort of stuff information is, and so forth. When you say you “see” me and put up your hand in an innocent way, you are, in fact, agreeing to certain propositions about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it.

I shall argue that many of these propositions happen to be false, even though we all share them. In the case of such epistemological propositions, error is not easily detected and is not very quickly punished. You and I are able to get along in the world and fly to Hawaii and read papers on psychiatry and find our places around these tables and in general function reasonably like human beings in spite of very deep error. The erroneous premises, in fact, work.

On the other hand, the premises work only up to a certain limit, and, at some stage or under certain circumstances, if you are carrying serious epistemological errors, you will find that they do not work any more. At this point you discover to your horror that it is exceedingly difficult to get rid of the error, that it’s sticky. It is as if you had touched honey. As with honey, the falsification gets around; and each thing you try to wipe it off on gets sticky, and your hands still remain sticky.

Long ago I knew intellectually, and you, no doubt, all know intellectually, that you do not see me; but I did not really encounter this truth until I went through the Adelbert Ames experiments and encountered circumstances under which my epistemological error led to errors of action.

Let me describe a typical Ames experiment with a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a book of matches. The Lucky Strikes are placed about three feet from the subject of experiment supported on a spike above the table and the matches are on a similar spike six feet from the subject. Ames had the subject look at the table and say how big the objects are and where they are. The subject will agree that they are where they are, and that they are as big as they are, and there is no apparent epistemological error. Ames then says, “I want you to lean down and look through this plank here.” The plank stands vertically at the end of the table. It is just a piece of wood with a round hole in it, and you look through the hole. Now, of course, you have lost use of one eye, and you have been brought down so that you no longer have a crow’s-eye view. But you still see the Lucky Strikes where they are and of the size which they are. Ames then said, “Why don’t you get a parallax effect by sliding the plank?” You slide the plank sideways and suddenly your image changes. You see a little tiny book of matches about half the size of the original and placed three feet from you; while the pack of Lucky Strikes appears to be twice its original size, and is now six feet away.

This effect is accomplished very simply. When you slid the plank, you in fact operated a lever under the table which you had not seen. The lever reversed the parallax effect; that is, the lever caused the thing which was closer to you to travel with you, and that which was far from you to get left behind.

Your mind has been trained or genotypically determined —and there is much evidence in favor of training—to do the mathematics necessary to use parallax to create an image in depth. It performs this antiestéticat without volition and without your consciousness. You cannot control it.

I want to use this example as a paradigm of the sort of error that I intend to talk about. The case is simple; it has experimental backing; it illustrates the intangible nature of epistemological error and the difficulty of changing epistemological habit.

In my everyday thinking, I see you, even though I know intellectually that I don’t. Since about 1943 when I saw the experiment, I have worked to practice living in the world of truth instead of the world of epistemological fantasy; but I don’t think I’ve succeeded. Insanity, after all, takes psycho-therapy to change it, or some very great new experience. Just one experience which ends in the laboratory is insufficient.

This morning, when we were discussing Dr. Jung’s paper, I raised the question which nobody was willing to treat seriously, perhaps because my tone of voice encouraged them to smile. The question was whether there are true ideologies. We find that different peoples of the world have different ideologies, different epistemologies, different ideas of the relationship between man and nature, different ideas about the nature of man himself, the nature of his knowledge, his feelings, and his will. But if there were a truth about these matters, then only those social groups which thought according to that truth could reasonably be stable. And if no culture in the world thinks according to that truth, then there would be no stable culture.

Notice again that we face the question of how long it takes to come up against trouble. Epistemological error is often reinforced and therefore self-validating. You can get along all right in spite of the fact that you entertain at rather deep levels of the mind premises which are simply false.

I think perhaps the most interesting—though still incomplete—scientific discovery of the twentieth century is the discovery of the nature of mind. Let me outline some of the ideas which have contributed to this discovery. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, states that the primary act of aesthetic judgment is selection of a fact. There are, in a sense, no facts in nature; or if you like, there are an infinite number of potential facts in nature, out of which the judgment selects a few which become truly facts by that act of selection. Now, put beside that idea of Kant Jung’s insight in Seven Sermons to the Dead, a strange document in which he points out that there are two worlds of explanation or worlds of understanding, the pleroma and the creatura. In the pleroma there are only forces and impacts. In the creatura, there is difference. In other words, the pleroma is the world of the hard sciences, while the creatura is the world of communication and organization. A difference cannot be localized. There is a difference between the tonalidad of this desk and the tonalidad of this pad. But that difference is not in the pad, it is not in the desk, and I cannot pinch it between them. The difference is not in the space between them. In a word, a difference is an idea.

The world of creatura is that world of explanation in which effects are brought about by ideas, essentially by differences.

If now we put Kant’s insight together with that of Jung, we create a philosophy which asserts that there is an infinite number of differences in this piece of chalk but that only a few of these differences make a difference. This is the epistemological base for information theory. The unit of information is difference. In fact, the unit of psychological input is difference.

The whole energy structure of the pleroma—the forces and impacts of the hard sciences—have flown out the window, so far as explanation within creatura is concerned. After all, zero differs from one, and zero therefore can be a cause, which is not admissible in hard science. The letter which you did not write can precipitate an angry reply, because zero can be one-half of the necessary bit of information. Even sameness can be a cause, because sameness differs from difference.

These strange relations obtain because we organisms (and many of the machines that we make) happen to be able to store energy. We happen to have the necessary circuit structure so that our energy expenditure can be an inverse function of energy input. If you kick a stone, it moves with energy which it got from your kick. If you kick a dog, it moves with the energy which it got from its metabolism. An amoeba will, for a considerable period of time, move more when it is hungry. Its energy expenditure is an inverse function of energy input.

These strange creatural effects (which do not occur in the pleroma) depend also upon circuit structure, and a circuit is a closed pathway (or network of pathways) along which differences (or tras*forms of differences) are tras*mitted.

Suddenly, in the last twenty years, these notions have come together to give us a broad conception of the world in which we live—a new way of thinking about what a mind is. Let me list what seem to me to be those essential minimal characteristics of a system, which I will accept as characteristics of mind:

The system shall operate with and upon differences.

The system shall consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and tras*forms of differences shall be tras*mitted. (What is tras*mitted on a neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference.)

Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.

The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies trial and error.

Now, these minimal characteristics of mind are generated whenever and wherever the appropriate circuit structure of causal loops exists. Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs.

But that complexity occurs in a great many other places besides the inside of my head and yours. We’ll come later to the question of whether a man or a computer has a mind. For the moment, let me say that a redwood forest or a coral reef with its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure. The energy for the responses of every organism is supplied from its metabolism, and the total system acts self-correctively in various ways. A human society is like this with closed loops of causation. Every human organization shows both the self-corrective characteristic and has the potentiality for runaway.

Now, let us consider for a moment the question of whether a computer thinks. I would state that it does not. What “thinks” and engages in “trial and error” is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer, and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is tras*mitted. They are not boundaries of the thinking system. What thinks is the total system which engages in trial and error, which is man plus environment.

But if you accept self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought or mental process, then obviously there is “thought” going on inside the man at the autonomic level to maintain various internal variables. And similarly, the computer, if it controls its internal temperature, is doing some simple thinking within itself.

Now we begin to see some of the epistemological fallacies of Occidental civilization. In accordance with the general climate of thinking in mid-nineteenth-century England, Darwin proposed a theory of natural selection and evolution in which the unit of survival was either the family line or the species or subspecies or something of the sort. But today it is quite obvious that this is not the unit of survival in the real biological world. The unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.

Our interpretation of Darwin's great vision is altered. Gaia draws attention to the fallibility of the concept of adaptation. It is no longer sufficient to say that "organisms better adapted than others are more likely to leave offspring." It is necessary to add that the growth of an organism affects its physical and chemical environment; the evolution of the species and the evolution of the rocks, therefore, are tightly coupled as a single, indivisible process.
-- The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, by James Lovelock

If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind.

Formerly we thought of a hierarchy of taxa—individual, family line, subspecies, species, etc.—as units of survival. We now see a different hierarchy of units—gene-in-organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits.

Let us now consider what happens when you make the epistemological error of choosing the wrong unit: you end up with the species versus the other species around it or versus the environment in which it operates. Man against nature. You end up, in fact, with Kaneohe Bay polluted, Lake Erie a slimy green mess, and “Let’s build bigger atom bombs to kill off the next-door neighbors.” There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. It branches out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life, and everything gets into a rather peculiar mess. When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise “What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,” you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.

You and I are so deeply acculturated to the idea of “self” and organization and species that it is hard to believe that man might view his relations with the environment in any other way than the way which I have rather unfairly blamed upon the nineteenth-century evolutionists. So I must say a few words about the history of all this.

Anthropologically, it would seem from what we know of the early material, that man in society took clues from the natural world around him and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which he lived. That is, he identified with or empathized with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organization and his own theories of his own psychology. This was what is called “totemism.”

In a way, it was all nonsense, but it made more sense than most of what we do today, because the natural world around us really has this general systemic structure and therefore is an appropriate source of metaphor to enable man to understand himself in his social organization.

The next step, seemingly, was to reverse the process and to take clues from himself and apply these to the natural world around him. This was “animism,” extending the notion of personality or mind to mountains, rivers, forests, and such things. This was still not a bad idea in many ways. But the next step was to separate the notion of mind from the natural world, and then you get the notion of gods.

But when you separate mind from the structure in which it is immanent, such as human relationship, the human society, or the ecosystem, you thereby embark, I believe, on fundamental error, which in the end will surely hurt you.

Struggle may be good for your soul up to the moment when to win the battle is easy. When you have an effective enough technology so that you can really act upon your epistemological errors and can create havoc in the world in which you live, then the error is lethal. Epistemological error is all right, it’s fine, up to the point at which you create around yourself a universe in which that error becomes immanent in monstrous changes of the universe that you have created and now try to live in.

You see, we’re not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages—the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We’re talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity, as you all professionally know. This is precisely why you’re here. These circuits and balances of nature can only too easily get out of kilter, and they inevitably get out of kilter when certain basic errors of our thought become reinforced by thousands of cultural details.

I don’t know how many people today really believe that there is an overall mind separate from the body, separate from the society, and separate from nature. But for those of you who would say that that is all “superstition,” I am prepared to wager that I can demonstrate with them in a few minutes that the habits and ways of thinking that went with those superstitions are still in their heads and still determine a large part of their thoughts. The idea that you can see me still governs your thought and action in spite of the fact that you may know intellectually that it is not so. In the same way we are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong. Let us consider some of the implications of what I have been saying.

Let us look at how the basic notions are reinforced and expressed in all sorts of detail of how we behave. The very fact that I am monologuing to you—this is a norm of our academic subculture, but the idea that I can teach you, unilaterally, is derivative from the premise that the mind controls the body. And whenever a psychotherapist lapses into unilateral therapy, he is obeying the same premise. I, in fact, standing up in front of you, am performing a subversive act by reinforcing in your minds a piece of thinking which is really nonsense. We all do it all the time because it’s built into the detail of our behavior. Notice how I stand while you sit.

The same thinking leads, of course, to theories of control and to theories of power. In that universe, if you do not get what you want, you will blame somebody and establish either a jail or a mental hospital, according to taste, and you will pop them in it if you can identify them. If you cannot identify them, you will say, “It’s the system.” This is roughly where our kids are nowadays, blaming the establishment, but you know the establishments aren’t to blame. They are part of the same error, too.

Then, of course, there is the question of weapons. If you believe in that unilateral world and you think that the other people believe in that world (and you’re probably right; they do), then, of course, the thing is to get weapons, hit them hard, and “control” them.

They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is nonsense. What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man “in power” depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he “causes” things to happen. It is not possible for Goebbels to control the public opinion of Germany because in order to do so he must have spies or legmen or public opinion polls to tell him what the Germans are thinking. He must then trim what he says to this information; and then again find out how they are responding. It is an interaction, and not a lineal situation.

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

Last, there is the question of urgency. It is clear now to many people that there are many catastrophic dangers which have grown out of the Occidental errors of epistemology. These range from insecticides to pollution, to atomic fallout, to the possibility of melting the Antarctic ice cap. Above all, our fantastic compulsion to save individual lives has created the possibility of world famine in the immediate future.

Perhaps we have an even chance of getting through the next twenty years with no disaster more serious than the mere destruction of a nation or group of nations.

I believe that this massive aggregation of threats to man and his ecological systems arises out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels.

As therapists, clearly we have a duty.

First, to achieve clarity in ourselves; and then to look for every sign of clarity in others and to implement them and reinforce them in whatever is sane in them.

And there are patches of sanity still surviving in the world. Much of Oriental philosophy is more sane than anything the West has produced, and some of the inarticulate efforts of our own young people are more sane than the conventions of the establishment.

The Roots of Ecological Crisis [3]

Summary: Other testimony has been presented regarding bills to deal with particular problems of pollution and environmental degradation in Hawaii. It is hoped that the proposed Office of Environmental Quality Control and the Environmental Center at the University of Hawaii will go beyond this ad hoc approach and will study the more basic causes of the current rash of environmental troubles.

The present testimony argues that these basic causes lie in the combined action of (a) technological advance; (b) population increase; and (c) conventional (but wrong) ideas about the nature of man and his relation to the environment.

It is concluded that the next five to ten years will be a period like the Federalist period in United States history in which the whole philosophy of government, education, and technology must be debated.

We submit:

(1) That all ad hoc measures leave uncorrected the deeper causes of the trouble and, worse, usually permit those causes to grow stronger and become compounded. In medicine, to relieve the symptoms without curing the disease is wise and sufficient if and only if either the disease is surely terminal or will cure itself.

The history of DDT illustrates the fundamental fallacy of ad hoc measures. When it was invented and first put to use, it was itself an ad hoc measure. It was discovered in 1939 that the stuff was an insecticide (and the discoverer got a Nobel Prize). Insecticides were “needed” (a) to increase agricultural products; and (b) to save people, especially troops overseas, from malaria. In other words, DDT was a symptomatic cure for troubles connected with the increase of population.

By 1950, it was known to scientists that DDT was seriously toxic to many other animals (Rachel Carson’s popular book Silent Spring was published in 1962).

But in the meanwhile, (a) there was a vast industrial commitment to DDT manufacture; (b) the insects at which DDT was directed were becoming immune; (c) the animals which normally ate those insects were being exterminated; (d) the population of the world was permitted by DDT to increase.

In other words, the world became addicted to what was once an ad hoc measure and is now known to be a major danger. Finally in 1970, we begin to prohibit or control this danger. And we still do not know, for example, whether the human species on its present diet can surely survive the DDT which is already circulating in the world and will be there for the next twenty years even if its use is immediately and totally discontinued.

It is now reasonably certain (since the discovery of significant amounts of DDT in the penguins of Antarctica) that all the fish-eating birds as well as the land-going carnivorous birds and those which formerly ate insect pests are doomed. It is probable that all the carnivorous fish [4] will soon contain too much DDT for human consumption and may themselves become extinct. It is possible that the earthworms, at least in forests and other sprayed areas, will vanish—with what effect upon the forests is anybody’s guess. The plankton of the high seas (upon which the entire planetary ecology depends) is believed to be still unaffected.

That is the story of one blind application of an ad hoc measure; and the story can be repeated for a dozen other inventions.

(2) That the proposed combination of agencies in State Government and in the University should address itself to diagnosing, understanding and, if possible, suggesting remedies for the wider processes of social and environmental degradation in the world and should attempt to define Hawaii’s policy in view of these processes.

(3) That all of the many current threats to man’s survival are traceable to three root causes:

technological progress

population increase

certain errors in the thinking and attitudes of Occidental culture. Our “values” are wrong.

We believe that all three of these fundamental factors are necessary conditions for the destruction of our world. In other words, we optimistically believe that the correction of any one of them would save us.

(4) That these fundamental factors certainly interact. The increase of population spurs technological progress and creates that anxiety which sets us against our environment as an enemy; while technology both facilitates increase of population and reinforces our arrogance, or “hubris,” vis-à-vis the natural environment.

The attached diagram illustrates the interconnections. It will be noted that in this diagram each corner is clockwise, denoting that each is by itself a self-promoting (or, as the scientists say, “autocatalytic”) phenomenon: the bigger the population, the faster it grows; the more technology we have, the faster the rate of new invention; and the more we believe in our “power” over an enemy environment, the more “power” we seem to have and the more spiteful the environment seems to be.

Similarly the pairs of corners are clockwise connected to make three self-promoting subsystems.

The problem facing the world and Hawaii is simply how to introduce some anticlockwise processes into this system.

How to do this should be a major problem for the proposed State Office of Environmental Quality Control and the University Environmental Center.



Fig. 1 The Dynamics of Ecological Crisis

It appears, at present, that the only possible entry point for reversal of the process is the conventional attitudes toward the environment.

(5) That further technological progress cannot now be prevented but that it can possibly be steered in appropriate directions, to be explored by the proposed offices.

(6) That the population explosion is the single most important problem facing the world today. As long as population continues to increase, we must expect the continuous creation of new threats to survival, perhaps at a rate of one per year, until we reach the ultimate condition of famine (which Hawaii is in no position to face). We offer no solution here to the population explosion, but we note that every solution which we can imagine is made difficult or impossible by the thinking and attitudes of Occidental culture.

(7) That the very first requirement for ecological stability is a balance between the rates of birth and death. For better or for worse, we have tampered with the death rate, especially by controlling the major epidemic diseases and the death of infants. Always, in any living (i.e., ecological) system, every increasing imbalance will generate its own limiting factors as side effects of the increasing imbalance. In the present instance, we begin to know some of Nature’s ways of correcting the imbalance—smog, pollution, DDT poisoning, industrial wastes, famine, atomic fallout, and war. But the imbalance has gone so far that we cannot trust Nature not to overcorrect.

(8) That the ideas which dominate our civilization at the present time date in their most virulent form from the Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as:

(a) It’s us against the environment.

(b) It’s us against other men.

It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

(c) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”

(d) Economic determinism is common sense.

(e) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievements of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

(9) That other attitudes and premises—other systems of human “values”—have governed man’s relation to his environment and his fellow man in other civilizations and at other times. Notably, the ancient Hawaiian civilization and the Hawaiians of today are unconcerned about Occidental “hubris.” In other words, our way is not the only possible human way. It is conceivably changeable.

(10) That change in our thinking has already begun—among scientists and philosophers, and among young people. But it is not only long-haired professors and long-haired youth who are changing their ways of thought. There are also many thousands of businessmen and even legislators who wish they could change but feel that it would be unsafe or not “common sense” to do so. The changes will continue as inevitably as technological progress.

(11) That these changes in thought will impact upon our government, economic structure, educational philosophy, and military stance because the old premises are deeply built into all these sides of our society.

(12) That nobody can predict what new patterns will emerge from these drastic changes. We hope that the period of change may be characterized by wisdom, rather than by either violence or the antiestéticar of violence. Indeed, the ultimate goal of this bill is to make such a tras*ition possible.

(13) We conclude that the next five to ten years will be a period comparable to the Federalist period in United States history. New philosophies of government, education, and technology must be debated both inside the government and in the public press, and especially among leading citizens. The University of Hawaii and the State Government could take a lead in these debates.

7.4 Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization [5]

First, it will be convenient to have, not a specific or ultimate goal, but an abstract idea of what we might miccionan by ecological health. Such a general notion will both guide the collection of data and guide the evaluation of observed trends.

I suggest then that a healthy ecology of human civilization would be defined somewhat as ***ows:

A single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, open-ended for slow change of even basic (hard-programmed) characteristics.

We now proceed to consider some of the terms in this definition of systemic health and to relate them to conditions in the existing world.

“A High Civilization”

It appears that the man-environment system has certainly been progressively unstable since the introduction of metals, the wheel, and script. The deforestation of Europe and the man-made deserts of the Middle East and North Africa are evidence for this statement.

Civilizations have risen and fallen. A new technology for the exploitation of nature or a new technique for the exploitation of other men permits the rise of a civilization. But each civilization, as it reaches the limits of what can be exploited in that particular way, must eventually fall. The new invention gives elbow room or flexibility, but the using up of that flexibility is death.

Either man is too clever, in which case we are doomed, or he was not clever enough to limit his greed to courses which would not destroy the ongoing total system. I prefer the second hypothesis.

It becomes then necessary to work toward a definition of “high.”

(a) It would not be wise (even if possible) to return to the innocence of the Australian aborigines, the Eskimo, and the Bushmen. Such a return would involve loss of the wisdom which prompted the return and would only start the whole process over.

(b) A “high” civilization should therefore be presumed to have, on the technological side, whatever gadgets are necessary to promote, maintain (and even increase) wisdom of this general sort. This may well include computers and complex communication devices.

(c) A “high” civilization shall contain whatever is necessary (in educational and religious institutions) to maintain the necessary wisdom in the human population and to give physical, aesthetic, and creative satisfaction to people. There shall be a matching between the flexibility of people and that of the civilization. There shall be diversity in the civilization, not only to accommodate the genetic and experiential diversity of persons, but also to provide the flexibility and “preadaptation” necessary for unpredictable change.

(d) A “high” civilization shall be limited in its tras*actions with environment. It shall consume unreplaceable natural resources only as a means to facilitate necessary change (as a chrysalis in metamorphosis must live on its fat). For the rest, the metabolism of the civilization must depend upon the energy income which Spaceship Earth derives from the sun. In this connection, great technical advance is necessary. With present technology, it is probable that the world could only maintain a small fraction of its present human population, using as energy sources only photosynthesis, wind, tide, and water power.

Flexibility

To achieve, in a few generations, anything like the healthy system dreamed of above or even to get out of the grooves of fatal destiny in which our civilization is now caught, very great flexibility will be needed. It is right, therefore, to examine this concept with some care. Indeed, this is a crucial concept. We should evaluate not so much the values and trends of relevant variables as the relation between these trends and ecological flexibility.

***owing Ross Ashby, I assume that any biological system (e.g., the ecological environment, the human civilization, and the system which is to be the combination of these two) is describable in terms of interlinked variables, such that for any given variable there is an upper and a lower threshold of tolerance beyond which discomfort, pathology, and ultimately death must occur. Within these limits, the variable can move (and is moved) in order to achieve adaptation. When, under stress, a variable must take a value close to its upper or lower limit of tolerance, we shall say, borrowing a phrase from the youth culture, that the system is “up tight” in respect to this variable, or lacks “flexibility” in this respect.

But, because the variables are interlinked, to be up tight in respect to one variable commonly means that other variables cannot be changed without pushing the uptight variable. The loss of flexibility thus spreads through the system. In extreme cases, the system will only accept those changes which change the tolerance limits for the up-tight variable. For example, an overpopulated society looks for those changes (increased food, new roads, more houses, etc.) which will make the pathological and pathogenic conditions of overpopulation more comfortable. But these ad hoc changes are precisely those which in longer time can lead to more fundamental ecological pathology.

The pathologies of our time may broadly be said to be the accumulated results of this process—the eating up of flexibility in response to stresses of one sort or another (especially the stress of population pressure) and the refusal to bear with those byproducts of stress (e.g., epidemics and famine) which are the age-old correctives for population excess.

The ecological analyst faces a dilemma: on the one hand, if any of his recommendations are to be ***owed, he must first recommend whatever will give the system a positive budget of flexibility; and on the other hand, the people and institutions with which he must deal have a natural propensity to eat up all available flexibility. He must create flexibility and prevent the civilization from immediately expanding into it.

It ***ows that while the ecologist’s goal is to increase flexibility, and to this extent he is less tyrannical than most welfare planners (who tend to increase legislative control), he must also exert authority to preserve such flexibility as exists or can be created. At this point (as in the matter of unreplaceable natural resources), his recommendations must be tyrannical.

It has now been fifteen years since the Association first accepted as the concrete expression of the first principle of its action the ***owing formula: "It is the whole duty of man to learn by observation and experiment (which is systemized and definite experience), facts, principles and laws of ALL that IS; apply them to the acceleration of individual and universal evolution, by producing a more perfect mutual adaptation of the organism, and its environments; to teach to others the knowledge and experience thus acquired, for the purpose of improving the environment, and creating in humankind the disposition to act according to the concepts thus acquired."
-- A Call to the "Awakened" From "The Unseen and Unknown," for an Esoteric College, and For G.....R Dept. No. 1, by Vidya-Nyaika.

Social flexibility is a resource as precious as oil or titanium and must be budgeted in appropriate ways, to be spent (like fat) upon needed change. Broadly, since the “eating up” of flexibility is due to regenerative (i.e., escalating) sub-systems within the civilization, it is, in the end, these that must be controlled.

It is worth noting here that flexibility is to specialization as entropy is to negentropy. Flexibility may be defined as uncommited potentiality for change.

A telephone exchange exhibits maximum negentropy, maximum specialization, maximum information load, and maximum rigidity when so many of its circuits are in use that one more call would probably jam the system. It exhibits maximum entropy and maximum flexibility when none of its pathways are committed. (In. this particular example, the state of nonuse is not a committed state.)

It will be noted that the budget of flexibility is fractionating (not subtractive, as is a budget of money or energy).

The Distribution of Flexibility

Again ***owing Ashby, the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance.

The healthy system, dreamed of above, may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire. To maintain the ongoing truth of his basic premise (“I am on the wire”), he must be free to move from one position of instability to another, i.e., certain variables such as the position of his arms and the rate of movement of his arms must have great flexibility, which he uses to maintain the stability of other more fundamental and general characteristics. If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall.

In this connection, it is interesting to consider the ecology of our legal system. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to control by law those basic ethical and abstract principles upon which the social system depends. Indeed, historically, the United States was founded upon the premise of freedom of religion and freedom of thought -- the separation of Church and State being the classic example.

On the other hand, it is rather easy to write laws which shall fix the more episodic and superficial details of human behavior. In other words, as laws proliferate, our acrobat is progressively limited in his arm movement but is given free permission to fall off the wire.

Note, in passing, that the analogy of the acrobat can be apps at a higher level. During the period, when the acrobat is learning to move his arms in an appropriate way, it is necessary to have a safety net under him, i.e., precisely to give him the freedom to fall off the wire. Freedom and flexibility in regard to the most basic variables may be necessary during the process of learning and creating a new system by social change:

These are parades of order and disorder, which the ecological analyst and planner must weigh.

Be all that as it may, it is at least arguable that the trend of social change in the last one hundred years, especially in the USA, has been towards an inappropriate distribution of flexibility among the variables of the civilization. Those variables which should be flexible have been pegged, while those which should be comparatively steady, changing only slowly, have been cast loose.

But, even so, the law is surely not the appropriate method for stabilizing the fundamental variables. This should be done by the processes of education and character formation —those parts of our social system which are currently and expectably undergoing maximum perturbation.

The Flexibility of Ideas

A civilization runs on ideas of all degrees of generality. These ideas are present (some explicit, some implicit) in the actions and interactions of persons—some conscious and clearly defined, others vague, and many unconscious. Some of these ideas are widely shared, others differentiated in various subsystems of the society.

If a budget of flexibility is to be a central component of our understanding of how the environment-civilization works, and if a category of pathology is related to unwise spending of this budget, then surely the flexibility of ideas will play an important role in our theory and practice.

A few examples of basic cultural ideas will make the matter clear:

“The Golden Rule,” “An eye for an eye,” and “Justice.”

“The common sense of scarcity economics” versus “The common sense of affluence.”

“The name of that thing is `chair’," and many of the reifying premises of language.

“The survival of the fittest” versus “The survival of organism-plus-environment.” Premises of mass production, challenge, pride, etc.

The premises of tras*ference, ideas about how character is determined, theories of education, etc.

Patterns of personal relatedness, dominance, love, etc.

The ideas in a civilization are (like all other variables) interlinked, partly by some sort of psychologic and partly by consensus about the quasi-concrete effects of action.

It is characteristic of this complex network of determination of ideas (and actions) that particular links in the net are often weak but that any given idea or action is subject to multiple determination by many interwoven strands. We turn off the light when we go to bed, influenced partly by the economics of scarcity, partly by premises of tras*ference, partly by ideas of privacy, partly to reduce sensory input, etc.

This multiple determination is characteristic of all biological fields. Characteristically, every antiestéticature of the anatomy of an animal or plant and every detail of behavior is determined by a multitude of interacting factors at both the genetic and physiological levels; and, correspondingly, the processes of any ongoing ecosystem are the outcome of multiple determination.

Moreover, it is rather unusual to find that any antiestéticature of a biological system is at all directly determined by the need which it fulfills. Eating is governed by appetite, habit, and social convention rather than by hunger, and respiration is governed by CO2 excess rather than by oxygen lack. And so on.

In contrast, the products of human planners and engineers are constructed to meet specified needs in a much more direct manner, and are correspondingly less viable. The multiple causes of eating are likely to ensure the performance of this necessary act under a large variety of circumstances and stresses whereas, if eating were controlled only by hypoglycaemia, any disturbance of the single pathway of control would result in death. Essential biological functions are not controlled by lethal variables, and planners will do well to note this fact.

Against this complex background, it is not easy to construct a theory of flexibility of ideas and to conceive of a budget of flexibility. There are, however, two clues to the major theoretical problem. Both of these are derived from the stochastic process of evolution or learning whereby such interlocked systems of ideas come into being. First we consider the “natural selection” which governs which ideas shall survive longest; and second we shall consider how this process sometimes works to create evolutionary culs-de-sac.

(More broadly, I regard the grooves of destiny into which our civilization has entered as a special case of evolutionary cul-de-sac. Courses which offered short-term advantage have been adopted, have become rigidly programmed, and have begun to prove disastrous over longer time. This is the paradigm for extinction by way of loss of flexibility. And this paradigm is more surely lethal when the courses of action are chosen in order to maximize single variables.)

In a simple learning experiment (or any other experience), an organism, especially a human being, acquires a vast variety of information. He learns something about the smell of the lab; he learns something about the patterns of the experimenter’s behavior; he learns something about his own capacity to learn and how it feels to be “right” or “wrong”; he learns that there is “right” and “wrong” in the world. And so on.

If he now is subjected to another learning experiment (or experience), he will acquire some new items of information: some of the items of the first experiment will be repeated or affirmed; some will be contradicted.

In a word, some of the ideas acquired in the first experience will survive the second experience, and natural selection will tautologically insist that those ideas which survive will survive longer than those which do not survive.

But in mental evolution, there is also an economy of flexibility. Ideas which survive repeated use are actually handled in a special way which is different from the way in which the mind handles new ideas. The phenomenon of habit formation sorts out the ideas which survive repeated use and puts them in a more or less separate category. These trusted ideas then become available for immediate use without thoughtful inspection, while the more flexible parts of the mind can be saved for use on newer matters.

In other words, the frequency of use of a given idea becomes a determinant of its survival in that ecology of ideas which we call Mind; and beyond that the survival of a frequently used idea is further promoted by the fact that habit formation tends to remove the idea from the field of critical inspection.

But the survival of an idea is also certainly determined by its relations with other ideas. Ideas may support or contradict each other; they may combine more or less readily. They may influence each other in complex unknown ways in polarized systems.

It is commonly the more generalized and abstract ideas that survive repeated use. The more generalized ideas thus tend to become premises upon which other ideas depend. These premises become relatively inflexible.

In other words, in the ecology of ideas there is an evolutionary process, related to the economics of flexibility, and this process determines which ideas shall become hard programmed.

The same process determines that these hard-programmed ideas become nuclear or nodal within constellations of other ideas, because the survival of these other ideas depends on how they fit with the hard-programmed ideas. It ***ows that any change in the hard-programmed ideas may involve change in the whole related constellation.

But frequency of validation of an idea within a given segment of time is not the same as proof that the idea is either true or pragmatically useful over long time. We are discovering today that several of the premises which are deeply ingrained in our way of life are simply untrue and become pathogenic when implemented with modern technology.

Exercise of Flexibility

It is asserted above that the overall flexibility of a system depends upon keeping many of its variables in the middle of their tolerable limits. But there is a partial converse of this generalization:

“Analogous relations certainly obtain in the ecology of a redwood forest or a coral reef. The most frequent or “dominant” species are likely to be nodal to constellations of other species, because the survival of a newcomer to the system will commonly be determined by how its way of life fits with that of one or more dominant species.

In these contexts—both ecological and mental—the word “fit” is a low-level analogue of “matching flexibility.”

Owing to the fact that inevitably many of the subsystems of the society are regenerative, the system as a whole tends to “expand” into any area of unused freedom.

It used to be said that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and indeed something of the sort seems to be true of unused potentiality for change in any biological system.

In other words, if a given variable remains too long at some middle value, other variables will encroach upon its freedom, narrowing the tolerance limits until its freedom to move is zero or, more precisely, until any future movement can only be achieved at the price of disturbing the encroaching variables.

In other words, the variable which does not change its value becomes ipso facto hard programmed. Indeed, this way of stating the genesis of hard-programmed variables is only another way of describing habit formation.

As a Japanese Zen master once told me, “To become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing.”

From all of this it ***ows that to maintain the flexibility of a given variable, either that flexibility must be exercised, or the encroaching variables must be directly controlled.

We live in a civilization which seems to prefer prohibition to positive requirement, and therefore we try to legislate (e.g., with antitrust laws) against the encroaching variables; and we try to defend “civil liberties” by legally slapping the wrists of encroaching authority.

We try to prohibit certain encroachments, but it might be more effective to encourage people to know their freedoms and flexibilities and to use them more often.

In our civilization, the exercise of even the physiological body, whose proper function is to maintain the flexibility of many of its variables by pushing them to extreme values, becomes a “spectator sport,” and the same is true of the flexibility of social norms. We go to the movies or the courts —or read newspapers—for vicarious experience of exceptional behavior.

The tras*mission of Theory

A first question in all application of theory to human problems concerns the education of those who are to carry out the plans. This paper is primarily a presentation of theory to planners; it is an attempt at least to make some theoretical ideas available to them. But in the restructuring of a great city over a period of ten to thirty years, the plans and their execution must pass through the heads and hands of hundreds of persons and dozens of committees.

Is it important that the right things be done for the right reasons? Is it necessary that those who revise and carry out plans should understand the ecological insights which guided the planners? Or should the original planners put into the very fabric of their plan collateral incentives which will seduce those who come later into carrying out the plan for reasons quite different from those which inspired the plan?

This is an ancient problem in ethics and one which (for example) besets every psychiatrist. Should he be satisfied if his patient makes a readjustment to conventional life for neurotic or inappropriate reasons?

The question is not only ethical in the conventional sense, it is also an ecological question. The means by which one man influences another are a part of the ecology of ideas in their relationship, and part of the larger ecological system within which that relationship exists.

The hardest saying in the Bible is that of St. Paul, addressing the Galatians: “God is not mocked,” and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to plead that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that “If I didn’t, somebody else would have.” The processes of ecology are not mocked.

On the other hand, surely the mountain lion when he kills the deer is not acting to protect the grass from overgrazing.

In fact, the problem of how to tras*mit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically “good” direction is itself an ecological problem. We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always and inevitably a part of it.

Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology—that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system.

We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion—he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.

I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop—and as they are developed by the (ecological) process of their propagation.

If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans themselves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.

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Minsky Moment dijo:

El acontecimiento más importante del s. XX para todos y cada uno de los nacidos en ese siglo es el día que nació cada uno de ellos. Sin ápice de discusión posible. Lo demás, devenires históricos y demás.

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Erwin dijo:

El lanzamiento de la primera bomba atómica debería ser considerado como el más importante.No tan sólo del sXX sino de toda la historia.Eso si que significó un cambio de paradigma

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

No veo por qué. Antes de la bomba atómica ya existía la guerra biológica.

A principios del pasado siglo Jack London escribió un relato sobre una guerra entre China y el resto del mundo que se resolvía con el exterminio de la población del país asiático por medio de gérmenes patógenos. Así que la idea de un arma capaz de exterminar a cientos o a miles de millones de personas es anterior a las armas nucleares.

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Sr. Pérez dijo:

El eterno ombliguismo anglosajón. Los dos eventos que definieron el XX, que alteraron esas relaciones entre los mamíferos de las que habla y cuyas repercusiones aún estamos por acabar de sentir fueron dos revoluciones:

La soviética de 1917 y la china de 1911.

Después de esos dos eventos ya los imperios multinacionales serían imposibles. Y tampoco usar a China de pilinguita. Pero claro, en ninguno de los dos sucesos palmó un sólo anglosajón a parte de algún quinto despistado de las expediciones punitivas o algún misionero perdido en China.

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

¿La EXTINTA URSS no fue un imperio multinacional?::

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

¿Y los EEUU?

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

No veo por qué. Antes de la bomba atómica ya existía la guerra biológica.

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

A principios del pasado siglo Jack London escribió un relato sobre una guerra entre China y el resto del mundo que se resolvía con el exterminio de la población del país asiático por medio de gérmenes patógenos.

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

Así que la idea de un arma capaz de exterminar a cientos o a miles de millones de personas es anterior a las armas nucleares.

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Sr. Pérez dijo:

Efectivamente, la EXTINTA URSS...

¿Cuantos imperios multinacionales se han formado desde 1911 a esta parte y cuantos han implosionado o desaparecido?



¿Qué nacionalidades dices que componen los EE.UU... ?

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

No veo por qué. Antes de la bomba atómica ya existía la guerra biológica.

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Curioso impertinente dijo:

Anglosajones, neցros, mejicanos, multitud de tribus amerindias, judíos, chinos, cubanos, italianos, vietnamitas, irlandeses, y resumiendo podría decirse que todas las que existen en el planeta.

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Taliván Hortográfico dijo:

La Destrucción Mutua Asegurada sí fue un cambio de paradigma. La bomba A per se, no tanto. La DMA vino con la bomba H y los ICBM.



Por no nombrar Puerto Rico, Hawaii, o muhcas islas del Pacífico, que son posesiones americanas "de lege" con una importante población "aborigen".

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