The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam

This concluding chapter starts off with a promising idea: Wiener states that he will explore the “philosophical assumptions” underlying the work of Benoit Mandelbrot and Roman Jakobson. However, he ends up making no more than passing reference to these two, namely that:

They consider communication to be a game played in partnership by the speaker and the listener against the forces of confusion, represented by the ordinary difficulties of communication and by some supposed individuals attempting to jam the communication. (187)

[Another thing: Based on the title of the chapter I was really hoping W was going to use the word “jam” in some jazzy/beatnik-derived sense, which would have been adorable and also refreshing. “Jam” in that sense could have been an opening for a positive sense of entropy and/or disorder as something creative, which W is lacking.]

This is based on Von Neumann’s game theory, in which one team tries to communicate a message, and the other tries to “jam” it. He then makes the point that, strictly speaking, in Von Neumann’s theory of games, both sides are pursuing rationally optimal strategies; they will not “bluff” to confuse each other, but are being in a sense perfectly honest and open, despite being opposed. He relates this to a quote from Einstein: “God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.” (188)

The point being that, unlike humans, nature is not deceitful. This means that scientists, used to studying nature, are naïve out of necessity. Scientists are not like detectives, a kind of thinking which has its role in other fields, e.g., “official and military science.” This kind of thinking is counterproductive in actual science, as it is a waste of time:

I have not the slightest doubt that the present detective-mindedness of the lords of scientific administration is one of the chief reasons for the barrenness of so much present scientific work. (189)

[whatever “barrenness” means]

Thus, a position of being overly “suspicious” like a detective makes you no good at science, because scientists have to trust that nature is honest, not deceitful. [He does not address this, but his odd anthropomorphizing stance must break down when it comes to the social sciences, which study humans, who can be deceitful.]Another kind of position that is bad for science is the “religious soldier,” who is a follower of propaganda of either the right or the left (he singles out “the soldier of the Cross, or of the Hammer and Sickle” (190)).

He ties this back to his earlier distinction between Augustinian and Manichaean perceptions of the devil: the first is just a force of nature, in the service of God (and thus equivalent to entropy in his worldview). The second is willfully malicious and in fact has some chance or belief in the chance that it can prevail (like Milton’s Satan). Scientists need to maintain an Augustinian view, but this is difficult because

The Augustinian position has always been difficult to maintain. It tends under the slightest perturbation to break down into a covert Manichaeanism. (191)

This is because Manichaeanism has more emotional and dramatic attraction; and also because Manichaeanists of the right and left create political conditions which they force upon scientists.

In this present day when almost every ruling force, whether on the right or on the left, asks the scientist for conformity rather than openness of mind, it is easy to understand how science has already suffered, and what further debasements and frustrations of science are to be expected in the future. (190)

A Manichaean suspects the world of being dishonest, and so adopts dishonest strategies in turn; this is obviously not good for science and the search for truth. There is an irony that the world created by these Manichaean faiths undermines the possibility of faith, which requires the existence of free choice. Science requires its own form of faith:

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the accept­ance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. (193)

The needs of science, and of a free and democratic society, necessarily dovetail:

Sci­ence is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a com­munity which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 7

 

Summary of Chapter 7: Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy

In this interesting little chapter Wiener turns the cybernetic lens to organizations, particularly nation-states, to address the issues of scientific advance, and of secrecy in the name of military advantage or national security. Essentially, secrecy is the enemy of communication and progress, and is typically based on an outdated or incorrect understanding of information and how it works. The US and USSR have brought back the Machiavellian politics and subterfuge of the Italian Renaissance; however, we now have a much more sophisticated scientific understanding of communication, and we can use this to analyze the present moment and see what we could do better.

One big problem that comes under Wiener’s scrutiny is the American propensity for judging the “value” of any thing by its value on the market. This is tied also to old-fashioned ideas, such as the idea that information can be treated like private property. He starts with the example of patent law; this made sense in age when inventions were made by skilled artisans working alone, but not today. He goes into the history of the changing relationship between artisan/inventors and groups of scientists.

He describes the qualities that make a thing a good commodity:

What makes a thing a good commodity? Essentially, that it can pass from hand to hand with the substantial retention of its value, and that the pieces of this commodity should combine additively in the same way as the money paid for them. The power to conserve itself is a very convenient property for a good commodity to have. (116)

A very cybernetic definition! He notes that gold makes a good basis for currency, because it is relatively stable (take that, bitcoin!). One presumes Wiener is not a big fan of markets, because of course these can cause even the value of gold to fluctuate wildly.

Information, in contrast, makes a bad commodity because it is subject to entropy – indeed, it is the opposite of entropy: “just as en­tropy is a measure of disorder, so information is a measure of order.”

He gives an example of competing measures of value: the value of a piece of jewelry has two parts: the gold, and the "façon" or workmanship [unfortunately I can't find other internet sources using this latter term, an interesting name for the imprint of labor on an artifact]. The latter leads to artificial markets such as stamp collecting, which depend on the existence of a group of buyers, and thus is open to dramatic swings in value, because “there is no permanent common denominator of collectors' taste.” A reasonable point so far as it goes, but can't even gold swing greatly in value? or more importantly, bread? It seems to me that trying to distinguish between “stable” and “unstable” commodities based on inherent qualities (derived from the theory of information) is not going to be successful.

“The problem of the work of art as a commodity raises a large number of questions important in the theory of information” (117). He moves into a discussion of art markets, noting that “the physical possession of a work of art is neither sufficient nor necessary for the benefits of appreciation which it conveys” [this is pretty much what Lady Philosophy tells Boethius regarding beautiful natural countrysides: you don't need to possess it to enjoy it]. Reproductions can give you a lot of the experience of the originals (even more so with music) – it is interesting what Wiener might have said about Benjamin’s theory of aura, perhaps this is relatable to his information theory of art? Reproduction is good because it spreads the enjoyment, though it also undermines the value of the original, and is furthermore lossy. (Wiener’s treatment of information here could benefit from some of the insights of the Innis school regarding space-binding and time-binding media). He derides derivative and second-rate copies.

 [The cybernetic theory of information may not be so good at explaining the value of art:]

What has been said before may not be worth saying again; and the informative value of a painting or a piece of literature cannot be judged without knowing what it contains that is not easily available to the public in contemporary or earlier works. It is only independ­ent information which is even approximately additive. The derivative information of the second-rate copyist is far from independent of what has gone before. (119)

[Scarcity of information = value, here. I thought Wiener was critical of such an idea? Or maybe he is not advocating such market reductionism, just describing it. And yet he seems to be taking it for granted as an aspect of the value of information.]

… a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community's previous common stock of information. Even in the great classics of literature and art, much of the obvious informative value has gone out of them, merely by the fact that the public has become acquainted with their contents. (119)

If the value of art can be reduced to “information” in this sense (and furthermore, simply novel or new information), then schoolboys who detest Shakespeare are quite reasonable to do so (until they are trained to see beyond the expected and cliché), and artists like Picasso can be seen as a "destructive influence" because they use up the available future positions for art [based on his later discussion of science, he is perhaps seeing art history as “path-dependent” here, an interesting idea but it seems just as easy to say that explorers like Picasso spur others to innovate as well. Then again I have actually made this argument myself, that the avant-garde is really about seeking out and pre-emptively using up possible future positions, in order to sort of suck the power out of these possible futures].

An interesting disquisition on what Wiener believes that the "man in the street" thinks about "Maecenas" (an ancient Roman art collector whom, imho, the “man in the street” has almost certainly never heard of) leads into his criticism of the idea that information (including artistic value) can be stored. This in turn leads to a discussion of weaponry and military tactics, which cannot be reasonably stored (at least not in modernity) but must be updated: storage, as antithesis of the process of change, is destructive and wasteful. England and New England are given as examples of regions which are economically hampered by being over-invested in older models (because they were first to develop), while later adopters easily move ahead.

Quite apart from the difficulties of having a relatively strict industrial law and an advanced labor policy, one of the chief reasons that New England is being deserted by the textile mills is that, frankly, they prefer not to be hampered by a century of traditions. (121)

[A.E.J. Morris makes a similar argument, in his History of Urban Form, regarding the ascendancy of Birmingham over the older artisanal center of Coventry; though he then notes that "with hind sight" this resulted in Coventry being spared many of the ravages of the Industrial Revolution (Morris, p. 290).]

Thus, from cybernetic viewpoint, law, “advanced labor policy” (as in, worker’s rights and protections) and traditions are examples of “storage:” once again cybernetics takes the form of a deeply functionalist way of looking at culture. Now Braverman, who I am reading at the same time in part specifically as a contrast with Wiener, might actually agree about this storage idea; but the overall role would have to be understood within the context of struggle over who has knowledge, and whose interests technology and production serve. I am reminded also of Braverman’s observation that the theory of management could have developed differently in a society run by workers themselves, as opposed to the current society in which workers are a problem to be “managed” – the same holds true for Wiener’s cybernetics. Perhaps there could be a more subtle and complex conflict theory cybernetics, or conflict theory/agonistic view informed by the insights of cybernetics, but going beyond Wiener’s functionalist assumptions – such as that the country that will be most successful is "the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it." (122)

This, in any event, brings him back to the question of military secrecy: there is no need or use for "storing" information using secrecy.

An example of the sort of description that must have influenced Silvan Tomkins:

I repeat, to be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transi­tional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unham­pered exchange. (122)

International relations involves bluffing, similar to litigation which was discussed in a previous chapter (and bluffing and misrepresentation is a bad thing, according to Wiener). Scientific military advance ends up being a paradox:

I have already said the dissemination of any scien­tific secret whatever is merely a matter of time, that in this game a decade is a long time, and that in the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies. Thus each terrifying discovery merely increases our subjection to the need of mak­ing a new discovery. (129)

He ends with demonic images, such as summoning demons, and the "Gadarene swine" from the Bible. The link between military development and evil is two-fold, because this will increase entropy (which he has equated with evil, before), besides literally resulting in the world being blown up.

 

 

The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 4

Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius. Detail of an illustration for the Consolation of Philosophy by the Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?), c. 1465. Image courtesy of the Getty Museum.

Summary of Book 4

This chapter, on the problem of evil, is at the same time the most interesting so far, and also the most unsatisfying, because so much of the argument is based on the sort of "I told you so" tautological reasoning that started from assumptions about the qualities of goodness/oneness/happiness and the idea that opposites cannot mix. The forceful ridiculousness of Lady Philosophy's arguments here is frequently countenanced by Boethius, who breaks out into expressions of disbelief and amazement, but ultimately agrees to all because of the nomothetic argument (following from arguments which had been accepted before), and of course the ultimate goal of providing a comforting worldview in the face of great misfortune and disaster.

The most surprising arguments are those such as: there are no bad men (because they cease to be men; this is not really pursued consistently, however, and they are thereafter referred to as "bad men” anyway). Good and evil lead to just rewards because good people produce good (which is what they naturally want to do) while bad people produce evil (which is the opposite of the good which they naturally want to produce/achieve; therefore, they are unhappy). Humans fail to understand divine ways because they are blinded by emotions and their own circumstances; instead they should heed only that which is eternal. Both hatred and dissatisfaction with the world are examples of failures to understand God's plan.

Lady Philosophy makes an important distinction between Providence (god's will/reason) and Fate (the resultant ordering of things); it seems that although our bodies are subordinate to fate, our reason is not, because it can grasp the underlying providence. Her ultimate argument is that all is for the best, by default because God is perfect and rules the world, and because of the additional arguments that suffering or happiness are dealt out to different people as they need it for their own growth [e.g., though this is not explicitly stated, Boethius is suffering because it helps him become wiser, or to demonstrate his commitment to philosophy; this suffering is an opportunity for the wise man, as warfare is an opportunity for the general]. So in the end, all fortune is good fortune.

There is an interesting contrast between the role of grief and scarring by the world in Boethius, and in Benjamin (whom I am also reading). For Benjamin, it is good to be open to such scarring and to express it. Boethius in contrast sees his grief as a cause of forgetting: he states at the beginning of this chapter:

And though through grief for the injustices I suffer, I had forgotten them, yet you have not spoken of what I knew not at all before. (46)

In other words, Lady Philosophy is reminding him of truths he had already known, but had forgotten due to grief (and this is perhaps linked further to the underlying Platonic supposition that we already know things and just have to remember them). In any event one role of Lady Philosophy is to cure him of his grief and restore his oneness with philosophy or whatever.

The chapter's final meter, with examples of the successes of Heracles and other heroes, ends with this:

 'Go forth then bravely whither leads the lofty path of high example. Why do ye sluggards turn your backs? When the earth is overcome, the stars are yours.' (60)

Written by a modern author, this would express the "we conquered the earth, now conquer the stars" vein of modernism; instead it means that if you conquer worldly confusion and desire, then you can achieve the peacefulness and order of the stars.

The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 3

Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius. Detail of an illustration for the Consolation of Philosophy by the Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?), c. 1465. Image courtesy of the Getty Museum.

 Summary of Book 3

Boethius is now ready for the more serious medicines that Lady Philosophy has promised. She discusses wealth, honor, power, fame, and pleasure as examples of false goods, and goes through each in turn to show how they are limited and only partial, when even good at all. The problem is that humans see only the partial and fail to understand that Good is actual unity.

The discourse becomes self-consciously Platonic as it is stated that humans (and all things) inherently remember the good and the one, but have forgotten or strayed, being misled by the senses and confusion of this world. In reality the happiness which all things seek is unity with God, who in turn is Oneness (as proven through the typical tautological argument starting and ending with the inherent qualities of a presumed concept, such as "oneness" which is typical of antiquity (so found also in both Plato and Aristotle, but even in the skeptic Sextus Empiricus).

Some interesting parallels with Norbert Wiener whom I am also reading: plants are compared to self-reproducing machines (in the Latin text: machinas), and all things seek to maintain unity (which is health, while disunity of the being is sickness and or death); however, in Boethius's universe the "helmsman" (kybernetes) is built-in (i.e., an all-powerful God), and the fear of overall entropy, that characterizes Wiener’s universe, does not exist). This has implications for the concept of “evil,” which in a secularized, physical form is so central to Wiener’s cyberneticism.

God is proven to be unity because nothing partial could have caused the universe; Lady Philosophy then asks if God, being perfectly good, could do evil; Boethius says no, and Lady Philosophy responds that therefore evil does not exist, because nothing is beyond the power of God. Boethius then objects that she is trapping him in a labyrinth and asks how she will get them out; Lady Philosophy responds with the myth of Orpheus, a warning not to be distracted by earthly desires. The problem of evil will be addressed in the next book.

 

The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 1

Lady Philosophy consoles Boethius. Detail of an illustration for the Consolation of Philosophy by the Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?), c. 1465. Image courtesy of the Getty Museum.

I was teaching a philosophy class at our little art college in Tucson when the announcement was made that the school would close due to the pandemic. I wrote this little text about Boethius for the class:

Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius (AD 477 - 524) was a Roman senator and philosopher who lived at just about the worst time in history to be a Roman senator and philosopher – to wit, just after Rome had been sacked and conquered by German barbarians, who proceeded to battle each other over whatever was left. If Boethius were alive today, he would not be impressed by all of our complaints about 2020.

Boethius tried to do the best he could, so he became an advisor to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Boethius hoped that he could civilize Theodoric by example, rein in his more barbaric impulses, and at the very least, make life in Italy a little more peaceful and predictable. One day, when Theodoric was threatening to arrest another Roman on a false charge of treason, Boethius jumped up and said, "My King, this man is no more guilty of treason than I or any other man. If you arrest him, you should just as well arrest me." So Theodoric arrested Boethius, too. He was kept in prison for some time and eventually executed.

While he was in prison waiting to be executed, Boethius wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy. In the book, he is visited in prison by "Lady Philosophy," and they have spirited discussions about Free Will, Justice, and the existence of God. One consolation of philosophy is that, although he is imprisoned, his mind is still free. But even more, a philosophical point of view allows him to get past his current suffering, and see the bigger picture.

The most lasting idea by Boethius is the "Wheel of Fortune," which, always turning, brings people good and bad fortune in cycles, always changing, never lasting.

Some quotes:

"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Change is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away."

"Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it."

"All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards, disciplines, amends, or punishes, and so is either useful or just."

"The good is the end towards which all things tend."

The truth is, when I wrote that, I had not read Boethius, but had only read what others had written about him. Now that I have, I realize most of the points reiterated above were from the first chapters of the book, as if my sources had not bothered to read the whole thing. Although the early part is interesting for its discussion of Fortune and the historical circumstances of Boethius’s imprisonment, it is really toward the end that more impressive feats of philosophical and theological argumentation come into play. I read a translation by W.V. Cooper, in the public domain and thus available freely online.

Summary of Book 1:

Boethius is in prison, or possibly house arrest in some part of Italy away from Rome; his surroundings are not described to any extent, except that they are much unlike the fine library in his home. He is bewailing his fate and writing poetry. Lady Philosophy appears and drives away the poetic muses which had been leaching off him and driving him to despair. She upbraids him for his miserable appearance and demeanor; he tells his story, detailing how good he has been and how he was betrayed and victimized. Lady Philosophy tells him to shape up, and pay attention as she will tell him what is what. Much of the metaphor of philosophy as a kind of cure or treatment for confused feelings and sickness, is used.

At one point Boethius points out, "Wherefore not without cause has one of your own followers asked, ‘If God is, whence come evil things? If He is not, whence come good?’" (12)

This was Epicurus; however, earlier on Boethius (as author, I mean; he is also a character) has had Lady Philosophy state that after the golden ages of Plato and Socrates, the Epicureans and Stoics had fought over her, with little or no understanding of philosophy. So perhaps, having criticized Epicurus (or at least Epicureans) earlier, Boethius cannot now admit that he is the one whose poignant and key question is being cited, and which will lead to one of the primary subjects of the book: the problem of evil.