IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 62

cannot tell you what will always
happen but what may happen
at certain times, given certain
conditions" [5. p. 34].
Even before this, Wiener had the
chutzpah to challenge the certainty
of Bertrand Russell, with whom Wiener briefly studied after earning his
degree in mathematical philosophy
at Harvard. Russell would point Wiener in directions that would shape
his later career, including advising
him to study a paper of Einstein's
on Brownian motion. Nonetheless,
Wiener was repulsed by Russell's
entire approach to mathematics.
Conway and Siegelman quote a
letter Wiener wrote to his father,
expressing "a great dislike" for the
great man. "His mind impresses
one as a keen, cold, narrow logical
machine," Wiener wrote, "that cuts
the universe into neat little packets,
that measure, as it were, just three
inches each way" [4, p. 30].
Wiener soon went public with
his reservations regarding Russell's
too-neat mathematics, publishing a paper attacking the central
argument in Russell's and Alfred
North Whitehead's magisterial Principia Mathematica. Contrary to what
Russell and Whitehead claim, Wiener
wrote, "it is highly probable that we
can get no certainty that is absolute
in the propositions of logic and mathematics, at any rate in those that
derived their validity from the postulates of logic" [3, p. 142], [4, p. 33].
Twenty years later Wiener would
note with pleasure that Gödel's
incompleteness theorems affirmed
that judgment. As he put it in I Am
a Mathematician,
"To me, logic and learning and
all mental activity have always
been incomprehensible as a
complete and closed picture
and have been understandable
only as a process by which man
puts himself in rapport with his

environment...We are swimming
upstream against a great torrent
of disorganization, which tends
to reduce everything to the heatdeath of equilibrium and sameness described in the second law
of thermodynamics" [5, p. 324].

Like many wounded people,
Wiener both hated his outsider
status and reveled in it. He also
used it. "...I knew very well that I
was competitive beyond the run
of younger mathematicians, and
I knew equally that this was not a
pretty attitude," he wrote in I Am
a Mathematician. "However, it was
not an attitude which I was free to
assume or to reject. I was quite
aware that I was an out among ins
and that I would get no shred of
recognition that I did not force.
If I was not to be welcomed, well
then, let me be too dangerous to
be ignored" [5, p. 87].
This attitude animated Wiener's
ethical convictions as well as his
achievements in science. Standing at a remove from conventional
wisdom, he was able to recognize
its failures and criticize them without risking his position in the club.
Steve Heims quotes an essay Wiener wrote criticizing Rudyard Kipling
for his "fear-rooted conformity."
Clearly thinking of himself, Wiener
added, "The marginal man is always
relatively the more civilized human
being" [3, p. 377].

That comment amounts to a
summary statement of the essential argument of cybernetics, which
posits information as the antidote
to entropy. That comment also suggests Wiener's determination to pursue a mathematics that is not lost
in abstraction, but that has practical
application in the real world, a determination that in turn reflects his natural inclination to holism. This was
another quality that distinguished
Wiener from his contemporaries in
science, one that made him highly critical of the growing tendency
toward specialization.
Just as I find it astonishing that
the ten-year-old Wiener would have
the insight to appreciate the futility
of certainty, so I find it remarkable
that an unknown mathematician
in his early twenties would openly
challenge so formidable a figure
as Bertrand Russell. Where did this
willingness - eagerness, even - to
take on the powers that be come
from? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the answer lies in Wiener's
troubled childhood.
Wiener once described himself
as "an extravagantly bent twig" [4, p.
274]. His father's relentless, brutal
pressures to mold him into a child
prodigy combined with Wiener's
nearsightedness, his clumsiness, his
Jewishness, his brilliance, his eclecticism, his ambition, and his utter
lack of social graces all served to
make him perennially insecure, and
thus perennially alienated from anything that smacked of complacency.
One of his closest friends described
Wiener as "a foreigner wherever he
was" [3, p. 377].

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

The Counter-Tradition
to the Dream of Mastery
Langdon Winner's discussion of the
counter-tradition to the dream of
mastery can be found in his seminal
book, Autonomous Technology:
Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme
in Political Thought. That title
suggests the degree to which the
ideas Winner so brilliantly explores
reflect and affirm Wiener's belief
in uncertainty. Indeed, at one point
Winner quotes a long confessional
passage from Wiener's Cybernetics,
in which Wiener acknowledges his
responsibility for unleashing powerful new techniques into "the world
of Belsen and Hiroshima," knowing
that those who would inherit access
to those techniques included "the
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september 2015

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