IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 70

"All closed systems in the universe," Wiener explains,
"tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable
state, from a state of organization and differentiation in
which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos
and sameness" [29, p. 12]. Like Dewey, Wiener promoted the values of openness, flexibility, and democratic
self-government as a way to maintain homeostasis
through generative and interdependent change and
growth in the organism of humankind.

The Dark Humanist's Faith
"Life is an island here and now in a dying world," wrote
Wiener [29, p. 95]. We cannot change our fate. But
we can come to play the game of life longer and perhaps with greater grace. The human organism can
learn to distinguish itself from other creatures of the
animal kingdom. We need not behave as kittens, ants,
or chimps, and Wiener offers a humanized form of
cybernetics as a way forward.
Wiener's brand of pragmatism - cybernetic pragmatism - brings together techno-social forces not

"Life is an island here and now in a
dying world," wrote Wiener.

into a closed system but into an open, evolving one -
one that pulsates into a flow of messages that allows
learning derived from its environs. For Dewey, such
a flow was made up of ideas working as instruments
that transform the uneasiness of life through realworld transactions in the form of feedback, experience,
and information. Both men remained cautiously, if
not darkly, hopeful not primarily in technology or the
machine but in the human organism.
Such a view made for a humanized understanding
of cybernetics that is markedly different from that of
Shannon, von Neumann, and others. For Wiener, "[w]e
are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate
themselves" [29, p. 96]. We can die gracefully having
seen the system, while life continues elsewhere or farther
down the rabbit hole: "For all we know," Wiener explains
describing the risks a totalitarian and thus inherently
closed view of science, "the world from the next moment
on might be something like the croquet game in Alice in
Wonderland, where the balls are hedgehogs which walk
off, the hoops are soldiers who march to other parts of
the field, and the rules are made from instant to instant
by [...] arbitrary decree " [29, p. 193], [27, p. 50].

Dewey also offered no guarantees of success or
continuance of life. But like Wiener, he saw learning
through transactions and feedback as a valid way
forward. "Pragmatism - at least Dewey's sort - had
seemed to offer us more than [reductionism]. It had
seemed to be teaching us how to transform the culture
that is decaying around us, rather than just how to
'cope' with its collapse" [24, p. 1]. So, too, does Wiener's cybernetic pragmatism:
"[T]o 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" as a "communicative organism" working with another "communicative organism," the machine. "There are many dangers still
ahead, but the roots of good will are there" [29,
pp. 122, 136].
In the penultimate chapter of The Human Use of
Human Beings, Wiener includes an excerpt from a
1948 Le Monde review of Cybernetics [29]. In explaining the potential and the horror of the machine à gouverner, or cybernetics, Pére Dubarle calls for the help
of a philosopher and anthropologists. "Perhaps it would
not be a bad idea," the French journalist writes, "for the
teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their
cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons
of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps
a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters" [29, p. 180]. Little could Dubarle know that by
1948, Wiener was already adding a much needed interdisciplinary approach to cybernetics through the Macy
conference and his recruiting of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, among others. Wiener
alone remained the philosopher on the core Macy team,
the incubator of the earliest cyberneticians. Still, one
should not forget that Dewey was already there, as a
founding board member of the Macy conference and as
a founder of the philosophies of relativistic pragmatism
and instrumentalism, which deepened and extended
the rabbit hole of cybernetics.
In 1961, in the preface to the second edition of
Cybernetics and three years before his death, Wiener
explained that his intention was always "to display some
of the [...] philosophical reflections that led [him] in the
beginning" [27, p. xv]. Once again, and well beyond the
early years of the 1900s, Wiener revealed himself as a
"philosopher despite himself" [29, p. 164].

Author Information
Laura Moorhead is Assistant Professor in Journalism,
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA.
Email: lauralm@sfsu.edu.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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september 2015

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