Enclosed, please find the posting I sent to the PCP list which, to my
surprise, was returned without acceptance.
Czeslaw Mesjasz
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 23:38:45 +0100 (CET)
From: Czeslaw Mesjasz <mesjaszc@janek.ae.krakow.pl>
To: Principia Cybernetica <prncyb-l@bingvmb.cc.binghamton.edu>
Subject: Re: Humanity 3000
Dear Fellow Colleagues,
I am astonished by the direction the discussion on Francis's Humanity 3000
response has taken. It seems to me that the discourse should be viewed at
least in three dimensions.
First and foremost.
As somebody with relatively good knowledge of social sciences and
economics I am often puzzled by the fact that so many "cyberneticians" ,
some of them self-declared, try to use their knowledge to describe and to
explain social phenomena. Sometimes attempts are even
made to set norms of social development.
I do not intend to say it is not possible, yet in most cases a large part
of knowledge from established social sciences and economics is just
neglected in such efforts. This phenomenon is well-known in applications
of systems approach (whatever it could be?) in social sciences. Let me
quote such analogies and metaphors like society-machine popularized by
numerous engineers, society-organism coined by biologists, firm as
the brain, etc. Now we have the World Brain.
The point is that in many cases "cyberneticians" lack either
knowledge in social sciences, or in philosophy, ethics, etc. As familiar
with several communities who in a more or less reasonable manner attempt
to build models and theories of "society" I always keep asking - do you
know what has been said about that in the "orthodox" social sciences?
What could be political consequences of a specific model of society, what
about ethical consequences?
It is not my intention to state that everybody presenting his/her view of
society must be a reneissance-like specialist. It is not the
case. The previous cybernetics-based aproaches to society provided quite a
few interesting models, analogies and metaphors. By the way, it is a pity
that they do not any longer influence methodology of orthodox social
sciences, and economics in particular, as it was at least until the early
1960s (remember O. Lange's "Cybernetics and Economics"). But it is
just another story - hopefully the "science of complexity" will provide
new methodological inspirations.
Secondly,
Let me now try to explain what, in my opinion, has happened to our
fellow Colleague Francis when he publicised his response to the Humanity
3000 project.
It was definitely a very interesting vision of the future development of
society. It was, however, predictable that the more or less precisely
spelled out vision of an ovewhelming social system, etc. without
moderating statements about potential disadvantages could stir such a
discussion.
Of course it was the problem of size and content of the Francis's response
but such a specialized view by definition must have lacked a broader
context.
The terms used in the polemique were far too reaching. When I read
them for the first time I tried to imagine the dispute afterwards. Later
it occured it turned to politics which should not too frequently take
attention of the PCP list participants.
I do not know, however, whether our fellow Colleague who used such
strong and rather exaggerated term like "fascist" (somebody
from the East would use totalitarian, etc.) did it as to provoke the
discussion or it was just his (over)reaction.
Anyhow, using other wording we can draw attention of cyberneticians
- at large or assigned somewhere, to the problem which emerged in that
dispute.
And here comes my third point.
Attempts to produce visions of society - no matter how sincere and honest
the authors could be, always have multidimensional context
usually discussed also in other areas - particularly in political science
and ethics.
Therefore when presenting a new "central metaphor", especially with a
normative social flavour, one must be aware what other dimensions have
to be taken into account.
It was the case with Francis's answer to the Humanity 3000 Project.
The polemique has one important aspect.
Even a honest person who uses his/her professional language to analyse,
predict and show the directions of social phenomena should take into
consideration the political issues. "Technocrats" should be especially
sensitive to that problem.
It is sufficient to remind how the "machine-society" metaphor influenced
utopian socialists, later dictators, and how it was used as a kind of
"objective" support of totalitarian ideologies, even only as a
deeply-rooted semantic structure. Mentioning Fordism as a foundation of early
industrial organisation would be just trivial - Garreth Morgan has
described it in detail.
The future of information society brings about new challenges. It
would be just a matter of brainstormig session to produce numerous
negative visions resulting from the "Brain Society" central metaphor.
If it was the purpose of our Colleague in his dispute with Francis then I
could agree with that. I would disagree, however, with the use of the
terms which have very negative connotations.
The PCP list is for intellectual discussion, no matter, how fierce it
could be. But the use of politicised labels imminently shifted the
dispute to politics.
Last but not least, it is worthwhile to remind that most of those
problems are well-known to those who try to study the limits and
possibilities of applications of cybernetics and related disciplines in
social theory and practice.
Czeslaw Mesjasz
Dr Czeslaw Mesjasz
Cracow University of Economics
31-510 Krakow
ul. Rakowicka 27
Poland
Tel: +48-12-616-76-19; Fax: +48-12-412-54-38
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"We say "COMPLEXITY" when we know that we do not know something
but we do not know precisely what we do not know"
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