The Cybernetic Dream of the Twenty-First Century

• Published in: The Journal of humanistic psychology 1986-04, Vol.26 (2), p.24-51
• Main Author: Berman, Morris
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0022-1678; 1552-650X
• DOI: 10.1177/0022167886262003

Over the last few decades, several critics of modern science have been able to demonstrate that science is not a value-free instrument for ascertaining truth, as many believe, but is rather a mode of cognition whose very "neutrality" constitutes its bias. That is to say, science is ultimately zweckrational (purposive-rational); it projects a world of pure form that can be bent to any purpose. In the last analysis, "value-free" really means "possessing scientific values." As the awareness of the ideological and culture-bound character of science began to grow over the past twenty years, Europe and North America experienced a twin development that reflected the need for a new epistemology. One aspect of this was a revival of magic and occult practice. The magical world view was attractive because it is strongly value-laden, biased toward an ecological or sacred view of nature; and unlike its scientific counterpart, it is embodied-sensuous and concrete rather than formal and abstract. The second aspect of the search for an alternative mode of consciousness was the emergence of a large "new paradigm" literature, which draws heavily on fields such as systems theory and quantum mechanics-those branches of knowledge that have departed, epistemologically, from the mechanism and reductionism of classical physics. This new "holistic paradigm," which relies heavily on cybernetic theory for its elaboration, claims to be a major shift in the history of Western thought; for in addition to its break with scientific materialism, it also claims to be value-laden rather than value-free and, as such, a major step forward in the evolution of consciousness. It is the argument of this article that, as things currently stand, most formulations of the new holistic paradigm are neither valueladen nor significantly discontinuous with the scientific world view of the last three centuries. Instead, they represent the philosophical aspect of a much larger process going on in society today that can loosely be termed "cyberneticization," or the rise of a "computer consciousness," a process that is now unfolding on three levels. The first level, as already noted, is that of abstract philosophy, and includes figures such as Ken Wilber, David Bohm, and Douglas Hofstadter. The second level is that of the professional disciplines, such as biology, ecology, and psychology, in which an information theory terminology is now being used to redefine the central concepts of these fields. The third