CYBERNETICS-WIENER-DARWIN-SMITH-MARX

The Vapour Engine

ANNOTATION
|...| Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Norbert Wiener observed: “Darwin's influence on the idea of progress was not confined to the biological world, even in the nineteenth century. All philosophers and all sociologists draw their scientific ideas from the sources available at their time. Thus it is not surprising to find that Marx and his contemporary socialists accepted a Darwinian point of view in the matter of evolution and progress.”

Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘the survival of the fittest’ and popularised the notion that social competition was beneficial to society (aka, social Darwinism), has often been cited as a major influence on the reception of Darwinism in the industrial age. There is a parallel between the processes of natural evolution and social evolution. Spencer, the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth century in England, developed the idea that the natural process of human evolution should not be interfered with. This allowed us to understand the inequalities of the day as natural and inevitable.

In the late nineteenth century there was an anxiety that “progress” was stalling. Urban poverty was on the increase and there was a fear that the urban underclass were outbreeding the “fit” (a crisis of identity). This resulted in ruthless views on control, including social Darwinism.

Indeed Darwin himself espoused the idea of the survival of the fittest in the later part of his career. This was opposed to Darwin’s earlier emphasis that an organism’s adaptability is dependent on a particular environment. Fitness to survive is not defined by strength but by adaptability Darwin’s earlier conception of evolution was closer to the egalitarian ideals of the enlightenment than the ideals of survival through competition as capitalism matured. As I point out in The Fabulous Loop de Loop, the notion of nature as ecologically balanced re-reasserts itself in the era of (post-)cybernetics, drawing on the agency of homeostasis (as opposed to dynamic equilibrium) as an interdisciplinary medial element.

It is telling that the liberal notion of balance and self-regulation are actually explicit in Adam Smith’s early writing. These proceed the era of the steam engine, or an energetic model of evolution (the survival of the fittest). In eighteenth century communication was considered to be a condition of ‘civilisation’.

Adam Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was published exactly one hundred years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species and seventeen years before Smith’s Wealth of Nations (it was in Wealth of Nations that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market was introduced to the world). The Theory of Moral Sentiments was of particular interest to Darwin because it was the first known text to suggest that social systems are self-organising, that they are ordered without the intervention of a divine ‘watchmaker’

Here I quote Smith’s thesis at length:

“In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce; and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species. But in these, and in all such objects, we still distinguish the efficient from the final cause of their several motions and organizations. The digestion of the food, the circulation of the blood, and the secretion of the several juices which are drawn from it, are operations all of them necessary for the great purposes of animal life. Yet we never endeavor to account for them from those purposes as from their efficient causes, nor imagine that the blood circulates, or that the food digests of its own accord, and with a view or intention to the purposes of circulation or digestion. The wheels of the watch are all admirably adjusted to the end for which it was made, the pointing of the hour. All their various motions conspire in the nicest manner to produce this effect. If they were endowed with a desire and intention to produce it, they could not do it better. Yet we never ascribe any such desire or intention to them, but to the watchmaker, and we know that they are put into motion by a spring, which intends the effect it produces as little as they do. But though, in accounting for the operations of bodies, we never fail to distinguish in this manner the efficient from the final cause, in accounting for those of the mind we are very apt to confound these two different things with one another. When by natural principles we are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle."

It was this text, rather than The Wealth of Nations, that had the greatest influence on Charles Darwin,
However it is significant that Wealth of Nations, builds on the premise of self-organisation per-se established in Theory of Moral Sentiments, which later allows for the operations of the invisible hand and which would also allow for the evolutionary principle to be imported into biology via economics This, as Wiener suggests in the passage above, feeds back into economics via Marx who was so enamored by Darwin's work that he wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to him

The transition is therefore more complex and ontologically interesting than Wiener suggests. It moves from

a) Smith’s general principle of society derived through a process of self-organisation
b) to Darwin’s evolutionary biology self-organising through natural selection, and then it is
c) fed back into the realm of economics in the form of Marx’s dialectical materialism.

Taking this periodisation, with self-organisation as, in the first instance, a social principle, allows for an interesting re-reading of Wiener’s writings on teleology and purpose, principally the co-authored Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology If they are indeed as much indebted to Smith as they are to Darwin, we are able to understand why the neoliberal economists Hayek’s early work on theoretical psychology should acknowledge Norbert Wiener The relation between the ‘spontaneous order’ of Neoliberal economics, extends the daisy chain of the principle of self-organization to thread further still, transversing science, biology, economic and social systems. With the principle of self-organisation at the heart of cybernetics and with its naturalisation within the realm of natural science and with the cross-over from the natural sciences into the realm of the social sciences– (bearing in mind that the key members of the first generation of cyberneticists were concerned with psychiatry and psychology and the early cybernetic devices were models of the human brain – with Walter’s tortoise and Ashby’s Homeostat) – the stakes of cybernetics cross-disciplinarity become greater.