CYBERNETICS – SOCIAL SCIENCES

Negative Entropy – Bateson - Freud

ANNOTATION:
|...| David H. Price: Gregory Bateson and the OSS: World War II and Bateson's Assessment of Applied Anthropology. Human Organization. Vol. 57, No.4,
|...| Steve J. Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-1953. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993
|...| Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences,

The social sciences had proved their metal during WWII, when psychological warfare, morale studies and propaganda analysis became accepted, specialized fields. Anthropologists worked for military intelligence through institutions such as the Office of Strategic Service, the Strategic Bombing Survey, the Board of Economic Warfare, the Office of War Information. Increasingly, the techniques and technologies of social science were used as instruments of state policy, as a bulwark to the perceived Soviet threat at home and abroad. World policy, formulated and adopted through the auspices of institutions such as UNESCO and World Health Organisation also employed social scientists to formulate policy.
These disciplines helped establish practices as neutral, non-political and non-ideological, and although they had not yet achieved the status of ‘exact science’ they were regarded as in some way ‘scientific’ as they were increasingly framed in a cybernetic epistemology, and sharing the same research cultures.

During WWII natural and social scientists had worked together, often on the same projects which involved human interaction with the machines of war, studying the psychological and physical limits of the human within the system impacted by engineering decisions to be made in relation to the machine; the morale of the troops, the morale of enemy combatants and the morale of civilians impacted by military hardware decisions. This model of interdisciplinary with proven results contributed to the interdisciplinary culture which produced the Macy meetings on cybernetics.

It was in this context that the human sciences, post WWII, overtook the humanities in terms of legitimacy and behavioral science eclipsed the humanities in the U.S.. Indeed, the social sciences alliance with cybernetics can be understood, as Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan argues, as an attempt to legitimate social science as science as such and also to neutralise social science politically. Immediately after WWII the ideology of anti-communism engendered a mistrust of the liberal humanities and favoured a form of human science which could fly under the flag of scientific neutrality. Funders in federal government favoured the social sciences which emerged within a positivist tradition, as did research foundations which grew from the tradition of scientific philanthropy (such as the Carnegie, Rockafaller and Ford foundations) We must also note that the social sciences in the United States were wedded to a positivist, anti-Cartesian tradition, the behaviorism of John Watson (which cybernetics effectively extended) rather than the liberal hermeneutics of the Europeans.

The sociology taught in universities in the united states was dominated by Alvin Gouldner,s functionalism for which "equilibrium, continuity and the stability of institutions" were key motifs, this was preferred over any model which allowed for their opposites as agents in social-organisation (see Marx for details). If equilibrium and control are principles of conservatism the Macy meetings on cybernetics ontologized these conservative tropes, re-framing them as non-political, socially scientific principles, gathering the social sciences into the space of scientific (cybernetic) discourse.

Seymore Sarason Yale University psychologist, has written on the subject of the rise of the social sciences post WWII: “The time had come, the social scientists argued, for our society to recognise that unless it took the lead to strengthen and support the social sciences we would miss a golden (and perhaps final) opportunity to gain that kind of knowledge and understanding necessary to reshape the social order, national and international, and to contain and even eliminate the destructive forces that had brought about World War II.” ….

Arthur Schlesinger: “The growing necessity of checking Communism by developing some constructive alternative speeded the clarification of liberal ideas in 1947 and 1948” as a bulwark to Communism, he added “we are under additional pressure, compulsion to make our mode one which can integrate men of every colour and culture.”
In the closing years of the 1940s, just as the liberal “the cybernetic family of man” was under construction, anti-Communist moral panic was at its height as academic institutions experienced the “integration of American higher education into the Cold War political system” as academic institutions responded to the pressures of McCarthyism […]