Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The distinctly cybernetic aspect of Beer's politics connected immediately
to the ontology of unknowability. Other people, at any scale of social aggrega-
tion, are exceedingly complex systems that are neither ultimately graspable
nor controllable through knowledge. And along with that observation goes, as
I noted in chapter 2, a notion of respect for the other—as someone with whom
we have to get along but whom we can never possibly know fully or control.
And this was Beer's normative political principle: we should seek as little as
practically possible to circumscribe the other's variety, and vice versa—this
was the condition of freedom at which Beer thought politics should aim. This,
in turn, translated into an explicit view of social relations. If the ontology of
knowability sits easily with an image of hierarchical command and control,
in which orders are transmitted unchanged from top to bottom, then Beer's
notion of freedom entailed a symmetric notion of adaptive coupling between
individuals or groups. In a process of reciprocal vetoing—also describable as
mutual accommodation—the parties explore each other's variety and seek to
find states of being acceptable to all. The ontological and practical resonances
here among Beer and Bateson and Laing are obvious, though Beer was operat-
ing in the space of organizations rather than psychiatry.
Beer recognized, of course, that any form of social organization entailed
some reduction in the freedom of its members, but he argued that one should
seek to minimize that reduction. In reference to viable systems, his thought
was that freedom was a condition of maximal “horizontal” variety at each of
the quasi-autonomous levels, coupled with the minimum of “vertical” variety
reduction between levels consistent with maintaining the integrity of the sys-
tem itself. Hence the notion of “designing freedom”: as Beer explained it, the
VSM was a diagram of social relations and information flows and transforma-
tions that could serve to guarantee the most freedom possible within orga-
nized forms of life. As we need to discuss, that view did not go uncontested,
but let me emphasize now two features of Beer's vision.
First, there are many absorbing topics of political theory which go through
immensely subtle arguments to arrive at the conclusion that we need more
freedom, fuller democracy, or whatever—conclusions which many of us
would accept without ever reading those topics. Beer was not in that busi-
ness. He took it for granted that freedom and democracy are good things.
The characteristic of his work was that he was prepared to think through in
some detail just how one might arrange people and information systems to
make the world freer and more democratic than it is now. Beer's specific solu-
tions to this problem might not have been beyond criticism, but at least he
was prepared to think at that level and make suggestions. This is an unusual
