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SOAS”—the School of Oriental and African Studies. Instead, as we have seen,
he went to India with the British Army in 1944, returning in 1947 “as thin as
a rake, a very different person. . . . He was almost totally absorbed in Indian
mysticism, had read endless topics and had seen death, etc, I recall he told me
there was no such thing as pain; it was in the mind and mind over matter and
so on. To prove his point he allowed people to press lighted cigarettes onto the
inside of his wrist to burn a hole while he felt nothing.”
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So, we have these two
sides to Beer's life: the scientific (cybernetics) and the spiritual (Catholicism,
Eastern mysticism, and strange performances). There is, of course, nothing
especially unusual about that. Many physicists, for example, are deeply reli-
gious. But in respect of modern sciences like physics, the scientific and the
spiritual are usually held apart, existing, as one might say, in different com-
partments of life, practiced in different places at different times, in the labora-
tory during the week and in church on Sunday. Bruno Latour (1993) speaks
of the “crossed-out God” of modernity—the Christian God as both almighty
and absent from the world of science and human affairs. As usual, cybernetics
was not like that. Beer's cybernetics and spirituality were entangled in many
ways, and that is what I want to explore here, focusing first on Beer's overall
perspective on nature and then on the more esoteric aspects of his spiritual
understandings and practices. The earliest of Beer's spiritual writings was an
essay published in 1965, “Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God,” and this
provides a convenient entrée for both topics.
Hylozoism
First, Beer's perspective on nature. “Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God”
begins not with nature itself but with a discussion of the finitude of the human
mind. “Each of us has about ten thousand million neurons to work with. It is a
lot, but it is
the
lot. . . . This means that there is a strict mathematical limit to
our capacity to compute cerebrally—and therefore to our understanding. For
make no mistake: understanding is mediated by the machinery in the skull”
(Beer 1965, 294). As a corollary, beyond our cerebral limits there must exist in
the world things which we cannot know.
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Here we recognize the cybernetic
ontology of unknowability—Beer was writing for a readership of nonspecial-
ists; otherwise, he could simply have said that the cosmos was an exceedingly
complex system, as he had defined the term in
Cybernetics and Management
in 1959. There is, though, a difference in the way in which Beer develops
this thought in this essay. One can think of the economic environment of
a firm as being exceedingly complex in a mundane fashion: we can readily
