STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 291

tual bears upon us and leaves marks upon the “human condition” (Beer 1965,
294). Beer gives the example of suffering. “The child of loving parents is sud-
denly seized by them, bound and gagged and locked in a dark cellar. What is
the child to make of that? It must be evident to him that (i) his parents have
turned against him; but (ii) they have done so without any cause, and there-
fore (iii) the world is a place where things can happen without causes.” In
fact, in this story, “what has actually happened is that the home has suddenly
been raided by secret police, seeking children as hostages. There was no time
to explain; there was too much risk to the child to permit him any freedom”
(296). Like the parents in this story, then, Beer had the idea that God moves in
a mysterious way which has effects on us , though, as child analogues, we cannot
grasp God's plan. The marks of God's agency are evident in history.
That means that we can accumulate knowledge, though never adequate,
of God, just as factory managers learn about their environments. And that,
in turn, implies, according to Beer in 1965, that there are two authorities we
should consult in the realm of the spiritual. One is the Catholic Church—the
“admonitory church” (Beer 1965, 300)—as the repository of our accumulated
wisdom in brushing up against and adapting to the spiritual. But since Beer
later renounced Catholicism, his second source of authority bears emphasis.
It is “the total drift of human knowledge. Though compounded of the work of
individual brains . . . the totality of human insight can conceivably be greater
than the insight of one brain. For people use their brains in markedly dif-
ferent, and perhaps complementary ways.” In cybernetic terms, many brains
have more variety than one and thus are better able to latch onto the systems
with which they interact. And the reference to “complementary ways” here
asserts that there is even more variety if we pay attention to the historical drift
of knowledge over a range of spiritual traditions rather than within a single
one (301): “Anthropologist friends point out so many alien cultures produce
so many similar ideas about God, about the Trinity, about the Incarnation.
They expect me to be astonished. They mean that I ought to realise there is
something phoney about my specifically Christian beliefs. I am astonished,
but for opposite reasons. I am cybernetically impressed . . . by Augustine's
precept: 'securus judicat orbis terrarum'—the world at large judges rightly.”
Beer perhaps verges on heresy in his willingness to find spiritual truths across
the range of the world's religions, but he saves himself, if he does, by seizing in
this essay on just those truths that the church itself espoused: God, the Trin-
ity, the incarnation of God in Christ. Later, when he had left the church, he
seized on other ones, as we will see. For the moment, let me repeat that here
Beer had developed a cybernetic rhetoric for smuggling all sorts of positive