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spiritual knowledge past the ontology of unknowability, and it is worth not-
ing that one example of this figures prominently in the “Knowledge of God”
essay (Beer 1965, 297): “In fact, we—that is men—have a whole reference
frame, called religion, which distinguishes between orders of creation pre-
cisely in terms of their communication capacity. The catalogue starts with
inanimate things, works up through the amoeba and jellyfish to the primates,
runs through monkeys to men—and then goes gaily on: angels, archangels,
virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, seraphim, cherubim.”
So here, in the writings of the world's greatest management cybernetician,
then director of one of the world's first OR consulting groups, we find the
medieval Great Chain of Being, running continuously from rocks and stones
to angels and God. There is, of course, no integral connection between this
and cybernetics, but, at the same time, it is hard not to read it back into the
development of Beer's cybernetics. The recursive structure of the VSM, as
discussed so far, is nothing but the Great Chain of Being, sawn off before the
angels appear—and, as we shall shortly see, Beer subsequently insisted on
recontinuing the series, though in non-Christian terms.
As I said, these maneuvers in “Knowledge of God” open the way for a positive
but revisable domain of spiritual knowledge, and we can learn more of where
Beer came to stand in this domain from a topic that he wrote that was never
published, “Chronicles of Wizard Prang” (Beer 1989b).
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Wizard Prang is the
central character in the twenty chapters of the topic and clearly stands for
Beer himself: he lives in a simple cottage in Wales, has a long beard, wears
simple clothes, eats simple food, describes himself as “among other things . . .
a cybernetician” (133) and continually sips white wine mixed with water, “a
trick he had learned from the ancient Greeks” (12). The thrust of the topic is
resolutely spiritual and specifically “tantric” (103). Its substance concerns
Prang's doings and conversations, the latter offering both cybernetic exegesis
of spiritual topics and spiritually informed discussions of topics that Beer
also addresses in his secular writings: the failings of an education system that
functions to reproduce the world's problems (chap. 2); the sad state of mod-
ern economics (chap. 15); the need to beware of becoming trapped within
representational systems, including tantric ones (chap. 15).
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We are entitled,
then, to read the topic as a presentation of the spiritual system that Beer lived
by and taught when he was in Wales, albeit a fictionalized one that remains
veiled in certain respects. And with the proviso that I am out of my depth
here—I am no expert on the esoteric doctrines and practices to follow—I
