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ment has been reached, in which science and religion relate to two disparate
realms of existence, each empowered to speak of topics in its own territory but
not the other's. Again, cybernetics was not like that. As we saw in most detail
in Beer's work, his science (cybernetics) and spirituality were of a piece, shad-
ing into one another without any gap or transition. I talked about the “earthy”
quality of this sort of spirituality; one could just as well speak of the “elevated”
quality of the science (I made up the phrase “spiritual engineering”). One
could say much the same about Ashby's brief foray into the spiritual realm (“I
am now . . . a Time-worshipper”). Aldous Huxley and his scientific contacts
(Osmond and Smythies) stand as a beautiful example of how to think about
an immanent rather than transcendent dimension of the spirit. Those of us
who grew up in the Church of England (and, no doubt, other more dogmatic
churches) find this a difficult position to even imagine—how can you have a
religion without a transcendent God?—but, as I said, it might be worth the
effort, a conceptual and spiritual breather from current agonizing about the
relation between Christianity and Islam, modern science and fundamentalist
Christianity.
T H E S I X T I E S
The sixties—in particular, the sixties of the counterculture—have skipped in
and out of these chapters, too. Substantively, in the recent history of the West,
the sixties were the decade when the preoccupations of cybernetics with
performative experimentation came closest to popular culture—iconically
in the countercultural fascination with “explorations of consciousness,” but
also in sixties experimentation with new identities and art forms, new forms
of social and sexual arrangements, and even with new relations to matter and
technology: Hendrix abusing his guitar and overloading the amps again. My
suggestion is that the many crossovers from cybernetics into the world of the
counterculture index a shared nonmodern ontology. Both the sixties and cy-
bernetics can be understood as nonmodern ontological theater, nonmodern
ontology in action. If cybernetics began as a science of psychiatry, it became,
in its symmetric version, the science of the sixties.
A L T E R E D S T A T E S
There are some places I wanted to go that cybernetics did not take me. My
interest in cybernetics as ontology grew out of my earlier work in the history
