"History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening" (Joyce)
I call this lecture From Versailles to Cybernetics --- naming the two historic events of the twentieth century. The word "cybernetics" is familiar, is it not? But how many of you know what happened at Versailles in 1919? The question is, What is going to count as important in the history of the last sixty years? I am sixty-two, and, as I began to think about what I have seen of history in my lifetime, it seemed to me that I had really only seen two moments that would rate as really important from an anthropologist's point of view. One was the events leading up to the Treaty of Versailles, and the other was the cybernetic breakthrough.You may be surprised or shocked that I have not mentioned the A-bomb, or even World War II. I have not mentioned the spread of the automobile, nor of the radio and TV, nor many other things that have occurred in the last sixty years.
Let me state my criterion of historical importance:
Mammals in general, and we among them, care extremely, not about episodes, but about the patterns of their relationships.
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This is crucial. This is what mammals are about. They are concerned with patterns of relationship, with where they stand in love, hate, respect, dependency, trust, and similar abstractions,vis-à-vis somebody else. This is where it hurts us to be put in the wrong. If we trust and find that that which we have trusted was untrustworthy; or if we distrust, and find that that which we distrusted was in fact trustworthy, we feel bad. The pain that human beings and all other mammals can suffer from this type of error is extreme. If, therefore, we really want to know what are the significant points in history, we have to ask which are the moments in history when attitudes were changed. These are the moments when people are hurt because of their former "values."
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Similarly, the important question about history is: Has the bias or setting been changed? The episodic working out of events under a single stationary setting is really trivial. It is with this thought in mind that I have said that the two most important historic events in my life were the Treaty of Versailles and the discovery of cybernetics.
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The Treaty was finally drawn up by four men: Clemenceau, "the tiger," who wanted to crush Germany; Lloyd George, who felt it would be politically expedient to get a lot of reparations out of Germany, and some revenge; and Wilson, who had to be bamboozled along. Whenever Wilson would wonder about those Fourteen Points of his, they took him out into the war cemeteries and made him feel ashamed of not being angry with the Germans. Who was the other? Orlando was the other, an Italian.
This was one of the great sellouts in the history of our civilization. A most extraordinary event which led fairly directly and inevitably into World War II. It also led (and this is perhaps more interesting than the fact of its leading to World War II) to the total demoralization of German politics. If you promise your boy something, and renege on him, framing the whole thing on a high ethical plane, you will probably find that not only is he very angry with you, but that his moral attitudes deteriorate as long as he feels the unfair whiplash of what you are doing to him. It's not only that World War II was the appropriate response of a nation which had been treated in this particular way; what is more important is the fact that the demoralizationof that nation was expectable from this sort of treatment. From the demoralization of Germany, we, too, became demoralized.This is why I say that the Treaty of Versailles was an attitudinal turning point.
I imagine that we have another couple of generations of aftereffects from that particular sellout to work through. We are,in fact, like members of the house of Atreus in Greek tragedy.First there was Thyestes' adultery, then Atreus' killing of Thyestes' three children, whom he served to Thyestes at a peace-making feast. Then the murder of Atreus' son, Agamemnon, by Thyestes' son, Aegistheus; and finally the murder of Aegistheus and Clytemnestra by Orestes. It goes on and on. The tragedy of oscillating and self-propagating distrust, hate, and destruction down the generations.
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Now consider the difference between my generation and you who are under twenty-five. We all live in the same crazy universe whose hate, distrust, and hypocrisy relates back (especially at the international level) to the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles.
We older ones know how we got here.I can remember my father reading the Fourteen Points at the breakfast table and saying, "By golly, they're going to give them a decent armistice, a decent peace," or something of the kind. AndI can remember, but I will not attempt to verbalize, the sort of thing he said when the Treaty of Versailles came out. It wasn't printable. So I know more or less how we got here.
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I included cybernetics as the second historic event of importance in my lifetime because I have at least a dim hope that we can bring ourselves to use this new understanding with some honesty. If we understand a little bit of what were doing,maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around our-selves.
Cybernetics is, at any rate, a contribution to change—not simply a change in attitude,but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is.
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The stance that I have taken in choosing what is important in history—saying that the important things are the moments at which attitude is determined, the moments at which the bias of the thermostat is changed—this stance is derived directly from cybernetics. These are thoughts shaped by events from 1946 and after.But pigs do not go around ready-roasted. We now have a lot of cybernetics, a lot of games theory, and the beginnings of understanding of complex systems. But any understanding can be used in destructive ways.
For example, the state departments of several nations are today using games theory,backed up by computers, as a way of deciding international policy. They identify first what seem to be the rules of the game of international interaction; they then consider the distribution of strength, weapons, strategic points, grievances, etc., over the geography and the identified nations. They then ask the computers to compute what should be our next move to minimize the chances of our losing the game. The computer then cranks and heaves and gives an answer, and there is some temptation to obey the computer. After all, if you follow the computer you are a little less responsible than if you made up your own mind.
But if you do what the computer advises, you assert by that move that you suppor the rules of the game which you fed into the computer. You have affirmed the rules of that game.
No doubt nations of the other side also have computers and are playing similar games,and are affirming the rules of the game that they are feeding to their computers. The result is a system in which the rules of international interaction become more and more rigid.
I submit to you that what is wrong with the international field is that the rules need changing. The question is not that is the best thing to do within the rules as they are at the moment. The question is how can we get away from the rules within which we have been operating for the last ten or twenty years, or since the Treaty of Versailles.
The problem is to change the rules, and insofar as we let our cybernetic inventions—the computers—lead us into more and more rigid situations, we shall in fact be maltreating and abusing the first hopeful advance since 1918.
And, of course, there are other dangers latent in cybernetics and many of these are still unidentified. We do not know, for example, what effects may follow from the computerization of all government dossiers.
But this much is sure, that there is also latent in cybernetics the means of achieving a new and perhaps more human outlook, a means of changing our philosophy of control and a means of seeing our own follies in wider perspective.
Gregory Bateson
* This lecture was given April 21, 1966, to the “Two Worlds Symposium” at Sacramento State College.
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