eisenhower as cybernetician

the great complex

Prompted by an email from a friend, I’ve been reading Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address (the “military-industrial complex” speech), and it’s really very interesting. There’s no evidence that he or his speechwriter had ever been involved with cybernetics or systems theory (other than that they had been educated middle class Americans in the years 1948-1950, a period when Norbert Wiener’s book was a massive publishing hit and written up in all the popular news magazines). But look at these selected extracts:

“But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance[1] in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”

“…This conjunction[2] of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications[3]. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought[4] by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist….”

“…Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research.[5] … For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers…”

So here we have an understanding that a new decision making system has been created, one which does not necessarily correspond to institutional boundaries (see [2] above). And also, at [4], a suggestion that this system has a tendency to generate outcomes which are not necessarily the ones which were sought by any of the individual people who make it up. And the warning at [3] that this system seeks to maintain its own viability and to grow. At [5] there’s an appreciation that the postwar era marked a big change in the way that lots of intellectual activity was carried out – what I’ve referred to elsewhere as “industrialisation of decision making”. And that this has something to do with the availability of computers; that the kinds of communication and information handling techniques you have available are going to influence the organisational forms you choose, because organisation is itself an information technology. If you squint your eyes a bit, you can see in [1] an acknowledgement that the goal of the system is to maintain viability and homeostasis, not to maximise some objective function. But maybe that’s taking things a bit too far.

It doesn’t pay to get dewy-eyed about this sort of thing. In context, for the most part this was all in service of a generalised grumpiness about the expansion of the Federal budget, and about the President’s inability to do anything about it. But there are some really interesting ideas in there, of the sort that people have fairly systematically ignored because they’re difficult. Cybernetics is the theory of organisation and systems, so it’s not wholly surprising that people who have big systemic problems to think about (including lots of economists, a subject which will be returned to!) often end up independently inventing bits of it.

Anyway, in the meantime I will just leave you with my friend's thought which prompted this reading - “ isn't it quite alarmingly close to the truth that the United States military has most of the characteristics of a Paperclip Maximiser?”