IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 35

KEYNOTE

Mary Catherine
Bateson

Norbert Wiener:
Odd Man Ahead
ior. Wiener's perplexity and lack of
much of the work on earth systems
skill in human relations included
science has been done, building on
genuine concern about the impact
cybernetics. To understand what
of cybernetics on human society,
is happening to the planet now, we
the creation of unemployment, and
have to think in terms of concepts
making warfare more destructive,
like homeostasis and how it can be
all of which happened. He worried
disrupted. We are in a situation of
that gadgetry would displace the
great danger, but we are unable to
beginning of a new ontology. He
discuss it in ways the public can grasp.
was right. We too should be more
Without shared comprehension, we
worried than we now are.
cannot, either within this country or
Wiener coined the word "cyberinternationally, arrive at a coordinated
netics" from the Greek word for
response. We apparently don't want
steersman, defining it as
the "science of communication and control." He
is sometimes called the
"father of the computer,"
We are in a situation of great
but more important was
what is often called systems
danger, but we are unable to
theor y and mainly now
discuss it in ways the public
belongs to business schools
and family therapy. We talk
can grasp.
about communication but
we - above all in the academy - do not live in terms
of the interactional realities that we
to be able to communicate. We are
talk about. The whole concept of
stuck with a patchwork of engineering
intellectual integration across disciproposals, but the problem can only
plines has slipped out of focus, so
be solved by changing interactions,
that research is decontextualized.
behaviors, and relationships at both
For several years I served on the
global and individual levels.
Advisory Council of the National CenCybernetics not only offered
ter for Atmospheric Research, where
a new ontology; it also demanded

y childhood memories of Norbert Wiener are of a strange
looking person who
c a me repea ted ly
from his New Hampshire home
nearby, to the summer home of
Lawrence K. Frank (vice-president
of the Macy Foundation), where
many distinguished thinkers came
and went. Periodically, Wiener
would appear without warning, talk
and talk about some new idea, and
then disappear. What I noticed as
a child in response to him was a
complicated mixture of respect for
his ideas and exasperation at his
lack of a sense of how and when
to communicate effectively. There
have been speculations that Wiener
was a case of Asperger's not-yetdiscovered syndrome. Whether or
not this was true, he suffered from
a father with pronounced ideas of
how to educate his brilliant child.
What is so striking, whatever the
source of his social ineptitude, is
that in spite of his limited empathy
and sometimes difficulty in communicating, he was aware enough to
be concerned about human behav-

M

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461184
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

september 2015

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

35
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015
