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| Essay on contemporary issues published in 1972 |
Something else, however, which became fully manifest only in the decades after [George] Sorel’s and [Alfredo] Pareto’s death, was incomparably more disastrous to this view. The enormous growth of productivity in the modern world was by no means due to an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists. The “intellectuals,” much despised by Sorel and Pareto, suddenly ceased to be a marginal social group and emerged as a new elite, whose work, having changed the conditions of human life almost beyond recognition in a few decades, has remained essential for the functioning of society.
In the aleatory compositions of John Cage, the ‘active confusion’ of the intellectual demagogue, Marshall McLuhan, who abandoned meaningful content with his dictum that the ‘medium was the message’, and the sensory barrage of ‘multi-media’ overload – siphoning off aspects of ‘Scientism’ for artistic purposes – [Erich] Kahler saw at work a deliberate attempt to undermine the whole conception of coherence in a misguided movement to break free of what it considered the restrictions of outworn, outmoded sensibilities. One of the main driving forces behind this demolition work, Kahler believed, was the increasing technological character of modern life.
The core accusation that [Walter] Benjamin levels at the tragedy of the whole of the modern age and its philosophy is “objectification”—of nature and, in particular, of humanity.
Self-organizing systems are therefore relatively autonomous, stable, and enduring, whereas artificial systems are intrinsically dependant, unstable, and transient.
So three processes produce greater complexity in our world: competition and interdependence among entities creates niches that new entities can fill; this competitive environment also encourages individual entities to breach performance limits by adding new subsystems; and large systems of entities can capture or task simpler systems, adapting and building on the grammar of these simpler systems to boost performance.
Of course a danger is a potentiality, not an actuality. Of course some of these developments may not happen. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions that have not matured into acts. That is our saving grace, our hope. But we must recognize that the source of the new and enormous danger is not outside but inside this world, inside the minds of men, including scientists and those who support and cheer them on.
Sadness, depression, frustration, upset, and anxiety can only be produced by seeing a situation and then producing an interpretation of it and then believing that interpretation.
