The Culture of Feedback

Ecological Thinking in Seventies America

Daniel Belgrad

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226652535, 9780226652368
• eBook ISBN: 9780226652672
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When we want advice from others, we often casually speak of "getting some feedback." But how many of us give a thought to what this phrase means? The idea of feedback actually dates to World War II, when the term was developed to describe the dynamics of self-regulating systems, which correct their actions by feeding their effects back into themselves. By the early 1970s, feedback had become the governing trope for a counterculture that was reoriented and reinvigorated by ecological thinking.

The Culture of Feedback digs deep into a dazzling variety of left-of-center experiences and attitudes from this misunderstood period, bringing us a new look at the wild side of the 1970s. Belgrad shows us how ideas from systems theory were taken up by the counterculture and the environmental movement, eventually influencing a wide range of beliefs and behaviors, particularly related to the question of what is and is not intelligence. He tells the story of a generation of Americans who were struck by a newfound interest in—and respect for—plants, animals, indigenous populations, and the very sounds around them, threading his tapestry with cogent insights on environmentalism, feminism, systems theory, and psychedelics. The Culture of Feedback repaints the familiar image of the '70s as a time of Me Generation malaise to reveal an era of revolutionary and hopeful social currents, driven by desires to radically improve—and feed back into—the systems that had come before.

ONE

Systems, Ecology, and Environmentalism

Maturity, sanity, and diversity go together. GARY SNYDER

Initially and most simply in the 1940s and 1950s, the cybernetic understanding of intelligence as a phenomenon of feedback loops referred to the capacity of a system to learn or self-correct. But in the 1960s, systems theorists devoted increasing attention to how such systems were “nested,” with feedback loops inserted within feedback loops so that what constituted the “outside” environment of a system on one level was itself subject to the dynamic forces of a larger system of which both were subsystems.1 The fact that natural systems were typically nested in this way implied that intelligence involved not only the capacity to learn, but a further capacity to respond creatively to changing environmental circumstances: to learn, spontaneously, new ways of learning—or, in a word, to evolve. The “new ecology” that emerged through the influence of cybernetics envisioned nature as such an evolving, self-regulating system, governed by feedback loops that placed constraints on the behaviors of its various parts.

The first textbook explicating the systems view of ecology was published by Eugene and Howard Odum in 1953. What begs for historical explanation, therefore, is the suddenness with which ecological thinking gained popular traction in the early 1970s. Paul Brooks, editor in chief at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company in Boston, wrote in 1970 that “the science of ecology has quite suddenly emerged from the obscurity of academic studies to become a household word.”2

This sudden prominence was due largely to the impact of the environmental movement, which brought ecological thinking to the attention of millions of Americans. Environmentalism used ecology to assert that if people did not quickly bring their behaviors within sustainable bounds, the collapse of the natural system supporting them would force a radical and painful remedy upon them. The mass popularity of the first Earth Day in 1970 expanded on the work of environmental writers who had brought the principles of ecology to general attention during the previous decade.

The idea of ecosystem collapse as nature’s feedback to errant humans formed the basis of an ecological ethic. Gregory Bateson pronounced in 1970 that “the processes of ecology are not mocked.” He was paraphrasing the biblical injunction “God is not mocked; for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” By substituting “the processes of ecology” for “God,” Bateson implied that, like the God of the Bible, the forces of ecological feedback both dictated ethical behaviors and meted out punishments for their transgression.3

Systems Ecology and Information Theory

In the seventies the idea of the ecosystem as a community of mutual interdependencies offered a significant popular alternative to the two dominant views of nature previously extant in American culture: that of nature as a savage wilderness to be subdued and civilized; and that of nature as a resource given significance only through human utilization. The term “ecosystem” was coined in 1935 by British ecologist Arthur Tansley to refer to the dynamics of natural communities such as were then being described by American ecologists like Aldo Leopold and Paul Sears. It was taken up in earnest in the 1950s and 1960s by a new generation of ecologists feeling the impact of cybernetics, among them Ramón Margalef and the brothers Eugene and Howard Thomas (H. T.) Odum. Yale ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson, who participated in the Macy conferences on cybernetics, published a paper in 1948 titled “Circular Causal Systems in Ecology,” applying cybernetics to the ecological problem of mapping the causes of population changes in biological communities. H. T. Odum was Hutchinson’s doctoral student. In his 1950 dissertation, Odum argued that natural selection was best modeled not as a competition among individuals, but as a history of open systems. The community that is successful in maintaining itself, through a combination of homeostasis and evolution, survives. In ecosystems ecology, as Sharon Kingsland explained, the ecosystem as a whole is understood “as a self-regulated entity, like an individual organism.”4

Called the “new ecology” or “systems ecology,” ecosystem ecology focused on the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems, detailing their dynamics and the causes and effects of disruptions in the flow. These processes could be modeled in the language—and sometimes also the mathematics—of feedback loops. Engaging the cultural debate over the meaning of efficiency, in the mid-1950s Odum published an essay in American Scientist that used systems of equations to define maximum efficiency as the slowest rate of increase in entropy.5

Entropy is the energy that dissipates in the course of an action (Odum called this “leakage”). According to the second law of thermodynamics, in the universe as a whole, entropy can only increase over time. The energy of the sun’s rays flying off into space, for example, dissipates for the most part into useless energy as it scatters. The exception, of course, is the portion of the sun’s energy that is captured by Earth’s plants and sent through photosynthesis into the food chain: the cycles of energy transfer within an ecosystem. This energy dissipates at a much slower rate—depending on the complexity of the community dynamics it gets entered into. Thus life and living systems, as they proliferate, slow the rate at which entropy inevitably increases.

The flow of entropy was most impeded, Odum demonstrated, by the functioning of nested open systems governed by feedback loops. Quantitatively, according to his equations, maximum efficiency as defined in this way never amounts to more than half of the maximum efficiency suggested by the Taylorist ratio of energy output to energy input.6 But Taylor’s method of calculation ignores all sorts of externalities. Odum’s method indicates the best system holistically—that is, if externalities are not disregarded. It maximizes the power available to be retrieved and recirculated repeatedly through the system before eventually being lost.

Toward the end of his essay, Odum offered examples to illustrate that his reasoning could be applied to all nested open systems, whether “physical, biochemical, biological, ecological, or social.” Thus he expanded ecosystems ecology to include human factors. This would come to be called “human ecology,” a subfield that received increasing emphasis during the 1960s.7

Significantly, according to Odum’s model, diversity is key to creating maximum systemic efficiency, since it provides for a proliferation of different energy pathways. The more various and complex the paths of energy circulation, the more the progress of entropy is slowed. Odum in this way provided a mathematical confirmation of Paul Sears’s 1935 assertion that monoculture on the arid plains had hurried the rate of soil erosion by destroying the plant communities that buffered against extremes of temperature and wind.8

Another insight of Sears’s that Odum’s entropic model of efficiency corroborated was that it was an illusion to see technological progress as opening out to infinite future possibilities. In reality, technologies could only give people new ways to tap energy resources stored up by biological communities in the finite past. While they have enabled a progressively more thorough tapping of those stored resources, they have done so at a progressively higher cost in entropy—at lower and lower efficiency rates, from an ecological viewpoint. For Sears, increased rates of soil erosion symbolized this higher cost of doing business. “Fertility has been consumed and soil destroyed at a rate far in excess of the capacity of either man or nature to replace,” he warned. Odum phrased the problem in terms of energy dissipation: “The rate of entropy increase in maintaining our American civilization with fuels is very great,” he observed. And the Cold War competition between nations to maximize the amount of energy they could afford to expend in fighting one another was not ecologically conducive to the long-term survival of either.9

Between 1956 and 1958, Spanish ecologist Ramón Margalef translated Odum’s ideas into the language of information theory. One definition of information is that it is structure imposed on variety. (In a binary information-storage system, “1” can mean something different from “0,” as long as you can impose those two distinct states.) Completely random variation contains no information. Complete randomness is also the state of total entropy, making it possible to conceive of information as the contrary of entropy, or “negentropy.” This in turn makes it possible to see Odum’s ecosystems, which circulate energy and prevent its dissipation as entropy, as forms storing useful information. The system with maximum ecological efficiency contains the maximum possible information or, in other words, is the form with the most learning. In his 1968 book, Perspectives in Ecological Theory, Margalef wrote:

The process of [ecological] succession is equivalent to a process of accumulating information. The initial, poorly organized, stages receive the full impact of the environment and any changes in it. Individuals of different species are selectively destroyed. . . . [But] in time the acquired information is expressed in a new organization of the ecosystem. This organization takes into account the predictable changes in the environment, and even controls the environment, so that in the future much smaller changes in the community are necessary to keep it in stable occupation of its area. . . . One can say that the ecosystem has ‘learned’ the changes in the environment, so that before change takes place, the ecosystem is prepared for it.10

By applying the mathematics of information-theory cybernetics to the dynamics of populations in an ecological community, Margalef concluded that the diversity of species in a community was indexical of its health, in terms of how far away in time it was from experiencing a fatal instability. Not only biological diversity was important, but also diversity of interactions. Because all successful adaptive responses are only temporarily advantageous, evolution is understood to take many paths simultaneously. Diversity implies more flexibility and, by extension, improved sustainability.11

According to the conclusions that Odum and Margalef reached by applying cybernetics to ecology, the most diverse and complex systems were the most knowledgeable, the richest in internal resources, and the most resilient; hence, the longest persisting.12 Elimination of the superfluous only took place in immature, poorly organized systems. In mature systems, everything was integrated through feedback loops, so nothing was superfluous and only the minimum was eliminated.

Ecological Thinking versus Game Theory

At the same time that ecosystem ecology was exploring the implications of cybernetics for natural systems and extending its conclusions to human ecology, a competing discourse also related to cybernetics, called “game theory,” was being used by military strategists to assist them in Cold War decision making. The adherents of ecological thinking and game theory often found themselves at odds.

Modern game theory was pioneered by émigré mathematician John von Neumann, who regularly participated in the postwar Macy Foundation conferences. Von Neumann’s game theory used the mathematics of homeostatic systems that Norbert Wiener had made the basis of cybernetics, and applied it to interactive decision-making scenarios that were called “games.” As William Poundstone explained, “A ‘game’ is a conflict situation where one must make a choice knowing that others are making choices too, and that the outcome of the conflict will be determined in some prescribed way by all the choices made.”13

Unlike ecosystems ecology, which emphasized the symbiotic functioning of whole systems, game theory focused on competition. Its equations calculated how one could statistically maximize one’s competitive advantage over an intelligent rival. When applied in military planning, economics, or evolutionary biology, the usefulness of game theory’s mathematics was premised on the existence of a population of completely self-interested players competing logically and yet ruthlessly for scarce resources, whether territory, food, or mates. The classic games on which the field was built were zero-sum games, meaning that one player benefits only when another player loses. The field was extended to include non-zero-sum games and games of more than two players by mathematician John Nash—although in such games the “optimal” strategies, known as “Nash equilibria,” often proved disadvantageous to all parties.14

Game theory was adopted by American military strategists to model the possible future outcomes of their present decisions, since the unprecedented possibilities of nuclear warfare seemed to make prior military experience irrelevant. In the late 1940s, von Neumann was brought on board as a consultant at the RAND Corporation, a think tank housed at the Douglas Aircraft plant outside Los Angeles and exclusively dedicated to military strategizing in the context of atomic warfare. There, game theory helped to propel the emerging atomic arms race by influencing the Truman administration to develop and stockpile hydrogen bombs. Although Robert Oppenheimer, as head of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, counseled President Truman in 1949 to set a good example by shelving the H-bomb project (“In determining not to proceed to develop the Superbomb,” Oppenheimer wrote, “we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war”), he was overruled by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who argued that it was too risky to assume that the USSR would not take advantage of a similar opportunity for nuclear superiority.15

Game theory encouraged players to see one another as implacable foes. In a letter to Norbert Wiener in 1952, Gregory Bateson identified the problem as game theory’s inability to take deutero-learning into account: “What applications of the theory of games do, is to reinforce the players’ acceptance of the . . . premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult for the players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing with the other,” he wrote. But von Neumann’s theories were nevertheless embraced at RAND, especially by the futurist Herman Kahn, who argued in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War that the United States should prepare to wage and win a nuclear war, and not rely merely on deterring one.16

That Wiener consulted with Bateson while von Neumann collaborated with Kahn illustrates that, although they shared a mathematics, profound differences of worldview separated the two men. According to historian Steve Heims, von Neumann “would much rather err on the side of mistrust and suspicion than be caught in wishful thinking about the nature of people and societies.” Wiener, on the contrary, believed that game theory overstated the role of malevolent competitiveness in decision making. In Cybernetics, Wiener derided “von Neumann’s picture” as not being a true systems theory, but a distorted abstraction that amounted to “a perversion of facts.” In his 1950 treatise, The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener made the ecological argument that in systems, the “enemy” was entropy—“the absence of order”—rather than the actively malevolent “contrary force” that von Neumann’s game theory posited.17

From an ecological perspective, game theory falsified the actual conditions of decision making in several ways. For one, it depended on a sequential logic, in which one player decides a move, then another player decides a move, and so on—wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1  Systems, Ecology, and Environmentalism
• 2  Self-Organizing Systems and Mind in Nature
• 3  Crying Indian
• 4  Talking with Plants
• 5  Ambient Music
• 6  Dancing with Animals
• 7  Neo-Orthodoxies
• Conclusion: A Metahistory
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Plates