Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  The movie ended and the lights came on again.

  What, the speaker asked with a smile, did this little demonstration prove? Simply that there is no unbridgeable gap between the animal and the machine: they are both tangles of communications and controls, c-and-c systems. Man is a multiple-purpose machine, while Jo-Jo is a single-purpose machine. But clog the feedbacks and both of them begin to dance at random, the same tremulous jogging dance.

  Jo-Jo, of course, was only a crude cybernetic toy, there were now many infinitely more complex machines which demonstrated that all c-and-c systems follow the same basic laws. But the moth-bedbug was the very first such machine ever invented by man in his struggle to bring the animal and the mechanical together, hyphenate the great incompatibles. All honor, then, to the man who, back in the forties, had played a leading role in building the first moth-bedbug—Norbert Wiener.

  Wiener. Professor Norbert Wiener. A name to remember and to cherish. Back in the days of the Second, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this mathematical genius had called together colleagues from many fields and with them created an entirely new science required by the times: cybernetics. He had invented the name himself, from the Greek κvβ∈ρvήτηζ, meaning “steersman,” and forged the first definition, “the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Most remarkable of all, he had had the vision to see that, once engineers knew enough about c-and-c systems, it would be possible—more: it would be necessary—to build machines which would duplicate, and then improve upon, even the most complex parts and functions of the animal.

  The greatest human function to usurp, to duplicate, ultimately to perfect, was that of thought itself—for if the brain could perfect itself in an electronic model, it could then imitate this model and thus become perfect itself. Wiener realized that the most important machine to develop was the calculating machine, the reasoning machine, the so-called robot brain. He argued that the machina ratiocinatrix was the next daring leap which the scientific imagination had to take, it followed inevitably from Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator: for once you had perfected a mathematical logic you needed a perfect machine to employ that logic.

  And so the first cyberneticists set to work building the thought machine. Their first efforts were pretty primitive—the M.I.T. Differential Analyzer, Harvard’s IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator, Bell Laboratories’ General Purpose Relay Calculator, the Kalin-Burkhard Logical-Truth Calculator, Moore School’s ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). But in twenty short years they perfected EMSIAC (the Electronic Military Strategy Integrator and Computer). And ultimately all the marvelous electronic brains had been developed which now ran the robot factories in the Immob world and thus freed man at last from the drudgery of inhuman labor so that he could concentrate on perfecting his own brain, to bring it closer to the perfection of the reasoning machine.

  Wiener had gone still further. With his intuitive genius he had somehow dimly sensed the Immob future which cybernetics would eventually usher in. So he had concerned himself from the beginning with duplicating other parts and functions of the human animal—in the machines called prosthetics.

  “The loss of a segment of limb,” Wiener had written in 1948, “implies not only the loss of the purely passive support of the missing segment or its value as mechanical extension of the stump, and the loss of the contractile power of its muscles, but implies as well the loss of all cutaneous and kinesthetic sensations originating in it. The first two losses are what the artificial-limb maker now tries to replace. The third has so far been beyond his scope. . . . The present artificial limb removes some of the paralysis caused by the amputation, but leaves the ataxia. With the use of proper receptors, much of this ataxia should disappear as well. . . . I have made an attempt to report these considerations to the proper authorities, but up to now I have not been able to accomplish much.”

  Of course he had not been able to accomplish much, the lecturer went on. His had been a brutalized war-bent society, all too ready to spend billions developing the A-bomb but quite reluctant to allocate even a penny to work out adequate prosthetics for those maimed in its periodic wars. It had remained for Immob to perfect artificial limbs superior to natural ones.

  “What’d you think of him?” Jerry asked as they walked down the corridor.

  “I had a sort of negative tropism to him—guess I’m not prepared to see the light yet.”

  The next lecturer was a philosopher. Remembering the philosophers he had known during his own student days, Martine rather expected that, as against the cyberneticist’s hammer-blow style, this man would be on the wispy and wishy-washy side. After all, the ephemera of metaphysics provided a much leaner diet for a man than the reassuringly tangible entities of physics and neurophysics. Because philosophers dealt in ideas with fuzzy rather than machined edges, in concepts which oozed out of pigeonholes and ran stickily together, they would only be putting themselves out of business if, following the cyberneticists’ logic, they tried to establish in the gray matter equivalents of the unerring networks of caged vacuums—if such a venture could succeed, metaphysics would be reduced to an exercise in hooking up electronic circuits.

  But Martine was dead wrong about this Immob philosopher. The young quadro plunged headlong into his subject as though he were regarding reality through the physicist’s electron microscope rather than the metaphysicist’s muzzy smog.

  Where, he wanted to know, did the philosophy of Immob start? With William James—more concretely, with the immortal The Moral Equivalent of War which James wrote, incredibly enough, in 1910. Here, at least in embryo, was to be found the core of the whole Immob concept—the idea that the heroic, derring-do energies of youth must neither be bottled up nor drained off by war, but must be given adequate outlets in peaceful, constructive projects which capture the young imagination.

  Wherever Immob operated—in the East Union orbit as well as the Strip orbit—one could see Moral Equivalents which pitted man against the elements rather than against his fellow-men. At this very moment brigades of mono-amp youths, serving for two-year periods without pay, were seeding and dispersing clouds to control rainfall, throwing up mighty dams to stem and divert rivers, exploring Lake Victoria’s depths: man against water. Others were working on projects in which mountains were literally moved and valleys filled in with atomic explosives: man against earth. Still others were helping to build and test rocket ships which eventually would break away from the earth and, free orbit, catapult into space toward the moon and the nearby planets: man against the air and the ether and the exasperating clutch of gravity. And there were those who were risking their lives every day to test new types of personal armor and non-inflammable suits which one day would allow human beings to bore through to the infernal center of the earth or land on the boiling surfaces of other planets and come away unscathed: man against fire.

  And the result? As men through mutual effort conquered and humbled the universe, they speedily lost the feeling of alienation from their environment and came, through mastery of Nature, to feel at one with it. And this in turn caused men to feel less alienated from each other: masters can mingle freely and exuberantly, while slaves can only skirt each other and cower in lonely skin-encapsulated terror. So the anguish of being a puny creature engulfed in an infinitude of threat was done for: the problem which had so haunted a certain antiquated pre-Immob school of philosophy called existentialism that it had defined the emotions of man—supposedly cowed and alienated for good—as those of nausea, anxiety, dread, fear and trembling, the sickness unto death. The morbid emotions of alienated man were finished, in their place were mutuality and joyousness. Man was now regaining that sense of the oceanic, of mystic, majestic connectedness with Nature and his fellows, which the old Freud had found to be so shriveled in his neurotic civilization that he had questioned whether there was such a thing.

  Every man was now coming to feel that the universe was close to h
im, wandering more deeply into his grasp all the time, meek, diffident, tamed, bursting with unsuspected intimacies. The universe was a mere extension of himself. Freud had long ago pointed out that in the beginning of life the infant does not distinguish between selfness and otherness, but this is a megalomaniacal myth and it is a rude, often shattering shock to the young one when reality intrudes on autarchic pleasure and it learns painfully that the world is less oyster than octopus. Everyone suffered this shock of Itness at the beginning of life, and the neurotic fears which resulted no doubt explained a good deal of the war-making energies which grown people unleashed against each other.

  Immob had found the way to heal this infantile wound. A mature kind of megalomania was now becoming possible. Now the universe was truly, literally, becoming an appendage of man’s ego. What the child lost in self-esteem, Immob restored on a higher plane. Omnipotence was rapidly becoming mankind’s everyday experience, infantile myth was yielding to cybernetic might. Thanks to the boundless heroism generated by Moral Equivalents, men were coming to terms with the once nauseatingly distant and indifferent universe and recapturing the exhilarating sense of the oceanic. And such men do not fight with each other, they embrace. Moral Equivalents were a strategy to restore human megalomania by smashing the “Its,” the steamrollers.

  “I couldn’t follow him on that last point,” Jerry said. “He’s too deep for me.”

  “Me too,” Martine said. “He seems to have a theme song: How Deep Is the Oceanic? I wonder, though, if Vishinu hears him singing.”

  “Oh, sure he does. Why, at this very moment there are lecturers in universities all over the East Union who are saying exactly what this guy just said, word for word. Matter of fact, that last prof wrote a textbook on his subject, Community and the Sense of the Oceanic I think it’s called, that’s used as an advanced M.E. text in the Union same as here.”

  “Do they really teach exactly the same things over there?”

  “Well, some of their philosophers like to sound off more on Tolstoy and Kropotkin and Pavlov than William James. Then their cyberneticists are a little sore about Wiener having been an American, they claim they had their own Wieners a long time ago and one bird even argues that he’s got documents to prove the Russians invented the first artificial leg. But mostly it’s the same.”

  “Maybe,” Martine suggested, “Vishinu feels unoceanic toward Theo because he thinks Theo’s a bit too oceanic about the Indian Ocean. That may be why everybody’s at sea today. Where do we go next?”

  “Elementary Semantics.”

  Alfred Korzybski, the next lecturer explained, had been a mathematician and expert on military logistics who had served as a Russian intelligence officer during the First. He had been filled with revulsion by the devastation which followed in the wake of the Versailles peace treaty. What was wrong with his moribund society, he had decided, was simply that it remained bound by Aristotelian logic—logic of the childhood of the human race. He had invented General Semantics to bring about an anti-Aristotelian wrench in human thinking.

  Here, in capsule form, was Korzybski’s idea. No doubt it represented a great advance over the old atomistic and particularist thinking about man to say that he is an integral unit, and that consequently he cannot be studied as a grab bag of separate parts. Hyphens had been inserted between his various parts by modern psychologists and philosophers, the emphasis had shifted from part to Gestalt, man had come to be defined as a mass of patterns and connectives and interactions. That was all to the good. But, Korzybski emphasized, one had to go much further before a science of human nature became possible. For man is not simply a functional unit, a bundle of hyphenated complexities which are themselves hyphenated—(mind-body) - (instinct-thought) - (conscious-unconscious) - (id-ego-superego) - (cortex-thalamus)—he is such a unit in a surround.

  The human skin is an artificial boundary: the world wanders into it and the self wanders out of it, traffic is two-way and constant. Therefore the proper approach to a science of human nature, the only possible one, was to define the object of study as man-as-a-whole-in-his-environment. The unit under observation is whole-man-wholly-surrounded. The moment the hyphenation was completed and man was defined that way it became necessary, of course, to determine what the human surround consisted of.

  Korzybski defined the human surround. Above all, he said, it is a neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic environment which emanates from man and then envelops him, a sheath of self-generated signs and symbols. For as man generates words, verbalisms, articulated images and tokens to represent objective facts, he projects them into the world about him and institutionalizes them. After millennia of such semantic spewing by the human race, every child is born into a world saturated with man’s verbal projections.

  Precisely here, Korzybski said, was where the difficulty lay. The environment which man spins about himself does not represent objective facts; the words and symbols which make it up are increasingly at variance with reality. Sheath of signs and symbols? No. Rather, a smoke screen.

  Why should this be? Well, there has always been an Aristotelian flaw in man, at least during his protracted childhood. From the beginning of human time there has been a certain gap between what exists and the representations which people developed for what exists. The reason was that man always took his words for the realities, the Aristotelian error. The sounds which become words were first produced by man in consternation—a series of oh’s and ah’s—precisely because he was bewildered by the ferment and dazzle of the world around him. But he never guessed that when these sounds hardened into words the words were not reflections of the real so much as they were muddied, groping, subjectively distorted substitutes for it—particularly since the world changed at a geometrically accelerating pace while words remained fixed. It did not occur to him that although he is in touch with the dynamic real world, both inner and outer, on a silent level, when he begins to verbalize, his static symbolic sounds wander very, very far from that silent level of things-as-they-really-are-and-are-sensed.

  Behind the Aristotelian frame of mind there had always been a belief in the magical power of the word. This has always been a delusion of primitives, children and neurotics, the megalomaniacal fiction that what the mouth produces molds and marshals the world outside. The classical Greek veneration for the Olympian mind—Aristotle’s assumption that simply by turning in on itself the human mind could fathom the real nature of things and then find verbalisms to convey that knowledge—was only a more sophisticated version of the same magical trust in words. This notion, because it made shaky men feel important, ruled human thinking for long centuries. As a result, thought remained entirely anti-pragmatic and anti-referential, there was no checking with the silent levels.

  “What is the way out?” the speaker demanded. “To clear away the verbal trash choking the feedbacks and preventing mature megalomania. To understand that the word is not the object, eloquence is not photography, sound does not equate with substance. The map is not the territory. The map is not the territory. This was Korzybski’s inspired slogan.”

  How did this slogan fare under Immob?

  “With Immob, with the capture of the oceanic sense, the primitive neurotic childhood of the human race is ended. For neurosis, primitivism and childishness consist in a cleavage between ‘I’ and ‘It.’ Immob makes possible a sort of cosmic hyphenation, which is the cure for neurosis—hyphenation of man within himself, of man and man, of man and his whole environment, of will and idea, word and thing, map and territory. Between the idea and the reality no longer falls the alienating shadow lamented by T. S. Eliot, a poet of the Aristotelian world in its death agonies. On the silent levels we can drill our way into reality with our bore-arms, sear our way into the truth with our flame-arms, indulge quite literally in epic flights of the imagination with our heli-arms, dispense with ethereal verbiage because increasingly we can roam at will, physically, through the real ether. Alienation is thus yielding to a universal integration,
and our language reflects it. The multiverse is becoming a universe. The Age of the Hyphen has begun. . . .

  “Now it is a distinct pleasure for me to introduce a guest lecturer from the Institute for Political Semantics.”

  Several assistants wheeled a large cratelike box into the room. The end turned toward the class was draped with a black cloth.

  Another sober, intent-looking young quadro stepped briskly up to the lecture platform and began to address the audience.

  “Most of you are acquainted with the Hallucinator,” he said, pointing toward the box. “Perhaps you remember that it was invented in the first half of the century by one of the greatest Immob pathbreakers, Professor Adelbert Ames of the old Institue for Associated Research. Perhaps you know, too, that when Professor Ames presented his celebrated demonstrations in 1947, at the Princeton Bicentennial Symposium on Man and his Physical Environment, the death-blow to Aristotleian man was delivered.”

  The lecturer walked over to the box and pulled the drape from its near end, exposing a small round aperture. By craning his neck Martine managed to bring this opening into his line of vision. Inside, clearly outlined in white against the thick gloom of the cubicle, was the figure of a large man, obviously a quadro fitted with pros, bending over a hillock and boring into it with some sort of special-purpose arm.

  “Those of you who are sitting directly in front of the Hallucinator,” the speaker continued, “can see what is inside. At least you think you can see what is inside. Will someone in the class be good enough to describe what his eye registers?”

  There was a volunteer in the third row. “It’s a man boring into a pile of something with a special pro,” he said.

  “Good. Now, in the context of semantic events of the last twenty-four hours, does this ‘spectacle’ suggest anything more concrete to you?”

  “Well, what Brother Vishinu accused Brother Theo of last night. The first thing that comes to mind is that this represents Brother Theo digging for columbium during his cruise with the Olympic Team.”