One Machine Fits All
If the analogical mind is asked to settle on one main cause of sclerosis, corruption and decay in all the activities of human endeavour at the moment, it will finger the machine (and mechanism) as the driving trope and conceit. Despite the advent of electricity, electronics, and logics, our civilisation continues to be dominated by the machine as analogy. And like an adolescent who has just come to learn the fun of sexual euphemism and innuendo, our civilization gravitates relentlessly toward that one metaphor. At root the trouble with our pursuit of Truth is the industrialisation of it into specialised parts to which we can job things out in an effort to resolve various inefficiencies to make the greater machine run smoothly.
The trouble with the Arts today is the same: specialisation, certification, instalment as a cog in some corporate apparatus. Same goes for law, social work, education, you name it. So I can point to the trouble with grand theorising, institutionalising, and administration, but these are only problematic at the moment they are caught up in the impersonal gear-train of a machine designed to make people fit the machine. So profoundly does the machine metaphor pervade our society, we take it for granted even as it colours and flavours our entire epistemology.
As the deleterious effects of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies come to fruition and we discover their inherent racism in figures like former President of Harvard, Claudine Gay—who, it turns out, is guilty of extensive plagiarism—we would be wise to question what exactly is going on. How, for instance, was she allowed to get away with it? And why, once unmasked as a scoundrel, was she allowed to teach the next generation of ivy league students? Furthermore, how could she find supporters with reputations of their own to uphold who were willing to publicly claim that plagiarism was being weaponised by political opponents? In short, why did so many unabashedly support cheating and lying one’s way to the top?
Sadly, the answer is that (a) they themselves are cheaters and liars, and (b) it doesn’t matter who fills the role of president of anything. Just look at senile President of the U.S. Joe Biden! What’s clear is that mental competence is no longer valued because anyone can fill the role of cog in the machine.
In an early article for analogy magazine, Bergson scholar and logics engineer Stephen Robbins pointed out how all systems of human endeavour tend toward rigidification “ultimately expressed as rigid, static structures,” exemplified by IBM’s CMM (Capability Maturity Model):
This model had its origins at Carnegie Mellon, one of the premier universities behind the computer model of mind, wherein mind, it is supposed, can be fully captured by computer programs. Already back in 1972 I had cut my teeth on the theories of Carnegie Mellon’s duo, Alan Newell and Herbert Simon, who devised programs that solve human problems such as those in chess, theorem-proving and arithmetic puzzles. But computer programs are the essence of motions of abstract objects (symbols) in an abstract space and abstract time—timeless, flowless, static. Yes, the classic metaphysic.
Here’s how Robbins characterises the model:
Succinctly, CMM aimed to turn all software creation into a robotic process. Robots create widgets—mindlessly. The top of CMM’s “Five Levels” envisioned a company with perfectly repeatable, robotic processes for developing software widgets. The lowest—the veritable stone age level—the “heroic,” in other words, characterized companies that relied on individuals and their minds. That this level described, say, Borland, Microsoft, Claris, Symantec, Oracle and Lotus—the most successful companies of the time? Insignificant.
So that’s what’s going on. Note that the final phase, level 5, isn’t about “improvement” in quality, but quantity; it’s about throwing the switch to automatic and letting the machine run. The best sort of person for the job is a robot turning out widgets. The last thing the system needs is a hero, someone promoting self development and cultural development. That’s too unpredictable and therefore unreliable.
Could the metaphysic Robbins critiques be true though? (That the universe is a machine populated by machines.) The analogical mind says, maybe the machine analogy has some value; certainly, it’s a productive way of looking at the universe and the socio-economic world when aiming for certain results short term; but there are other metaphors, after all, plenty of them.
Recent string theory has puzzled over the universe as data and concluded that our universe may be a sort of hologram. Thinking of the cosmos in terms of things like data and holograms is a splendid example of the way of analogy.
Gradually the data metaphor is influencing scientific understandings of biology as well. A 2003 paper in Nature by Leroy Hood and David Galas called “The digital code of DNA” states:
Because most ‘higher’ organisms or eukaryotes (organisms that contain their DNA in a cellular compartment called the nucleus), such as yeast, flies and humans, have predominantly the same families of genes, it is the reorganization of DNA-binding sites in the control regions of genes that mediate the changes in the developmental programmes that distinguish one species from another. Thus, the regulatory networks are uniquely specified by their DNA-binding sites and, accordingly, are basically digital in nature.
But even in this paper there’s a compulsive use of the machine metaphor, which frames the digital network as the programming for the machine, thereby supporting Richard Dawkins’s assertion that biological organisms are robots guided by DNA software.
As I noted in a previous essay, geophysicist and science philosopher Stephen Meyer has seen the same phenomenon as an indication of intelligent design because the hypothesis of development by chance or through undirected processes must have limits after all. Would you trust a computer assembled by undirected processes? Why not?
If evolutionary biological processes are directed, we can once again propose significant interiority—that “inner tendency” which Richard Owen (1804-1892)—the most revered naturalist of his time—proposed, but Darwin rejected. The idea of mere mechanism must throw up its arms here, and one would hope that future scientists will catch the tinny sound of the old machine metaphor. If science is to continue developing, it must become conscious of the analogies that guide its assumptions.
On another tack, the field of economics seems fixated on either a benign dispensation model or a come-and-get-it model: communism and capitalism. There are, I’m aware, many schools of thought and theory under each of these headings, but socio-economically speaking, they fall under one system or the other because both communism and capitalism are products of the machine. They are the main options available to an industrialist economy; or as Marx saw it, industrialism evolves from capitalism to communism. Arguably, Marx was a false prophet and got history altogether wrong because it hasn’t always been a struggle between the workers and the bosses, and there is no such thing as communism except as a utopian fantasy. All we’ve ever witnessed from communist social experiments are forms of corporate feudalism under kleptocratic governance.
It is not appreciated enough that Marxism is specifically about industrial economies and represents the most extreme, final form of industrialism, while capitalism represents the developing form. But the core issue with our society is industrialism—i.e. the machine and what kind of corporation owns the machine and what kind of organisation operates it.
As we see things presently, those two economic models—capitalism and communism—mark the poles of our political spectrum. But why aren’t there any developed alternatives? And if there are any out there, why is there no discussion of them?
The zero-growth economy is an interesting notion, but no one has bothered to lay out its principles and consequences. Since the idea of a zero-growth economy is central to influential agencies like the Club of Rome, the World Economic Forum and the UN, it is imperative that we demand transparency on this subject. With the information on hand, the best one can do is deduce from the rationale for zero-growth (and from the misanthropic messaging) that what these organisations have in mind is a form of feudalism involving corporate barons, patronage, and dispensations for compliance—all in an effort to satisfy a ledger-book model that demands human phenomena conform to its diktats. Globalist leaders are perpetuating the industrialist model and perceive everything metaphysically as a machine. Accordingly, they are the software, and the global population is the hardware, the cogs and the grease of industry. Ineluctably, both groups wind up becoming “the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan.”
Those who’ve been following analogy magazine will recognise the allusion here to poet Ted Hughes’s (1930-1998) observations regarding people with no imagination, those “who simply cannot think what will happen if [they do] such and such a thing.” These folk must “work on principles, or orders, or by precedent, and [. . .] will always be marked by extreme rigidity, because [they are] after all moving in the dark”:
We all know such people, and we all recognize that they are dangerous, since if they have strong temperaments in other respects they end up by destroying their environment and everybody near them. The terrible thing is that they are the planners, and ruthless slaves to the plan — which substitutes for the faculty they do not possess. And they have the will of desperation: where others see alternative courses, they see only a gulf. [See this article for references.]
It is unfortunate that the field of economics has not been more analogically productive. We could use creative thinking in this area of human activity. And I know alternatives exist. I’m aware, for instance, of localised economies using money in ways that communism and capitalism do not account for because they depart from industrialism. For example, communities in Africa often engage in systems where money is not lent, but given to friends and family in times of need. In the developed world however we take interest-based lending for granted. Few are aware of how recent this state of affairs truly is and behave as though it were natural. I mean, in our culture, I’ve heard of brothers lending to one another at a rate of interest. When your own brother turns loan shark on you. . . well, it ought to give one pause.
Anthropological and historical accounts of economics have addressed and continue to address the subject. But where are they in our popular discourse? Perhaps the field of economics is among the most afflicted with leftbrainitis because it’s all about the holy %. In any event, the solution will likely arise from new metaphors, new connections that yield new solutions.
One might imagine, for example, that an ecological analogy might be productive here. And unsurprisingly such an approach is indeed being proposed. Unfortunately, the thinking on this subject, although partly self-conscious regarding its metaphors, is making the mistake of attempting to develop yet another model to which the human phenomena must conform instead of developing a model that conforms to human behavioural phenomena. In other words, it’s not truly ecological in its philosophy. Instead of being descriptive it is prescriptive. Steeped in the misanthropic notion of the Anthropocene, which in turn is steeped in the misguided Dawkinsian notion of humanity as a bunch of selfish robots, the authors seek to punish rather than release human potential.
As the analogical mind helps us clarify the nature of knowledge and the relationship between the phenomena and our methods of accounting for them, we are better equipped to understand the implications inherent to a given model or paradigm. Perhaps with an awareness of analogical strategies we can get better at selecting productive analogies, ones that have an increased chance of accounting for more of the phenomena.
With the present CMM in play and scoundrels like Claudine Gay training the next generation, things aren’t looking hopeful. What we’re looking at is a machine metaphysic turning out robots instead of heroes, and potential heroes elbowed out by misguided efforts at equity meant to ensure equality of outcome. And these efforts are meant to make humanity conform to a model of the Good based on a ledger-book analogy.
The whole system is a factory floor with a foreman pacing the grounds holding a clipboard and ensuring product consistency and reliability. In the end, I don’t think we’re getting much of either, certainly not culturally speaking. Other than a few devices like smartphones, washing machines, and automobiles, the only consistency we’re getting is consistent decline in quality, consistent decline in humanity.
Perhaps the main issue here is that these terms no longer represent virtues of character, but instead goals of industrial production. It’s worth observing that the notion of reliability, for instance, has lost its meaning as an ethical standard—I’m thinking of Gay here and her defenders. Might this corruption of values be a consequence of the migration of the term into the realm of production and process improvement?
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.