Cybernetics [spoilers]
The entirety of this movie is preaching the gospel of cybernetics, a failed scientific discipline that broke apart as soon as scientists began collecting actual data, yet that nonetheless has entered the public imagination and shaped our (failed) modern view of nature, including ourselves. Simply put cybernetics is the study of systems which interact with themselves and reproduce themselves from themselves. It is one of the reasons we've come to see nature as a vast machine, in much the same way as centuries ago scientists thought of the solar system and the universe as one big clockwork, and it is why we always fail to act to change our predicament. Because we've come to accept its false pseudo-scientific beliefs of nature as self-correcting, self-stabilising "ecosystems", or the "balance of nature". There is no reason to act when we mistakenly believe that nature will sort itself out in the end, and that's not just true of the people in governments and corporations that are systematically unable to think in anything but the short-term, but if we're honest, most or all of us.
It is a conscious decision of the writers to have this geodesic dome (which came to symbolise cybernetics at the time) drift into space with a robot to tend the garden. It's not so much the point that Lowell sacrifices himself to protect his cybernetic garden, it is that he sees himself, and by extension humanity, as the failed, broken component in this machine fantasy of nature. It is beyond cynical, and upon closer examination, as unsettling as "holism" and eugenics. A 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan illustrates the underlying philosophy in the cybernetics movement at the time:
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (excerpt);
"I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."
Of course, if you look at the film's message through a blurry lens, it (at least) tries to have a provocative point. It tries much too hard, and in all the worst ways imaginable, but I do admire it for trying. And obviously it's easy now to have the hindsight to pick at it from afar, but that doesn't mean its gaping flaws and faults shouldn't be pointed out and criticised for what they are. Had cybernetics been a valid approach to understanding the natural world, this movie might have deserved its cult status, but it isn't, and viewers ought to be at least aware what was really going on in the minds of the writers, as well as understand that nature is not an inherently stable self-correcting system. It is too complex to reduce to cybernetic diagrams of energy and food webs, as cyberneticists found out when they actually started gathering data.
Here's a concise explanation and background of how cybernetics came to be, from the Wikipedia article of the BBC documentary "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" (part 2):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Gr ace_(TV_series)#The_Use_and_Abuse_of_Vegetational_Concepts
"This episode investigates how machine ideas such as cybernetics and systems theory were applied to natural ecosystems, and how this relates to the false idea that there is a balance of nature. Cybernetics has been applied to human beings to attempt to build societies without central control, self organising networks built of people, based on a fantasy view of nature.
Arthur Tansley had a dream where he shot his wife. He wanted to know what it meant, so he studied Sigmund Freud. However, one part of Freud's theory was that the human brain was an electrical machine. Tansley became convinced that, as the brain was interconnected, so was the whole of the natural world, in networks he called ecosystems, which he believed were inherently self-stable and self-correcting and which regulated nature as if it were a machine.
Jay Forrester was an early pioneer in cybernetic systems, who believed that brains, cities and even societies live in networks of feedback loops that control them, and he thought that computers could determine the effects of the feedback loops. Cybernetics therefore viewed humans as nodes in networks, as machines.
The ecology movement adopted this idea also and viewed the natural world as systems as it explained how the natural system could stabilise the natural world, via natural feedback loops.
Norbert Wiener laid out the position that humans, machines and ecology are simply nodes in a network in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, and this book became the bible of cybernetics."
If you've seen Silent Running and never once wondered or examined its core message more closely, I recommend watching this fascinating and provocative documentary about the subject and how it connects the Holocene Extinction, Colonialism, Cybernetics and the counter-culture movement, computer utopians, the Club of Rome, World War 3 (the Second Congo War), and even the current financial crises. It's possibly one of the most important and riveting accounts of recent history. On the other hand, Adam Curtis documentaries are complex and benefit from multiple viewings, to say the least, so don't be put off or give up too easily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Gr ace_(TV_series)
(to find it streaming, search for it on vimeo using google's search, as vimeo's own search engine isn't very precise and the BBC doesn't allow it on youtube or something)
Thoughts? I was extremely surprised to see this board empty of any discussion of what is clearly the bulk of ideas that went into this film. share