Computers, lie detectors and good Samaritans sway people, their communities, economics. Those super sleuths, who know everything, told us that President Truman didn't fire General MacArthur before he had consulted the computer. The computer was asked whether we could, at that time, afford a war as big as MacArthur proposed. The computer said no. So there it was. The electronic wizard had spoken.
The electronic wizard has spoken again, about the war in Vietnam.
Dr. Norbert Wiener, the so-charming and unassuming father of all computers, visited the University of California just before he passed away. We were anxious to talk to him (the "we" is not here used for "Majesty")not the least about his recent statement that computers might usurp men's decisions. How could he, of all people, say that man-made and man-fed machines could extend beyond man's wish and will?
"Of course not," he smiled, oh, so engagingly, except for man's superstition."
Just because computers can do some things faster, some believe they can also do things better, that they have better judgment.
All a computer can do is magnify our speed, the speed with which we make mistakes, for example. The alluring feature which deludes the unwary is that this speed permits a computer to quickly assimilate and coordinate many various thought patterns. If these thought patterns were not all true (and how could all of them be true?) then the coordinated sum total is untrue also.
The "lie detector" is a striking and shocking example. If not exactly a computer, it is a horribly misused machine. At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, in the mid-fifties, a student was suspected of murder. One morning the papers sported a statement by a policeman,
"A lie detector test shows that our man is guilty."
With the complete backing of the then-head of the university's Law Department, I phoned this policeman. "Your instrument shows nothing but emotions. If you repeat to a suspect the same question you have already thrust at him a hundred times, how can he help being upset, outraged, and register what you misinterpret as guilt?"
The terse reply came gruffly, "How many lie detector tests have you conducted?"
My reply to that was not conciliatory. "If I had employed your device, even once, with serious intent, I would have considered myself disqualified."
I added, "J. Edgar Hoover happens to be in my corner, you know."
"I know. I also know the reason for Edgar Hoover's viewpoint."
Since no solution was in prospect with this gentleman, I went to the Chief of Police, offered to undergo a lie detector test in his presence, at which I would make the machine call me a liar when I was telling the plain truth, and register "True!" when I told screaming lies. This is easy for anyone knowing how this machine is made. This holds true for the simple version and for the most sophisticated type, Suave, intelligent criminals and particularly spies know this and can easily "handle" the machine. Nevertheless , even Allen Dulles used it when he was head of the Central Intelligence Agency. This deeply troubled General Mark Clark who investigated the CIA and mused that if a baby wet itself while under the spell of a lie detector, big amplitudes would interpret its emotions as uncouth lying.
The police chief sweetly assured me he might consider my offer, though only "after we've settled this murder case."
This false faith in computers and lie detectors is part of a wider human frailty:
We ascribe miraculous powers, or evil intent, to persons or things we don't know. We see people of a different color, different traits walking down the street. We conjure up amazing fictional characteristics and hang them on to these people.
In the same vein, a policeman may have conducted lie detector tests most of his life without the slightest knowledge of what his detector actually shows. "It works!" he jubilates after having tried it on a hundred naive offenders who still squirm when they tell a lie. He forgets, does not even notice when the machine plunges innocents into the cruelest fates or sets free a smart aleck.
As of now, the lie detector is spreading its ugly lies all over Washington, D.C. where several large Departments subject all their employees above a certain rank to this "test".
Similarly, our dispositions in the most complex war in our history were influenced by computers excelling in multiplying the mistakes of political or military strategists.
With such goings-on in our government, what can we expect of our youth?
There is an old story about a man who was beaten and mauled and was lying in the street, helpless. Many passed by, looking the other way; some because the beaten man wasn't of their race; others simply because they couldn't be bothered.
Then a Samaritan came by, a man of an entirely different race and build. So, obviously, he must be an incompetent. Yet, this stranger stopped and helped the wounded man.
Is this just a story about different religions, different races in a far-off land far back in time?
It would be comfortable to think so. To some of us, the story of this beaten man and the Samaritan is the story of the computer and the lie detector here and now. That student at the University of California was worse than beaten. He was stamped a murderer. His trial was dominated by jurors with superstitions about lie detectors.
Another modern superstition condemns millions -- not to death, but to unemployment, which is not much better. Practically everybody will tell you that full employment equates inflation. What is inflation? What is a little inflation and what is a big inflation, and what relation is there between the two, if any? The final chapter reviews such economic finery. Here, we shall just quote Leon H. Keyserling, a man not to be ignored in these fields, who doubts that even a little inflation needs to follow full employment. In THE PROBLEM OF PROBLEMS, the beginning article in Social Policies for America in the Seventies (1968), he writes,
"The experience since 1953 had already, in the main (and still has), refuted any direct and positive correlation between the rate of price inflation and the rate of economic growth or our degree of closeness to reasonable full resource uses."
He adds, "In any event, how can we accept the proposition that we should foist unemployment upon breadwinners and their families in the millions in order to insure the affluent that they will not have to pay somewhat higher prices for their third cars, fur coats and steak dinners?"
Some of my generation, like Leon Keyserling and John Philip Wernette, are raring to go. Are there enough of them? Among the young I find more, but will they keep their fire through the ordeal of education and early life?
Enthusiastic youth, are you ready to tackle, master and revise the messy world you inherited from your elders? After having been schooled in all our tricks, the clean ones and the unclean ones, our knowledge and our ignorance?
Why do you think you will do so much better than we did?
Of course you will. You have bigger, newer computers (some of the newer ones don't work well, I hear, so we have to go back to older ones). You have color television (which takes away another dimension of your individual imagination substituting TV writers' imagination and brains). You have Lasers (upon each beam a hundred million units of telephone chatter are conveyed, further dissipating your energy and drive). You have microfilms of great books and many more small books by means of which your mind and heart are distracted and diminished.
Yes, cybernetically, you will be doing better.
And what about those ancient tales? Could they add or subtract?
That tale about the good Samaritan added a lot-to my pain; also to my understanding, I hope. All those ancient tales could add, or subtract, or go by you without a trace depending on your own knowledge and your attitude. And now, instead of painting abstract word pictures, we shall look at the shining example of Bishop James A. Pike for whom the ancient tales meant so much that he devoted his ]life to them while he was also well aware of cybernetics and its applications to modern law. The fact, however, that makes him particularly suitable is that his honesty meant more to him than smoothness, truth more than peace. He brings to mind Bernard Shaw's words, "The reasonable man changes himself to suit the world; the unreasonable one insists upon trying to change the world. All progress, therefore, is due to the unreasonable man."
It also helps that with all his great knowledge, Bishop Pike shows eddies of ignorance; for example when he attacks TRINITY, which is an old, very significant symbol for the observer, the observed and observation. This will be elaborated in a following chapter. Bishop Pike is right that Trinity, as now taught in churches, could easily derail you. (In the Middle Ages people were burned at the stake for saying God was one, not three.) But, without an accompanying explanation of where the concept came from, one is left dangling in the air or, as has been said about Bishop Pike, he has one foot in the stream and one on dry land. This endears him to people and makes him so human. Greater waves were raised by his statement that, "the concept of Jesus being the son of God is not useful."
Here the prelate mind unites with the stringent lawyer mind. Lawyer Pike knows it is useless to argue whether or not Jesus really was the son of God (and the only son!) for who ever defined God or the son of God? And how could a man with a lawyer's mind argue about words no one could define? To ponder whether the concept is useful or not is another matter--useful for mind and heart; useful for sound development. To assume that the followers of one faith have access to the one and only real son of God - can such a belief be useful? Or is it conceited, crude, ugly, brutal and destructive of international relations and peace, let alone truth?
To compassionate students of ancient tales there is another meaning for this concept: That we are all sons or daughters of God who created us. There is this further feeling that some of us are more true sons, or at least more alert and keen sons, recognizing the sonship more than others. Those who view sonship in this light, who say they feel Jesus was a keener and more alert son than most, have a useful sonship concept.
So, through his penetrating and often - violent and sometimes partially - ignorant crash attacks, Bishop Pike leads us up the path to more wisdom and a wider scope of mutual respect and even love. In a sense, he divides us into three groups: The persistent believers, not in the ancient tales themselves but in the interpretations their sect has supplied. These people converse and operate well with those who believe exactly as they do. To others their hearts and minds are closed whether they live next door or in China. So they are only half-awake in the body of humanity. The story of the good Samaritan beckons to them, but do they notice?
The second group rejects all ancient tales. Toward the believers their reactions vary from a shrug to pity to amusement to condescending tolerance. They have fun among themselves at parties and at work and they may get along fairly well in this world. Yet their minds are half-closed, closed to all the beauty and wisdom the ancient tales have in store for the open mind. Closed, also, to all those people who live by or with those ancient tales. So they contribute to the isolation that causes all the unpleasantnesses among us -- and that caused a Samaritan to act.
There is the third group, open to all sides, laughing with the laughing, bowing with the bowing, though never fearing, never subjecting themselves to superstition or -- one might say -- never thoughtlessly believing and never disbelieving.
Is there anything more sobering or more satisfying than breaking the chain of your immediate surroundings and your own mind and finding a new and wider world communication with more people? Whatever path one chooses, there are always powerful hands to help one along, the hands of the good Samaritans.
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