The revenge of the good fairy - Reality Club lecture on human fallibility and technology

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1987 by Mary Catherine Bateson

But the fact that technology can disappoint andbetray is not news. The problem here is not to examine a series of horror stories, but to ask about the relationship between these stories and the patterns of human decision and action. If it is the case that not only is what you want not what you want, but also that, at some level, we already know this, what is the lesson to be learned? One possibility to consider is that, poor forked creatures that we are, with ambivalence built in to the deepest levels of our personality, we insert the worm into the apple and the weakness into the O-rings ourselves, building the faults into all we do, and this is not avoidable. We have been increasingly committing our lives and the health of the planet to technologies that require perfection, and yet there is good reason to believe that we may sabotage them deliberately in an unconscious reassertion of the truth of fallibility. After all, if only we could learn the lesson of fallibility from the space shuttle disaster, that learning might save our world, and yet the whole machinery of investigation was oriented towards proving that the errors were so specific and exceptional as to make it possible to assign blame and regain the illusion that such errors could not occur in the future. We may have to find ways to reclaim the ancient wisdom intended to protect human beings against fantasies of omnipotence, and to make a virtue of fallibility.

This then is one side of the story--the fact thathuman beings carry with them ambivalence that is a necessary byproduct of a human childhood. The other side of the coin is the fact that this ambivalence may be both adaptive and necessary. The cases of the revenge of the Good Fairy that occur in human affairs have certain systematic characteristics in common. Thus, there are a great many instances in which supposed solutions simply move problems up to the next level of systemic determination, so that the Green Revolution promotes population growth, insecticides and antibiotics promote immune strains, and legislation to control pollution produces acid rain. A very large range of examples of the revenge of the Good Fairy involves the logical types: the attempt to solve a problem at an inappropriately low logical level pushes the pathology up to the next level where it may be much harder to deal with. The question arises whether the repression of ambivalence and the inability to think systematically are related, or whether these two issues are different and simply coincide in some cases.

TO BEGIN WITH, we should note the factthat in nature, effort often seems one-sided, as long as you look at the single organism, for a component of the organism is balanced by a characteristic of the environment, with the two together forming the unit of survival. When humans gain the capacity to make our desires effective, we are like people who have been walking against a high wind, leaning into it: when the wind drops we risk falling over. In fact, just as children necessarily have desires whose fulfillment is prevented by their caretakers, organisms are necessarily genetically programmed to strive for things that would be bad for them, which they are prevented from obtaining by some characteristic of the larger system. This is not limited to human beings, but provides the basis for pathologies that are largely special to our species.