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Shedding light on the 'Dark Hero of the Information Age'
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| Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman spent eight years researching and writing about cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener, above. |
By: CYNTHIA DETTELBACH Editor
"On a crisp New England morning in the autumn of 1906, the first whiz kid of the twentieth century came down from his room to meet The World. The reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's flagship newspaper had traveled north to Boston from New York to check out the "Youngest College Man in the History of the United States."
Thus begins Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman's fascinating new book Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, N.Y., 2005; 423 pp. $27.50).
Never mind that some of the more technical parts of cybernetics (and there was mercifully little of it) eluded my grasp. What engaged me virtually from the first sentence quoted above was the poignant, beautifully told story of Norbert Wiener, the eccentric, often lonely and misunderstood genius who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics ... and then spent his remaining years warning the world about its dangerous human consequences.
The journalist would describe Wiener as the "infant prodigy of Boston:" At 11, he entered Tufts College; at 18, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. But if the math, science, philosophy and philology came easily, living as a prodigy did not.
His father Leo, the first tenured Jewish professor at Harvard College, was both Norbert's stern taskmaster and greatest hero. As Conway and Siegelman point out in an interview at the CJN, Leo Wiener gave his genius son "ethics and values he carried his whole life." As a result, "Norbert was never sure what was his and what was his father's."
His mother, likewise, contributed to the overweight youngster's insecurity. Always wishing to be accepted into the Waspy Cambridge community, she chose not to raise her children Jewish. When he was 15, Norbert discovered by accident that he was a Jew. This upset him greatly since, as Siegelman points out, if his mother, herself a Jew, "was hateful about Norbert's (overtly) Jewish relatives, she probably hated him, too."
Yet Wiener, never a practicing Jew, would declare in his autobiography Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, "I am myself overwhelmingly of Jewish origin." Conway and Siegelman meticulously document this fact, noting that Wiener was the descendant of famous Eastern European rabbis and Talmudic scholars. He was also the purported descendant of Moses Maimonides, the greatest religious scholar of the Middle Ages.
As a newly minted teenage Ph.D. and winner of a one-year Harvard fellowship for "unfettered travel and study abroad," Wiener sailed for Europe in 1913. "Fettering" him, alas, was his whole family who chose to accompany him.
That impulse to control even extended to the wife his mother chose for him - an anti-Semitic German woman Margaret, who would later keep two copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf, one in German, one in English, on her dresser. Until his death at age 69, Margaret would be Norbert's gatekeeper, exiling the friends and colleagues she felt were detrimental to her husband's career and mental health.
Initially, Wiener had trouble finding an academic appointment. "Harvard remained closed to him and to virtually all Jewish applicants," the authors write. An opening at Case Institute in Cleveland also didn't pan out. Finally, he got a job in 1919 "not at Harvard but at the technical school down the road called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." (Delightful sentences like these pepper the whole book.) Wiener would remain at MIT for the next 45 years, helping it to rise above the withering designation of "technical school."
His troubled childhood, manic depression, suicidal tendencies, and problematic marriage notwithstanding, Norbert Wiener made history. First as a mathematician in probability theory and later in the science of cybernetics, to name just two. His discoveries influenced fields ranging from neuroscience to anthropology.
Cybernetics, as Conway explains, is "the science of integration." It looks at how living (biological) things and technical things function together. Wiener's scientific discoveries "ignited today's information-age revolution of computers, automation and global telecommunications."
A humanist, as well as a scientist, Wiener worried that when a machine "became capable of responding to its incoming data at a pace no human could match, it might act in damaging ways before people could override its decisions." Prophetically, he cautioned scientists and society in the (Cold War-permeated) 1950s against "the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf." Particularly one that might move too fast to be properly harnessed.
Sadly, Wiener never received the accolades or deference in his own country that he enjoyed abroad. When Russia embraced cybernetics, for example, U.S. grants for scientists in that field dried up. India lionized Wiener, and he was frequently invited there to teach them ways to modernize. (If he were alive today, Wiener would smile at how well India learned that lesson, becoming the site of so many outsourced American computer jobs.) Wiener in turn embraced the spirituality he found in Hinduism and Indian culture.
Because Wiener was such a complex, often difficult man, few, if anyone, knew every aspect of him or his life. So the co-authors sought to put together the disparate pieces of the Wiener puzzle. They employed their considerable sleuthing and interviewing skills (they once worked at Harper's and wrote two previous books together - Snapping and Holy Terror). Even Wiener's daughters, who initially hung up the phone on the co-authors, eventually came around and talked about their father. So did some of the surviving scientists who once worked with him.
One touching story the authors uncovered related to Norman Levinson, one of Wiener's talented students. Wiener wanted Levinson to become a mathematician, arranging for him to go to England for further study. It was the 1930s, and Levinson's parents, poor immigrants who had recently fled the rising tide of Nazism, were worried that their son was returning to the dangerous Europe they had left. So every Shabbat, Wiener would visit the couple at their home to reassure them and tell them about the lovely, genteel life their son was leading in England.
After eight years of research, the authors had amassed volumes of material. "Jim is a great drafter, great with details," explains Conway. "I'm great in plotting journeys." Siegelman, who grew up in Cleveland Heights and belonged to Park Synagogue, would often present Conway with initial drafts of chapters that ran up to 150 pages. Then, like the rabbi of Prague "carving a golem out of a block of clay," Conway jokes, she would trim and shape the material. (Wiener used the golem image in his book God & Golem.)
"Most of the words are mine," interjects Siegelman, "but the best words are Flo's. She is the poet; I am the prose writer."
Happily, the poetry and prose flow together seamlessly, as for example in this summing up of Norbert Wiener's life: "He was a dark hero in the highest sense, a restless rebel soul who waged a scientific and technical revolution predicated on the transforming power of communication - and on his unwavering belief that people are more important than machines."
Thus begins Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman's fascinating new book Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, N.Y., 2005; 423 pp. $27.50).
Never mind that some of the more technical parts of cybernetics (and there was mercifully little of it) eluded my grasp. What engaged me virtually from the first sentence quoted above was the poignant, beautifully told story of Norbert Wiener, the eccentric, often lonely and misunderstood genius who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics ... and then spent his remaining years warning the world about its dangerous human consequences.
The journalist would describe Wiener as the "infant prodigy of Boston:" At 11, he entered Tufts College; at 18, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. But if the math, science, philosophy and philology came easily, living as a prodigy did not.
His father Leo, the first tenured Jewish professor at Harvard College, was both Norbert's stern taskmaster and greatest hero. As Conway and Siegelman point out in an interview at the CJN, Leo Wiener gave his genius son "ethics and values he carried his whole life." As a result, "Norbert was never sure what was his and what was his father's."
His mother, likewise, contributed to the overweight youngster's insecurity. Always wishing to be accepted into the Waspy Cambridge community, she chose not to raise her children Jewish. When he was 15, Norbert discovered by accident that he was a Jew. This upset him greatly since, as Siegelman points out, if his mother, herself a Jew, "was hateful about Norbert's (overtly) Jewish relatives, she probably hated him, too."
Yet Wiener, never a practicing Jew, would declare in his autobiography Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth, "I am myself overwhelmingly of Jewish origin." Conway and Siegelman meticulously document this fact, noting that Wiener was the descendant of famous Eastern European rabbis and Talmudic scholars. He was also the purported descendant of Moses Maimonides, the greatest religious scholar of the Middle Ages.
As a newly minted teenage Ph.D. and winner of a one-year Harvard fellowship for "unfettered travel and study abroad," Wiener sailed for Europe in 1913. "Fettering" him, alas, was his whole family who chose to accompany him.
That impulse to control even extended to the wife his mother chose for him - an anti-Semitic German woman Margaret, who would later keep two copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf, one in German, one in English, on her dresser. Until his death at age 69, Margaret would be Norbert's gatekeeper, exiling the friends and colleagues she felt were detrimental to her husband's career and mental health.
Initially, Wiener had trouble finding an academic appointment. "Harvard remained closed to him and to virtually all Jewish applicants," the authors write. An opening at Case Institute in Cleveland also didn't pan out. Finally, he got a job in 1919 "not at Harvard but at the technical school down the road called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." (Delightful sentences like these pepper the whole book.) Wiener would remain at MIT for the next 45 years, helping it to rise above the withering designation of "technical school."
His troubled childhood, manic depression, suicidal tendencies, and problematic marriage notwithstanding, Norbert Wiener made history. First as a mathematician in probability theory and later in the science of cybernetics, to name just two. His discoveries influenced fields ranging from neuroscience to anthropology.
Cybernetics, as Conway explains, is "the science of integration." It looks at how living (biological) things and technical things function together. Wiener's scientific discoveries "ignited today's information-age revolution of computers, automation and global telecommunications."
A humanist, as well as a scientist, Wiener worried that when a machine "became capable of responding to its incoming data at a pace no human could match, it might act in damaging ways before people could override its decisions." Prophetically, he cautioned scientists and society in the (Cold War-permeated) 1950s against "the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf." Particularly one that might move too fast to be properly harnessed.
Sadly, Wiener never received the accolades or deference in his own country that he enjoyed abroad. When Russia embraced cybernetics, for example, U.S. grants for scientists in that field dried up. India lionized Wiener, and he was frequently invited there to teach them ways to modernize. (If he were alive today, Wiener would smile at how well India learned that lesson, becoming the site of so many outsourced American computer jobs.) Wiener in turn embraced the spirituality he found in Hinduism and Indian culture.
Because Wiener was such a complex, often difficult man, few, if anyone, knew every aspect of him or his life. So the co-authors sought to put together the disparate pieces of the Wiener puzzle. They employed their considerable sleuthing and interviewing skills (they once worked at Harper's and wrote two previous books together - Snapping and Holy Terror). Even Wiener's daughters, who initially hung up the phone on the co-authors, eventually came around and talked about their father. So did some of the surviving scientists who once worked with him.
One touching story the authors uncovered related to Norman Levinson, one of Wiener's talented students. Wiener wanted Levinson to become a mathematician, arranging for him to go to England for further study. It was the 1930s, and Levinson's parents, poor immigrants who had recently fled the rising tide of Nazism, were worried that their son was returning to the dangerous Europe they had left. So every Shabbat, Wiener would visit the couple at their home to reassure them and tell them about the lovely, genteel life their son was leading in England.
After eight years of research, the authors had amassed volumes of material. "Jim is a great drafter, great with details," explains Conway. "I'm great in plotting journeys." Siegelman, who grew up in Cleveland Heights and belonged to Park Synagogue, would often present Conway with initial drafts of chapters that ran up to 150 pages. Then, like the rabbi of Prague "carving a golem out of a block of clay," Conway jokes, she would trim and shape the material. (Wiener used the golem image in his book God & Golem.)
"Most of the words are mine," interjects Siegelman, "but the best words are Flo's. She is the poet; I am the prose writer."
Happily, the poetry and prose flow together seamlessly, as for example in this summing up of Norbert Wiener's life: "He was a dark hero in the highest sense, a restless rebel soul who waged a scientific and technical revolution predicated on the transforming power of communication - and on his unwavering belief that people are more important than machines."
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