If someone were to analyze current notions and fashionable catchwords, he would find “systems” high on the list. The concept has pervaded all fields of science and penetrated into popular thinking, jargon and mass media. Systems thinking plays a dominant role in a wide range of fields from industrial enterprise and armaments to esoteric topics of pure science. Innumerable publications, conferences, symposia and courses are devoted to it. Professions and jobs have appeared in recent years which, unknown a short while ago, go under names such as systems design, systems analysis, systems engineering and others. They are the very nucleus of a new technology and technocracy; their practitioners are the “new Utopians” of our time (Boguslaw, 1965) who —in contrast to the classic breed whose ideas remained between the covers of books—are at work creating a New World, brave or otherwise.
The roots of this development are complex. One aspect is the development from power engineering—that is, release of large amounts of energy as in steam or electric machines—to control engineering, which directs processes by low-power devices and has led to computers and automation. Self-controlling machines have appeared, from the humble domestic thermostat to the selfsteering missiles of World War II to the immensely improved missiles of today. Technology has been led to think not in terms of single machines but in those of “systems.” A steam engine, automobile, or radio receiver was within the competence of the engineer trained in the respective specialty. But when it comes to ballistic missiles or space vehicles, they have to be assembled from components originating in heterogeneous technologies, median-, ical, electronic, chemical, etc.; relations of man and machitie come into play; and innumerable financial, economic, social and political problems are thrown into the bargain. Again, air or even automobile traffic are not just a matter of the number of vehicles in operation, but are systems to be planned or arranged. So innumerable problems are arising in production, commerce, and armaments.
Thus, a “systems approach” became necessary. A certain objective is given; to find ways and means for its realization requires the systems specialist (or team of specialists) to consider alternative solutions and to choose those promising optimization at maximum efficiency and minimal cost in a tremendously complex network of interactions. This requires elaborate techniques and computers for solving problems far transcending the capacity of an individual mathematician. Both the “hardware” of computers, automation and cybernation, and the “software” of systems science represent a new technology. It has been called the Second Industrial Revolution and has developed only in the past few decades.
These developments have not been limited to the industrialmilitary complex. Politicians frequently ask for application of the “systems approach” to pressing problems such as air and water pollution, traffic congestion, urban blight, juvenile delinquency and organized crime, city planning (Wolfe, 1967), etc., designating this a “revolutionary new concept” (Carter, 1966; Boffey, 1967). A Canadian Premier (Manning, 1967) writes the systems approach into his political platform saying that
an interrelationship exists between all elements and constituents of society. The essential factors in public problems, issues, policies, and programs must always be considered and evaluated as interdependent components of a total system.
These developments would be merely another of the many facets of change in our contemporary technological society were it not for a significant factor apt to be overlooked in the highly sophisticated and necessarily specialized techniques of computer science, systems engineering and related fields. This is not only a tendency in technology to make things bigger and better (or alternatively, more profitable, destructive, or both). It is a change in basic categories of thought of which the complexities of modern technology are only one—and possibly not the most importantmanifestation. In one way or another, we are forced to deal with complexities, with “wholes” or “systems,” in all fields of knowledge. This implies a basic re-orientation in scientific thinking.
An attempt to summarize the impact of “systems” would not be feasible and would pre-empt the considerations of this book. A few examples, more or less arbitrarily chosen, must suffice to outline the nature of the problem and consequent re-orientation. The reader should excuse an egocentric touch in the quotations, in view of the fact that the purpose of this book is to present the author’s viewpoint rather than a neutral review of the field.
In physics, it is well-known that in the enormous strides it made in the past few decades, it also generated new problems— or possibly a new kind of problem—perhaps most evident to the laymen in the indefinite number of some hundreds of elementary particles for which at present physics can offer little rhyme or reason. In the words of a noted representative (de-Shalit, 1966), the further development of nuclear physics “requires much experimental work, as well as the development of additional powerful methods for the handling of systems with many, but not infinitely many, particles.” The same quest was expressed by A. Szent-Gyorgyi (1964), the great physiologist, in a whimsical way:
[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don’t, and this can only be something very simple.And Bernal (1957), some years ago, formulated the still-unsolved problems thus:
No one who knows what the difficulties are now believes that the crisis of physics is likely to be resolved by any simple trick of single machines but in those of “systems.” A steam engine, automobile, or radio receiver was within the competence of the engineer trained in the respective specialty. But when it comes to ballistic missiles or space vehicles, they have to be assembled from components originating in heterogeneous technologies, mechanical, electronic, chemical, etc.; relations of man and machine come into play; and innumerable financial, economic, social and political problems are thrown into the bargain. Again, air or even automobile traffic are not just a matter of the number of vehicles in operation, but are systems to be planned or arranged. So innumerable problems are arising in production, commerce, and armaments.
Thus, a “systems approach” became necessary. A certain objective is given; to find ways and means for its realization requires the systems specialist (or team of specialists) to consider alternative solutions and to choose those promising optimization at maximum efficiency and minimal cost in a tremendously complex network of interactions. This requires elaborate techniques and computers for solving problems far transcending the capacity of an individual mathematician. Both the “hardware” of computers, automation and cybernation, and the “software” of systems science represent a new technology. It has been called the Second Industrial Revolution and has developed only in the past few decades.
These developments have not been limited to the industrialmilitary complex. Politicians frequently ask for application of the “systems approach” to pressing problems such as air and water pollution, traffic congestion, urban blight, juvenile delinquency and organized crime, city planning (Wolfe, 1967), etc., designating this a “revolutionary new concept” (Carter, 1966; Boffey, 1967). A Canadian Premier (Manning, 1967) writes the systems approach into his political platform saying that
an interrelationship exists between all elements and constituents of society. The essential factors in public problems, issues, policies, and programs must always be considered and evaluated as interdependent components of a total system. These developments would be merely another of the many facets of change in our contemporary technological society were it not for a significant factor apt to be overlooked in the highly sophisticated and necessarily specialized techniques of computer science, systems engineering and related fields. This is not only a tendency in technology to make things bigger and better (or alternatively, more profitable, destructive, or both). It is a change in basic categories of thought of which the complexities of modern technology are only one—and possibly not the most importantmanifestation. In one way or another, we are forced to deal with complexities, with “wholes” or “systems,” in all fields of knowledge. This implies a basic re-orientation in scientific thinking.
An attempt to summarize the impact of “systems” would not be feasible and would pre-empt the considerations of this book. A few examples, more or less arbitrarily chosen, must suffice to outline the nature of the problem and consequent re-orientation. The reader should excuse an egocentric touch in the quotations, in view of the fact that the purpose of this book is to present the author’s viewpoint rather than a neutral review of the field.
In physics, it is well-known that in the enormous strides it made in the past few decades, it also generated new problems— or possibly a new kind of problem—perhaps most evident to the laymen in the indefinite number of some hundreds of elementary particles for which at present physics can offer little rhyme or reason. In the words of a noted representative (de-Shalit, 1966), the further development of nuclear physics “requires much experimental work, as well as the development of additional powerful methods for the handling of systems with many, but not infinitely many, particles.” The same quest was expressed by A. Szent-Gyorgyi (1964), the great physiologist, in a whimsical way:
[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don’t, and this can only be something very simple.
And Bernal (1957), some years ago, formulated the still-unsolved problems thus:
No one who knows what the difficulties are now believes that the crisis of physics is likely to be resolved by any simple trick or modification of existing theories. Something radical is needed, and it will have to go far wider than physics. A new world outlook is being forged, but much experience and argument will be needed before it can take a definitive form. It must be coherent, it must include and illuminate the new knowledge of fundamental particles and their complex fields, it must resolve the paradoxes of wave and particle, it must make the world inside the atom and the wide spaces of the universe equally intelligible. It must have a different dimension from all previous world views, and include in itself an explanation of development and the origin of new things. In this it will fall naturally in line with the converging tendencies of the biological and social sciences in which a regular pattern blends with their evolutionary history.
The triumph in recent years of molecular biology, the “breaking” of the genetic code, the consequent achievements in genetics, evolution, medicine, cell physiology and many other fields, has become common knowledge. But in spite of—or just because of— the deepened insight attained by “molecular” biology, the necessity of “organismic” biology has become apparent, as this writer had advocated for some 40 years. The concern of biology is not only at the physico-chemical or molecular level but at the higher levels of living organization as well. As we shall discuss later (p. 12), the demand has been posed with renewed strength in consideration of recent facts and knowledge; but hardly an argument not previously discussed (von Bertalanffy, 1928a, 1932, 1949a, 1960) has been added.
Again, the basic conception in psychology used to be the “robot model.” Behavior was to be explained by the mechanistic stimulus- response (S-R) scheme; conditioning, according to the pattern of animal experiment, appeared as the foundation of human behavior; “meaning” was to be replaced by conditioned response; specificity of human behavior to be denied, etc. Gestalt psychology first made an inroad into the mechanistic scheme some 50 years ago. More recently, many attempts toward a more satisfactory “image of man” have been made and the system concept is gaining in importance (Chapter 8); Piaget, for example, “expressly related his conceptions to the general system theory of Bertalanffy” (Hahn, 1967).
Perhaps even more than psychology, psychiatry has taken up the systems viewpoint (e.g. Menninger, 1963; von Bertalanffy, 1966; Grinker, 1967; Gray et ah, in press). To quote from Grinker:
Of the so-called global theories the one initially stated and defined by Bertalanffy in 1947 under the title of “general sys-tems theory” has taken hold,… Since then he has refined, modified and applied his concepts, established a society for general systems theory and published a General Systems Yearbook. Many social scientists but only a handful of psychiatrists studied, understood or applied systems theory. Suddenly, under the leadership of Dr. William Gray of Boston, a threshold was reached so that at the 122nd annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1966 two sessions were held at which this theory was discussed and regular meetings for psychiatrists were ensured for future participation in a development of this “Unified Theory of Human Behavior.” If there be a third revolution (i.e. after the psychoanalytic and behavioristic), it is in the development of a general theory (p. ix).
A report of a recent meeting (American Psychiatric Association, 1967) draws a vivid picture:
When a room holding 1,500 people is so jammed that hundreds stand through an entire morning session, the subject must be one in which the audience is keenly interested. This was the situation at the symposium on the use of a general systems theory in psychiatry which took place at the Detroit meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (Damude, 1967).
The same in the social sciences. From the broad spectrum, widespread confusion and contradictions of contemporary socio- logical theories (Sorokin, 1928, 1966), one secure conclusion emerges: that social phenomena must be considered as “systems” — difficult and at present unsettled as the definition of sociocultural entities may be. There is
a revolutionary scientific perspective (stemming) from the General Systems Research movement and (with a) wealth of principles, ideas and insights that have already brought a higher degree of scientific order and understanding to many areas of biology, psychology and some physical sciences. … Modern systems research can provide the basis of a framework more capable of doing justice to the complexities and dynamic properties of the socio-cultural system (Buckley, 1967).
The course of events in our times suggests a similar conception-in history, including the consideration that, after all, history is sociology in the making or in “longitudinal” study. It is the same socio-cultural entities which sociology investigates in their present state and history in their becoming.
Earlier periods of history may have consoled themselves by blaming atrocities and stupidities on bad kings, wicked dictators, ignorance, superstition, material want and related factors. Con- sequently, history was of the “who-did-what” kind—“idiographic,” as it was technically known. Thus the Thirty-Years War was a consequence of religious superstition and the rivalries of German princes; Napoleon overturned Europe because of his unbridled ambition; the Second World War could be blamed on the wickedness of Hitler and the warlike proclivity of the Germans.
We have lost this intellectual comfort. In a state of democracy, universal education and general affluence, these previous excuses for human atrocity fail miserably. Contemplating contemporary history in the making, it is difficult to ascribe its irrationality and bestiality solely to individuals (unless we grant them a superhuman—or subhuman—capacity for malice and stupidity). Rather, we seem to be victims of “historical forces”—whatever this may mean. Events seem to involve more than just individual decisions and actions and to be determined more by socio-cultural “systems,” be these prejudices, ideologies, pressure groups, social trends, growth and decay of civilizations, or what not. We know precisely and scientifically what the effects of pollution, waste of natural resources, the population explosion, the armaments race, etc., are going to be. We are told so every day by countless critics citing irrefutable arguments. But neither national leaders nor society as a whole seems to be able to do anything about it. If we do not want a theistic explanation— Quern Deus perdere vult dementat—’we seem to follow some tragic historical necessity.
While realizing the vagueness of such concepts as civilization and the shortcomings of “grand theories” like those of Spengler and Toynbee, the question of regularities or laws of socio-cultural systems makes sense though this does not necessarily mean historical inevitability according to Sir Isaiah Berlin. An historical panorama like McNeill’s The Rise of the West (1963), which indicates his anti- Spenglerian position even in the title, nevertheless is a story of historical systems. Such a conception penetrates into seemingly outlying fields so that the view of the “process-school of archaeology” is said to be “borrowed from Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s framework for the developing embryo, where systems trigger behavior at critical junctures and, once they have done so, cannot return to their original pattern” (Flannery, 1967).
While sociology (and presumably history) deals with informal organizations, another recent development is the theory of formal organizations, that is, structures planfully instituted, such as those of an army, bureaucracy, business enterprise, etc. This theory is “framed in a philosophy which accepts the premise that the only meaningful way to study organization is to study it as a system,” systems analysis treating “organization as a system of mutually dependent variables”; therefore “modern organization theory leads almost inevitably into a discussion of general system theory” (Scott, 1963). In the words of a practitioner of operational research,
In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the “system” as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added.. .. The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments. … These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever- widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made (Ackoff, 1959).
In this way, the circle closes and we come back to those de-velopments in contemporary technological society with which we started. What emerges from these considerations—however sketchy and superficial—is that in the gamut of modern sciences and life new conceptualizations, new ideas and categories are required, and that these, in one way or another, are centered about the concept of “system.” To quote, for a change, from a Soviet author:
The elaboration of specific methods for the investigation of, systems is a general trend of present scientific knowledge, just as for 19th century science the primary concentration of attention to the elaboration of elementary forms and processes in nature was characteristic (Lewada, in Hahn, 1967, p. 185).
The dangers of this new development, alas, are obvious and have often been stated. The new cybernetic world, according to the psychotherapist Ruesch (1967) is not concerned with people but with “systems”; man becomes replaceable and expendable. To the new Utopians of systems engineering, to use a phrase of Boguslaw (1965), it is the “human element” which is precisely the unreliable component of their creations. It either has to be eliminated altogether and replaced by the hardware of computers, self-regulating machinery and the like, or it has to be made as reliable as possible, that is, mechanized, conformist, controlled and standardized. In somewhat harsher terms, man in the Big System is to be—and to a large extent has become—a moron, button-pusher or learned idiot, that is, highly trained in some narrow specialization but otherwise a mere part of the machine. This conforms to a well-known systems principle, that of progressive mechanization—the individual becoming ever more a cogwheel dominated by a few privileged leaders, mediocrities and mystifiers who pursue their private interests under a smokescreen of ideologies (Sorokin, 1966, pp. 558ff).
Whether we envisage the positive expansion of knowledge and beneficent control of environment and society, or see in the systems movement the arrival of Brave New World and 1984— it deserves intensive study, and we have to come to terms with it.
Source: Bertalanffy Ludwig Von (1969), General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, George Braziller Inc.; Revised edition.