626 Book Reviews

Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age, J. David Bolter (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986). xiv+ 264pp. 33.95, paper.

There is little doubt that the computer has become the defining technology of our age, as the ubiquity of such metaphors as ‘interface’, ‘input’, ‘network’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge base’ attests. Turing’s Man is both an intriguing account of how the computer has come to have this importance and a challenge to us to make something of it,

The book is organized around a comparison of three ideal types of man, each defined in terms of the technology of an historical period of western culture. First, we have the Socratic man and the potter’s wheel of ancient civilization. Ancient technology calls forth a sense of limits, finitude, and the surface of things. Next, there are the Faustian man and the self-moving engines of modern civilization. Modern technology is a spur to exploration. Faustian man is driven by a sense oftheunbounded depth and breadth of the subjective world and the physical universe.

Finally, ours is the post-modern age of Turing’s man, named after Alan Turing, the founder of the theory of computation. Turing’s man gives to modern culture a new kind of self-moving engine: an engine of pure thought. The computer permits us to represent the subjective world and the physical universe as rule-governed processes whose behavior can be captured, reproduced, and explored. At the same time, however, the two limits of the computer-processing speed and memory size-give Turing’s man a post-modern sense of the boundedness of things.

According to Bolter, the computer is just the remedy required by a culture in danger of self-destruction from Faustian excess. Not only are the spirits we conjure now limited by our computational resources, but our sense of these limits can enhance an incipient ecological awareness.

On the other hand, in our reappropriation of the ancient sense of limits, we may become too attached to the surface of things. In particular, we may lose the depth of historical understanding achieved by our Faustian ancestors, and come to take too shallow a view of ourselves. The view that the mind is just an information processing system is a symptom of

this danger. It would be instructive to read Turing’sMan in conjunction with another powerful study

of ideal types in western culture, Hannah Arendt’s 7’he Human Condition.’ Arendt provides a political focus that is missing in Bolter’s book, and would help the reader to address perhaps the fundamental question of our age: what is the place of politics in

Turing’s world?

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

Washington and Lee University Kenneth A. Lambert

The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939, Wesley K. Wark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). $5.95 paperback.

The most striking and convincing thesis in this superb book is that the decision of the Chamberlain government to travel the road of appeasement with Nazi Germany resulted

Book Reviews 627

in part from an exaggerted estimate of German military might. At crucial timesGermany was credited with much more military hardware than it had.

This picture of German might and main was produced by the inexperienced, understaffed, and unto-ordinated British intelligence services, each of which Wark submits to detailed scrutiny. The prior question is why this state of affairs was tolerated. It is a question that Wark does not directly address, but there is much in his book that bears, Too often policy-makers and military planners alike did not want their pre-conceptions upset. On one rare occasion when real, valuable intelligence on German armaments was volunteered from a person in a position to know, it was strenously resisted because it did not fit into the governing con~ptio~ of the time. Though resistant, these conceptions were not totally immune to the environment, and so they did evolve.

Wark identifies four phases in the reconstruction of Germany’s martial intentions and ability: secrecy 1933-1935, honeymoon 1935-1936, blindness 1936-1938 and war 1938-1939.

German secrecy effectively kept the British ignorant at the beginning of its re- armament. The main source the 3ritish could rely on was the French.

When the Germans decided to forego secrecy and test world opinion, a honeymoon period followed. British military attaches were wined and dined, and selectively shown samples of German military progress. The improved atmosphere produced an optimism at odds with the now visible evidence.

The evidence was discounted on the basis of two assumptions. The first was a national stereotype of Teutonic perfectionism. The burden of this assumption was that perfectionism would slow the pace of German re-armament. In fact, the pace was frenetic and the quality was low, but industrial and organizational capacity expanded rapidly. Expansion was partly due to a policy that constantly raised production quotas while strictly forbidding any overtime. Confined to a single shift, the only way to increase production was by expanding capacity. This policy was known to the British, but its implications were obscured by the Teutonic stereotype.

Equally damaging at this time was the policy of reading German intentions as a mirror image of British intentions. If Britain maintained armed forces to protect its legitimate interests with no designs for aggression, then so did Germany.

When the honeymoon ended a period of blindness followed. By the middle of 1936 Germany’s restiveness was apparent even in Whitehall. An atmosphere of dark foreboding prevailed. A worst case assumption was adopted in estimating German capability. An obsession with the quantitative aspects of Germany’s war-making machine developed. This assumption together with this obsession combined with a stereotype of totalitarian efficiency to make Germany seem an overwhelming foe. Even the evidence of the indifferent effect and disorganization of the Condor Legion in Spain did not cause the scales to sway.

Finally, war scares caused a more realistic assessment of both British and German strengths. Consequently, the Polish guarantee was made, not made because British military preparations had improved, but because previous assumptions of worst case, mirror image, perfectionism, totalitarian efficiency, quantitative obsession, and the like were put aside.

This is a richly detailed book with general implications about the analysis of the intentions and abilities of nations. It is highly recommended.

University of Sydney M.W. Jackson