Feedforward Backlash
Feedforward is a term developed by I. A. Richards in 1951. It was incorporated into the work of Marshall McLuhan who developed it further and the term has found its way into behavioral sciences and workplace coaching through the likes of Marshall Goldsmith and others. In short, feedforward is an anticipatory response to expected changes in the environment of a system. It is the event of responding in advance. Immediately, its contrasted relationship with feedback should be clear.
An example from the workplace will give us a necessary model of feedforward in action. Imagine there are two team-members on the wait staff at a restaurant we’ll call Lamb-chop Mountain who are constantly at each other’s throats. They speak past one another. They assume the worst of each other. And the rest of the waitstaff are starting to be negatively affected by the turmoil. A manager decides to pull the two employees in question aside. She asks each of them, independently and then together, what it would look like to have a better relationship between the two of them in the future. She has each of them visualize a context in which they are not speaking past one another and to expound on how they would describe the event of being sufficiently heard and understood. If they were to simply respond to the past behaviors or even the talk with the manager it would be feedback. If present effects can be caused by a potential causal context in the future, it is feedforward.
These kinds of applications revolve around the fact that people feel condemned by feedback for one primary reason: they can’t change the past. The future, however, is perceived as being unfixed and therefore malleable. If a cause can successfully be contextualized in one’s perception of the future, then it’s possible to have a present tense effect simply based on the anticipation of the new future context. McLuhan once summarized this as effect preceding cause. It’s possible to get weird with this, either in a religious sense, like the pseudo-science that surrounds much of the genre of quantum physics, or to dismiss the idea as having any viability whatsoever.
If we leave Lamb-chop Mountain and significantly pull the camera back, we can see larger-scaled attempts of this at a societal level. Imagine, for a moment, a hypothetical scenario in which university systems had developed a future context regarding racism. In this future context, students desired the perceived systemic racism to be eradicated. The hypothetical professors might ask the students to imagine this causal context with them. Perhaps the peaceful pastures might only be accessed by a process of atonement accomplished through scapegoating. If an elaborate enough context were to be developed by the institutions in which sinners and heretics were named and the righteous were identified, and if the narrative had coherence across regional divides, feedforward should be able to produce the present effect of a kind of manifest destiny inciting unrest at the hands of the righteous. The territory would be theirs per the decree of their god, which would possibly be the collective will of the believers. We could go on, but we would only be imagining. After all, to materialize this would require collusion amongst mainstream media outlets and a long-term layering of perceived axioms for decades throughout various institutions.
It would be easy to dismiss feedforward as a mere denomination of idealism, but it may be more appropriate to consider it a kind of ideationalism. If we were to see aspects of an idea materializing in action, we might have something to go on . . . hypothetically, of course.
Fyodor Dostoevsky writes about the subtle subversion of pandemic-sized plots being thwarted by an apparent micro-plot of some invisible hand. To use Solomon’s maxim in a positive sense, “It is the little foxes that destroy the vineyard.” This is true of sin and its leavening effects of the entire lump . . . but Jesus uses the same motif to be true of the Kingdom. The kingdom is like a little leaven. It is a small stone, according to Daniel’s vision, that tumbles down the mountain and becomes not only a giant stone that fills the whole earth, but the very culprit that destroys earthly empire in its progress. If we ever found ourselves in a situation like our hypothetical scenario . . . one in which future causes were producing destructive present effects, Christians would do well to remember the subversion and simplicity of Christ’s victory. How did our Lord kill death? With His own death. In a positive sense, it is the unassuming little foxes that will bring in the Kingdom.
In Epilogue II, at the end of Crime and Punishment, Roskolnikov is in prison and has fallen ill, requiring that he be hospitalized. The epilogue begins with a questioning of why he was sick in the first place. Ultimately, he arrives at the conclusion that his own pride has made him sick. He was stuck between the idiocy of the prison sentence and the reality that had repentance come to him sooner rather than later, the narrative would be completely different. His pride is still warring against his being humbled. Eventually, he recalls his dreams. This season, it is noted, began in the middle of Lent. We will give the last word to Dostoevsky.
He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned, because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.
