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The greatness of Turgot now began to appear: while he performed all the duties of the seminary and studied thoroughly what was required, he gave himself to a wide range of other studies, and chiefly in two very different directions—to thought and work upon those problems in religion which transcend all theologies, and upon those problems in politics which are of vast importance in all countries, and which especially needed discussion in his own.
--
White, ibid., Seven Great Statesmen...

 

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

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I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism. And I know that, based on reports, that the Obama administration gave this a lot of thought – a lot of discussion. This was not some little side issue that no one thought about. They gave it a lot of thought, and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization, and morning after pills to the employees of the church. And that came as a shock. As I think it was Mike Huckabee said, "We are now all Catholics." Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion.

 

Mitt Romney

 

The young man [Turgot] destined for an ecclesiastical career was placed within walls carefully designed to keep out all currents of new thought; his studies, his reading, his professors, his associates, all were combined to keep from him any results of observation or reflection save those prescribed: probably, of all means for stifling healthy and helpful thought, a theological seminary, as then conducted—whether Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Mohammedan, was the most perfect.

 

Andrew Dickson White

 

As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics.

 

Norbert Wiener

 

Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and philosopher, was a deeply original thinker who crossed multiple disciplines, always sitting on the edge between them. He began only late in life to attempt to synthesise his many contributions. As Brockman (2004) wrote, “Bateson is not easy … To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, was a rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society.” But his contributions were considerable, to a wide range of fields. He was perhaps the most wide-ranging and profound thinker in early cybernetics, and his work provides a foundation for much of the important work that followed, and a deep insight into the problems of the world today.

 

Gregory Bateson