The Reenchantment of the World
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9. Gregory Bateson, Naven, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 276.
10. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead; Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942). For representative kinesic studies, see R. L. Birdwhistell, Introduction to Kinesics (Louisville, Ky.: University of Louisville Press, 1952), and A. E. Scheflen, How Behavior Means (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1974).
11. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), pp. 123, 194, and passim. On the discussion of analogue versus digital knowledge given below see Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 109-12, 387-89, 408 British edition, and pp. 136-39, 411-14, 432-33 American edition.
12. Actually, I have some difficulties with Bateson's contention that the essence of an unconscious message is that it is unconscious, or that all analogue communication is an exercise in communication about the unconscious mind. Dance can be about the relationship between space and content, or lightness and gravity, for example. In the famous film Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), Jean-Louis Barrault does a mime sequence about a pickpocket. The purpose of this sequence was not to reveal the nature of the unconscious, but to expose the theft of a watch. It is really straight psychodrama that Bateson is talking about, I think, rather than every type of analogue communication.
13. "A Conversation with Gregory Bateson," in Lee Thayer, ed., Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues (London and New York: Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers, 1973), p. 248.
14. The discussion that follows is taken from "A Conversation with Gregory Bateson," p. 247; Mary Catherine Bateson, ed., Our Own Metaphor (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 16-17; John Brockman, ed., About Bateson (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 98; Psychology Today, May 1972, p. 80 (interview with Lévi-Strauss); and Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 95, 303, 410, 434-35, 459-60 British edition, and pp. 122-23, 332-33, 434, 460, 483-84 American edition. Cf. also Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (10 March 1967), 1203-7.
15. On acclimation versus addiction see Mind and Nature, p. 172-74, 178, and Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 321, 416-17, 465-5, British edition, and pp. 351, 441-42, 488-90, American edition.
16. Some of this information is available in the 1979 article by Pacific News Service (San Francisco), entitled "Global Comeback of Once-banished Malaria," by Rasa Gustaitis.
17. Sources for the following include the interview with Lévi-Strauss cited in note 14 of this chapter; Mary Catherine Bateson, Our Own Metaphor, pp. 91, 266-79, 285; Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 420, 426, 475, British edition, and pp. 445, 451, 499, American edition; and Murray Bookchin "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1971), esp. pp. 63-68, 70-82. The importance of diversity is also discussed in most textbooks of ecology or genetics.
CHAPTER 9. The Politics of Consciousness
1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1958; orig. German publ. 1904-5), p. 182.
2. See Chapter 7, note 24.
3. This statement may be wrong. The perception of colors in the human aura, and their relation to healing, may prove to be such an avenue of inquiry. Cf. my discussion of color at the conclusion of Chapter 6.
4. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973; New York: Ba!lantine, 1972), p. 436, British edition, p. 461, American edition.
5. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking, 1972).
6. I am not personally active in "planetary politics" and therefore cannot speak with authority on these matters. What follows, then, should be understood as a report on certain trends that fall into this category. In this discussion, I shall be drawing on the literature cited below to construct the argument, but I wish to state my great indebtedness to Peter Berg for opening my eyes to the subject in general. Many of the ideas presented in the discussion that follows have been the focus of his own political and educational efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a decade now, through his journal Planet Drum, his book Reinhabiting a Separate Country (San Francisco: Planet Drum Books, 1978), and numerous other activities. The nature of planetary culture, and its existence as a political alternative, was also the subject of a four-day conference titled "Listening to the Earth," which was codirected by Berg and myself in San Francisco April 7-10, 1979. Some of the discussion presented below draws on ideas articulated at this conference.
The general literature on the subject is fairly large at this point, so I can do no more than cite my favorites:
Fiction: Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975); Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed (New York: Avon, 1974); Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976).
Futures research: Willis W. Harman, An Incomplete Guide to the Future (San Francisco: San Francisco Book Company, 1976); Kimon Valaskakis et al., eds., The Conserver Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Hazel Henderson, Creating Alternative Futures (New York: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1978); Edward Goldsmith et al., eds., Blueprint for Survival (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Peter Hall, ed., Europe 2000 (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1977); Michael Marien, "The Two Visions of Post-Industrial society," Futures 9 (1977), 415-31, and Toward a Devolution, "Social Policy," Nov./Dec. 1978, pp. 26-35.
Political and economic commentary: Leopold Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations (New York: Dutton, 1975; orig. publ. 1957); Gary Snyder, "Four Changes," in Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974); Gordon Rattray Taylor, Rethink (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972); Michael Zwerin, Case for the Balkanization of Practically Everyone (London: Wilddwood House, 1975); E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Herman E. Daly, ed., Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973); "Ecology Party Manifesto," The New Ecologist 9 (1979), 59-61; and the literature of a number of anarchist writers and/or social critics, particularly Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, and Murray Bookchin (on the connection between anarchism and ecology, see the essay by Bookchin entitled "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," in Post-Scarcity Anarchism [Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1971], and also George Woodcock, "Anarchism and Ecology," in The Ecologist 4 [1974], 84-88).
Ecology: Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973), 95-100; Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New York: Scribner's, 1973); Bill Devall, "Streams of Environmentalism," Natural Resources Journal 19 (1979), no. 3; John Rodman, "The Liberation of Nature?" Inquiry 20 (1977), 83-131; Raymond F. Dasmann, "Toward a Dynamic Balance of Man and Nature," The Ecologist 6 (1976), 2-5, and "National Parks, Nature Conservation and 'Future Primitive,'" The Ecologist 6 (1976), 164-67; and the marvelous essay by Jerry Gorsline and Linn House, "Future Primitive," which appeared in Planet Drum, no. 3 ("Northern Pacific Rim Alive"), 1974, and was reprinted in Alcheringa 2 (1977), 111-13.
Religious renewal: Eleanor Wilner, Gathering the Winds (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), and Jacob Needleman, A Sense of the Cosmos (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975).
7. Unfortunately, parapsychology has, for many years now, been taken quite seriously by the CIA and the KGB, which are interested in its possible military applications. I discuss the political dangers of Learning III later in this chapter, but the reader should be aware of the heavy American and Soviet investment in psychic research per se, most of it classified information. There have been a few public revelations of CIA experimentation with LSD (for example, Project MK-ULTRA) as a result of material being released under the recent Freedom of Information Act, but otherwise little is available. See Michael Rossman, New Age Blues (New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 167-260; John D. Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times Books, 1979); "Soviet Psychic Secrets," San Francisco Chronicle, 16 June 1977; John L. Wilhelm, "Psychic Spying?" Washington Post, 7 August 1977.
8. F
ernand Lamaze, Painless Childbirth (New York: Pocket Books, 1977); Frederick Leboyer, Birth Without Violence (New York: Knopf, 1975).
9. I am using "self" here in the Jungian sense rather than in Bateson's sense of ego (see Chapter 8).
10. The American video artist Paul Ryan has been working on just such an experiment for years, which he calls "triadic practice," in which groups of threes learn to avoid escalation to conflict. Some aspects of his work are dealt with in his book Cybernetics of the Sacred (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1974), and more explicitly in "Relationships," Talking Wood 1 (1980), 44-55.
11. Jerry Gorsline and Linn House, Future Primitive.
12. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 78; Gary Snyder, Four Changes, p. 94.
13. There is by now a large literature on what is called "appropriate technology," or "technology with a human face." Two of the most well-known works are Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.
14. Murray Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New. York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938). The quote from Ariès is in Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 414.
15. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, "Reinhabiting California," in Peter Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate Country, p. 219.
16. Roszak's work, especially Unfinished Animal (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), Where the Wasteland Ends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), and Person/Planet (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), is premised on the Roman Empire model. Cf. Harman, Incomplete Guide, and Robert L. Heilbroner, Business Civilization in Decline (New York: Norton, 1976).
17. Percival Goodman, "The Double E" (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1977).
18. "A Future That Means Trouble," San Francisco Chronicle, 22 December 1975.
19. Leopold Kohr, "The Breakdown of Nations"; Kevin Phillips, "The Balkanization of America," Harper's, May 1978, pp. 37-47; Peter Hall, Europe 2000, esp. pp. 22-27 (in general, all of the trends I have sketched in the vision of a planetary culture are laid out in this book, including some of the sources for change). See also Zwerin, "Case for the Balkanization of Practically Everyone."
20. Hall, Europe 2000, p. 167.
21. I Ching, trans. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, 3d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 186 (Hexagram 445, The Well).
22. William Coleman, "Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative Thought in Science," Centaurus 15 (1970), esp. pp. 292-304.
23. Bateson's work has important political implications, but these are not particularly emphasized or utilized in his own analyses. In the case of schizophrenia, for example, the largest unit of Mind under his consideration is the family, and the family is hardly isolated from a wider political context. Authority relationships of the larger society are duplicated within the family structure, but this problem is never addressed. The power relationship that obtains between parent and child does not always produce schizophrenia, of course, but as Bateson pointed out in 1969, it is a necessary condition for it: the victim must be unable to leave the field. Hence Bateson's focus on disturbances of metacommunication is important in the analysis, but perhaps incomplete.
24. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 113.
25. Anatol Rapoport, "Man, the Symbol User," in Lee Thayer, ed., Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1973), p. 41.
26. The following critique of logical typing and hierarchy is the contribution of Paul Ryan, and I am grateful for his help in this difficult area. I hasten to add that Ryan does not share the other criticisms of Bateson's work which I have presented in this chapter.
For an elaboration of Ryan's critique, see "Metalogue: Gregory Bateson/Paul Ryan," in a special issue (Spring 1980) of the magazine Talking Wood titled "All Area."
27. G. Spencer Brown, The Laws of Form (New York: The Julian Press, 1972), p. x.
28. Warren S. McCulloch, "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets," in Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1965), pp. 4O-44.
29. Hierarchy certainly exists in the animal kingdom, as shown by various studies of the behavior of wolf packs and other animal groups; but there is no way to prove the existence of a carry-over to human nature, as advocates of class society frequently wish to do. In Murray Bookchin's opinion, there "are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in function between and within living things" (Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 285). Some of Henri Laborit's work argues this view as well.
Strictly speaking, heterarchy and egalitarianism are not the same thing. Heterarchy is intransitive differentiation, which is not identical to equality. But the two are so close that in actual practice a heterarchical system would be virtually egalitarian.
30. René Dubos, "Environment," Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 2 (1973), 126; C.H. Waddington, "The Basic Ideas of Biology," in C.H. Waddington, ed., Towards a Theoretical Biology, 4 vols. (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1968), 1: 12.
31. Wilden, System and Structure, pp. 141, 354ff. Shannon, Weaver, and W. Ross Ashby are typical of the early cybernetic writers.
32. Of course, this is a tricky issue. Whether a change was a true alteration of a program, or part of the program all along, is a subject that historians debate for nearly every major historical development. The whole quantity-to-quality argument developed by Marx was designed to overcome the tension between homeorhetic and morphogenetic development.
33. Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), p. 206.
34. Robert Lilienfeld, The Rise of Systems Theory (New York: Wiley, 1978), p. 70.
35. Ibid., p. 160.
36. Ibid., pp. 174, 263. Cf. William W. Everett, "Cybernetics and the Symbolic Body Model," Zygon 7 (June 1972), 104, 107.
37. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 103, 252, 291; see also pp. 238-39.
38. In point of fact, the experiment did not work as described. As Bateson tells us, the situation was so often on the verge of breaking down that the trainer had to give the animal numerous rewards to which it was not entitled in order to maintain his relationship with it.
39. See Chapter 7, note 27.
40. Rossman, New Age Blues, pp. 54-56. On the following paragraph cf. Chapter 7, note 2.
41. According to Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1978), pp. 11-12, 56, 161, there are currently more than one thousand religious cults now active in the United States, using nearly eight thousand techniques that fall under the rubric of what Bateson calls Learning III. Many are run or guided by Madison Avenue experts, and the following in these cults is not necessarily small: the Church of Scientology, for example, has an estimated 3.5 million members in America alone.
42. Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 100-107.
43. Rossman, New Age Blues, p. 117.
44. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974; orig. publ. 1947), p. 120. For material on est see Rossman, New Age Blues, pp. 115-66; Peter Marin, "The New Narcissism," Harper's, October 1975, pp. 45-56; Suzanne Gordon, "Let Them Eat est," Mother Jones 3 (December 1978) 41-54; and Jesse Kornbluth, "The Führer over est," New Times 6 (19 March 1976), 36-52.
45. On the link between Nazism and the occult, see Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich, trans. Lewis Sumberg (New York: Macmillan, 1974); Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (New York: Putnam's 1973); and Dusty Sklar, Gods and Beasts (New York: Crowell, 1977).