by Nora Bateson
How would most people react? Would they fight, would they try to get the money to him right away? Would they try to trick him? What are the scenarios that immediately play out? For most of us, a knife in our side would be a moment of panic. This was an emergency. But somehow it was not. As a passenger in the back seat of the van I watched their interaction and never for one second felt fear in the car. There was no spike in the drama, no flutter of breath, no indication of danger at all. I still do not think of that afternoon as being life-threatening, though surely it was.
After driving another half an hour we came to a place where we would have to drop off our hitchhiker and deliver me to my horseback-riding lesson. When we pulled off the road my father opened his wallet and gave the young man a $20 bill. He wrote our home phone number on a scrap piece of paper from the floor of the car and gave the guy a hug. My father suggested that the man call if he found himself in trouble. These were not idle generosities to suggest good will. He was not faking it. The warmth and the care he felt for the traveler was genuine. I could feel that, and so, apparently, could the hitchhiker. All three of us learned a great deal from that half an hour in the VW van.
As I look back now at that situation I can only say that I hope one day to be able to see context as well as my father did. He was not young when this story took place. He was maybe 74 years along in his practice of seeing more than just the tip of the knife. I suppose it takes time to be able to respond to an acute situation with love that stems from complexity… or is it the other way around: complexity that stems from love?
Perhaps there is no beginning to that loop. I will start by noticing my reactions, and searching for wider, deeper edges to the complexity I am reacting to, responding to—and shift that into mutual learning.
The solution expected, the way predicted, is so far removed from the options that surface when viewed from a wider angle, that they are entirely unplannable. I have spent long hours defending the possibility that attempting to solve a problem by going at it directly is only occasionally effective. I usually receive lost looks of bewilderment and a plea for a map, a method, and a technique. But, so often we make more of a mess than we ever imagined possible by seeking direct solutions. The problems we see are nested in contexts with particular alchemies that produce the ‘issue’ we want to solve. Identifying and strategizing our way through becomes short-circuiting which is often destructive. The consequences go spiraling off into further confusion, more issues, and more problems. Sometimes the way through is at an entirely unseen angle.
The Thing Is…
Time rolled us around like river rocks
Wore the edges round.
Soft enough to hold now, without breaking the skin
Like stepping barefoot through sun-warmed prairies
Your touch telling mine a story
It illustrates in epiphanies.
Quick movement and the slippery stones slide back into the water,
Where intuition swims below the line of logic.
There, the water is slow and ancient
Whispering breathy prophecies—just out of range,
Mouthing directions through wobbly waves.
Not quite see-able, easily misheard.
Which way? What did you say?
We are mapping ourselves in illegible script.
In the pleasure, the play, the lightness
Weightlessly draped together, I am barely holding you
It just is.
Jasmine instinctively bends into the spot the shadow does not reach.
Holograms of glass shards have been projected onto our path,
Are placed there to remind us to tread carefully.
The river knows its course.
Transcontextuality
I am giving up on interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and even meta-disciplinarity. The world is not made of disciplines. I still hold the work of my academic colleagues in high esteem, but I no longer place the academy at the center of the solar system of knowledge. I now see the academic contribution to learning as one aspect of knowledge—amongst many. Life is not divisible into the departments of a university, nor is our understanding of life greatly increased by standard research practices, which tend to pull their ‘subject’ matter out of the larger contexts they exist in, to facilitate focused study. The studied subjects never get put back into their relationships, and the contexts never seem to be describable in the data.
There was a time when I would have said that the context is what is missing in our current research practices. I might have said that we have a methodology in academic and scientific research that allows for an imbalanced attention to ‘things,’ rather than their contextual relationships. But I have come realize that even context is not enough. Living systems especially require more than one context of study if we’re to get a grasp of their vitality.
Transcontextual description as a starting place opens the possibilities of better understanding the interdependency that characterizes living (and arguably many non-living) systems. With a transcontextual lens I find interfaces of mutual learning. This lens opens up entirely new dimensions of information where the data has otherwise been flattened into a single plane or a single context. I also find that the multiplicity of the descriptive process demands that I never lose sight of the many perspectives that are integrating. There is no lack of rigor in this research. It is not to be done alone; a multi-headed research group is needed.
If we look at a medical or educational institution, for example, and begin to describe it in terms of it transcontextuality, we will see that both exist in contexts of family wellbeing; both exist within the context of societal robustness; the economics of both medicine and education share contextual languages of research from public and private funding; both are contextually bound to their respective history and to the development of their field; and both exist within contexts that share cultural understanding of authority. These shared contexts will provide us with linkings to wider descriptions of these institutions. The contextual descriptions observed offer new perspectives on how the interdependency is interweaving between them.
The transcontextual lens also demands the zoom-in. The contextual interfaces shared by a family might include cultural trends like technology and music, school culture, the historical perspective of their parents, a context of social expectation within their demographic of friends and family, as well as the children’s personal contextual perspectives, their health, their hygene, their talents, and their history within the family. The parents will have other contexts, such as their professional lives, their own experience as children, their financial position, their cultural context in time, their home food culture, their relationship with each other. And, again, each parent will have their own contextual frames, including their physical health, their friendships, their history, their language, their relationship to nature, and so on.
All of these contexts, shared and otherwise, come together to form the ‘causalities’ of the family. They integrate into the aesthetic of the family communication culture. Each context is a door into the many informing processes that culminate in the ongoing interdependency of family. (I have only named a few contexts to make a point; in any family there will be more, and perhaps more important, contexts—ones that I have not mentioned.)
In interaction with a complex system, like an institution, or a family or a forest, familiarity with the transcontextual interdependency requires humility and in return offers insight.
A forest is a world of insects, of microbacteria, of flora, and fauna, with weather patterns, and interactions with human contexts of industry or conservation. The forest is not fragmenting these contextual processes, but is them. An understanding of the interaction between these contexts is an understanding of the forest itself.
A transcontextuality lens offers productive observational advantages over the singular contextual model, and certainly over the disciplinary model. But what about being alive? Isn’t that by
definition a transcontextual process? And, if the transcontextualiy is mutually informing and forming, where is agency in transcontextual causality? This is a question that I am puzzling with. Through the construct of seeing the world as ‘things’ it is possible to separate the livingness of life forms that share contexts. In that separation, agency is assignable. But, when the larger intertwined contexts are in focus, agency is diffused. The influences they share are not separable. The vitality is inclusive in the contextual relations.
I am hoping for an increasing familiarity with this vocabulary and a mandate for this kind of information and “warm data”—data within its many contextual relationships. Without it there are blind spots, denials, numbnesses that hinder the development of sensitivity to so much information. Without this information, mistakes get made, simplifications abound, and a bland flatness encompasses our inquiry. With a transcontextual approach the inquiry is still not easy, but it’s enriched with perspective and diverse knowledge. There is toxicity in the flat numbness of singular study; the blending of contexts is where the study becomes alive.
Leadership Within the Paradox of Agency
In this era of multiple crises and global threats, I am increasingly uneasy with the call for leadership. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, and other iconic figures are held up as examples of true leaders: they offered charisma, vision and strength enough to pioneer new eras of thought. The lack of such characters now, we are told, suggests a vacuum in our capacity to generate the old-school kind of hope for the future that these courageous individuals embodied. So where are the leaders of today? This is the question plaintively asked of today’s activists, scientists, politicians, and keepers of the moral fabric.
I would like a moment to call bullshit. This thinking about leadership is not useful. There is no such thing as an isolated individual—we are all interdependent. Period. Our evolution is only in our mutual contribution and learning. Mutual. Leadership is an evolving process and, as such, our understanding of what leadership is must evolve in accordance. In the past the world understood leadership as the great deeds of heroes; now we are in another phase of global transition that requires an understanding of leadership based on our understanding of interdependency.
Is there a part of any of us that we can point to and truly say, “that is me—untouched or influenced by any of my history, my culture, education, family, religion, social life…”? Unlikely. Perhaps, instead, leadership is a product of the context, combined with other influences that seem to culminate in crowning an individual with leadership duties. When we look through the lens of interdependency, it is impossible to separate individuals from their contexts of influence and experience. This blurs the ‘hero’s story.’ Leadership, then, can better be attributed to the town or village that nourished a person than to that person’s individual qualities.
In ecological terms we can attribute the health and vitality of the whale to the ocean not only to the whale, and we can attribute the strength of the lion to the jungle (or savannah) not only to the lion. The environment in which the alchemy of collective need is met with a corresponding alchemical combination of possibility produces new paths to follow. In the combination of community and individual, hardship and support, isolation and belonging, past and future, vision and discipline, there can arise a perfect storm that produces what we have, in the past, called leaders.
The very word ‘leadership’ has become cringe worthy. It reeks of colonialism and lopsided history-book listings of individuals successful in taking, making, and claiming. Celebrating the potency of the individual is an insatiable ghost haunting the endless array of courses and manuals for developing leaders. Our fatal flaw may be the idea that an individual or institution can single-handedly penetrate new frontiers of possibility. This is an obsolete but undead dream of heroes and rescuers pioneering innovations. Lightning bolts of imagination and strength, these so-called leaders are presented as utterly independent of their histories; as though they had fallen from the sky. The haunting seeps into what we call ambition, fueled by our wanting to be important and successful. There are scissors somewhere that slice the ambitious from their comprehension of the mutuality we all inevitably live within. The mutuality is where the imagination is brewing, where the strength is made, where the integrity of the context lies. Can we extract a stand-out entity from that mutuality and call it a break-away? Isn’t the break-away a product of the mutuality? How can ‘leaders’ exist without all the relationships that have culminated and fermented to make them? Should we not point to those mutualities as heroic?
So I don’t want a leader. I am sick of heroes. I look back at how we got where we are now and I wonder what kind of systemic imbalances have been created by the thinking that longs to canonize leaders. What is a leader in a complex system anyway? What is the ecology of leadership?
I think there isn’t one. When we look to nature for models, we find that there is not an ecology that would accommodate the existing model of leadership. Think of trees in a forest. How did the ‘leaders’ get so tall? Were they extra courageous or charismatic? The ecological response would observe that the other organisms mutually contributed to that growth. The ‘king of the jungle’ is human nonsense that understands nothing of the lion’s relationships in the ever-changing natural order of the many species that extend into the pride of lions. The alpha dog is seen as the ‘leader of the pack,’ presuming that the pack ends with the grouping of dogs, which it does not. The human construct of leadership is projected onto the pack by us who are in the habit of identifying that pattern. Dogs have no such framing. Pack members are in communication and mutual learning with each other and the wider surroundings, responding to information that is funneled through the ‘alpha’ but generated through the pack. This makes the ‘relationship of dominance’ perceived, contextual, and not fixed. What we see as deference is a collaborative, communicational relationship that can be disrupted if the ‘leader’ or the ‘followers’ reorganize the communication.
In fact, I think our notions of leadership are toxic to the ecology of communication and collaboration in a social system. How can there be real communication when there is deference to a leader? This imbalance creates a hold-back of contribution and interaction. Look now at the fascination with celebrity that has infected the globe. The imbalance in the possibility for communication when one individual is placed above others in this way effectively destroys the possibility of true cooperation and mutual learning.
Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong… willing to learn, to explore new ideas, to go off the map, out of the known, and together grope in the shadowy corners of new ideas, new plans, new territories. That cannot happen if one person is the know-it-all. Even if that person has perfect ‘leadership skills’—they still disrupt the ecology with individualism. ‘Leadership’ often creates competition, ambition, greed and, on the flip side, fosters deference, hopelessness, apathy, and blame.
Being part of a system requires knowing that whatever happens is an expression of the patterns that entire system is involved in—that means, there is no fault, and everyone is responsible. No blame. Everyone must contribute to the shift. The health and the toxicity of the system ecologically manifests in keeping with the trends of the system. Someone with a diet of sugar, alcohol, pesticides and other harmful substances may develop pimples, rashes, tumors, or other illnesses. The manifestations of the system’s toxicity are intrinsic responses—indicators of challenges to the system. In the same way the toxicity of our institutional infrastructure is an indicator of the challenges in our cultural zeitgeist. The tumor or pimple is formed from within the body as a whole, in the same way that the healing of a wound, or embryonic development of a baby is also formed from within the system as a whole, including the father. These forms are not stand-alone.
This means big oil is not to blame, big banks are not to blame, big pharma is not to blame. Big weapons, and bad guys—not to blam
e. We are all included in a pattern in which those systems are interlocked into our survival and destruction. Whether we like it or not. As uncomfortable as it is, the lens of contextualizing leadership reveals that the responsibility we would like to hold our institutions to, does not in fact lie inside the institutions, but between them. The linkings between institutions, where no governing body lies, is the zone where integrity or corruption actually rests. But there is nothing there; no board of directors, no policy, no bylaws; it is a nowhereland where there is neither authority nor jurisdiction. The injustices that occur are not stand-alone either, they are the tumors, the pimples, and the deadly contextual toxicity in our culture.
One example is the interlocked institutional bond that forms the spectrum of troubles around depression and anxiety. It is all too easy to get bogged down in the current cultural quest for success and to feel unable to measure up. The anxiety and depression of this feeling of failing is often treated with pharmaceuticals that have side-effects, including addiction, further depression, or conditions that need additional medication. The pain of this common story leaks into marriages, family life, professional productivity, bleeding into how the affected family interacts with the education system, and even the legal system. Where is the responsibility? Pointing a finger anywhere in particular is only a small peek of inquiry into the situation. Should big pharma not sell those drugs? Should society not be so competitive? Should government take better care of citizens?