Small Arcs of Larger Circles

by Nora Bateson

  An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within community, culture and, ultimately, the natural world. Margaret Mead noted the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Indeed, the responsibility for the world the child grows to understand lies in the collective impressions that the village provides. In the same way, the behavior of institutions lies in the contextual expectations and valuations of each organization’s relationships within the larger community, as well as at the level of each employee. This is a tricky set of boundaries to draw, influenced at meta levels by lurking habits of thinking that tend to individuate. The responsibility is in the village, and the way the village interacts with its institutions. In the same way, the institutions interact with each other to form the linking zone where the blending of culture, economy and education happens. In our dissatisfaction with the behavior of our institutional or corporate organizations, we, the village, with our wish for ‘change,’ may feel impotent. Politics, business, law, education, medicine, and media are all substantiating each other. Politics needs business to thrive, education is the link to employment and scientific importance, medicine and law try to support both the political and personal codes of health and justice in respect to business and governmental policy. We cannot after all vote on the board or rewrite corporate policy from the sidelines. We cannot impose transformation on the institutions. But we can change our relationship to them. In doing so we alter relationships between institutions. Collectively, growing systemic transformation is always relational; the ecology is what changes, not the individual bits.

  We may learn more about leadership if we study it as an entrustment of context, and not as a twinkle bestowed upon a few select individuals from the heavens above. To trust the context requires a second order shift in purposing our agendas. Instead of being activists for this or that cause, we need to tend to the contextual capacity for those changes we would like to see. For example, making laws that limit the production and distribution of dangerous drugs does not stop the drugs from being made and sold. Those who see gain in supplying them find a way, either legally or illegally. But if there is a shift in shared tastes and values within the community—a general trend that does not include those drugs—the suppliers will seek other opportunities. So the question is not how to stop the dealers, though this clearly must be addressed to some extent. The more effective inquiry is around how to assist the community overall in valuing its own well-being. The context, be it a society or family or ecology of any sort, will adjust in the ways in which its given circumstances accommodate. The illusion of the leader’s capacity to innovate is created by the success of the one who chimes the bells that were in a sense ready to ring anyway.

  We might inquire more broadly (while at the same time trying to change policy)—what kind of civilization we want to live in. What kind of family is this? What sort of person am I? Am I the sort that is numb to the suffering of others? That question is not about which street beggars I may or may not give a coin to, it is about what my children see me do, all day every day and how they make sense of the world they are growing up in. The millions of people who are forced now for economic, ecological, and political reasons to start new lives in new lands, are dangerous not because they will deplete the social services of the ‘developed’ countries they enter, but because in the act of refusal by the developed countries the integrity of ‘civilization’ is being condemned. What kind of civilization allows millions of people to die at its doorstep? The damage this does to the contextual fabric of Europe and North America is likely to reveal itself in a horrifying loss of decency, empathy, and integrity.

  The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture.

  Leadership does not reside in a person but in an arena that can be occupied by offerings of specific wisdom to the needs of the community. So leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual. The individual’s responsibility is to be ready and willing to show up, serve, and then, most importantly, stand back. Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it’s a zone of interrelational process. Step in, step out.

  The illusion of the prevailing way of thinking is that there is someone to blame—or to praise—as a leader, hero, villain, tyrant, saint or Satan. And that thinking—that is how we got where we are today. Am I writing this book? Or is it the swirling contexts of my culture and family history, my digesting breakfast, my friends, and colleagues that are collectively responsible for this purple prose? I cannot rule out contextual input or the particular sensitivities of my epistemology. Both are relevant. But are they mine? But are they me?

  In the ecology of the interdependence of our world, that individualistic idea is wildly out of sync. With blame, as with praise, the causation becomes singular and linear… The problems we face now are neither singular nor linear. So the solutions won’t be either.

  The danger of the world’s fascination with celebrity is that it distracts from our ability to perceive larger interactions in context. In a world in which individualism is a viable illusion, collaborative discovery is unseen.

  What part of a jungle is the most important? Water? Soil? Insects? Plants? Animals? Geography? Rivers? Air? The jungle in fact is only alive in the living, growing relationships between the processes…

  What part of the body is the most important part? Heart? Lungs? Blood? Muscles? Emotions? Dreams? Intellect?

  Maybe there was a time when these notions of leadership were useful – but not any more. This global whirl of interrelations and interlocked histories and futures is not waiting for leaders… it’s waiting for the courage to trust each other and to step carefully into the ‘intentional community’ of the 7 billion people we share the commune of life with. This is our tribe. Just the 7 billion of us… and the animals, plants and microorganisms. Those who came before, and those who will follow. That’s all.

  So, am I saying that there is no room for teachers? That there is no room for the expert? No. But a good teacher, and a real expert, knows that they are in a process of learning themselves. They are not leaders. They are not making the seeds grow… They are fertilizer, tending to the soil.

  By definition, leadership is needed when something has to be done that has never been done before. Meeting unknown circumstances requires rapid and spontaneous learning. In the case of today’s leadership needs, that learning is mutual.

  Nothing’s Changed

  Everyday emptiness in the palm of my hand,

  Cupping the shifts of temperature, air resting on folds

  Holding nothing was just that.

  Singularly receptive.

  Then there was something, not much it seemed, in my hand,

  Solidly there,

  With weight in points of contact,

  A circuitry of signals

  And new places to edge understanding around.

  I let go of the something, and Nothing was not what it had been.

  Nothing looked the same,

  But newly filled with an imprint, it outlined another realm

  Ghosting emptiness,

  Crinkled infinity forgetting nothing

  of the presence it contains

  Isn’t—is granted independence

  Giving weight where there is none.

  Pulling ‘not there’ into full focus

  Mocking that there is nothing to push away.

  While collecting invisible knowings,
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  Nothing’s changed.

  Framing the Symmetry

  Art and Complexity

  If you look out the front window of your home you will see something very different than if you look out the back window. It is not our doors that hold us in our trenches, not the gates or walls—it’s the windows. They are the frames through which we see, limit, and define what we can see.

  I am not so sure, on some days, that humans are worth saving. They are reckless and mean, destructive and greedy, they are careless and self-centered. Is there anything worse? They abuse sentient animals, pollute, lie, steal, betray…

  At this juncture every country on earth is living with pathologies compounded by pathologies. With so little time left to tend to the rivers, forests, children, oceans, air cleanliness, and so few moments remaining to reverse the unraveling of the natural systems of our world, I realize the impossibility of shifting our course. The trenches are deep. It is not, after all, in the monetary interest or the political interest of our existing institutions that they come together and alter the patterns of our living, as they must. It is not our job, nor our nations’ job, to take up the task of a total system change. Anyway, we are too late, we say—the tipping point has come and gone. Sometimes it seems that humanity is a lost cause.

  But then, there is art.

  The way we think has everything to do with the way we perceive. With our logical, rational frames of reference we can only see small pieces of the larger patterns of our world; but art is impatient, skips over decades of theory, and is either baffling, or stretches perception into new territories of knowing. There are levels of communication that only art can reach. For me, this is where hope waits.

  Unlike either religion or science, art does not offer explanation. Through subjectivity, art brews the healing salve of multiplicity. It plunges us into a realm where there is more than one and also more than two versions of truth. We know there is no singular interpretation of a poem, or a sculpture, but we do not know and cannot know what all of the interpretations will be.

  I found this paragraph in a letter written in 1922 by William Bateson (my grandfather), to Gregory Bateson (my father). It was written in an effort to console Gregory after his brother Martin had committed suicide. In these few lines of fatherly advice, I see the map of the unique commitment that the generations of Batesons have had toward the study of life.

  The faith in great work is the nearest to religion that I have ever got, and it supplies what religious people get from superstition. There is also this difference, that the man of science very rarely hears the tempting voices and very seldom needs a stimulant at all, whereas the common man craves it all the time. Of course there is great work that is not science—great art, for instance, is perhaps greater still, but that is for the rarest and is scarcely in the reach of people like ourselves. Science, I am certain, comes next and that is well within our reach—at least I am sure that it is well within yours…. To set oneself to find out something, even a little bit, of the structure and order of the natural world is, and will be for you I dare foresee, a splendid and purifying purpose, into which you can always withdraw in the periods of suffering that every man must pass through. If you keep your eyes on that, the other things in life look so poor and small and temporary that the pain they give can be forgotten in the greater emotion.

  In this letter I can see the passion, and the loneliness, of science as a path alongside an esteem for the arts that is nearly untouchable. The distancing from religion is in contrast to the “purifying purpose” of the pursuit, to “find out something, even a little bit of the structure and the order of the natural world.” Without question, the embracing of this infinite study of life is in its own atheistic way a practice of both care and curiosity. This great work is not a job, it is not a way to gain prestige, nor a book deal—it is a way of staving off the pain and suffering that come with being human. It is learning to learn, both within and about the systems that are inside and outside ourselves, micro, macro, biological, and social. More importantly, it is a way of seeing.

  Gregory’s father William used to say that genius can only be found in two places: in art and in nature. He went on to add that, while science would never actually achieve “genius,” it should always be inspired by it. As a film student, I was riddled with guilt for not having followed in my family lineage of science, and I found solace in William’s statement. It vindicated me, or so I thought. It has taken me years to unravel it. As I have begun to understand what he meant, I am starting to think that it might have been easier to be a scientist than an artist.

  Why? What was he saying? It has to do with the idea of understanding how this pursuit of structure and order in the natural world has everything to do with context. The tricky part is that both William and Gregory Bateson were familiar with the scintillating paradox of the idea of “structure and order.” Life has structure, certainly, but that structure and order is cradled perpetually in chaos. And while both structure and order carry impressions of solidity to an untrained ear, the Batesons mean something quite different. Together notions of ‘structure,’ ‘order,’ and ‘natural world’ share an underlying assumption of a massive process made up of smaller processes of communication and relation that occur at multiple levels and through time. In short, “structure and order” as such are only solid at the level of “eternal verities.” Since not many of us have figured out what those are, the quest continues.

  Eternal verities provide paradoxes too. If there are no eternal verities then that is a verity – and if there are eternal verities then they can only really be eternal if they are all about change, complexity, unpredictability, interaction, confusion, distortion, and so on. They seem to require a necessary flexibility in order to hold ‘truth’ from all the perspectives that the world presents.

  ‘Structure’ and ‘order’ in Batesonian vernacular are meta-terms. We will get further in our understanding if we think about them like this: the structure of structure, and the order of order. After working with Gregory and William’s ideas for several years I have become increasingly aware of the interrelated vital processes that they refer to as ‘context.’ Sometimes we call that context ‘the system,’ or we label it more specifically as a kind of system: the body, the university, the forest, the globe.

  The ‘order’ and ‘structure’ was a scaffolding of patterns around which other patterns might form and shift. “Evolution,” they both said, “is in the context.” Organisms learn and develop in an environment that influences their genotypic evolution, as well as their somatic evolution. The evolution of one species is inherently tied to that of other species that it shares life with. In the century since William first began his studies of contextual inheritance, science has begun to embrace this multifaceted approach to the study of genetics.

  The branches of science that first came close to aligning with this holistic search were cybernetics and its subsequently articulated cousin, systems theory. Later developments have reshaped these studies into complexity theory. While there are important differences between these fields, there is much that they share in terms of discovering the dynamic processes of how ecological contexts, or living systems, function. In fact, I would say that without these additions to science (cybernetics, systems theory, and complexity theory), our universities and research institutions would have virtually no capacity for studying either the philosophy or the operations of interrelating patterns in life. Collectively, this work has pushed the need for interdisciplinary thinking to the fore, and generated entire schools of thinking around psychotherapy, ecology, information technology, management, personal development, and more.

  However, the project of defining systems science has run the gauntlet of trends in academic and pop culture, and it has been dented here and there along the way. It is, I believe, still the best option for preparing for the changes we are facing globally, but I would caution that care is needed now, as the word ‘system’ itself has gathered meanings tha
t are distracting.

  Before we get lost down the rabbit holes of what has become ‘cybernetics, systems theory and complexity theory,’ I want to address the way in which I am inspired by my ancestry’s common thread of attraction to and appreciation of art, toward a new version of contextual research.

  As I see it, art allows us to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously. In order for science to really work with complexity we need art to help inform science about forming an approach to perceiving.

  I maintain that although Gregory’s work was seminal in the formation of cybernetics, systems theory, and complexity, there are departure points that significantly distinguish the tone of his work from that of his colleagues. One such departure point is the way that art and poetry informed the scientific inquiry that both William and Gregory explored. For Gregory, the process through which art might expand and integrate the many parts of the mind was an explicit element of his thinking. Although the source of William’s inspirations was kept closer to his chest, still he inspired Gregory with his love of art and appreciation of poetry and especially (both for art and poetry) of William Blake.

  In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory addresses the way in which art brings multiple aspects of communication and culture together to integrate the conscious and unconscious sense-making of our world. In the chapter, ‘Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,’ he courageously assigns to art the task of doing that which science cannot, namely, to pervade our knowledge with what he calls “grace.” Gregory opens the chapter with a reference to Aldous Huxley’s take on this:

  Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem for humanity is the quest for grace…. He argued—like Walt Whitman—that the communication and behavior of animals has a naiveté, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man’s behavior is corrupted by self-deceit—by purpose, and by self-consciousness.