by Nora Bateson
—Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
He goes on to say,
I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind.
Blake, like the Batesons, was captivated by an urge to study the structure and the order of life. The insight Blake had into the systems and interrelatedness of life—especially in the tension between man and nature—was a poignant compass in our household, which has informed my work at every level.
Keeping William’s letter in mind, as a plea for his son’s pursuit of pure purpose in the scientific search for the order of life, I invite you to revisit the famous poem of William Blake’s, ‘The Tyger’:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The poem seems like a forerunner to the questions that Gregory spent his life asking. What is pattern? Not because there was or is an answer, but because the question brought both rigor and imagination into the inquiry. The noticing of each aspect of the tiger’s symmetry and grace is an invitation to another kind of empathy. Who has the right to say how the tiger was made? Who can claim truth over this magnificent collection of ideas and processes?
Blake’s poetic portrait burns with the impossibility of knowing what made this tiger, what forged its remarkable integrations of the brain, the feet, and the heart. Then there is the lamb to consider, which is of course part of the tiger’s set of relationships as well. This is a call to the humility of biology; it is about culture, it is about ecology, it is about psychology, it is about information and communication, it is about behavior, it is about science in its glory, and its failings. The poem brings in many relationships: those within the tiger, those between the reader and nature and science, and the multiple reflections within these relationships to God.
Science and religion have always flanked the path of knowledge. The quest for structure and order requires careful attention. To study the workings of life through inquiry places one on a path where religion is on one side, proclaiming the mystery, and mechanistic application is on the other side, with blueprints. On one side the high priest is ready to save souls and on the other is the eager engineer. Without this tension the field is numb. The contrasting polarities are two ends of the same rope, as they say. Between the two exaggerations are multitudes of great minds, with breaking hearts and good ideas to play with.
Systems thinking on the wire
Framing the structure of life is not for the greedy—neither in religion nor in science. Rather, the starting place is to find the edges of our epistemological window frame, and play with them. To bring the arts into the process of describing living systems is to embrace a questioning about how we think. When we start to study one aspect of life, the complexity will expand the scope of our vision to include much more. As Frank Barron puts it:
The psychology of the individual, the person, is the study of a world in itself. Yet, that world intersects and intermingles with the world of other individuals, so that very soon we must consider community, habitat, the intersection of the personal with cultural history, expectations of the future, and perhaps above all else in the human case, values and philosophy of life.
Creativity and Personal Freedom, p.6
I have seen letters in the Library of Congress where Gregory Bateson is referring to “systems” as early as 1929. He offers a clear definition. The idea of systems began to get traction in the ’50s when cybernetics emerged through the Macy Conferences. Cybernetics grew in the dialogues of those conferences and then found purchase in the larger culture’s love affair with industrial and mechanistic thinking. While cybernetics has brought much needed insight, we have now arrived at a moment in the development of its ideas where they find themselves face-to-face with the polarities of our culture.
I am acutely aware when using the word ‘systems’ in this era that it has meanings that tie into a number of trendy furnishings in the popularized culture of both science and spirituality.
The lens through which we see systems theory or cybernetics or complexity will influence what we do with it. Since our culture has a penchant for mechanistic thinking, it will seek mechanistic versions of systems thinking. And, conversely, since our culture seeks to fill the hole that science dug where religion used to hold the soil in place, unrigorous forms of systems thinking will offer explanation through mystery. In both cases, what is lost is the ability to stretch across the disciplines.
The systems sciences are probably our best chance of adding depth to our understanding of life. To think that there is such a misplaced mechanistic metaphor right in the center of the field is indeed a challenge to take to heart. In fact, if you Google the word systems, and select images, you will see only a rather bizarre collection of abstract models and diagrams, with boxes and arrows in varying layouts and primary colors. In the first pages of results, not a single living thing is returned by Google to represent the input of systems. I think that is frightening.
I have a bias against those models. I will admit it. I see in them the traps of linear and causal thinking, the notions of control, and the mechanistic approach to life that is repeatedly evident in all aspects of our culture. Perhaps as intellectual crutches they are fleetingly useful, but only if they are then thrown away; because life does not work that way. Complexity does not compress.
The larger conversation that forms an ecology includes all of the organisms interacting and learning. William Bateson said: “Every feather is, as it were, a flag whose shape and coloring denote the values of determining variables at the point and time of its growth.”
The understanding of how living systems learn is not mappable. Some will disagree with that, but the processes are taking place at multiple levels and between multiple parts of a system, and within those parts of systems there are more systems with parts—and all the parts are in communication, and communication is not the same thing as a script.
One example I use is this: imagine you are going to a party, and you want to enjoy meeting other people. In preparation for the party you study, memorize, and practice every line of Hamlet, right down to the emotional expressions and body movements. You will find that your contribution to the conversation is out of sync, unintelligible, perhaps absurd, and meaningless. I am a great fan of Hamlet—it is a script that says important things about life—but living people, living organisms, and living systems do not communicate in scripts. The maps are scripts.
Systems theory is struggling inside a system that doesn’t actually accommodate it
In scientific circles, the systems sciences have become a haven for a modeling and explanatory language for how to deal with complex problems. This would be OK, except that the linearity and the mechanistic principles of reductionism in western culture have wormed their way into the systems vocabulary. The result is that we get strategic methodologies and defined models for fixing isolated issues within complex living inter
actions that have a living context. To put it more bluntly, the old way of addressing problems—by defining causality and applying predetermined formulized ‘actions’ to ‘solve’ the problem defined—has become painted into the terms and language of the new systems and complexity disciplines. The vocabulary has changed, but the thinking remains the same. ‘Recursive’ becomes a word that brings to mind a series of boxes connected by arrows, and ‘decoupling’ seems now to refer to a mechanistic split in systems linkages.
Something is getting lost in the ether of new age oneness. Or else it slips down the other side of the cliff into engineering. This is rigor and imagination, yet it is all out of balance and distributed weirdly across our epistemological horizon.
Interconnected
There is a sort of fashionable thrust right now toward popularizing systems thinking, encouraged by ecology celebrities looking for a way to make more palatable the bad news about the ecosystem, and how we can respond to it. It has crossed into the genre that includes the western misunderstanding of ‘interconnectedness.’ You might hear something like the cry for unity in our world and ecosystem in the slogan ‘we are one with the planet.’ This has by all accounts the benevolent intention to change the sickness in our thinking that leads us to imagine that we are NOT one with our planet. It is an improvement, I hope. But it is an improvement that comes at a high cost. Perhaps the cost is indeed too high.
The concept of interconnectivity has become a sloppy way of addressing the vast tangle of interactions in a living system. The very idea of interconnectedness has allowed lines to be drawn lazily between nodes or parts of the whole system. The world may be able to use the terms of systems thinking, but some of the thinking has lost its real value and become muddled into something more akin to ‘oneness.’
The deepening of our understanding of how the vast variables and interactions in the natural world are functioning will inform our actions; it will inform our ethics, our choices, and our epistemological frame. Take out the vast variables and replace them with oneness, and you lose the differences, the information, the aesthetics of interaction, the evolution, the complexity, the life. Unity is not about oneness, it requires the process of uniting, which requires relationality.
Gregory’s concept of “the difference that makes a difference” requires that the relationships inside a system be communications of contrast. The gecko that catches its food by seeing the insect’s movement is an example of a pattern of cognition and evolution that exists between species. Yes, they are interconnected. No, they are not in a big oneness. The differences are beautiful, and they matter. In the study of structure and order of life, which William Bateson refers to above, these are the rich co-evolutionary forms that offer insight into all sorts of other systems.
In this sense, to suggest that systems thinking can offer a scientific overtone to a spiritual movement is to miss the more rigorous intellectual pursuit that systems thinking ideas can deliver. It’s a rip-off. In fact, the beauty and awe that can be generated by seeing the world as a nest of millions, billions, and trillions of interdependencies interacting with each other across time and geography is profound. But, it is not a profundity that asks for vacant surrender; instead it beckons for study, for art, for active learning.
Uncertainty
Then there is uncertainty—another curse and blessing brought on by systems and complexity thinkers. Without doubt, the tone of our studies becomes poisoned with hubris and this is evident in the application of most scientific discoveries. Whether it be medicine, space travel, or other technology, we are too often sure that we have cracked the code of nature and found the answers we need, and that is usually the moment at which we brazenly commit the most destruction. So, uncertainty is healthy. It can change the tone of our approach, make us humble, give a pause, and cool off the arrogance that comes with the sense of having found ‘solutions.’
We cannot know all the millions of relational interactions in our own digestive process, let alone the larger ecology we are disrupting with genetic modification of our food. We should take that uncertainty seriously. We do not know why two people fall in love or fall out of it—and we should take that seriously too. In this form, uncertainty is good.
But uncertainty has also become a sort of island of intellectual excuses—reasons for deferring deeper study. The problem with making a place for mystery is that it so easily gets co-opted into an eddy, where ideas go in easy circles instead of lending themselves to the movement of a wider stream. While there is a kind of sweetness and beauty to this deferral, it is also an entry point to binary thinking. There soon exist in that epistemology just two categories: that which we know and that which we do not. This is a divide that soon gains potency and can contaminate our work: both in terms of what we feel we can understand, which assumes a more rigid and possibly arrogant form, and that which we can’t, which turns to fluff and quickly blows away in the wind.
I would suggest a more modest motivation, which is neither to completely understand nor to label as mystery, but to simply deepen our understanding. The deepening is not finding the answer, not looking for a final truth, but becoming increasingly familiar with the many complexities that surround all that we study. We will never understand it completely, but we can continue (endlessly) to increase our comprehension of the variables at play. As William said, “to find out something, even a little bit, of the structure and order of the natural world….”
Integration of many levels
Art and nature share the genius of contextualizing multiple levels of relatedness and communication at the same time, and across time. A painting is a study of relationships of color, of culture, of subject, of framing, of light, of concepts, and of perspective. The meaning that is found in the visual metaphor today can, and will, change in ten minutes—and in a hundred years. These meanings vary between people and between cultural references. Likewise, a pond is a possibility to study all the relationships that make it: the water, the algae, the fish, the bacteria, the insects, the birds, the micro-organisms, the leaves on the shore, and the animals that drink and feed from it—now, a hundred years from now, and a hundred years ago. So, where is the art? Where is the pond? In the relationships.
In contrast, the planned and strategized cultural mandates of our social norms do not give voice to the multiple threads of information needed to make decisions. Nor does our daily professional vernacular communicate the unseen interruptions that are made in our haste to solve problems. The use of names and categories to save time is valid. But these outlines are arbitrary. The tendency is to remember the names and forget the other possible ways of seeing. Like the horse with blinders on, or the pointed focus of a camera lens, we shut out information. We have an unspoken agreement that we will not blur the interactions of specific issues that in fact desperately need to be blurred to see their integration.
The professional adult tone of respectability and credibility is monotone and singular. It says, “I am not capricious, and won’t be fooled by the flim-flam of ‘complexity’; I can be objective and level-headed about what needs to be done.” But subjectivity is gone. Purposefully stamped out. Professionalism and authority demand a tone and an approach that is unswayable. Of course the evidence is in our back pocket, the facts, the statistics, the graphs, and indicators all point to one simple truth, and that is what we will clearly and willfully state. But is that possible? Is it a cultivated lie?
The subjectivity of our perspectives gives depth and information to everything we see. Information is lost in the masking of subjectivity. Interactions are lost.
I am remembering a time when I was asked by the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco to teach a workshop on complexity. I was thrilled to join their classroom of grad students who were studying the noble material on complexity, but when I read the sheet that described my contribution, I blanched. It said something like this: “Nora Bateson will join us for a workshop in which she will present a feminine perspective on complexity.�
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“What? What is that?” I thought. I have certainly studied my share of feminism, and that was fine. And I have certainly studied my share of complexity, and that was fine… but what in the world is a feminine perspective on complexity?
I arrived at the class, a wonderful group of about 30 bright and eager students, all poised and ready to receive this illumination, and promptly asked them: “Does anyone here have any idea what a feminine perspective on complexity is?” They were unsure for a moment whether they had been sold a faulty teacher, or whether there was a trick. Of course neither was the case. I found I had to describe my predicament with care and honesty.
I am a woman, yes, and I can only speak as a woman. I cannot remove the woman-ness from who I am. But I am also many, many other things and play many other roles in life. I cannot surgically or otherwise remove any of those influences or experiences from who I am at any given moment. I am complex. We all are.
One student pointed out that, with the addition of more versions of herself in her work, she was freed from the obligation of representing a particular cultural or disciplinary perspective. With her newfound subjectivity she could employ a much richer perspective on her work. She could present herself as more than her race, more than her gender, more than her religion and so on.
There is no room for racism, or religious discrimination, or professional insult, if we can begin to see each other and ourselves as multifaceted in our complexity. Seen in this way, our subjectivity offers a voice uniquely ours to speak from. The epistemological frame through which I and you, and the rest of the world’s population, see the world is a living invocation of all of our experiences and reflections, mixed into memory and learning. The subjectivity of our perspectives is what gives depth and in-form-ation to everything we see.