by Nora Bateson
It is my hope that we can develop this important conversation so that it can continue across disciplines, religions, cultures, age groups, demographics and more—for the sake of a healthier world.
The trophy of this learning was the healthy confusion that came with the realization that there is more than one way to see something that at first appeared as ‘fact.’ The difference between this ‘confusion,’ and the ‘misunderstanding’ that preceded it, is the humility to learn, and to hold multiple truths in hand, even when they are paradoxical. When both sides think they are right, we get misunderstandings; when they see another possibility, we get the cognitive dissonance of mutual learning and the confusion it opens.
There are no bystanders. Every conversation counts. Everywhere.
Whole Peace
Slam shut has a bit of stretch still,
Brittle with too many capitulations beforehand
This time I will not forsake myself
With the force of ten people I will stand
In integrity, and protection of my family
I will not forsake myself
Gentle was too subtle and taken
Without notice of the glass ribbon
I will not forsake myself,
On behalf of all women wilting
A stone not silent
Will not forsake itself
Misunderstood has a bit of hope still
Sad, with judgment everywhere
I will not forsake myself
Translating misconstrued intention
Is torture and it broke me
I will not forsake myself
Reaching always for depth
In an expanse of possible truths
I will not forsake myself
But in keeping, even crumbled
My path is growth
And I will not forsake myself
Up, out and over, has a bit of resolve still
Forgiveness a single puddle in a landscape
I will not forsake myself
Apology a reed at its bank
Peace has stones, has sorrow, has torn through the idea
That we look beyond each other’s weaknesses and asserts:
“Do not forsake yourself”
I stand with my gift, by the puddle on the hill with the reeds and the stones
And we are not separate
With the same strength I stand as ten
Again by you,
By not forsaking myself
I do not forsake you.
The Fortune Teller
Call us the future from your past
—Fred Schneider, Founder, the B-52s
You pull the ‘death card’ from the tarot deck.
The ‘Love-Line’ on your palm is broken.
The tea leaves reveal a great pain is coming.
The prophet has seen doom.
Doom is imminent. The cards are dark.
In flickering candlelight a veiled seer might say to us:
“Beware for there is a future of great turmoil ahead, and many will not survive.”
When the fortune teller delivers an unwanted fortune, what is the best response? Can we stave off coming misfortune? Or is it fated?
To adjust the momentum and redirect the course is probably the only way to avoid the outcomes of this patterning. But to do so would require a shift in the overtone of how we make sense of this entire situation. Such an approach would have to abandon the scripted list of precautions that has previously acted as a distraction from the acknowledgement of a necessary shift in ecological context.
When we want to redirect our ill-drawn cards or diagnoses, we usually do so with the implicit hope of maintaining the status quo. Therein lies the sabotage of our efforts. What we know as ‘life’ is only known through living the way we are living. Our professions, our families, our homes, our food, habits, and holidays all define our lives. The curious logic that appears has something akin to a Möbius twist in it and begins to look like this: to avert doom we must preserve life which turns out to require a complicated set of ‘actions’ aimed at restoring or maintaining the very patterns that are currently propelling us toward our doom.
To be fair, the adjustments we make may help to defer the predicted ending, but more than likely they will not prevent it.
In the hopes of cheating destiny one might pursue all known ways to deflect, defer, and deter such a fate. This is a proactive and responsible approach. But, within the strategy of taking every precautionary measure to insure that the prophecy does not occur, there lies the likelihood of locking even deeper into the pathways that lead to it.
The causes of impending doom are systemic and therefore multiple. Like wads of wiggling threads, the many societal and epistemological narratives have become knotted into an ecology of their own over the course of centuries.
Both tarot cards and scientific laboratories are illustrations of the many creative capacities of humanity. Yet, when it comes to imagining how to maneuver into a multi-modal life-change, our capacity for imagination seems to dry up, even when the alternative is death. It is not just public officials who resist the idea of systemic reboot—most marriages require (and seek to avoid) similar evolutionary jumps over time, as do organizations, and by the clock of life on earth, even species, landscapes and entire ecosystems go through a complete overhaul. The structures that allow for survival are bound to be temporary. Evolution is what happens when patterns that used to define survival become deadly.
Will this multi-modal change destabilize and crash the existing system in question? Yes, probably. This is the cost of continuance at another level. The marriage will break; global economics will crash. But a new relationship might spring out of the old marriage, another valuation of life may emerge out of a crashed economy.
However, the security of not making those changes is a false security, and delivers deadly consequences. Using fewer petrochemical products will decrease the carbon emissions problem so that we can continue to use these products longer. Using communication techniques that denote respectful communication in relationships that are rotten does not change the nature of the disrespect, but allows the marriage to continue. False security is justified by incremental shifts that pick at one problem at a time in the name of prolonging stabilization.
Continuation of the patterns currently in place will lead to collapse, and will do so almost certainly. The idea that tomorrow must look almost just like today is apparently hard to shake. Plans get drawn up in important offices to address ‘problems’ and identify their ‘solutions.’ Steps are taken to provide security to the system: steps that take us deeper into the quagmire of protecting systems that have to be overhauled—all of them, all at once; steps toward fulfillment of the prophecy of doom.
It takes a great deal of change to keep things the same
In a world that is defined by constant change, significant effort is needed to hold any particular aspect of a system in a static pattern. Kids grow up, buildings disintegrate, seasons change, technology develops, viruses mutate, stones become sand. In any complex living system there are countless variables moving and changing in countless ways. This makes it hard to keep something—anything—inside this complexity from changing. To hold one part of a system still requires that all the relationships upon which this part is interdependent must alter to absorb the shifting. Every other interaction within the system must compensate for the lack of flexibility in one part. This strategy for maintaining security is temporary at best. It will not be long, in ecological time, before the larger patterns of the system overtake the attempt to keep sameness in place. The larger ecology of any system will continue. To walk across a restaurant holding a bowl of soup is to engage all the muscles and balancing processes of the body. Keeping the hot soup in the bowl, instead of sloshing it on the floor, becomes a full system task dependent upon the attention, balance, and maneuverings required to deliver the soup. Which physiological processes have to remain flexible to do this simple tas
k? Which have to stabilize?
For some, the acceptance of doom is to fall off a cliff, an abandonment of possibility. For others the prophecy itself offers the opportunity to ‘set right’ those things that it is important to attend to before the end. Ironically, in preparing for departure the necessary actions are those which may well address the wad of wiggling threads of causation at another level. The peace made with old grudges, the planning of a will, finishing the abandoned manuscript, realizing unmet dreams, expressing uncommunicated affection and so on—these seemingly inconsequential actions represent a reweaving of the contextual patterns we live within. Significantly, movement of motivation alters the character or sensibility of the larger context. The bias, the tone, the posture of the logic within which we make sense of our decisions weaves a hidden weft of limits.
Preparing for a life that will come after death or divorce, or the fall of civilization, though perhaps pessimistic in tone, offers another sort of vista on resilience. This process activates another ecology of patterns.
If we reverse the view and imagine ourselves sometime after the apocalypse looking back at where we stand right now, will we still think that there was nothing we could do? Or will we see that we were blinded to the possibilities of what we might have changed? A pre-examination of how we might assess our failures once we can no longer change them stretches the imaginary limits of our current perspectives. To visualize the post-apocalyptic landscape of our remorse can shift the arcs of determination, change the tone, and assist our planning. The where, of where we are headed, shifts; the why, of why we are headed there, shifts; the when on the timeline of possibility moves; and the how becomes visible.
Using this kind of ‘pre-hindsight,’ different directions for our actions may become imperative, and for very different reasons than we might expect. Looking backward from the rubble of our mistakes we may see our current priorities from another angle. While this thought exercise may appear to embody a loss of hope, it is also likely that leapfrogging on the timeline of consequences may provoke a kind of thinking we do not otherwise have access to.
Right now, for example, it seems possible to think only in terms of incremental additions and subtractions to policy that would provide steps toward a more harmonious ecological economy. The guiding assumption is that life as we know it, and as it shapes our infrastructure (both societal and epistemological), is not capable of accommodating the upheaval of its premises. Instead of interrupting our day-to-day political and economic system, we imagine that we would be interrupting the whole ecology of our biosphere and violently brewing a future of distrust between nations, between generations, and between religions. So, for example, our strategy thus far has been not to disrupt the many stabilizing interdependencies that permit the continuation of the web of industries that generate distrust and exploitation. These characteristics of our world appear to be immutable. But from the other side of the devastation, when we are looking back at the trauma, the loss in nature, and the gaping wounds in our notion of what humanity is—will we still feel we could not have interrupted the industries of war, or the economies of exploitation?
Why is it that short-term thinking is deadly, and long-term plans are also often disastrous? My father wrote about what he called “conscious purpose” as being a habit that should be regarded with suspicion. The capacity to see across epochs of ecological and geological narrative is not something that any expert can claim. Actions that appear at first to be benevolent often turn out to be destructive. “The road to hell,” as the old proverb says, “is paved with good intentions.” The changes visible in a human lifetime of 70-90 years are significant in comparison to the brief hours of a mayfly’s life, but sequoia redwood trees have much longer clocks. The human attempt to perceive the larger narratives of nature cannot take into account the complexity of co-evolution. Plans get derailed by the fact they do not include the larger circuits of life. My father writes:
If you use DDT to kill insects, you may succeed in reducing the insect population so far that the insectivores will starve. You will then have to use more DDT than before to kill the insects which the birds no longer eat. More probably, you will kill off the birds in the first round when they eat the poisoned insects. If the DDT kills off the dogs, you will have to have more police to keep down the burglars. The burglars will become better armed and more cunning… and so on. That is the sort of world we live in—a world of circuit structures…
—Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
What is the road back from hell paved with? Another version of hope.
The dark side of the prophecy offers a foundation from which to imagine a context after the worst has befallen. The ground is moved. The thinking that can take place from that point on the timeline runs backward through the hoops of causation and re-groves the premises of change. If we ask how to continue after a system has self-destructed (rather than how to make change in an existing system) we shift from prevention to starting again.
In the process of imagining what we would do differently if we had to start over there is a good likelihood that we will envision beyond the barriers of what is ‘possible’ to change from inside the perspective and mindset of our existing systems. Long-term planning from present to future is likely not to account for the possibility that the system will explode along the way. But to set a course that begins after that explosion is to leave behind the baggage of impossibilities that currently bog down and misguide our trajectory to change.
The presumption of linearity in these matters is an illusion. Then is now and now is then. The future we project into our planning processes is just as unreal as the past we can project into our reconstruction plans. Apocalypse is a linear idea, and we do not live in a linear world. Complexity reaches in more directions than we might authorize in the boardroom.
Assuming that we will soon be long gone, that our social economic systems destroy our world as we know it, what can we tell those who continue after us about the mistakes we made? What would we like them to remember about us? How do we suggest they avoid the pitfalls that we could not? Framing the questions in this way we set new patterns into play.
While We Slept
But…what if there is no longer such a thing as national politics? While I commend and cheer those ardent souls who stand bravely (I hope) in the political arena and hold the dream there, I think we need another position from which to shift the compass, besides elections.
What if there is no ‘left’ and ‘right’ but rather a split between big corporate interests and those of the living organisms (like humanity, nature)? What if what we are seeing is really a global business divide? Then what? The BLOB (Business Looming Outside Borders) is actually not democratic; it is a profit model (and one that favors oil, guns, limiting human rights, limiting immigration in times of climate change, cutting education funds, medical care, robbing the social piggy bank, ecological abuse, and wars).
Maybe the role of politics has been redefined from ‘the pursuit of happiness’ to implementation of the will of the hungry ghost in societies around the globe. That is a far cry from ‘we the people.’ Today the US is reshuffling the poker deck, but this is not about America; we are witnessing the selling-off of humanity and nature—and it is everywhere: Ukraine, France, Sweden, Canada, Hungary, Germany, the UK, Ireland, China… everywhere.
How can nations address global issues when policy is national? Do we need a new entry point? What should be considered instead of the existing structures of democracy?
The practice of stance not strategy is next. While the tendency is to contemplate replacement forms of order, it may be more appropriate now to consider how to prepare to be in chaos more creatively. Re-visioning order is pre-emptive, and in a sense off-topic. Systems as we know them are in transformation. Ecological, economic, political, and cultural diagrams are washing off the page. Like martial arts masters, to be in this transformation calls for increasing sensitivity and responsiveness within the mome
ntum and chaos of this era. So the question now is not ‘what is better than democracy?’ but ‘how can epistemological frames adjust to everything we know as normal melting into new opportunities to be better humans?’
Fools See Outlines
The group think could shrink
cultures into vultures.
Pickled and preserved in nostalgia for a time that
never was.
Outlines? I doubt mine.
Ink seeping and creeping.
A hash of a hundred myselves sussing:
all and none ever was.
But identity is no entity
projected and reflected
Its stewing a broth of what humanity could be,
and all it never was.
Claiming an un-naming
Is complexly perplexing
when my future me is serving up all I ever never was.
Practicality in Complexity
The subtle poetry of leaves on sand after the rain is a nearly unseen messenger.
A message of wabi-sabi gestures reads: life is elegant, by accident.
Grace is the default.
How can we use knowledge of complexity in a practical way? I am often asked this question. I am confused by it. Practical at what level? Does ‘practical’ mean:
… to offer quick but un-systemic solutions?
… or to offer better understanding of the complexity of the context?
Executive decisions define our lives, and evidence-based research with deliverables is required to back those decisions up. In this era, substantive demarcations of what makes an effort worth the time and money should be provided at the outset of any program. Consequently, we see, in workshops, lectures, conferences, and universities, an insatiable appetite for prêt-à-porter improvement programs. There is always the next new 5-or 7-step program ready to be sold with the promise of improvement for individuals, organizations, and ministries. I want to pull my hair out when I see these books and seminars touting their promises. The price of short cuts is consequences and their echoes.