Small Arcs of Larger Circles

by Nora Bateson

  I now wish I had asked the old woman: “Can you see the pain in the woman’s face that you just humiliated? What do you think she is feeling?”

  Numbness is an epidemic. The lack of sensitivity to these seemingly inconsequential moments is deadening the ability to feel pain when we should. Pain that will grow between generations, races, and religious groups and act as the paintbrush of blood for the future. The discomfort and confusion I feel now is necessary. It is due. More is due. I got angry at the old woman, at myself, at the politicians and publications that have seeded this lack of decency in the public sphere. My anger is not the kind to soothe away; it is the anger that holds in its fist the tenderness to want other people to be treated with respect. It is an anger whose fire burns away numbness.

  Stop That Thing You Do

  I am baffled by our habit of issuing endless ‘direct correctives’ to our children, ecology, and economy…. We must re-think the notion of fixing things.

  Diffused adjustments are more effective in complex systems. Indirect is much more effective, though impossible to prescribe. Banking on the order of life to justify a notion of what is correct overlooks necessary chaos.

  My thoughts are of the snow on the branches that make beautiful, jagged zebra stripes on the horizon in winter…Symmetry and asymmetry are convivial.

  The paradox of order and chaos in simultaneous improvisation is such a challenge to hold in focus. But in that balancing (for it is surely in infinite process and never totally balanced), in that conversation, in that music, the new enters the patterns.

  Ecology of Love

  Ecology is a love story.

  A play scripted between the sunlight’s tender dappling on the forest floor,

  The elegant drapery of the vines that climb a cliff face,

  The tickle of the squirrels and birds

  Holding society in the tree tops

  And the sultry sway of the purple kelp the otters cannot resist.

  The touch of life on life met in the tension

  Between unshaking trust and heartbreaking vulnerability

  Is a kiss of light and love and heat

  And earth.

  It is fierce and sweet

  And rages with the same passion.

  It births a wild rose.

  And in naming you

  I grasp and find there are no completions,

  Nothing in straight lines

  Only affection,

  Reaching,

  Reading the gestures

  That spread everywhere.

  (This is the transcript from a short film I made, by the same name)

  Parts & Wholes, Hope & Horror

  If we inquire what does constitute a nation, we soon find that neither common racial origin, nor identity of language, or of religion, or of manners is essential. The most acceptable definition is probably that which declares that people compose a nation when they feel themselves to be a nation. But if we inquire how they come to share this feeling which has no necessary dependence on genetic relationship, on collocation in space, on common language, or common customs or beliefs, the answer is by no means obvious. National sentiment… is the power of those whom we call patriots, to give them their more noble title, thus to polarize the peoples. In their wake follow the journalist, the contractor and the manufacturer of armaments. The scene is set. Catch-words are chosen, insults bandied and the play begins.

  —William Bateson, 1918 address on ‘Science and Nationality’

  There may be a blind spot in the way we make sense of the world that is holding back our ability to make the shifts necessary for human survival. It is possible that this could be the implicit assumption that the world is made of parts and wholes geared together to resemble a giant machine. Has this schematic blueprint been projected onto our understanding of nature and culture? Are there clear defining lines between parts and wholes, nations and individuals, organisms and ecosystems?

  Obviously a family is not a machine any more than a forest is; still there is a presumption that each part of either of those systems has a role in how the larger system functions. I want to show that the influence of the machine metaphor can be seen throughout our world, a world in which we see a global return to pre-WWII levels of nationalism, coupled with declining ecological systems, and the apparent inability of presiding experts to swerve our social and scientific realms into system change. I have become suspicious in recent years of the violence that indirectly results from this machine-dream. Of course, 21st-century science has compiled a portrait of life that is much more complex than an ordinary machine, but I would argue that, if one looks deep enough, the imprint of this mechanistic metaphor is still there.

  The benefits of studying the ‘workings’ of life according to the logic of machinery have been substantial, but there is a conceptual problem. If each part of the ecosystem is particularly purposed into its place in the larger biosphere, how does evolution happen? Increasingly the study of environmental context, which we see for example in the rediscovery of epigenetics, has upended the more linear evolutionary narrative. It turns out that context matters, and that organisms learn together. From a social perspective that same question can be reframed: if each culture has something intrinsically set that it brings to the global family, how do we account for the constant transference of customs, lands, and languages, and the emergence of new ideas?

  I have dedicated my life to researching contextual mutual learning, along with my partners at the International Bateson Institute, in the hope of illustrating a different premise upon which life is operating.

  In recent years, there has been some movement toward holistic studies and ‘interdisciplinarity’ has become a catchword in academic institutions, where programs have been installed to transcend the division of learning into isolated subject silos. However, these separations between subjects are not in themselves the problem. The silos are a product of our perception of how life is organized. Beyond the fragmentation and de-contextualization apparent in the many separated disciplines and departments, there lies the underlying problem inherent in dividing up life.

  Why does it make sense to divide the world into abstracted pieces? Why does the child take apart a watch? To see how it works, that is the argument. A watch however, has a mechanism that, unlike a living system, does not require a context of living, learning, changing relationships. Working watches are stabilized in their functioning. Life is not stable; without evolution there is only extinction. Yet, even within the holistic discourse of cybernetics and systems theory, the whole system, be it ecological, technical or social, has often been presumed to be a composite of parts. The upshot is that, as with the watch, in order to study any given system, divisions within it have to be made, delineating the various ‘parts’ that would come together to make the whole.

  In this approach, parts and wholes are held to be real and separate from the efforts of the observer or analyst. Our way of seeing and perceiving is conditioned by the system we are seeing and perceiving. It is tricky and probably futile to try to describe this phenomenon, especially using the same prose though which it is formed. Function, seen through this lens, is dependent on having just the right parts, with just the right organization.

  Early systems and cybernetics work was at the forefront of bringing revolutionary holistic studies to western science. These studies have always been marginalized, and are only recently coming into favor. While I am excited to see this new popularity of systems and interdisciplinary studies, I am also concerned that they can be used in ways that the founders of this thinking never intended. I fear the consequences, the substantial and deadly miscalculations that the ways we define parts and wholes have led to. The Achilles heel that I see even in some systems theories is the holdover of a metaphor that describes the rigging of life as a functional set of processes—even though these theories do this in a more complex way than many studies without interdisciplinarity in their favor. I would like to see the possibilities that would be
available to our studies if we were to start with the assumption of contextual mutual learning.

  It matters a great deal what image underpins our research. The findings and the analysis will be framed in the same logic as that initial assumption. I have two stories that illustrate how I have come to this question and why. One is a story of horror and the other is of hope.

  A Story of Hope

  In 2013 I took a trip to the Library of Congress with a few colleagues. We discovered correspondence in the Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson files that illuminated the beginning of ‘systems thinking’ as we know it today. In the letters, a collective of intellectuals in the late 1930s correspond as professional colleagues and friends, and express their fight against fascism as they saw Hitler gaining momentum and eugenics catching the imagination of the scientific world. Through a new glimpse into the inception of these ideas I saw not only the acumen that this early group embodied, but perhaps more importantly their care for the future of humanity and the biosphere.

  Their idea was to address the epistemology that made fascism possible. They were disturbed by the threat of fascism as it was developing in Europe and around the world and saw science as giving traction to the foothold that fascism was gaining at that time. In their letters they describe the fragmentation and fractioning of knowledge as contributing to the kind of thinking which could allow fascism to take root. They maintained that if the world could be divided up, it would be. Having been divided, those divisions would gain political, military, and ideological strength.

  To address this, they discussed the possibility of developing a new science that would offer a way to study the world through all of the other sciences simultaneously. These scholars wanted to study how culture, biology, and ideas were interconnected. They were the core of what would become the Macy Conference group twenty years later. The science that they would later develop was cybernetics.

  (Cybernetics is not easily definable, but using the words of Wikipedia, let’s call it “a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities.”)

  I was moved by the passion and emotional concern in these letters for how the world was being torn apart during WWII. This group was driven to do what they could to stop the physical and cultural violence of fascism. The tendency toward separation of disciplines in natural and social sciences was seen as the epistemological scaffolding within which separations between peoples, ideas, and nature would be logical and reasonable.

  Gregory, Margaret and others were already posing questions that reached toward finding out what in our cultures had been cultivated that would beget the collective human trend towards such terrifying, blind disregard for life as they were seeing in Germany (and elsewhere) at that time. In their dedication to their cause they expressed their heartfelt fears for what would happen if fascism took hold of the collective imagination of the western world. They imagined the damage would likely be complete. They predicted that the trauma of future generations would surface in unrecognizable hatred, humiliation, and exploitation. Humanity’s integrity was in the balance. Life itself was in the balance. They cared.

  The letters we found that day at the Library of Congress predate the Macy Conferences in which Cybernetics was first defined. The history of how and why this group came to be is essential to our understanding today of the material they developed. It is all too easy to think that the great minds that gave us cybernetics did so out of intellectual rigor—which they did. But, they were also motivated to do so by the obligation they felt as thinking, feeling, human beings to address the threat of ecological destruction, generations of future trauma, cultural pain, and species depletion that they perceived would be the result of procuring knowledge in divided compartmental ways, i.e. dividing the world into bits. They wanted to find a way to study life in its wholeness as a kind a vaccination against fragmentation. Those letters were written 80 years ago.

  A Story of Horror

  Also in 2013, I was asked to do a radio interview after the release of the film I made about my father, ‘An Ecology of Mind.’ New films generate press, and I was doing interviews to promote the film with some frequency at that time. What was unusual was that I took the time to vet this request. I am not sure what prompted me to be more careful, but something did. The interviewer wanted to discuss my father’s ideas of ecology and culture. I was not surprised by that. He went on to say how important it is to have these discussions of ecology and culture in an era where so much diversity was being lost. I agreed with that too. But, I began to smell something fishy. He made a remark about racial intermarriage that I could not quite place in the rest of conversation, and then something else about immigration. I chalked my confusion up to a bad Skype connection. I looked up his name on the Internet and found his organization. The request turned out to be from a right-wing group of neo-Nazis concerned about the imminent genocide of so-called native Europeans (i.e. white people).

  I did not see that coming.

  It would be a few more years before huge waves of immigrating refugees would take center stage in our press stories. Immigration was not so much in the news then, especially not in Europe. Speaking from my desk in Vancouver, Canada to this polite man on Skype who wanted an interview, I had no idea what he was trying to say. With hindsight I notice with amazement how difficult it is to see something you have never seen before. I simply could not imagine that he was approaching me for an interview to assist in justifying his vision of a divided world. Me? Gregory’s work? Systems? Anthropology?

  At that time, I did not yet recognize the velocity of the emergence of these right-wing groups as a global phenomenon. The Tea Party was in full swing in the US, but truthfully in my eyes it was so full of idiotic rhetoric and buffoon-like characters that, like many other people, I did not take it very seriously. This request marked the first time it truly dawned on me that the threat of these extreme right-wingers might actually be a substantial danger, let alone an intellectual challenge. Snobbery is what I was guilty of, and my come-uppance was harsh.

  On the website for this particular group there was almost none of what I would have expected as predictable racist material. Instead, the content was all derived from highly sophisticated, systems-informed anthropology, philosophy, ecology, and social justice activism sources. To my horror, it was in the name of cultural preservation, and the need for every culture to provide a knowledge base in the ecology of ideas, that the imagined loss of a so-called indigenous European place in the social ecology could be seen as an ecological tragedy. In the spirit of protecting biodiversity the site raged that what it called injustice needed to be addressed in order to restore European cultural purity. The website suggested that inter-marriage should be stopped between indigenous Europeans and others to save the remaining authenticity of the culture, and that immigration should be stopped. I found it staggering to see so many ideas I thought were ethical, intelligent, and beautiful put toward this ugly neo-Nazi agenda. Though I have since found that this hijacking of ecological thinking by white racists is well known in some circles, for me this was personal because the tenets of systems thinking were also being co-opted.

  On the website the bloggers were referring to my father’s ideas, to Margaret Mead, and to other ecologists and systems thinking icons. I had to take time, step back, reconsider touting systems thinking as a way to save the planet—and begin a quest to find out how this could happen. I needed to develop or contextualize systems ideas differently, in hopes of creating a way to get to another level of thinking where this kind of divisiveness would be precluded. There was an oversight somewhere, and I began a hunt to find it.

  I knew I had made two mistakes. First of all, I overestimated the water-tightness of systems thinking. For me it was a foregone conclusion that my father’s work, and the work of his contemporaries since the beginning of cybernetics, would eliminate ideas that could house racist polarities like the ones I was seeing. Secondly, I underestimated
the refinement and complexity of the rhetoric that the extreme right was using. Somehow I expected that only a narrow-minded, bigoted reductionism could hold such destructive binaries. On both of these counts I was mistaken.

  I declined the interview, realizing that anything I said would likely be taken out of context. Instead, I have put myself to the task of finding the blind spot within the work that that my father and his contemporaries set into motion. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I do so for the same reasons that this work was begun in the 1930s.

  ***

  Systems, Ecology and Fascism

  As the decades have gone by, the tenets of cybernetics have seeded the fields of systems theory, complexity theory, and chaos theory as well as so much else in the world today, including psychotherapy, engineering, ecology, information science, and communication theory. Understanding and decoding life’s ‘order’ is at the core of all of these traditions of knowledge. Now, I would argue, is a critical moment in the evolution of thinking about this ‘order.’ Is it a multi-perspective learning process? Or is it definable in terms of its parts and wholes?

  I am beginning to see a sickening similarity between the ecologists’ description of the earth’s systems interacting, and the neo-Nazi description of why purity of culture is necessary. The irony of this observation is that the extreme right and left share a worldview—though their intentions are entirely different. Both are founded on the idea that the world is made of parts and wholes that should remain intact in order to keep the social or environmental system functioning. The cogs must not be disrupted if the system is to continue and not become obsolete. In both cases the processes of evolution, co-evolution, and learning are confined to the impossibility of static forms interacting with static forms.