by Nora Bateson
Saving Systems Science
Since my discovery of the neo-Nazi website and the way in which these ideas were being used to promote the very sorts of thinking they were meant to deter, I have been concerned that decades of systems work could be lost. If the vocabulary of systems gets hijacked by the extreme right, it will be difficult to get it back, or it could be impossible to replace. Given the rate at which the coherence of our economic, social, and ecological systems is declining, there is no time for a reboot of the last 50 years of important work. The depth of thinking, the naming of patterns, the criteria of the systemic approach to thinking about life are, I am convinced, absolutely vital for our decisions in coming years. The loss of the use of these tools of thought would be a disaster. It is in this spirit that I am seeking to find where the blind spots are in this work, and how we might begin a discussion on attending to the oversights that have led to this emergency.
At the core of systems work is a search not just for details, but for patterns. This is not an easy task within the epistemological limits of western culture, where the habit of applying notions of cause and effect has been rewarded over several centuries of cultural, technological, and theological development. Systems thinking requires us to see past those old scripts and into the world of interrelations. To think in terms of systems is to suspend the version of reality of the wise scholar who looks though his binoculars or microscope and classifies parts of nature he objectively sees. This arcane character is replaced with another sort of scholar, one who is willing to look in several directions, seeking patterns of interaction.
At its best, being able to see systems requires the observer to muster the muscle to hold multiple inputs and outputs in mind simultaneously, while recognizing that the action of this observing itself is within the ‘clump’ of interactions in process (as we are taught by second order cybernetics).
More than half a century has passed since the beginning of the noble attempt to see the world through this lens. Much new vocabulary has been developed, and patterns have been identified. People have applied systems thinking to their work in myriad professions ranging from social science to art, architecture, and biology. Remarkable contributions have been made to the world with this thinking tool, the Internet being one of them. The visionaries who have taken up systems thinking have done so in the face of professional risk.
These scientists and professionals have embraced uncertainty; they have applied themselves to the difficulty of trying to perceive in a way that allows them to become familiar with processes that take place between disciplines instead of walling up their work within singular fields of study. These rogues have been shunned and rewarded in equal measurement. They have been pioneers in a new conceptual landscape who questioned the most basic assumptions of orthodox ‘knowledge about things.’
For many, the study of systems sciences offers hope for the future. The horizon might be brighter if we could only see the interconnectedness of our world and, in beginning to understand it, we might be less likely to destroy it. As the decades have passed, concepts of interconnectedness and ecology have become familiar. Up until about 20 years ago those words were strange to the ears of most people; now they are the common narrative of green politics, and even advertising campaigns that want to attract a lefty consumer base. Now this work could be co-opted and derailed.
Clarity Obscuring Complexity?
The preference for the safety and surety of the divisions implicit in ‘parts and wholes thinking’ is not a crime; it gives the illusion of making life easier to make sense of and to control. While it may be that thinking in terms of parts and wholes has served us thus far, as we look around the globe we see that there have been some oversights in our understanding of life. From ecological overshoot, to economic volatility, to human trafficking and rampant racism, there is a recurring theme of exploitation. Could our habit of separating the world into parts, which we imagine gear together to function as wholes, be contributing to the segregation of ideas, people, ecologies, and more?
The tidiness of identifying compartmentalized parts and wholes creates muddles at other levels. For one simple instance of this, isn’t the difference between parts and wholes to some extent a matter of scale? Taking the examples of a family-member in a family, and a tree in a forest, it is clear that the person is a whole system, and so is the family of which they are a ‘part,’ just as the tree is a whole system within the whole ecosystem of the forest. Scaling up and down we can identify the systems within systems; scaling down, both the human being and the tree have systems for reproduction; scaling up, both the forest and family are part of still larger landscapes. A piece of music can be arbitrarily divided up into parts. Each instrument could be considered a part, or each stanza with all the instruments playing could be considered a part, or the song itself could be called a part of a genre.
Where are the parts? Where are the wholes?
Transcontextuality and Paradoxes
The habit of drawing divisions between natural processes, between cultures, or between disciplines, and believing that those divisions are necessary cogs in a purposeful mechanism is indeed useful, but only within limits. Our humility in remembering that those divisions are to some degree arbitrary (and stem from the process of observation) keeps the possibilities open for understanding in multiple contexts. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Once identified, parts and wholes get mixed up quickly, and are further confused when one starts to examine multiple contexts. To study the interaction between the organisms in a forest and the ways in which that forest changes over time, is to study many contextual frames—time, weather, bacterial growth/death, relation to humanity, and so on.
Perhaps systems theory needs more dimensions. Transcontextual observation is helpful here, due to the way in which it blurs the outlines of parts, as the identifiable ‘roles’ of the parts and wholes within the ‘function’ of a system are revealed to be contextual. Identity is also not singular in context. We are friends to some people, colleagues to others, parents of our children and children of our parents, but we are also still ourselves.
I am American, and I have lived in other cultures most of my life, and I am a woman, and I am a filmmaker, and I am an educator. I belong in many groupings, and can be defined by them differently. I am, and I am not. None of the circles in the Venn diagram of my life has clear edges. I never stop being American even though my days are filled with Swedish life. They do not erase one another, and they do not agree. They leave open paradoxes pulled into a tension that does not allow for reductionist labeling.
Habitually removing ambiguity requires the simultaneous removal of transcontextual information. Ironically, ambiguity offers insight into more information than tight, arbitrary definitions can do. Arguably, the more transcontextual information one has, the more able one is to ‘suss’ and decide upon a more graceful action. More blurry is actually more clear and vice versa. It is uncomfortable perhaps to lose the concreteness of a single identity, but that singularity was an illusion anyway. Cultural identity is impossible to ignore, but equally impossible to pin down: it has been relentlessly integrating and reintegrating countless influences over the last 1.8 million years. And ‘I’ live in a body that internally requires co-existence with more than 10 trillion organisms, while externally my survival is ecological, emotional, and cultural. I am not an isolatable specimen.
It is these paradoxes of defining characteristics within multiple contexts that bring another sort of clarity to our understanding. I suggest that we need to get better at doing aikido with paradoxes. The impulse to regiment the existence of one group of people in a world of interacting cultures, or one organism in an ecology, or one person in a family, is rooted in the logic that those divisions are realities. They are not. And yet, they are. It is both correct and incorrect to outline parts and wholes. Maddening though that paradox is for doing research, it is the only transcontextual way to account for the variables of interaction over
time in complex systems.
The parts exist, the wholes exist, and both can be redefined from other perspectives. But today, an appetite for bite-sized, clearly outlined definitions has trumped any appreciation of complexity in our decision-making. A yearning for the satisfaction of puzzles that fit together has made unresolvable paradoxes untenable in planning committees. In our future studies and the coordination of our efforts to decrease destructive patterns of behavior, we need to become more comfortable with the kind of tension these paradoxes pull us into. While it may sound abstract to say life is transcontextual it is also the most basic practical understanding of nature, starting with our own existence as individuals.
Meta-messages & Presuppostions
The question of how it could happen that systems thinking is used (by neo-Nazis) to justify dividing peoples and cultures needs to be brought before the community of systems and complexity theorists and held up for us to examine with care. The same is true for ecology. What are the social implications of the sort of ‘preservation’ projects that botanical gardens, for example, implement to save native species? Isolation and disruption of interactive change in either realm presents difficult questions. And we need to be extremely careful that the language botanists and zoologists use to talk about species extinction cannot be re-purposed by social engineers.
So how did it happen? Why? To meet the challenge of this query I would like to step back and reassess what it is that we assume is true about systems, about complexity, about why these ideas are useful to our understanding and learning about our world. After all, communication of an idea is not just about describing the idea itself. What is also communicated is the ecology in which that idea lives. Language, culture, assumptions about how life works, these are layers of what is being transmitted that are usually indirect.
The way in which a concept is delivered speaks not only to the concept itself but also offers a description, between the lines, of what is unquestioned. As an example, when someone says the sky is blue, it is assumed that there is an agreement about what ‘blue’ is, and that there is such a thing as a ‘sky.’ The presupposition that both ‘sky’ and ‘blue’ are not in question makes it difficult to enter the discussion with any skepticism of what ‘blue’ might be, or what the ‘sky’ is. The tricky business with presuppostions is that they quietly shrink our ability to see the limits of our assumptions.
My analysis of the situation that I encountered with the neo-Nazi group is that the blind spot is in the presuppositions. The presuppositions are not in what is said or unsaid, but exist in the dimension of what it is possible to say, or to understand as having been said. In scrutinizing the implicit and indirect givens of systems theory and complexity to find the gap this fascist thinking squeaked though, I notice that thinking of life in terms of parts and wholes is assumed. As is the case with epistemological mistakes, the shadow is usually where the issue lies. Here is my father’s description of the issue:
Now, there is a peculiarity of human and animal learning, that it sinks. What you receive at a superficial level becomes what is called ‘habitual,’ and as it becomes habitual it becomes less conscious. That which has sunk to become habit is more difficult to disrupt, to change; and it becomes difficult to change because one has built and organized later information upon it… To change it means disrupting a whole mass of more superficial ideas which one doesn’t want to disrupt because they work out alright. To make the change at a deeper level is difficult. Now, it is particularly the more abstract ideas about relationships that tend to sink and become more unconscious.
—Gregory Bateson, Q&As: ‘Conscious Purpose versus Nature’
What happens if we begin to ask if perhaps the world is not made of parts and wholes? How can we describe it, study it, and in fact… what is it? Where does that land academia? Medicine? Studies of ecology, language, and more? At this level we are addressing the meta-message. I see the ghostly verification of our presupposition that the world is made of parts and wholes in the ways in which we communicate research, theory, strategy, and goals. It is not difficult to see that delivery of data in graphs depicting statistical breakdown of the gathered information implies a methodology. What is not so obvious is the meta-message that life is clear and definable. The models, graphs, and charts that communicate this methodology carry ‘fact’ packaged in such a way that its authority is unquestionable. It says, “this is serious,” “this is how things are done,” and most insidious, “this is how life works.” These are deep, qualitative suggestions that speak, not to the information given, but to the relationships the recipient should have with the information.
In such reports the parts are defined, the function is illustrated, and causation is defined—the presupposition is that the parts are definable, and that causation is based upon their function. The meta-message is that that mechanistic causality is ‘natural.’ ‘Naturally’ we should identify cultures as separate entities, ‘naturally’ we can expect a forest to operate like an engine, and subsequently, ‘naturally we can “control” these parts and wholes.’ However, without mechanistic causality there is no instrumental solution-finding. The question unasked is this: how can we communicate research about transcontextual relations as they learn and re-organize—if the report is communicated using statistical models that lay out and determine boundaries that are paradoxical?
Our ability to communicate is limited by what it has been possible to say. But we will live in the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences of these shadows and binaries. The system through which perception is achieved is inside the larger systems. We could never have this conversation if it were not for language, as there would be no collusion upon which to establish language. But we are in danger of believing what we see as though it were absolute. No one is innocent in this communication crisis: it is becoming a vicious circle of right and left, right and wrong, yay or nay, we and they. The confusion is in the need for clarity. A clarity without ambiguity is one in which we are all asking the wrong questions.
I am suggesting that our notions of parts and wholes are ideas deeply sunken under our conscious perception. Upon these notions our entire industrial epistemology has been built. This is for better and for worse. Either side of the paradox, it is a good practice to tilt the spotlight onto the presuppositions and meta-communication.
Where I’m Coming From: Abbreviated Bateson History
The letters I saw in the Library of Congress were written by scientists and academics, but they were people first. Gregory and Margaret and their friends were people with anger, pain, and disappointment ripping them open. They were able to conceive new ideas out of this caring-pain. The lines are blurred between professional and personal, between political and academic, between then and now. The people matter, and for me this material is extremely personal. In order to contextualize the above stories further, allow me to share some very brief history of the Bateson family.
Gregory, in the 1950s, was part of the Macy Conference group which founded the science of cybernetics. Before that he was an anthropologist in New Guinea and Bali. Much of his anthropological work was done in collaboration with his wife at the time, Margaret Mead. He had come to anthropology via zoology, which he studied at Cambridge. How did he get from zoology to anthropology? For him it was not such a distance, having grown up with his father, the pioneering biologist William Bateson. As the years passed, Gregory would change disciplines and careers several more times, crossing into psychology, information science, ecology, and bring his work in anthropology and zoology with him along the way. Each game change in his studies meant looking at life through another lens.
He has been called an interdisciplinary thinker, a title which I think he would shun. He was not interdisciplinary any more than life is. He was simply studying life, and life is whole. He used the vocabularies and focal points of the many disciplines he visited to increase his perception of the patterns he was attempting to describe.
His father W
illiam is famed for having coined the term ‘genetics.’ William was also a great lover of art and was on the board of the British Museum for whom he did a good deal of traveling, which he combined with his genetics studies. Studying culture and environment in the development of an idea or an organism was a question of studying patterns for William. No doubt this way of thinking rubbed off on Gregory. It should be noted that this period (the early 20th century) marked the height of discussions about eugenics. (Eugenics was a popular scientific project that involved improving humans and society by controlling genes and mating practices.)
William came out against eugenics and considered tampering with the complex process of evolution to be a violence against nature. In the quote below we can see how prescient he was about the dangers of this kind of thinking as it applied to genetics. In 1905 William wrote:
What… will happen when… the facts of heredity are… commonly known? One thing is certain: mankind will begin to interfere; perhaps not in England, but in some country more ready to break with the past and eager for ‘national efficiency.’ Mr. Galton has suggested a selection at the top, with State encouragement of families of superlative quality. More probably, and we suspect more effectively, selection will begin by elimination at the bottom… [While] contemporary socialism strives for the elevation of the unfit… that of the future will probably aim at their extinction. Ignorance of the remoter consequences of interference has never long postponed such experiments. When power is discovered man always turns to it. The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time, not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation or for humanity at large is a separate question.