by Nora Bateson
More than circular
Circles have come to be the branded motto of recycling, ecology, and the cycles of living things. But, for our work, the model of circles is not enough. The cybernetic notion of circular communication, interaction, and cyclical behavior was a big step forward from pre-cybernetic, linear descriptions of these processes. The value of that progress in our thinking is not to be underestimated. Because conceptual models provide potent impressions to our comprehension, metaphors matter. While circles are a popular visual metaphor for life, the limits of the circle as metaphor are overcome in the concept of symmathesy. The notion of a symmathesy and a learning context within other contexts does not define a two-dimensional field of variables, nor does it return to where it began. A better visual might be the double helix, as the model of a learning system must have at least three dimensions (four if you count time). Gregory Bateson writes:
First, there is humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy. In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance. We had discovered how to make trains and other machines. We knew how to put one box on top of the other to get that apple, and Occidental man saw himself as an autocrat with complete power over a universe, which was made of physics and chemistry. And the biological phenomena were in the end to be controlled like processes in a test tube. Evolution was the history of how organisms learned more tricks for controlling the environment; and man had better tricks than any other creature.
But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.
—Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Given that the tricks we have developed to ‘control the environment’ have reeled into consequences beyond our wildest dreams, we would do well to think humbly about how we are thinking. The trouble is NOT that the world has gone to hell, or that we have no idea how to save the future for our children. The trouble is at another level. The trouble is that even the advocates for peace and justice, the ecologists, and the dedicated teachers, the therapists, and the philanthropists, are still thinking in terms of parts and wholes. Even the ones that use the language of ‘systems.’
People who have devoted themselves to the deeper practice of systems thinking will say this criticism is unfair. For some, a system does not primarily refer to something arranged. But only for a few. So pervasive is the habit of applying the problem-solving methods of the engineer that the language of the entire body of systems and complexity theory has become a container for slightly higher order reductionist thinking. At least that is my experience. For several years now I have been a traveler into the groups of ‘system thinkers’ around the world: including psychologists, politicians, artists, ecologists, economists, doctors, biologists, educators, and coaches.
I will share my water test with you. Ask: Does this thinker seek to make a plan? Employ a strategy? Find a solution? Or interact with a context?
One type of thinker plots a trajectory into the future that can be controlled. The other does not consider control, but is sensitive to the aesthetic, attempting a multilayered ecological shift at the level of context. This requires a rigor of intellectual, perceptual, and emotional multiplicity and sensitivity. Developing rigor to hold variables in focus is not the same as romanticizing the blurry unknown. There is enough borderline ‘new age’ material out there now to require that I address the issue of the ‘unknown’ and ‘unknowable.’ This concept has unfortunately become a catch-all for a lack of rigor. Instead I would argue that the complexity inherent in living processes requires that we employ more rigor, not less. To take into account the larger consequences of our ‘actions’ is to better understand the many facets of our interactions.
I am not suggesting that action cannot be taken in acute situations to address an emergency quickly. Of course it is necessary to relieve pain, to avert a suicide, to eschew bankruptcy. But the larger, longer, wider response is to be scrutinized at another level. Not either/or, but both. Why is one way of looking ‘linear’ and the other ‘systemic’? What if linear was not linear at all… just over-planned, and what if ‘systemic’ was something more than an organic Swiss watch?
Delivery from the dilapidated state of the world now is not in the providence of the mechanic. There are no parts to fix. No particular manuals to write, or scripts to edit. The poverty of our description of these living things we call ‘systems’ will starve us from a future of juicy life. This concerns me. And seems so unnecessary. Perhaps a better description, inaugurated by the new term symmathesy, will give us the missing understanding we require to hold present in our thoughts the mutual learning processes of all living systems.
Do we reinterpret history and the knowledge of the past through the same grid/lens we use to interpret the institutions of knowledge now? What is the plumbing blueprint for the piping up of knowledge? What is information that has been through the jam-jar factory, stripped of its contexts, labeled, categorized, and parceled into jargons?
Symmathesy. I am one, you are one, we are within them. Learning together in context, at all scales.
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And three fold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newtons sleep
—William Blake, 1802, ‘Letter to Thomas Butts’
Part V: Implications and Applications of Symmathesy
Education, therapy, medicine, social infrastructure, interaction with the living environment, and personal life, are all premised upon our understanding of the world we live in. If that world is a world defined through mutual learning or symmathesy, here are some shifts in perception we might notice.
(Let it first be recognized that, with symmathesy in mind, we will be disinclined to draw the distinctions of this question as I have done above. To define a separation between education, therapy, social infrastructure, and personal life is a misleading fracturing of context. As a means of providing a glimpse into the possible benefits of this idea, I have listed these entities as separate because that is how they are depicted by our culture. But by no means do I see them as isolated facets of our lives.)
Education: from the perspective of symmathesy, education would look at the interconnections between what we now call disciplines or subjects. Forests are interactions, food is culture, and so on. The ability to study both the details (existing disciplines) and the relationships of learning between them will increase our students’ ability to see and interact with a level of complexity that is necessary for the survival of future generations. As it stands, our ‘knowledge’ often prevents us seeing the interdependencies in our complex world, therefore we disrupt them—to the detriment of our wellbeing and that of the biosphere we live within.
Therapy: If a living context is a mutual learning context then the way we approach a notion of ‘pathology’ is radically altered. Seen as a symmathesy, a person or a family is learning to make sense of its world. Like their bodies, emotional, mental, and interactional processes would all be included in their ways of calibrating their world (not necessarily consciously)—all pathology is also learning.
The way a symmathesy makes sense of its world is a learning process at multiple levels. But that learning is not necessarily positive or progressive in the orthodox understanding of learning. We can learn to be sick. A tree learns from its context that it needs to grow crooked. Remove the value judgment from that process and we will instead see a remarkable feat of life to survive in whatever tangle it perceives. Think of an alcoholic’s body: his skin, his metabolism, his liver, his family, his history, his communication with his friends are all revealing a mutual process o
f manifesting the way he makes sense of his world. Where is the pathology? In the learning.
Healing: If pathology is learning, then so is healing. The person, family, or other symmathesy will make sense of their contextual existence in another set of calibrations that create healing. What if healing and pathology are both expressions and possibilities of mutual learning? Our approach to health, then, would be to provide circumstances in which multiple aspects of life can be cultivated for an individual, a family or perhaps even a society to generate combined realms of learning, change, and healing.
IBI has been observing work on rehabilitation after paralysis and on terminal pain at the Centro Studi di Riabilitazione Neurocognitiva (CSRN) in Italy. It is a testament to another way of thinking, contrasting with a world where the ‘solution’ of a problem involves singular and direct treatment. In medicine, politics, education, economy, and even our personal lives, we measure our productivity in terms of action and reaction. It is almost as if a script runs through our culture that instructs us how to address trouble. It reads, ‘where is the problem and how do we fix it?’ This linear questioning leads to a set of responses that can only treat the problem directly, with therapies that focus specifically on the symptoms as presented. At CSRN the therapies are designed to reach behind the visible manifestation of the crisis the patient is in and ask another sort of question. Their question is: ‘How is this system making sense of its world?’ The information and influences that the clinicians at CSRN find in the pursuit of their question are qualitatively and quantitatively of another order, at another level.
The question being posed at CSRN reveals something like a stew of slow-cooked, cognitive, cultural, and relational processes that need to relearn. The ‘treatment’ then stems from a recognition that the whole person/system has to find their way to re-understanding the world they are in. This involves the enormity of the neurocognitive system, as well as the patients’ interaction with their environment and community. (Much more information on this work is available from the IBI.)
Medicine in this sense can potentially shift in its modus operandi toward becoming more a means of cultivating a learning context in which reorganization is possible and less a toolkit for tweaking the parts of a system. Obviously both are necessary. There are moments when the short view is vital, but even emergency situations might be seen differently through this lens. What is the symmathesy calibrating?
An umbrella concept that addresses the living world as a learning context offers another window through which to see, analyze, and interact with the complexity of life. This conceptual frame furthers our research agenda, offering a wider basis of relational interaction into our notion of ‘subject’ for study. The interactions within living systems and between them are many. So many in fact, that it is a daunting task for the research team to draw an outline around what might be the focus of study. But is this rigor a hindrance? Or is it perhaps the next frontier of inquiry? The multiplicity of these interactions requires us to include the crossover between multiple contexts, in which new methods of inquiry can approach the rigor of zooming our lenses of study in and out on combined processes of continual learning.
Ecology of Institutions
Much like the body in paralysis whose many systems for making sense of the world are interrupted and disorganized, our institutions appear to be equally entwined in a self-preserving holding pattern of dysfunction that stymies all attempts to instigate change, even for the survival of our species. When the question is asked in this way, ‘How is this symmathesy learning to make sense of its world?’ it becomes apparent that there is a similarity in the multi-modal and iterative processes of ‘learning to make sense’ that is comparable to the cognition systems of patients at CSRN. Like a pin ball game in which the ball is bounced between nodes of perception making connections and interconnections into learning, there is a pattern of permeated operational interactions within and between the institutions of our world. We have a context of economic, social, and cultural institutions that have learned to accommodate us as they do today, even as we have learned to accommodate them. If the question is shifted from ‘how do we fix the institutions?’ to ‘how have we learned to interact with these institutions as a context?’—we may find that our set of ‘solutions’ is much more productive.
The education system desperately needs to change in order to provide coming generations with support for their future, but the job market needs professionals who have individual skills, specialized in fragmented subjects. The economic viability of our global marketplace is hinged on an increase in production and a constant growth rate, which ties perfectly into the thrusting technological rush to invent and innovate new tools. In turn, the hurry created by these imperatives increases imbalances in the social realm that feed the need for more technology, whether this takes the form of apps for an iPhone or advances in medicine. The political system must conduct itself to serve the tempo and demands of the market, leading inevitably (though not always intentionally) to the upsurge we can see in fundamentalism, economic inequality, and the privatization of social services. Meanwhile, to support this ecology of institutions, the ecology of our biosphere is being exploited. Alongside the precious diversity of our planet, the basics of our living needs like air, water and food are in danger of being destroyed.
More research is needed, from another angle, with another methodology, and symmathesy offers a very fertile approach to explore.
What if we look at the interlocking interdependencies of our institutions as an ecology in and of itself? Ecology can be loosely defined as a totality of patterns of interrelationship that form interdependencies. In this sense, our institutions function very much like a forest or an ocean. The infrastructures of our institutions reinforce and balance one another, and our socio-economic system develops in patterns that fit the characteristics of any ecology. Are we not, in that case, contributing perfectly to an ecology that we live within? Perhaps humanity is not so un-ecological after all. The difficulty we face is in the fact that the larger ecology of the biosphere is at odds with the ecology of our institutions, and right now we believe we need both to survive.
How can this idea of contextual rehabilitation help us to address the dysfunctional and stuck interrelationships within the ecology of institutions? How can we address the context of these institutions instead of attempting to chase down the crises as separate issues?
Many vocabularies are needed to begin to grasp the multiple contexts of knowledge within a single living organism (including a thought), and such research is best approached with multiple minds in collaboration. The work of the IBI has been particularly illuminating. The unexpected gem of this group, and its surprising outcome, is the shared language with which we discuss patterns, relationship, and learning. This language is the result of our individual studies of Gregory Bateson’s work (among others). Our respective professions give us depth in a diversity of fields, which is then articulated in integration with the language of our roots in his work. The jargon of our fields is then trumped by the shared, overarching discourse of interconnection, interdependency, and interaction through relationship. We do not tend toward the subject fragmentation that many ‘interdisciplinary’ studies funnel into, which is refreshing. Our projects have enjoyed remarkable leverage with this contrast and collaboration.
~ ~ ~
A version of this essay was first published in Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the ISSS – 2015, Berlin, Germany, Vol 1, No 1 (2015).
Integrity
Occasionally one runs across a taste of integrity so stark it resets the focus on how we take stock. Thinking about these words of Franz Kafka, I am impressed at his edge of self-reflection. So keen was his warning that he called out his own ambitions and laid them naked against dreams of what is meaningful. At least that is my reading. When the deep ‘you’ catches the lost ‘you’ making compromises on irretrievable qualities, you might say to yourself:
If this is what you ca
me for, then I didn’t send for you.
—Franz Kafka (note to himself in his journal)
Who has the future-self sent for? Kafka was clever to divert the predictable, inevitable corruption of his own motivations. Is there an authority better suited to scold the hijacker of one’s history than the past-self? Brilliantly he sent himself a reminder from his former self—who swore never to sell out, never to cave in, never to convert to the religion of mediocrity. It is all too easy to slip under the spell of familiar behaviors that make normalcy out of greed, dishonesty, and manipulation. This is not the future that we thought history was aiming for.
Who are we Now?
Who we were, who we are, and who we will be—these are all identities that lie on a spectrum of possibility; a spectrum that includes everything we can imagine ourselves to be.
Looking backward we can explain, authorize and claim the boundaries of our national and larger social identities. Looking through that rear-view mirror, we can justify the horror of seeking to exclude other peoples and cultures from our homes. We can say “let the Swedes be Swedish,” “keep Poland Polish,” and we can make an argument for the protection of ‘individual cultures.’
But the world is changing. This is the era of people movement. No one knows exactly how and where ecological and economic pressures will drive the millions of people who are moving. But it is certain that nothing will be as it was.
Being alive now requires us to participate in some of the most significant transformations in the history of humankind.
Being alive now also means we have the potential to make these transitions. No one will keep the culture they had 50 years ago. There is no going back. Looking ahead we must ask: