[Noel G. Charlton] Understanding Gregory Bateson (BookZZ.org)

U N D E R S TA N D I N G

GREGORY BATESON

SUNY series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren, editors

UNDERSTANDING

GREGORY BATESON MIND, BEAUT Y, AND THE SACRED EARTH

NOEL G. CHARLTON

STATE UNIVERSIT Y OF NE W YORK PRESS

Cover and interior photo of Gregory Bateson by Fred Roll, courtesy of the Institute for Intercultural Studies. Published by the State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York Press, Albany All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, www.sunypress.com Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Susan M. Petrie This book is printed on eco-friendly paper that is 50% recycled and acid-free.

Library of Congress of Cataloging-in-Publication Data Charlton, Noel G., 1932– Understanding Gregory Bateson : mind, beauty, and the sacred earth / Noel G. Charlton. p. cm. — (SUNY series in environmental philosophy and ethics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–7914–7451–8 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978–0–7914–7452–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Human ecology—Study and teaching. 2. Human ecology—Philosophy. 3. Human ecology—Religious aspects. 4. Environmental ethics. 5. Bateson, Gregory, 1904–1980—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. GF26 . C49 2008 304.2—dc22 2007033407

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To the memory of Gregory Bateson, wise elder.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Sacred: A Poem

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chapter 1 Introduction: Gregory Bateson, the Urgency of Our Ecological Crisis and the Possibility of “Grace”

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chapter 2 Bateson: The Man and the Growth of His Ideas

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chapter 3 Mind and Bateson’s Claims: The Living World is Organized by Minds

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chapter 4 The Evolution of Bateson’s Thought about Aesthetics: The Earlier Years

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chapter 5 Aesthetics, Ecology, and the Path Toward Grace

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chapter 6 Aesthetic Engagement and the Grace of Relatedness

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chapter 7 Bateson and The Sacred

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chapter 8 Wise Action?

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appendix Table of Lifetime Events and Publications

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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am indebted to many friends and several organizations for help given during the process of study, beginning for me rather late in life and extending over a period of fifteen years, which has resulted in the creation of this book. Initially stimulated by study at Schumacher College in Devon, England, the process developed into an MA and PhD project supported and encouraged by Lancaster University’s Institute for Environment, Philosophy, and Public Policy. I offer my grateful thanks to the Epiphany Philosophers of Cambridge and to the Countess Eleanor Peel Trust of Lancaster for substantial financial assistance during these years. Particular thanks must go to Dr. Jenny Brine and her colleagues in Lancaster University’s Inter-Library Loans Service, to Paul Stubbs and the staff of Special Collections and the Bateson Archive at U.C. Santa Cruz and to members of the Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California who, together, provided copies of all Gregory Bateson’s 228 publications. Among the many friends and colleagues at Lancaster University who contributed wisdom, encouragement, and creative criticism I must mention, in particular, Professor Alan Holland, Dr. Jane Howarth, Professor John Benson, Dr. Emily Brady, Professor Ruth Chadwick, Professor Brian Wynne, Professor Robin Grove-White, Dr. Isis Brook, Dr. David Littlewood, Dr. Bronislaw Szerszynski, Dr. Sue Weldon, and a whole phalanx of fellow students—many participating in IEPPP’s unique MA courses in “Values and the Environment,” which are at present transferring to the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. Most particularly, I wish to thank Vernon Pratt, tutor, counselor, and friend, who steered Lancaster’s Philosophy Department through difficult times and nursed its evolving identity into partnership with the Center for the Study of Environmental Change as IEPPP, giving me his constant encouragement, support, and wisdom throughout. ix

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For stimulus and continuing interest and assistance I must thank, among many potent influences from Schumacher College courses, Theodore Roszak for his introduction to many environmental themes; Fritjof Capra who introduced Bateson’s work and the discipline of systems thinking to me; philosopher Henryk Skolimowski for much encouragement and further Batesonian input; Arne Naess, Stephan Harding, Lynn Margulis, and James Lovelock for my introduction to Deep Ecology and Gaian thinking; novelist Lindsay Clarke for reinforcing my urge to write; Fr. Thomas Berry, Rupert Sheldrake, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Stephanie Kasa for many eco-spiritual insights, and also the unique course team of Carolyn Merchant, Alastair McIntosh, and John Seed who, with a remarkable international group of students, crafted a course called Soil, Soul, and Society, which changed the lives of many of us. Not least, I want to thank Satish Kumar, Anne Phillips, and the staff who form the family community of Schumacher College—for many wonderful weeks of learning spent in their company. More recently I have been grateful to Mary Catherine Bateson, Lois Bateson, and Hildred Geertz for their friendly help with copyright and other matters. I am grateful to Professor Arnold Berleant of Long Island University for many insights and for his friendly interest in my work. Also I have learned much in recent years from my interaction with the members of GreenSpirit, the British manifestation of the Creation Spirituality movement. Grateful acknowledgment for permissions to use copyright material is made to the following: Mary Catherine Bateson, the Institute of Intercultural Studies and Brockman Inc., the Estate of Gregory Bateson, photographer Fred Roll for the image of Gregory Bateson, Lois Bateson for the image of the Balinese painting, the Josiah Macy Foundation, Peace News, University of Chicago Press, Hampton Press, Random House, HarperCollins, the New Alchemy Institute, Professor David Lipset, and Professor Arnold Berleant. Lastly, and most of all, I thank my wife Jean for living with this unfolding process for so many years, for being unfailingly enthusiastic, loving, and loyal—making the whole project into a possibility. TEXT REFERENCES

The following references have been used parenthetically in the text to refer to frequently cited works by Gregory Bateson and others. The same system has been followed in the Notes and bibliography. Some

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of these dates are not the dates of original publication but refer to those editions that were available to the author, thus ensuring accuracy of page references. Other Gregory Bateson texts are abbreviated using Rodney Donaldson’s sequencing system from his excellent bibliography in A Sacred Unity: for example (Bateson 1975a), (Bateson 1975b). Author, title, and date of original publication, followed by abbreviated references as found in text: Gregory Bateson

Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (1936) (Bateson 1958 [1936a]) (With Margaret Mead)

Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) (Bateson and Mead 1942a) (With Jurgen Ruesch)

Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951) (Bateson and Ruesch 1951) Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis, 1830–1832, ed. G. Bateson (1961) (Bateson 1961a) Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) (Bateson 2000) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979) (Bateson 1979a) (With Mary Catherine Bateson)

Angels Fear: An Epistemology of the Sacred (1987), Angels Fear: An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred (1988) (Bateson and Bateson 1988) A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1991) (Bateson 1991a) Mary Catherine Bateson

With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984) (M. C. Bateson 1984) Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation (1972) (M. C. Bateson 1991)

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Peter Harries-Jones

A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (1995) (Harries-Jones 1995) David Lipset Early Biography (in John Brockman, ed., About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson . . . (1978) (Lipset 1978) Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (1980) (Lipset 1982) James Lovelock

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) (Lovelock 1991 [1979]) The Ages of Gaia (1988) (Lovelock 1989) Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (1991) (Lovelock 1991) Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist 2000)(Lovelock 2001) The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back—and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006) (Lovelock 2006) Joanna Macy

Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (1991) (Macy 1991) World as Lover: World as Self (1993) (Macy 1993) Arne Naess

Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989) (Naess 1990)

Sacred: A Poem

What is “the sacred’? Thing? A word? A world? Why “sacred”? Set apart? Devoted to the God? A reference to religion? Religion?—Ah! poor word. To have been born “religio,” Singing of how to reconnect the sundered, Making whole, uniting, making One . . . And now perceived as structure: frozen, dated, Denoting ways no longer understood. So—sacred? Sacred space? And places, buildings, statues, texts, and songs? Ah! Music! Sacred song? And symbols too? These entities are things, or seem to be. Substantial matter, placed and made or built. But these old sacred things may cease to be, May be destroyed or changed And be no longer sacred. What made the now demolished church a sacred place? It was the lives of those who worshiped there, Their prayers, their friendships, their knowing that In the process of that place They were enfolded in divinity. Or maybe where the river flowed and otters swam And secretly you watched and smiled, Immersed in that sleek, sinuous display Before the hunters came. xiii

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No longer can you share in that companionship. The sacred place is now no more. The river’s bank is lonely now. There, pain and grief replace The gentle joy you shared with otter and with flow. Thus, when we share in process with the world And process touches that which is divine, Then may we know the sacred in our lives. Not thing but process I now see is sacred. “That with which” (says Bateson’s ghost) “thou shalt not tinker.” And that, for Bateson and myself, Is more than things, men, women, beasts, or plants. More too than nation, tribe, or herd. The sacred is the realm that is to “thing” as life to death. The realm of linking with the small and huge, The great, the One, the ultimate. So: where we find the sacred is within The process—in the “going on” Which is the changing, flowing, thinking Of the world. The growing, birthing, failing, dying, Loving, nurturing, and killing Which is the living Earth. To know which is ecology. This nesting of the systems inside others Means that the relating includes All. The most vast systems of the earth and space Compose the One. The sacred whole, the ultimate. And so ecology, if it is open to this truth Is sacred, knowing all is interlinked. Such process is (for Bateson and for me) A greater mind that includes all the rest, That bears within it minds that are like ours: Processing information, choosing acts, Opting for growth or change or death, Remembering and learning from the past, Developing new forms, creating beauty.

Sacred: A Poem

When cell chooses to divide or stay as one, When healing foot or hand is once more whole, When embryonic life maintains its shape While growing, or the evolving species learns to change In ways that will make sure its onward life. When group or nation, herd or shoal Act with one thought, response, or aim, Or when the lives in coral reef or forest Meld to respond in balanced climax, Then mind is there. We know mind from our own experience. What seems to us unique is worldwide spread. Perhaps the whole Earth’s process is a mind And even spiral galaxies rotate with will And the whole universe has purposes Too vast for us to scan. This is no work of distant God. No supernatural agency is here, But just the interacting systems of the world, Nested inside large, enfolding small. Systems within systems. All as one great process that is God and World In unity, as thought contained in thought And interlinked. And beautiful. This “integrated fabric” that “envelopes all our lives,” Writes Bateson’s daughter, is the stuff of mind. We humans are a special case But not supreme, just specialized In one direction among many. The mental process of the world Embraces the whole dance in which we weave, Creating and destroying, experiencing pain And joy, love, hate, and fear, and then serenity. But this is Shiva and Abraxas, God of Gods, The God of making and of breaking, Beneficent to life and dealing death: “both beautiful and terrible.”

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There is no pity, mercy, in this God, So when we sin against ecology, there will always be The automatic penalty to pay. At smaller scales of mental process, there is also God, Where family or herd, community and friends Display the properties of mercy and of love. “Where caring is and love, there is God also,” says the song, Not only among people but throughout the living world. Where tree and plant or moss and soil embrace, Enable, shield, and nurture life, Even our human love is echoed, planetwide. For me, it works. I know myself enfolded and sustained By this vast net of mind that links me to The whole vast web of living that is World. A member of the universe, I am at home. —Noel G. Charlton, Sacred Ecology



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Introduction Gregory Bateson, the Urgency of Our Ecological Crisis and the Possibility of “Grace”

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his book offers an accessible introduction to the work of a very important but inadequately known thinker of the twentieth century: Gregory Bateson. This great anthropologist, psychologist, cybernetician, student of animal communication, and ecologist has been neglected, largely because of his refusal to stay within the bounds of single disciplines. Scientist, philosopher, verging on theologian in his final years, this man was one of the finest thinkers of recent times. Less positively, his published output of 228 works is not easily accessible to those who have not had the time to study and develop insight into his thinking. Bateson has crucially important advice for us all as we confront escalating environmental problems. He believes it possible that we can recover “the grace” of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on this planet. The route to this realization is via personal engagement with the more-than-rational processes of the natural world and of human art. Poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, “the best of religion,” and “natural history” all offer to us the possibility of renewed access to the wisdom that we, as a species, have gained during millions of years of evolution—now overlaid and rendered unavailable to us by our “self-conscious purposiveness.” This is one of Bateson’s key phrases, often repeated. By it he means that we have learned, through the centuries, to identify single goals for our purposes. We have come to think of causality as a series of straight-line, “knock-on” effects that can be managed by a single human “self,” in its own personal interests— without allowing for all the interpenetrating influences and effects flowing between each of us and the wider living world. A key aspect of Bateson’s thought is his insistence that we must actively engage with the processes of the living world and with all the forms of human art. Engagement, he claims, yields understanding that can lead to wise action. By recognizing beauty in the world we can identify sane and health-giving possibilities for action. “Fourth-generation atheist” Bateson came, in his 1

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final years, to see the total complex of “mental” systems that is the living world as, itself, “the sacred.” My task is to help you, reader, to penetrate Bateson’s unique thought and to uncover the rare beauty of his writing. This book builds on his seminal ideas, particularly on his highly original understanding of all the systems of the living natural world as being “minds” or “mental processes.” Such “minds,” claims Bateson, may not be conscious but they function as the informational drivers of the living systems that exist at every scale from the tiny components of biological “cells” to the great ecosystems and the vast processes of evolution. My hope is to extend Bateson’s thinking toward further insights, enabling wiser relationships between humans and the “more-than-human world” (Abram 1997). Note that I use the term “world” in its full sense as inclusive of all that exists in the universe. The book is, intentionally, a project in the application of philosophical thinking. Bateson himself was always hesitant about recommending action. Nevertheless, our present situation of ecological imbalance requires radical changes in human attitudes and early action. It may soon be too late for us to act. Those who have the time and ability to research, study, and clarify the real situation of humanity in its environment today have a duty to take the results of that study out into the world. This book is intended to promote action. It is now a commonplace assertion that human industrial and military activity, the growth in population, deforestation, inorganic agricultural practices, and many forms of pollution are causing damage to the biosphere that is rendering the survival of the human and many other species doubtful. I am convinced by the evidence for such a view and will assume, throughout, that the threat to biospheric sustainability is real and that our need to find wiser ways of living is urgent. ECOLOGICAL SIN AND THE GRACE OF WISDOM

As early as the year 2000, the Independent newspaper ran a story (Lean 2000)1 that summarized the then recent State of the World Report from the Worldwatch Institute. The headline was “The Seas Keep Rising but the World Looks Away.” The human-interest angle was that “our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a message for us: Earth is getting warmer.” Human bodies frozen into the ice twelve thousand years ago were coming to light because, all over the world, the ice was melting. In the Arctic the Greenland ice sheet (8 percent of the world’s ice) had lost thickness at three feet a year for the previous six years. The Arctic icecap

Introduction

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as a whole was shrinking by twenty-four thousand hectares per year. In 1970 it was an average of nine feet thick. By 2000 it was five feet thick. Forty percent of the Arctic sea ice had melted in less than thirty years. In the Antarctic the “great ice sheets”: the Larsen A, the Wordie, and the Prince Gustav shelves, no longer existed. The Larsen B and the Wilkins had lost one-seventh of their area in the previous eighteen months and would break up soon. The Pine Island glacier had retreated by 1.2 km per year for the previous four years, thinning by ten feet per year. That glacier is thought to be “the key” to the West Antarctic ice sheet, which, if melted, would raise sea levels by twenty feet worldwide. Nearly all of our nuclear power stations are sited near to present sea level. All over the world the glaciers were smaller than at any time in the last 5000 years. Alpine and Caucasian glaciers had lost half their ice in the previous 100 to 150 years. Half of the Spanish glaciers had gone completely, as had two-thirds of those in Montana. In the Peruvian Andes the Quelccaya glacier was melting ten times as fast as it was in 1990, threatening the water supply of Lima’s ten million people. The melting of land-based ice is what causes sea level to rise, because floating ice fields already displace their own weight of water. Oceanic water itself expands with warming. Present sea rise is 10 cm to 25 cm over the last one hundred years, all over the world. Two Pacific Ocean islands have already submerged. The greater part of Bangladesh (population 138.5 million)2 may go permanently underwater. The South American country of Honduras (6.7 million people) is similarly threatened. As ice melts, its heat-reflecting albedo effect is reduced and warming increased. It is thought that changes in ocean salinity (the ice is primarily fresh water) may cause the Gulf Stream to deflect, making Britain and Northwest Europe much colder. Worldwide, eight of the ten hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. Storm damage in 1998 exceeded the whole of the 1980s. The Kyoto Agreement about reducing greenhouse gases is still not ratified. The U.S. government refuses to ratify it because their 4 percent of the world’s people “need” to maintain their present lifestyle, producing 20 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. A World Bank official told members of the Lancaster University Philosophy Department several years ago that climate change is expected to produce dramatically wetter weather with flooding in some areas, drought and severe water supply problems in others. Tens of millions of people will be displaced. Social, economic, and political conflicts are expected, as resources become scarce. Species extinctions may rise to fifty or one hundred times the natural rate. Impacts may produce positive feedback loops (the

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

“vicious-circle effect”) within twenty to forty years. Even stopping emissions now would not avert these effects. The leaders of commerce are convinced. Scientists are convinced. Industry and commerce are making plans for continuing profitability as the climate changes. Only governments are in denial and informed debate is little understood by their negotiators. A leaked report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development3 states that the world has lost a further 10 percent of all forests since the 1992 Rio summit meetings. Carbon dioxide emissions are expected to rise by 18 percent in “rich” countries in the next eighteen years, and by 2020 (Wright 2002) we must expect extreme water shortages. Twenty-five billion tons of topsoil are being washed into the oceans from the American continent each year. We still have no safe method for disposing of our accumulating radioactive nuclear waste. The British are experimenting with genetically modified organisms in farm scale trials with no idea of the possible consequences. We are already seeing conflicts about oil supplies as internal American production diminishes (Berry 1999). Ervin Laszlo writes (2002, 18) that in the past fifty years humanity has used up more natural resources than were consumed in the whole of our previous history. As early as 1992, Margaret Thatcher’s environmental adviser Sir Crispin Tickell was warning that world population was likely to reach eight billion by 2025, that conflicts over water supplies, particularly in the Nile, Jordan, Euphrates, and Ob river regions are probable, and that “vast increases in the number of refugees and widespread risks to human health” will be caused (Tickell 1992). A new report from the World Watch Institute4 warns of falling water tables in countries worldwide. We are pumping out the Earth’s reserves of ground water from depths exceeding half a mile in order to feed additional billions of people. The report warns of the imminent failure of supplies and urges population control as the only feasible strategy. There are industrial hazards: Soviet scientists have recently declared nearly 1.4 million square miles of their land to be “an ecological disaster area.” The nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl accident was fifty times that of Hiroshima. Worldwide loss of species can already be compared to the great extinctions of Permian and Cretaceous times (Tickell 1992, 65–76). The World Development Movement5 claims that increasing injustice to humans makes wars more likely. Eight international companies earn more than half the world’s population, 1.3 billion people, 20 percent of the world’s population live on just one dollar a day. For every dollar of aid given to poor countries, multinational companies take sixtysix cents of profit back out. The three richest men in the world are

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wealthier than the poorest forty-eight countries combined. The richest 20 percent of the world’s people account for 86 percent of global consumption (Laszlo 2002, 23). Twelve million children die from poverty-related disease annually—twenty-three every minute of the day and night. The policies of Western governments and companies are perpetuating poverty and profiting from it. In spite of all this, human population is increasing at the rate of 77,000,000 per year and 97 percent of this increase is taking place in the “poor countries” (Laszlo 2002, 23). This means that every day there are over 210,000 more people. Every hour, nearly 8800 more people who need land, food, and water. The most recent evidence of our global emergency suggests that world conditions are changing even more rapidly that we earlier feared. And we call ourselves intelligent. What are we doing? How can we respond? While we discuss and theorize, our world is getting worse. We are in crisis. Crises imply the possibility and the need for choices to be made. We need to change societal understanding (and action) radically and soon. We need to find the means of making those changes. I believe that Gregory Bateson’s understanding of the underlying cause of our crisis is important. He saw ecological destruction as being caused by human linear-conscious purposefulness and by our conviction that we are somehow separate from the rest of the living world. He came to see “conscious purpose” as aberrant mind, a kind of madness. Bateson believed that we have lost the use of our wider, deeper, more-thanconscious minds. We have lost some forms of wisdom that the other animals still have. Bateson saw our present ecological situation as comparable to the cargo cults, which he and others had studied in Melanesia where people believed that great riches would be brought to them if they were trustful enough to destroy all their own tools, boats, crops, and other means of survival. We are destroying the living systems of Earth, our present means of survival, in expectation of a wonderful and magical future to be brought to us by technology and science (M. C. Bateson 1991, 71–103). Bateson also saw religious process as providing a way by which, in the past, we have corrected our tendency toward single-minded selfish purposefulness. Completing Gregory’s final unfinished book Angels Fear (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 200), Mary Catherine Bateson wrote that “he wants us to ‘believe in’ the sacred, the integrated fabric of mental process that envelops all our lives—and the principle way that he knows that has allowed men and women to approach this . . . has been through religious traditions, vast, interconnected metaphorical systems. Without

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

such metaphors for meditation, as correctives for the errors of human language and recent science, it seems that we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways—so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one in which we cannot live.” There is much in the above paragraph that must be unpacked and discussed in the process of this book. In fact, Bateson’s core theme is encapsulated here. It will become evident that the thinking of Gregory Bateson is particularly important for us at this time. In the new introduction to the recent republication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mary Catherine writes: Gregory was haunted in his last years by a sense of urgency, a sense that the narrow definition of human purposes, reinforced by technology, would lead to irreversible disasters, and that only a better epistemology could save us. Certainly irreversibilities lie all around us; many, like global warming, the decay of the ozone layer, and the movement of poisons through global food chains, are set on courses it is too late to change although we have yet to suffer their full effect. . . . But the habits of mind that he described can be seen in every newspaper or newscast: the search for short-term solutions that worsen the problem over time (often by mirroring it, such as violence used to oppose violence); the focus on individual persons or organisms or even species, seen in isolation; the tendency to let technological possibility or economic indicators replace reflection; the effort to maximize single variables (like profit) rather than optimizing the relationship among a complex set of variables. The essays in this volume and in the publications that followed it suggest a trajectory. What is important is to begin to move with that trajectory, to empathize with it, in order to move beyond it, so the next step becomes obvious. Scholarly analysis of the work of Gregory Bateson is only a fraction of the task, for analysis has always been a means of control. It is more important now to respond.” (Bateson 2000, xiv).

I believe, (with Bateson in his later years) that we need an essentially “religious” response to our ecological crisis. Bateson offers us a truth about the unified nature of the living world, a truth that we can still use to enable in ourselves a response, a responsibility, a capacity to be responsible. He offers us a way of getting our epistemology right, of knowing our unity with the world. He saw, rightly, that it is our ways of knowing that have to be amended. If we can learn to see the sacred as no more (or

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less) than the totality of the living systems of the world, worthy of respect, reverence, and love, there will be an ecological role for humans still. For me, Bateson’s understanding is transformative. I now recognize as mind-like, as mind-full processes, the living systems that are my family, my marriage, my friendships, my caring relationships with some nonhuman animals, my interacting with the ecosystems that sustain me, my internal processes in health and illness. I have looked at the supposedly chance processes in wider society and in the larger apparently inorganic world. I have recognized the working of purpose, the existence of supportive tendencies, the fact that I am a member of a beneficent community of minds of many scales. I know myself to be included as a member of the world, the universe. I feel I have value as a part of something greater than my “self” and as the guardian of smaller processes that are within me. I recognize that this is religious language and that I am saying something very like “In the great hand of God I stand.”6 Like Bateson, I have come to understand that this bonding to the larger and largest processes of the physical world, this recognition that the mental nature of the world is clearly evidenced from the “going on” of process among material things, is a deeply religious matter. We should not dismiss it as bad philosophy or bad science because of that. CHAPTER OUTLINE

Chapter 2 offers an introduction to Bateson the man: his life experience, the intellectual climate in which he developed, the influences of earlier thinkers on him, and his own interaction with thinkers in several disciplines. In chapter 3, I explain Bateson’s understanding of “mind” and mental process as immanent throughout the living world, supporting his contention that this theory offers a resolution of the “mind-body problem” and many other dualities. There follows detailed examination of Bateson’s criteria for such “mental” natural systems, his emphasis on a hierarchy of relationships within and between systems, his key example of evolution as an ongoing mental system and his cybernetic understanding of information as being the medium of the “thinking” within natural systems. I examine his claims about learning, creativity, pattern, aesthetic qualities, and metaphorical communication within such natural mental systems, and I suggest a way of understanding individuality within the complex of interdependencies. Chapters 4 and 5 examine one possible path toward ecological wisdom. These chapters follow, chronologically and in some detail, Bateson’s path of learning and insight as he came to see the aesthetic,

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

the beautiful, as both an indicator of ecological health and as something that we should all be engaged with. It is this engagement, he claims, which can offer us the “grace” of ecological wisdom. I support his claim that an understanding of mentality or “mind” as existing throughout the processes of the natural world enables and requires a view of this mentalmaterial world as worthy of respect, awe, and reverence. The living world can be seen as sacred without any need for appeal to the supernatural. I extend Bateson’s understanding to further aspects of mental experiencing: emotions, feelings, compassion, and love. Chapter 6 examines Bateson’s mature understanding of the links between beauty, ecosystemic health, artistic process, and the possibility of refinding the “grace” of reconnection between humanity and the rest of the living Earth. Bateson’s aesthetic insights are summarized, common aspects of our own experience are examined, and the ways in which we have become culturally separated from the daily experience of both human-produced aesthetic beauty and of the beauties of nature are noted. Bateson’s emerging conviction that natural beauty is symptomatic of systemic health is considered and the concept of “grace” is examined. There follows a consideration of the ways in which we may, through the “grace” conferred by engagement with beauty in all its forms, be reconnected to the matrix of natural relations within which we live. A section on Bateson’s understanding of wholeness, oneness, and monism (that is, of the essential unity of all living systems) follows and leads into a consideration of “engagement.” To give perspective and to situate Bateson’s thought within the context of aesthetic scholarship, an extended consideration of the work of a current aesthetician, Arnold Berleant, is offered. Bateson’s approach is contrasted and compared with Berleant’s work, and some possible criticisms of both thinkers are noted. Finally, it is suggested that Bateson produced an important and, in many ways, new ontology (that is, understanding of what is “there” in the world) of beauty and inclusion. This offers us a renewed awareness of interrelationship within the “sacred” world of living mental systems. In chapter 7, it is shown that the nested and interrelated processes of the world can be seen as “the sacred,” an appropriate focus for “religious” attitudes. I assert, with Bateson, that the processes (ecosystemic, social, ideational, organic and personal) that form the seamless web of change in which we live are, indeed, “what some people mean by God ” (Bateson 2000, 467). From all this I derive an ethic of “going with” the larger process and its purposes, even when such purposes are inscrutable. Such an understanding offers release from the current endemic sense of alienation and meaninglessness. It offers a sense of membership and

Introduction

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inclusion in what is a single interrelated universal process. It offers a resolution of the fact/value dichotomy and a basis for enlightened attitudes toward other natural beings and for wiser relationships between humans and their world. Finally, in chapter 8, I suggest, from the system of ethics and the understanding of the sacred nature of our ecological relationships, some possibilities for appropriate human action. Bateson wrote in the first chapter of Angels Fear (1988, 10–11), after alluding to “the vast and often beautiful mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity”: “I claim no originality, only a certain timeliness. It cannot now be wrong to contribute to this vast literature. I claim not uniqueness but membership of a small minority who believe that there are strong and clear arguments for the necessity of the sacred, and that these arguments have their base in improved science and in the obvious. I believe that these arguments are important.” The following poem (and warning) was written by Bateson in October 1978, after the completion of Mind and Nature: The Manuscript So there it is in words Precise And if you read between the lines You will find nothing there There should be nothing there For that is the discipline I ask Not more, not less Not the world as it is Nor ought to be— Only the precision The skeleton of truth I do not dabble in emotion Hint at implications Evoke the ghosts of old forgotten creeds All that is for the preacher The hypnotist, therapist and missionary They will come after me And use the little that I said

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

To bait more traps For those who cannot bear The lonely Skeleton of Truth7 In her introduction to Bateson’s last book, Angels Fear (1988, 8–9), coauthored by Gregory and his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson, the latter wrote: “In this book he approached a set of questions that were implicit in his work over a very long period . . . the question of ‘the sacred’ . . . of ‘the aesthetic,’ and the question of ‘consciousness.’ This was a constellation of issues which, for Gregory, needed to be addressed in order to arrive at a theory of action in the living world, a cybernetic ethics. Imagining himself at the moment of completion, Gregory wrote, ‘It was still necessary to study the resulting sequences and to state in words the nature of their music.’ This is necessary still, and can in some measure be attempted, for the implicit waits to be discovered, like a stillunstated theorem in geometry, hidden within the axioms. Between the lines? Perhaps. For Gregory did not have time to make sure the words were complete.” I will heed Bateson’s warning. If I must “read between the lines” I will do so with respect. Certainly, it is necessary to interpret what many of the lines actually mean. I will respect the loneliness of the “skeleton of truth” Bateson left to us. I am no therapist; though I would gladly see the healing of this planet and of the relationships between humans and the living world we increasingly endanger. I am no missionary; but I hope that my reading of Bateson may enable, for many people, a new awareness of the sacred nature of our living ecology. Stewart Brand, meeting Bateson some seven years before his death, described his first impression (Brand 1974a, 13): “Six-foot five, disheveled . . . Bateson’s presence is like that beetling Rodin sculpture of Balzac, only instead of fierce, completely benign. He looks at you critically, optimistically, as if you’re going to say something good any minute now.”8 I hope, with appropriate respect to the memory of a great man, that I am about to “say something good.”



2

Bateson The Man and the Growth of His Ideas

T

his chapter provides an introduction to the life and work of Gregory Bateson. I want to develop a perspective from which the reader may later engage with the central concepts in Bateson’s work, so I offer here a brief overview of his life history, the major formative influences that shaped him as person and as thinker and the main themes of his work. It will be valuable to understand the intellectual climate that, to a large extent, formed Bateson’s innovative mind and to follow the particular strands of earlier thought that underpin the profound insights of this “great anthropologist and biological philosopher” who “may yet be recognized as the single most important thinker of the twentieth century.”1 Cultural change appears to progress in a slow, incremental manner. We can seldom disentangle the influence of a particular person from the more general trends but, occasionally, a thinker emerges who has a prescient awareness of social tendencies and a prophetic understanding of the attitudes that threaten future possibilities. Such a man is Gregory Bateson. I write “is” because, though he died in 1980, his ideas are very much alive. Though his books have, until very recently, been out of print for decades he remains, as Mary Catherine Bateson writes, “a remarkably persistent shade” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 201). The well-known physicist, environmentalist and author Fritjof Capra (1989b, 73–92, 280–319) credits Bateson with formative influence on the development of his own work on living systems. Canadian sociologist and anthropologist Peter Harries-Jones published A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson in 1995 and a study of Bateson and Mead’s predominantly photographic fieldwork with the Balinese people in the later 1930s appeared in 1999 (Sullivan 1999). A trawl of the BIDS/IBSS Citations Index revealed 432 references to his work by other authors between 1994 and 2003, there are a number of recent journal articles by authors who claim Bateson’s work 11

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

as foundational,2 and there is a substantial Bateson presence on the Internet.3 His 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind was reprinted in 2000, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1980) was reissued in 2002, and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (1987) in 2004. Mary Catherine Bateson’s Our Own Metaphor (M. C. Bateson 1987) was reissued in 2004.4 I believe that Gregory Bateson was, and remains, a crucially important source of wisdom. In our present ecological peril his insights offer the possibility of a return to sanity in our relations with the living world, but his lifetime’s thought, scattered as it is through 228 publications, is not easy to form into a coherent system. Nevertheless, carefully reassembled, sequenced, and disclosed, it can enable our recognition of an “ecology,” an understanding of the intimately and inextricably related beings and systems of the world, the comprehension and acceptance of which he came to call “a grace.” As we have already noted, the tool he offers to enable our rediscovery of such grace is active, engaged participation in “the aesthetic,” the beautiful, in both nature and in human art. So—who was this unusual and possibly crucially important thinker? How did he develop the sort of mind he had? How did he reach the substantial, if limited, platform from which he was able to address the world in his final years? There is a chart depicting the major influences that were effective on Gregory Bateson’s development on page 17. A detailed timeline showing the main events of his life and the sequence of his publications appears as an appendix. We must first ask what stream of ideas and influences produced Bateson’s original thinking and led him to these particular themes. There were four important sources. Firstly, he was very strongly influenced by his family, most particularly by his father. Secondly, born as he was into an exceptional family and a social milieu composed almost exclusively of the English intelligentsia, there is a remarkable crosslinking of influences between Gregory Bateson himself and thinkers of the preceding three generations. Consequently and thirdly, he was heir to a tradition of highly independent, even conflictual thinking, that permitted each scholar to stake out his claim for intellectual territory and build whatever he could on it, without necessarily acknowledging the work of other thinkers. Lastly, it is important to note that the whole web of influences that formed Bateson’s potential was centered around understandings of evolution and the genetic inheritance of what he would come to see as “ideas.” Bateson’s own formative experiences can be seen as a metaphorical pattern for his later conception of the nested mental systems of the world.

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EARLY LIFE, EDUCATION, AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Gregory Bateson was born in Grantchester, near Cambridge, England, in 1904. His father was William Bateson, a famous biologist, the first professor of genetics in the world, who himself named the new discipline in 1905. William Bateson was a Trustee of the British Museum, the first Director of the John Innes Horticultural Institute, and the main English proponent of the rediscovered genetic work of Mendel. Gregory’s mother was the daughter of a famous surgeon and the Batesons were part of a circle of academic families that included the Huxleys, Whiteheads, Haldanes, and Hutchinsons: famous names, upper-middle-class professionals, self-assured, affluent, central among the intellectual elite of England. Gregory was the youngest of three brothers. He experienced the boarding school education normal for his social class and had just entered Charterhouse School in 1918 when his eldest brother was killed in the war. The second brother survived the war but, stressed by his father’s insistence that he should become a worthy scientific successor to himself and by an unhappy love affair, committed suicide. Thus, Gregory was left as the sole heir to his father’s expectations and many of his beliefs and emphases. PARENTAL INFLUENCE

The three brothers grew up in the shadow of their father’s eminence. Nearly all the family concern and activity was about biology. David Lipset, Gregory’s biographer, writes: “Childhood in the [Bateson] household was an informal but full-time course in the father’s natural science. The children were trained to be naturalists, it would seem, in lieu of being allowed to be children. Walks were considered to be field trips and conversations were explicitly didactic” (Lipset 1978, 26). Bateson told Lipset: “I grew up in the middle of Natural History and beetle collecting and all of that. This was the culture of the house” (Lipset 1982, 44). There was no question of religious belief. Both Gregory’s parents were convinced atheists but it was typical of the father that he regularly read the Bible to his family after breakfast—so that they would “not grow up to be empty-headed atheists.” After the death of his brothers, Gregory felt crushed by a sense of responsibility and by the weight of his parent’s expectations, saying later: “I felt I was getting breaks undeservedly. This was one of the reasons I moved out of zoology. . . . To get out of the field. . . . To get into something in which I was me and not ‘son of’. . . . It bothered me a great deal at the time. It used to bother me that I was named Gregory, after Gregor Mendel” (Lipset 1978, 45). William

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

Bateson was undoubtedly a dominant and demanding father. Gregory said to Lipset: “There was no expectation that we would be any good— but there was a strong feeling that we ought to be”(Lipset 1978, 28). William wanted a worthy successor, a son who would become another great biologist, although he thought this unlikely. The controversies about evolution were William Bateson’s lifetime focus. Though familiar with Charles Darwin’s understanding of evolution from boyhood, the senior Bateson made enemies and became labeled as “anti-Darwinist” by insisting that the actual process by which characteristics were transmitted to offspring was still a mystery. When Gregor Mendel’s theory of dominant and recessive genetic factors was rediscovered William Bateson, among the first to realize its importance, translated Mendel’s papers into English, named his third son after the Austrian monk-scientist and himself became “Mendel’s apostle to the Englishspeaking world” (Lipset 1982, 37). He was, as Gregory was to become, deeply concerned with symmetry, segmentation, and pattern in organisms. He believed that genetic variations occur when pattern is disrupted. Gregory Bateson was aware that he had absorbed many attitudes and interests from his father. He told David Lipset that, among these, were some that had become lifelong themes in his own work (Lipset 1978, 43). There was his “visual bias”; his fascination with pattern or form and how it develops, his conviction of the vital importance of understanding evolution, and an early recognition of process in organisms. Gregory’s mother records William Bateson’s prescient statement, as early as 1907: “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing” (C. B. Bateson 1928 209). Gregory recalled, most significantly, that his father “was always trying . . . to catch that component of nature which we might as well call Mind” though William Bateson refused to discuss “Mind”: “He skirted the issue while always keeping one eye cocked upon it” (Lipset 1978, 43). Gregory, following his brothers, father, and grandfather, became a student of St. John’s College, Cambridge, graduating after two years with a first-class BA degree in Natural Sciences. He took part in an expedition to the Galapagos Islands, found himself to be confused about field naturalism, doubtful of his own commitment and ability, and “came back feeling very restive about sitting in a lab for the rest of [his] life” (Lipset 1978, 44). After the Galapagos experience the unsettled young Bateson turned to psychology (which, at the time, he found “unsatisfactory”) and antiquarian interests until, in 1926, A. C. Haddon’s offer of anthropological training enabled him to step aside from his father’s specialism. Gregory later told his biographer: “The switch to anthropology was a sort

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15

of revolt. . . . And in a sense I didn’t revolt very far . . . [I did not want] to make a frontal attack because I don’t think the parents had any idea . . . what they were doing [to me]. . . . But, instead, I wanted to use the sorts of tools that they would use to prove a new position” (Lipset 1978, 46). Feeling crushed by the weight of family expectations, when the chance came to take up anthropology and so escape something of the shadow of his father’s prominence, the young Bateson readily accepted it. Haddon was a family friend who half-jokingly offered Bateson a year’s training in social anthropology. Gregory took this seriously, eagerly accepting the offer, and so Haddon sent him out to study tribal communities in New Guinea. From the fieldwork in New Guinea came a first-class MA degree and then (though Gregory later described the fieldwork as “a failure”) a Fellowship of St. John’s College and more fieldwork in New Guinea. While engaged (in 1932) in some important work with the Iatmul people, later published in his book Naven (1936, 1958), still regarded as an anthropological classic, Bateson met and fell in love with anthropologist Margaret Mead. He was already seeing social and intersocietal interaction in terms of process and, during this work with the Iatmul people, he first recognized (while puzzling over the fact that conflict and reciprocally aggressive behavior between groups of natives did not normally escalate into all-out war) the processes that would, in postwar cybernetics, become “positive feedback” and “negative feedback”—though at the time he referred to “symmetrical schismogenesis” and “complementary schismogenesis.”5 Schismogenesis refers to the creation of change in social and other situations. Symmetrical schismogenesis would describe a situation where change in one influence (say, more aggressive behavior by one tribe), produces similar changes (more aggressive behavior by the opposing tribe) which, if repeated, might well result in great violence. Complementary schismogenesis describes a situation where one change is counteracted by another which cancels it out. Bateson uses the example of a steam-engine “governor” that, if the engine starts to run too fast, will reduce the supply of steam to a level that maintains a safe speed, increasing the steam supply if the engine then starts to run too slowly. THE TRADITION OF INDEPENDENT SCHOLARSHIP

One belief that was certainly passed on to Gregory was that intellectual and social progress depended on gifted individuals. William Bateson, speaking to the British Association in 1914, had said: “The great advances of science are made like those of evolution, not by imperceptible mass movement but by the sporadic birth of penetrative genius. The

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

journeymen follow after him, widening and clearing up, as we are doing along the track that Mendel found.” And again: “Annul the work of a few hundreds—I might almost say scores—of men, and on what plane of civilization should we be? We should not have advanced beyond the medieval stage” (C. B. Bateson 1928, 296, 313). The elder Bateson, descendant of a line of autocratic merchants and gentleman scientists passed on to Gregory the assumptions of his tribe: that one could bring one’s mind to bear on any field of thought, follow one’s own intellectual path and support one’s conclusions as necessary, without taking into account the scholarly preoccupations and disputes of the day. This legacy from William Bateson was to bring Gregory into areas of conflict and criticism that persist even now. EARLIER THINKERS

Samuel Butler

Some earlier thinkers were deeply influential for the younger Bateson, either directly or through their influence on his own family’s attitudes and beliefs. Among these was Samuel Butler. The Bateson family had direct contact with Butler who was a student of St. John’s College when Gregory’s grandfather, W. H. Bateson, became Master in 1857. Butler was to become a widely eclectic thinker, but the disputes about the new theories of evolution were critical for him too. Having renounced Christianity after reading Darwin, Butler’s own stance on evolution was a partial opposition to both Lamarck and Darwin. He interpreted Darwinian theory as claiming that evolution, operating only by chance variation, was “mindless” even in the human case: “According to . . . Darwinians . . . effort and intelligence acquired during the experience of any one life goes for nothing. . . . It dies with him in whom it is acquired. . . . It is my fortunate task to maintain that such a nightmare of waste and death is as baseless as it is repulsive” (Butler 1904, 307–8). Attempting to account for the survival reflexes of newly born babies, Butler postulated memory in heredity. He felt there must be a way in which the memories of forbears are transmitted genetically. William Bateson was wary of admitting anything “psychological” to genetic science but Gregory was later to develop this idea in his own mental process view, which sees, for example, both the development of embryos and the process of evolution as forms of “learning” involving the transmission of “knowledge.” Samuel Butler’s views were to influence Gregory Bateson directly. Butler questioned the assumed division between life and the technological. He posed questions that are live issues today. If there was no

Figure 1: Bateson Influences Chart 1720

1740

Lamarck (1744–1829)

1760

Blake (1760–1827)

1800

Theory published 1801 Darwin (1809–1882) W. H. Bateson (1812–1882)

1820 Mendel (1822–1884) Butler (1835–1902)

1840 Origin of Species 1859

1860

1880

Theory published 1865

Wm. Bateson (1861–1926) Erewhon 1872

Died

1900 Theory rediscovered 1900

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980)

1910

1920 Naven 1936

1940 Communication 1951

1960 Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972

1980

2000

Mind and Nature 1979 Angels Fear 1987 A Sacred Unity 1991

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

genetic transmission of lifetime learning, how were men different from machines? Conversely, did machines have a form of life? Were they subject to adaptive pressures? Might it not be true that a “vapor engine” has a form of consciousness? Is it possible to draw lines of demarcation? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Butler’s project was to make a synthesis of evolution and mind. He questioned the primacy of consciousness and emphasized the importance of the unconscious in large areas of life (Lipset 1982, 7–8). He held the middle ground between the opposed determinisms of the biologists and the religious Creationists: his own religion was “a modest pantheism” where God was immanent in all things and the designer was the design: “Although we cannot see the bowl and the water as part of the goldfish, yet . . . their material is not without intelligence, and . . . God who is life, is in everything” (Jones 1919, 2, 303). Gregory Bateson, by the end of his life, could have written those words himself. Plainly, he internalized these questions and ideas so that they became his own project. As late as 1959, discussing the possibility of lifetime habits being transmitted genetically, Gregory was wondering if Butler’s analogy between the formation of habit and evolutionary adaptation might, after all, be correct (2000, 257–58). Similarly, Butler’s idea that thought is flawed to the extent that it is conscious may have fueled Bateson’s belief that there are necessary limits to consciousness if the mind is to function economically. Bateson was to claim, as we will see in chapter 3, that only a small part of mental process reaches the “screen of consciousness” and that the minds that he sees in all living systems do not require consciousness or self-consciousness (2000, 436). W. H. Bateson

Gregory’s grandfather W. H. Bateson, an academic though not a scientist, was influential in forming the family’s tradition of autonomous individuality. Becoming Master of St. John’s in midlife he became famous as a liberalizing university politician, moving the colleges and the whole curriculum away from the domination of a celibate and ordained hierarchy and broadening the range of teaching and research beyond the classical tradition. He married one of the earliest suffragettes and, due to the impact of Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, found the credibility of the Bible undermined and abandoned his Christian faith. Thus, the Bateson family became and remained atheist, though they continued to live their lives in ways that were founded on evangelical religious attitudes. These included great dedication to tasks, the idea of purposeful

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living, a sense of working under the scrutiny of one’s own conscience, of having a mission to improve society or the world, using ones talents to the full, disregarding the vanities of the world, and concentrating on “the solid results of scholarship.” The result was “a splendid eccentricity . . . a rejection of sham,” again inherited by Gregory (Lipset 1982, 42). William Blake

William Blake was a strong influence on both William Bateson and Gregory. Gregory recounts that when their eldest son was born his parents had “celebrated by buying a copy of Blake’s Job engravings.” He realized that there was common ground between Blake and his father in their protest against contemporary values (Lipset 1982, 53). For Blake the protest had concerned religious attitudes, restrictive education and moral values, limited democracy, and international conflict. Blake had created his own mythology of creation and divinities and this may have been significant for Gregory Bateson in his last years when he began to see the evolving living world as “the sacred.” At the age of nineteen he developed a passion for “this rebellious romantic” that was to last for the rest of his life. This influence is discussed more fully in chapter 4, in the context of Gregory Bateson’s claim that artistic process is the tool that we can use in recovering “grace”: our sense of membership within the ecological community of Earth. WORLD WAR II

Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead married in 1935, en route to an extended period of anthropological fieldwork in Bali, collaborating on the production of Balinese Character (Bateson and Mead 1942a) and moving on to further anthropological study in New Guinea before the 1939–45 war broke out. Bateson failed to find a useful place in the British war effort and, after his daughter Mary Catherine was born in 1939, became a United States resident, working with a number of United States government agencies. With Margaret Mead, Lawrence K. Frank, and other anthropologists (Yans-McLoughlin 1986a, 184–217) he became a member of the Institute for Intercultural Studies. He taught U.S. Navy personnel and troops who were about to be posted to the South Pacific to speak and understand Pidgin English. Later, he became Secretary of the Committee for National Morale, undertook interviews with ex-German immigrants in an attempt to understand “culture at a distance.” Later still Bateson worked in Washington, writing papers for

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

the use of U.S. soldiers on how to understand the British or other Europeans; a type of comparative anthropology very different from his previous experience. Toward the end of the war he was stationed in the Pacific: Ceylon, India, Burma, and then China, working on propaganda and social interpretation for the U.S. forces; tasks that he found manipulative and distasteful. Much of this work was undertaken for the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency. At the commencement of the war Bateson had major reservations about the application of anthropology and psychology (in the context of international conflict) to the manipulative purposes of government and the military. In spite of this, he seems to have involved himself wholeheartedly once he was actually engaged. His Pacific area activity attempted to discredit Japanese “news releases” by faking broadcasts that ridiculously overestimated their claimed successes; an application of Bateson’s own concept of “symmetrical schismogenisis.” David H. Price, an American scholar researching the effects of international conflict on the development of anthropology, obtained access to CIA papers that reveal that not all Bateson’s war work was either sedentary or undertaken with misgivings (Price 1998, 379–84). In August 1945, Bateson “volunteered for a dangerous secret mission” to attempt the rescue of allied agents believed to have escaped from Japanese captivity. In recommending the award of the Asia Pacific Campaign Service Ribbon to Bateson, his operations officer stated that he had “volunteered to penetrate deep into enemy territory . . . shared all the very considerable dangers of this operation and in view of his civilian status, his courage in doing so resounds [?] greatly to his credit” (Mosgrip 1945). After the end of the war Bateson quickly reverted to his earlier attitude of distaste and revulsion for the manipulative uses of science. Very soon a profound and lasting concern about the dangers of nuclear weapons and technologies was to be added to this. It is arguably not an aside to comment here that when, in the August of 1945, a scant two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Sixth Symposium on Science, Philosophy, and Religion convened in New York, a much sobered gathering chose to issue a “statement.” This document stressed how the “dramatic events which marked the end of the Second World War” had given new emphasis to some basic problems “the most important of [which] is the need for collective thinking and cooperation among men of different backgrounds, for the pursuit of great goals in our time.” The preface to the conference record containing this statement lists the most cherished goals of the conference as peace, material and cultural progress, security, and understanding. It notes: “The most

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threatening obstacle to the attainment of [these goals] . . . is . . . the shocking failure of communication among men.” The statement goes on to quote the words of President Truman, words that (writing in the years following the terrorist attacks on buildings in New York and Washington and consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) sound all too familiar in tone, characteristic of the nationalistic pride and arrogance with which the government of the United States has promoted its “war on terrorism.” President Truman applauded the “greatest marvel . . . the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by men in very different fields of science . . . the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” The conference’s “statement” goes on to insist that cooperation is as vital to the aims of peace as it had been to the aims of war. It points out that “the problems of peaceful civilization require . . . the collaboration of scholars, men of letters, leaders of the economy, and leaders of philosophical and religious thought.” They cite the fate of Germany and Japan as something “that should warn us of the perils of seeking salvation by sheer power.” They urge that “America . . . must in these days be careful not to be dazzled with the prospect of world power which has come to her. . . . To hope for a peaceful world which will be permanently dependant on us, economically and militarily, is to hope for that which cannot be, because it should not be. . . . No one now living knows how to deal with the problems of educating a whole people to the type of responsibility which is falling upon us.” And the last paragraph of the statement begins with words that resonate with warning for today: “We cannot bomb ourselves into physical security or moral unity.” It is not clear whether Gregory Bateson had already returned from his duties with the military in Burma and was present at this conference, or subsequently read the conference papers and was able to contribute “remarks” to the edited record that was eventually published in 1947 (Bryson, Finkelstein, and MacIver 1947). Either way, it is worth noting that he was profoundly influenced by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the presence in the world of a newly awesome and dangerous technology. This was the beginning of Bateson’s opposition to nuclear weapons and his more general ecological concern. CYBERNETICS

After the war came cybernetics. Study of the self-regulating systems in airborne missiles had engendered a new view of purposiveness (in machines and organisms) based on the mutual communication of error

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

between a desired pattern and actuality. Catalyzed by a seminal paper in Philosophy of Science (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943), a whole group of cyberneticists emerged, their early focus being the Macy conferences. These were funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which was primarily concerned with seeking knowledge about medical issues that required interdisciplinary study involving biology and the social sciences. The cybernetics group met from 1946, at first biannually and later annually until 1953, on the theme of “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” For much of the information about the membership of the Macy conferences I am indebted to David Lipset’s biography Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (1982, 178–79) and also to S. P. Heims, for his paper “Gregory Bateson and the Mathematicians” (1977, 141–59). These meetings brought Bateson into contact with such figures as mathematician Norbert Wiener, computer engineer Julian Bigelow, Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, Hungarian mathematician and computer designer John von Neumann, logician Walter Pitts, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, and psychologists Lawrence Frank and Lawrence Kubie. Characteristically, Bateson was attracted by the interdisciplinary nature of the group and its focus. Wiener (1948, 8) wrote that he had shared with Rosenblueth the conviction “that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those that had been neglected as a noman’s-land between the various established fields.” Starting from a focus on feedback processes “in” the nervous system, their interest widened to biological and ecological systems, engineering, information theory, and learning processes. English ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson (a one-time school friend of Bateson), German biologist Heinrich Kluever, German psychologist Kurt Lewin, philosopher F. S. C. Northrup, information theorist Claude Shannon, learning theorist Donald Marquis, and German engineer Heinz Von Foerster all became members of the group. From those beginnings cybernetics has developed to embrace a whole range of ideas about information flow and control within systems, particularly in circular or more complex causal systems. The impact of this new science on Bateson’s thought cannot be overestimated. Its ideas of circular or recursive causal systems and the consequent emergence of concepts of “feedback” permitted him to develop a new understanding of the social dynamics of the Iatmul people he had studied in New Guinea.6 His initial puzzlement as to why societal systems of “schismogenesis” did not develop into full-scale conflict was resolved by the cybernetic notion of negative feedback. Feedback concepts and the concept of circular or more complex systems of causality were to revolutionize Bateson’s thinking,

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notably in the development of his theory of minds as existing in organisms and living systems throughout the biological world. Such “minds” are the flow of information around circular or feedback systems, thus maintaining more complex circuits or “loops.” Systemic feedback is a vital part of this mental activity, especially negative feedback. Negative feedback systems are those where information travels round loops in which the links between components are such that deviations from the existing state of the system are corrected in succeeding circuits of information. Such corrections result in an approximately stable state (homeostasis) or, in more complex situations, a stable trajectory of development (homeorhesis). For example, a population with a limited food supply might increase its numbers until malnutrition forced a reduction to the sustainable population level. Such systems are “negative” to change. Positive feedback systems are those where successive cycles of information amplify any deviation from the norm, resulting in increasing change: the “vicious-circle effect.” A society in which a majority is prejudiced against a minority group, seeing the minority as idle or stupid, may restrict access to education or employment for that group. The real attainment level of the minority group will fall, so reinforcing the prejudice of the majority, leading to further deprivation, and so on. These systems are “positive” to change. Cybernetic systems are now seen to include: • biological systems: processes within cells, organ growth, embryo development, organisms and groups of organisms (including human persons), and the processes of evolution. • food supply and habitat. • social, political, financial, and management systems in groups, communities, nations, international relations, economies, companies, and corporations. • mental systems: in and between minds, communication, the spread of ideas, the growth of attitudes, ethics, and norms of behavior. • engineering systems: control of automatic machines, computer theory. Every one of these areas of systemic theory was to be crucial for Bateson’s later work. BATESON AS PSYCHOLOGIST

Bateson’s cultural anthropology had always been, in a broad sense, psychological. As early as 1934, his papers for the Congres International

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques (1934b 1934c 1934d) show his interest in the interaction of individual psychology and cultural ethos. In the same year, the twenty-one-year-old Bateson (already concerned about the increasing threat of war with Germany) was writing to the editor of The Times7 to point out that anthropologists and psychologists should be combining their efforts to question ideas of the innate savagery of mankind. He cited anthropological evidence from cultures that are almost entirely nonaggressive and others that have so incorporated aggressive tendencies into ritual behavior that they have no need to engage in war. Bateson suggested that British preparations for war were evidence of fear produced by cultural factors in that society. When writing Naven in 1935 one of his main concerns had been the reciprocal effect of cultural “structure” and general “ethos” on individual behavior and cultural norms. He speculated then on the possible application of his concept of schismogenesis to the treatment of schizophrenic patients. His collaboration with Margaret Mead on Balinese Character was primarily concerned with individual and group psychology. The beginning of the war meant, for Bateson, an urgent focus on the psychological processes that function in the context of international conflict. In August 1939 Bateson and Mead jointly drafted a letter (signed by Margaret Mead only) to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then President of the United States. They urged that she should encourage the President to intervene in “the present world crisis” by presenting a plan to Hitler that might, in view of the “peculiar aspects of [his] psychology,” divert him toward becoming a great leader toward peace, a role that could be “represented as more active, more constructive, more magnificent than the courses which it is desired that he abandon.” Hitler’s invasion of Poland, less than a week after this letter was sent, preempted any response from President Roosevelt and precipitated the onset of war (Yans-McLoughlin 1986b, 3–8). Bateson’s 1940 address to the Eastern Psychological Association (1941e) related frustration and aggression to the societal processes in New Guinea and Bali. His collaboration with Margaret Mead produced Principles of Morale Building (Bateson and Mead 1941f), a report on methods of influencing individuals and groups toward desirable attitudes in war time. Further works produced during the war years include papers on the links between national character and morale, culture and personality, the deliberate cultivation of democratic values, American stereotypes and attitudes toward other nations engaged in the war, analysis of German film material that was intended to get Nazi attitudes accepted by the population (1943b, reprint 1980), and the development

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of suitable psychological training for dealing with the postwar situation.8 In all these papers Bateson shows an increasing interest in psychological topics. After the war and two short periods of teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Harvard University, Bateson took his anthropological, cybernetic, and psychological perspectives into the field of clinical psychiatry. His first post was as Lecturer in Medical Anthropology within the new Psychology Department of the University of California Medical School. The core purpose of the appointment was to work with the Swiss psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch on a study of psychiatric communication. The collaboration was, at times, fraught with conflict. Bateson “had difficulty with timing” and was inclined to lecture on topics other than the lecture title. In their joint research he was “restlessly agnostic” about psychological theories and unhappy about the way that, in clinical practice, pragmatic action was so often preferred to anything grounded in theory. He was inclined, when confronted with administrative requirements, to “immerse himself in the abstract realm of ideas and science.” The needs of patients conflicted, as Bateson saw it, with the process of research (Lipset 1982, 185–86). In spite of these tensions, the research was fruitful, the two men producing from this dialectical process their related, if separate, chapters in Communication: The Social Matrix of Society (Bateson and Ruesch 1951a). Bateson’s chapters focus on cybernetic approaches to understanding the coding of information, the conventions of communication “where validity depends on belief,” an epistemological approach to psychiatric thinking, and on what he saw as the contemporary “convergence of science and psychiatry.” Between 1954 and 1959 the Batesons (Gregory had by then married his second wife Betty) were resident in Palo Alto, California. Funded by grants from the Macy Foundation, Bateson was leading a team of researchers working on “schizophrenic communication.” Their bestknown, still extensively cited, and influential contribution to psychiatry is the “double-bind” theory of schizophrenia. This sees the schizophrenic patient as the product of a cybernetic family process that places him in an intolerable emotional situation where whatever attitudes or responses he exhibits will be unacceptable to the family as a whole. Bateson later extended the double-bind concept to a whole range of processes including innovative work in family therapy (then a new field), dependency and addiction, theories of play, armaments races, international relations, and environmental crises. During this period Bateson edited and published a schizophrenic patient’s own journal: Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832 (1961a).

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Understanding Gregory Bateson BATESON AND AESTHETICS

Aesthetics and the arts played an important part in Bateson’s life, from early influences in childhood, his own adolescent enthusiasm for the work of Blake, evaluation of aesthetic qualities in anthropological artifacts, film analysis during World War II, analyzing the artistic integrity of an anthropological exhibition, appearance on at least two major conference “panels” concerned with the arts, to his major lecture to the Wenner-Gren conference on Primitive Art in 1967. From that time onwards, aesthetic concern and engagement were central to his work and seen by him as crucial to the possibility of attaining ecological wisdom. Bateson’s aesthetic emphases are examined in detail in chapters 4 and 5. BATESON AND THE “MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLD”

In the 1960s Bateson divorced again and remarried for the last time. His research moved into work with animals about learning and communication, studying octopuses in his home in California and then dolphins and porpoises at research institutes in the U.S. Virgin Isles and Hawaii.9 His notable theories about learning and “deutero-learning” (learning about learning) and his major insight into systemic mind emerged in this period.10 In 1968 he involved himself seriously in environmental activity for the first time. Bateson had long-standing doubts about the possibility of correcting our damaging ecological behavior from within the radically dualist understanding of the world that we have. We see mind as separate from the physical body, man as separate from nature, and the self as separate from all that we relate with. He thought that any attempt to put things right from within that framework of assumptions would be useless, possibly disastrous, and he saw the way humans develop and use “conscious purpose” as our most dangerous feature. Nevertheless, he made an attempt at examining the defective framework within which we interact with the world. Under the aegis of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Bateson convened a conference on The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation, held during 1968 in the medieval castle of Burg-Wartenstein, high in the Austrian mountains. Bateson chaired this, having invited psychologists, intellectual historians, mathematicians, psychiatrists, neurologists, cyberneticists, ecologists, anthropologists, and linguists but no professional philosophers. The invitations were accompanied by a memorandum stressing the central question: whether purposeful human consciousness, especially as shaped by Western culture, “might contain systematic distortions of view which,

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when implemented by modern technology, become destructive of the balances between man, human society, and the ecosystem of the planet” (Bateson 2000, 446). Bateson’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, was the rapporteur; her book Our Own Metaphor (M. C. Bateson 1991), reprints the memorandum (13–17), slightly edited, and reports the process of the conference in detail. This conference provided the stimulus for Bateson to develop the ideas that became the key themes of Mind and Nature and Angels Fear. In his last ten years Bateson became much better known. He undertook some university teaching and also became, unwillingly, something of a guru figure for the alternative movement. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of his key essays, was published in 1972. He was appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California where he made himself less than popular by campaigning against the university’s involvement in nuclear weapons research11 and also by insisting to the other regents that it was systematically impossible for the university to educate anybody adequately, given its structure of divided disciplines.12 In 1979 Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, the first of Bateson’s books to be written for a general audience, was published. By the spring of that year he was dangerously ill with cancer. He started work on Angels Fear: An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred, which was substantially drafted before he died in 1980 and was completed by Mary Catherine Bateson as “the collaboration he intended” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 1). Thus Mind and Nature and Angels Fear with some other late publications comprise Gregory Bateson’s testament, the climax, the apogee of his thought. These two books and many papers, lectures, articles, and audio tapes contain the innovative worldview which I wish to explain, criticize, support, and build upon. George Markus of Rice University suggests, in a review of David Lipset’s 1982 biography13 that, had Bateson remained in England, his influence might have been contained and submerged within the “respected place” the English keep for “such eccentric figures.” As an American, he had no clear identity. Only the social upheaval of the 1960s allowed the maverick Bateson to be recognized for the power that he was. Marcus credits Bateson with “some truly enduring insights that approached the metalevel of wisdom for which he made a place in his theories of communication and learning”—in other words, the rarely attained level of an enlightened being. From all this it is evident that Gregory Bateson was the inheritor, during his youth and early manhood, of a rich and interlinked mesh of thought: William Blake, Samuel Butler, the male line of his own family,

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

and (filtered through the sieve of controversy) Lamarck and Darwin. His subsequent passage, as Roger Keesing (1974) wrote in a review of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, “around the fringes of academia, around the disciplinary walls of science, and into a bewildering range of subjects” enabled the wide awareness and the wealth of insight into those areas of environmental interchange that Bateson eventually came to call “the sacred.” In fact, Keesing’s slightly disdainful description of Bateson’s progress through half a dozen superficially unconnected disciplines is misleading. As this chapter has shown, Bateson succeeded in following his key themes throughout, in spite of real difficulties in obtaining funding and secure positions in American academia. His career can be seen as a masterly composition of successive phases of learning, insight, and the application of earlier knowledge and theory in whatever directions each new situation disclosed. Having initially studied biology, he was able to use many biological insights in his anthropological research, the latter provided many psychological ideas that were available when he moved, after significantly enhancing the new discipline of cybernetics, into social and then clinical psychology. The well-known theories from his years as a psychologist, not least the “double-bind” theory and the understanding of “hierarchies of communication” initially adopted from Whitehead and Russell (1910, 1913) and then developed with Ruesch, illuminated his work on animal communication, enabling him to evolve his profoundly important theories of learning. Such “hierarchies,” which will be examined in chapter 3, involve the idea that all communicative experiences can be seen as members of “higher” (i.e., larger and more general) classes of communication. These larger classes may be grouped into yet higher classes. Thus, a sergeant’s order to a soldier is given on the understanding that it will be obeyed because it belongs to the (higher) class of army regulations and regimental customs. This higher class can, itself, be seen as belonging to the larger class of national traditions, made good by historical experience and need. And so on. All this previous experience nurtured Bateson’s understanding of the nature of mind at large in the living world and, in his last years, his awareness and analysis of the looming environmental crises. Not least, as Mary Catherine Bateson points out in her introduction to the reissue of Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000, ix), the development of the environmental movement in the 1960s provided a focus for the integration of all the strands of Bateson’s work in his “emerging concern for integrative changes that would offer the possibility of ongoing systemic health.”

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The central concept originated by Gregory Bateson is his understanding of all the systems of the living world as being mental in kind. Each system, claims Bateson, is a mind. Such systems vary from the very small, perhaps bacterial, genetic, or cellular, to the very large: a coral reef and its inhabitants, a forest ecosystem, the mind of a nation, or the whole process of biological evolution. All these systems are interrelated and nested within larger mental systems so that there is an ultimate interconnected whole, which is “the sacred.” These are, at first sight, astonishing and improbable assertions. I intend to explain Bateson’s thinking about mind and to lay the groundwork for an extension of his thought that will enable wiser human responses within the network of relationships in which we all live. THE SACRED

There are further key thoughts in Angels Fear on which Bateson knowingly spent the last months of his life, the months of the remission that had surprised his family, friends, and colleagues by making it possible for him to work again. This was to be the last large-scale work of lifelong atheist Bateson, seeking to understand the meaning of the sacred. Mary Catherine Bateson, in completing and editing the manuscript after her father’s death writes that there seemed to be two meanings of the sacred for Gregory: “that with which thou shalt not tinker” and “that which can only be met with a sense of awe—and not tinkered with” (148). She added, as I have already written, her own understanding of his meaning: the sacred is “the integrated fabric of mental process that envelopes all our lives” (200). In his last years Bateson came to understand the great mental process of the world as “a system so pervasive and so determinant that we may even apply the word “god” to it” (1988, 142), a possibility that will receive attention in the final chapters of this book. As we have seen above, Bateson recognizes that, as we understand the world at present, our whole epistemology and ontology in which humanity is seen as separate from nature, in which “things” are separable and can be possessed, is wrong. Our most dangerous characteristic is our propensity to develop and rely only on our conscious purposes. He asserts that until we see the world as a network of relating, as a vast interrelated process of which we are dependent members, we will not be fit to survive in it. The great systems of the world cannot be deceived. The “Ecological God . . . is not mocked” (1988, 135ff.) and will not suffer foolishness. Retribution, which is the response of the larger system to

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our ecological sin, is necessarily involuntary, automatic. Bateson claims that his own theory of mind permits precise, systematic attention to “religious matters,” in which he includes love, the sacred, wisdom, and mind itself. In Angels Fear, he spells out more of his understanding of nested minds, of mental process at the planetary scale. This whole, he writes, is worthy of our love, our respect, our reverence, and our sense of awe. For Gregory Bateson, this whole is “the sacred.” This unified mental process that is going on inside us, that is ourselves, that includes us and all the systems that enfold us and make us possible, the mental system that makes life possible and that is the world: this is what is sacred. This is Bateson’s revised ontology and epistemology, his understanding of “what is there,” the new “knowing” of reality. What can be known to exist is the totality of the “communicational regularities in the biosphere” (1988, 142), which we should now see as being, themselves, divine. Bateson offers no ready-made solution for our present dangerous predicament. His task and ours is “to explore whether there is a sane and valid place for religion somewhere between . . . two nightmares of nonsense.” These are: “established materialism” and “romantic supernaturalism.” We need to discover “whether . . . there might be found in knowledge and in art the basis to support an affirmation of the sacred that would celebrate natural unity” (1988, 64). He thinks religion and religions have been metaphorical ways in which we have been able to interact with the vast systems of the world in better ways than we can now achieve. Those ways were flawed by errors of epistemology but the processes involved in religious activity, attitudes that recognize the sacred in the natural world, are what we need in order to survive. But there is no one way. He writes: “We have to have in mind not an orthodoxy but a wide and compassionate recognition of the storm of ideas in which we are all living and in which we must make our nests—find spiritual rest— as best we can” (1988, 178–79). We have each to find the way for ourselves. But, as we have already noted, Bateson does offer one possibility, culled from the later two-thirds of his life experience. This is the idea that, if we can learn to reengage with the beauty of the natural (including the human) world, to reengage with the aesthetic, to “walk in beauty,”14 then we may be enabled to receive a grace that would permit the recovery of a sense of the world as sacred. To examine this claim and to set out the creative responses it could enable for us is the aim of this book.



3

Mind and Bateson’s Claims The Living World is Organized by Mind(s)

T

his chapter offers an introduction to Gregory Bateson’s most important, most central, and most misunderstood claim: that the living world is a single intermeshing hierarchy of process relationships that are all “mental” in kind: “comparable to thought” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 16–17). It is the most theoretical (and perhaps the most demanding) part of this book. It will require some careful thought and perhaps more than one reading. However, this material is the foundation for the later understanding of the importance of beauty, the grace of direct and more-than-conscious relating to the living Earth, and the consequent possibility of seeing the total system as the sacred. It is worth the time and effort it may take to fully comprehend Bateson’s quite startling insights. Bateson understands all the processes that produce, for instance, healing in organs, growth in organisms, development in societies, or balance in large ecosystems, as being “minds.” This is a strange and initially perplexing view. It is difficult to accept and is counterintuitive because we are used to thinking of minds (with the exception of such concepts as the “mind of God”) as existing only in humans and only in connection with a physical brain. Bateson’s imaginative leap of understanding does not relate easily to conventional ideas of mind or brain. The first, most important, and perhaps most difficult part of my task is to enable the reader to understand this view. To that end I offer, in this chapter, a careful explanation of Bateson’s most important claims about the mental nature of the biological world. CONSCIOUSNESS, PERCEPTION, AND “AWARENESS”

Note, before proceeding further, that Bateson’s “mental processes” do not require consciousness. For him, consciousness is only a small part of total mental activity, even in humans. Mary Catherine Bateson writes 31

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in Our Own Metaphor (1991, 160) that, for Gregory, “The sea was the sea of mind, with consciousness only a shallow layer at the top.” Mental process is the activity involved in receiving and responding to information and in gaining and using knowledge; these terms having a much wider meaning than we are accustomed to give to them. As only a small part of our human knowing ever reaches the “screen of consciousness” (2000, 142), the bulk is unconscious knowledge of kinds shared by organisms and systems throughout the living world. Consequently, perception does not require consciousness either. Perception, for Bateson, includes many types of awareness: all the many ways in which organisms or systems can register and respond to news or informational stimulus reporting change. Hence, in the Batesonian world of mental systems, perception and awareness perform a great deal of the work that we are accustomed to think is dependent on consciousness. All these activities, conscious or otherwise, are, Bateson claims, strictly comparable to thought. He understands all the systems to be, in very real and important ways, thinking. “Awareness” is the term I will use in the remainder of this book when I wish to refer to the responsiveness of beings or systems to informational stimuli reaching them from their environment. It is not necessary for the awareness to be consciously recognized. All living systems have the ability to respond to incoming stimuli. An earthworm will shrink away from a touching hand, plants respond to differences of temperature, light, shade, nutrition, humidity, or water supply. Our bodies respond to awareness of temperature change by perspiring or shivering. Awareness of carbon dioxide excess in our lungs and blood supply regulates our breathing. I have encountered no convincing argument in contemporary theories of mind that justifies any veto on nonconscious minds and, given Bateson’s firm understanding that mental process does not require consciousness, I will not, in this book, consider the relationship of his minds and mental process to the many theories of consciousness. Bateson’s stance on mental process is related to very ancient worldviews such as panpsychism, which holds that there is mind or “soul” in everything. His view may be seen as a modified form of panpsychism because, though objects do not have soul or mind in themselves, material components are necessary for a mental system to exist. The mind is the process of informational interaction between these components. He limits mental process to Creatura, the living world, and insists that the material parts between which mental process flows must comprise, at

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least, a minimum complexity. Individual material objects such as grains of sand or single subatomic particles cannot themselves be minds. The “mental function is immanent in the interaction of differentiated ‘parts’” (1979a, 93–94). Bateson does not endorse the idea, supported by Samuel Butler, Teilhard de Chardin, and other panpsychists, that even the smallest single entities have mental characteristics. One wonders whether he would have revised this criterion in the light of recent developments in quantum physics that suggest radical interconnectedness of even the smallest subatomic particles. MENTAL PROCESS: THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE AND UBIQUITOUS MIND

I suggest that the most effective way of understanding Bateson’s claims is to start from our common personal experiences. I invite the reader to consider the experience of one’s “own” mind. We as persons understand ourselves to “have” a mind. We are not too sure what this mind is, or where it is, but we know “it” is “there” by our direct experiencing of its activity. We know from our own experience that what is most essentially “ourselves,” that is, our personality and our basic understanding of who we are, is (to borrow philosopher Dorothy Emmet’s homely and useful phrase from The Passage of Nature [1992]) our mental “going on.” What we identify as “self” is our thinking, believing, feeling, loving, deciding, choosing, and so on. The entity that we understand to have this mind, we see as our self, as a body-sized being. Bateson denies that the mind is limited in this way. His concept of much wider mind, or mental process, requires that we question this for ourselves. Are we really a single entity, controlled and managed by a conscious internal mind? Are there not entities within our bodies that have their own independence? Are our “selves” not significantly shaped and altered by larger physical and social processes that can also be seen as minds? And do we not participate in these larger processes in ways that suggest that our self is much wider in scope and influence than we think? It is a fact that there are smaller entities within us that may also be seen as having (or being) minds. Pregnant women carry an entity that is both self and other. Men carry sperm: millions of potential others, some of which may prove to have quite independent direction and purposes. Further, within our body-sized selves are organs that, in the complex interactions between themselves and other bodily entities, grow, mature, change function, and opt for one of possible alternative courses of action.

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Understanding Gregory Bateson

Examples of such choices include growth, healing, maintaining the present state, or beginning to decay. Our organs age and may eventually cease to function. All of this goes on without the conscious intervention of the human person’s mind. There is still further complexity to consider. Our bodies are made up of microscopic, indeed, microcosmic, beings: many billions of cells, enormous numbers of bacteria. Our cells divide and multiply, grow, die, and are replaced largely according to their own internal genetic knowledge, dynamics and process interactions. Few of them remain as part of us for more than six or seven years. The biologist Lynn Margulis stated (in a lecture at Schumacher College, Devon, UK) that 10 percent of our body weight is bacteria. We carry around two kilograms of them, of two hundred different species, in our digestive tract alone. We need a balanced ecology of another six hundred species of bacteria in our mouths to stay healthy. All these are self-organizing entities, essentially independent beings that can (and do) enter and leave our bodies. We are walking communities of billions of tiny beings, which cannot flourish without being in us and without which we cannot live. Bateson requires that we see each of these beings as a mind or mental process and that, where aggregates of such beings form a recognizable organ or subprocess, we should see these also as minds. To this must be added a further molecular complexity. Our bodies are entirely composed of atoms that we have taken in from the outside world, many of them (all the carbon for instance) originating from the second-generation star that destroyed itself four or five thousand million years ago to form the materials of our solar system, thus conferring the possibility of life and mind on Earth. These atoms and molecules also pass in and out of our “selves” continuously in accordance with larger processes that are, in Bateson’s terms, strictly comparable to thinking, posing the ultimate question of our “personal” identity with the universe. Thus, it is a matter of material fact that there are smaller beings within every living organism that effectively make their own “decisions” about how to act and react to new information. Each of these living beings, says Bateson, is a thinking mind. The recent work of biologists Candace Pert and Michael Ruff on peptides and the immune and endocrine systems in humans provides physiological support for Bateson’s intuition. Their findings indicate that peptides behave as “bits of brain/mind floating around in the bloodstream” performing essential tasks that enable emotional responses and memory, and that the immune and endocrine systems also act in complex relationships with

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mental and neural processes. Pert (1999) suggests that the body really is the subconscious mind. Comparable mental processes may be recognized in the larger systems of which we humans have direct experience: couple relationships, friendships, families, neighborhood and work communities, committees, regional and national communities or political systems. In these and other interactive relationships the larger system itself shows mental characteristics. Marriages take on their own flavor and dynamics, families develop styles and norms of thinking and attitude, committees collectively “turn against” or “are minded to support” a project, the “mind of the country” swings against a government or an ideology, hate or fear can infect a whole population with insanity. The larger minds in which we are enfolded are not limited to collections of individual human mental processes. What we call our “environment” is also made up of mental systems. The complex processes that permit the production of our food (the weather and solar energy, soil processes, nutrients, and chemical exchanges), the natural systems that provide breathable air, drinkable water, warmth, clothing, and the experiencing of beauty are also to be seen as minds. The existence of such processes is a necessary condition of our ability to continue living and so, as systems depending on information transfer and the utilization of knowledge (in Bateson’s wide senses), they can be seen as processes comparable to the minds we conventionally regard as being resident in our bodily person. Similarly, all nonhuman organisms are to be recognized as mental processes, beings with minds. For Bateson, all of evolution and embryology is mental too. In a 1967 lecture (2000, 432–45) he explained that the logical outcome of the eighteenth-century evolutionary thinker Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s inversion of the traditional God-down hierarchy of being, is that “the study of evolution might provide an explanation of mind.” Bateson went on to ask what was for him a rhetorical question, “Is the biological world the explanation of mind?”, thus reversing the traditional understanding that transcendent divine mind is the explanation of the natural world. Bateson claims that the adaptive evolution of species and the development of individual babies and kittens and little fishes is a matter depending on information and knowing: how to select and perpetuate those characteristics of a species that render it able to persist, how to grow and still stay the same shape, how to develop an eye on either side of a nose. From all this, mind is mental process—comparable to thought— whatever living being or system it is evidenced in.

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Understanding Gregory Bateson BATESON AND THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

It becomes evident in reading Bateson’s work that he regards (increasingly as his thinking progresses) the unconscious mind, not as a substratum of mental activity, a mere repository for items “suppressed” or “lost” to consciousness, but as by far the largest, most effective, most important, and most wise area of mind. He sees unconscious mind, even in humans, as the main source of personality, character, deep evolutionary knowledge, and wisdom. As will be made clear in chapters 4 and 5, he came to see artistic process as a tool that allows us to reaccess the evolved and inherited wisdom that lies in our unconscious minds. Artistic activity can allow us to regain the grace of understanding that we are an integral part of a single unified system which is the living world. For Bateson the unconscious or subconscious is really the greater-thanconscious mind. It may help to clarify Bateson’s understanding of systemic processes as being mental if I provide two examples of mental process: A human architect may design a house. She may think about, foresee or imagine the future functions of the building and its ability to meet the needs of its inhabitants. This is mental process based on experience (including handed-down tradition) of the needs of humans and the functions of houses. When the house is being built the physical processes of building will be imbued with the mental elements of planning. The architect’s knowledge, gained by training and familiarity with the long tradition of home building, the requirements for successful family living, the social mores that must be expressed in the layout of the rooms, and the structural requirements that will make these possible—all this will be communicated to the builders by means of the plans and specifications and the architect’s direct supervision of the work. If there is need for amendment of the plans or if the builders do not adhere to her instructions she will be, in Bateson’s words “responsive to difference” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 17). The builders too will rely, both consciously and unconsciously, on inherited knowledge, training, and personal experience as they convert the information from the plans into physical structure. The mental and physical aspects of design and construction will interpenetrate and, as descriptions of the house-building process, will be indistinguishable. This physico-mental process will continue for the house’s future inhabitants as the processes of design, building, and living interweave as dwelling. Their inherited and acquired ideas about decoration, furnishing, the allocation and sharing of space, the development of their garden, and so on, will all merge into an amalgam of

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aesthetic, social, and cultural patterns. These patterns of interaction will comprise the particular and evolving identity of the house: the mind of the household. A seed begins the process of becoming a tree. It carries genetic information, a form of memory (handed down from its forbears) that provides an outline “design” (a set of potential responses to incoming information that have been “selected for” in the evolution of its species) for its future ability to meet its needs and to function as a large tree. This inherited information may be seen as knowledge accumulated (learned) by selective genetic processes in the tree’s ancestors, themselves part of a larger mental process. As the tree grows, environmental influences will require adaptive responses in the tree’s process, the development of its structure. The tree will itself become the living environment for many inhabitants. Its physical growth will be imbued with the inherited genetic information and with its own “experience” (response to stimuli) of interacting with its wider environment. All these processes are also mental in kind, comparable to thought. Inherited tendencies, physical structure, and mental influences will, again, interweave in the tree’s process of dwelling.1 These cases are essentially similar. Both show the working of mental process. All of the processes described above display the characteristics of mind. With this preliminary understanding of the way Bateson approaches the question of mind, it should now be possible to look at some of his definitions and key statements with insight. First, however, we must clarify the question of how mental systems can be distinguished from each other and the related matter of their interdependence. DISTINGUISHING SYSTEMS FROM OTHER SYSTEMS: “INTERFACES,” “FOCUS,” AND WIDER “SELF”

The perceptive reader will have already seen that there is no clear dividing line between any one mental process and those greater mental processes in which it is enfolded. Similarly, there is no obvious division between it and the mental subprocesses that can be seen as its own components. The southbound swallow, heading for warmer climes as the English September cools and darkens, is undoubtedly, as a physico-mental object, a recognizable organism. Nevertheless, its bodily systems are dependent on subprocesses comparable to those in human beings discussed above. It is similarly dependent on inherited genetic knowledge, not least in its ability to navigate some thousands of miles of air space and to arrive at

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a particular destination. It is also dependent, perhaps most crucially in this matter of navigation, on the group mind of the flock of which it is a part. There is further dependence on the wider minds within environment for food supply, roosting places, water, weather, prevailing winds, and so on, right up to the systemic planetary and solar interrelation that is summer and winter, warmth and coldness, the rhythmic process that decrees the swallow’s progress across the Earth. I suggest therefore, though Bateson seldom makes this clear himself, that any subdivision of the living process of the inhabitants of Earth is arbitrary. We may (and must in order to understand complex processes) usefully consider parts of the living system of Earth. But we must always remember that the delineation of such a subsystem is a matter of our own choice, very possibly culturally influenced, a matter of convention rather than actuality. In fact, it is in discussing “interfaces,” particularly during his final years, that Bateson comes nearest to clarifying this issue. In a tape recording2 of one of the seminars he gave at the Esalen Institute, made during the last months of his life, he said: “What I want to talk about . . . are ‘interfaces’: boundaries between . . . not enclosing boundaries, which might be opaque or non-transmitting. They are boundaries which connect between two active areas.” He notes that skin is such a boundary. It is “concerned with transmission” and is thus part of our connection with the outside world. Like our gut, which is the interface where potentially harmful concentrations of substances are broken down, rendered safe, and then accepted into the body as nutrients, the skin both absorbs and exudes material, thermal energy, and many sorts of “news of difference.” The “twitchings of end organs” report messages of what is “outside” and, by unconscious processes of interpretation, we receive the product across the interface. Our bodily interaction with the world is “a dance of interfaces.” Memory and learning are themselves interfaces. Bateson pointed out to his Esalen audience that if, in nature, we want to find a great wealth of wild animals or plants, the place to search is at an interface. At the edge of a forest or on the borders of a swamp we will find many interacting species. This is “where the action is.” All mental life is “rigged around, dependent upon, made of . . . these multiple interface meeting points where something different from something else meets that something else and something happens.” All that we can perceive is change. Out of observed change or “difference” we deduce stable states and prevailing conditions, but these are illusory. They are hypotheses, constructed by ourselves and our ancestors from long experience of receiving news of difference. Boundaries or dynamic interfaces enable our living.

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It is interesting to note that during these last years Bateson was a member of the Lindisfarne Fellowship and in friendly contact with “Bill” Thompson: William Irwin Thompson, the historian.3 In the same period Thompson (1977, 49) was writing: “Beneath us is the molten core of earth, above us is the burning radiation of the solar wind. Behind the wall of the earth’s magnetic field, we keep ourselves together. . . . Whether it is the thin film of the biosphere, or the thin wall of the Acheans, man lives at an interface between opposites: earth and sky, sea and shore, life and death. Yet it is precisely the interface between opposites that is the place of transformation, and the energy of that transformation comes from remaining poised at the perilous edge. . . . We live at an interface between order and disorder, and cannot move into one singly without destroying the disequilibrium that is basic to change and evolution.” My claim, that systems (not least organisms) are individuated by creative, interpenetrative interfaces rather than by limiting boundaries, emphasizes the importance of Bateson’s monism—his understanding that, ultimately, all is one. In seeing the whole of the living world as a systemic nesting of minds within minds within minds, his thinking can restore to us the awareness of unity that three hundred years of reductionist science have concealed. However, scientific (and consequently cultural) insistence on the separability of things (rather than on the relating between them) persists. Many contemporary thinkers see the presence of boundaries that distinguish between different systems as real and necessary. Fritjof Capra, himself indebted to Bateson for some of his formative ideas (see Uncommon Wisdom; Capra 1989a, 10, 75–92, 131, 215–16), holds that all “cognitive” or living systems must have something like a “membrane” that delineates or marks off the limits of the system and specifies its identity. Capra accepts that such boundaries are “open to material and energy” and to the dispersal of wastes but insists that they are able to decide, from their internal structural resources, what (if any) response they make to disturbances from outside their boundary. He claims that they are autonomous (“autopoietic” or self-making) in the sense that the nature of their response (or whether they respond at all) to external influences or events is decided only by the system’s internal resources, even though external factors may trigger that response (1996, 163ff). Capra’s thinking is developed from the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1987) and also depends on the work of Ilya Prigogine (1967, 1980) about dissipative structures. Maturana, Varela, and Capra attempt to explain learning and development within systems while maintaining that

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system boundaries are impervious to what Bateson would call “informational input.” They do this by claiming that the structure of living systems is altered by experience so that subsequent experiences will produce changed responses, still generated and determined from within the system. Structure becomes a record of the system’s experience. I cannot see that this is other than an openness (in Bateson’s terms) to information: “difference” that “makes a difference.” When Bateson talks about difference he means that the informational stimuli that are now reaching the awareness that is the mind in question, are in contrast to those that were received earlier. A change in the chemical environment of a cell, a fall in the temperature of the air in a forest, or a new expression on a friend’s face are all examples of informational difference that may require action on the part of the systemic mind that has become aware of them. If the autopoietic systems of Capra and Maturana need to change their internal structure as a result of their awareness of such external changes, these systems are not closed to external disturbances, and I question whether the proponents of the Santiago theory are not mistaken in this particular. If a system influences and is influenced by other systems, is dependent on inputs from its surroundings and also on the working of subsystems within itself, it is not helpful to describe it as autonomous or separate. As noted above, Bateson’s mature view of the interfaces that form the edges of systems is that they are places of dynamic interchange, not isolating capsules. My claim is that this holistic perspective both requires and is capable of enabling a new vision of integration and interdependency which, at present, we badly need.4 Our human understanding of self, if not limited by convention to the boundaries of our body or the immediate range of our personal influence, could become almost infinitely wide. The potentiality for wide identification with all the systemic processes that support and enrich our personal lives will be explored in chapters 4 to 6. Bateson’s insights offer the possibility that aesthetic engagement and a new knowledge of our interdependency, combined with a realization of the essential unity of all living systems as a single world-mind that is a unified sacred whole, may enable human beings to understand and live within this wider understanding of our “selves.” “FOCUS”—NOT BOUNDARIES

If, however, I am correct in asserting that there is no real separation between living systems, we are presented with a problem. If no definitive boundary is to be found between a given system and its component

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subsystems or between it and the larger systems of which it is a dependent part, we may find it very difficult to think about and understand the many “parts” of the world. I propose an alternative way of directing our attention toward parts of the systemic world, a way that does not rely on finding fictitious dichotomies between one system or mind, and another. This depends on finding the appropriate center of interest in a particular system, process, or mind. We must move away from our conditioned habit of looking for boundaries that separate, toward looking for the central function or focus of any systemic process within the wider unity. The etymology of the word “focus” is useful in explaining this idea. The focus of a house or household was originally the name for the central hearth of the dwelling. It was not only the source of warmth. It was the place where the family gathered to discuss their plans, to feel their togetherness, perhaps to consider action against others who were not members of this hearth or household. It was not a boundary. Others could be welcomed to it; the household members could freely depart and return. It was the heart of the house, which gathered to itself the activities of the household. Thus, I stress “focus” (as center of attention) rather than “boundary” (as limit) because effects are always flowing between what we may think of as different scales of process and between the subprocesses that we conventionally experience as separate beings. Other people’s attitudes affect how we feel. Cancer cells are affected by the state of mind of the patient. A garden ecosystem is affected by the weather, the gardener’s energy, the kids’ games, or an influx of slugs from next door. A political system can be profoundly changed by the actions of one politician. The climate of the world has been changed by “our” industrial activity. We can learn to specify our interest in particular scales of system by thinking in terms of focus. To choose a personal example: my mind is focused in Noel, the person. In this context, “focus” carries the additional connotations of photographic focusing (picking out the desired subject of examination, as distinct from background) as well as the original etymological emphasis of the central hearth. There is a “hanging together” in terms of purpose, the pursuit of goals, or consistent tendencies, which is essential to any understanding of focus or identity. My mind is the purposeful “going on” of Noel’s interfacing activity with the world. But it is not bounded, limited in extent or effect, nor is it isolated from the causal influences directed toward it from the wider world. Nevertheless, it can be studied (if we choose to do so) as a single mind.

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Such study would involve examination of past input, the mind’s present state, and its output. Past input would be, in Bateson’s language, information, including my genetic heritage, experience of other minds and their products, experience of events, the effects of bodily health or disease, and the influences of diet and medication. The present state of the mind would be represented by the mental functioning between the physical components of brain and body, the processing of past input and the translation of causal effects into future output. Such output would include ideas, speech, writing, attitudes to others, decisions enabling action in the world, and so on. In the process of interfacing, all of this would impact on other mental systems of many scales and these causal effects will all be cybernetically recursive. That is, they will be effects that circle round through complex circuits, modifying the effects of previous cycles and generating novelty by their interaction with new stimuli. Equally, we could study a larger mental process (say, a voluntary group of which I am a member) that includes “my” mind and is affected by “my” thoughts and consequent actions. The focus of this larger mind will be the aims and activities of the group as a whole, including its internal discussions and the formation of plans. The group mind develops purposes that are not necessarily those of any one member, though its total process will be altered by the opinions of members and by inputs from the wider world. The mental system that is the group will interface with the wider processes of the world and will influence these by its output. Alternatively, one could study a subprocess of my personal mind such as dreaming, visual recalling of past scenes, falling ill, regaining health, growing old, the forming of speech, the generating of self-image, the developing of prejudices, and so on. All these are interrelated, recursive processes, which influence, change, or reinforce characteristics of the subprocesses and the larger minds. All this interrelating is required by the nature of mental systems. We know from sensory-deprivation experiments that human minds are dependent for their continuing functionality on constant exchange of stimuli with other beings (Polt 1999, 57). Minds, at all scales, are necessarily dependent on their dynamic interfacing with other minds. MONISM

Bateson’s understanding of the world is essentially monistic. He holds that mind is necessarily a unity with nature, with the living physical world, because nature (including humans) is one vast interconnected mind.

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Inclusive nature is one interconnected mental activity, comprised of countless smaller mental systems, ranging through mitochondria in cells, bacteria, organs in bodies, organisms (both animal and vegetable), groups and herds, flocks and shoals, societies and political systems, to the great natural ecosystems, which Bateson calls “very large mental systems, systems of ecological size and larger” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 135). EPISTEMOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY

Some scholars (e.g., Dell 1985) have claimed that Bateson failed to set out an ontology. What these critics fail to understand is that Bateson conflates ontology and epistemology. That is, he brings together and merges his understanding of what is there to be known in the world with his understanding of how we can know about it. By his claim that (given the fallibility of our sensory awareness) what can be known about the world is equivalent for all practical purposes to what is understood to exist, he unifies epistemology and ontology and transcends the whole idealism/realism argument. Mary Catherine Bateson’s explanatory paragraph in Angels Fear (19) emphasizes that, for Gregory and herself, “because what is is identical for all human purposes with what can be known, there can be no clear line between epistemology and ontology.” Bateson’s understanding of the mental nature of all living systems is his ontology. What is there in the living world is a vast collection of minds or mental processes and these provide the possibility of knowing. Minds are the relational and dynamic interconnections between things and they are, though not material, equally real. The living beings in the world are both the product of mental process and the evidence for mental process. In setting out this material Bateson is explaining his combined ontology and epistemology, considering what it is to know—for humans but also (because of his unprecedented extension of knowing to all the systems in the living world) for minds at all scales. Living beings or systems comprise what Bateson calls “Creatura,” borrowing and adapting the term from Gnostic thought via Carl Jung’s (rather different) use of it in his Seven Sermons for the Dead (1916).5 For Bateson, Creatura is the totality of the living systems of the natural (including human) world, the realm in which distinctions are drawn, where difference can be a cause. Pleroma is the “lifeless world” of material physics in which forces and impacts can be seen as the causes of events—and where difference can never be a cause. Creatura is the realm of mind and mental systems; Pleroma is the realm of hard science (1979a, 6–7). It is important to recognize that it is only as description that

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Pleroma and Creatura are separated in Bateson’s thought. Mary Catherine Bateson (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 18) notes that there is no dualism here, only a distinction between living systems that are governed by informational stimuli—and those physical systems where changes are due to physical causes only. Pleroma is necessary for Creatura to exist, but knowledge of Pleroma can only exist in Creatura. The territory is Pleromatic; the map is a product of Creatura. In the 1980 tape recording6 Bateson drew attention to an “interesting difference” between Pleroma and Creatura. The Gnostics, he said, accepted much earlier Pythagorean thought in which the world of mind was separate from the world of matter insofar as it dealt with differences within the material realm. Differences are not material things; they have no location. Location is a mental distinction, and so differences can only exist in Creatura. Bateson is essentially a realist in that he accepts that physical objects exist in the world independently of being perceived. Such objects are not, however, parts of a mind-independent world but, on the contrary, are parts of a world characterized by mental systems. There is real stuff out there and what can be known about it is the basic informational content of all mental systems and their active processes. Hence, Bateson’s ontology is inseparable from, and required by, his epistemology. His understanding of the process of perception is basically phenomenological. Our senses assemble images or representations of the world, but we have no access to the formative processes themselves. What we have to deal with is the report, not the direct perception of objects, processes, and (according to Bateson) mental “going on.” The reports are filtered through our presuppositions and through selective habits and assumptions formed from personal and cultural experience. In Talking Philosophy: A Wordbook, A. W. Sparkes (1991, 210) suggests that any worldview or paradigm may be called an “epistemological framework . . . because of its function. . . . It is in terms of such a framework that its holder understands what happens, explains and interprets, makes knowledge claims, etc. . . . An epistemological framework . . . is not a merely epistemological theory . . . rather it is a metaphysics, perhaps primarily an ontology. . . . The phrase ‘epistemological framework,’ itself quite legitimate, has sometimes led sociologists and philosophers of sociological bent to say ‘epistemology’ when they should be saying ‘ontology,’ ‘metaphysics’ or ‘philosophy of science.’” This is a good summary of Bateson’s own position. There was a very significant moment during the research process with Jurgen Ruesch in 1948–49 when, discussing the nature of messages and using the calls of jackdaws as an example, the two men wondered

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whether the birds could vary the call if a second bird had failed to respond. “Though we did not know it, we were asking about the epistemology of jackdaws, and the word ‘epistemology’ had suddenly jumped out of the philosophy to become a cross-cultural word” (Bateson, 1977b). This was the point at which Bateson realized that epistemology was, indeed, a cross-species concept as well as a cross-cultural one. The question of the jackdaw being able to ask about the possibility of varying a communication (which would imply an awareness of the nature of messages) was “a question heavy enough with theoretical load to shake the San Andreas fault.” He and Ruesch went on to speculate about other higher-order awareness in other nonhuman animals, in particular about their awareness and recognition of the concept of play. Observation of otters in a San Francisco zoo confirmed the existence of this ability, permanently widening Gregory Bateson’s understanding of epistemology and enabling much of his later theoretical work.7 THE CRITERIA OF MIND

Bateson’s final version of his criteria for mental systems is given in Mind and Nature and repeated in Angels Fear: 1. A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components. 2. The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than to energy. 3. Mental process requires collateral energy. 4. Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination. 5. In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions of events which preceded them). The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content) but are themselves subject to transformation. 6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena. (1979a, 92, Bateson’s emphases)

Few readers find this list, or Bateson’s subsequent discussion, selfexplanatory. After careful reading and consideration I offer the following as a more accessible paraphrase. • The system will be one of relationships between any sufficient complexity of material components in the living world.

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Understanding Gregory Bateson • The systemic interactions must, using energy available within the system, pass information around circular (or more complex) pathways. Such information is always “news of difference,” a version of a previous event, coded in ways appropriate to the ability of the pathways to carry it and the material entities to respond. • Such mental systems are to be understood as particular beings, entities, and processes that are related by membership of larger and more general classes. Such minds are “nested” within larger mental systems. • Interaction within and between minds promotes learning in the system, involves memory and results in knowing. All of these are defined in much broader terms than those in which we normally think of such processes. • These are necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of mind.

Bateson, in referring to his own list of the requirements for mind (1979a, 91), says that “if any aggregate of phenomena, any system, satisfies all the criteria listed, I shall unhesitatingly say that the aggregate is a mind.” Hence, this is a set of sufficient criteria. Any system displaying all these characteristics must be regarded as a mind. It will be useful if we now examine my paraphrase, considering each of the above requirements. I have concluded, after scrutiny of Bateson’s own accounts of his theory, that the following explanation of each of the above criteria is consonant with his mature thinking. The system will be one of relationships between any sufficient complexity of material components in the living world. Bateson’s claim is that minds exist and function only as the relating between material parts. He is emphatic that there must be some complexity in the system for mental process to take place. The parts must be differentiated and linked by the system. The material components are essential but the interactive relating between them is the mind or mental process. This relating may take the form of information transfer, response to “news of difference,”the self-correction of systems (negative feedback), their tendency to amplify the results of communication so as to produce “runaway” or “regenerative feedback” (positive feedback), or the selection, from the possible alternatives, of one course of action or development (1979a, 93).8 Examples of such mental systems would include a growing plant, seen as a system in itself. A larger mind would include the plant’s relating with its environment: soil, nutrients, temperature, sunlight, air, water, and other plants nearby. The relating of a wolf to fellow members of her

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pack, to her cubs and mate, to available sources of food, temperature and climate, and her own processes of health and aging would be a mental system too. At a larger scale, the relating between the wolf pack and other animals, hunters, or preservationist human groups would be a more complex mind. The interrelating between global climate change, rising levels of carbon dioxide, more than four hundred million petrol-driven vehicles (Campbell, 2002, 38), government policies, multinational corporations, the oil industry, and international politics form a “mind” operating between material components of vastly greater complexity than Bateson’s definition requires. In this context it is worth remembering that he sees mental systems as capable of being infected by the insanity of other mental systems such as our societal processes: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds. . . . When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops or the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience” (2000, 492). The implications of this view of mind, as being the active constituent in every scale of process in the natural world, are immense. Not least, it suggests a radical revision of our understanding of human “self” and a revised approach to corporate and individual human “responsibility.” It is possible that a general acceptance of Bateson’s view would produce a new and essentially “religious” worldview in which our present conceptual separations between self/other, human/nature, and culture/environment would disappear. These important potential changes are discussed in subsequent chapters. The systemic interactions must, using energy available within the system, pass “information” around circular (or more complex) pathways. Such information is always “news of difference,”a version of a previous event, coded in ways appropriate to the ability of the pathways to carry it and the material entities to respond. Bateson’s mental systems are cybernetic systems, as described in chapter 2. They are recursive circular or more complex systems in which the recirculation of a signal or item of information will indicate, or cause, change within the system. Such signals or coded items of information are not to be seen as being, themselves, pulses or forms of energy. Their arrival may trigger energetic responses that use energy already available

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within the system. The clenched fist is a coded signal of threatened violence but the muscular capability used to make the sign, deliver the punch, or run away on receipt of the signal must be already available as stored energy in the body. The Internet carries very large amounts of information around the Earth with great speed but must utilize electricity generated elsewhere to do this. Information can be any sort of indication of change or “difference” that can inform the system that something has happened. It might be a chemical change in the environment of a cell, a nervous impulse within an organism, symptoms of illness or recovery in a human or other animal, the temperature changes and diminution of daylight that signal the onset of winter to a forest ecosystem, or news of an attack on a nation. The “coding” of signals means that the form in which the item of information travels through the system is adapted to the receptive ability of the those parts that need to receive it. A hormonal change in the body can act as a coded signal releasing emotions (and actions) of love or anger. A recognizable warning call from one bird may alert the whole flock. Identifying the scent of fox may enable the grazing rabbit to take appropriate action. A folksong may carry coded words that, to those who know the code, indicate rejection of an oppressive regime. The black and yellow stripes of a wasp are a code that communicates “this insect stings” to those with experience of other wasps. This criterion implies a significant widening of our concept of perception. It suggests that “awareness” (defined as the capacity to register and respond to information) is common to all mental systems and that consciousness or self-consciousness is not a requirement for this. It also implies a profound revision of our understanding of “information.” Subsequent sections and chapters of this book will explore these matters. Such mental systems are to be understood as particular beings, entities, and processes that are related by membership of larger and more general classes. Such minds are “nested” within larger mental systems. Bateson repeatedly relates his mental systems to Bertrand Russell’s theory of Logical Types (Russell 1956; Whitehead and Russell 1910, 1913), which is concerned with distinguishing between and ordering hierarchies of the members of classes, classes, classes of classes, and so on. In many areas of mental process (including learning, play, humor, dream, artistic engagement, and religion) Bateson’s thought is fundamentally influenced by Russell’s logical theory.

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CLASSIFICATION AND LOGICAL TYPES

Bateson’s interest in classification and logical types seems to have been a very early development. He repeatedly told the story of his strategic ploy when, faced (in the final examination for his zoology degree in the early 1920s) with an anatomical question about a type of organism of which he knew nothing, he responded by analyzing the meanings of terms in the question and by suggesting structural arguments about the classes to which such organisms would belong. In his “autobiographical sketch” for the report of a Macy Foundation conference on group processes, he wrote: “Since then I have been interested in forms of order, natures of order, sorts of sorting, sorts of categorizing, as these occur within any sort of organization, organisms, entities, computing machines, etc.” (1956a, 11). Some understanding of the Theory of Types is necessary in order to appreciate Bateson’s use of it. We should note that Russell developed his theory of types in order to resolve a problem in the foundational theory of mathematics—a very different field from Bateson’s theory of learning. However, using ideas from one discipline to illuminate thinking in another field was a characteristic Batesonian strategy and such “hybridization” produced meaningful insights on many occasions. In The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication (2000, 279–308), written in 1964 and augmented for the 1972 publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, he set out the main basis of this thinking. He begins with an introduction to the logical structure of Russell’s theory, offered as a tool to enable understanding of the classes of learning that he is about to propose. The key points in the theory are that: • No class can be a member of itself. Bateson says that “The class of Elephants does not have a trunk ... ,” by which he means that the class that is comprised of all the real elephants in the world is, itself, an immaterial logical concept that must not be confused with the elephants themselves. • Similarly, a class of classes cannot itself be one of the classes which are its members. That is, the class of, say, mammals (which will be comprised of the classes of mice, dogs, elephants, humans, etc.) must not be confused with the class of elephants—even though the class of elephants is one of the classes that it contains. • A name is not the thing named. Bateson says that this is the mistake of eating the menu card instead of the meal. He means that we

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must not confuse the name we give to an entity (“elephant,” “house,” “bacon,” “egg,” “sentence,” “idea,” and so on) with the real existent thing or concept itself. • A named item is the class of which that item is the unique member. A single item (such as the idea “democracy,” a mammal—“rat” or the man “John Bateson”) can be thought of as a class but no other ideas or things can belong to that class. • A class cannot be one of those items which are correctly classified as its nonmembers. The class of chairs excludes tables and lamps—these are part of the class of nonchairs. The class of chairs cannot be a member of itself and so is also not a chair—but must be distinguished from the class of nonchairs. The class of nonchairs is of a higher logical type—is a wider, more general concept—than the items like tables and lamps that are correctly to be seen as being in the class of nonchairs. • The term “logical type” represents orders of abstraction: The class of chairs is of the same logical type (order of abstraction or generality) as the class of nonchairs. The class of all furniture would be of a higher (more general) type than the class of chairs or the class of nonchairs. Bateson points out (280–81) that if, in the practice of abstract logic, the rules are contravened, paradox results and, hence, “the entire structure of axioms, theorems, etc., involved in generating that paradox is thereby negated and reduced to nothing. It is as if it had never been.” However, such practice was developed in the “abstract world of logic.” In any description of the real world we must take account of time, and things that have actually existed in the world can never be totally negated. Time, Bateson is suggesting, cancels logic. The if-then of logic becomes (in the world of time) the if-then of cause and later effect. We must allow for the differences between logic and the world of phenomena whenever we base our reasoning on logic. Logic, says Bateson, becomes a partial (but still important) analogy that provides a useful bridge between the phenomenal world and the abstract world of reasoning. He goes on to claim that the theory of logical types provides a more than useful analogy for the organization of learning and, more generally, of communication. It must apply, he says, to all animal and mechanical communication. Taking the learning of experimental animals in laboratories as a first example, he asks if reinforcement (negative or positive) will lead to more or less “exploration” in, say, a laboratory rat in a maze. The answer is that

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it will not—because exploration is “not an item of behavior but a category of such items” and, by analogy with Russell’s theory, if descriptive statements of the items are true they cannot be true of the class of items. A rat, placed in an experimental maze, explores in order to gain information and so the discovery that something is dangerous and is to be avoided (an item of behavior) is a “success.” Though it may have learned that one strange object is dangerous, the rat is not discouraged from investigating further strange objects, that is, from further behavior of the class “exploration.” The model discussed above assumes that the logical types can be ordered as “a simple unbranching ladder.” But, says Bateson, “the world of action, experience, organization and learning cannot be completely mapped onto a model which excludes propositions about the relation between classes of different logical type.” We may want to say, for instance, that the relation of the members of one class to the members of the next higher (more general or abstract) class is comparable to the relation between the members of this higher class and the members of a further still higher and more abstract class. The relations between factory workers and their overseers might be interestingly similar to the relations between the overseers and the senior management. There might be further similarity between these relationships and that of the managers to the company owners or shareholders. There are further examples of such interlevel relationships in the section below on learning. It follows from this criterion that all the organisms and systems of the living world are closely related and linked to each other. Indeed, all beings must be members of the highest and most general class. The monistic implications of this are examined below. Such interaction promotes learning in the system, involves memory and results in knowing, all of these defined in much broader terms than those in which we normally think of such processes. This criterion is implicit in Bateson’s understanding of mind. Though it is not among the 1979 “criteria” in Mind and Nature and Angels Fear, his writings demonstrate a widening understanding of the scope of the terms learning, memory, and knowledge and of their centrality to his concept of mental process. LEARNING

Bateson sees learning as occurring in all mental processes. From the smallest organisms to the great ecosystems of the world, the processes that are “minds” are engaged in learning. Not all learning is the same.

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Bateson distinguished several levels of learning, known by different names and descriptive terms as his understanding of living systemic minds developed. As in his understanding of minds, he sees learning processes as conforming to a hierarchy of nested scales or levels of sophistication. In his later work these are classified as “zero learning,” Learning I, Learning II, Learning III, and Learning IV. These levels can be seen as consonant with Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, discussed above. Indeed, Bateson sees the types or grades of learning as really being organized in such classes, and his means of demarcating the successive grades relies on the notion of context of learning. Context and the related concepts of form, pattern, and the nesting of systems are important in all Bateson’s work. When organisms or systems advance in their ability to live successfully, they are achieving levels of learning that enable them to recognize (not necessarily consciously) the wider context of their previous learning. Change is a characteristic result of process, says Bateson, but processes themselves are subject to change. Learning always denotes change of some kind. This is the basis of his claim that the theory of logical types is fundamental to learning. In his 1971 introduction to Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson wrote: “It was only in late 1969 that I became fully conscious of what I had been doing. I found that in my work with primitive peoples, schizophrenia, biological symmetry, and in my discontent with the conventional theories of evolution and learning, I had identified a widely scattered set of benchmarks or points of reference from which a new scientific territory could be defined. These benchmarks I have called ‘steps’” (2000, xxiv). A separate book would be required to trace the full development of Bateson’s understanding of learning processes and their interaction with his all-embracing theory of mind. I will here describe a few of the more significant stages in the emergence of his theory of learning. Even before the 1939–45 war, Bateson was aware of the importance of context. His anthropological research with Margaret Mead in Bali shows clear evidence of their recognition of cultural context as formative of personality (Bateson and Mead 1942a; Bateson 2000, 107–27). Bateson was laying down important foundations for his own process of “learning about learning” as early as 1941. Amid the exigencies of wartime planning, he made a perceptive comment on Margaret Mead’s article “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values” (Mead 1942a). This was footnoted by Bateson himself in Angels Fear (46) as significant previous work on learning. The paper (1942f), since widely reprinted as “Social Planning and the Con-

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cept of Deutero-learning” (2000, 159–76), shows his awareness of the importance of learning contexts, his recognition of the way we “punctuate” or classify events and circumstances so as to form and maintain our own “character.” We say “This is not me! ” or “I’m not the sort of person who does that!” Bateson maintains that our character is a cluster of habitual ways of looking at life, themselves products of our learning experiences. He is already aware that there is a higher level of learning— the process of “learning to learn” (later to be labeled as “Learning II”), which is about the recognition of the contexts and processes that permit and surround the basic level of “proto-learning”—later labeled as “Learning I.” At this early stage, Bateson was limiting his concern to the learning of humans and animals in experimental situations. By 1964 he was writing: “A priori it can be argued that all perception and all response, all behavior and all classes of behavior, all learning and all genetics, all neurophysiology and endocrinology, all organization and all evolution—one entire subject matter—must be regarded as communicational in nature, and therefore subject to the great generalizations or ‘laws’ which apply to communicative phenomena. Therefore we must expect to find in our data those principles of order which fundamental communication theory would propose. The Theory of Logical Types, Information Theory, and so forth, are expectably to be our guides” (2000, 282–83). In the same work, “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication” (1972e), Bateson set out his detailed understanding of each successive class of learning. It will be worth our while to examine this paper in detail. ZERO LEARNING

Zero learning (2000, 283–87) represents Bateson’s perception of the fact that even the simple receipt of an item of information is an instance of learning. This is the simplest level of learning in which the “entity shows minimal change in response to a repeated item of sensory input.” Zero learning is occurring when an animal (in an experimental situation) begins to give consistent responses to a repeated stimulus—it has already learned, perhaps, to expect food when a buzzer is sounded so now, when it responds to the sound of the buzzer, there is no new learning exhibited—the animal’s expectancy is an automatic response to the signal. Other examples of zero learning would include “habituation”—where an animal has already ceased to give overt response to a signal because is has “got used to” what was formerly a disturbing stimulus. For example, a riding horse may have learned that a verbal stimulus (“trot on”)

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represents a command to speed up, which, if ignored by the horse, may be reinforced by the rider applying his spurs or whip. For some time, the verbal command may be sufficient to produce the desired response but, eventually, the horse may cease to respond. The parent who threatens her child with some less than pleasant action if certain behavior is repeated will find, if the threats are not carried out, that the child has learned to ignore them. Both horse and child will have become habituated. Zero learning, says Bateson, also occurs in cases where response is determined by genetic factors rather than experience. Where the response to some stimulus is inbred, the response is automatic—any horse will shy away from a sudden loud sound but this is not an instance of new learning. Similarly, in simple electronic circuits where the circuit structure is not itself subject to change by the impulses passing through (i.e., the causal links between stimulus and response are “soldered in”), there is no new learning when the system is operated. When we press the button outside the door and the bell rings inside the house, the electrical system has not learned anything new. We “learn” from the sound of the factory whistle that it is lunchtime but we really learned this long ago—today’s response is zero learning. Bateson stresses that, unlike the higher types of learning, zero learning is not the product of trial-anderror strategies in the learner. The product of zero learning is a specific response that is not subject to correction by further learning. LEARNING I

Learning I (2000, 287–292) can be understood as changes in zero learning. An entity may learn to give a different response to a stimulus than it gave at an earlier time. Habituation, the change from responding to stimuli to not responding (and, conversely, the loss of habituation), can be seen as Learning I—and can be achieved even by living things that do not possess a neural circuit. Other examples would include the Pavlovian type of learning in which responses to stimuli are developed or learning of the instrumental reward/avoidance type is achieved. Rote learning is also classed as Learning I because one item of behavior becomes the stimulus for another item of behavior. When we learn a song by repeated practice we become able to remember (when singing) the next words and notes, even though we might not have recall of, say, the words of verse 4 without singing through the song. Negative examples of Learning I include the disruption, extinction, or inhibition of previously completed learning—we might learn from experience that certain behavior leads to social criticism.

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All these forms of learning assume a context. If we are to decide whether learning has occurred, the “before and after” context must be the same. If our child was previously happy about going to school but has now become fearful, we need to know what has changed in her school experience. Has she been moved into another learning group? Does she have a new teacher? Has another child started to bully her? In other words, we ask if her context of school experience has changed. “No man,” says Bateson, updating Heraclitus, “can go to bed with the same girl for the first time twice.” The original saying of Heraclitus is that no man can step into the same river twice. The river is flowing, changing from moment to moment; our lover is no longer experiencing a “first time” situation when we meet again. The context of the later experience is changed. When we judge whether learning has occurred in our relationship we must make allowance for the differences that familiarity makes. We try to learn about our partner’s character and desires while making allowance for the fact that our developing relationship constantly changes the context in which we can learn. The necessity, if we are to assess whether learning has occurred in any situation, for repeatable context requires and entails the ideas of logical typing. The notion “context” is itself subject to logical typing. If, writes Bateson, we have stimulus (an elementary signal), context of stimulus (metamessage—a message about the message that classifies the signal), context of context of stimulus (a meta-metamessage that classifies the metamessage), and so on, these are successively more general (higher) logical types or classes. We may get a letter from our landlord asking to arrange a meeting with us—a message or signal. If, in fact, we have not paid the rent for two months we may then classify the signal (the landlord’s note) as related to the context “unpaid rent”—a metamessage. That fact may lead us, in the context of having no money available to pay the rent, to see the message as threatening—a meta-metamessage. These are, again, a hierarchic series of contexts and contexts of contexts. Bateson introduces the idea of “context markers.” Noting that organisms respond to the same signal differently in different contexts, he points out that this may be due to recognition of the particular context they have entered. Children behave differently in the classroom, the playground/school yard, or the family home. All these settings act as coded messages about appropriate responses. Each context is marked by both physical and psychological “flags.” And, of course, contexts themselves have recognizable contexts. In the context of a theater and the subcontext of watching a play, we do not send for the police when a character is murdered onstage. The owner, picking up the dog’s leash, indicates

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that this is the context “walk”: frolicking and excitement is in order. The dog’s laboratory harness may signify the context “experiment” and the appropriateness of showing “discrimination.” Hence, if learning is to be defined as change, the context in which it takes place must be repeatable. This implies that the learning organism is aware of the change or similarity of context and that it recognizes punctuated sequences. Bateson’s metaphorical use of “punctuated” is interesting. He implies that we experience and classify our lives, apportion value or dislike to circumstances and experiences, in much the same way as we order the words of our sentences so as to express and communicate meaning. Learning I, unlike zero learning, allows change in the specific response by correction of errors within a set of possible alternatives. Bateson denies that input and output, perception, action, and so on can be experimentally distinguished. Perception is, notoriously, changed by experience. When we make a new friend we often find our first impressions of this person to be enhanced or corrected by later experience. Like all events in cybernetic processes, such effects are recursive. Our responses to the new person affect his or her attitudes and responses toward ourselves. Causal sequences are circular or more complex and the status of events can readily alternate between cause and effect. When nations engage in an arms race, each may see the other as threatening just because they are building up the size of their army and developing new weapons. Each will see the response of the other nation to their own actions as stimulus for further escalation of the race. Thus, in similar ways, it is possible to see any item of experience or behavior as either stimulus or response. LEARNING II

Learning II (2000, 292–301) enables change in the process of Learning I. This may be a corrective change in the set of possible alternatives available to the Learning I subject. It may also be a change in how we punctuate (classify, value) the sequences of experience, which would be about learning to learn, or “learning to learn better.” Learning II is adaptive (useful in the learner’s circumstances) only if the learner is correct in its expectation of the new context. If so, there is learning to learn and there will be less trial and error in future learning. Bateson offers examples from the study of human learning. In studies of rote learning (Hull et al. 1940) it was found that the ability of subjects increased in successive experiments. Bateson maintains that, in this case, the change must have been enabled by adaptation to the experimental

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procedures: the context of learning. In another study of “set-learning” (Harlow 1949, 51–65) it was found that, if problems were of a similar type of logical complexity there was a carryover of skills in successive tests. In a third study (2000, 296), in this case a study of “reversal learning,” the subjects had to learn that the clues for choosing between two alternatives in earlier tests were reversed in later ones. Bateson points out that the learning these subjects had to achieve was of a higher logical type (a new type of context): they were required to learn about a set of the earlier sets of learning. He also cites, as an example of Learning II, the “experimental neurosis” produced in laboratory animals when, for instance, tests requiring discrimination become so difficult that “discrimination” ceases to be a useful context and the situation would be better served by guessing. Distress only occurs if the animal has recognized the situation (context) as one where discrimination is called for. The development and adoption of character in humans and other higher organisms is the product of Learning II—brought about by chance or circumstantial experiences at the level of Learning I. We say someone is anxious, hostile, bold, humorous, or the like. These adjectives really describe the manner in which the person approaches and then conducts relationships or transactions with others. Interactions between two people are structured by each person’s “own perception of the sequence as a series of contexts, each context leading into the next.” The manner in which people structure contexts will be the product of previous Learning II—or possibly of their genetic heritage. Such relational characteristics are, of course, self-validating because transactions include the subject’s behavior as well as the external events. Their unconscious assessment of the context molds the total interaction and is likely to persist through life. LEARNING III

The section on Learning III (2000, 301) was added to the paper in 1971 for the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind. It is defined as change in the process of Learning II and produces corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives. Because of the self-validating nature of character produced by Learning II, Bateson thinks Learning III is difficult to achieve and rare, even in human beings. He writes that it occurs sometimes in psychotherapy, religious conversion, “and in other circumstances in which there is a profound re-organization of character.” Such profound changes may be beyond the reach of language but, at least in terms of logic, learning about the learning contexts of Learning II

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is possible. The function of habit formation and Learning II is economy of the thought process or neural pathways used in Learning I. Learning III opens the unexamined character-forming premises of Learning II to question and change. Examples of Learning III would include: learning to form more readily the processes of Learning II, learning to close for oneself the loopholes that would enable avoidance of Learning III, learning to change the habits acquired in Learning II, (and consequently learning that one unconsciously achieves Learning II), learning to limit or direct Learning II or learning about the contexts of the contexts used in Learning I. Bateson writes (304–306) that . . . Any freedom from the bondage of habit must also denote a profound redefinition of self. The concept of the self will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience. For others . . . the resolution of the contraries may be the collapsing of much that was learned at Level II, revealing a simplicity in which hunger leads directly to eating, and the identified self is no longer in charge of organizing the behavior. These are the incorruptible innocents of the world. For others, more creative, the resolution of contraries reveals a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction. That any of these can survive seems almost miraculous, but some are perhaps saved . . . from being swept away on oceanic feeling by their ability to focus in on the minutiae of life. Every detail of the universe is seen as proposing a view of the whole. These are the people for whom Blake wrote the famous advice in the “Auguries of Innocence”: To see the World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour.

It is evident from all this that Bateson equates Learning III with the deep recognition of wide relationship, an insight closely related to his evolving understanding of vast minds within the systemic natural world. It should be noted that he connects this level of learning and the recognition of interrelatedness with his important and new characterization of “aesthetics,” the subject of chapters 4, 5, and later chapters in this book.

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LEARNING IV

Bateson comments (2000, 293) that Learning IV “would be” a change in Learning III. He thinks it improbable that it would occur “in any adult living organisms on this earth.” He thinks it possible that the total process of evolution (which is, itself, a mind by Bateson’s definitions) could be credited with achievement of Learning IV. Evolution achieves Learning IV by “the combination of phylogenesis with ontogenesis,” which is to say adding the learning (including their growth and life process) of some organisms to the learning involved in the whole process of their evolutionary development. By 1966 Bateson, writing the essay “The Message of Reinforcement,” was defining learning as: “the receipt of information by an organism, a computer, or any other data-processing entity.” He continued: “This definition is intended to include all sorts and orders of information, ranging from the single bit which we suppose to be received in the single firing of a single neural end organ to the building up of complex chunks of information—i.e. constellations of neural structures and events—about relationship, philosophy, religion, mechanical systems, etc. The definition also will include internal learning—the building up of information regarding the changing states and characteristics of the learning entity itself. After all, there are many parts of any learning entity which are themselves concerned with the processing of information, so that what I am calling “internal learning” is, in fact, the receiving of information by such parts” (1970d—reprinted in 1991a, 134). Bateson stresses here that learning takes place at all scales of mental process and that consciousness is not a requirement. Bateson repeatedly stated that consciousness was something he had deliberately avoided writing about. Even in his last fully completed book, Mind and Nature, he was writing that consciousness was, with aesthetics and “the sacred,” the next problem to tackle (1979a, 211–14). In Angels Fear, the final and unfinished book, reference to consciousness is almost entirely concerned with the necessary limitation or secrecy that must prevent the bringing into consciousness of material the larger mental system needs to keep within its own scale of operation. PURPOSIVE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

Bateson did, however, approach one aspect of human consciousness in the invitational paper to his first conference about ecological concerns and, indeed, in the conference itself. This paper (1972i, reprinted in

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2000, 446–53), “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” committed that 1968 conference to examination of “the role of consciousness in the ongoing process of human evolution.” Our human and cultural adaptation is seen as an aspect of learning but Bateson believes that our self-conscious purposiveness lacks the evolutionary wisdom to which our unconscious mental processes still have access. In this preconference memorandum, Bateson (having retold Lewis Carroll’s tale of Alice attempting to play croquet by using a live flamingo as a mallet) wrote: “The problem of coupling man through consciousness with his biological environment is comparable [to Alice’s dilemma]. If consciousness lacks information about the nature of man and the environment, or if the information is distorted and inappropriately selected, then the coupling is likely to generate meta-random sequences of events.” Bateson’s point is that the coupling of conscious human thinking to its biological context is the attempt to couple two self-corrective systems. Our evolved total mind (including the unconscious) has the resources to do this, but consciousness alone does not. Bateson explains that the “content of consciousness” is not a representative sample of the contents of total mind but is “systematically selected.” We know, he says, little of the rules of this selection, but it seems to be strongly related to “purpose”, “attention” and similar matters about which, also, we have little knowledge. He argues that, if consciousness deals only with a skewed sample of the events in wider mind and is part of a recursive system that has feedback connections to that larger mental system, then our conscious views of ourselves and the world must be distorted. The true nature of our interconnected selves and the living world we inhabit is concealed from us, and this “must distort the processes of adaptation” (2000, 450). The cybernetic connectedness of self and world is concealed from us. We see only small arcs of the circuits of connectivity and we mistake these for straight-line causality indicating ways of going directly for what we want. Bateson told the 1967 London conference on “The Dialectics of Nature”: “[Human] consciousness . . . is organized in terms of purpose . . . to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want . . . dinner . . . a Beethoven sonata . . . sex. Above all it may be money or power” (2000, 439–40). ABDUCTION AND METAPHOR

Mary Catherine Bateson notes that the central theme in Mind and Nature was that evolution, of all kinds, is a mental process. Thus, evolution is systemic and so “shares key characteristics with other systemic processes,

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including thought.” Evolution and thought are analogous, “they share a pattern which connects,”so thinking about their similarities will lead to enhanced understanding and new insights about each. Both evolution and thought, the characteristics of each seen as enhancing the possibilities of the other, allow for “something like anticipation or purpose” (1988, 7–8). This process of seeking insight through consideration of analogies is what Bateson called, following C. S. Pierce, “abduction.” “Abduction” wrote Bateson, “was Pierce’s word for that part of the process of inquiry which proposes that a given set of phenomena is a case under some previously supposed rule” (1976d—reprinted in 1991a, 186). It is the process of reasoning from recognizable similarity in two or more different systems or situations, to reach new insights about one or both. It was Bateson’s reliance on abduction as a valid form of real-world reasoning that produced criticism when Mind and Nature was first published. Responding to these criticisms, Bateson claimed, first in a letter to the editor of the London Review (1980a, 2) and later in a taped address to the Lindisfarne Fellowship (1980f—reprinted in 1991a) that there is nothing wrong with what logical philosophers call “affirming the consequent.” Nick Humphrey, in reviewing Mind and Nature for the London Review of Books,9 had focused on Bateson’s argument for the mental nature of evolution. He claimed that to argue that “because evolution . . . life, ecology, the biosphere also [have] these properties . . . [they] must be the same kind of thing as mind . . . [is] at best a verbal conceit, at worst a piece of moral blackmail.” Bateson, he correctly claimed, had implied that “if the whole of organic nature is imbued with qualities of mind, then we as human beings should treat nature with the respect due to a human mind.” Humphrey, however, was unable to accept that this might be true. “Cutting down the rainforest” is not, he wrote, “equivalent to psychosurgery.” My own view is that, from today’s context of many more years of rainforest destruction (including the deliberate and systematic killing of forest-dwelling humans), species loss, climate change, and ecological threat, we can see that the prioritizing of commercial greed over prudent conservation is indeed equivalent to societal brain damage and that its reversal would be moral wisdom rather than blackmail. Humphrey proceeded to accuse Bateson of “logical sleight of hand” in attempting to rest his argument on an “affirmation of the consequent.” Bateson, he wrote, lists some necessary properties (characteristics) of “minds” and claims that as evolution has these properties it must be “a mind”—equivalent to arguing that since lack of postal deliveries is a property or characteristic of Christmas Day, then any Sunday must also be Christmas Day. In fact

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Bateson had clearly stated in Mind and Nature that his “criteria of mind” are both necessary and sufficient for a system to be called a mind: “If any aggregate of phenomena, any system, satisfies all the criteria listed, I shall unhesitatingly say that the aggregate is a mind” (1979a, 97). This seems to have escaped Humphrey. The misunderstanding led him to think that Bateson was framing his argument in the form of the “syllogism in Barbara” which requires two sets of “premises” (or statements of fact) which (if both are true) necessarily entail the truth of the third: If evolution is a mental process, evolution must have characteristics × if p then q Evolution has characteristics × q Hence, evolution is a mental process so p

This would be, by arguing backwards from the consequent (the conclusion) to the antecedent (the given facts), an “affirmation of the consequent”—which is a logically invalid form of argument. Bateson’s statement is actually that all systems which exhibit all these characteristics are minds: The process of evolution is a process possessing characteristics × All processes with characteristics × are mental processes So evolution is a mental process

a is a b all b are c a is a c

—which is a valid deductive argument. Expressed as a conditional statement, Bateson’s argument would be: If evolutionary process has characteristics ×, then it is a mental process if p then q Evolutionary process has characteristics × p Then evolution is a mental process. then q

—which is “affirming the antecedent,” again a logically valid form of argument. Bateson claimed, in a response to Humphrey that was published in the London Review of Books (1980a), that in the real world—which is distinct from the world of timeless logic—it is most necessary to affirm the consequent because the whole of the living world depends on such affirmations. Metaphorical means of information transfer are the channels by which the natural world perpetuates itself. The processes of evolution and those that govern the growth of organisms rely on the transmission of meaningful likeness. There are, wrote Bateson, other names for “this pattern of thought.” One of these names is “science.” “The whole of science is (or claims to be) knit together by assertions of the general type: ‘this set of phenomena is an example under the same rule as that set of phenomena’ . . . The unity of science depends on it.”

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To say it is wrong to affirm the consequent is to “reduce the human race (and all our fellow organisms) to the level of silly computing machinery.” Logical, deductive syllogisms depend on the identification of subjects and their assignment to classes, e.g. “all rabbits (subject) are mammals (class).” Abduction depends on the equating of predicates and the formation of a class from the equated predicates—which is a way of saying that understanding aspects of one thing, system, or whatever, can help us to understand comparable aspects of another phenomenon. Bateson proposed an abductive (or metaphorical) syllogism, a “syllogism in grass”: Men die Grass dies Men are grass

This practice of comparing and associating important similarities between different beings is, he claimed, profoundly human. It is fundamental to our natural history or biological development. It engages with the more-than-conscious mind, the mental activity described by Freudian psychologists as “primary process.” It enables the coherence of dreams and provides the “universal base of all thought.” He wrote that other common names for affirming the consequent are poetry, metaphor, and sacrament: “This is my body . . . this is my blood.” Bateson claimed that many consequents within biology “badly need affirming.” We need to see that “what is claimed by theologians as due to transcendental interference is also due to immanent mind.” This will not “detract from the religious importance of the generalizations (e.g., that evolution and thinking are formally similar processes). It will simply convert biology into a religion.” However, to think of the two types of syllogism as having the same species of cogency would be fundamentalism. Scientism denies the “syllogisms in grass,” fundamentalism would assert that both methods of reasoning have the same sort of cogency. In the speech (1980f, reprinted in 1991a, 235–42) to the Lindisfarne Association, Bateson examined the implications of relying only on logical analysis generated within a linguistic matrix when thinking about the living world. Syllogisms in Barbara require propositions (statements of what is the case) that are linked in subject-predicate form. Bateson’s “grass” syllogisms do not require this. If it is true, said Bateson, that the grass syllogism does not require subjects, and the conventional syllogism in Barbara does require subjects, then the latter could only exist after the development of language and the conceptual separation of subject and object by human beings. Hence: “Until 100,000 years ago, at most a

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million years ago, there were no Barbara syllogisms in the world, and there were only Bateson’s kind, and still the organisms got along all right. They managed to organize themselves in their embryology to have two eyes, one on either side of a nose . . . to organize themselves in their evolution. . . . And it became evident that metaphor was not just pretty poetry . . . not either good or bad logic, but was in fact the logic upon which the biological world had been built, the main characteristic of this world of mental process” (1991a, 241). Bateson’s syllogisms in grass function thus: Men [are beings who] die Grass [is a being that] dies Men are [as] grass

all A are B all C are B all A and all C are B

If a being is a man then it will die If a being is grass then it will die Men are like grass in that they will die. Men and grass are members of the class of those who die Men is a metaphor [i.e., enables insightful understanding] for grass Grass is a metaphor [i.e., enables insightful understanding] for men.

As Mary Catherine Bateson comments in Angels Fear (192), Bateson was fascinated by the idea of syllogisms of metaphor as a basic intellectual strategy: the “search for insight through analogy,” which might, by finding significant similarity, permit further insight. Several critics have argued that the way that Bateson evokes mind is “just” a metaphor. The implication is that metaphor is a less true or complete way of describing the world than are the alternative possibilities of description. Bateson claimed that to suggest that metaphor cannot represent true situations in the world is mistaken. Metaphor, he said, is one of our most effective tools for representing and describing aspects of the world. It can, especially when referring to complex wholes, be the most effective method of conveying a real understanding, often more effective than scientific or rational description and analysis. Bateson claims metaphor as the primary aspect of communication, learning, information transfer, evolution, and growth in the living world. Bateson does not, however, concede that he is using metaphor when he describes the presence of mind at all scales in the living world. Even if this was so, he claims, the concept would retain its explanatory function and power. If the understanding of mental systems or minds as prevalent in the world in the ways Bateson suggests was to be thought of as metaphorical only, we would need alternative explanations or descrip-

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tions that would account for the phenomena. A metaphor is a word that stands for other words. There would have to be other words that would describe the mental processes. I suggest that there is no more adequate description for the interactive complexities in the living world, than that offered by Bateson. Those living complexities constitute (and are constituted by) “mind” and “mental process.” The core material of Mind and Nature is the chapter called “The Great Stochastic Processes” (145–85) on evolution as an all-embracing learning process and as a form of ongoing memory. Learning is evidenced by adaptive evolutionary change in the gene pools of populations of organisms (118, footnote), creativity is demonstrated when new forms, patterns, or types of activity emerge. Such learning became, for Bateson in his later years: “all events in which an organism or other system receives information . . . from the simplest and most transitory case—the firing of a single sensory end organ—to receipt of complex chunks of information which might determine the creature’s character, religion, competence, or epistemology” (1988, 46). MEMORY

Clearly, there is functional memory in the mental process of many organisms. Memory is also to be found in systems linking organisms and in permitting their evolution. It is exemplified by information encoded in DNA and enabling evolution and reproduction, also in embryology— the postreproductive growth of organisms. Whatever retains and transmits shape, pattern, or the ability to respond to environmental challenge or other knowledge that the system or organism will need in the future is functional memory. The fact that the effect of information traveling round any cybernetic loop always depends on the state of the relationships in the loop on the previous circuit is a demonstration of memory in itself. The difference between the current information and the previous state is what triggers response. For instance, the homeostatic processes of body temperature or respiration control are activated by the “remembered” difference between the present state and the optimum states of body heat or carbon dioxide concentration. KNOWING

Knowing and knowledge as aspects of the working of mental systems are central to Bateson’s groundbreaking understanding of epistemology and ontology. To the epistemic question of how we (or any other scale of

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mental system) can know, and the related ontological question of what we understand to be there in the world to be known, Bateson offers answers that have been misunderstood and misrepresented but which, I believe, contribute vital dimensions to the possibility of our human reintegration into the living world. We must therefore consider the capacity of mental systems to contain or acquire knowledge in the context of this ontology and epistemology. Mind and Nature is a combination of what Bateson originally saw as two separate book ideas: firstly a book about the theories of biological evolution “re-examined by the light of cybernetics and information theory” and, secondly, a basic introduction to epistemology—“about how we can know anything.” In the process of writing he came to see that the two are not separable: evolution is a form of learning and human (and other) knowing of the world is an evolving mental process. These are necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of mind. I have added this last statement from the body of Bateson’s writings to my paraphrase of his list of mental criteria because, as we have seen, reviewers of Mind and Nature interpreted these as being merely necessary conditions. They thought that the criteria might plausibly be held to be characteristics of mind but not that they could, without addition of something essential, be enough to identify mind. SOME FURTHER KEY TEXTS

Bateson offers his mature core thinking in Mind and Nature and in Angels Fear, from which come the following key statements. These will reinforce what we have learned about minds and mental process. He writes, perhaps a little provocatively, of the verities, the necessary and lasting truths by which the world is governed: “The Ten Commandments, the rules of morphogenesis and embryology and the premises of grammar in animal and human communication are all part of the vast mental process which is immanent in our world and is as real, and as unreal, as syllogistic logic” (1988, 162). I interpret this passage as saying that the injunctions that underlie our religious and social behavior are strictly comparable to the ways that the processes of evolution and growth “know” how to produce the shapes and patterns that form the living community of the world. Bateson suggests that “the rules” that provide the basis of consistent coding that makes language and other forms of communication possible, are also common to all living systems. All these relational processes are present in the material world but must not be reified as concrete

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“things.” Like the symbols and syllogisms manipulated (within their proper field) by logic, they are relational systems, latent and actually effective in the world, but are not to be seen as objects. In Mind and Nature (4–5) Bateson offers an example of his mature position on epistemology: The whole ongoing process of evolution is a “knowing” that includes and enables our own human knowing. Writing of a “we” who might know “anything,” Bateson includes “of course . . . the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg and the Senate of the United States.” The “anything” which these minds can know includes “how to grow into five-way symmetry, how to survive a forest fire, . . . how to grow and still stay the same shape . . . learn . . . write a constitution . . . invent and drive a car . . . count to seven. . . . Particularly—how to evolve.” (my emphases). Evolution and learning, Bateson says, “must fit the same formal regularities.” Note that knowledge is always of how to do an activity, how to engage in process. Evolution is the prime example of a mind, a mental process. He writes: “I was . . . starting . . . to reflect, not upon our own knowing, but upon that wider knowing which is the glue holding together the starfishes and sea anemones and redwood forests and human committees” (Bateson’s emphasis). That is, on what is common to the epistemology of systems throughout the natural world. He claims that there is a single sort of knowing which “characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans.” He writes: “I was transcending that line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human being. . . . Mind became, for me, a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.” For Bateson, mind is the process that enables all living systems, from the very small to the vast ecologies of the Earth. He emphasizes the commonality between human minds and the rest of nature: “It was . . . the more complex, the aesthetic . . . the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature . . . [The human’s] wisdom . . . bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects are just as ‘animal’ as his cruelty.” Mind, for Bateson, is the necessary and inevitable function of the appropriate complexity wherever it occurs—“in a great many other places besides what is in my head and yours. . . . A redwood forest or a coral reef with its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure” (2000, 490). By using these excerpts we can summarize the shape of Bateson’s insight. Mind is everywhere in the living world, not resident only in humans and not only in other sentient animals. Mind is evident at every scale from the microscopic to the vast system of the living Earth. It is to be seen as focused within individual beings, groups, ecosystems, and the

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Gaian whole itself. Every living system or process is mental in kind. Any system that responds to stimuli (information), that opts from its internal resources for one possible response among others, that acts so as to hold itself together, or to grow, or to change—is behaving in ways comparable to thought. Such systems are, effectively, thinking. Bateson’s minds are entirely process. They are not things. They are “empty.” “Mind” he says, “exists only in its ideas, and these again are no-things . . . the ideas are immanent, embodied in their examples” (1979a, 11). There is no mind, says Bateson, that is separate from “body,” from physical things, but the process, the “going on” between the entities that are related by the system is there in the world, real though not material. Things are the product of mind. Change in things provides the evidence for the existence of the mental systems. All this, for Bateson, is mental process taking place within physical reality. This, he claims, is good science, capable of being rigorously analyzed, “framed in precision, able to coexist with mathematical formalism”(1988, 7), evidenced entirely from the material world and not dependent on “romantic supernaturalism” (1988, 61–64). It is important to emphasize that Bateson’s understanding of mind and mental process as being endemic in the living world is the keystone of all his theoretical thinking. His monism, his denial of dualities, his insights into the importance of aesthetic awareness, the possible gift of the “grace” to recognize again our planetary integration, his understanding of the sacred nature of the whole; all these depend on his core theory of minds. In the light of the material presented in this chapter, I suggest that Gregory Bateson’s understanding of the systems of the world as “minds” is a much needed insight, an ontological revisioning of the living Earth that we should learn to value and accept. Bateson has provided a seminal insight for us all. His understanding of the world as mind and his identification of this vast mental system with “the sacred” offer a resolution of our present perplexity about how to respond to increasing ecological disruption. His insight can help us to regain an understanding, compatible with emerging science, that is essentially a religious grasp of our unity with, and within, “nature.” His monistic understanding of the world may help us to develop attitudes of respect, reverence, and awe that could yet save our species and many others from annihilation. The support of these claims is the concern of later chapters.



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The Evolution of Bateson’s Thought about Aesthetics The Earlier Years

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regory Bateson has been dead for more than twenty-five years but, by carefully interpreting and relating scattered and sometimes obscure statements, he may be found to have new and valuable things to say. In this and the following chapter, I will set out the development of his many-faceted understanding of the aesthetic and the beautiful. Even with the lapse of years, Bateson’s thought provides much that is novel and useful for our current understanding of aesthetics: in the biological world, in the realm of human art creation and appreciation, and in connection with our access to what he came to call “the sacred.” This last aspect is the main focus of chapter 7 but it will be given preliminary consideration in chapters 5 and 6 from the perspective of Bateson’s claim that aesthetic process is, at once, “part of man’s quest for grace” (1972d; 2000, 129) and a way of recognizing and reaccessing the sacred. I will claim that his vision of human aesthetic engagement with the natural world offers a way in which we may indeed recover a “grace” that will renew our lost understanding of the intimate interdependency that links our species with what we call “our environment.” Bateson never clearly set out his theory of aesthetics but, by bringing together his various writings, he can be seen as offering an account of how humans can and should make art and live aesthetically within nature. This is much more than a view of how individuals can appreciate the beautiful in nature and in artworks. His progress toward this understanding was gradual. Much of what he said and wrote about the aesthetic appears in the context of other lines of thought. Only in his later years do we find anything like a clear statement of his position or a plainly expressed claim for its central importance for the survival of our species. It has been necessary to examine all Bateson’s 228 published papers, speeches, and books in order to assemble a cohesive account of his meanings. This work reveals that his understanding of the biological 69

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importance of beauty and the psychological importance of our human aesthetic processes, in both the creation and the appreciation of beautiful things, is essential to us now in our need to make wiser ecological decisions. Bateson’s understanding of aesthetics is closely interrelated with other key concepts and ideas so these chapters are cross-referenced to, and codependent upon, matters dealt with in the chapters on the nature of mind, religious process and the sacred. They are also linked with the topics of metaphor, language, learning, and the nature of process. It will become evident that, for Bateson, “the aesthetic” and “the sacred” became almost synonymous. In some of his later work he equates the aesthetic with the vast systems of the universe. For him, the outcome of “third-order learning” (discussed in chapter 3) can be something very like enlightenment. It can reveal “a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction” (1972e; 2000, 306). “MIND” AS ART PROCESS

Gregory Bateson’s understanding of art process is radically interlinked with and dependent upon his cybernetic understanding of mind as evident in all the living systems of the world. It will be useful, at this point, to revisit Bateson’s theory of mind as discussed in chapter 3 in order to appreciate its importance for artistic practice and our appreciation of natural beauty. Knowledge of Bateson’s concept of mind is necessary for understanding his views on art because it is the basis for his insight that all living systems or beings are irrevocably one. The living beings of Earth: viruses and bacteria, algae and plants, insects, reptiles, birds, mammals (including humans), the great ecosystems, the seas, the atmosphere, and the geological processes together comprise a single interconnected mental system. Thus, radical interconnectedness and engagement is inescapable. This assumption about the mental nature of systems runs through all Bateson’s later work. Any view of artistic process that assumes separation between artist and artwork, between humans and nature, or even between human culture and the rest of the living world, he regards as absurd. Bateson was proposing a radically new and still not widely accepted way of thinking about mind. Remember that he does not suggest that all such minds have consciousness. His understanding of mind and mental systems is about what minds do, recognizing the presence of mind wherever we find appropriate activities going on. Even conscious or self-

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conscious minds have many unconscious levels. Most workings of mind, even in humans, never reach “the screen of consciousness,” as Bateson termed it in discussion with Henryk Skolimowski and others in 1979 (1980b reprinted in 1991a, 299). For Bateson, deeply influenced by cybernetics, minds or mental activities are seen in terms of information flow. His criteria of mind were extensively discussed in chapter 3 but the following paraphrase will provide a link between his understanding of mind and artistic process. Bateson holds that there is a mind wherever the following six conditions are all met: 1 There is a sufficiently complex “system” of related material components, for example, cells, plants, animals, groups, evolving species, ecosystems—or artists (painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, poets, or natural historians) in interaction with their surroundings. 2 These systems are linked by circular or more complex pathways or flows of information, for example, the circulatory, immunological, and sensory systems of an organism, the news media informing society, the symbiotic chemical processes of soil organisms and trees—or the many ways in which an artist forms her style by contact with other artists, by interactive process with her subjects, and with her own physiological and psychological processes. 3 The “information” consists of “news of difference,” for example, a change in environment, movement of another organism, growth in the system itself, a verbal message, a shift in rhythm, the “feel” of a surface, a contrast of color, texture, or a trick of perspective. This news of difference will be coded in various ways: neural impulses reporting “hot” about your fingertip to your brain, a chemical message penetrating the membrane of a cell, a warning shout coded in English language, a smell of fox alarming a grazing rabbit, a fall in popularity coded as questionnaire responses influencing a government’s spin doctors, a painting that communicates a sense of calm to the viewer, a change of tempo, dynamics, or key in a symphony or the changing light on a landscape. 4 There is available energy within the system, so that there can be physical response to the information. If you kick the dog, says Bateson, the information is in the kick but the dog responds with energy from its own metabolism. The “mind” in this case is the complex relationship of the dog and yourself. The artist must eat, he must maintain his physical ability and skills if he is to be able to use metabolic energy in painting, singing or crafting poetry.

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5 The interactions promote learning in the system, involve memory and result in knowing, all of these defined in much broader terms than those we usually apply to such concepts. The total relationship of government and population may be changed if unpopularity causes learning about more appropriate policies and if the people then respond with more approval. Such learning may become governmental and cultural “memory” as it becomes enshrined in law, and there will be knowledge gleaned from these events that will affect all parties. This example from a human interaction corresponds to an evolutionary process in which variation within a species is tested against a slowly changing ecosystem. For instance, those changes which render organisms better able to cope with global warming will be selected for. Though some organisms will die and others live, the species as a whole will have learned adaptive responses. These may be perpetuated (remembered) in the successful breeding population and will become genetic knowledge. Similarly in art: a group of painters, writers, or musicians may develop a distinctive style as they view and remember each other’s works or performances and their patrons or peers respond with approval or otherwise. 6 Such mental systems will be related by membership in larger and more general classes. As explained in the sections on learning in chapter 3, each mind will be nested within larger mental systems and may contain smaller identifiable minds. A group of artists (perhaps centered in a particular town) may develop a corporate style, so that the process of forming and maintaining the style, and the group itself, becomes a mental system or mind. The group (as a mental system) is, of course, composed of individual women and men, each of whom (as a mental system) brings to their art a whole history of training, experience, and influences from many sources, all of which were mental processes too. The artists are nested within the group and also within their friendship networks and the whole of the local community, as well as within their national group, the total economic system, and so on. The whole group of artists is similarly nested within the wider art world, the economy of the art market, the larger trends of style and thinking—all of which can be seen as Batesonian minds. Note, again, that these six factors are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of mind. All these criteria must be met—or the

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system of relationships will not be a mind. If they are all met the system is a mind—however unfamiliar such a view may be to us. As an example from the art of another writer that very beautifully illustrates what Bateson and I are trying to make clear, I offer a paragraph from the American nature writer Henry Beston’s lucid prose. In 1926 and 1927, while the young Bateson was embarking on his first anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea, Beston spent a year living literally on the great ocean beach of Cape Cod and saw many things that made him ask the questions that we are considering now. After watching the movements of flocks of shoreline birds, he wrote (in The Outermost House): “No aspect of nature . . . is more mysterious . . . than the flights of these shorebird constellations. The constellation forms . . . in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other . . . suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such thing . . . as a lead bird or guide. . . . My special interest is . . . the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time?” (Beston 1992, 23–25). A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH

Before attempting to understand Bateson’s interactive view of the aesthetic, grace, and mind as combining to offer a viable way forward for human society in the context of the present ecological crisis, it will be instructive to examine the personal process through which he attained his later wisdom. I have chosen to offer a biographical account of the development of Bateson’s aesthetics, rather than a thematic survey of his various publications for the following reasons. Firstly, the temporal sequence of Bateson’s intellectual development has intrinsic importance as an account of the evolving process of a major thinker. His unique progress through six or seven related but significantly different academic disciplines offers explanation of both the wide scope of his ideas and the way in which he became capable of melding insights from widely separated areas of thought. The process by which he came to combine knowledge and ideas from biology, anthropology, individual and group psychology, aesthetics,

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cybernetics, and the study of animal communication is, itself, worthy of inspection. Secondly, the intellectual development of a man who was able to produce an anthropological classic as his first book, a still famous theory of the etiology of schizophrenia (in both individuals and in societal processes), a revolutionary theory of mind, and a possibly crucial approach to planetary ecology, can be expected to provide valuable lessons to those who follow him. Bateson’s own cybernetic process is important; his various intellectual achievements are the product of the systemic progress of his thinking. If we can understand the ways in which he navigated the recursive systems that produced his miscellaneous professional situations and yet was able to make major contributions to thought, we may learn lessons in integration, holism, and ways of learning that will be useful to us now in our attempt to live sustainably on this planet. Gregory Bateson’s own course through a complexity of disciplines and often conflicting demands may offer an example we can now follow with advantage. His learning process may inform the learning we are all faced with in our attempt to keep the human species viable as a member, rather than as a pathology, within the Earth community. Thematic analysis of Bateson’s key contributions to the understanding of mind, the value of aesthetic engagement, the possibility of a consequent grace that may enable our reintegration within the systems of the Earth community, and our recognition of the totality of the mental systems of the world as the sacred, will follow in chapters 6 and 7. EARLY INFLUENCES

Gregory Bateson’s early life offers some explanation of his highly individual approach to the beautiful in nature and the world of art. Many of the influences absorbed by him as a child or young adult remained effective in his later years. As noted in chapter 2, Bateson’s father was deeply influenced by William Blake, an enthusiasm absorbed and maintained by Gregory throughout his life. William Bateson was a collector of artworks and a passionate connoisseur. The collections in the family home included oldmaster drawings, Japanese color prints, Greek island embroideries, and smaller collections of Chinese porcelains and bronzes, as well as paintings by Blake including the original of Satan Exulting over Eve (Lipset 1982, 53). There were family visits to continental museums and galleries. William Bateson “knew the European museums by heart,” a factor rele-

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vant to his appointment as a Trustee of the British Museum in 1922 and well illustrated in the story Gregory told to David Lipset about William dragooning the whole family (in Holland for a horticultural conference) into a pilgrimage to view the famous Poussin paintings at The Hague galleries: “We had absolutely to see these Poussins . . . a blazing August afternoon . . . he had his walking stick . . . a game knee . . . and he liked to rest. . . . We sweat down the whole length of the street. . . . He knew exactly where the pictures were . . . led us to the room and it had been entirely rehung with the works of Vincent Van Gogh. It must have contained fifty such things. . . . I can see him look around, like a rat somebody’s just triggered the trap on. . . . Then he picks up and walks out into the middle of the room, and with the metal covered stick, beats on the ground, screaming at the top of his voice, which was considerable, ‘I will not admire the works of Spirochaeta pallida!’” (53). The elder Bateson passionately admired art and artists and was an amateur painter himself. While he saw the scientific profession as important, he believed it to be inferior to the fine arts. He saw science as accessible to intelligent and diligent men, as the source of reliable knowledge and rational conduct, providing “the light which shows man in his natural perspective” (52) but (as Gregory was to do much later) he associated the fine arts with the sacred. William Bateson “worshipped art and regarded it as all but inaccessible to all but geniuses” (52). After the suicide of Martin Bateson, William wrote to Gregory, then just starting undergraduate studies in Cambridge: “The faith in great work is the nearest to religion that I have ever got and it supplies what religious people get from superstition. . . . Of course there is great work that is not science, great art, for instance is perhaps greater still, but that is for the rarest and is scarcely in the reach of people like ourselves. Science I am certain comes next and that is well within our reach, at least I am sure it is within yours” (Lipset, 1982, 96). His brother Martin’s own struggle in turning away, against his father’s wishes, from natural science toward literature and drama may have influenced Gregory’s later view of the importance of artistic process. During his own university years Gregory developed an intense interest in the work of Blake, as painter, poet, and thinker. He immersed himself in this new research, feeling that it was his first real and selfchosen academic project. Harries-Jones (1995, 21) suggests, claiming David Lipset’s “Early Biography” in John Brockman’s About Bateson (1978) as support, that Bateson felt he had rediscovered Blake in a way comparable to his father’s rediscovery of Mendel. I can find little support for this view in Brockman’s book or Lipset’s autobiography but there is

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no doubt that Bateson was much excited and deeply influenced by Blake’s life and work. When the Biological Tea Club in Cambridge decided to admit nonbiological topics during one summer term, he seized the opportunity to deliver a talk on Blake. Margaret Mead told Gregory’s biographer that “he somehow felt that instead of having his hands picked and put on the keys of the piano, that with Blake he was free to pick it himself” (Lipset 1982, 105–106). Blake became an abiding passion for Gregory. As late as the end of the 1960s Bateson was taxing the students in his Living Systems seminars in the University of Hawaii with such questions as “What could one conclude from William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience,’ given the notion that God created both the ‘Tyger’ and the ‘Lamb?’” Later still, when Stewart Brand visited and interviewed the sixtynine-year-old Bateson in Big Sur (Brand 1974a, 20–22), the latter was quick to search through his library for Blake’s engraving of Job “affrighted with visions,” very possibly the copy Gregory’s father and mother had bought to celebrate the birth of their first son, John, in 1898 (Lipset 1982, 53). Bateson wanted to make a point about the way we can be “squeezed up a level of abstraction” when confronted with an image in which two differing beings are superimposed—in this case God and Job, and God as God-plus-Satan. God and Satan, said Bateson, are “so intimately joined that you will never disentangle them. . . . The first evil evidently was the separation of good and evil.” Here, perhaps, is a clue to Bateson’s belief that any divinity governing ecological process must be both “Shiva and Abraxas” (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 150), both good and evil, dealing life and death dispassionately. Later in this conversation Bateson emphasized his view that many things we consider separately are in fact closely related: schizophrenia, humor, the arts, poetry, and religion. Investigating any one of these throws light on any of the others. Detailed study of relevant Bateson papers shows that he sees the processes of art as a particularly important aspect of mental process and recognizes that these processes are not limited to humans. The activities of many organisms and many complex living systems are strictly comparable to human artistic processes. Of his own creative process in melding two originally separate writing projects into Mind and Nature, he writes (as noted in chapter 3) of his realization that a single sort of knowing characterizes both evolution and the thinking of groups of humans. The characteristics of nature and the characteristics of humans are, he realized, the same. It is complexity, beauty, intricacy, and elegance

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that characterize both. As we saw in chapter 3, Bateson thought our ideas of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, wisdom, our bodily grace, and our capacity for making beautiful objects to be just as animal as our cruelty (1979a, 5). This is a crucial aspect of the essential oneness that Bateson sees in the world. It is because of the identity of human and other creative processes that, for us, the practice of art (in the widest senses) is integrative. Bateson eventually came to see, by the process I detail below, that art is a tool that we can use in refinding our lost heritage of inclusion in and membership of nature. One key thing to remember is that Bateson claims convincingly that nothing can ever be isolated from its context. It is the context, the web of interrelating, that connects each thing to every other thing. Bateson sees context as pattern. It is too easy for us to understand a concept like pattern as something fixed, like the pattern printed on a piece of cloth. For Bateson, pattern is always dynamic—formed by all the shifting relationships that make up the ever-changing dance of social, biological, and psychological contexts. This dynamic interweaving is “the pattern which connects” (1979a, 8). Remember also that “psychological” is not only about human mental process. If mind is endemic in the whole biological world, “psychological” considerations must apply to nonhuman as well as human systems. Bateson equates truth with beauty, falsity with ugliness. The great scientific discoveries have always, he says, “been elegant.” In the following section I will examine some Bateson texts and will show how his emphases on aesthetic beauty and the pattern of contexts gradually emerged as his own academic contexts changed. Most importantly, the analysis of these texts will show how his view of the process relationships between entities and his awareness of the presence of living pattern at all scales of process produce a monistic understanding of the total unity of the systems in the natural world. THE PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF BATESON’S UNDERSTANDING OF “ART” PROCESS

We turn now to examine Gregory Bateson’s understanding of “the aesthetic,” artistic process, and artistic appreciation in various writings. A progressive series of developmental changes will be seen. Dates of publication and writing sequence indications are from Rodney Donaldson’s definitive bibliography in A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1991a, 314–35).

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1925 (with William Bateson) “On Certain Aberrations of the Red-legged Partridges” Bateson’s first published work (1925), a collaboration with his father, is little more than the record of a possibly influential experience that may help to explain later emphases. It concerns a number of instances of aberrant plumage in partridges shot in areas of England, Switzerland, and Italy. Gregory, aged twenty-one, sent by his father to examine the Swiss birds, produced a very detailed and systematic description supported by photographs. In this description he shows awareness of symmetry and of systemic influences in the coloration of plumage. The “discussion” section, perhaps written by William Bateson only, speculates on possible genetic influences, suggesting “wave-motion” as contributing to the banding or barring of feathers. There is no specifically aesthetic content. 1932b (written 1930) “ Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River” This is the text of Gregory Bateson’s Masters thesis, published in the journal Oceania, the record of his first anthropological expedition to the tribal communities on the Sepik River in New Guinea. He found the Iatmul people to have a particularly “high” culture and comments that “almost everything is ornamented.” This is the first evidence of interest in “decorative art”: There is “richness of artistic production,” “grotesque fancy,” “with few exceptions every object made by the Iatmul is ornamented,” possibly because useful objects were frequently given as ostentatious ceremonial gifts. Some of the “art,” Bateson notes, has reference to totemic ancestors so he was already aware of the contextual nature of artistic practice. However, in his later recollection of Sepik culture (notably in “Arts of the South Seas” [1946c] below), he shows a much more sophisticated understanding of the importance of artistic process. 1936a Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View Gregory Bateson’s first book, the product of his years of anthropological study in New Guinea, contains little significant reference to art, aesthetic process, or natural beauty. There are descriptions of ceremonial dress, masks, buildings, and dances but these are analyzed in terms of ritual and social function only. The 1958 epilogue to the second edition re-

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interprets much of the material in terms of cybernetics but, again, there is no overt emphasis on the aesthetic. Lipset (1982, 140) notes, however, some “aesthetic inclinations” that “broadened [Bateson’s] approach” to Iatmul society. In the opening paragraphs of the book Bateson notes the contrast between artistic and scientific approaches to writing accounts of societies. He contrasts the functional school of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski with the work of travelers such as Charles Doughty and the “splendid representations of our own culture in such novels as those of Jane Austen and John Galsworthy.” Bateson’s own desire to describe the Iatmul society completely and in detail included, significantly, his awareness of the importance of ethos: the emotional tone of the society and the feelings of people that underlie this. 1942a (With Margaret Mead) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis Mead and Bateson, newly married, spent most of the time between 1936 and 1939 in the study of indigenous societies in Bali. The first period was spent in the mountain village of Bayung Gedé followed in late 1937 by a stay in the lowland village of Batoean, where a community of Brahman and casteless artists, primarily painters, lived. In this latter period of study they commissioned and purchased a collection of over twelve hundred paintings (Geertz 1995, 1). The product of the whole period of study included more than twenty-five thousand still photographs, twenty-two thousand feet of film, and eleven hundred carvings of “small kitchen gods.” The choice of such an innovative method reflects three concerns. The first was a very real prioritizing of the visual: their conviction was that it is seeing behavior, seeing what people actually do that can cross cultural boundaries and result in learning. Their second concern was linked to this. They were anxious to avoid the distortions inevitable when attempting to translate knowledge of the culture into Western terms by means of language. Believing that it is “types of behavior” that embody the abstraction that we call “culture,” Bateson and Mead were attempting to get their understanding across the barrier of cultural boundaries by using an almost entirely pictorial method. The third reason for adoption of the photographic method was that they wished to obviate any change of perspective and cultural understanding that might be acquired by themselves as observers in the course of fieldwork. The photographs themselves would be the field notes. Mead had written in their funding application to the Social Science Research Council: “The camera will neither be naive at the start nor experienced at the end of the research.”

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The photographs were not intended to be aesthetic, though many are beautiful (Sullivan, 1999, 4,16). Balinese Character was published in 1942. It contains, carefully and systematically selected, one hundred full-page plates containing a total of 759 photographs, all of Balinese people exhibiting “behavior.” Though there is a separate description of Balinese culture (by Mead) and a further “Ethnographic Note,” the photographs (taken by Bateson) are accompanied only by his brief factual notes. The large collection of paintings by native artists made by Bateson and Mead at this time shows an amalgam of traditional Balinese styles and Western influence. Mead (1995 [1972], 229) noted that many of the resident Europeans were artists, dancers, or musicians. She claims that these people were interacting with the Balinese artists, introducing new materials and themes, encouraging and criticizing the native artists and, thus, raising standards of execution and appreciation. These Western painters had been resident in Bali for some years. While encouraging the native painters to produce work for sale to tourists and other visitors to Bali, they had taught occidental techniques and ideas of design to them. This pictorial emphasis in their methods of research suggests that Bateson and Mead were already aware that culture could be communicated more successfully by means of artistic process than in language, even when the form of the art product is in transition. The pictures and other artworks may have revealed and explained aspects of the Balinese culture to Mead and Bateson themselves. However, it seems Bateson and Mead attached little importance to the collection because all but one of these twelve hundred paintings remained in their packaging for many years and there is no record of either Gregory or Margaret producing work specifically related to the collection. Hildred Geertz (1995, viii) comments that when Margaret Mead first showed the paintings to her in 1972 they were still packed in their original wrappings: copies of the London Times from April, 1938. The intervention of World War II and the almost simultaneous birth of their daughter Mary Catherine may well account for the long-term shelving of their intentions for these paintings. Mead (1995, 235) lists the paintings with other “new kinds of samples” made available by the richness and diversity of Balinese culture. They attended twenty birth feasts, experienced and recorded the entry of little girls into trance states on fifteen occasions, collected six hundred carvings of kitchen gods from one village to compare with a similar collection from another village. They purchased paintings by a hundred Balinese painters including forty examples of one artist’s depictions of his own dreams.

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One painting that did not remain in its packaging was given by Gregory to his mother and recovered by him after her death. This painting, taken from his wall, was the example he presented to the 1967 conference on “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art,” (2000, 128–56) discussed in chapter 5. 1944d “Form and Function of the Dance in Bali” In “Form and Function of the Dance in Bali,” which Bateson coauthored with Claire Holt in 1944 (though the observations must have been made before the outbreak of war in 1939), the analytical emphasis is on the relationship of the “peculiar character of the dance to the character of the people concerned and to the whole pattern of their culture.” The material is almost entirely descriptive, the dances are regarded as cultural expression, to be compared and contrasted with the dances of other cultures. The author’s interest is in skills (the dancers are trained from early childhood), in motive and purposes (many dances are performed as offerings to the gods), and in style (there is striking angularity in the motions and gestures, great precision in performance). Although it is noted that these characteristics are common to Balinese pictorial and plastic arts also, there is no suggestion that the dance is a significant art form; it is simply described as behavior expressing cultural characteristics. 1946c “Arts of the South Seas” This article is a review of an exhibition, Arts of the South Seas, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In terms of aesthetic and artistic awareness, it is very different from any previous Bateson statement. There is a new emphasis on the importance of aesthetic process for enabling cross-cultural understanding and a new depth of analysis. The work in Bali in the late 1930s appears to have convinced Bateson and Mead that the transmission of understanding of one culture to members of a different one is enhanced by pictorial illustration of behavior. They had, however, related this only to the academic and scientific project of anthropological study. Nevertheless, Bateson had benefited from the years of working with Mead both in Bali and in America during much of the war. Mead’s remarks in Blackberry Winter (1995, 209, 224) show that, from her perspective, when they first met, Bateson had been “floundering methodologically” and by the time they reached Bali, both in their early thirties, Mead was feeling that she had

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already completed a lifetime of work but Gregory felt that his life’s work still lay ahead. As noted in chapter 1, between the years in Bali and 1946 Gregory Bateson engaged in cultural studies (including film analysis), the training of military personnel, propaganda, and some active war service in Ceylon, India, Burma, and China. This had, most importantly, been followed by the Macy Conference on “Cerebral Inhibition” with its attendant introduction to the ideas of cybernetics, the second conference on “Teleological Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems,” and, during the period of this exhibition, the third on “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” The massive and increasing tensions between American and European cultures must have made Bateson aware of the potential results of failure to understand other peoples. Not least, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the prospect of an arms race with the USSR must have made him aware, for the first time, that our whole civilization and possibly the future of our species were under threat. The Arts of the South Seas exhibition consisted of art objects collected by anthropologists and others from North Queensland, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, New Guinea (the Fly and Sepik river regions), New Britain and New Ireland, the Solomon and Admiralty Islands, Polynesia, and Micronesia. There was also some Maori material and several exhibits from Easter Island. Bateson saw the necessary criteria for the exhibition’s success to be (1) whether the spectator could know what the art objects were, (2) whether “some feeling for the emotion” invested by the makers was conveyed, and (3) whether the totality of the exhibition was successful in conveying a “whole aesthetic experience” that would be consonant with “what, if anything, the exhibit says.” Bateson asks if the exhibition “makes sense,” which, he suggests, is about coherence in such aspects as sequence and lighting that could enable “meaning” to be transmitted. He recognized that the exhibition as a whole had “form”: in fact, a structure of climax. Containing many works of art, it was a work of art itself. Bateson’s emphasis on coherence is interesting and I expected to find further development of this theme in his later consideration of aesthetic matters. In fact, I have found no further mention of coherence though, clearly, the term is closely linked to other key themes that he was later to develop: integration, relatedness, context, nonduality, and monistic unity. The art, claimed Bateson, depicted the ethos of each culture. Individual exhibits showed particular characteristics, such as the “assertive art” of the Sepik River peoples. Here Bateson had a rich store of personal

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knowledge and experience to utilize. Now seeing what he had previously called “decoration” as real art, he found “an immanent totemism,” which conveyed the integration, through time, of the people and their mythical ancestors: the “crocodiles, weevils, and ancestors with noble noses are the people who made them.” Meaning is transmitted because there is identification of totemic creatures with the human artist and the admirer of the art. Such meaning seems to emerge from the integration of the present life of the people with their historic or mythical past. He wrote: “The people will state this even more clearly than the Americans can tell you what their own eagle stands for. They will say that the bird is ‘Our warfare. Our anger.’” This is significant as the first clear example of Bateson’s later emphasis on the integrative and engaging functions of artistic process. This art, he wrote, depicts the tribal community process, its reliance on genealogy: The names of living persons are the names of the art objects. “The positive assertion, which equates the self with a traditional ego ideal, is the basis of the art.” None of this had occurred to him when writing Naven. Bateson also saw new importance in the fact that for the Sepik River people the art, always produced by men, is kept and used within the ceremonial house, which is itself thought of as feminine. He is recognizing here a cybernetic nesting of systems, though he is not yet calling these systems “mental.” Bateson’s developing aesthetic awareness revealed to him the importance of the sequencing of experiences as the viewer passed through the exhibition. There was a progression, assisted by “vistas,” through which could be seen earlier and later stages of the exhibition, a form of crossreferencing that enabled the viewer to experience the whole sequence as a work of art itself. In a later letter (1980h) Bateson, remembering the exhibits representing cultures ranging from New Guinea to Polynesia, wrote: “There are continual cross-echoes. It is as if a vocabulary of artistic expression had been scattered over the area, and each people had built up out of this vocabulary their own syntax and their own set of things that they wanted to say.” He compared this experience to listening to a symphony, at one level of description simply a sequence of single musical sounds; at another an integrated formal experience: We “may be utterly unable to define the emotional content of these themes, still less to say . . . how . . . a given theme may gain special value . . . from its position in the sequence. . . . It is . . . this order of artistic appropriateness that makes for greatness.” Bateson saw the exhibition as being integrated by a theme that the organizers had not recognized. This theme, he claimed, was the stages of the human reproductive process: bodily awareness, phallicism, virility,

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“a period of crystalline clarity undistorted by sexual fantasy” (perhaps the experience of pregnancy?), and then parturition. Here is further evidence of Bateson’s growing awareness of the participative nature of aesthetic experience. He claims that all spectators of works of art “participate . . . in a climax form which has spatial and temporal unity, and which owes its value to rhythms inherent in the human body.” Though this understanding was questioned by the exhibition organizer, Rene d’Harnoncourt, Bateson suggests that d’Harnoncourt had, consciously or otherwise, “proposed a hypothesis about the psychological place of artistic emphases and conventions in human life”; that the art styles of the various peoples have a real subconscious reference to the physiological stages he saw in the exhibition and to the human reproductive sequence. Possibly as a result of his recently acquired cybernetic perspective, Bateson was seeing the totality of the exhibition as a process. The form was climactic, related to human bodily rhythms and, thus, “makes sense.” It was felt, he said, as unity. This is another example of Bateson finding explanatory biological metaphors for complex processes; Margaret Mead had, at their first meeting, been impressed by his ability to move easily from one science to another, choosing analogies freely from biology, physics, and even geology when discussing problems (Mead, 1995, 209). In his final paragraph, Bateson suggests that this exhibition has proposed “a new field of collaborative work” between “anthropological knowledge” and “artistic sensitivity,” which “might lead to some advance in our understanding of the tangled emotional themes expressed in man’s diverse artistic conventions.” We should note that, in the 1940s, it was not only Gregory Bateson who was, newly, seeing indigenous art as worthy of the aesthetic attention of westerners. The postwar period saw a general emergence of openness to valuing the artistic products of other cultures on their own terms. Nevertheless, for Bateson, this exhibition and the experience of analyzing it, was a significant step toward his eventual recognition of artistic engagement as necessary to finding the grace that may enable ecological survival. 1949a “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State” Bateson was displaying a more developed interest in the art forms themselves by the time he produced “Bali: the Value System of a Steady State.” He notes a pervasive lack of climax in Balinese music and other arts. There is onward movement, sequence, and balance but, as in much of Balinese social life, there are no climaxes; any tendency toward an emotional peak is turned aside or neutralized in some traditional and

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socially endorsed way. Much time is spent on artistic activities, mainly devoted to ritual or religious purposes. While some artistic activity receives a minimal economic reward, Bateson sees the main motivation as the activity of performance and involvement in community process. Similarly, much effort is spent on preparing temple offerings, but there is no reward expected from the God. Bateson writes “Instead of deferred purpose there is an immediate and immanent satisfaction in performing beautifully, with everybody else, that which it is correct to perform in each particular context.” He writes, “it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based on bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance.” The community is “continually undertaking ceremonial and artistic tasks which are not economically or competitively determined. . . . This steady state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change.” I am concerned here only with Bateson’s own maturing understanding of artistic process but it should be noted that his view does not go unchallenged. Hildred Geertz, in the introduction to her book Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead (Geertz 1995, 2), writes that Balinese art reveals an underlying concern and fear about disaster, suffering, illness, or moral breakdown of the community. She sees much of the ritually focused art as being an attempt to placate the angry gods and protect the temple congregations from evil powers. Similarly, Gerald Sullivan, in his book Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Highland Bali: Fieldwork Photographs of Bayung Gede, 1936–1939 (1999), questions Mead and Bateson’s understanding of the Balinese culture. There is within Balinese culture, he writes, emotion, dignity, and the effective integration of children into social life. He suggests that Mead and Bateson have imposed their own idea of “an inhibited society” on their study of the Balinese. 1949d “Remarks in Modern Art Argument, the Report of the Western Round Table on Modern Art,” and “The Western Round Table on Modern Art” in Modern Artists in America It is clear that, by 1949, Bateson had achieved a reputation as an expert anthropological commentator on art. His membership of the “Western Round Table on Modern Art,” and his inclusion in the “Open Forum on the Exhibition of Illusionism and Trompe L’Oeil” both held in San Francisco during that year suggest a definite move into the art world. The Western Round Table event took place over three days in April of that year, mainly in private session (1949d, 80–83. Also in MacAgy, ed.

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1951, 24–29). It accompanied an exhibition of modern art and assembled, by invitation, a wide range of well-known artists. Panel members included painters Marcel Duchamp and Mark Tobey; composers Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenberg; art historians and critics Andrew Ritchie and Robert Goldwater; critic and music and art editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein; literary critic and novelist Kenneth Burke; and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The moderator was philosopher and historian George Boas. Gregory Bateson appeared as cultural anthropologist and lecturer at the University of California Medical School. The proceedings of the conference, judging from the 18 percent of the total text that appears in the published abstract, show Bateson as taking a characteristic stance. In the early section on “The Cultural Setting” he is already stressing that those who make art or view art among such people as the inhabitants of New Guinea or the Dutch East Indies live “in a world which is totally intelligible.” In contrast to this, in our Western societies “most of what happens is mysterious, or is concealed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or in more obscure places even.” They “haven’t got themselves into quite such a confused state—in New Guinea.” The majority of people in such stable communities are able to bring an aesthetic emotion to bear on art because “They feel they know the world they live in, and the art objects which they see are produced out of that homogenous world. . . . But we live in a culture which is changing very rapidly.” What we feel or perceive, he claims, is very often nostalgia for an unchanging world, a resistance to change or an anxiety about change. Later, in the section on “Heritage,” Bateson suggests that our “museums and storehouses of art” are used by us “almost as methods of exploration,” while in societies that are changing slowly, such art is “used as affirmations.” In the context of a discussion of “the beautiful,” he notes that modern Western artists are “in search of principles, rather than engaged in reiterating the principles of former cultures.” Responding to Duchamp’s denial of “the existence of eternal laws governing art metaphysically,” Bateson is quick to say that “the ‘eternal principles’ have to come out on the mat and be faced” but claims that “the principles on which principles are built vary enormously from culture to culture.” He instances the Chinese understanding of poles of opposition as being essentially reciprocal functions of the same idea—“The good is a necessary development out of evil . . . love and hate are related”—and contrasts this with the dualities that permeate western thought. By implication, Bateson’s view of the beautiful is that it is similarly culture dependent.

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Faced, in the discussion on “Science and Art,” with the assertion that scientists are incapable of understanding “the innate” and are “the enemy at the present time of all the artist would represent” (and faced also with Boas’s invitation to “defend . . . your craft, Mr. Bateson”), Gregory responded with a claim that deterministic, manipulative science was already being replaced by cybernetic understanding. In the cybernetic view, the scientist is inside the system being considered and, hence, cannot be manipulative. This, Bateson claimed, puts the scientist on the same footing as the artist, he is a significant part of the thing he studies. This is, for Bateson, another early move toward an aesthetics of engagement. During the discussion on “Art in a Changing Culture,” Bateson suggested that modern art offers a refusal of the static, of being coerced into particular forms. Modern works are making statements about process, movement, and dynamics. We are turning away from art that tries to command our emotional responses, toward something harder, something more like Greek tragedy, which says starkly “this is how it is.” An example is T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland.” It is, says Bateson, “a grim, diagnostic statement . . . you can laugh at it, or you can cry at it, but there it is.” I see these claims as evidence of Bateson’s emergent holism and his already established recognition of the cybernetic nature of life process. In the session on “Art as Magic” Bateson claimed the support of R. G. Collingwood in asserting that “an action, a ritual, a work of art . . . contains magic insofar as it lays down in the actor or participant—usually unconsciously—some essential value premise.” This would not necessarily be a “plus” premise: “maybe a premise of mockery.” Bateson distinguished between those actions and objects that have that effect (and thus, are art) and those that are entertainment, merely catering for spectatorship. It is important to note that, again, the difference is one of involvement. What matters is the engagement of the artist or appreciator of the art with the art process itself. When the group considered “The Work of Art,” Bateson agreed with Milhaud and Duchamp that works of art are, in some sense, preexistent, waiting to be brought to birth. He claimed that it is the same with scientific theories, a view that was to fit well with his later views of mental process or “minds.” In the individual, the artwork or scientific theory may well be developing in the unconscious mind long before its emergence to conscious execution. In wider, larger societal minds, it may be necessary for the climate of scientific thinking or the trends in the art world to evolve or change, before the new ideas or art forms can be received by the community.

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The group moved on to consider “Cultural Circumstances.” In this discussion Bateson claimed that the critic shares the dilemma of the scientist: how to talk about such things as emotion without destroying the emotion. Critics and scientists are dangerous. This is a technical problem, so far unsolved but perhaps capable of solution, and it confronts the art critic as much as it does the scientist. He stressed that the mind has various parts and functions; the part we think with is different from the unconscious mind, which is the source of the work of art. The normal pressure is from the unconscious upward; it is difficult to sink conscious learning into the unconscious. These evidences of Bateson’s thinking in the context of the art world are gleaned from the partial report of three days of intense discussions. It may be useful, at this point, to summarize what has been disclosed as new in Bateson’s thinking. Bateson’s cybernetic perspective, which puts both the artist and the scientist inside the studied system, is given a little more shape here. There is a clear emphasis on the cybernetic process demanding an engaged stance in both artist and scientist, a stance that denies manipulation because when one is part of a system it is impossible to control it. Art, says Bateson, transmits values, often unconsciously, so widespread engagement in art process is needed for the values to be generally adopted. Bateson’s unease about bringing either art process or intuitive scientific searching into the realm of language (and, thus, into purposive conscious thought) anticipates much of his later concern with the effects of conscious purpose. Talking about art destroys emotion; framing artistic process within rational language necessitates bringing it into consciousness and this may deny the unconscious wisdom from which the art or scientific insight has been generated. Linear analytic thinking inhibits the unconscious and recursive processes upon which art and intuitive science depend. This is why critics and scientists can be dangerous. Also new is Bateson’s awareness of the connection between the complexity of our Western civilization, its rapid rate of change, and the consequent lack of understanding of their own lives on the part of most people. He sees that this is why art is a minority activity, largely (though not always consciously) given over to a search for meaning. He contrasts this with the intelligibility of traditional societies for most of their members and the consequent availability of art process to the majority, so producing art that affirms the culture. Art works are brought forth by the artist and there is often a time for which they must wait. This is true of science too: significant advances or new theories often have to wait for the scientist’s thinking to develop enough to give them form, or for a

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climate of acceptance in the scientific community or the wider society to develop. This is an early example of Bateson thinking in terms of group minds: “science” or “the art world” can be seen as composite mental processes that evolve their own emphases, criteria for acceptability, and readiness for change. 1949c Comments in “Panelist Comments—Open Forum on the Exhibition of Illusionism and Tromp L’Oeil” Bateson was a member of the panel at the “Open Forum on the Exhibition of Illusionism and Tromp L’Oeil,” held in California in June, 1949. Trompe l’oeil is a French term meaning “to deceive the eye of the viewer.” Paintings within this tradition aim at making the spectator think that the objects in them are real, rather than being representations. Bateson’s statements at this meeting (1949c, 14–35) included his assertion that the attempt to deceive the eye by extreme realism in painting is something limited to Western society, and his comment that attempting to paint with such realism makes any living object depicted appear lifeless. Bateson suggests that taboos on realism in other than Western cultures are rooted in the idea that the representation actually is, in some way, the object itself and so the existence of a representation diminishes or offers power over the being represented. He instances the fear of being photographed and the anxiety about breaking a mirror: It is our own image that is “taken” or shattered and so, magically, we are damaged. He asks whether this may, in our own culture, be related to the Aristotelian understanding of form and object (or substance) as being distinct from each other; an understanding that possibly no other culture in the world accepts. This, he says, may explain our metaphorical difficulties with the concept of “transubstantiation” of the sacramental elements in the mass, our confusion about the relationships between the symbol and the object symbolized and the way we can object so strongly to the idea that a symbol is a symbol. Much later, he was to claim that the ritual of the Mass requires that we approach it in a right-brain, metaphorical mode, avoiding bringing the process into the inappropriate field of rational thought. Bateson wonders if our sense of the insecure linkage of form and object and the Platonic understanding that the form possesses greater reality might itself be a stimulus to realistic painting. If, as in trompe l’oeil, we can feel as if we can touch the object there is a sense of tactual linkage and, hence, of affirmation of reality. We touch things in order to confirm our visual impressions. Touch is, for

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us, more certain than sight. All this might be a stimulus toward producing artworks that attempt the realism of trompe l’oeil painting. Many of these insights are further developed in Communication: The Social Matrix of Society, the fruit of Bateson’s 1949–50 collaboration with Jurgen Ruesch, discussed below. BATESON IN THE 1950s: SCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE AESTHETIC

The most important development in Bateson’s thinking in the early 1950s is, as recounted in chapters 2 and 3, the achievement of his insight about the mental nature of systems beyond the human mind. When this understanding was added to his existing awareness of the integrative nature of cybernetic aesthetic processes, Bateson was able to begin the move toward his later conviction that art process is capable of freeing contemporary humans from the vicious effects of “linear conscious purpose.” 1951a (with Jurgen Ruesch) Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry In 1951, in collaboration with Jurgen Ruesch, Bateson produced the book Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. Bateson, writing in 1950 and 1951, was in his period of major focus on psychiatry. This book is concerned only with human communication with other humans, though an increasing ecological awareness is evident in places. Apart from two collaborative chapters (in which art and artists are not mentioned) each of the two men made himself responsible for particular chapters so there is no doubt about which parts of the text represent Bateson’s thinking. By this time, Bateson was adapting his understanding of cybernetics and communication theory to the concerns of psychology. In chapter 8, “Conventions of Communication: Where Validity Depends on Belief,” he addresses “the idea that man lives by those propositions whose validity is a function of his belief in them” (1951a, 212–27—Bateson’s emphasis). This is, itself, a cybernetic, process-related thought. Though there is no reference to the aesthetic as a concept (in fact there is no index entry for it), art and artists are now seen by Bateson as members of the class of “the great creative fields of human communication,” along with play, religion, epistemology, and psychiatric theory (224). The membership of classes is, once more, an important feature of explanation and a basic tool for understanding the interrelationships that are the core of his message.

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The comments on art and artists appear in the context of a discussion of truth in linguistic communication. Clearly, Bateson sees art as a method of communication that has important similarities with language. He asserts, for instance, that the linguistic communication “The word ‘cat’ stands for a certain small mammal” is neither true nor false. It is only true if both partners in communication agree that it is true. To thus agree is, in fact, to make a statement about codification. The category of such statements is, he says, a category that includes many conventions: those of local phonetics, vocabulary, syntax, timing, pitch, emphasis, tone of voice, “and all the other modalities of verbal and nonverbal communication.” These are the conventions of coding. Statements about codification are a subclass of metacommunicative statements—statements that communicate about communicating. Metacommunication, claims Bateson, is necessarily subject to internal contradiction, to paradox, when it is combined with objective communication. This view is derived from Russell and Whitehead’s theory of “logical types” which, as we have learned, insists that no class of phenomena or ideas can be a member of itself. Hence, any statement that is both an objective statement (hence, a communication) and a statement about communication must produce paradox. As an example Bateson cites, in cut-down form, the paradox of Epimenides: “I am lying.” Statements about communication are members of one class (the class of metastatements) while the objective statements are members of their own class. Statements that combine objective messages and metamessages are, thus, members of two different logical classes, one of which contains the other and cannot itself be a member of the less general class. This is what produces the paradox or internal contradiction. This is another example of a situation where formal logic does not work in the “real” world. In practice, writes Bateson, “we must accept and must expect to find in the great creative fields of human communication—play, art, religion, epistemology, and psychiatric theory—paradoxes of the general type contained in the statement ‘I am lying’. . .” (1951a, 224). So what does Bateson mean when he writes that the processes of art must convey the paradoxical message “I am lying”? He considers the nature of play, art, and religion. In play the paradox is clearly visible: The mutually accepted rules, the conventions of opposition and competition, the agreed codification of gains or losses are all fictions. We say “It’s only a game.” In art the matter is less clear but it will help, writes Bateson, to consider the difference between art and propaganda. The propagandist attempts to convince the audience that what he says has more than the truth of normal communication, that his message is objective truth and not metamessage. In propagandist films and plays, the intention is to convince the audience that the

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fiction is objective truth, that what is portrayed is “typical” reality. Bateson was here using his wartime experience of analyzing Nazi films in order to understand their effects as propaganda (1943a, 1943b). The artist, however, says openly: “This is my creation—this is how I react to some part of my world,” admitting that this, no less than the propaganda, has the potential for paradox. “I am lying” is openly said as “this is my interpretation.” Bateson sees this as “perhaps the greatest formal distinction between art and propaganda” (1951a, 224–225). This same ambiguity of classification is, says Bateson, at the core of religion. Religion, he writes, contains complex objective, propagandic, and artistic elements that “have been a source of strife through the centuries.” Christianity is notorious for insisting on objective historical truth for its mythologies and even for its parables. “Anti-religionists” are “equally stupid” in denying metacommunicative or relative truth to any religious text that may be subject to objective doubt. For instance, Christianity carries inherent statements about God’s omnipotence and about the Father/Son/humanity relationship. Whatever their objective truth, these statements “carry implicit in their poetry a large number of assertions of the type we are here to discuss” (i.e., metacommunicative statements) such as “the brotherhood of man,” which has profound implications for mutual human relationships. Metacommunicative truth, which Bateson now begins to call “deutero-truth” is always a function of belief. In very many situations an increase in belief permits an increase in validity. Such “truths” are implicit in all religious processes: in mythology, ritual, ethics, and the ways we form worldviews. Religion, particularly, is “one of the mass agencies which determine our epistemology”—which determine, that is, how we form our knowledge of the world. In chapter 10, “The Convergence of Science and Psychiatry,” Bateson explores tendencies in science and in psychological practice. Prophetically, he sees a general trend away from “hard” nineteenth-century science toward a more “humanist” and interrelated way of working that includes the observer or therapist in the processes. In other words, he hopes for, and is willing to assist the process of change toward a more cybernetic, recursive and engaged science. To illustrate this (1951a, 267–68), he imagines four representative people standing in a wood. One is a woodsman engaged in cutting down a tree. He is watched by a nineteenth century scientist, a humanist artist (perhaps a poet), and a “modern” scientist “of the circularistic variety,” that is, a scientist enlightened by cybernetic understanding. The conventional scientist will calculate formulae for mass, energy, and the trajectories of a simplified axe blade striking a fictitious homogenous substance. He will “say very

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little about himself .” The humanist-artist will say much about himself, may include the observer in the description of the process—perhaps to the extent of excluding the woodsman. He may respond to the contrast between strength and precision (in the woodman) by using his own strength and precision to create an artwork that will carry important deutero-messages: messages about communication that may enrich the lives of others. He will have “said” something obscurely true about relationships: the relations between the woodsman and his axe, between himself and the woodsman, between himself and his art medium and between himself and his audience. Such “statements . . . are relevant to the human spirit. But the humanist—be he artist or even poet—will be unable to say what it is that he has said.” The cybernetic scientist will accept the nineteenth-century formulae but will go on from these to find that “the strokes of the axe form a complex series, each single stroke being partially determined by the state of the tree trunk left by the previous strokes,” thus leading himself into complexities not solvable by nineteenth-century science. He will include the purposive characteristics of the woodsman. He will be aware that he is himself part of the system he is describing. His study will include interactive relationships and many levels of reference (e.g., microscopic self-correction combined with great forces) in himself as observer/ analyst as well as in the woodsman. He comes close to the position of the artist but must also examine the internal logic of his synthesis and test it, so that he can know his own codification system. He will value knowing exactly what he is saying. The purpose of this tale is to provide a parable. Psychology, says Bateson, was (at that time) evolving in two directions, roughly comparable to the humanist and the “circularistic.” He sees the humanist psychologist as a person who works with patients as one human being with another. Intuitively responding from his own emotional resources, he can “act spontaneously out of his own integrity,” using that integrity as a check on his understanding—much as an artist might evaluate his work. The circularistic psychologist will be, quite consciously, a scientist. He will try to be totally articulate about his methods and results and will aim for predictability and logical coherence. Bateson sees the way forward as a compromise, a working together of the two types of operation. The intuitive humanist may find ways of working that are useful, the scientists will follow with precise examination and description. Some of the precision will be useful to the intuitive practitioner who may again improve his methods, drawing ahead of the scientists who must then describe the process.

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Finally Bateson stresses that complete description or prediction can never be possible because, as Gödel (1931, 173–98) proved, “no system of propositions can be complete in itself and not lead to contradiction” and, thus, the more humanist psychologist has no need to fear the scientific dehumanizing of his therapy. Hence, humanist and scientist, artist and theoretician are all needed to form the cybernetic unity of healing. 1954 Metalogue: “Why a Swan?” “Why a Swan?” ([1954] 2000, 33–37) is the first of Bateson’s “metalogues” to contain significant aesthetic material. The metalogues are fictional conversations between father and daughter, which may owe something to actual discussions that took place between Gregory and Mary Catherine but are mainly constructed by Bateson himself as a freeform method of exploring ideas and the relationships between ideas. Bateson was using the metalogue form before 1948 when he considered publishing a book of them (Harries-Jones 1995, 26). The earliest of those eventually published, “Metalogue: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” (composed in 1948, reprinted as 2000, 3–8) was written when Mary Catherine was nine years old and Bateson was living away from Margaret Mead and what had been the family home. Bateson describes a metalogue as “a conversation about some problematic subject”(2000, 1). This was one of his solutions to the difficulties of setting out innovative ideas within the academic paradigm. The structure of a metalogue is metaphorically related to its subject, though only some of the metalogues achieve this. “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?” is muddled in form as well as dealing with muddle, tidiness and order in its content. It is really about entropy and negentropy; about (as Bateson says) the fact that there are many more possibilities for disorder than there are for order. Bateson comments that “the history of evolutionary theory is inevitably a metalogue between man and nature in which the creation and interaction of ideas must necessarily exemplify the evolutionary process” (2000, 1). Harries-Jones (1995, 92) explains that “Metalogues are literary forms through which a ‘message’ or content of a proposition is presented in the manner of an imaginary dialogue.” He continues, interestingly: “More than this, metalogues reveal that any message is meaningless until it is related to a classifier or context which limits what the message can be about.” He points out that within the metalogue form it is possible for processes of reiteration, feedback, and circular logic to be used in ways precluded by the conventions of academic writing (92–93).

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In the glossary of Angels Fear Mary Catherine Bateson writes (1988, 210) that “A metalogue is a conversation dealing with some aspect of mental process in which ideally the interaction exemplifies the subject matter.” Bateson placed the metalogues at the beginning of Steps to an Ecology of Mind—the first items (after the introduction) that the reader encounters—an indication of their importance in his eyes. In her introduction to the 2000 edition of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mary Catherine stresses the importance that her father attached to the metalogues: “It is no accident that a group of the father-daughter conversations he called ‘metalogues,’ especially those written in the 1950s, stand at the beginning of this volume: Daughter is uncorrupted by academic labeling and becomes Father’s excuse to approach profound issues outside their boundaries.” Most of the metalogues were initially published in periodicals of the General Semantics Movement, which offered, to new disciplines such as cybernetics, an interdisciplinary setting for discussion of processes of communication (2000, ix). Returning to the current example, “Why a Swan?” the metalogue is about the representation of humans and other animals in art, specifically in Tchaikowsky’s Swan Lake ballet. Daughter asks “Why a swan?” to which Father responds: “Yes—and why a puppet in Petroushka?” Why represent a human by a puppet, or a swan by a human? They agree that both the puppet and the swan are “sort of” human, but move on to say that each is “sort of” the other though this is using “sort of” in different ways. Bateson claims that the relationship that is implied by “sort of” confers meaning and importance on “the whole of fantasy, poetry, ballet and art in general.” In examining the significance of this metalogue and Bateson’s increasing awareness of artistic process, we might remember his (then recent) love affair with a dancer in New York (M. C. Bateson, 1984, 49). The message of the metalogue is that we can only understand the metaphorical relationship of puppet, dancer, and/or human when we know what “sort of ” means. More precisely, the relationship is between ideas that we have of the dancer, the swan, and so on. Bateson contrasts this with an area where the relations are not “sort of.” Sacraments and sacrificial behavior are different. Men believe that the bread and the wine really are the body and the blood of Christ and will die for that belief. Is Swan Lake a sacrament? Possibly, because the costume and movements of the dancer could be for some people “an outward and visible sign of some inward and spiritual grace of woman.” The dance may be for some a metaphor, for others a sacrament. And which it is must be essentially “secret”—that is, it cannot be told, cannot be put into words. The dancer

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cannot tell you what the dance has meant. Elsewhere (1972d reprinted in 2000, 137; 1970a in 2000, 470) Bateson has quoted the dancer Isadora Duncan as saying “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” “I mean” writes Bateson (2000, 37), “first that great art and religion and all the rest of it is about this secret, but knowing the secret in a conscious way would not give the knower control.” It is the combination of the “pretend” and the “pretend-not” and the “really” that together constitute a sacrament; they get fused together. The logicians would keep them separate but ballets and sacraments are not made that way. It is evident from this metalogue that Bateson had realized that the metaphorical functions of art processes are the central and most important dynamic aspects of the relationship between artworks and those who interact with them. He was to go on repeating and explaining this truth to the end of his life. It is the metaphorical nature of art that may become the tool by which, even yet, we may seek the “grace,” the renewed capacity to live compatibly with the rest of the natural world. 1955a (written 1954) “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” It was in the early 1950s that Bateson, as director of the team working on “the role of the paradoxes of abstraction in communication” (which eventually produced the double-bind hypothesis) developed an interest in play among nonhuman animals. With Weakland, Haley, Fry, and Jackson he produced this report for an American Psychological Association conference in March, 1954 (1955a reprinted in 2000, 177–93). The report describes how the team watched and filmed monkeys and, later, otters engaged in what was clearly play in the San Francisco zoo. The core of the Bateson team’s thinking was the idea that real play is only possible if the organisms involved are able to transmit the message “this is play ” and also understand the message as a message about the nature of messages. That is, they must be capable of second-order thinking about messages. In play-fighting the signals passed between the animals were similar to but not the same as the signals in real fighting. “The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (2000, 180). This thinking was extended to such areas of interaction as threat, histrionic behavior, deceit, and ritual. The playing animals “do not quite mean what they are saying but, also, they are usually communicating about something that does not exist.” In humans, similar processes lead to all the complicated inversions of play, fantasy, and art. Bateson is suggesting that play is meaningfully similar (i.e., of the same logical type) to aesthetic engagement and that ritual is

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something of the same order. In ritual, we only partly separate the denotative action and that which is denoted. The action or symbol represents the denoted object. Finally, says Bateson, “in the dim region where art, magic, and religion meet and overlap, human beings have evolved the ‘metaphor that is meant,’ the flag which men will die to save, and the sacrament that is felt to be more than ‘an outward and visible sign, given to us’” (182–83). We half-consciously choose to blur the distinction between the information, signal, or code and the real object or event. As well as forming the basis for the double-bind theory, this work on play and the associated processes prepared the way for much of Bateson’s later thinking about aesthetic process. 1956b (written 1955) “The Message, ‘This Is Play’” Further material equating the processes of play with artistic activity appears in the record of the 1955 Macy Conference. Bateson was, for the first time, making a main presentation. This paper, “The Message, ‘This Is Play’” (1956b, 145–241) continues the theme of “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” claiming that the analogy between metaphor and play is close, noting that people commonly talk about play by saying what it is not: that it is not serious. He claims that it is very serious, very real. Bateson mentions Collingwood’s analysis of art which discriminates between art as useful or purposive and art “in the strict sense.” In the present context Bateson distinguishes between art as entertainment and art as “art proper.” In cinematic entertainment, he writes: “the satisfactions are completed at the end of the performance, whatever it may be. The catharsis is given within the frame of the movie and you come out relaxed but relatively unchanged; whereas, if the movie is propaganda you come out changed, because tension has been raised and not released, and this tension you now have to release in some form of action. In contrast to both of these, art proper is characterized by discovery of something new in yourself as a human being, either by creation of the art object or by the enjoyment of it” (215–16). Play, says Bateson, is similar in that it may be entertainment, or education, or a process of self-discovery. There is a close analogy between play and psychotherapy, in that they are both methods of self-discovery. Bateson’s personal interest in the abstract problem of play stems from a desire to know about those processes whereby organisms “pull themselves up by their bootstraps. . . . They do it, as far as I can see, by loosening up on the rules of communication—the onionskin structures within which they are operating. They play with these structures or rules and thereby

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move forward to new rules, new philosophies” (216). Something similar occurs in dreams. Anger, fear, anxiety, pleasure, delight, can all be found in play and dreams (231). Play, dreams, and art are of the same logical type and Bateson could see, by this time, that there is a possibility of gaining new perspectives and insights by means of engagement in aesthetic process. 1960a (written 1958) “The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia” This 1958 presentation (1960a; 2000, 228–43) to a psychiatric conference represented the combined thinking of the Bateson/Haley/ Weakland/Jackson/Fry collaboration. Bateson, speaking about techniques of treatment described by another conference participant, claimed that the discourse involved in his treatment must, if it was to be effective, have been enriched by enthusiasm or humor. There must have been “some set of signals which altered the mathematical sign . . . of what was being done.” He proceeded to offer “a wide biological analogy in order to examine further this magical realm of communication”—the metaphor of evolution. Organisms are systems “whose determinants are not a matter of physics in the crude sense, but a matter of messages and modulated systems of messages.” This thought led Bateson to say: “Perhaps organic forms are beautiful to us and the systematic biologist can find aesthetic satisfaction in the differences between related organisms simply because the differences are due to modulations of communication, while we ourselves are both organisms who communicate and whose forms are determined by constellations of genetic messages” (231–32). But this, says Bateson (leaving us to work out what he means) is not the place for a revision of aesthetic theory. My understanding is that Bateson is saying, perhaps for the first time in a public forum, something of major importance: that we are genetically conditioned to like things that share our own formative influences and that we recognize, mainly at unconscious levels of mind, those aspects of the world that are convivial to our systemic survival. This thought is the basis of the beauty-grace-sacredness linkage that is the theme of this book. Bateson has indexed these two pages as “aesthetics as modulation of communication” (515). I take this to mean that our inherited aesthetic senses are able to recognize the mode of wisdom in the nonverbal communication that is reaching us from environment. As a musician would recognize, with a sense of completion, a return to the home key, so we can, using the cue of beauty, register what will be healing for our process.

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BATESON IN THE 1960 S : MIND, AESTHETICS, AND ECOLOGY

1967b Consciousness versus Nature and 1968b Conscious Purpose versus Nature The 1967 paper is a summary, by Gregory Bateson, of his own lecture, given to the London conference on “The Dialectics of Liberation” in July, 1967.1 This summary was published in Peace News a few days later.2 The 1968 publication (1968b; 2000, 432–45) consists of the edited full text of the lecture. I will consider both versions in this section. The Peace News editor’s introduction to Bateson’s summary links the double-bind theory (that schizophrenic behavior occurs when an organism is made to feel in the wrong regarding the basic premises of its relationships with others) to the fact that the premises of any conflict are often unconscious, unstated, and communicated by nonverbal action. Hence, the study of nonverbal systems of communication is vital. In the text, Bateson claims that the processes of art and natural history are particularly important aspects of such nonverbal systems of communication. Bateson summarizes the lecture as “an attempt at a scientific diagnosis of what a person is, what a social system is, and what the natural world around us is really like.” He sees the problems of politics and sociology as biological problems. In an oak forest several hundred species live in balance: “not ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ . . . [but] a complex network in which competition and mutual dependency are closely combined. It is when the balance swings toward pure competition, or even exploitation, that the system breaks down. Some species then . . . become either a pest or a weed. . . . The human species seems to have some of these characteristics.” Human society is like an oak forest. Many different sorts and occupations of people should, ideally, be able to coexist. “But always there is the danger that some group (the politicians, or the workers, or the rich, or the poor, or the public relations men or the industrialists) will achieve a Malthusian expansion of power and become pests.” A human body is similar. The biological problem for human philosophy is to learn to think in terms of the balances: It is the systemic nature of the human animal that handles the world in which we live. This sort of thinking has become excessively difficult because “we think of consciousness as the great human achievement and blessing but it also makes for trouble.” The human mind is like the oak wood, the society, and our bodies: a self-correcting, balancing system. But consciousness is “a selected excerpt” from this balanced whole, and the selection is guided by what we

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call “purpose.” We ignore or are unconscious of the greater part of our mind and so we pursue our own narrow purposes and lose the wisdom of knowing ourselves as a whole. In the same way we lose wisdom regarding the social system in which we live, as well as all wisdom regarding the natural world of which we are a part. “We create weeds and vermin in the wood . . . societies which become pests on the surface of the world, and we . . . individually become at best greedy and at worst insane.” This situation is getting worse: “Social evolution has changed the ratio of power between consciousness and the rest of mind. We are steadily implementing consciousness with new technology so that today our vulgar and shortsighted purposes can destroy the whole species and the oak wood and all.” Bateson concludes: “I do not know the remedy but there is this: that consciousness can be a little enlarged through the arts, poetry, music and the like. And through natural history. All those sides of life which our industrial civilization tries to mock or put aside. . . . Never vote for a man who is neither a poet nor an artist nor a birdwatcher.” In the full text of the lecture these thoughts are developed further. Bateson begins by counseling humility as a constituent of scientific philosophy: We have become, in the process of the industrial revolution, most arrogant. We have gone for an impossible ideal of controling the living world but that sort of science is now obsolete. We now know, from cybernetic thinking, that we are only part of the living system and that a part can never control the whole. And it may be that the remedy for our present predicament lies with the individual. Referring to the experience of dreaming: “Freud’s royal road to the unconscious,” Bateson suggests that we should “lump together dreams and the creativity of art, or the perception of art, and poetry and such things. And I would include with that the best of religion. These are all activities in which the whole individual is involved. The artist may have a conscious purpose to sell his picture, even perhaps a conscious purpose to make it. But in the making he must necessarily relax that arrogance in favor of a creative experience in which his conscious mind plays only a small part. . . . We might say that in creative art man must experience himself—his total self—as a cybernetic model” (1986b, 2000, 444). We need a synthesis of the two partial views of the self. Bateson is stressing that both engagement in artistic process and close involvement with the more-than-human world have the necessary healing properties. They may reconnect us to systemic wisdom.



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Aesthetics, Ecology, and the Path Toward Grace

T

he last ten years of Gregory Bateson’s life were notable for two new emphases. Firstly, he was linking the aesthetic, the beautiful, in “nature,” and in human art, with the possibility of enlightened ways of living. Secondly, he was becoming much more aware of the urgency and seriousness of the ecological issues that faced humanity. Thirdly and increasingly, he was beginning to link these two insights together. He asserted that aesthetic engagement was the tool that we could use in seeking ecological wisdom, and that this quest for a new way of relating with our fellow members of Earth was a “religious matter.” It was, he said, a matter requiring spiritual insight, calling for a new attitude of reverence toward the natural (including human) world. 1972d (WRITTEN 1967) “STYLE, GRACE, AND INFORMATION IN PRIMITIVE ART ”

In this section I examine Gregory Bateson’s understanding of “the aesthetic” by discussing what is arguably his major paper in aesthetics: “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art” (1972d; 2000, 128–56), his position paper for the Wenner-Gren conference on primitive art, held in Austria in 1967. It was written during the years spent in studying animal communication in Hawaii when he was approaching the full flowering of his thought. Bateson had, by this time, become a prominent cybernetic thinker in the realm of art and art process and was increasingly aware of the systemic problems affecting humanity and environment. The paper is, as always with Bateson, a work in progress. It contains “several still separate attempts to map a theory associated with culture and the non-verbal arts” (128). In fact all Bateson’s main themes appear, related here to aesthetic activity. He discusses mental process as information transfer or communication, hierarchy and the nesting of classes 101

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or “patterns” of meaning, the limitations of consciousness, the importance of “primary process” and metaphorical understanding. He now begins to stress our need for active engagement with beauty or the aesthetic in order to recover what he will refer to henceforth as the “grace” of evolutionary wisdom. Art Enables Our Recovery of Grace Bateson begins his lecture with a profoundly important claim: artistic process, as both creative activity and the active appreciation of art, is a tool for recovering grace. He refers approvingly to Aldous Huxley’s assertion that the central problem for humanity is the need for grace and to Huxley’s thought (following Walt Whitman) that the communication and behavior of animals has an uncomplicated simplicity that man has lost. We have been corrupted by deceit, by self-deceit, selfish purpose, and self-consciousness. We have lost the grace that animals still have. For Huxley, God but not man still resembles the animals, “ideally unable to deceive and incapable of internal confusions” (128). Bateson agrees: “Man is as if displaced sideways and lacks that grace which the animals have” He will argue that “art is part of man’s quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure.” There are many species of grace, many kinds of failure and frustration, of departure from grace. Each culture has its own difficulties with this. For Bateson, the “problem of grace” is one of integration (or reintegration) of the “diverse parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called ‘consciousness’ and the other the ‘unconscious.’” Bateson was fond of the famous words of Pascal: for grace to be achieved, “the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason.” The success of the expression of grace in a work of art, claims Bateson, may be recognizable across cultural barriers; hence our appreciation of art from different cultures. He offers surprising examples: we can value the very different physical grace of cats and horses without having those graces ourselves. For Bateson, art covers many kinds of creation. Again, the evolutionary theme is hinted at: the products of evolution are to be thought of as comparable to human attempts at creation. Bateson proposes a “central question”: “In what form is information about psychic [mental] integration contained or coded in a work of art?” (2000, 129). Bateson claimed that art, as process, is capable of relinking us to our context. He was later to repeat many times that our loss of understanding

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that our context is the wider-than-human living world is the pathology that threatens our survival. To recover the grace of integration within the natural world we must become aware again of the patterning of which we are a part. I emphasize again that Bateson’s patterns are not static things; they are dynamic and alive: growing, changing, and evolving. It is, he says “of prime importance to have a conceptual system that will force us to see the “message” [i.e., the artistic creation] as both itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe—the culture or some part of it” (132). The characteristics of objects of art are related to (derived from, determined by, about) other characteristics of social or psychological systems. One could consider the characteristics of an art object in the setting of the characteristics of the rest of the culture, and then ask what sort of relationships, correspondences, and so on, cross or transcend the boundary between them. Artworks are necessarily part of larger culture; they only exist in interaction with culture. Bateson’s claim is that the key function of artistic engagement is its ability to reintegrate human beings with the living world. In artistic process we begin to reenter our lost context, we recover ancient knowledge of how to live. As we live now, we are plagued by our developed abilities for deceit, self deceit, purposiveness, and an excessive and individualistic consciousness of the self. We need to recover our understanding that we are members of the nested, interconnected hierarchy of living beings. There is wisdom in the larger patterns of the living world: natural ecosystems, societies, groups, and evolutionary processes. HIERARCHY, CLASSES, AND LOGICAL TYPES

The idea of classes and hierarchy can help in explaining and understanding relationships within patterns. As we have seen, hierarchy was a lifelong theme with Bateson. With both Russell and Whitehead as Cambridge neighbors and family friends, it is not surprising that the Principia Mathematica with its emphasis on logical types and hierarchies of classes should be part of his intellectual equipment. Bateson saw the hierarchy of logical classes as a way of understanding the communicative aspect of artistic activity. The core of the matter is his attempt to get over to the 1967 conference and subsequent readers the idea that the world is composed of systems: each containing smaller systems and embedded in larger systems. This conception is essentially biological: Bateson was to say, during his last years, “I have been a biologist all my life” (1979a, 8). Art, for Bateson, is biological too; it is a practical (if also cultural) way for us to reestablish ourselves in nature. For him, life is a matter of

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patterns within patterns, all beautiful and hence aesthetic, arranged in levels and differentiated into logical types of lesser or greater generality. These levels are really scales: varying sizes of system (e.g., cell, organ, organism, ecosystem, or culture), with distinct qualities emerging at different scales. For Bateson the Russellian levels and logical types are also epistemological levels of knowing with some exchange of meaning between levels. Remember that Bateson applies the terms “knowing” and “knowledge” to a wide range of biological activities. There is evolutionary knowing; knowing as “adaptation,” for which the genome must contain, for instance, in the case of a shark, “information or instructions which are the complement of hydrodynamics.” The genome cannot contain hydrodynamics but the evolutionary process must “know” (carry the relevant information) about what hydrodynamics requires and be able to build that into the shark’s genome. Similarly, migratory birds must carry the unconscious knowledge that enables navigation (134). Importantly, larger processes (“higher” classes) may contain wisdom about their component processes. There is “wisdom in the larger patterns.” Our biological world contains wisdom that is badly needed in human decision making today. For Bateson there are many ways of knowing. There is mental knowing and there is knowing through the senses. Sensory knowledge can become mental knowledge. The Primacy of “Primary Process,” Meaning, Integration, and Beauty Bateson now approached the core material of his lecture—that artistic process, the aesthetic dimension of living, is able to enhance the possibility of our refinding grace, specifically because art is not subject to purposeful, language-bound, conscious rationality. He considered the division between “consciousness” and what he called (following Freud) “primary process.” Denying the Freudian assumption that the “unconscious” is no more than a repository of repressed fears and unresolved issues, he also denied the primacy of the conscious mind. Knowing already the wide understanding of mind and mental process that Bateson had, this will hardly surprise the reader. Primary process includes all the mental processes that are not consciously rational and mediated by language and logic. The “processes of the heart” or of the unconscious, claimed Bateson, are poorly accessible and cannot be expressed in language. While secondary process is conscious and language based, primary process has no access to negatives, has no tense (no way of operating on

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past or future), and has no linguistic mood. “Mood” is a term from linguistics that refers to the choice of verb forms or inflections made by the speaker or writer. Such choices indicate the speaker’s belief about the truth or likelihood of the fact or action being considered. The subjunctive mood suggests doubt, the indicative mood would suggest acceptance as fact. The imperative mood is used for commands. All these, claimed Bateson, are attitudes to which the unconscious mind has no access. Consciousness talks about specific things and persons and attaches predicates to them. Primary process usually does not identify things or persons. Its focus is the process of relationship between them. It is primarily metaphorical, depending on the equating of like with like, which is the essence of pattern. The subject matter of primary process is always the relationship between the self and other people or environment. This is the context in which artistic activity takes place (140). Primary process deals with feelings and emotions but these “reasons of the heart” can be “very precise algorithms.” “Algorithm” is a term from mathematics meaning a method of solving a problem by a series of small steps, particularly by a recursive series of actions—a thought that must have appealed to Bateson’s cybernetic mind. Feelings and emotions, which are “the outward signs” of precise and complex algorithms (Bateson here threw in a metaphorical link to the ancient statement that sacraments are the “outward and physical signs of an inward and spiritual grace”), are the subject matter of primary process: love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, and so on. These abstractions, said Bateson, refer to patterns of relationship that are now misleadingly characterized by quantity: “a nonsense from psychiatry” (138–39). The fact that artistic, metaphorical, and relational activity takes place in primary process, while discussion, analysis, and verbal appreciation of art occurs in the secondary linguistic and rational realm explains, said Bateson, why we find it so difficult to discuss art or related matters such as ritual or mythology. There are many levels of mental activity between sensory feeling and thinking. There is “complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness.” In illustration of this layering of the multiple levels of the mind, he offered four examples from other thinkers. The first was Samuel Butler’s dictum that the better an organism knows something the less conscious it is of the knowledge or habit. The knowledge sinks to deeper levels, as exemplified in Zen thought and Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953). It is, claimed Bateson the same for art. Secondly, Adalbert Ames’s perception experiments (Bateson 1979a, 32–37) show that we make conscious images (from the reports of our sensory organs) by processes to which

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we have no access and cannot control. Van Gogh’s odd perspective in his chair painting “dimly reminds the consciousness of what had been (unconsciously) taken for granted.” Then there is the Freudian understanding of dreams as “metaphors coded according to primary process.” Bateson suggested that style (e.g., neatness or boldness of contrast in painting) is similarly metaphoric. Lastly, Bateson referred to the Freudian view of the unconscious as the repository of painful or fearful memories, placed and kept there by repression (2000, 134–35). This last Freudian belief he saw as mistaken and undesirable, holding that there is much more than the unpleasant memories predicated by the Freudians in the unconscious primary process of mind. Primary process includes, for instance, most of the premises (the knowledge already held within the system) of mammalian interaction. These mental capacities exist in “the idiom of primary process, only with difficulty to be translated into ‘rational’ terms” (135). This enlarged understanding of primary process is highly relevant to Bateson’s project of producing a theory of art. He suggests that such a theory will extend beyond the visual arts to poetry. Poetry, he says, is not distorted prose. It is the reverse of that: prose is poetry that has been subjected to logic (136). Not all kinds of knowledge, said Bateson, can be conscious. Of the “many sorts of knowing,” the “many levels between sensing and thought,” only some types of knowledge reside in surface consciousness. These include knowledge that is required when behavior must be modified in new instances. Consciousness must always be limited to a small part of mental process. We do not have the physico-neurological resources to keep in consciousness all the multiplicity of items of knowledge, information, bodily control sequences, and so on, that are called for in everyday life. Nevertheless, sensory knowledge and such knowledge as that enabling reproduction and evolution are real forms of knowledge. Consciousness must be husbanded. All organisms must be content with “rather little consciousness” (143). Habitual unconscious processes and the inaccessibility of the processes of perception economize on both thought and consciousness. We cannot expect to bring artistic or creative process wholly within the world of conscious purpose and description. The price of such economy, said Bateson, is inaccessibility; we may be unable to know about the primary process stimuli that produce our conscious conclusions or inclinations (136). Our unconscious components are continuously present in all their forms. For instance, in relating with others, we involuntarily exchange messages about the unconscious materials. It is important to exchange these metamessages to qualify the partly unconscious messages. We may consciously produce deceitful

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messages but our “semi-voluntary kinesic and autonomic signals . . . provide a more trustworthy comment” (137). Note that “the characteristics of primary process . . . are the inevitable characteristics of any communicational system between organisms who must use only iconic communication” (e.g., those without language, artists and artworks in communication with their public or the dreaming self). Organisms are forced into “saying the opposite of what they mean in order to get across the proposition that they mean the opposite of what they say.” The meaning of this puzzling sentence becomes clear if we consider the exploratory behavior of dogs and humans: the playful bite, the “inverted statement,” sarcasm, and other sorts of humor, in dream, in mythology, and also in art. Bateson sees animal discourse as always concerned with the self and with a physically present other, or with the animal’s environment. The relata are always perceptibly present to illustrate the discourse, which is “iconic,” that is, composed of part movements that “mention” the whole action proposed. He instanced the cat meowing, suggesting that the cry we hear as “milk” is really one expressing a dependent relationship; the cat says “mama,” we guess “milk.” Such communications are far older than language and resonate more deeply with our feelings (136). We can now see that, implicit in all this, is the explanation of Bateson’s claim that artistic engagement can provide us with the grace that offers recovery from the ecosystemic ruin produced by human conscious purpose. There is a natural tendency for human minds to conserve their limited capacity for conscious operation by sinking into the unconscious primary process area all those activities for which the limiting conditions are normally unchanging. Because our interactions with our surroundings have (until recent times) been constant, they have been consigned to primary process operation and so we no longer have the conscious capacity to deal with environment wisely. Our habits of relating with our world are no longer appropriate for its rapidly changing condition. We have no direct access to primary process. Conscious process is inadequate in our rapidly changing ecology so we create more environmental damage whenever we attempt to correct our actions. However, artistic engagement, active involvement in the creation and appreciation of beauty, provides a route into primary process whereby the buried wisdom, the otherwise inaccessible responsiveness, can be accessed and utilized. The most important aspect of this buried knowledge is the fact of our unity with the rest of the living world, our inextricably integrated membership of the family of living beings. By engaging with beauty in art or nature we may be reenabled as responsible members of the living

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world. Bateson approaches with care the subject of meaning in art. It is a “slippery” term. Characteristically, he sees it in terms of the transfer of information. Seeing artworks as “encoded messages,” his interest is in the meaning of the code chosen rather than in possible messages. His definition of “meaning” is offered in the framework of four “approximate synonym[s]”: pattern, redundancy, information, and “restraint.” All four of these terms are systemically related to each other. Any creation, a spoken sentence, “a painting, a frog or a culture,” will contain redundancy, by which Bateson means that there is internal relation so that one part will give information or knowledge about other parts. Another way of saying this would be that an observer could guess from one part of the creation, with a “better than random” chance of success, about the nature of other parts or elements. This would also mean that the creation was patterned. “Restraint” is a cybernetic term for anything that reduces the chance of wrong guessing. The part of the creation that is thus linked to another part may be said to have information about the other part. This information is meaning (130–31). Bateson offers examples of redundancy or restraint. These include the probability of certain letters of the alphabet being followed (in English words) by other particular letters and the fact that we can guess at the syntax of a complete sentence from knowledge of part of it. The sight of a tree allows us to guess at its roots; knowledge of one’s employer’s actions yesterday will permit a forecast of how he will act today. In each case, knowledge of one part of the process or entity discloses information or meaning about the wider relational context. Hence, meaning is always about connectedness to a wider context: “psychic integration,” patterned relating, the recovery of “grace.” Communication is “the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information and/or the reduction of the random by restraint.” We are to see the artwork as both internally patterned and part of the larger patterned world, the world of culture (130–32). Art undertakes the role of metaphor in communication. Like dream and myth it is primarily concerned with relationships—with relating (150). Bateson says that metaphor makes it possible to understand relationships and to transfer those understandings to other situations because it preserves the relationships involved while substituting other sets of things or persons as the relata. Metaphor is very different from simile in that there is no “as if ” statement; the claim of metaphor is that the relationships, whether in our internal primary process (perhaps as dream), in creating art or in living rightly within an ecosystem, really are the same relationships (140). Bateson is not discussing the stories artworks may present or the mythology around them. It is the aspects that resist reduc-

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tion to language that concern him most. He sees style in art as being primarily a matter of what he calls the code, “the . . . rules of transformation” derived from the culture, mediated through the cultural and personal experience of the artist, by which “perceived objects or persons (or supernaturals) are transformed into wood or paint.” There is “psychic [that is, psychological] information” in the art object that was derived (as code) from culture but which, reexpressed through the artist’s process as style, will be made available again to the culture. The artwork becomes a recursive source of information about the culture. It becomes, again, a tool for understanding our systemic relationships (130). Skill is the capacity to express the unconscious elements of artistic or other creative process. Bateson believes that what we recognize as skill is an indication that there are large unconscious components in the performance. In developing skill the artist has been able to allow the acquired knowledge to sink into primary process and is no longer compelled to think about many aspects of his practice. Bateson’s question is: “What components of this message material [the artwork] had what orders of unconsciousness (or consciousness) for the artist?” Art can communicate about the various forms of unconsciousness. He refers again to Isadora Duncan: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Bateson suggests that she means, “This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication,” or “This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious.” Skill, he says, always carries this message (137–38). It may be useful for the reader to look back at the discussion of the metalogue “Why a Swan?” in chapter 4. Bateson sees as important the fact that communication through artistic media is iconic. When we communicate by using pictures, some of the characteristics of the picture will correspond to characteristics of the matter communicated about. Even verbal description is often iconic in its larger structure: a scientist describing an earthworm may start at the head and provide “a sequential elongated account.” However, most verbal or written language communication is limited by the fact that language is digital, the medium itself (as the constituent words and signs) is arbitrary. In language, lying and deceit are possible but with iconic communication there is necessarily some correspondence between image and reality (133). Bateson’s message is, predictably, about integration. We are members of a complex world. We, ourselves, are patterned organisms, living within a world that consists of patterns within patterns. As a species, we lose our sense of oneness with this world at our peril. Engagement in art and art process is a way to reengage as members of the world, a creative and

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healing activity that is helping to keep us aware of our role within complexity. For Bateson, the aesthetic, the beautiful, becomes (in later work) the hallmark of the sacred. Example: A Balinese Painting In the 1967 presentation, Bateson concluded by using the process of examining a single painting from the Balinese collection as a way of summarizing his main points (147–52). As noted above (see chapter 4 and Geertz 1995, introduction and chapters 1 and 2), these paintings were traditional in the sense that they were made by local painters following an established practice of painting significant scenes from their own village societies. Some techniques had been modified due to contact with Western artists but the new methods had been largely assimilated to the native genre. The painting (see illustration on p. 111) is of a funeral procession. The central feature is a cremation tower, carried by men, approaching the narrow entrance to a “serene courtyard” followed by a procession of mourners bearing the coffin, set against a conventional and very detailed background pattern of leaves. The picture is framed by darker areas, signifying that the subject is “out of this world” even though it is a familiar scene. It is densely “filled ,” there are no vacant spaces, and so it appears “fussy.” To an occidental viewer it suggests anxiety and compulsiveness. The composition of the lower half is turbulent, the upper half is serene, the reverse of Western expectations. Bateson notes some particular aspects. The cremation tower is less prominent than it could have been, the coffin does not catch the eye, there are “whimsical details” like a snake and little birds in trees, the people (while doing ritually correct things) seem also to be details whimsically added. He sees possibly unconscious sexual symbolism in the tall, phallic cremation tower and the narrow entrance to the courtyard. The suggestion that the subject matter of the painting might be “double” enhances the experience of viewing. The picture may be “about . . . the interwoven contrast between the serene and the turbulent,” as sexual passion or as Balinese etiquette and gaiety counterpoised against turbulence. These, again, are matters of relationship and Bateson reemphasized that this must always be what dream, myth, and art are concerned with. Their metaphorical nature can speak only of relating. The picture, like almost all art, exhibits skill and contains redundancy, which is pattern. These are not separate components. The skill first maintains and then modulates the redundancies. The background of foliage

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Figure 2: Cremation, the start of the procession. Ida Bagus Made Djatasoera. Appears in H. Geertz, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1995, p. 35. Reprinted by permission of Lois Bateson.

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requires precision and skill in producing “rather uniform and rhythmical repetition of leaf forms.” It is nevertheless fragile because it shows smudges and irregularities of size or tone. Even this background generates levels of redundancy: The leaves in one area must be different from leaves in other areas but still part of the larger pattern. The first-level control makes the second level possible. The viewer’s knowledge of the artist’s ability to paint uniform leaves allows significance to the variations. The linking of skill and pattern is almost universal. This is a basic principle of the world. Bateson applies his central question to this example: “What sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art?” He says that it affirms “that to choose either turbulence or serenity as a human purpose would be a vulgar error.” The experience of creating the artwork must have exposed this error: that neither of the extremes can be chosen to exclude the other because such poles are mutually dependent. “This profound and general truth is simultaneously asserted for the fields of sex, social organization and death.” There can be no duality. The Corrective Nature of Art Bateson’s message to this 1967 conference was that “the content of consciousness is, at best, a small part of truth about the self . . . if this part be selected in any systematic manner, it is certain that the partial truths of consciousness will be, in aggregate, a distortion of the truth of some larger whole.” For example, if my conscious mind (which is both experience remembered and conditioning acquired) sees nature as willfully opposed to me, that will distort the truth about nature that is known through my inherited genetic knowledge and experience of systemic process (144). What is most serious about our assumption that only conscious mind can be applied to planning our actions is that it makes us cut through the complete mental circuits and perceive (and then rely on) only short arcs of these, which we see as straight-line linear causality. We lose access to the “total . . . integrated network.” If the content of consciousness is only a sampling of different parts and localities in this network then, inevitably, the conscious view of the whole network becomes “a monstrous denial of the integration of that whole.” Our limited, language-mediated consciousness, unaided by art, dreams, poetry, and other aesthetic practice, can no longer appreciate the systemic nature of mental process. “Purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily patho-

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genic and destructive of life . . . its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends on interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies return to plague the inventor” (146). That, claims Bateson, is the sort of world we live in: a world of circuit structures. His message is that we are members of a complex world, a world of dynamic patterns of relationship. As societies and as individuals, we are dynamic patterns within the patterned world. Love can only survive if wisdom (recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice. Engagement with the aesthetic and the beautiful is a way to reclaim such wisdom (144–46). Bateson was very close, by this time, to the realization that he had developed tools for thinking about global ecology. 1972i (Written 1967–68) “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation” In this invitational paper for the 1968 Wenner-Gren conference (2000, 446–53): “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” Bateson reemphasized the centrality of the arts in enabling systemic wisdom about our own survival. After summarizing the increasing urgency of global ecological problems, he lists some of the “factors which may act as correctives—areas of human action which are not limited by the narrow distortions of coupling through conscious purpose and where wisdom can obtain.” Firstly there is love: Martin Buber’s “I-thou” relations propose a loving alternative to “I-it” interactions in which purpose is all-important.1 Bateson suggests that it must be possible for humans to develop I-thou relations with their societies and with ecosystems. Among “factors which may act as correctives,” he asserts again that “The arts, poetry, music and the humanities . . . are areas in which more of the mind is active than mere consciousness would admit.” The heart has its reasons. Similarly, we need radically increased contact with the natural world. Such contact “breeds—sometimes—wisdom.” And, lastly, “There is religion.” Bateson concludes his conference invitation with the biblical warning given to Job. Job’s “narrow piety, his purposiveness, his common sense, and his worldly success are finally stigmatized by the Voice out of the Whirlwind: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding. . . . Dost thou know when the wild goats of the rock bring

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forth? Or canst thou tell when the hinds do calve.”2 We are ignorant of the natural history of the world on which we depend. 1972k (reprinted 1991) Mary Catherine Bateson. Our Own Metaphor (report of the 1968 conference) Bateson’s conference on “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” attended by a small and carefully selected group, took place in the medieval castle of Burg Wartenstein in Austria in July 1968. Mary Catherine’s Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation (1991) is a selective account of this meeting, written in narrative form and with the sequence of materials rearranged to enhance clarity. The thirteen invited participants were: Warren McCulloch, older than Bateson, a man who “started off as a theologian . . . got seduced by mathematics . . . got interested in the epistemic problems of all science . . . majored in philosophy, minored in psychology,” and then moved into medicine and brain science; Barry Commoner, a biologist with expertise in pollution studies and DNA theory and a member of the “Information Movement,” which was concerned to make technical knowledge accessible to the public so that informed moral decisions about environment could be made; Will Jones, a historian of philosophy concerned with the relations between particular philosophical positions and culture; Gordon Pask, a British cyberneticist and systems theorist; Bernie Raxlen, a Canadian psychiatrist with anthropological interests; Horst Mittelstaedt, a German zoological cyberneticist concerned with issues of the cybernetic control of orientation; Peter Klopfer, ecologist and ethnologist with a particular focus on parent-offspring ties, species distribution, and population issues; Anatol (Tolly) Holt, long known to the Batesons, another pilgrim through the varied disciplines of psychology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science; Gertrude Hendrix, mathematician, teacher, educationalist, and trainer of horses; Bert Kaplan, a psychologist with particular interests in personality and consciousness; Ted Schwartz, an anthropologist with concerns about culture contact and the development of goals in social movements—and Mary Catherine Bateson herself, a “linguist interested in anthropology” (1991, 23–30, 327–30). By the time of this meeting Bateson and most of the other members of the conference were fully aware of the global dangers of increasing environmental disruption. Nevertheless, it became clear during the week of meetings that Bateson wanted to hold back the group from making

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any firm proposals about ameliorative action. He feared that any decisions or plans made by processes of conscious reasoning would inevitably be tainted and rendered dangerous by the very fact that they were the product of the same linear conscious purposefulness that was producing so much ecological damage. During the discussions Bateson reiterated some ideas from the “Style, Grace, and Information,” conference, again recommending engagement in aesthetic process as a way of recovering the wisdom to take appropriate action. In a discussion about the effect of Western ideas and values on the Manus society in New Guinea (and its consequent disintegration and adoption of a “cargo-cult” mentality), Ted Schwartz had warned that there is a strict analogy between “people who kill off their livestock, destroy their canoes and, in general, destroy what they had to sustain their life with, under a certain set of cultural expectations” and our own environmental situation. We are facing, said Schwartz, “a situation which is not different in principle from the cargo cultists and others who have destroyed their means of existence as a result of maladaptive transactional systems” (93–94). Bateson was quick to stress the ecological value of artistic process by pointing out that the Manus abandoned their highly developed traditional arts when they took up the notion of a cargo cult. “Giving up their art,” he asserted, “is perhaps as good an indication of their having engaged in an illusory operation as any other” (95–96). Later in the week, he was asking whether any social system could be viable “with only laws and ethical principles and no play, no art, no totemism, no religion, and no humor” (237). At another point Bateson put in a reflection on “a curious . . . relevant fact . . . that an ancient ecosystem—the primeval forest, the desert, the Everglades, the arctic tundra . . . is an incredibly beautiful thing. Now, there must be a reason why, to an organism who is also interested in automobiles and in the maximization of wealth . . . these funny interacting masses of, you might suppose, quite irrelevant organisms, most of which you can’t even eat, should have beauty. I leave that as a question” (260). At another point (289), Bateson agreed with Mary Catherine that when we say something is beautiful we have perceived a set of relationships in it, adding “and in ourselves.” For Bateson, the main impact of the Burg Wartenstein experience was a wider appreciation of the extent of planetary damage and an enhanced realization of the risks of intervention predicated on conscious purposefulness. By the time he began to plan the succeeding conference for July the following year, he was much more definite in claiming the need for action and in linking this to aesthetic wisdom.

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1991d (written in November 1968) Invitational paper: “The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation” Bateson’s invitational paper for the 1969 Burg Wartenstein symposium (reprinted in Bateson 1991a, 253–57) stated that this second conference was intended to initiate a move toward “moral planning and action.” He saw this event as a development of the earlier conference’s consensus that “certain sorts of shortsightedness which ignore the systemic characteristics of man, human society, and the surrounding ecosystems are bad when implemented by a powerful technology.” He noted that the first conference had not used the word “immoral” but that he saw now that, where the shortsightedness is willful, the word is appropriate. The 1968 conference had shown that such immoralities form a class of behaviors. The members of this class, societal actions that produce ecological pathology, have many characteristics in common. Hence, it should be possible to study these characteristics in order to recognize, understand, and ameliorate their pathological effects. We could learn about the characteristic interrelationships and variables of the systems. There is, claimed Bateson, “a general structure of immorality and, similarly, a general structure of those mental processes which would avoid such shortsightedness.” He notes that, because we are ourselves part of the systems, we need a “Theory of Action” that would work within large complex systems of which the active agents were, themselves, both parts and products. The Kantian “categorical imperative” (that we must “act only on that maxim that you can, at the same time, will to become a universal law”) might provide a first step. However, we should remember that the “great teachers and therapists” work by trying to provide the contexts or settings in which desired changes might occur. He claimed that there are deeply rooted cultural errors in our society: reductionism, the mind-body dichotomy, the belief that means can be justified by their end results. Vested interests in art, education, religion, commerce, science, even in sport and international relations, defend these pathologies. There are homeostatic processes in society that maintain the pathologies. From this general assessment of the difficulties, Bateson moves directly to an aesthetic consideration. He postulates an “aesthetic determinism,” It is easy to misunderstand Bateson’s use of the word “determinism.” He uses it interchangeably with “causality” or “influence,” rather than in the strict philosophical sense that would indicate specific causes that have necessary consequences. Bateson is here

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suggesting that there are, in human societies and in the morethanhuman world, repeated instances in which the dominant person or lead animal is noticeably more beautiful, more spectacularly dressed or colored, more impressive than others. He suggests that this dominance may be determined by and supported by aesthetic superiority. Noting that “some people are guided away from the courses of action which would generate ugliness . . . [or] . . . have ‘green thumbs’ in their dealing with other systems,” he associates this with aesthetic judgment: “an awareness of criteria of elegance and of the combinations of process that will lead to elegance rather than ugliness.” It follows, suggests Bateson, that the moral and the aesthetic are closely related. The difference is only one of logical type. Moral judgment is about identifying classes of cases, most noticeably when it is expressed in legal codes. Aesthetic judgment, on the other hand, is “more intimately connected with relationships which obtain within each particular case.” Our conventional division between moral judgment and aesthetic judgment has followed from the premise of mind/body division or the similar division that we assume to exist between consciousness and the remainder of mind. He suggests that there may be a scientific truth behind the metaphor (that their skills depend on art rather than science) by which we explain greatness in some teachers, political leaders, gardeners, or animal trainers. The previous conference, wrote Bateson, came to see its own group process as a metaphor for the wider social and ecological processes in the world. Similarly, the present pathologies involving human groups and ecosystems might be avoided by using mental processes in which the total organism (or the largest mind) is used as a metaphor.3 We can use ourselves as analogues or metaphors in order to understand nature. We can use our inner ecology of ideas—our thoughts, our premises, our feelings or emotions—rather than only our cognition, conscious thought, or perceptions of self. All this could enable us to recognize that an ecosystem or society is alive: “The ancients who endowed forests and lakes with personality were not without wisdom. Such mythology surely made it easier for men to use themselves as analogues in the attempt to understand nature.” Such skills may be “an art.” An “ecology of ideas” may be a close synonym for aesthetic sensibility. We must consider “aesthetic determinism” because if it exists it may be fatal to ignore it. It may be closely related to or derived from the cybernetic, may provide shortcuts to evaluation and criticism of action plans. It may, as a characteristic of humans, be essential if plans are to be adopted or even be

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practicable. We need to know that aesthetic computation and aesthetic creativity may be subject to pathology—cultural pathology may produce artistic monsters—though we should realize that some monstrosities may be the system attempting self-healing. For these reasons, wrote Bateson, we must consider aesthetics before planning action. In fact, this 1969 symposium was, in Bateson’s own view, a failure. He had assembled a rather different group of biologists, anthropologists, and other thinkers and, as he later said, “lost them” on the first day. The question, as he saw it, was “Do aesthetic factors play a role in changing what animals and people do in their relationships?” He told the story of anthropologist Sol Tax and the Native American Church, which he later offered to a California governor’s prayer breakfast meeting. Sol Tax, working with a group of Native Americans, was invited to the national convention of their church at a time when it was under attack because of its use of the drug peyote in its central ritual. Tax’s proposal was that he should film the deeply expressive ritual as evidence of the truly religious nature of the ceremony but, after long discussion, the members chose not to do this. Bateson quotes the report of the Wenner-Gren Foundation conference in which Tax reported this experience: “Gradually the realization came that they were choosing their integrity over their existence.” It would be nonsense to sacrifice integrity in order to save a religion “whose only validity—whose point and purpose—is the cultivation of integrity.” Bateson’s point is that the validity of our mental processes is imperiled if we breach the “fine lines dividing the sacred from the secular, the aesthetic from the appetitive, the deliberate from the unconscious, and thought from feeling.”4 The 1969 symposium members took “a worldly view” of the story and then spent the next eight days “trying to find our way back to an integration of the group” but failing to do so (Bateson and Bateson 1988, 69, 72, 75–76). No program of action resulted from this second conference. Mary Catherine Bateson notes, in an afterword to the 1990 edition of Our Own Metaphor, her father’s unwillingness to directly influence events: “Gregory’s distaste for politics came from a deep unwillingness to determine the lives of other beings or to let others try to do so; he would have made a terrible philosopher king. . . . We knew that there were insights that needed to be passed on but were warned against doing so . . . refusing to dominate, he extended his objections to the act of persuasion; intellectually repelled by inconsistency, he was loath to send his ideas into a marketplace . . . the fundamental error in a democracy is failure to listen, but failure to speak is also an error” (323–24).

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1973c (written 1969) “Mind/Environment” In this 1969 lecture to a professional psychiatric audience (1991a, 161–73), Bateson explained further the link between contexts and aesthetic process. After discussing the nature of social systems such as cities or ecosystems in which much of the system’s behavior has become “hard programed,” habitual, he asks how such deeply held attitudes can be modified. “A certain characteristic of the behavior of the system is so deeply built into the system that it affects almost everything the system does, and nothing short of very violent change will change that deep programming. This is the problem of psychotherapy after all” (170). He goes on to ask how it can be possible that some entities, while forming their habitual behavior from their contexts, recognize other similar systems or minds. This, he suggests, is where aesthetics and systems theory are linked. When, in the words of Wordsworth’s poem we see “The primrose by the river’s brim. . . ,” what do we really see? Wordsworth’s aesthetically blind observer sees “nothing more.” Bateson claims that if we do see something more aesthetically, then that recognition is a realization that “the primrose contains formal characteristics of symmetry, imperfect symmetry, complex interwoven patterning, and so forth which indicate that the primrose itself is a mentally governed piece of morphogenesis . . . the aesthetic thing is a recognition of that, for better or worse, for beauty or ugliness. That is one of the matters I’m now rather interested in” (1991a, 170). These were the final words of Bateson’s lecture and it is clear that this was his key point. It can be summarized as: to experience an aesthetic response is to recognize a fellow mental process. In the question-and-answer session that followed this lecture, Bateson repeated his assertion that what is at issue is the sinking, to the level of unconscious habit, of generalizations about how we are related to other beings. If we meet “down there . . . with genotypic determinations of propositions about relationships” we find that we have “visceral feelings” about such questions as “Do you love me?” or “Am I dependent on you?” These feelings are what we mean by “emotions.” Psychiatry attempts to resolve habitual sets of responses at the level of what we do in relationship. Bateson moved on from this to address comparable relationships in society and ecology. Asserting that our civilization is at least 70 percent insane in its major premises about the nature of man and the nature of relationships, he went on to question our almost universal assumption that the “unit of survival” is either the individual organism, the family, or the species, opposed to the rest of the world. It is, claimed Bateson, the

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organism in relationship with its environment that is the unit of survival. From his earlier statements, it is clear that he sees aesthetic recognition of relationship as a necessary aspect of survival. BATESON IN THE 1970S: ART, NATURE, AND THE SACRED

1970a “Form, Substance, and Difference” In the opening minutes of his Korzybski Memorial Lecture (2000, 454–71) Bateson took the same theme of organism plus environment as his starting point. Describing himself as one who has “tried to do something which Korzybski was very much concerned with doing . . . namely . . . studied the area of impact between very abstract and formal philosophic thought . . . and the natural history of man and other creatures,” he went on to warn that the overlap between “formal premises and actual behavior is . . . of quite dreadful importance today.” Faced with a world threatened by many sorts of disruption we are still unable to think clearly about the relations between an organism and its environment. After referring to Korzybski’s famous distinction between map and territory, Bateson sketched in the early philosophical thinking of the preSocratic Greek thinkers, noting the Pythagorean interest in pattern and moving on to claim Lamarck’s nineteenth-century evolutionary theory as the first to recognize the mental nature of the natural world. Lamarck, he said, recognized mentality as existing widely in the living world and provided the beginnings of comparative psychology. The subsequent prominence of Darwinian theory led to the suppression of much-needed study of mind and pattern as explanatory principles, but the arrival of cybernetics, systems theory, and information theory has now provided the formal basis for us to think about mind. For the first time we can begin to say what mind is. We have assumed for too long that the unit of survival is the individual, family line, or species. Our experience now demonstrates that any organism or aggregate of organisms that bases its adaptive strategy on its own survival destroys its environment. The viable unit of survival is “a flexible organism-in-its-environment.” Bateson asks, if the territory does not get onto the map, what does? For him, the inevitable answer is “difference.” He notes Kant’s understanding that the most elementary aesthetic act is the selection of a fact. Kant believed that, for example, in a piece of chalk there is an infinity of facts. The Ding an sich, the piece of chalk in itself, can never enter into mental process but must remain inaccessible. The sensory receptors must filter out most of the facts, while those that do enter into mind are

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selected and become information. Bateson modifies Kant’s statement to mean that there are an infinite number of differences in any “thing” and that we select those “differences which make a difference” to ourselves. We then use these as ideas or information which, once received by an end-organ, can be coded in a form suitable for their transmission within the body, perhaps as neural impulses that utilize already available energy. After claiming that thought is inclusive of emotions and extends beyond the body to much wider pathways in environment, thus forming a much-extended self, Bateson raises the question of what bridges there are between one sort of thought and another. All love, hate, respect, dependency, spectatorship, performance, dominance, and so on, can be understood as thought. And these various forms of thought must be able to meet and interact. He suggests that “artists and poets are specifically concerned with these bridges” and that “art . . . is concerned with the relation between the levels of mental process . . . artistic skill is the combining of many levels of mind—unconscious, conscious and external—to make a statement of their combination.” Bateson concluded the lecture by claiming that the whole basis of aesthetics must be reexamined. If we link feelings not only to “the heart ” (the wider-than-conscious mind) but to “computations in the external pathways of the mind ” (to all our interchanges with environment) then, when we perceive beauty or ugliness, we are recognizing processes and beings in the world as themselves the products of “thought.” They are beautiful because they are the products of mental process comparable to our own: “We recognize another mind within our own external mind.” Lastly, Bateson spoke of death. He commented that it is natural, in a society that conceptually separates mind and body, that we should attempt to forget death or make myths about “the survival of transcendent mind.” However, said Bateson, if mind is immanent in pathways outside our bodily selves, we are already part of larger mind. The individual “me” is no longer so precious. Ideas are the differences that make a difference. “The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you. May they survive—if true.” 1974k “The Creature and Its Creations” This piece (1991a, 263–64) was originally written as a chapter opening for The Evolutionary Idea, one of the two books Bateson started to write during the 1970s. The book was to be “a reexamination of the theories of biological evolution in the light of cybernetics and information

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theory.” The second book, Every Schoolboy Knows, seemed to Bateson to be necessary in order to explain to his imagined readership the “elementary ideas relevant to evolution and to almost any other biological or social thinking—to daily life and to the eating of breakfast.” It seemed “monstrously evident” to him that education in the Western world was “careful to avoid all crucial issues.” Such education “was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and the plains.” Because of this it would be necessary to provide a primer to address such questions as “What are butterflies? What are starfish? What are beauty and ugliness?” The drafts of these two books were eventually to be combined in Mind and Nature because, in the process of writing, it became evident to Bateson that there is a single epistemology that embraces the creativity of evolution and the learning processes of people. There is “a single knowing which characterizes evolution as well as aggregates of humans.” The draft chapter opening for The Evolutionary Idea was edited and published in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974. Bateson starts by accepting William Paley’s principle and argument for a Creator, “that the symptoms and evidences of mental creation are always to be found in the products of that creating,”5 though, as we know, Bateson holds that mental capability is naturally inherent in all living processes. He is here beginning to emphasize that aesthetic process—the production and recognition of beauty—is a feature of evolution. Evolutionary creativity is mental in kind. It is analogous to, and is a special case of, mental creativity and artistic process. The products of evolution become examples of art. The artistic products of humans are similarly “marked by the evidences of that mental creativity.” We can now search for the “criteria of mind” among all the products of mind: evolutionary, environmental, natural, and artefactual. As noted in the section on the “Mind/Environment” lecture above, Bateson believes that when we recognize beauty in nature or in a work of art we are recognizing the characteristics of a fellow mental system, a mind with essential correspondences with our own. He writes: “The very nature and purpose of art and poetry is to exemplify the creativity of mind. . . . This is the appropriate fundamental theorem for a science of aesthetics. In creativity mind is brought together, and this integration is a close synonym of ‘beauty.’” Bateson refers again to the Wordsworth poem in which Peter Bell fails to recognize the beauty, complexity, and fellow mental nature of “a primrose by the river’s brim.” He repeats his conviction that the “something more” that might have been recognized is a reflection of the self: “This something more is a self-reflexive recog-

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nition. The primrose resembles the poem and both poem and primrose resemble the poet. He learns about himself as a creator when he looks at the primrose. His pride is enhanced to see himself as a contributor to the vast processes which the primrose exemplifies. And his humility is exercised and made valid by recognizing himself as a tiny product of those processes” (1991a, 263–64). 1975a “Ecology of Mind: The Sacred” Gregory Bateson’s lecture (1991a, 265–70) to members of the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Colorado during the summer of 1974 overtly linked his understanding of mind and mental process to “the sacred.” Speaking to a primarily religious audience he attempted to “unravel . . . some of the ecology, something of the position and nature of the sacred in the ecological system.” He contrasted “left brain,” calculating, rational consciousness with “right brain” processes where dream, humor, metaphor, and most understandings of the sacred occur. In doing this he clearly, and almost for the first time, linked the aesthetic and the beautiful to the sacred. To know with the left brain what the aesthetic or poetic is, is to kill it, to make it available for manipulation by others, by the self, by one’s own self-consciousness. The aesthetic and the sacred are rightbrain processes. They belong to the area of mind that deals in dream and metaphor. Bringing them into the conscious, calculating, rational, logical left brain renders them meaningless. Sacredness, said Bateson, is related to health, to processes that are stable and effective. The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth: The communion bread can be itself and also stand for the body. This is a both-and process. As noted earlier in this chapter, Bateson’s awareness of this possibility was foreshadowed in the metalogue “Why a Swan?” (1954) and hinted at in “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” (1955a). In a creative task, when both the intellectual and the intuitive faculties are joined, there is a moment of integration that is not separation, not confusion, but is both spiritual and aesthetic. Bateson recalled his childhood experience of learning, without adult help, to tie his own bow tie, a moment when thinking through of a complex physical task was rewarded by an intuitive awareness of the action required. This was a conjunction of the spiritual and the aesthetic: “spiritually, aesthetically . . . my whole mind and soul was in the business of thinking how to do it.”

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1979a Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity Described variously, on publication, as “the major life’s work of one of the great thinkers of our time,”6 a contribution to the genre of the “grand synthesis of everything . . . the last infirmity of noble minds,”7 and a work that has “yielded new terrain that future scientists will be exploring and settling for decades ahead,”8 Mind and Nature, the last book that Gregory Bateson completed, represents his mature thought. The introductory quotation from St. Augustine’s The City of God significantly links the topics of beauty and sacredness: “Plotinus the Platonist proves by means of the blossoms and leaves that from the Supreme God, whose beauty is invisible and ineffable, Providence reaches down to the things of earth here below. He points out that these frail and mortal objects could not be endowed with a beauty so immaculate and so exquisitely wrought, did they not issue from the Divinity which endlessly pervades with its invisible and unchanging beauty all things” (1979a, 2). Having placed these words before the beginning of his introduction, Bateson makes only two significant references to his linking of beauty and the sacred in the rest of the book. In the opening pages he writes of his own process in producing the book and the realization, referred to above, that a single epistemology or way of knowing links the processes of evolution and all living beings. He realized that the “line which is sometimes supposed to enclose the human being” is illusory and so mind “becomes a reflection of large parts and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker.” Important among the qualities of humans that are also to be found in the more-than-human world are “the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant . . . the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being’s very aliveness and little bit of wisdom. His wisdom, his bodily grace, and even his habit of making beautiful objects” (1979a, 5). Bateson was now seeing all the living world as aesthetic. He describes one of his classes of “young beatniks” at the California School of Fine Arts. He had presented the students with a dead lobster, asking how they would recognize it as having been a living thing if they were inhabitants of another planet and had never seen a lobster before. He writes: All untrained as they were, their bias was aesthetic. I would define that word, for the moment, by saying that they were not like Peter Bly, the character of whom Wordsworth sang:

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A primrose by the river’s brim A yellow primrose was to him; And it was nothing more. Rather, they would meet the primrose with recognition and empathy. By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects. . . . I faced them with what was (though I knew it not) an aesthetic question: How are you related to this creature? What pattern connects you to it? 9

Bateson offers the readers of Mind and Nature less help in understanding this imaginative leap of insight than he had done in four of the five papers considered immediately above. The “pattern which connects” is beauty, the recognition of which is our registering of a fellow mental process, a being or system that (like ourselves) is a product of the aesthetic processes of evolution, embryology, and life experience. The aesthetic turns out to be a process, a way of receiving and dealing with information. As explained earlier, information is not, for Bateson, just data or words about facts or things in the world. It is any “difference which makes a difference,” any item of “news”—novelty, change, contrast, comparison, growth, evolution, symmetry, asymmetry, similarity, or dissimilarity—that is relevant to the relationship in which it is perceived. Bateson says that the understanding of the “deeper symmetry of formal relations” is basic: “Never quantities, always shapes, forms and relationships” (1979a, 6–9). There is always connectedness. Though much of the book is concerned with matters of symmetry, pattern, context, and so on, Bateson does not return specifically to aesthetics until he reaches the closing pages. In what was to be the very last of his metalogues he imagines a quite challenging conversation with Daughter in which he reflects on what he has written and on what matters remain to be addressed (1979a, 205–14): “The question is onto what surface shall a theory of aesthetics be mapped? Consciousness and aesthetics are the great untouched questions. . . . What is untouched is the question: Onto what surface shall aesthetics and consciousness be mapped?” This is typically enigmatic Bateson. Are we to take this literally? What is it to “map” something? Literally, it is to take the information (the news of the differences that are important to us) about something, or contained in the something, and to assemble the information in one place in a way accessible to us when we want to navigate, use, think about, or understand that something. For geographical maps we use symbols;

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metaphorically we can map something in words (symbolic code), even, perhaps, in numbers and formulae. Conceivably, mapping could be done as painting, gesture, dance, sculpture, modeling, ritual, diagram, song, or poetry. We speak of mapping the human genome, of listing and setting out the properties and the relationships of all the genetic components of the human body. This thought may be helpful. When Bateson uses the verb “map” he seems to mean the act of gaining a comprehensive understanding of relationships in a way that enables us to “travel” them—to comprehend and engage with them. Looking again at the metaphor of mapping, what does “surface” mean? We are to map aesthetic qualities onto a surface? For the cartographer the surface is paper: a receptive medium that allows for many different symbols and arrangements of symbols to be inscribed. More generally, the surface or medium could be canvas, body, floor space, clay, voice, and so on. It could also (and this seems to be Bateson’s thought) be an existing and more basic understanding. Bateson writes that it must be possible to map the theories of aesthetics and consciousness onto the “primary definition of mind,” onto the ideas in this book or similar ideas. We must, I think, assume that here he is asking the question: What theoretical framework will explain mind and also be compatible with our understanding of consciousness and aesthetics? In other words, how can we talk and think about aesthetics and consciousness while accepting the understanding of mind at large in the living world that he has already outlined? Bateson implies that he is thinking in terms of language: “The terminology to deal with beautyugliness and the terminology for consciousness have got to be elaborated out of (or mapped onto) the ideas in the present book or similar ideas. It’s that simple” (1979a, 211). We may well smile at that “simple.” It seems, in fact, that Bateson already had the theoretical surface on which to map these aspects of mind. The territory-map distinction is about what parts of the world become information, news of difference, that can be meaningfully received by a mental system. The information must be knowable as part of the map, as part of the context of that mental system’s process. “If the territory is homogenous,” wrote Bateson in Angels Fear, “there is no mark upon the map” (1988, 122). Jung’s contrast between Pleroma and Creatura matches the territorymap concept. There can be no maps in Pleroma—the world of nonliving material cannot produce or register “news of difference.” In Creatura, everything, in a sense, is a map: information is the stuff of relationship, the living world relies on communicational integration, on context and relevance. Maps, in Bateson’s fullest metaphorical sense, permit context to be known. When, with the development of cybernetic thinking, such

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tools could be applied to the workings of Creatura, when Creatura could be seen as being organized in levels of logical types, then Bateson could think systematically in terms of mental process. Mind and Nature combined these ideas with the idea of evolution as mental process in a new way. No longer had evolution (or other living processes) to be explained in terms of two different Cartesian substances—mind and body. Bateson was able to think of mind in the living world as the relating between the material components of systems, a very different understanding to that which saw matter in the nonliving world as being influenced by physical or mechanical causes only. Again, Bateson achieved the insight that the conjunction between Creatura and Pleroma—between the living map and the lifeless territory—is an interface. As we have seen, such interfaces are not boundaries or barriers. They are permeable, active areas of interchange providing distinction but not separation. In Angels Fear he was to claim that epistemology (how living systems can, in the widest sense, “know”) becomes “the study of phenomena at an interface” between the mindless world of Pleroma and the living world of Creatura. The properties of maps are relational, mental (1988, 20–21). Bateson, however, is still asking these questions about beauty and about consciousness at the end of Mind and Nature. He believes that we must first ask why those who have attempted to answer these questions have always failed. In some way the answer is concealed (211). How does the question itself deflect the searcher? I would suggest that partial answers to this would be that most previous questioners have limited their consideration to human beings; also that they have assumed that the answer can be expressed in language and, hence, set out in rational thought. Bateson has many times denied that either aesthetics or the sacred can be brought entirely within rational discourse, asserting that they belong, at least in part, to the realm of metaphor and analogy, of feeling and emotion. Some further clarity about these issues will emerge when we consider the idea of “necessary secrecy” that Bateson developed in Angels Fear. Finally, in Mind and Nature, Bateson introduces another and greater “untouched question”: “And don’t forget the sacred. That’s another matter that was not dealt with in this book” (213). Against Daughter’s accusation that he is evading her original question, he replies that he is only making the original question bigger. The sacred is surely related to the beautiful—whatever those terms mean. If we could say how they are related, we could perhaps say what the words mean. Or perhaps that would never be necessary. Every time we add a

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related piece to the question, we get more clues to what sort of answer we should expect. The next book will be called Where Angels Fear to Tread because “everybody keeps wanting me to rush in with an oversimplified question,” which would be “a sin against all three of our new principles. Against aesthetics and against consciousness and against the sacred.” Bateson reminds us on the final page that “to be conscious of the nature of the sacred or of the nature of beauty is the folly of reductionism.” Our unanswered questions may be usefully taken forward to an examination of Angels Fear, which also begins with a “map” of the regions wherein they fear to tread. But first there are two or three other examples of his thinking to consider. 1991e (written September, 1979) “Last Lecture” Invited to give a lecture he would be willing to call “Last Lecture” to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Bateson prepared this draft for distribution to the press (1991a 307–13). The lecture was given in October, 1979, and was, in fact, very nearly Bateson’s last public performance. He opened his talk by referring to T. S. Eliot’s lines in Little Gidding: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (Eliot 1959, 59)

“Returning to the place from which I started,” said Bateson, “and knowing the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot gives the recipe for a last lecture.” Sketching in his own lifetime experience from Cambridge biology and “boyish collecting of . . . invertebrates ,” looking “at all that with eyes changed by anthropology and dolphins and schizophrenia ,” seeing that he had “never traveled far from where [he] started,” Bateson asks again the questions he had at the beginning, finding that they are still the same questions: “What is form, pattern, purpose, organization, and so on?” Mysteries remain, but “the world looks more elegant than it did.” He discusses the disparate proprieties of the high table in St. John’s College, Cambridge, and of other tribal peoples in New Guinea, concluding that the elegant, the beautiful means that “parts function together, fitting together in every detail.” Importantly, one must be unconscious of how systems work. We are now, he told his 1979 audience, “in an epoch in which very deep things, of which

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we were happily unconscious, are now rumbling with change. I think it is time for . . . the whole Western world—and perhaps for the Oriental world—to pay attention to that rumbling. We have become conscious of those things of which we were previously happily and for our own good unconscious.” After explaining the unity of body and mind, Bateson went on to claim that it is understanding the basic nature of relationships that enables the perception of beauty and ugliness. These, he said, are concepts that biologists do not consider, though “they may be real components of the world that you as a living creature live in. It’s not a new idea that living things have immanent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live.” Having spoken of the difficulties caused by viewing the world, or language, or education as a collection of separable things, Bateson ended by assuring his audience that the “monstrous atomistic pathology . . . of wrong thinking in which we all live—can only be ended by an enormous discovery of those relations in nature which make up the beauty of nature.” 1986 (written December 1979). Introductory essay in T. Evans, Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky By December 1979, Bateson was back in the United States, resident at Esalen again and writing an introductory essay for Terry Evans’s photographic study of a surviving area of American prairie (1986, 12–13). He offers his belief that there is need for an aesthetic science and for a rigorous aesthetics. He remarks that “we have not, since the sixteenth century had artists whose prime direction was the synthesis between a scientific and an aesthetic understanding of nature.” Since then “to approach the two sides of the living thing with equal imagination and discipline has almost never been attempted. . . . The world to be investigated is commonly split into two sides—the mechanical and the aesthetic—and the human mind, the organ which is assigned the task of synthesizing these two sides is itself correspondingly split between imagination and rigor.” Bateson hopes that Terry Evans’s book is “a sign of the times . . . of better times to come.” We have at present lost “the creative man who will combine scientific rigor with imagination.” He begins to hope that the science of ecology may do much to bring back the combination of love and precision that Terry Evans has brought to her photography and analysis.

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In the covering letter10 sent by Bateson to Terry Evans with his draft of the essay, he again stressed the identity between mind or mental process and nature. If we want to understand nature we must look at mind and, conversely, if we wish to understand mind we must examine the products of biological evolution. Mind, learning, evolution, rigorous art, and loving science are one. In the book, Terry Evans offers her thanks to Bateson “whose work challenges me to be both rigorous and loving” (Evans, 1986, 6). 1987 (British edition 1988) (Written 1979–80, completed by Mary Catherine Bateson) Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred This book, left unfinished when Bateson died in July 1980, is his last substantial contribution to the record of his own thought. Mind and Nature and Angels Fear were the main product of the period of remission that followed the diagnosis of his lung cancer in early 1978. Mary Catherine returned from her work in Iran to assist in the completion, by August of that year, of Mind and Nature. She writes that she worked as Gregory’s amanuensis, with her contributions during discussion and revision being merged within his own (1988, 3). When Mind and Nature was finished Gregory made a start on Angels Fear and had completed substantial parts of the manuscript before the onset of his final illness in June 1980. Again, Mary Catherine returned, Gregory proposed that they should collaborate on the book as coauthors but died before they could begin work, leaving “a stack of manuscript . . . miscellaneous, unintegrated, and incomplete” from which she “tried to make . . . the collaboration he had intended” (1988, 1). In the completed book Mary Catherine has clearly indicated which chapters and sections are Gregory’s work and which are her own, making only minor alterations to the remainder of his text. Thus, it is possible to identify the important developments in Gregory’s own thinking that appear in this last work. Mary Catherine notes that the final years of Bateson’s life had seen the growth of a nonspecialist audience for his ideas, “eager to approach [his] work as a way of thinking, regardless of the historically shifting contexts in which it had first been formulated.” Lecturing to and writing for this wider constituency had stimulated Bateson to “a new synthesis and a new effort of communication” (1988, 2). Angels Fear was to be different because he had become aware of the fact that the monism, the unity of all nature, that he had explained in Mind and Nature “might only be comprehensible through the kind of metaphors familiar from religion; that in fact he

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was approaching that integrative dimension of experience he called the sacred.” (MCB’s emphasis.) Since our particular concern in this chapter is Bateson’s evolving view of aesthetic experience and activity, and because that view is linked (through the understanding of grace as that which enables the recognition of our relational embeddedness in the living world) to the possibility of understanding the sacred, this matter is important here. In the chapter: “Neither Supernatural nor Mechanical” (1988, 50–64), Bateson comments that scientists, like the angels, fear to tread in those regions that are, at present “deemed to be outside the ken of science.” When “the split between problems of mind and problems of matter ceases to be a central determinant of what it is impossible to think about,” then “aesthetics—the beautiful and the ugly, the literal and the metaphoric, the sane and the insane, the humorous and the serious . . . all these and even love and hate . . . will become accessible to formal thought.” We must not, says Bateson, fear to tread in these fields forever. In the following chapter “Let Not Thy Left Hand Know . . .” (1988, 69–81), Bateson approaches the question of whether there is a “necessary secrecy” between some parts of informational systems and other parts. I remind the reader that these “systems” are not abstract concepts, they are real processes in the living world. They are the relating between real constellations of molecules, cell components, organs, organisms, people, species, nations, ecosystems, or religions. Bateson’s question is: Is it a necessary strategy within living systems that information (the news of difference) is kept in one part or several parts of a system and is not transmitted to other parts? He believes that there are rules, “quite obscure rules,” that govern the epistemological processes of perceiving, knowing, and acting. If we fail to observe the rules our mental processes may become misleading. These rules, he claims, are particularly vital in “preserving the fine lines dividing the sacred from the secular, the aesthetic from the appetitive, the deliberate from the unconscious, and thought from feeling” (1988, 69). These rules, he says, exist in all societies, which shows that epistemology (and Bateson understands this term to cover many types of mental explanation) “is ordered, real and must be examined.” After this introduction, Bateson characteristically chooses to make his main points by means of “stories.” First, he describes the experience of taking LSD in an experiment aimed at achieving insight into the “aesthetic organization of behavior,” after which he concluded that certain forms of “thought” (again, in his wide understanding of the term) are bad for spontaneity of feeling. Feeling and spontaneity are part of aesthetic process and seem to be

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inhibited by “thought.” The question was: Which sorts of thought inhibit or destroy aesthetic creativity? The narrative suggests that Bateson’s spontaneity was inhibited during the LSD experiment by several factors. There was the psychologist’s request for him to repeat his initial statement of what he hoped to get from the experience. There was the fact that his comments were being recorded and there was the suggestion that he was “thinking too much.” The implication is that rational intention (e.g., to record and analyze the thoughts) and linguistic articulation of aesthetic experiences are both antithetical to creativity. While watching the dreamlike changing of shapes and colors that the drug produced Bateson felt that he was watching only the “planes of fracture” rather than the dream-stuff itself, which he saw as “bits and pieces of the stuff of which we are made.” The big question, he says, is “the nature of the envelope in which all that “experience” is contained.” This question “approaches matters that are part of religion.” Bateson is here referring to the importance of mental context. We are, I think, intended to understand this in terms of the right-brain–left-brain metaphor discussed above. We can discuss our experiences and perceptions but the context that enabled these to be experienced in terms of creative process, of beauty, is the right-brain functionality of metaphor, dream, humor, and religion. This is the part of our mental process that enables aesthetic engagement. Much of the above understanding is confirmed as Bateson introduces his next stories. First, he offers the tale of anthropologist Sol Tax and the group of Native Americans that he had already used in his invitational paper to the members of the ill-fated 1969 conference. He then relates Coleridge’s story of the Ancient Mariner’s dilemma and its resolution, followed by a briefer reference to the over-pious biblical Job and the lesson in ecology that God is recorded as having given to him. All these are contained within Bateson’s account of the California governor’s prayer breakfast event in 1975, the three stories being the main part of his speech to that august gathering (1976b). Hence, we have here stories within a story: the first of them again involving the use of drugs for aesthetic or religious purposes. There was a thinly veiled suggestion throughout Bateson’s presentation to the assembled politicians that he was deeply skeptical of their religious sincerity. He started his speech to this ostensibly religious gathering by saying that one thing children have to learn about prayer is that you do not pray for pocket-knives. He claimed to be present in order to link the prayer breakfast to other religious gatherings “where men gather together,

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perhaps in prayer, perhaps in celebration, perhaps simply to affirm that there is something bigger in the world than money and pocket knives and automobiles” (1988, 71–75). First, Bateson told to the politicians the story of Sol Tax and the Native Americans. As noted above, the issue for the Native Americans was whether, in an attempt to legitimize their religious peyote ritual, it was acceptable to film the ceremony. They decided that the act of filming would be an act of desecration, even though it might have helped to deflect criticism, by the general American public, of their use of the drug. Bateson points to the paradox: the truly religious nature of the ceremony was proven by the participants’ refusal to profane it by an act calculated to legitimate their practice in the eyes of others. He claimed that this story exemplified what he was describing as “religion,” in particular it illustrated the fine line that divides the secular, and the sacred, protecting the proper context of religion and avoiding it becoming temporal, secular or just entertainment. After relating this story to the politicians Bateson read the central passage from the Coleridge poem11 in which the Ancient Mariner, condemned to carry around his neck the body of the Albatross he had needlessly killed, watches the sea snakes swimming “within the shadow of the ship.” Becoming aware of their beauty, he finds “a spring of love” that enables him to “bless them unaware”—at which moment he refinds forgiveness, the ability to engage in prayer, and relief from his suffering. It is, says Bateson, at “moments of change” that “the nature of prayer, religion and the like” becomes evident. This is enlightenment, the “sudden realization of the biological nature of the world in which we live . . . a sudden discovery or realization of life.” Note that the key to this experience was seen by the poet and by Bateson as the recognition of beauty, of the aesthetic. This offers further support for Bateson’s own view that the aesthetic, the systemic, and the religious are inseparably interrelated. Bateson’s final thrust at the politicians was the story of Job, rebuked by God for excessive pietism and finally humbled by realization of his own ignorance of the world: “Knowst thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve?”12 He concluded by saying that he would be much happier about the world in which he lived, about the pollution and exploitation it is subject to, if he “really felt sure that [his] governors and . . . representatives knew how many months the hinds fulfil and how they bring forth their young.” After the ensuing breakfast meal there was music from a Sufi choir.

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Bateson records that they “sang like angels”: he had been there to talk about religion, they had exhibited a little of it. Referring again to the 1969 symposium on “The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” Bateson notes that the intention had been to discuss aesthetic determination in human and animal behavior (1988, 75). He writes that this is the same question as the one that had led him to try the LSD experiment: Do aesthetic factors play a role in changing what animals and people do in their relationships? He implies here that in all three of the stories he offered to the prayer breakfast there was a single implicit idea: It is the bringing into consciousness of the sacred matter that destroys it. Notice the cybernetic recursiveness in this: The Ancient Mariner could not have blessed the sea snakes unaware if he had done this with self-consciousness; with conscious purpose. The Native Americans could not have saved their religious ceremony by purposefully sacrificing its integrity. And we ourselves will not understand the message with our deeper, more thanconscious mentality if Bateson makes the message explicit to us. Clearly, however, Bateson’s message is that aesthetic factors do make a profound and “religious” difference to how we will act. In the book’s final chapter, Mary Catherine writes that Gregory firmly believed that all organisms, not just art critics and philosophers, rely on aesthetics all the time (192). In her final summary, she writes: “Gregory believed that art, like religion, represents an area of experience that privileges Creatural ways of thinking. A work of art is the outcome of mental process, like the conch or the crab or the human body. The thought that enters into its creation generally involves multiple cycles of self-correction, repeated testing and listening, correcting and editing. Sometimes we may see the results of calibration in the swift curve drawn by the practiced hand of the Zen master, as sure as the hawk stooping to its prey after aeons of evolution. On the other hand there is the text that has been polished and honed, ‘tuned and tuned and tuned again,’ a pot thrown with certainty and confidence by an illiterate potter held and informed by centuries of tradition. Every work of art depends on a complexity of internal relations and can be seen as a member of the family of examples that can be looked at to understand ‘the pattern which connects’ and the nature of Creatura” (1988, 198–99). In the glossary, she defines aesthetics as “that branch of philosophy which provides a theory of the beautiful. For GB, the study of the processes in creator and onlooker whereby beauty is created and acknowledged” (1988, 207).

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These are the milestones of Gregory Bateson’s aesthetic path from childhood to old age. It remains to consider whether Bateson’s idea of a “grace,” flowing from engagement in aesthetic process, is a tool that could have practical and beneficial effects on human interaction with the rest of Creatura. We will need to examine how Bateson’s views and ideas relate to some current thinkers, in aesthetics, environmentalism, philosophy, and theology. This will lead to a consideration of Bateson’s ideas about religion and the possibility that there is ecological benefit to be found in “seeking the sacred” within the relationships of the living world.

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Aesthetic Engagement and the Grace of Relatedness

T

he previous two chapters chronicled Bateson’s progress toward his mature understanding of the importance of aesthetic process to planetary well-being. It will now be useful to summarize the insights gained by Bateson in that process. His central insight was that active engagement within aesthetic processes can enable us to see beyond the “purposive consciousness” that has led us into ecological peril. Our conscious awareness is largely limited to the satisfaction of immediate desires by the most direct ways available. We have lost our access to the wisdom accrued in evolution, even to the greater part of the fruits of our own personal experience. We have absorbed the societal beliefs and constructs that foster our illusions of supremacy, dominance, separation from the natural world, and immunity from the consequences of our ecosystemic ignorance. We have come to believe that mind and mental activity only occur significantly in relation to human brains, we think that mind is a “substance” divorced from the physical world and we perplex ourselves with the question of how it can interact even with our own physical bodies. We have lost, says Bateson, even the grace the animals still have: the more-than-conscious sense of our total dependence on the ecological systems within which we have been, so far, kept viable. However, Bateson’s most penetrating and hopeful insight is that when we are actively engaged with any element of beauty we are able to reaccess much of the systemic wisdom that our total reliance on conscious thought and intention has overlaid and largely sealed off from us. If we consider our ongoing personal experience we may see the force of Bateson’s analysis. Part of the problem is that, in our daily lives, most of us have little access to real beauty. We are seldom, if ever, able to spend time in truly natural surroundings. When we do see a nonurban landscape it is often from our car or, at best, from our windows. Our work environments are mostly utilitarian and often aesthetically sterile. Participation in “the arts” is thought of as appropriate only for the rich, 137

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the highly educated, or the retired. Many of us feel ill equipped and insufficiently informed if we visit an art gallery or attend a concert. Pressures on our time limit what interaction with beautiful things or places may be possible. Television and other entertainment tends, quite literally, to screen us from real experience. Apart from our pets, if we have them, almost all our contact with living beings is with other humans either at work or at home. Much of our countryside is itself industrialized by high-technology farming. Advertising, packaging, and commodification conceal the sources of our food from us. We are surprised to learn that we could be jailed for keeping our pets in conditions that are usual for comparable farm animals. Both “the arts” and “nature” have become separated from ordinary human life. Bateson’s view is that actual experience, either in “doing natural history” (that is, spending time in natural settings while engaged in interacting with and learning to know the other organisms that live there) or in actively appreciating or making art as a significant life activity, is a crucially important way in which we can begin to access systemic wisdom again. In the 1967 “Human Adaptation” conference he said (as you have read) that we commonly find ancient ecosystems beautiful and that this is strange in an organism mostly interested in cars and money. He went on, in later work, to claim that we retain deep knowledge of our need for the integration that such systems represent. This linking of the beautiful with the ecologically healthy is, he thinks, the key to recovery. It would enable our recognition of the real situation. It would confer on us the grace of understanding again our integrated wholeness as part of the living world. Aesthetic engagement is a necessity if we are to recover our sense of membership of the biotic community; it is essential if we are to live sustainably on the Earth. GRACE

It is worth looking carefully at the concept of “grace.” It appears that, before the 1967 “Style, Grace and Information” conference, Bateson only used the word in the religious sense of an undeserved clemency or mercy conferred by the divine, or in the physical sense of beauty or charm of movement or behavior. His use of the term and his decision to attach it to those factors which reenable our awareness of ecosystemic connectedness, seems to be a deliberate combination of the original meanings, as well as an extension of those meanings to the possibility of ecological reprieve. This is, as Mary Catherine Bateson writes in the introduction to Angels Fear, “A pedagogue’s trick ”: to take a familiar word and to redefine it, making it “at once memorable and grounded . . . rele-

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vant both to general discourse and matters of value” (1988, 7). This is what the physicists have done with words such as “force” and “energy” and, indeed, what Bateson had already done with “mind.” In this way, the term “grace” has been given further meaning, related to but transcending its earlier meanings. In Bateson’s new and full sense we live, now, in a “moment of grace.” The priest, historian and ecologist Thomas Berry has recently written: “As we enter the twenty-first century we are experiencing a moment of grace. Such moments are privileged moments. The great transformations of the universe occur at such times. The future is defined in some enduring pattern of its functioning. . . . The present is one of those moments of transformation. . . we must note that moments of grace are transient moments” (Berry 1999, 196, 201). My main purpose in this chapter is to examine the process which Bateson recommends: engagement in the more-than-conscious mental activity of “art.” What happens when we spend time amid natural beauty, look perceptively and with openness at a mountain, an ocean, a landscape, a bird’s nest, or a fallen leaf? What goes on that is life changing when we attend carefully to great art, whether painting or sculpture, poetry or ballad, symphonic music or folk-song? How are we changed when singing with others, dancing, sketching, painting, or playing an instrument? Can it be that in play, metaphor, dream, art, and natural history we are in some way freed from the tyranny of purposeful logic, formal language, classes and categories? Are we therefore able to function in a prelinguistic, morethan-rational mode, which allows the transcendence of conscious purpose and in some way enables the grace of wise relating? Aesthetic engagement will provide the grace, says Bateson, to enable our reintegration within the ecology of the world. This claim depends crucially on his understanding of mental process or minds as forming all the relationships within the biotic community. Like his claim for the essential oneness of the world, the idea of using aesthetic experience as a cure for our self-seeking purposefulness can only be understood if we accept and work with his revolutionary view of mind as ontologically foundational. Few thinkers have as yet appreciated the full implications of this, Bateson’s central insight into the nature of mind. This one penetrating move denies the whole structure of Cartesian duality: the separation of mind and body. It refutes the “fact/value distinction” between what exists in the world and what is good or desirable. It rejects the idea of the isolated self, the whole complex of reductive science and the ontology of things as the separate and foundational bases of existence. Bateson’s claim places relating at the center of ontology and epistemology. The

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process that flows between the material beings is what matters. What we thought of as boundaries and limits become zones of interchange, active interfaces. Most, if not all the puzzles about the nature of mind dissolve. Mind is everywhere in the entire living world and is the systemic relating between every part of that world, from the microscopic inhabitants of biological cells to the totality of the great ecosystems. There is no way that mind can ever be separate; it is the systemic “going on” that links together all the material components of life. It is the communicational web of process that Bateson sometimes called “the glue” (e.g., 1979a, 5) that unifies the organisms, the ecosystems, and the human organizations. Bateson approached all these “puzzles” from the perspective of a wider-than-human biology, a new view of evolution, and a relational psychology. It is hardly surprising that the mainstream theorists of mindbrain-consciousness have dismissed his thinking without serious consideration. In spite of all the years he spent in clinical psychology, Bateson never limited his mental processes to humans or even to particular organisms. Conventional study of mind is concerned mainly with brain physiology, the nervous system, and specifically human intellect and emotions. The two lines of thinking fail to connect. Bateson’s thought was too wide ranging for the mind-brain specialists, too psychological for the biologists and the environmental scientists. His claim that mind and mentality is the primary factor in the process of the living world and that it extends throughout the ecologies of Earth has so far proved unacceptable to most conventional thinkers. One factor that has contributed to this rejection is that Bateson never put together all the elements of his thought into a succinct form. He believed that reducing his insights to precise language would take the metaphorical life out of them and so he hesitated to formulate them clearly. In fact he said on more than one occasion that he was reluctant to express ideas in logical terms, or to teach in ways that would be understood without metaphorical translation. As we saw in the section on “The Western Round Table on Modern Art” in chapter 4, he believed that bringing the processes of art and even the intuitive side of science into consciousness must negate the unconscious wisdom from which the art or science could grow. He held back from recommending action. I may be treading too boldly, but I believe that this central insight is so urgently needed by our sick world that we must now discard Bateson’s caution about moving from understanding to action. Bateson’s theory of mind and his assessment of aesthetic process, as an antidote to the pathological isolation of self-conscious purposefulness, depends on connectedness. In the lecture “Mind/Environment”

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([1973c] 1991a, 161–73) he asked how it is that living mental systems (like us) can recognize other mental systems, can find affinity and be drawn toward them. As we have seen, the answer is that we recognize, say, a flower as containing “formal characteristics of symmetry, imperfect symmetry, complex interwoven patterning, and so forth, which indicate that the [flower] itself is a mentally governed piece of morphogenesis” (170). This is what an aesthetic response is. Responding to beauty (or ugliness) is recognizing a systemically related being that is an extension, an enlargement, of our own systemic sense of self. This is the link between systems theory and aesthetics. AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT

To understand the promise of Bateson’s aesthetic theory we need to see that his thinking is importantly concerned with the bringing together of mental systems in active relationship. If aesthetic engagement offers us a remedy for our sealed-off, self-seeking purposiveness, it will do so by reconnecting, integrating, enabling wholeness and the recognition of oneness. Further, we must be involved in active process with the art and with the natural beauty. We will understand Bateson’s concept of engagement more fully if we now consider these aspects. CONNECTION AND RECONNECTION

Concern with connection and reconnection is central to Bateson’s thinking, as we have seen throughout chapters 4 and 5—and as one would expect from his cybernetic background. To take just one more example: The 1960 paper “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia” (1960c, 2000, 244–70) is concerned with the connections between science, beauty, and morality. Bateson examines the connections between how we know our world, what we recognize as beautiful or ugly, elegant or crude, and the basis from which we justify our deeds. He claims that if we do not understand our own interconnected nature, our deeds will be misdirected, resulting in ugliness and wrong. Connectedness requires responsibility for what we are part of. Bateson’s oft-repeated mantra, “the pattern which connects”, gains meaning in this context: within our societal pattern of knowing we separate our scientific knowledge from our aesthetic assessments and from our understandings of right and wrong. The pattern fails to connect what should be an integrated whole. We are left to deduce our ethics from fragmented and increasingly disregarded religions, outmoded philosophical systems, or social expediency. What we need

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is reconnection to awareness of the web of life so that, following the indications provided by what we recognize as beautiful (and, hence, systemically healthy), we can know what is right action for our “selves” and for all those living beings with which we are connected. INTEGRATION

Integration is another related term in Bateson’s work. For him, mind is integrated with body and with all the material components of the biological world because it is the communicational process, the flowing of information, the eliciting of physical responses, the enabling of life. The mind is foundationally linked to the aesthetic because, as a “tool for survival,” it uses both positive and negative aesthetic responses as ways of identifying the “health” of other parts of the systems of which we, ourselves, are parts. A negative aesthetic response such as the recognition of ugliness, grimness, or lack of proportion indicates a malfunction of the systemic whole, of which the “viewer” is, of course, a part. Bateson’s view of an integrated systemic world denies the possibility of a separable subject and object. A positive response, identifying beauty, grandeur, pleasing lines, harmony, colors, and so on, would suggest systemic health. A negative response would suggest either that the relationship between the viewer and the system viewed is deficient or that the system is itself malfunctioning. Either alternative would indicate a malfunction of the total system, which includes our self. Of course this is, again, a matter that will be affected by the scale of process that is our focus during the aesthetic experience. It follows from this that we must necessarily use strategies of limiting or focusing our field of attention. If we were to extend our area of awareness to the entire world we would always register a mixture of positive and negative aesthetics. But then, this is in fact what happens: at too vast a scale the mixture of beauty and ugliness merges into incomprehensibility. There is a limit to our systemic perception, however clearly we may intellectually recognize the integration of the world. Nevertheless, we are very much part of the biological (including cultural) world and we can learn to use our aesthetic sensibility to enhance our functionality within it. It is worth noting that the mixture of positive, negative, and neutral responses to art and to natural phenomena is often raised as a question in the philosophy of aesthetics. We seek explanation of such matters as why the mountains of the north of England and Scotland were seen by eighteenth-century and earlier travelers as barren, inhos-

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pitable, fearful, and ugly places, while in more recent times they have come to be valued as so beautiful that people travel thousands of miles to see them. It seems possible that a malfunction in the systemic integration of the earlier travelers was operative, perhaps prejudicing their assessment of the wild in favor of richer, easier, and less challenging rural landscapes in other parts of the country. It may be that comparative deprivation of contact with natural places has played a part in changing the aesthetic bias in modern times. Perhaps we now recognize in the wilder parts of our home lands the comparatively viable, sustainable qualities that we so badly need to reintroduce to our more urban industrialized or intensively farmed areas. WHOLENESS, ONENESS, AND MONISM

“Wholeness” is almost a synonym for “integration” but the slight change of perspective will offer further clarity. Bateson’s emphasis on context is closely related to the matter of wholeness. He has shown that nothing can ever be understood in isolation from its context, and that context must be seen as depending on patterning. We are embedded in dynamic patterns, which are themselves interlinked and so, ultimately, comprise that whole which is the living Earth community. Patterns are not fixed. For Bateson, they are more like the rhythmic, shifting, interactive relating of people engaged in folk dancing. We can never know the whole in any detail but, as Bateson reminded us (see the discussion of “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art” in chapter 5) one part of the process or entity always discloses information or meaning about the wider relational context. The music, the rhythm, the step patterns, the movements of other dancers, and our memory of previous dancing all merge into a perceptible whole which is the dance. Each dancer’s movements have meaning only within the shape of the dancing as a whole. The wholeness of the system provides each part with meaning. Any artwork and any experience of our context contains both its internal patterning and the information about larger contexts, in an infinite regress of redundancy or meaning. The contexts of life range from microscopic systems to whole civilizations, the great ecosystems and, as we now know, the cosmic process that has provided the potential for life. A complementary aspect of “wholeness” is Bateson’s understanding of mind as being largely unconscious. As we have seen, he thinks our conscious minds are secondary and potentially dangerous. What Freud called “primary process,” which I prefer to label “more-than-conscious mind,” is the much greater whole, containing evolutionary and somatic

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learning and in which artistic process is fully enabled. Because consciousness presents to us only a skewed sample of the total workings of mind it is always difficult for us to imagine or realize the tremendous integration of that wholeness. This is, teaches Bateson, one of the tasks of art: we can make iconic or symbolic representations of the greater wholes, which can give us access to that greatness. Such representations enable our access to a metaphorical or nonverbal understanding of wholeness. Whenever we engage with the aesthetic we are distancing ourselves from conscious literal understanding in order to see the larger whole. It follows from these considerations of wholeness that all definitions of beauty or the aesthetic must refer to examples of the beautiful within their context. This will be necessarily true because the pattern connects all scales of experience: context is inescapable. Again, we can specify the focus of interest but that can never isolate the beautiful from the processes at smaller and larger scales that link it to the total mental world. ACTIVE PROCESS

Lastly, we are always and necessarily engaged within the larger and largest processes of the world. As discussed in chapter 3, the delimitation of any process is a matter of definition by the observer. The boundaries of any process are really active interfaces. These link each process to the larger process it lives inside. Thus, the identifying of processes is a matter of choosing a focus of interest. It necessarily follows from this that “engagement” is also constant whether particular organisms are aware of this or not. We are always engaged and, consequently, our understanding of engagement depends on a balance of conceptual separation and conceptual linking. The important fact about the unifying effects of art or experience in nature is that it enables our conscious selves to recognize the deeply interrelated engagement that we already have. To this we can add our conscious intention to be engaged and thereby enhance the quality of our engagement. The pragmatic recognition of our real and unavoidable integration can be augmented by deliberate decisions to engage in natural and artistic process. Bateson offers little direct advice or instruction on how we can or should engage in aesthetic activity but there may be something to be gained by looking at the way one eminent contemporary thinker approaches the concept of engagement. This man is Arnold Berleant, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Long Island University, New York, who introduced the term “aesthetic engagement” into aesthetic philosophy. The following section examines Berleant’s understanding of aesthetic engagement.

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ARNOLD BERLEANT AND AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT

Art and Engagement Arnold Berleant proposes a theory of aesthetic engagement with both art and nature, which is in some ways very similar to Bateson’s approach. In “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature” (1993) Berleant sets out this theory, primarily in relation to nonhuman nature, but says little about his earlier development of it in relation to human art forms. I will therefore examine his book Art and Engagement (1991) in order to set out the basis of his thinking and to situate it within the thought of earlier aestheticians, before proceeding to an analysis of the later article and Berleant’s developed understanding of environmental engagement. In Art and Engagement Berleant seeks to correct what he sees as a twohundred-year-long aberration. He notes the long history of human participation in artistic practices and our consequent attempts to understand how the arts function and what they mean. He asks what it means to respond to beauty, what the ethical and healing effects of art may be and, importantly, seeks to understand the “power of art to transform and transcend, leading us into a condition of enhanced perception that may be wondrous, dangerous . . . overwhelming ” (9). Berleant points out that the classical age was a time when art was linked to the individual, to the society, and to cosmic awareness. However, since the eighteenth century, conceptions of art have narrowed, reflecting the wider philosophical change from ontological concern toward a focus on epistemological issues. The attitude to aesthetics that emerged in the work of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, and Kant produced a new way of relating to art objects: disengagement, the concept of “disinterestedness,” separation of the art object from the viewer and the world, and a consequent “contemplative” approach to art. Berleant claims that the older tradition of involvement and active engagement with art is showing signs of revival. He supports this by reference to twentieth-century developments in art that also reject the idea of disengagement and seek to involve the observer as participant. He claims that these recent developments represent a much needed “renewal ” or return to earlier practice and are not, themselves, freakish or in any way outside the boundaries of legitimate art. He proceeds to examine, in turn, particular fields of artistic practice: landscape painting, architecture and environmental design, literature, music, dance, theater, and film. In each, he shows how an engaged relationship with or in the artwork is possible and desirable in order to fully experience the occasion provided by the artistic presentation.

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In the case of a landscape painting the viewer can become a participant by the simple expedient of walking up very close, well inside the points of convergence of the painting’s perspectival lines. One then, literally, has the experience of moving into the depicted scene, becoming a part of the landscape, an inhabitant rather than a viewer. The active viewer is choosing to be interactive with the painting and the consequent process of engagement is enabled by this (53ff.). When considering architecture and environmental design Berleant points out that we are always, inevitably, active within our physical surroundings and also within our cultural environment. We live in a dynamic field of forces, within which our built environment is an active component. Architecture is centrally important for us and our interactive involvement with it is unavoidable. We are actors, performers in our cultural landscape, a “physico-historical medium of engagement.” For instance, how we choose the site for any new building is a “physical statement of personal and cultural beliefs about the human place in the world” (76ff.). Berleant’s discussion hardly penetrates beyond the built environment and there is no concern here for nonhuman organisms. He seeks to justify this by claiming that “since no human habitat is unaffected by our presence, there is no exaggeration in saying that architecture and the human environment are, in the final analysis, synonymous and coextensive” (77). Later in this chapter, Berleant asks, “What is environment?” He sees the common understanding of environment (as that which surrounds a thing or person) as a return to Cartesian dualism. Instead, he claims that there is a whole range of possible interactions and interconnections between person and place, varying from attitudes quite near to disinterested contemplation to a full and vital cultural and aesthetic assimilation of the person by the dynamics of place. In considering the aesthetic integration of literature, Berleant invokes assimilation again. He explores the integration of author, text, and reader, claiming that the reader’s involvement is necessary for the “completion” of the writing. As readers we are members of interpretive communities. The act of reading is at once an activity, a contribution, and an engagement (105ff.). Turning to the aesthetic engagement possible in music, he concentrates mainly on music as composition. The composer’s process is one of engagement with the “tonal possibilities,” the musical materials that are available to form into the new work. The performer’s act of engagement is to add a personal interpretation of the score, while the listener brings the aesthetic occasion to completion with the aid of musical

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memory. Berleant comments on a particular requirement for all participants in the musical occasion: the need to be totally present in the moment. The listener is inseparable from the music as a whole and “no distinction can hold.” The total engagement of the composer, performer, and listener is focused in the sound (132ff.). In the chapter on the art of dance (151ff.), Berleant challenges the distinction commonly made between the arts as art objects and the arts as performance. If we accept such a distinction how can we account for poetry, originating in song and still read (even if silently) with an internal ear tuned to the poet’s voice? Indeed, the whole of literature is “an occasion for reading.” Plays and other theatrical scripts rely on actual performance or imaginative recreation by the reader. Film can be seen as visual art but involves the dramatic portrayal of dialogue and needs to be “performed” in the presence of an involved audience. Even painting and sculpture require the appreciator to “animate the art object.” Performance is ubiquitous in the arts and all performance requires an activator. To this unsettled middle ground of the arts, dance also belongs. Performance is absolutely central to dance: there is no script and there is no separate art object. The dance, the artist, and the audience are in intimate union. The artwork evolves, is performed and is appreciated in and through the performing. There is, says Berleant, a halo effect: the aura of the occasion encloses choreographer, dancers, audience, set, and music in a synthesis. Turning again to film (175ff.), Berleant suggests that this “purely phenomenal” art engages its audiences more fully than any other. Combining vision, sounds, language, social and physical settings, and mental images into a continuous whole, film manipulates time, space and movement, enforcing the presence of the viewer within the passing moment, engaging both memory and imagination in total involvement. The general thrust of Berleant’s discussion and the overall aim of his theory is to widen the understanding of emotions, feelings, meaning, and communication as appropriate within aesthetic activity and to relegitimate the integration of aesthetics and art practice with other aspects of life. In the concluding chapter he asserts that we have come “to the end of aesthetics as we have learned it” (211). Berleant offers his book as a beginning to the development of a new theory of aesthetic engagement starting from the arts and artistic experience rather than from elements of other fields such as public policy or the epistemological or metaphysical presuppositions of philosophy. The development of such a theory, he believes, should not be attempted by a single scholar. Rather, it must be the concern of the whole range of

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disciplines and subdisciplines that seek to aid our quest for understanding of the human position: art history, the psychology and sociology of art, music, dance history, the theory of both “fine” and “popular” arts, cultural anthropology, intellectual and cultural history, and the various elements of philosophy. The contributions of all these and more are needed if a new aesthetics of engagement and involvement is to be formed. Berleant claims that the arts have, in the past, been “obstructed ” because their activity tends to subvert those institutions that attempt to substitute their own truths for the truths of direct perception. Such institutions seek to base themselves on structure. Examples of this would include religious, political, or societal influences that decree what is “seemly”—suitable for display or performance within the spiritual, moral, or ideological climate of the time. The Russian government’s encouragement of paintings extolling the energy and purpose of “the workers” during the post–World War II years, and it’s simultaneous discouragement of musical composers who were following trends that had originated in capitalist Europe provides an illustration of this tendency. Berleant insists that the validity of the arts is to be found within their own processes. There are strong links between aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics because experience is basic to all three. These links can yield insights, including ethical and social wisdom. Being rooted in direct experience, the source of perception and meaning, aesthetics can become foundational to more general philosophical and sociological thinking: “The arts bring us closer than any other social form to the immediacy of the human world as we live it” (210). Berleant hopes we can learn to recognize again the engagement that has always been present when “aesthetic encounters” have been effective and fulfilling. Aesthetic activity is a unified process that joins together the various aspects of art into an experiential whole. When we practice art there is always “something more” that reaches out to life. Berleant ends his book by claiming that “In an age pervaded by irrationalisms, from drugs to deities, from terrorism of the gun to terrorism of the mind, the artist is the ultimate anarchist offering to save us all from such solutions by returning us, with gratuitous benevolence, to our own essential and free place in the human world” (211). As I write this book (in the spring of 2006), in a world torn and threatened by incipient madness, violence and war, I see that these matters remain as contemporary concerns. Little has changed. Berleant, like Bateson, is seeing engagement in artistic process as promoting sanity and wisdom.

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“The Aesthetics of Art and Nature” By the time he produced The Aesthetics of Art and Nature (1993, 228–43), Arnold Berleant had moved toward a real consideration of natural environment. He first considers whether the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the aesthetic appreciation of human art are two different types of experience and thus require two separate theoretical approaches, or whether it is possible that a single aesthetic will enable interaction with both. His intention is to argue for a single approach and he starts, as he did in Art and Engagement (and in contrast to Gregory Bateson’s practice), by discussing earlier aesthetic theories of art and nature. Berleant’s entry point to the discussion is an examination of Kant’s theory of “disinterestedness,” which has been prominent in aesthetic thought for many years. Berleant first examines a paper by Allen Carlson (1993, 199–227). He considers Carlson’s understanding of Stolnitz’s view (1960) that a “special attitude” is required to enable aesthetic appreciation. A prime feature of this is Kant’s principle of disinterestedness, which requires that we set aside all interest “either of sense or reason” before we can experience aesthetic satisfaction and see things as beautiful. Kantian disinterestedness requires “borders” around art objects. They must be isolated by frames, pedestals, proscenium arches, or stages. Art must be grasped in a single view. Attributes are seen as internal to the object. Aesthetics becomes a separate domain requiring a special type of sensibility to appreciate it. The history of aesthetic appreciation of art during the last two hundred years has been one of attempting to maintain this separateness in order to enable the “contemplative stance.” Consequent (and, Berleant claims, often implausible) dichotomies have been introduced in order to maintain the separate identity of art works, including distinctions between form and function and between beauty and utility in architecture, with even more isolating divisions being introduced in the performing arts and in literature. Berleant believes that the Kantian theory of the arts is applicable only to paintings and sculptures, and that there are problems even there. When such a divisive theoretical approach is transferred to appreciation of nature, there are further difficulties. The ideal of disinterested contemplation may be theoretically possible for a scenic outlook or a formal garden but even these, in practice, involve movement and engage us in relational process. We, the viewers, are necessarily in the same space as the natural object. Another difficulty is the Kantian requirement that we must appreciate the skill and creativity used in making the art object. This, says Berleant (with Carlson), cannot apply to nature where there is no creator. Carlson’s alternative is to value nature in terms of its order.

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Such approaches depend on objectification, which Berleant questions, claiming that much modern art, as discussed above, is best understood as an invitation to involvement, even physical involvement. It invites “somatic engagement.” Conventional aesthetics, he claims, impedes our encounter with both art and nature. We need an aesthetic that is appropriate to the environment. The nature/culture division itself misrepresents nature. Again, Berleant claims that nature unaffected by humans has almost disappeared: little wilderness remains and all of this is affected to some extent by human activity, flora and fauna are located far from their original habitats, the surface, climate, and atmosphere of Earth are all changed. The natural world has become a cultural artifact, pervasively altered. Furthermore, it is seen differently in different cultures and at differing times; our socially constructed understanding of nature is historically based. By this point in his own theoretical development, Berleant had discovered a way in which nature can be reconciled with the theoretical demands of aesthetics. The aspect of nature that Kant called “the sublime” can provide a link between human process and nature. This is “the capacity of the natural world to act on so monumental a scale as to exceed our powers of framing and control . . . to produce . . . a sense of overwhelming magnitude and awe” (234). Berleant is about to say that we cannot choose to distance nature from ourselves. Separation is not possible but Berleant finds, in the sublime, a clue to a potentially new aesthetics of nature, one that “acknowledges the experience of continuity, assimilation, and engagement that nature encourages.” We should, if we utilize it at all, reserve disinterestedness for art objects. Kant’s understanding of the sublime as being in our minds, capable of being comprehended by intellect and enjoyed as contemplation from safety, is no longer available. Nature breaks out to engulf us; our illusion of separateness is specious. We must start, writes Berleant, by recognizing our connectedness. The sublime, as a model for our aesthetic experience of nature, provides for feelings of awe mixed with humility. The natural world does not surround us, it assimilates us. The “cognitive relation” is possible for us but it is not the only relationship we can inhabit. Our proper response is awe: of magnitude, of power, but also of mystery. As in a work of art, we are confronted with “the essential poetry of the world” and with “terror.” Nature is revealed to us as overwhelming force and power and Berleant believes that terror is an appropriate response for us now because, with the aid of our scientific technology, we have made ourselves into the victims of our own actions in nature (234–35). Aesthetic pleasure is not possible in these circumstances except by accepting the sublime as the model for aesthetic experience. The qualities of experi-

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ence that are dominant when such aesthetic appreciation is taking place are sensory acuteness, the perception of unity, the awareness of inextricable involvement and simultaneous understanding, awe, and humility. Looking at environment from within, says Berleant, looking not at it but in it, it is transformed. We live as participants: “intensely and inescapably aesthetic,” not only during dramatic and fearful experiences but in gentler times also. What is possible is “not disinterested contemplation but total engagement . . . sensory immersion that reaches the still uncommon experience . . . of unity” (237). All this applies not only to occasions that involve “the sublime” but also to smaller and more gentle natural beauties: to profusion, continuity, and gratuitousness. What we can have is a participatory aesthetics (238). It will be seen that Berleant has extended to nature all the ways in which humans can engage with art, discussed above in the section on Art and Engagement. He now goes further, suggesting that the aesthetics of nature can serve as a model for appreciating art. Engagement is about continuity and perceptual immersion. For instance, in environmental art much meaning rests on ties with the perceiver’s experience. There is order in art as there is in nature. Both nature and art are appreciated aesthetically and function reciprocally with the appreciator. For instance, “the beauty of the beloved” can, in engaged appreciation, be aesthetic as well as sexual. Moving to consideration of nature and the transcendent, Berleant claims that attempting to reach the sacred, the divine or God by using nature as a tool for that purpose would be to forego aesthetic experience in favor of a mystical transcendence. However, by retaining aesthetic engagement we may, in a sense, transcend the self. Berleant hints at the possibility of extending the self in ways comparable to Arne Naess’s “Deep Ecology,” to be discussed below in chapter 7. Berleant writes (240): “Perhaps the truth approached by transcendence lies in the quality of unity with nature which aesthetic engagement encourages. The perceived sense of continuity of our human being with the dynamic forms and processes of the natural world is a central factor in the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and it accounts for a touch of the sublime in the feeling of awe which accompanies that occasion. . . . We still retain the quality of numinousness in the sense of immanence we sometimes obtain in nature and art.” He still sees nature as a cultural construct. Art and nature, he claims, are both culturally constructed, and a single aesthetic applies. An active, engaged aesthetic reopens, to aesthetic appreciation, many experiences that have been closed by aesthetic theories of exclusion. In his closing sentences, Berleant approaches the question of normative

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ethics, claiming that aesthetic value is to be accorded to natural environment and, hence, that we can find actions that do not respect environmental beauty to be wrong. He goes on to suggest that such an aesthetic must necessarily be universal and that it “offers us a goal to work for as well as a standard by which to judge our success” (241). Berleant and Bateson To what extent do Bateson’s ideas about aesthetic unity and Berleant’s understanding of an aesthetic of nature cohere, overlap, agree, or conflict? How well does a contemporary aesthetician’s thought support Bateson’s understanding of the vital role of aesthetic process? It will be instructive to examine these questions. There are certainly similarities between the two theories. Professor Berleant tells me that a number of people have suggested to him that there is similarity between his work and that of Bateson. He says, however, that he has not been directly influenced by Bateson at all; in fact he had not read Bateson’s books until, as a result of a discussion between us, he bought a copy of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 2002. There are real correspondences between the ideas of the two authors. Most obvious is the fact that they both make engagement and integration their central theme. As we have seen, for Bateson the necessity of integration follows from his cybernetic understanding of mind and mental systems, resulting in a world of closely linked systems of communication, smaller systems acting within larger ones until the whole of biological activity becomes a unity. For Bateson the world is in deep mutual engagement throughout, except for our own human sector where, as a result of the development of “conscious purposefulness” we have succeeded in constructing an illusion of separation from nature. It is this error that has produced our present pathological inability to live sustainably within the Earth community. Bateson sees that both artists and scientists are inside their systems. Cybernetic understanding reveals that they cannot possibly control the larger system of which they are part and, hence, in both art and in dealing with the wider world, engagement must be recognized as membership of the life community. “Any person or agency that influences a complex interactive system thereby becomes a part of that system, and no part can ever have control of the whole” (Bateson 1970c). We have never been, and can never be, separate from the systems that have produced us and (so far) continue to sustain us. For Berleant, the emphasis is different. He sees humanity as conceptually other than nature. Nature has already been colonized by human culture and, though we have constructed an idea of a separate primal

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nature, damaging human effects are evident throughout the natural world. A conceptual reintegration is necessary and is achievable by means of aesthetic understanding. In this, Berleant and Bateson concur. Berleant recommends using “the aesthetic of the sublime” as the means by which we can recognize again the enormous and unforgiving forces of the natural world on which we depend. Bateson sees getting involved with the experience of beauty in both art and nature as a course of action that may lead us back to ecological sanity. Bateson believes that art and natural history offer to us the realization of our inextricable engagement. For Berleant, nature properly understood can inspire awe and even terror, though it may also be experienced as gentle and calming. His aesthetic of the sublime is, he says, the only possible way we can experience aesthetic pleasure in our present wounded relationship with nature. For Bateson it is the experience of reconnection to an essentially enfolding and supportive biological world that is sought by reengaging with the beautiful. However, both thinkers are agreed on the need for an aesthetic move toward enabling reconciliation between humanity and the rest of the living world. They are also agreed that a single theoretical approach to the appreciation of art and nature is both sufficient and desirable. There is, of course, a difference between the two thinkers’ views of mind. For Berleant, mind is very largely equated with conscious awareness in human beings. Bateson’s understanding is, as we have seen, uniquely broad, incorporating informational and communicative processes throughout the biological world and seeing some aspects of human consciousness as pathological. In particular, Bateson’s understanding of evolution as a vast mental learning process has no counterpart in Berleant’s thinking. Berleant (with Carlson) disputes Kant’s view that appreciation of the beautiful must include admiration and respect for the creativity and skill of the artist. In the case of nature, says Berleant, there is no artist and so, rejecting Carlson’s alternative of respecting order, he substitutes the idea of engagement with rather than admiration for the art, thus rejecting the separation of viewer and artwork that underlies Kant’s requirement. Berleant’s assumption that there can be nothing in nature that is comparable to the “skilled artist” in human art is challenged by Bateson’s view of the nonconscious but creative mental processes in organisms, ecosystems, and evolution. Bateson claims that it is the great natural processes of evolution and epigenesis that comprise the creative element in the world and he has no difficulty in seeing these as minds to which respect and admiration is due. Evolutionary mind is still developing and beauty has a key role in enabling the biological development of the world. Very often, says Bateson, when we recognize an organism or habitat as beautiful it is in

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fact “fit” in the Darwinian sense; it is a well-integrated fellow (mental) system. We recognize pathologies by their ugliness. Though we are part of these systems, in no way separate, human evaluators such as Bateson or ourselves are a “focus” (as discussed in chapter 3 above) of interest and activity that may recognize and respect larger systems. There is agreement between Bateson and Berleant about the processes of perception. Bateson’s understanding of perception is (as noted in chapter 3) a form of phenomenology. Berleant’s whole philosophy is rooted in phenomenology, particularly in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.1 For Berleant, “experience is the central term in aesthetics, and all that we can say about art and the aesthetic is in some way an elaboration of this notion” (1990, 14). Both Bateson (1979a, 32–37) and Berleant (1990, 58, 220–21 note) have written about experiencing the experiments of Adalbert Ames, Jr., an ophthalmologist. The experiments consisted of some fifty models with moveable parts that were to be viewed through “peepholes.” Each was designed to confuse the optical clues (contrast in size as registered on the retina, contrast in brightness, overlap, binocular parallax, or parallax caused by moving the head) by which we register depth or distance. In each case the observer’s perception of the model was confused by optical illusion so that, through he already knew the true size and positioning of objects, it was impossible to believe that these had not changed. Bateson wrote that, after experiencing some forty of these experiments his faith in his ability to form images “was so shaken that I could scarcely cross the street. I was not sure that the oncoming cars were really where they seemed to be from moment to moment” (1979a, 36). These experiments showed the unreliability of sensory perceptions and, consequently, both men realized that our knowledge of the real nature of things in the world is necessarily insecure. Bateson believes that all we can “receive” are images—perceptual constructions—and that we are necessarily incapable of knowing how those images are formed. Both thinkers, however, accept that there is a world of real things to be observed, even though we can never have precise knowledge of it. We may note Berleant’s reservations about using art in order to attempt connection with, or realization of, the transcendent. As we will see in the next chapter, Bateson was, by the end of his life, open to seeing the vast systems of the world as something very like divinity, but for him this could only be an immanent divinity. Ideas of transcendence were meaningless to Bateson. This seems to be the case for Berleant also: He hints that a possible enlargement of the sense of self, an extension of our felt identity to include the wider natural systems that sustain us, may offer the awareness of immanent and numinous

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presence that has, perhaps mistakenly, been seen as evidence for a transcendent God. We will shortly examine the work of other thinkers who support this view. Both thinkers wish to deny the dualisms on which much of our thinking, in aesthetics and in wider philosophy, is built. Berleant emphasizes that there is no division between the observing subject and the artistic or natural object. As nature is, for him, subsumed by culture, no nature/culture division exists. For Bateson (consequent upon his view of mind) there can be no duality between mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, mind and matter, fact and value, self and other, human and nature, or between human and whatever immanent divinity there may be in the world. He even denies the duality of good and evil, seeing these as relational and variable, dependent on the interaction of those concerned. Berleant does not, at first glance, seem to offer anything directly comparable with Bateson’s “grace”: a gift that may enable ecological wisdom. He invokes only the sublime, offering awe, terror, and, perhaps, contemplative peace as possible alternative experiences in different circumstances. There is no developed suggestion that this can offer us a way to achieve sustainable living but there are hints that this new aesthetic may help. We can experience awe mixed with humility. We can relish the gratuitousness and profusion of nature. We can experience nature as a unity with the cultural world of humanity. Our own emotions, values, beliefs, and memories enter into the process. There is an ethical thrust to Berleant’s thinking here, though it is not developed in “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature.” Aesthetic value may become a tool enabling us to condemn those actions that ignore the beauty of the natural world. Berleant suggests that the new universal aesthetic will give us a goal to work toward and a measure of the success we may attain. There are, therefore, some significant differences between the two thinkers. Berleant sees human culture as distinct from nature except insofar as we have rejoined ourselves to nature by “colonizing” it. For Bateson we are inextricably part of the natural world. Berleant thinks of mind in conventional terms as being evident only in humans, while Bateson finds mind and mental process everywhere in nature. For Berleant there can be no “skilled artist” in nature while, for Bateson nature is the product of evolutionary learning which is a skilled mind. Again, Berleant disapproves of trying to use art to connect with the transcendent; Bateson sees the metaphorical (including the use of icon and symbol) as an appropriate way to approach the sacred. Both, however, require engagement of humans in nature and in art. The integration of the human and nature is essential, though

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achieved by different means. Both thinkers are deeply aware of human damage to the world. They each propose means by which aesthetic or artistic practice can reunite humanity with nature: Bateson by engagement in art and nature, Berleant by psychological experience of nature and an appreciation of the sublime mingled with consequent terror. They share similar views on the process of perception and both wish to deny the dualisms that are endemic in our culture. Both recommend a single theoretical approach for both art and nature, and each sees normative or ethical considerations arising from our aesthetic interaction with nonhuman nature. Thus, an eminent contemporary arts theorist has significant areas of agreement with Bateson’s aesthetic ideas. Where disagreement exists this is largely attributable to the contrast between Berleant’s background, in aesthetic theory and cultural studies, and Bateson’s biological approach. Possible Criticism It is possible to challenge the theories of both Berleant and Bateson. The whole idea of a wider-than-human aesthetic has been criticized by arguing that the aesthetic is a human concept, developed and recognized only by humans, so that it is not meaningful to think of aesthetic awareness in nonhumans or of aesthetics having a function throughout nature. Aesthetic awareness, it is claimed, depends on human culture and intellect. Hence, we can observe or experience beauty in the nonhuman world but nonhumans cannot do that. Bateson argues that this is not the case. Firstly, beauty is a significant and necessary feature of biological life, evident in many communicative exchanges within nonhuman nature. As noted in chapters 4 and 5, Bateson repeatedly claimed that the alpha animal in any group is necessarily beautiful and that this is related to status and ability. The healthy system is the beautiful system and this is the case throughout the biological world. Also, biological process creates beauty: nests, forests, shells, birds eggs, the shapes and colors of flowers and trees. More basically, all beauty (including human beauty and human art works) is produced by the biological processes of evolution and embryology, these again being minds. The basis of this defense, as of the theories themselves, is Bateson’s understanding of mind as comprising all the processes of relating between material beings. Aesthetics, he writes, “has to be mapped onto the primary definition of mind” (1979a, 211). It is a characteristic of all minds. Secondly, I would suggest that, as biological processes produce beauty that is recognized by both human and non human minds, the

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workings of aesthetics are necessarily dependent on and functional within the whole of the living world. Aesthetics must have a biological base and our relating to the beautiful does not have to be founded in intellect or culture. The intellect names and recognizes beauty but the processes by which we respond to beauty are an inherent feature of the living world. These processes are themselves the aesthetic. Aesthetics has for too long accepted anthropocentric notions of processes and abilities available only to humans. We will see in chapter 7 that other thinkers who support the idea of an extended conception of the self, produce similar understandings of cross species process. AN ONTOLOGY OF BEAUTY AND INCLUSION

It is appropriate now to ask some questions. What are the implications of Gregory Bateson’s insights on aesthetics? What, in considering art, the aesthetic, and the beautiful, does Bateson’s work offer to support a holistic view of a process world, which, if adopted generally, would influence humanity toward sustainable living? What is new about Bateson’s ideas of aesthetic process? Bateson’s new gift to human society at this time is his linking of our aesthetic process with both natural beauty and human artistic activity. Peter Harries-Jones (1995, 49–50) refers to an unpublished Bateson article that he discovered in the Bateson Archive at U.C. Santa Cruz. This shows that Bateson believed that when we engage in aesthetic expression we “do not assume well-formulated purposes . . . definite motivations or the presence of clear intention.”2 Thus, we balance our consciouspurposive action with experiences that are more intuitive, more playful, activities that enable access to our inner, nonconscious knowledge gained in evolution and in life experience. Bateson’s understanding restores to us a lost tradition of closeness to the rest of nature and can provide renewed access to our wider-than-conscious mental processes. By teaching us to value the beautiful as evidence of ecosystemic health, he provides a tool that can be used in guiding our future practice. Further, Bateson’s understanding of the interrelation between mind, aesthetic process, artistic engagement, and the perception of beauty enables a holistic view of a process world which, if adopted generally, will influence humanity toward sustainable living. It is worth remembering that Bateson’s use of the terms “information” and “ideas” is a wide one. “Any difference that makes a difference” is his definition. On one or two later occasions he extended this to “any difference that makes a difference at a distance.” Implied, here and there in Bateson’s work, but not spelled out, is the possibility that such differences

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communicate feelings of love, excitement, sympathy, enthusiasm, and so on. Whether or not Bateson saw this clearly, I wish, for myself, to claim that this is the case. I believe that such stimuli reach us, not only from other persons but also from a gestalt of processes: social, theoretical, academic, aesthetic and political. Further, we are, as engaged mental subsystems, able to receive and recognize such stimuli from wider nonhuman processes. I suggest that aesthetic awareness and process may link us to ways in which we can receive, from more-than-human nature, elements of experience that contribute to our well-being, our psychological health, and to our sense of being at home in the world. It may be that we receive (from our dog or cat, from interaction with other animals, from a woodland walk or a mountain trek, from gardening, sailing, swimming, or just lying in the grass) real systemic communication that is enabling and restorative. Our situation is one of total interconnection with other beings through natural, recursive, nested mental systems. Understanding and internalizing this knowledge leads to recognition of our inclusion in wholeness, in consonant mind, which is sanity, the gift of reentry into membership of the world. The identification of the beautiful with the ecological good is a related Batesonian insight. His linking of beauty (as the mark of value) to beauty (as the sign of ecological health) provides the basis of a normative ethic that will be explored in chapter 7. Finally, the idea of “grace,” as the undeserved possibility of reaccessing ecological wisdom, emerges because Bateson recognized that the interrelated mental systems of the world are the sacred. They form a nonsupernatural, immanent divinity that we can learn to respect and love. The ancient meaning of the Latin words “religare” and “religio” (which are the origin of our word “religion”) was “to bind together, to rejoin or reconnect.” Thus, we are offered a “religious” hope: the opportunity of using religious process as a way of recovering sustainable living. This is the concern of the next chapter.



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s we have seen, by the time of the “Style, Grace and Information” lecture in 1967, Gregory Bateson’s understanding of grace was that it offers the possibility of regaining ecological wisdom by interacting with the beauty of nature or with human art. In later years he came to see that grace could enable a further step. He suggests that when we have recognized our interconnective membership within the biotic world, we can learn to see the total living system itself as divinity or as the sacred. I believe that Bateson’s thinking may now enable, for all of us, a rediscovery of sacred process. This will not be a religion such as we have known but a way, at once new and very ancient, of offering respect, reverence, awe, and love for and in the ongoing relating that is the informational process of the material world, the relating that enables life. Bateson’s claims about mind, grace, and the sacred are profoundly metaphysical. They are not products of analytical philosophy. Nevertheless, I see them as truly philosophical insights, products of the final years of a great mind, in which the love of wisdom is linked to the wisdom of loving. “Love” is a term seldom used in academic writing. I want to claim that love is not an abstraction; it is something that one does. As with so many aspects of process, it is difficult to express verbal concepts in our noun-centered language. It was no coincidence that Anatol Holt arrived at Bateson’s 1968 “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation” conference with a bumper sticker reading “help stamp out nouns” (M. C. Bateson 1991, 63). Bateson had written in the invitational paper for that conference: “It is appropriate to mention some of the factors which may act as correctives—areas of human action which are not limited by the narrow distortions of coupling through conscious purpose and where wisdom can obtain. Of these, undoubtedly the most important is love . . . [and] there is religion” (2000, 452–453). He proceeds to examine Martin Buber’s ideas about interpersonal relationships. As we saw in chapter 5, Buber divides these into I-thou, 159

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and I-it relations. The latter are typical of human relations with things and even with other humans “whenever purpose is more important than love.” A loving I-thou relationship, says Bateson, is possible between humans and their societies or ecosystems. Thus, we can recover the possibility of love between each other, within ourselves, and in the wider world. We can recover the processes of religious engagement without any need for transcendent divinity. I believe that we urgently need to attempt this because we probably have very little time in which to change our ways. The only social process that seems potentially able to override the consumerist, aggressive, power-hungry ethic that is prevalent now, seems to be a psychological dynamic oriented toward the sacred nature of the total ecology, a religious approach to valuing the Earth. It is in this sense, close to its original meaning of rejoining, “reuniting,” or “bringing together,” that I use the term “religious.” I am not referring to conventional Christian or other religious practices. Our guide toward this possibility will be the aesthetic, the beautiful. Bateson’s analysis (2000, 147–52) of the Balinese painting in “Style, Grace, and Information”1 offers an example of how this process might work. As we have seen, the picture depicts a Balinese funeral procession involving many people, set against a complex and stylized background of leaves. Parts of the painting appear serene, other parts are “turbulent.” Bateson examined the painting in order to explain what might be learned, by viewing it, about moving toward systemic wisdom. He claimed that it can be seen as “an affirmation” or lesson that to choose either turbulence or serenity as “a human purpose” would be grossly mistaken. The artist would have experienced this tension because the poles of serenity and turbulence are mutually dependent. Either “turbulence” or “serenity” would be meaningless concepts if the other did not exist. The picture is not, as a whole, either serene or turbulent, because each requires the other as its counterbalance. This understanding, said Bateson, can be extended to such fields as sexual relationships, social organization, or even dying. Always there is an interplay of dynamic influences and connections that require a systemic and intuitive understanding, rather than a purposeful approach based on only one perspective. This is a return to Bateson’s theme of context. Learning (and, particularly, learning about wise relationships in ecology) is always context sensitive. We must learn to relate to the widest context: the evolving natural world in all its mindful complexity, as revealed by natural beauty, art, and our own aesthetic process. This can provide access to awareness

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of context that is not circumscribed or concealed by purposive consciousness. We can learn to see that total context as worthy of the attitudes we have in the past extended to the gods. If we learn, before it is too late, to make this move toward reverential relationship with the systemic and material world, we will be in a win-win situation. We will gain enormously in quality of life. We will cease to be a pathology within the systems of the living Earth. Our children will grow into a progressively healthier planet and may be freed from much of the guilt and many of the fears that afflict us all now. To achieve such a state would be to enter into a new worldview, which I will call “reverential monism.” We need to know, however, what will be involved in making such a move. I believe that the following list covers the main requirements. What Does a Move Toward Reverential Monism Involve? There are five distinguishable stages or emphases that will be necessary. Each of these is essentially an activity, which may produce (and will require) a changed attitude. 1. Acceptance of Bateson’s understanding of “minds.” 2. Acceptance of the idea of inseparable unity—an extension of the sense of self. 3. Acceptance of Bateson’s understanding of a systemic ecological divinity. 4. Adoption of a new ethic. 5. Engagement in the new mode of sacred interaction with the world. I will examine each of these areas of activity in turn. 1. ACCEPTANCE OF BATESON’S UNDERSTANDING OF “MINDS”

As we have seen, Bateson’s whole structure of thought is dependent on his theory or understanding of mind as being the mainly nonconscious, informational, cybernetic process that enables the functioning of the living world. We have already learned that this basic understanding of thought or mental process as endemic throughout nature is the basis of Bateson’s ontology. His understanding of aesthetics and natural beauty, of the nesting of smaller mental systems within larger ones, and the postulation of a single all-embracing mind that is the totality of the smaller minds, underpins his monism and, ultimately, supports and makes credible his final hypothesis of the divine nature of the total process.

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If we are to immerse ourselves in a world seen anew through Bateson’s vision, we need to transcend our present limited and dysfunctional views of mind. As noted in chapter 3, we are all socially conditioned to the understanding of mind that was initiated by René Descartes in the first half of the seventeenth century. We have been taught to think of mind as an elusive entity that somehow inhabits or interacts with the human brain, produces consciousness (by means we do not understand), and enables reasoning, language, purposefulness, and agency. We believe, in spite of our knowledge of evolution and the great similarity of many mammals to ourselves, that only human beings have minds and the attendant capabilities. We see ourselves as individual, separate entities, delimited by our skin but also mysteriously involved with this mind, which we tend to think of as being more truly our “self” than our body is. Philosophy of mind has become an industry, employing large numbers of thinkers who support one or other of the many conflicting theories about what this mind is and how it can interact with the body. It is no wonder that we have difficulty in accepting Bateson’s understanding. The first step is to admit that our conventional view of mind is just that: a convention, accepted and validated by society. Before Descartes, nobody “had” a “mind.” The ancient Greeks saw their souls as something much larger than their bodies in which they, in some metaphysical sense, lived. People knew, of course, that they had thoughts, memories, fears, intentions, and so on, but these were not ascribed to a distinct mind. They were related to the total person. If these matters can be recognized and accepted it becomes easier to see Bateson’s view of mind as, at least, a more plausible set of beliefs than our current one. We can come to see that what we experience (that is, are aware of) as mind, self, or soul, is a particular focus of process and agency. It is the “going on” between the physical constituents of our body and also of all our relating with the beings and systems that surround us. Though the Batesonian understanding of mind is offered as a literal, scientifically verifiable account of mind in the world, it also has metaphorical force. It provides us with a way of imaging our immersion in the network of ecological relating. Self becomes the experiencing or awareness of the personal (and wider) agency that is our knowing, doing, loving, feeling, planning, growing, maturing, and dying. The basis of the going on is the transfer of information coded in many different ways to suit the particular systems within which they flow. All this, I submit, is much less a stretch of the imagination than are conventional ideas of dualistic mind.

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The real test of a theory of mind is whether it matches with our best knowledge of the world. Does it lead to a more truthful understanding or to pathological error? Does it have the potential to engender a clear appreciation of our relationships with other species and ecosystems? We have already seen the many ways in which our present mental functioning, as individuals, as societies, and as nations is leading toward disaster. Bateson’s scheme does better. It shows us an interconnected world with humans in membership but not separate, superior, independent, or immune from wider systemic effects. It offers an understanding of our past mistakes and of ways in which we can learn to fit into our dynamic world. One of the most important aspects of Bateson’s view is his realization of the total interconnectedness of all life; the essential unity of the biotic world. 2. ACCEPTANCE OF THE IDEA OF INSEPARABLE UNITY— AN EXTENSION OF THE SENSE OF SELF

The sacred, for Bateson, is the vast, interconnected whole that is the totality of all the nested mental systems or minds of the living world. The fact that systems are “nested” has important implications. Any system (except the smallest of all living systems) must contain smaller subsystems that are necessary for, or at least compatible with, the functioning of the system that contains them. Any system (except the very largest and most inclusive) must be a component of larger systems. Additionally, we may expect that there are lateral and reciprocal connections between systems of similar scale. As explained earlier, the definition of any one part of this interactive web as a particular “system” is necessarily arbitrary. Let us consider an example: the process of an acorn in its mental striving to become an oak tree. A single growing acorn may be seen as a mental process, a mind, but there is no way we can separate that process from others. The acorn’s survival and germination requires moisture so it is dependent on rain and wind. Its growth requires warmth, sunlight, and air. It may be trampled, eaten, frozen, excessively shaded by the parent tree, sprayed with herbicide by a farmer, assisted or hindered by bacterial or fungal organisms in the soil. Its inherited genetic makeup has to interact with all this and links this acorn to the processes of its forbears throughout evolution. This linking is, itself, an example of learning and memory. The acorn must become one system (one mind) with air, soil, water, nutrients, weather, and much more. Seen as a part of the larger system or process of the forest it will, itself, require fertile land produced by geological and biological processes in

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past times, it will moderate the present climate, take in and hold carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, affect the respiration of animals, provide habitat for countless insects and birds, timber for houses, the experience of serenity, a subject for a human artist, hiding for fugitives, fuel for a forest fire . . . the ramifications are endless. There is no way that we can say when the process involving the acorn begins or ends; there is no way for us to decide how widely its influence extends in the world. So, essentially, there is no real division between processes, either between the processes of different individuals or between scales or sizes of process. There can only be a single, all-embracing universal process. As Chief Seattle (probably) said: “All things are connected.” As early as 1970, when he gave the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Lecture in New York, Bateson was convinced that mankind and the rest of living nature was a single interrelated mental system and that the most embracing scale of this was related to the idea of divinity: “The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. . . . What I am saying expands mind outwards . . . a certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God” ([1970a] 2000, 467–68). A Revision of Our Sense of “Self’ This view of the living world as a unity requires a changed understanding of our sense of self. We have seen that, for Bateson, the self is immanent both in the body and in all the informational systems that link us to wider environment. This, combined with his view of the active nature of interfaces, means that we all live within, as part of, the total process of the world, which is divinity, the sacred. Bateson writes: “The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, ‘thinks’ and ‘acts’ and ‘decides,’ is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness.’. . . There are multiple differences between the thinking system and the ‘self’ as popularly conceived . . . the system is not a transcendent entity as the ‘self’ is commonly supposed to be . . . the ideas are

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immanent in a network of causal pathways . . . not bounded with consciousness . . . [the ‘self’] extends to include the pathways of all unconscious mentation—both autonomic and repressed, neural and hormonal . . . is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel . . . [such as] the pathways of sound and light along which travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other people—and especially in our own actions” ([1971a] 2000, 319). Hence, Bateson believes that what we are—our real identity—is not restricted to our body or even to what we are consciously aware of. If the self is to be seen as extending through all the causal pathways and is thus part of a wider environment, then there is theoretically no limit to the extent of our possible self-image. All elements of our living environment are themselves linked to larger systems and so an infinite regress of association and effect extends outward to include the entire cosmic process. Bateson’s Learning III does, indeed, provide us with “a world in which personal identity merges into all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction” ([1972e] 2000, 306). This is another aspect of Bateson’s unification of the living world, which is supported by quantum physics and the work of such thinkers as David Bohm (1980). Bateson compared his Learning III to the experience of enlightenment2 and in Angels Fear he suggested that enlightenment is an experience that occurs at “moments of change.” It is, he wrote, often the case that enlightenment is “a sudden realization of the biological nature of the world in which we live. It is a sudden discovery or realization of life” (1988, 74). Bateson’s monism, if accepted, means the end of anthropocentrism. Insofar as we retain individual identity, we can see ourselves as members of the world, distinct from other species but not in any way superior. We must learn to understand ourselves as equal to and equally dependent on all the other components of life on the planet. Extending our sense of identity to acknowledge our oneness with the other organisms, social systems, and ecosystems, we will no longer find meaning in our previous illusions of separation and species-based importance. Many other thinkers and movements are deeply opposed to anthropocentrism. These include James Lovelock and his Gaia Theory, Arne Naess and Deep Ecology, the proponents of Creation Spirituality, and a number of theological writers who seek to merge religion, God, and our human lives into an integrated relationship with the living world. These are discussed later in this or the final chapter.

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It is interesting and, I believe, important that Gregory Bateson thought of himself throughout almost the whole of his life as a “fourthgeneration atheist.” As we have seen, his family background and upbringing was deeply atheistic. The thinkers who were particularly influential on his early life—Charles Darwin, Samuel Butler, and William Blake—were themselves people who had rejected Christianity or modeled their own belief system in individualistic ways. The foundation of Bateson’s eventual understanding of the world was, as we have seen, the development of his cybernetic and psychological theory of mind. From this followed his appreciation of the systemic unity of the world, which became the basis of his monism. Metaphors of Divinity: Abraxas, Shiva, and “the Great Ecosystems” It seems that the beginning of Bateson’s (at least metaphorical) use of the idea of an ecological “god” may have been his discovery of Carl Jung’s strange work Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (1916)3 around 1965. In a review of the work (1974e) Bateson describes “this tiny book” as “the greatest achievement of Jung’s life—the turning point in a long battle . . . the moment for a new (or return to a very old) natural history of Man-GodCosmos.” Jung records the experience of writing this strange poetic booklet in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1983, 202–16, 339). In 1916 he was in the first years of his radical break with Freudian theories and was himself experiencing profoundly disturbing dreams and visions. He was already convinced that human beings have, in addition to their personal subconscious, a common collective unconscious that offers to all of us symbols and archetypes from past experiences and belief systems. Jung found himself repeatedly experiencing fantasy and dream contact with mythical figures with whom he interacted as if with a guru. There was the wise prophet figure Elijah, accompanied by the biblical Salome and a large black snake, and then (as a development of the Elijah figure) a being Jung named Philemon, who carried associations with Grecian and Egyptian traditions and some reference to Gnostic beliefs. Jung saw this being as an old man with bull-like horns and kingfisher blue wings who carried four keys. He was convinced that these visions were not produced by his personal psyche but emanated from the collective and historical unconscious. Shortly after this the Jung family experienced a series of

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“hauntings” within their home, which climaxed in Jung’s own experience of the house being invaded by a host of beings who announced themselves as “the dead” who had “come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.” Feeling compelled to write, Jung took up his pen, the occult experiences ceased and, over the next three evenings, the mystical poem or pamphlet “flowed out of” him.4 Jung’s decision to present the Seven Sermons as the work of the ancient Gnostic thinker Basilides may have had significance for Bateson. A little research reveals that Basilides was a conspicuous exponent of Gnosticism, resident in Alexandria in the early second century CE. Only fragments of his work survive but these suggest a pronounced dualism. He proposes two original principles, which are not reconcilable: light and darkness. In some way darkness made itself the master of the reflection of light and, thus, light and darkness were able to form the world. These thoughts, possibly derived from Persian dualism and Iranian cosmology, suggest a pessimistic view of the world, founded on the theft of light by the power of evil. Basilides proposes a supreme god, Abraxas, perhaps derived from the Persian god Mithras. A group of “hypostases” (rather like the “persons” of the Christian Trinity) surround Abraxas. These include Nous, Logos, and Sophia. There are also seven worldcreating angels or powers (possibly the planetary deities from later Babylonian religion), which may be seen as the lowest emanations of Abraxas.5 It is obvious that Bateson found, in the figure of Abraxas, a metaphorical reference that he could link with the corrective effects of the great ecological systems of Earth. Jung’s text describes Abraxas as the “God above God ” who is, himself, “activity . . . power, endurance, change.” Subsuming both God and the Devil, he is “undefinable life itself, which is the mother of good and evil alike . . . the sun and also the eternally gaping abyss of emptiness . . . the devil.” If Bateson was in any sense looking for a process divinity, if he was wanting to see good and evil, life and death, as the poles of experience rather than as opposed and noncommensurable antipathies, the figure of Abraxas was the icon he needed. It is worth noting that Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious has important similarities to Bateson’s ideas of an all-enveloping mental system. Jung, in this same “channeled” work, set out the Gnostic dualities of “Pleroma” and “Creatura,” terms I have discussed more fully in chapter 3. Bateson was to take these names and use them as terms for his own rather different distinction between the lifeless world of physics (where only forces and impacts create change) and the living world of differences, information, and mental process. Bateson, as we have seen, was eventu-

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ally to offer, though never quite articulate, a nonsupernatural (in fact an absolutely natural) explanation of the interrelated total process of the living world, which he never quite brought himself to call “God” or “the Divine.” He recognized the existence of this total world system that, including its many layers of subsystems, has all the attributes that humans have thought to be the characteristics of God. Bateson’s total process wields ultimate power, has purpose, is beneficent toward life but imposes implacable retribution for antilife actions. More individually sustaining aspects of divinity such as pity, forgiveness, and compassion may be seen at subsystemic scales of process: in community or herd, family, or interpersonal relationships between animals (including people), and also in local ecosystems as they provide for the needs of their constituent members. The dual nature of this sustaining and punishing deity symbolized the tension that Bateson always recognized within the biotic world. In “Conscious Purpose versus Nature” ([1968b] 2000, 432–45) he writes that lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. We can consider the biological systems (ourselves, our culture, and the ecology we live in) as “partly living sustainers” but they are also “punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces “God” if you will” (440). In the same lecture and in several other contexts Bateson offered his own version of the Garden of Eden myth. He claimed that the biblical myth is inverted, “as is so often the case.” Bateson’s version holds that Adam and Eve lived in a very fertile and balanced “garden” containing hundreds of species, probably in the subtropics. The two anthropoids saw, very high on the trees, fruit that they could not reach. They began to think and that was their error. They began to think purposefully. Adam experimented with boxes, putting one on top of another (a technology) until he could reach the fruit. This was exciting for them; they had discovered a new way to do things: “Make a plan, A-B-C and you get D.” Bateson’s key paragraph follows: “Then they began to specialize, in doing things the planned way. In effect they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own systemic nature and of its total systemic nature. . . . After they had cast out God from the Garden . . .” Bateson is close to a definition of divinity here. His meaning is clear: God is our total systemic nature; grace is our awareness of membership of this total system. The story continues. Adam and Eve extend their purposive operations. The topsoil disappears, some species of plants become weeds, some animals become pests, gardening becomes hard work, and Adam, getting his food by the sweat of his brow, sees God as vengeful. Adam and Eve’s relationship suffers too—their behavior to each other becomes

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purposive. Eve begins to resent sex and reproduction. She finds giving birth painful and blames the vengeful God for that too: Her woman’s capacity for love comes “to seem a curse inflicted by the deity.” Adam proceeds on his purposeful way and finally invents the free-enterprise system from which Eve is, for a long time, excluded because she is a woman. “But she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate” (440–42). Shiva and Abraxas

Bateson used the names of both Abraxas and Shiva as labels for the total mental process of life. There are similarities between these mythical figures. In fact the beneficent dancing Hindu god of creation, the protector of forests and wild beasts, has a second identity as Rudra, god of destruction. Evolution, writes Bateson in a thoroughly beautiful passage in Mind and Nature, “is as value-free and as beautiful as the dance of Shiva, where all of beauty and ugliness, creation and destruction are expressed or compressed into one complex symmetrical pathway” (1979a, 172). When Stuart Brand asked him, in 1973, about how one would choose one form of governmental administration rather than another, Bateson replied: “The truth which is important is not a truth of preference, it’s a truth of complexity . . . of a total eco-interactive on-going web . . . in which we dance, which is the dance of Shiva. You know, the whole of good and evil gets wrapped up in the dance of Shiva. And in ancient Hebrew, goodand-evil is a single word meaning ‘every-thing.’” The “only preference” is “for [a system’s] complexity” (Brand 1974a, 33). Mary Catherine Bateson, completing Angels Fear after her father’s death, wrote a metalogue discussion between herself and Gregory, in which she says: “ So . . . tragedy and opposites and the total fabric? And Eco as a nickname for the logic of mental process, the connectedness that holds all life and evolution together? And it can be violated but cannot be mocked? Perhaps It really is beautiful rather than loveable.” And Gregory answers: “Beautiful and terrible. Shiva and Abraxas” (1988, 150). This matter of the inseparability of good and evil, of God and the Devil, is a recurrent and important theme. During the 1973 interview Bateson showed Stewart Brand the Blake engraving of Job Affrighted with Visions,” where a composite God-Satan-and-snake hover over the halfsleeping Job. Bateson says of God and Satan: “They’re so intimately joined that you will never disentangle them. How many sorts of good and evil are there? The first evil, evidently, was the separation of good and evil” (Brand, 1974a, 21–22). I believe that Bateson’s meaning is that we

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have come to view only our personal experiences as “good” or otherwise. We have lost the wider view of the societal or ecological scale wherein the “evil” that afflicts us as individuals might be recognized as good or healing for the larger system. Similarly, creation and destruction, death and life may be seen as affecting specific organisms or systems but, in the total view, may be recognized as complementary, as the ongoing balancing of the world. Any absolute good or evil is thus precluded. In my view Abraxas and Shiva are the key to understanding ecological divinity and Bateson’s model for the “Ecological God.” The vast system of life is determinative at the large scale for the nested systems within it but the determinism is not absolute, nor is it imposed from outside the system. The process world in which we live is a dance rather than a structure. I am reminded of another wise man, Satish Kumar of Schumacher College in Devon, England, saying that the idea of the Dance of Shiva is preferable to the biblical idea of the Creator. He said: “The Creator can leave his creation but the Dancer can never leave the dance.” 6 The patterns within which we live are dynamic and responsive to our actions. The shape of the creative dance of life is determined by all living organisms together. Our personal intentions and our understanding of our living situation can influence the wider, perhaps even the widest systems of the world. Thus, God/Divinity/Universal Process contains both good and evil, creation and destruction, suffering and joy, God and the Devil, Shiva and Abraxas. These are not dualities. They are polarities that are in tension but are not separate or conflicting. They are the very nature of the living world. It is in the tension between these polarities that we can find our path. The divine, the sacred, or God is to be seen as the totality of the enfolded scales of mental process in the world. Hence, we are all in God. God is in us. The old sayings become newly comprehensible in terms of a natural process divinity. “Heaven” may be just “the universe,” the widest process of agency and mind, the origin of life, our galactic home. Bateson’s understanding of the whole vast web of creative processes that is the living world, as being the sacred—“that with which thou shalt not tinker” (1988, 148)—offers us the knowledge that we do, in fact, live within the mind of God. Peter Harries-Jones notes that in the unedited manuscript of Angels Fear, Bateson had written: “It is my thesis that . . . religion consists in recognizing not little bits of miracles . . . but vast aggregates of organization having immanent mental characteristics.”7 This is more than pantheism, more than panentheism. Along with the other dualities, we need to transcend the conceptual split between immanence and transcendence. Thomas Berry suggests that we can

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simply coin the word “inscendence”8 and accept that God or divinity can be, at once, present within the whole of life (in Bateson’s terms within every mental system of whatever scale) but also may be transcendent in the sense of being the very largest of systems, the totality of the living minds of and in the universe. Bateson’s phrase “all the processes of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interaction” (2000, 306) seems, again, to come as close as language can to conveying the nature of an inscendent divinity. An inscendent divinity fits well with Bateson’s understanding of agency. For him every scale of every process has agency in the sense of being able to cause or modify change through the relational transfer of information. As we have seen, there is communication and reciprocal influence between processes of various scales and the systems that form their components. There is also lateral connection between processes and similar nearby or more distant processes. In such an interlinked world, agency is vested in process itself. Agency becomes the product of the relating between material entities, which we see as the effect of processes: the changing in “things.” I suggest that the bringing into being of new things (and, hence, of new processes of relating) is a proper use for our term “incarnation,” the production of things by mind. The obvious extension of this is to view the overall systemic divinity of the living world as itself birthing the whole of biotic existence. Ecological Reverence and Traditional Faiths What sort of bridge is there between this new view of divinity and more traditional ways of thinking? In Christian and other deistic religions there is already much common ground. We have no problem in seeing that God, divinity, the creator, the One, has—or perhaps is—mind. It is the in-between scales of the world that science has taught us to believe are insentient, mindless. As individuals, we may see God as loving, supportive, capable of anger, dealing punishment, responding to prayer, and having plans or intentions. These are clearly the actions of a being with a mind. We are familiar with such notions as the Quaker “that of God in me” and, more generally, with the idea of living within the protective care of the divinity. Devout Christians may seek to live “in God,” meaning to live with their individual mind or life process subsumed in a relationship with God. The aim of prayer is often seen as an attempt to transcend personal self and to achieve a close and continuing relation with God. Faith healing may be seen as a way of engaging with larger mental processes. The practice of worship, the gathering together of even two or three people in shared devotion, is understood as an activity

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of mind. Meeting for such practices as “keeping vigil” represents the merging of a number of individual minds into a united process of intention. The church can be seen as, itself, a mental process. Moral or ethical communities are developed and maintained by consensus, by finding and keeping a common mind about right and wrong action. All this is compatible with Bateson’s understanding of the mental systems of the world. The Christian religion and the other world faiths may easily be seen in process terms. The difficulty arises when it is realized that a mental process divinity is necessarily immanent within the physical world and is not “transcendent” in the sense of being “above” or in some way “beyond” the universe. Such a divinity is not personified as a human and cannot be expected to prioritize human needs. A profound difficulty will be that most people continue to see themselves as separate, skin-encapsulated persons with individual needs, rather than understanding the self to include wider ecosystemic relations. Any general adoption of a mental-systems view within the traditional religions will require these difficulties to be resolved. In Bateson’s terms God is the totality of the processes or circuits of information. This totality can be said to have knowledge of the world, to organize the energetic processes of change and creation, to deal out retribution for ecological sin, and to offer the possibility of salvation. Such salvation will not be in an otherworldly heaven but in a potentially beautiful and sustainable Earth, with the oppression of the fear of death exchanged for a widened sense of self in which the ongoing flourishing of the living Earth succeeds the old anxiety for the individual body and soul. Bateson’s “Serious Truth” Just before Christmas, 1967, Bateson wrote to cybernetic polymath Warren McCulloch in these words: I begin to wonder whether I am mad or have hit on an idea which is much bigger than I am. Of course these are not mutually exclusive alternatives. . . . I suggested [in the invitational memorandum to the 1968 “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation” conference] that the lineal arguments of human purpose necessarily conflict with the cybernetic arguments of physiology, sociology and ecology, and that therefore, following his own purposes, man almost inevitably messes up his own physiology, social system and ecosystem. . . . I had joked . . . about the idea that Original Sin was

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the discovery of planned purpose; and that, following this discovery Adam and Eve expelled God from the Garden . . . the general notion was that God symbolized the systemic and cybernetic nature of the environment which inevitably took vengeance on man’s short-sightedness. . . . This little parable can be considered as a serious truth—especially if we turn it upside down. I suggest that one of the things man has done through the ages to correct for his short-sighted purposiveness is to imagine personified entities with various sorts of supernatural power, i.e., gods. These entities, being fictitious persons, are more or less endowed with cybernetic and circuit characteristics. In a word, I suggest that the supernatural entities of religion are, in some sort, cybernetic models built into the larger cybernetic system in order to correct for noncybernetic computation in a part of that system. I do not believe anybody has said this but I do not think that this view of religion contradicts what has been said by others—the religious, the mystical and the scientific. There is therefore no conflicting hypothesis against which mine can be tested. . . . If I am right, my hypothesis will provide an almost totally new way of analyzing religious ideas and . . . behavior. We shall have to ask, for instance, what sort of corrective is introduced into an otherwise purposive system by the Mass. . . . I think that the idea . . . is the biggest thing I have bumped into yet (1982c, 62–67).9

This letter shows, quite clearly, that Bateson believed the processes of religion to be capable of influencing for the good our interaction with the ecological world on which we depend. What Bateson is saying is this. Throughout our known history as a race, we have recognized, in our mental interfacing with the more-than-human world, that there are pathologies in the way our purposeful consciousness leads us to act in relation to other species and systems. That recognition has occurred in our more-than-conscious minds at the level of the individual, the group, and the society. In response we have been groping for ways of more integrated living and have expressed this search in devotion to deities often imagined as great humanoid beings. This has proved partially successful. The importance of Bateson’s insight is that we can now recognize the ecological and religious needs as identical. We could, if we wished, deify the relationships and systems we have learned are existent in the world, transferring to them the processes of religious devotion that we have seen as appropriate for the gods. as well as looking at what sort of corrective is produced by particular religious activities, we can ask what sorts of

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religious practices may help us to avoid the need for correctives. Bateson held back from such strategies because he felt that our purposive, conscious choices would inevitably be wrong. In religion, however (particularly in ecological religion), we can learn to incorporate the nonrational, the intuitive, and the aesthetic, thus engaging much more of mind than calculating consciousness. Mary Catherine, writing as if in conversation with her dead father, exclaimed: “Daddy, it’s just not here.. . . You just don’t spell out what, finally, you mean by “the sacred,” and you don’t tell us beans about Eco. We need more” (1988, 145). We do indeed need more. We need to take, into our thinking, Gregory Bateson’s insight as I have explained it. We need to move on to actively developing this new “religious” approach to our daily living. The religious and the secular need no longer be divided. We can learn to see ourselves as living within the ecological God, to see our “selves” as widely extended so that we will indeed be living as a part of that divinity. And, as members of the living world, we will know that the divine is also within our “selves.” Other Relevant Thinkers Bateson’s understanding of the world is not without precedents and supporters. There is philosophical support for his views from thinkers ranging from the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza to contemporary thinkers such as Arne Naess, James Lovelock, and Joanna Macy. Spinoza

Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) has much in common with Bateson. He provides an early and profound example of a philosopher finding the world and the Judeo-Christian God to be synonymous. For Spinoza, God was immanent in the world; all things and beings were aspects of the mind of God. Hence, the world was a unity; the human self (as an aspect of God’s mind) was to be seen as unified with the world. Spinoza was, clearly, a forerunner of Bateson and, in several ways, a similar character. He was born into a Jewish family that had escaped from Spain and the Inquisition to the comparatively tolerant Dutch Republic. He was a thinker who, like Gregory Bateson, wanted to question the very basis of how we understand the world. He wanted to start again from the beginning. Unlike Bateson he started with God and then rethought the whole world to fit his understanding of the divinity. Like Bateson (by the end of his life), he wanted to have God (for Bateson, “the sacred”) and world as a single being.

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Spinoza sees God as being absolutely everything, the only substance that exists. God has infinitely many attributes (characteristics or facets) but we humans can only perceive two of them: extension (by which he means material things in the world) and “thought,” by which he means God’s mind and mental activity, of which our own minds and their activity are a part. This idea of divinity or the sacred as mind closely linked to the material world is close to Bateson’s view of the world as imbued with nested mental systems, which, in total, are the sacred. Spinoza sees each thing or being (including human beings) as a “mode” of God, so God is in us and we are in God. There is no God out there, in heaven or somehow beyond the world; God is immanent, wholly here and inside the material world. There is, for Spinoza, no personal God, there are no immortal souls. Only that part of our mind that has learned to see everything “as it is in eternity” can survive death. Spinoza’s central thesis is that there is only one substance in the universe: which is both God and nature. God does not exist outside nature. Nature is God; God is nature. God-nature includes humans. “Deus sive Natura” said Spinoza: “God-or-Nature,” indivisible. His writing is densely logical; the Ethics10 is set out in the style of Euclid’s geometry, the most rational and logical treatise known to Spinoza, with definitions, lists of axioms, and many layers of interrelated propositions leading to proofs. Another aspect of Spinoza’s thought is also partly echoed by Bateson: the question of whether all our actions are the inevitable result of previous events and causes, or whether we have genuine free will and can decide and choose our actions independently. For Spinoza, the total God-world entity is self-determined, that is: free to choose how to be. God, however, has already chosen, once and for all, that all the changes within the world shall follow strictly from the natural laws. This means that all changes conform to those laws that we have, by observation, understood as the causes of the way things consistently occur. Hence, for Spinoza, everything that happens is the inevitable result of a previous cause, which was itself brought about by earlier causes—and so on in an infinite regress. Even the will of God cannot change. For us and the other beings in the world there is no freedom of choice. Whatever we think we are choosing, the fact is that we were predetermined to choose that way. All beings strive to maintain themselves and to survive as they are, but even this striving is predetermined. There is no “contingency,” nothing ever “just happens.” Time is unreal and there is no point in feeling hope, fear, or remorse because things could not have been other than they were, and the future is similarly fixed. In humans the striving to persist is

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conscious. We call it desire. For Spinoza all other emotions are derived from this desire or from pleasure (which we experience when making the transition to a greater perfection of mind and body) or pain (which is the opposite). Emotions like anger and fear come to us from outside because we have “inadequate ideas.” When we understand the causes of these emotions properly they cease to affect us. For instance, if we realize that the person whose behavior makes us angry could not have behaved differently, we can set anger aside, realizing that this person’s actions were caused by other events in the past. For Bateson too there is a measure of determinism in the way that the “Very Large Ecosystems,” which may be “what some people mean by “God’” ([1972a] 2000, 467) must respond inexorably to the damage we do to them. Bateson writes of “the familiar physical determinism which characterizes our universe,” which is also “a mental determinism.” Like Spinoza he sees the way that causes determine outcomes as “in no way supernatural. Rather, it is of the very nature of the macroscopic world that it exhibit mental characteristics. The mental determinism is not transcendent but immanent and is especially complex and evident in those sections of the universe which are alive or which include living things. . . . Immanent mind has no separate or unearthly channels by which to know or act and, therefore, can have no separate emotion or evaluative comment. The immanent will differ from the transcendent in greater determinism” ([1972a] 2000, 472–73). In other words, the immanent mental processes will act automatically to redress imbalances. If we cut down the rainforests the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will increase, the greenhouse effect will be enhanced, less heat will pass out into space, global temperatures will increase, the polar and glacial ice will melt, sea levels will rise, unstable weather patterns may develop, crops may fail, and human population levels (and human interference with global climate) may be reduced. This process is already under way. Note however that, for Bateson, the determinism is not absolute. What is determinate is the common sequence of cause and effect from which we are not excused because of our ignorance of the connections. We have some freedom in our choices but, if we make enough mistakes, the consequences will certainly follow. If we fail to reduce harmful emissions of pollutants and further damage is done to rainforests there is no way that we will escape retribution. I find Spinoza’s strict determinism unacceptable. It makes nonsense of all morality, of any hope that we can do better by aiming for what is right. It takes away all possibility of striving for the good. It seems to me

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that Spinoza has been forced into determinism by assuming that logical deduction is the model on which the world works. Spinoza must take this view because he understands what exists as being a single substance that is both God and world. For him, the mind of God is rational and therefore logical, the material world is a product of that mind. “Extension” and “thought” are the only attributes of God that we can perceive. Given this set of beliefs, Spinoza must claim that all happenings in the world are caused by logical relations and necessity. This claim is open to dispute. Anthony Kenny (1994, 149) points out that there is a “hidden assumption” in Spinoza’s thinking, “smuggled in through the original, harmless sounding, definition of substance.” This assumption is that logical connections are the same as causal connections. Roger Scruton (1986, 36–37) also writes that Spinoza assumes that the logical relations between ideas are copied in the relations between material things in the world. The relations between ideas do, he thinks, follow mathematical reasoning. Spinoza believes that relations of cause and effect between real things are organized by mathematical or logical processes in exactly the same way as the relations between ideas. Scruton writes that this is not so. We can know that the car engine will not run without having knowledge that the crankshaft is broken. Knowing that the engine will not run (we tried to start it but it just clanked and stopped again) is an idea. Knowing why it won’t run would be knowledge of the effective material cause—a different sort of knowing, which depends on dismantling the engine or on engineering experience of other broken crankshafts. Spinoza, believing that the thing depends on the idea for the sort of thing it is—was compelled to think that everything that exists has been produced by preceding causes and could not have been otherwise—just as, in logical reasoning, once one has accepted the premises (the starting point of reasoning at which you accept the facts, as you understand them, to be true) there can only be one true conclusion. Bateson certainly rejects anything like logical deduction or simple straight-line causality as determinant of events in the living world. He points out that, although logic denies the validity of “circular reasoning,” the causal chains in the living world are always circular or more complex. Information comes round the causal circuit again and again, its effect changing on successive circuits. Real-world situations are always influenced by many different interacting systems of information transfer. For these reasons, the old way of applying logic to the functioning of living organisms and systems always “generates paradox”—it produces results that are simply not true of the living world—such as strict determinism. Logic is precisely not able to deal with living systems (1979a, 20–21).

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For Spinoza the changes and processes in the world are themselves modes (versions or particular configurations) of God and so we (being also modes) see them through our partial and confused understanding of the world and God. This is not so for Bateson who sees the processes and the changing in the world as the most real and important components of reality. The only “freedom” that Spinoza can salvage for humans is the possibility that we can, by rational thinking, manage to understand “why everything is as it is.” We can do this by seeking the highest form of knowledge. For Spinoza, as for Bateson, there are levels of knowledge or learning. For Spinoza there is a lower level of knowledge (“vague knowledge”) gained from experience through our senses such as sight, touch, or hearing. This is necessarily confused and “inadequate” knowledge. For instance, our sense impressions of the sun suggest a small glowing ball rolling round the sky. There is, however, a second level, which is the holding of “adequate ideas” or “clear ideas” about the world. Through scientific investigation we have now gained an adequate idea of the sun’s nature or essences. These adequate ideas can be used as tools to reach the third and highest sort of knowledge—the intuitive knowledge of “the essence of things.” Essences are, literally, the essentials that make a thing what it is. If you take away an essence, the thing is no longer what it was. The essences of a Lake District view include mountains and lakes; without these the view would not have the characteristics that make it what it is. This highest form or level of knowledge, says Spinoza, gives us the greatest possible peace of mind and a sort of freedom that comes from accepting that all things are as they are because we can see that they are in accordance with God’s will. We may eventually see the world as God. So freedom is understanding. Misery is the lack of this adequate knowledge and understanding. Happiness and peace of mind are genuine knowledge—and merriment is always good. Bateson’s thinking and Spinoza’s philosophy partly coincide where they consider knowledge and learning. The key difference is that Bateson sees knowing as a characteristic of all beings and systems within the living world. Spinoza, while he sees the mental thought attribute of God as present throughout the wider world, in fact limits his discussion to what humans can know. For Bateson, learning and knowing extends to “a great many other places besides what is in my head and yours. . . . A redwood forest or a coral reef with its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure” (1972f, 2000, 490). Bateson (as detailed in chapter 3) saw the process of learning as having levels rather similar to Spinoza’s levels of knowledge. Bateson tells the

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story of one of his dolphins at the research center in Hawaii who learned, during a series of experiments, that what was being rewarded was not the repeating of behavior that had been rewarded before, but that she would score if she invented something totally new. Eventually, showing great excitement, the dolphin started a training session by putting on an elaborate performance with eight “conspicuous pieces of behavior” of which four were quite new and had never before been observed in the species (1979a, 131–32). Clearly, Bateson claims, this was an example of learning about the context of learning. Bateson’s “seldom achieved ” third level of learning, the achievement of something like enlightenment, can be interestingly compared with Spinoza’s third level of intuitive understanding of the world as God. For Bateson there is complete merging of the physical components of a mental system with the mental process itself. As we saw in chapter 3, there can be no mind without some minimal physical complexity, but any sufficiently complex living system will constitute a mind. For Spinoza, minds and bodies are quite distinct attributes of God. Humans are modes of God, and so possess the same attributes. We are not individuals but partakers in the unitary existence of God and the world. What occurs in our mind is somehow mirrored in our body (and vice versa) but there is no causing of thoughts by what happens to the body, or causing of actions by the thoughts of the mind. This is all rather mysterious and seems similar to the “psychophysical parallelism” now favored by some theorists in this area and is also close to modern behaviorism. We must remember, however, that (as attributes and modes of the unitary God) mind and body are not separate for Spinoza. They are the same thing, “conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension”11 In effect, both Bateson’s view and Spinoza’s understanding are monistic, unifying mind and body with the world. Roger Scruton writes that, for Spinoza, nothing exists except the one substance, self-sustaining, self-explanatory, and self-contained. This substance, the world, may be understood as God and nature, mind and matter, creator and created, eternal and temporal. We can know it adequately or clearly through its essential attributes, but only partially and confusedly through its modes, the beings and things of earth. “To understand it in its totality, under the aspect of eternity, is . . . to know that everything in the world exists by necessity, and that it could not be other than it is” (Scruton 1986, 50). In spite of living in a totally determined world, Spinoza was profoundly cheerful about life and God. His whole project was to discover how to “use reason to discover the true good” this enables “a joy

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continuous and supreme.” Indeed he thought that, if we do this, we can all possess “hilaritas,” “a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity.” He wrote that “There cannot be too much merriment. . . . It is always good. . . . Melancholy is always bad.”12 Arne Naess

Spinoza’s philosophy (and not least his thinking about joyfulness) offers a useful bridge to the work of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, whose thinking amplifies and offers support for several aspects of Bateson’s understanding of the world. Naess was himself deeply influenced by Spinoza’s work. His own philosophical enterprise, Deep Ecology—and its claim for the interdependence of all living beings, has its roots in Spinoza’s conviction that (to quote Roger Scruton again) “all things that exist, exist necessarily in thoroughgoing interdependence. . . . The identity, separateness and self-sufficiency of the person all seem to be denied. . . . Man, as part of nature, seems to be no more important a feature in the scheme of things than are rocks and stones and trees” (Scruton 1986, 53). Scruton finds this puzzling and absurd. Naess, like Bateson, sees in it the key to appropriate humility toward the rest of the living world and to our possible survival on this planet. Naess sets out his view of Spinoza’s “hilaritas,” in an article for the North American Review: “The Place of Joy in a World of Fact” (1973, 53–57) and in an unpublished 1991 manuscript: Freedom, Self and Activeness According to Spinoza.13 In the former article he looks first at our ideas of utopia and how we might get nearer to a utopian society. Utopias presume that their inhabitants would all be able to lead a balanced life containing many activities. We would practice these activities “from personal inclination, with joy and within the framework of [our] value priorities.” In contrast, there is today’s situation where even those working to solve environmental problems are unable to live out the values of nature that they are fighting for. The “pioneers who—through endless meetings held in contaminated city air—succeeded in establishing wilderness areas in the USA” have lost their capacity to enjoy those areas, to live out their ideals in action. Few have “stepped down from their exalted position as chairman of this or that, as senior member of a law firm, as professor of wilderness in order to enjoy the areas at least part of the year.” Environmentalists tend to succumb to joyless lives. We need environmentalists who will provide good examples. Naess hopes that eventually there may be “no fragmentary Ecologists.” All this stems from Naess’s roots in Spinoza’s thinking and his own practice. He is writing from the heart. Naess became (at the age of

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twenty-seven) full Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University and was deeply influenced by Spinoza and, later, by Gandhi. He was a wartime member of the Norwegian resistance movement and taught in mainstream philosophy, mainly philosophy of science, until 1969. At the age of fifty-seven he resigned his professorship in order to concentrate on the ecological crisis and to develop a philosophy that could help, as he says, to “chart a way out of the chaos.” For him, the “love of wisdom” has always been related to action and his system of Deep Ecology validates that link. He was and is an activist himself and has chained himself to cliffs and lain down in front of bulldozers with the best. And he makes sure that he spends much time in wild nature. In 1938 he built a wooden hut on “his” mountain, the Hardangervidda, at twelve thousand feet and (when I was last in his company) he was, aged eighty-five, spending several months each year up there, writing, skiing, and climbing. At that time he was still inclined to enter the Schumacher College lecture room by climbing in through the window and to become a little restless toward the end of the sessions because “Stephan has promised to take me to the quarry—to climb!” When I asked for some discussion time with him about the project of this book, he beamed, said “Yes! Let us talk. Let us find somewhere quiet!” set off at a run through the college and, finding an empty room, listened, suggested possibilities and poured out enthusiasm and encouragement. A year later he took up rollerblading as his “new sport.” I relate these personal details to show that Arne Naess is a man well qualified to interpret Spinoza’s understanding of joyful living. In the article, he stresses the importance of linking our personal lifestyle to our teaching or to our other ways of seeking to influence people. The psychotherapy for passivity (which is the product of despair) is action. Not “saving the world” but engagement in what is immediately possible. This may mean close engagement with “extreme misery” (he instances Gandhi washing the feet of lepers), but working to relieve the situation will bring joy. Activeness is the solution to our despair, alienation, and pessimism. Evil and misery are not real objects in the world; they are the absence of goodness and joy, which are real parts of our lives. This is close to the “engagement” that both Bateson and Berleant enjoin. For Spinoza, joy is hilaritas, a serene quality of being that colors the whole personality “or better, the whole world.” It affects every part of our bodies and minds. This is what translators tend to call, rather trivially, “merriment,” of which there can never be too much. A second category of joy, writes Naess, is “titillatio,” “pleasurable excitement,” which can also be good, though not in excess and not if it is strong and influences only parts of

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the self. Too much sex, ambition, or love of money can dominate and inhibit other joy. Naess emphasizes Spinoza’s insistence that an important aspect of our joy (and a condition for being able to be joyful) is “repose in ourselves,” a satisfactory knowledge of our own activity, our process of living, our creativity, and our achievements. We often lack this quality. Instead, we may repose in something outside ourselves—in achievement in the eyes of others or external standards of excellence or competitiveness. Lack of this resource, says Naess, inhibits our effectiveness in ecological conflicts; we value ourselves so little that it is difficult for us to stand up and speak to others. We find it hard to “tell about it in public, make it crystal clear” how we feel about pollution in our neighborhoods. We must support others in speaking out. It is not necessary for everyone to fight—a smaller number of people will do that—but the support of the larger group in saying openly what they want and need, with the confidence that comes from self-valuation, is vital. There is also in Spinoza’s thought the joy he calls amor, which comes from contemplation of the whole of nature, of “all the causes of joy outside us.” But even with repose in ourselves and with the outwardlooking amor, there can be too much of a good thing. This is because these attitudes may refer to parts rather than the whole of the person. Naess insists that the intensity of these joys is enabled only by the intensity of our own interaction with our environment. We must be deeply rooted in the natural world by frequent contact with it. Full integration of our personality is the ideal, and so we must “never act as ‘functionaries’ or as mere specialists, but always as whole personalities conscious of our value priorities and of the need to make manifest those priorities in social, direct action.” Note that this has much in common with both Bateson’s and Berleant’s “engagement.” Naess clearly sees Spinoza’s determinism as less inhibiting to human freedom than do the other commentators noted above. The paper “Freedom, Self and Activeness According to Spinoza”13 suggests that it is possible and necessary for us to “be active . . . when we cause and are not caused.” What acts is “we ourselves.” We cannot be absolutely active because we are joined to other beings and so we cannot be “the absolutely whole cause of an action.” Nevertheless, “we can cause adequately for our own interests.” We have some freedom and can, within the limits of our ecological connectedness, determine what we will do. For Spinoza, joy is a tool enabling each of us to develop power—the power to carry out our intentions. When our personality is increasingly integrated, whole, centered on our aims, we gain the power to know what

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to do and to fit our activities to the real needs of the world. “Joy is man’s transition from lesser to greater perfection” writes Spinoza. For “perfection” we should read wholeness and integrity. The process of transition is the joy. We feel joy in relation to “objects,” but we really experience it through our interaction with the object, through our experience of the process that unites our selves with the things in the world. Joy brings power, rationality, virtue, freedom, activeness, the ability to be selfcausing or self-directed and to make ourselves intelligible to others. Joy confers power; power enables effectiveness. It is vital, writes Naess, to enable joyous activity first. Lack of joy is a serious malady, not least in those working for environmental change. The way to enable joy is to involve oneself in learning about things more potent than ourselves: a project, a field of study, a way of living. The interaction with these things gives joy in three ways. Firstly we increase the possibilities for self-repose. Secondly, we increase our personal active knowing of the greater entity. Lastly, we find joy in the interactive process as part of the wider field—which is ultimately nature, the integrated unity of the living world. All this provides adequate knowledge (in the senses discussed above), which leads to an increase in power. Though Bateson might be unhappy with the energy metaphor of power, Naess’s interpretation of Spinoza is in harmony with Bateson’s belief that involvement in the more-than-human world can enable us to transcend the limitations of purposive consciousness. Spinoza, like Bateson, denies the fact/value distinction which says that we can never come to a view of what ought to be done by looking at what is the case in the real-world situation. For Spinoza, this is because God, mind, and the living world are a unity; what is to be valued and prioritized as divine is inextricably part of the material world. The joys and other aspects of experience that we have been taught to disparage as “subjective” are part of reality. The reader will see that, for Bateson, the position is similar. He holds that, given our awareness of the nested mental processes of which we are a part, what ought to be done is that which we can see to be in line with the needs of the whole system. We feel respect, awe, and even reverence for the processes that sustain us. Our feelings are real presences in the world. They are part of our rational assessment of the practical situation of the Earth community. Our responses should follow from our felt understanding of the situation, of what is. What ought to be done is clear from our inspection of what is in the real-life mental/material situation. This is the central message of Arne Naess’s article “The Place of Joy in a World of Facts.” The joy that can enable our effective participation

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and engagement in the living world is to be found in that world—in the world of facts and among the living realities. Joy is the positive experiencing of life process, as real a fact as a lump of coal or the warm presence of a lover. Both Naess and Bateson see the ongoing process of mind and the physical entities between and through which it generates itself as factual presences in the world. Benedict de Spinoza brought to us, more than three hundred years ago, an amazing conception of the essential unity of the world and the divine, of mind and body, of the human and “the more-than-human world” (Abram 1997). He offered us a way of seeing ourselves as joyful members of something infinitely greater than our limited human selves. We should respect and learn from his thinking and reverence his memory.

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Deep Ecology. The thought of Arne Naess includes other elements that are compatible with Bateson’s theories. His systemic environmental philosophy, “Deep Ecology,” makes important claims about the possible extension of the sense of self. Deep Ecology is both a philosophical perspective and a campaigning platform—a set of beliefs that a wide range of people engaged in environmental activism can agree on and accept. Naess describes Deep Ecology as “a process of reflection leading to action.” In practical terms it is a systemic conceptual framework for assisting personal and social decision making about matters that affect the natural world. I offer here a brief summary of Naess’s system. Deep Ecology is a “normative derivational system. For Naess, Deep Ecology has a four-level structure. At the highest and most general level are the norms or ultimate premises—the basic beliefs that are foundational for our personality and our understanding of the world. These beliefs will be compatible with the second level: the “eight points” or principles of the Deep Ecology Platform (discussed below). The principles of one’s personal lifestyle (ones own “ecosophy”) make up the third level and, from this, appropriate, practical action (level four) becomes evident. Thus the system is one of deriving from “norms” (statements of what ought to be) appropriate principles and actions. This is not the same as strictly logical deduction. Premises (statements of what is the case) follow, by “loose derivation,” from other premises and hypotheses (statements of belief). Appropriate practical consequences and actions result from these. The Deep Ecology process is a tool for enabling systematic discussion of total views—of how norms and consequences interact. Naess’s thought also requires deep questioning that enables situations of value

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conflict (e.g., should you, from pity, kill a suffering animal—even though you believe life to be inviolably sacred?) to be systematically discussed and resolved. Level One: Ultimate Premises. These are our basic beliefs, intuitively known, “beyond which we cannot go.” Also called ultimate or basic norms, they are our deeply held intuitions about how the world is. An infinite variety of basic norms is possible, one must think out and choose one’s own but the Deep Ecology platform must be derivable from them. These deeply held beliefs (‘ultimate premises’), are intuitively felt and perhaps not articulated. Such beliefs may be Christian, Buddhist, Humanist, whatever. An ultimate premise might be “Respect all living beings!” or “Never interfere with another living being—except at vital need!” (the “!” indicates an imperative, a command, in Naess’s notation). Level Two: The Deep Ecology platform. This “platform” or statement of agreed beliefs resulted from an attempt, made in the late 1970s by Arne Naess and American philosopher George Sessions, to formulate the “most general and basic views” held by supporters of the Deep Ecology movement (Naess 1990, 29). The platform represents the second level of Naess’s system and acts as a focus and filter for the deeply held beliefs that form level one above. The eight points of this platform are: 1. The flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth has intrinsic value. The value of nonhuman life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for narrow human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves and contribute to the flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. 6. Significant change of life conditions for the better requires change in policies. These affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures.

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7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the forgoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes. Level Three: Personal Ecosophies. Each of us, claims Naess, must think through and construct our own “ecosophy”—our philosophy for living wisely in the world. We all have our deeply held basic ideas of right and wrong, our ultimate norms as discussed above. At our personal level we can add to this some further premises and hypotheses: “This will happen if I do that” or “This is so.” If we are deep ecologists this will lead us to endorse the principles of the deep lifestyle and take practical action in our particular situation. Several key aspects of Naess’s system are appropriately reviewed when thinking of the development of personal ecosophies. They include gestalt ontology, the idea of “total views,” Naess’s important idea of equal intrinsic value for all beings, and “deep” relationship with the world. Gestalt Ontology. “Gestalt” is about looking at the interrelated whole. “Ontology” is what we perceive as “being there” in the world. “We need,” says Naess, “a gestalt ontology, to get rid of subject, object and something in between, the “me-it” relationship . . . [we need] to see the whole set. All is one. This is about feeling rather than thinking.” Readers will note the resonance of this with Bateson’s process thinking. The Idea That We Each Hold Total Views. We all act as if we have a systematic total view of the world by making assumptions, having a philosophy of life, and making daily decisions—but this is not consciously thought out. It is our responsibility to articulate and act out our total view. This will improve our decision making and make it possible to communicate to others our systematically thought-out beliefs. Such a clearly thoughtout and stated position would be, for each of us, our own ecosophy. However, this must be an ongoing exercise. The evolution of our total views is a lifetime project; they are never complete. Equal Intrinsic Value for All Beings. This principle implies species egalitarianism: All beings, of whatever species, have equal value in themselves for what they are. This is quite distinct from any instrumental or use value they may have to other beings. Thus humans may interfere with other beings only “at vital need,” not just to satisfy their desires. Even nonliving beings such as rivers or mountains have intrinsic value. There is no grada-

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tion of intrinsic value—it is absolute. No natural being is less valuable than another. “Self Realization” or “Wide Identification.” These terms indicate our recognition that the environment that supports us and with which we interact is part of our self. Naess also calls this “the relational total field image” (1990, 28). Named selv-realizering in Norwegian, this is a continuing process of recognizing that the self is not limited to the person but extends to all the interconnecting processes in the world, within which our minds and bodies live (Rothenberg, in Naess 1990, 9). Naess says, “Not saving the rain-forest, but saving that part of yourself which is the rain-forest.” Another term Naess uses is “wide identification”: One must at least extend one’s sense of self to nonhuman beings, ideally to all forms of living and nonliving entities: “The focus is on single living beings. The whole has intrinsic value. . . . We have respect for wholes; we identify with individuals.” Note that Naess’s self-realization provides further support for the wide understanding of mind and self, urged by Bateson and other thinkers discussed in this chapter. “Deep” Relationship with the World. We need to practice deep questioning (of personal lifestyle, of society, of experience) and make deep connections. Naess distinguishes “deep” from “shallow” or “technical fix” approaches to ecological issues. We need a deep change of attitude, a spiritual change in our inner selves. We are part of nature. Responsible ways of living are more conducive to truly human goals than the present destructive lifestyles. Deep questioning is a process of examining our beliefs and then engaging with others who differ—thus evolving clearer understandings in discussion. Deep questions are about quality of living, about “feeling good.” We should, Naess says, “worry about essentials.” “Quality of life is nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with what you have; everything to do with how you feel about it.”14 Level Four: Commitment to Action. Naess says: “We are an occupied country. A minority must stand up, talk in public, say “If things are so, the problems will be so, and we should do thus. Turn discussions into the deeper questions of life.’” Deep Ecology is a movement as well as a philosophy. Many can agree to support the movement; the Deep Ecology Platform is a summary of points agreed upon by activists and thinkers holding very different philosophical perspectives. Differing basic norms can, when they have been “sieved” through the “eight points” of the platform, result in cooperative outcomes and decisions that will only “vary a little.” The movement must collaborate with the peace movement and the movement for social justice. Starvation, male domination, or wars are

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ecological evils too. We need a universalized lifestyle that can be sustained without injustice. However, Naess says (frequently) “The frontier is long— there are many ways of acting for good—you cannot do everything!” It will be seen that Naess’s philosophy is consonant with Bateson’s thinking and that it adds some needed elements of action and strategy. Joanna Macy

Joanna Macy is commonly thought of as an activist and campaigner, rather than as an environmental scholar. However, her scholarly book Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Macy 1991) provides, in addition to an interesting survey of the development of cybernetics, an important linking of cybernetic theory with a compassionate ethic, and many other insights that are compatible with Bateson’s views. She is an environmental thinker influenced by cybernetics, to which she adds a Buddhist religious and normative perspective. This is supportive of selfless environmental campaigning activity and an engaged process ethic. It provides grounds (such as the recognition of the world as sacred or divine) for human attitudes of veneration, gratitude, reverence, and awe. Macy also provides a useful link or transition between the thought of Bateson and the contemporary thinking of Arne Naess and others about Deep Ecology. In particular, she supports a widening of the human sense of self, suggesting a “mental” ontology of the world that is thoroughly Batesonian. She has developed some penetrating insights on telos, process and language, religious processes, creation spirituality, and other related concerns. Macy discovered general systems theory (cybernetics) while studying, in midlife, for a PhD initially centered on early Buddhist thought, at Syracuse University. Her project developed to show that Buddhism and cybernetics together provide a philosophical basis and a moral grounding for the emerging ecological worldview. Like Bateson she sees religious and philosophical concerns as urgent and as offering possible amelioration of the threatened global crises: the progressive destruction of the biosphere, increases in human suffering, and the risk of deliberate or accidental use of nuclear weapons. These concerns are the context of her work. Dependent Coarising and Mind. Central to Macy’s thesis is the Buddhist understanding of “dependent coarising” or “pattica sammupada.” This is a view deeply opposed to straight-line causality. It sees mind as being the reciprocal interaction between the perceiving self and the world that it

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perceives and knows. Mind and matter are interdependent; neither body nor mind can be identified separately and neither can be reduced to the other. Similarly, the cybernetic systems view of mind holds that phenomena are distinctive but inseparable from the mental process of cognition, thus making both dualism and reductionism inappropriate. Mind is not limited to humans but extends to animals, plants, and “even suborganic systems.” It is also evident in social systems where, being loosely organized, it is a weaker form of consciousness. Systemic properties are the criteria for the attribution of mind. Mind is “co-extensive with the physical universe” (Macy 1991, 150–53). Macy cites Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead, and Teilhard as previous proponents of “psychospiritual extension.” Again, the Buddhist view is consonant with this understanding of mind: Humans are not unique in the possession of soul or mind, we are “one manifestation in a current of psycho-spiritual energy,” now human, now animal, now God.15 This is the basis for the duty of compassion. Mutual causality teaches appropriate psychological and ethical attitudes, including the release from fear of the “external” and consequent respect for the phenomenal world (141ff). Macy quotes Bateson (2000, 317) in support of her view that cybernetic and Buddhist thinking can save us from the “versus” mentality: We can recognize that mind exists beyond personal consciousness and “is immanent in the larger system—man plus environment.” Expansion of Self and an Ethic of Participation. Similarly, in both Buddhism and General Systems Theory (Macy uses this term interchangeably with “systems cybernetics”), the self is a process that cannot be abstracted from its context in nature and society. It is an “open system” and so it is impossible to distinguish self from nonself. Any division is arbitrary; the individual self is a fiction. Worse, for Buddhists, the imagining of such a self is the cause of greed, anxiety, and aggression. The self is unique but is inseparable from its natural and social matrix. There is a third choice in addition to the options of atomism and holism: “articulated integration.” Given “particularity of form” and participation in the wider social and natural world, we must accept the double nature of self: diversity and unity. It is this amalgam of identifiable self and necessary interaction with others that is the basis of Buddhist ethics: “compassion, nonviolence and concord.” In a book aimed at a more general readership, World as Lover: World as Self (1993), Macy further develops this theme of widening the self. She cites Bateson’s understanding of a widely interlinked mind and self and refers to his examples of, firstly, a woodcutter cutting down a tree, and

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secondly, of a blind man with a stick feeling his way along a street. In both cases the cybernetic circuit is extended beyond the body of the person involved. The woodcutter is part of a circuit involving eye, hand, axe, and the cut in the tree: “That is the self-correcting unit, that is what is doing the chopping down of the tree.” Similarly, for the blind man, it is the arm, hand, cane, curb, and ear that forms the self-corrective circuit. “At that moment that is the self that is walking.” Macy endorses Bateson’s conviction that the prevalent “false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves” (1993, 189). She continues: “The self is a metaphor. We can decide to limit it to our skin, our person, our family, our organization, our species. We can select its boundaries in objective reality. As the systems theorists see it, our consciousness illuminates a small arc in the wider currents and loops of knowing that interconnect us. It is just as plausible to conceive of mind as coexistent with these larger circuits, the entire ‘pattern which connects,’ as Bateson said ” (1993, 188–89). The values that emerge from the above understanding of self are normative. Certain moral values are required for systemic harmony and unity to exist. Because, as self, we necessarily participate in the lives of other beings, we are indebted to them and responsible for them. To ignore that connection would be to damage ourselves because we would be excluding the participation that we need. The needs of others emerge as covalent with our own. This means that our sense of self will be broadened to include all our interactions with “others.” Cybernetic stability requires this broader base; an understanding of the fact that we live in a unified world is needed. Survival on the planet requires a shift to this view (1991, 194). The section below on evolving a new ethic from the insights of Bateson and others will develop this thought. James Lovelock: Linking Science and Religion as Reverence for Gaia

According to a metalogue written by Mary Catherine Bateson and incorporated in Angels Fear, it was only shortly before he died that Bateson read of scientist James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis.” In the metalogue Mary Catherine scripts her father as reacting adversely to Lovelock’s ideas as “based in the physical reality of the planet. . . . Pleromatic, thingish. . . ,” although he agrees that “the condition of the planet can only be explained by the processes of life” (Bateson and Bateson, 1988, 149). If this was Bateson’s view (and Mary Catherine tells me that, although it was a fairly casual rejection, it was certainly there) he must have failed to understand the deeply biological nature of Lovelock’s thesis. The Gaia hypothesis (now the Gaia theory) suggests that the whole living skin of

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Earth: organisms, soil, oceans, surface rocks, weather, and atmosphere, behaves like a single living being, acting in an integrated way to preserve the conditions in which life can flourish. This is, in fact, close to Bateson’s understanding of all the organisms and ecosystems of Earth as being minds, acting so as to transfer information and thus cause sustainable change. Bateson’s minds, as we have seen, are nested within larger minds so that there is ultimately only one great thinking and acting process, the total mind of the world. Lovelock recognizes that Bateson’s work was a seminal influence on the general movement in science during recent years, away from reductionism and toward the study of whole systems. In recent correspondence with me he writes, “What Gregory Bateson started in those days was a rejection of the Cartesian philosophy that has so strongly dominated science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not surprisingly, for reductionism is wonderfully successful in molecular biology and particle physics.”16 As we have seen, Bateson was transcending dualisms of all sorts: the dualisms between mind and body, mind and matter, humans and nature and, eventually, between divinity and the world. Lovelock never met Bateson but he has read his books and I think it possible that Batesonian holism had some influence on the development of his remarkable hypothesis of the interconnected systemic working of the whole of Earth’s biosphere. He records the moment of insight in Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (Lovelock 1991, 21–22). He and philosopher Diane Hitchcock were working for NASA in Pasadena where preparations were being made for the Viking spacecraft missions to investigate the planet Mars for signs of life. While discussing, with Diane, the contrast between the atmospheric composition of Earth and Mars, Lovelock realized that the presence of life must make a major difference to Earth’s atmosphere. This is composed largely of readily reactive gases such as oxygen, nitrogen, and methane. Its stability depends on the constant replenishment of these reactive gases and absorption of carbon by the living beings on Earth. In contrast, the atmosphere of Mars is largely made up of carbon dioxide and is close to chemical equilibrium, indicating absence of life. Following this moment of insight Lovelock, working with American biologist Lynn Margulis, realized that the biota of Earth was modifying and controling many further parameters essential to life: ocean salinity, temperature, humidity, the transfer of elements between oceans and land by means of organic processes, rock weathering, and cloud formation. Thus, the living organisms, soil and surface rocks, atmosphere, and oceans are combined in a system that has, so far, kept planetary conditions suitable for the flourishing of life.

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Lovelock was surprised to find that two-thirds of the letters he received after the publication of his first book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1991a) were about the implications of his theory for religion or spiritual thinking. He writes (in The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth) that his feelings about Gaia are spiritual: “Thinking of the Earth as alive makes it seem, on happy days, in the right places, as if the whole planet were celebrating a sacred ceremony” (1989, 205–7). He recognizes that the Universe has properties that make the emergence of life and Gaia inevitable, but he is not prepared to credit it with purpose. This is a possibility but the question is “ineffable.” He believes that there must be other planets with similar living systems in the universe but these are so utterly remote that they are concepts for the intellect, not the senses. He feels more comfortable comparing the way we may understand Gaia to the beliefs of “those millions of Christians who make a special place in their hearts for the Virgin Mary.” Mary is an accessible figure, believable and approachable, and this may account for her importance in faith. But what, asks Lovelock, if Mary is in fact “another name for Gaia?” This is compatible with her “capacity for virgin birth,” which would no longer be a miracle. It matches the Gaian process of creating new life throughout evolution. Gaia is close to being an immortal—and immortals do not need to reproduce themselves. They continuously renew the life that makes them what they are. Gaia is a quarter as old as the universe and is still “full of vigor,” she is an integral part of the universe and “conceivably a part of God.” She is alive, gave birth to humanity, and we are part of Gaia ourselves (1989, 206). It is for these reasons that Lovelock finds Gaia to be both a religious and a scientific concept. In both contexts it is, he says, “manageable.” Lovelock does not see Gaia as a sentient being or as a “surrogate God.” Belief in God is an act of faith and he maintains “a positive agnosticism,” but Gaia offers a way to understand the living Earth, ourselves, and our relationships with other beings (1989, 207, 217–18). Gaia has much in common with Bateson’s “Shiva and Abraxas” divinity. Lovelock writes that his understanding of Gaia is often misinterpreted to mean that, whatever we do, Gaia will sort out the mess. Nothing, he says, could be more wrong. Gaia is far from being a “doting mother.” Neither is she a “fragile and delicate damsel” threatened by mankind. She is stern and tough. She keeps the world habitable for species that “obey the rules” but will ruthlessly destroy those who threaten her. She is not “conscious,” but she has tendencies. She wants to maintain a planet that is “fit for life.” If we get in the way of that purpose she will destroy us with “as little pity as would be shown by the micro-brain

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of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile in full flight to its target” (1989, 212). In his most recent book, The Revenge of Gaia (2006), Lovelock expresses the view that human pollution of the atmosphere has already passed the limits of sustainability. He claims that Earth is now headed inexorably for climate overheating that will, in a few decades, render most of the surface uninhabitable. He suggests what, at first sight, seems to be a counsel of despair: that we might as well use all possible technologies, including nuclear power, in order to keep the Earth habitable for the brief span in which humans and other mammals may survive. It may well be that this is Lovelock’s “last ditch” (he is eighty-six years old now) attempt to rouse us from our apathy and selfishness into an adequate response to the real urgency of our environmental peril. We have to make a serious effort, now, to cease our pathological attacks on Earth’s life-preserving systems. Philosophical Implications. Gaian theory inevitably raises the issues of “teleology”: whether nonhuman beings, ecosystems, or genetic and evolutionary processes can have any sort of “purpose.”17 Lovelock claims that his theory demands responsiveness in the system(s) but not awareness, foresight, or intention. The action of organisms is always automatic but natural selection chooses those that are fitted for the conditions, as in Lovelock’s mathematical model, “Daisyworld.”18 Questions, however, remain. Why, for instance, should the needs of small ocean organisms called “coccolithophores” be exactly what will serve to take carbon dioxide (excessive for other planetary life) out of the atmosphere? If the system is in control, does this give ontological status to the system itself? Is the whole system somehow able to value the continuance of “life”? In Lovelock’s view humanity is peripheral, though dangerous, to the life systems of the planet. Our anthropocentric concern is to preserve the Earth as we want it. He sees our ideas of stewardship of the planet are absurd and dangerous hubris: “We’ll never know enough. . . .” The advice is “hands off.” The large plants and animals, says Lovelock, are the icing on the cake. The basis of life, what matters for a living planet, is the microbiological world. Micro-organisms drive the system and we cannot influence them. We are probably incapable of completely destroying life on Earth. We can refrain from doing what we see is damaging but little more. His regretfully pessimistic personal view, expressed to a Schumacher College group ten years ago, is that “we have, already, probably “blown it” for the large mammals.” This raises profound questions about responsible action for individual humans and social groups. Is value related to the continuance of life in general, to the life experience of

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sentient animals—or only to the welfare of human beings? Why does it matter if species are destroyed? Gaian thinking suggests an alternative to the view that the world is mechanistic and is best understood by reducing everything to parts, that life has come about by chance operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, that evolution is a matter of ruthless competition, and that the natural world is there to be exploited. The Gaian view shows the living world as interconnected and in some sense meaningful. What follows from instituting a new metaphor for the old “world as machine” image? David Abram’s chapter in Gaia in Action (Bunyard, 1996, 234–47) suggests that the change to an organic metaphor removes the assumption of an external “maker” who is in some way like a human creator of machines. This undermines our assumption that we can treat nature as a machine and allows recovery of our sense of being encompassed by and immersed in the world as participants. In his introduction to the same book, Peter Bunyard (13) suggests that the Gaian world has more to do with cooperation than competition, with integration of organisms and environment rather than struggle and conflict. This provides, he suggests, fertile metaphors for community. In her chapter in the same book English ecophilosopher Kate Rawles asks (but does not answer) the question of what ethics follow from the Gaian view. (Bunyard, 1996, 308–23). Does it imply that ethical concern extends beyond humans to other sentient beings? To ecosystems? To the planet? What sort of obligations and responsibilities could this meaningfully involve? Does Gaian theory suggest that there are specifically environmental goals and values? Does it tell us how we ought to act? Does it depose humans from their assumed position at the “apex of evolution” and, if so, what follows? These questions open up a vast terrain of new responsibilities for human beings. Rawles cannot provide the answers to these questions in a short paper but the fact that she is asking them shows that Gaia theory casts a distinctly new light on our understandings of Earth. At the very least, we are challenged to rethink some of the philosophical bases of our contemporary worldview. Mary Midgley

In her pamphlet Gaia: The Next Big Idea (2001b) the English philosopher Mary Midgley suggests that Gaia theory is an intellectual and conceptual advance comparable, in its potential effects, to Darwin’s theory of evolution. She bases her argument on the claim that all of us in Western societies have had our thinking framed within the mechanistic conceptions of Descartes and consequent Enlightenment ideas of the separation

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of mind from body, of humans from the rest of the world, and of rational objective thought from feeling and imagination. She argues that we now see individuals as all important, essentially separate from and competing against each other. The language of selfishness, spite, exploitation, manipulation, investment, insurance, and war games is now freely used in reference to the human and the natural world. We have expanded Social Darwinism beyond the human sphere as sociobiology—and this has fragmented our conceptual world. We are now unable to think clearly about relationships. This pathology leads us to adopt moral, social, and political attitudes that are deeply unethical and are destroying our world: “as the flood-waters rise around us , many even deny even the possibility that rainfall and combustion engines may be linked.”19 Our deeply ingrained habit is to separate the world into disciplines, countries, races, sectors, species, and individual persons. These divisive attitudes, writes Midgley, have made it difficult for the scientific community to accept Gaia theory readily. Our acute individualism makes it difficult to ask new questions and limits the answers that seem possible, but our limitations of thinking should not escape criticism just because they have often been presented as science. We need to recognize intrinsic value as permeating the living world. All parts of the living world have value in themselves for what they are. Secular thought has not abandoned the idea of intrinsic value but it is now only applied to humans. Human life is sacred—human freedom is sacrosanct but the nonhuman world is a mere means or resource, something to be used. Commonly, we justify this attitude by invoking social contract theory—which sees our rights and our secure interaction within society as guaranteed by the implicit contract of conformity and mutual support that each of us makes with our society. And only people can make contracts. Midgley asks whether even the relations between humans are really like that. Babies do not make contracts—and we have all been babies. Relations between parents and children are not normally contractual or competitive, nor are most other human relations. Even such competitive activities as running a school sports day or trading on the stock exchange require a basis of mutual cooperation. Such conflictual thinking fails when we try to value the natural world. The Arctic or the rainforest are “chronic nonlitigants” that cannot be seen in terms of competition. Contract theory is no longer useful. Exclusive humanism is beginning to look “arbitrary and unreal.” Both Christian and humanist morality has been “carefully tailored to fit only the human scene.” Promoting a few natural entities such as wildernesses to human status will not help. We are not separate, the melting ice is flooding all the oceans, Bangladesh (population 138.5

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million) and Mauritius (population 6.7 million) may soon be under water, the Gulf Stream may fail, changing the climate of Western Europe to that of Labrador. Rational self-interest is not doing the job because we are unable to conceptualize disasters until they happen. We do not expect the unfamiliar: The passengers in steerage may report that the ship is sinking but we complacently reply: “Not at our end.” We will never grasp the urgency of our ecological situation if we think we can model our concern for environment on our attitude to fellow citizens. Such individualist claims as Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society” reveal the essence of sociobiology to be an individualistic vision in which evolution occurs exclusively by competition and cooperation is impossible. All this, writes Midgley, is officially based on Darwin but is far more extreme than anything found in Darwin’s work. It is quite contrary to nature. Sociobiology’s legitimate concern with evolution, humanity’s oneness with the rest of nature and its placing of humans at their proper scale in nature is valuable, but unexamined moral and political ideas have been grafted onto scientific sociobiology, producing “a mindless social atomism.” The language has become excessively conflictual and now results in “individualistic melodrama.” Midgley cites the work of Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) and E. O. Wilson (1975, 1978) as influenced by the “naive social atomism of the 1970s and 1980s.” It is no more than “one optional vision among others.” Midgley emphasizes in her appendix on sociobiology that this matter is important. It demonstrates the fact that science draws images from everyday life and often returns them in altered forms. Thus, an idea can have both scientific and moral importance—as is the case with Gaia theory. This means that “scientists are responsible for thinking through the social consequences of what they are suggesting.” “Only doing science” is impossible. It always involves morals and politics. However, all is not lost. Concern about the damaging of the natural world is still something we feel—and we have no reason to suppress such feelings. The shock and outrage we feel, when we learn of some further despoliation of the Earth, can provide the energy to change. We need to relearn the basic truth that we are not living on a planet, we are inseparably part of the Earth. The importance of Gaian thinking is that it reenables this awareness. If humans are really integrally part of the total systems of Earth, then “politics becomes the domain of the group, the individual and the nonhuman.”20 Gaia theory claims no more than that all life on earth is a single self-sustaining natural system. We are still able to feel that we have a duty to our family, to our clan or country, and a duty to future generations. This still works for us—we do find intrinsic value in these

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relationships; we value them for what they are in themselves (30). A general awareness and acceptance of the truth of Gaian thinking, claims Midgley, could compensate for our present fragmented view of the world. At first sight it appears that Gaia theory is directly opposed to competitive evolution but, in fact, the cooperative and the competitive aspects of life in nature take place at different scales of process. Locally, organisms do compete with members of their own and other species but one way in which they compete is in finding ways to improve their environment, and such improvements are often beneficial to others. In other words, without any requirement for purpose, intention, or conscious awareness, actions that benefit the wider system are rewarded by increased viability for the individual. Midgley explains that Lovelock sees the coupling between life and its environment as so tight (the feedback loops are so interrelated) that, at the planetary scale, the evolution of rocks, the air, and the biota cannot be separated. The benefit of the larger system rewards its component systems. Pro Gaian adaptations spread, anti-Gaian adaptations disadvantage the species and so do not spread. There is intrinsic value in the larger system. Midgley considers the question of whether the whole Earth may be said to be “living” (39–41). Life is complex and mysterious. No definition of life is agreed by scientists in different disciplines. Lovelock claims that Gaia qualifies as living under the definitions commonly used in either biochemistry or in physics. Clearly, the planet does not mate and reproduce but a cell can be seen as being, itself, alive. Midgley cites Lewis Thomas (1976, 4) in support of Lovelock’s belief that life is an aspect of Earth as a whole. Thomas suggests that the polyps that form coral reefs and the termites that build and constantly change complex nests cannot be understood in isolation from the reefs or nests that are their homes. This is true, claims Midgley, of ourselves and the Earth. Life is an aspect of the Earth itself. Finally, Midgley asks “What can we do?” (42–45). She notes that common dangers are beginning to shake us out of complacency. We are in urgent need of newer, noncompetitive ideas if we are to change our perspective, and Gaian thinking can serve that need. We should realize that we do not have to value the Earth above human needs; the needs of humans and the needs of Earth are the same. Without a healthy Earth we cannot survive. The ship cannot sink at only one end. Earth and human needs are not separable, they are not alternatives. Midgley quotes Lovelock’s own advice: First, recognize the urgency. Deal first with energy production and the reduction of atmospheric carbon, then seek to mitigate the increasing shortage of drinkable water. After that, attempt the

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removal of the ozone damaging CFCs (carbon fluorocarbons mostly produced by industrial and household spray propellants) and other substances that are permitting the entry of carcinogenic radiation from space and adding to the greenhouse effect. This strategy is enjoined in Lovelock’s most recent book Gaia’s Revenge, as noted above, though many of us will have reservations about the nuclear and other technologies recommended there. Attitudes—ideas about what is possible—do change. Midgley comments that attitudes to smoking in business meetings or to the use of such techniques as feng-shui in designing commercial offices have changed profoundly over the last twenty years. We need to bring Gaian thinking into education, into our adult awareness. And we need to act, soon. Gaia and Theology: Diarmuid O’Murchu and Anne Primavesi. Gaian theory has brought science and religion into creative dialogue once more. Though Lovelock attempts to keep the scientific understanding and the religious implications of Gaia separate, some theologians have begun to examine them as a unity. Diarmuid O’Murchu, a Roman Catholic theologian, has published Evolutionary Faith: Rediscovering God in Our Great Story (2002), which draws on scientific and religious sources in order to suggest ways in which we may form new understandings of God or “the divine” in the context of new knowledge of evolution and our membership of living creation. “It is only in the past five thousand years that we have seriously deviated from our intuitive sense that we inhabit a living organism. . . . This . . . is where both theologian and scientist need to begin their exploration. The Gaia theory . . . invites us to engage not with life on earth, but rather, with the life-form that is the earth. Our earth is not an object to be exploited, but a living organism inviting our dialogue and participation. Setting humans over against the alive creates a violent disparity. . . . In the planet’s coming alive, we too begin to live fully. . . . We need a fresh approach to our theology of God. . . . The divine is written all over creation: the quantum vacuum, the supernova explosions, the recurring cycle of birth-death-rebirth, the process of photosynthesis— these and many more are the chapters of our primary scriptures. Divinity abounds, in and around us” (O’Murchu 2002, 201, 205). O’Murchu emphasizes,21 that we can best understand the world as an ongoing, evolving story, seeing the whole universe as a living organism, a life-form far more elegant and sophisticated than our human species. One of our primary responsibilities is to learn and then tell this story. Interdependence and paradox are the primary laws, paradox being

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the appearance of contradictory understandings that require of us a deeper search for ways of coping. Communion is fundamental to living. The divine cocreates from within the evolving universe and so the universe and planet is our primary revelation of the divine. Creation-based spirituality predates all the formal religions by many thousands of years and it is this that we need now. We, young species as we are, need to outgrow our adolescent belligerence and internalize the awareness that without a meaningful world our human lives are also meaningless. We need to deconstruct a number of beliefs that many of us hold: the patriarchal context of all present religions, the idea that the only meaningful religious focus is the last two thousand years, the understanding of Jesus as an “imperialistic hero” that was invented by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE, the dualisms between the sacred and the secular, the objectification and desecularization of creation, and the demonization of the feminine. We need to reclaim the Cosmic Jesus (rather than only the historical one), the central role of the “Kingdom” as our aim for successful living on Earth, the importance of relationships, the radical inclusiveness of Jesus the “suffering servant” rather than the archetypal hero, and an understanding of personhood based on wide relationship with the world—as opposed to anthropocentrism. Similarly, theologian Anne Primavesi writes of her hope that her book Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science may build, within the Western theological landscape, a bridge of nonviolent connectedness between “what we say we know about the nature of the world, what we say we know about God and how we live” (Primavesi 2000, xvii). Constructing her argument on the Gaia theory, she asks: What kind of God can be discernible in a planetary environment which has developed over billions of years? What kind of continuous relationship between planetary ecosystem and God can we posit? Can such a God be concerned with anything less than the entire field of interrelations? How does that affect our understanding of our place in the world? What lifestyle is appropriate? How does it fit with ideas of human dominance over nature or with claims that we are dependent solely on God? Can such a God sanction the disproportional suffering we inflict on other living beings? (xvii) In her final chapter, Primavesi develops the argument that the ecologically involved God is “a gift event within Gaia ”: “I am saying with Bateson . . . that the sacred . . . is always related to, unifies and dwells in mysterious fashion within whatever event, experience or knowledge relates us to the whole” (171). In Sacred Gaia and in her later book

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Gaia’s Gift (2003), Primavesi emphasizes that Lovelock’s work, in common with the work of many other thinkers, points to the necessity and the possibility of developing a new and ecologically healing ethic. 4. ADOPTION OF A NEW ETHIC

There is, in much of Bateson’s later work, an implicit understanding that the nature of the process world requires and makes evident a whole new set of normative relationships. This view of the world as a living system requires us to recognize that there are actions we ought to take and other actions that we ought not to take. This ethical requirement follows from Bateson’s understanding of the systemic unity of the living world, the interdependence of organisms, social systems, and ecosystems and, particularly, from his idea of the extended nature of the self. This is vital to us at this time and so, in this section, I will attempt to clarify and develop Bateson’s ethic. First, the presence of the ethical strand in Bateson’s thinking and his understanding, never fully expressed, of the divine nature of the total process of the living world supplies the link between his monism and the possibility of a religious perspective for human beings in their relating with and within the rest of the biosphere. What was a theoretical attitude for the intellect becomes an active position that we ought to adopt. Such activity, as we will see, is participation within what Bateson called “the sacred,” engagement in reverential monism. The crucial element is the extension of the self. As we have seen, Bateson, Naess, Macy, Lovelock, Primavesi, and others have supported this view. In systems science there is no logical or scientific basis for setting up a separate “me” or “other.” Our breathing, thinking, and acting all depend on interaction with our shared world. Bateson emphasized that “The self as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding” (2000, 331). What we need is a deeply felt understanding that there is no division to be made between our body/brain and the rest of the world. The systems that we call “life” are inseparably linked to everything we do and are. Ecological error is self-harm. This is what makes our actions ethically important. If we can accept this radical expansion of our sense of self we will be able to discard ideas of duality, isolated things, and the division between humanity and nature. The is/ought and the fact/value distinctions can be abandoned. If the self/other distinction is discarded, my self must include the rainforest and so destructive logging or genocidal attacks on

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forest dwellers are harming me. If any actions are harmful to my self then they ought to be forbidden. If it is true that my self is being damaged, then there can be no doubt that there is a devaluing of me. However, my wider self is also logging the forest and killing the natives. Here we have a conflict of values, which is really a conflict of interest between a systemic section of human society and the much wider world ecosystem, including all human beings. The two systems are not separable but the idea of “focus,” explored in chapter 3, offers a way of comparing their importance. We can focus on the logging company, it’s shareholders, officials, and workforce. Or we can focus on the global system of the functions of world forests in carbon dioxide management, weather, climate, and the effects of climate change—to say nothing of interhuman relationships and the interests of the forest-dwelling population. It is clear that the larger, more inclusive system must be prioritized. Notions of self-interest or altruism become detached from individual human persons and groups; they apply to the largest focus of ecology that is relevant to the issues concerned. Psychologist Jane Roberts (1979) writes that we have not always thought of our “selves” as isolated, skin-encapsulated beings. In the distant past we understood ourselves as distinct entities but, nevertheless, as entities that were connected with all of nature: “When this kind of connectedness was broken by the over-development of the ego, it became necessary to formulate a system of “ethics” that would summarize what people once knew without the need of words or concepts.” If we accept Roberts’s view, what we now call “ethics” is the attempt at making conscious rationality do the job that the wider-than-conscious mind was able to do in the past. We substitute the “ought” of ethics for the interconnected “self” that was in the wider natural process. We were able to feel what was right and good, what was sustainable. Now we try to deduce what we “ought” to do from the partial perception of our consciousness. Evil may be seen as the separation of humanity from the rest of Earth. There is knowledge, wisdom, and healing in the larger biological life-mind. This means that the intellectual adoption of Bateson’s ethical insight cannot be enough. We need to reenable the unconscious mind by artistic practice, by sustained presence in nature, and by ritual, worship, and the other elements of religion. How this can be done is far from clear. Some suggestions will be made in the final section of this book. It may be possible to enlist, cooperate with, and otherwise influence the existing world religions toward engagement with sacred creation. It may be possible to promote specifically earth-centered religion. A both and approach may be more appropriate than choosing either of these as

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alternatives, but first we have to ask: What would influence us toward making the effort to spend much time in natural surroundings, engage in art processes, and so on? What would make us want to attempt to influence other people in large numbers? I suggest that the only answer is: a deeply felt sense of the rightness of taking such action. This requires a new ethic based on our experiential realization of radical interconnectedness: an ethic of service to the total system, a new attitude to personal survival and death, a valuing of the beautiful above the expedient, a recognition of an obligation to treat all organisms with awareness (as discussed above in chapter 3) and consideration. We would need to treat them as we now (ideally) treat those with “consciousness” or “self-consciousness.” The basis for such an ethic is Bateson’s understanding of unity, the mental nature of the world, our own mental nature, of extended self, a recognition that “what some people have called God” is, in fact, the ongoing process of the living systems of the world, a focus for reverence and awe. Evidence from Bateson During a conversation with Lee Thayer, later published in Thayer’s book Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues (Bateson 1973b, 247–48), Bateson insisted that our conceptions of ethics need to be changed, though at present we have little idea of how to change them or of what direction such changes should take. Ethics, he said, are about relationship: what they should be concerned with is the relating rather than the people or things that are the relata. We have a false idea that people are unities; the ethical unit is the relating between two or more people and their relating to the larger environment. Unilateral control is an illusion fostered by ideas of the separate autonomous self. We understand our ethics through language and it will be a very different ethic if we base it on verbs rather than on nouns. That would mean we had developed a very different way of looking at things. Thinking in terms of relatedness and pattern gives us a richer ethic. Also, said Bateson, any ethical system will be different according to the size of the system we look at. We need, he says, “an ethics of hierarchical order.” He was suggesting that the larger and more inclusive system level should be the focus of ethical concern. The good of the group or ecosystem is to be preferred above the good of the individual organism, perhaps even the good of a particular species. Such an ethic would “lead to less damage.” This, again, relies on the understanding of extended self: “Suppose we had an ethic in which what is valued are the dimensions of the relating rather than the individuals

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doing the relating. Even the mortality of the patterns is quite different from the mortality of the individuals. So then suppose one wanted to talk about survival, only the units were patterns of relatedness rather than individuals; would we have our present problem of over-population?” Bateson is suggesting that ethics should be about how we relate to another person or organism. What matters is the quality of relating, the intentions involved in the process that flows between people or other beings. The beings between whom this improved pattern of relating evolves may die but the pattern or style of relating they have established may continue. If what we value is a better pattern of relating and if this survives then we will be less anxious to ensure either our fertility or our longevity. If the better patterns of relating are those that give us all a sense of widened self and unity with other humans, nonhumans, and wider nature, then our personal survival becomes much less important. In the conclusion of the 1970 Korzybski lecture, Bateson had said: “And last, there is death. It is understandable that, in a civilization which separates mind from body, we should either try to forget death or make mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind. But if mind is immanent, not only in those pathways of information which are located within the body but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect. The individual nexus of pathways which I call “me” is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind. The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you. May they survive—if true” (1970a, 2000, 471). What, then, would an ecological ethic of relating look like? It must be, at once, an ethic that favors the larger gestalten in the systemic world, promotes an extended sense of self among humans, and also helps us to live in a fully sustainable interaction within the biosphere. This newold way of living within an integrated whole I will call “reverential monism.” Reverential Monism

Since reverential monism is to be based upon the real, systemic needs of the natural (including human) world, and because it will not require the supernatural as an explanation of phenomena, it will be a form of naturalism. That is, it will be focused on the interconnected and interdependent living world. It will be found to have much in common with forms of “religious naturalism,” a term that has been used to identify the work of many thinkers—including Spinoza, Santayana, Dewey, Thoreau, the poets Whitman and Jeffers, and some contemporary thinkers such as Jerome Stone and Ursula Goodenough.22 A useful intro-

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duction is Jerome A. Stone’s internet article, “What Is Religious Naturalism?” (2000).23 In philosophical terms, reverential monism will be a form of “ethical naturalism” but will share some of the insights of “critical naturalism.” It will also carry some of the emphases of “monistic naturalism”: the acknowledgment of systemic integrity, an avoidance of explanations requiring the supernatural, and the incorporation of knowledge emerging from an improved and enlightened science. It will not be humanistic in the old sense because there will be a centrally important understanding of the human self as extending into all the systems of the natural world. For this reason the ethic cannot be anthropocentric; it will, rather, be biocentric and the emphasis on individualism found in some forms of naturalism would be inappropriate and irrelevant. It will aim to rectify the present unbalanced and pathological state of the Earth’s ecosystem and so, because it has this purpose, it will be teleological. As in critical naturalism, mind, life, and values will be seen as significant and effective components of reality and the idea that evolution carries a creative thrust toward greater integration and harmony will be accepted. Some aspects of ethical naturalism are appropriate within reverential monism, particularly the view that judgments or evaluations of the world are not necessarily distinct from examination of the facts about how the world actually is. Reverential monism is derived from the way in which (with the assistance of Bateson and other thinkers) we may, newly, come to see the living world. It will, with the assistance of new understandings about the extent of our selves, incline us to prioritize the good of the larger and largest systems of life. It will combine the knowledge of an enlightened science with attitudes of reverence and humility toward the total living world. It will have a central ethic of service to the greater and greatest process. Clearly, this ethic is derived from the observation of nature (including humans) and the condition of the world and it will encourage actions which will bring about a better ecological balance. Hence, it is a form of consequentialism: Those actions that bring about good consequences will be right actions. It is important to understand that this will be a generalization of environmental ethics; the extension of a previously specialized ethic to all aspects of human understanding, action, and behavior. The ethical system is essentially empirical in that it will arise from and depend upon what is occurring in the world. In responding to this new ethic we will be acting so as to secure the greatest possible health and viability of the total world system, which is, ultimately, our “self.” The extension of self must also mean an extension

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of concern for the suffering of any organism. In cases of value conflict, the good of the largest relevant system will be prioritized. The new ethic will provide standards and criteria of legitimacy for human behavior while simultaneously extending moral considerability to the entire world. Hence, I claim that this ethic can bridge the gap that is often alleged to separate anthropocentric ethics from a wider ethical stance embracing nonhuman organisms, nature, land, and ecosystems. How will such an ethic be justified? First, it can be shown to be necessary. The rapidly deteriorating viability of Earth’s ecosystems and the apparent inability of any of the present systems of ethics to produce the radical change that is needed, mean that a new ethic of integration is required. Secondly, it is relevant to a purpose. It will be an improved guide to practical action. The purpose served by this and any ecological ethic is to enable an adequate quality of living for all members of the codependent system. The end to be achieved is the securing of an ongoing, stable, and enjoyable quality of life for all the members of the Earth community. Our human ability to follow conscious purpose proposes an ethical obligation. Human “superiority” in reasoning and planning and in scientific knowledge will be seen as a capability that makes us responsible for and responsible to the nested mental systems of the world. The possibility of discharging such human responsibilities adequately within this larger context will depend, crucially, on recovering our access to our own evolved wisdom by engaging with the beautiful and the wider-than-human community as discussed in previous chapters. I do not suggest that a philosophy or set of attitudes such as this could be introduced as theory alone. It will be closely enmeshed with the religious processes discussed above and also the religious action suggested in the final chapter. My hope is that communal involvement in ritual, shared learning, celebration of the full range of living systems, and mutual support will enable the changes of attitude that are needed and will motivate many people to engage in activity that is guided by the new ethical priorities. Kantian duty will never do it. Realization of the true nature of this interdependent world and a communal, supportive spiritual process may make these changes possible. An ethic of this kind is inevitably open to the criticism, often leveled against utilitarianism, that some action aimed at benefiting the larger system might in itself be morally abhorrent. For example, the compulsory sterilization of men or women might be proposed, with the aim of reducing the population and, consequently, human impact on the rest of nature. Clearly, there is a deontological (based on moral principle) case to be made that would proscribe some actions, however beneficial they

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might be to larger systems. This would amount to a version of “rule utilitarianism.” Such principles or attitudes would have to evolve in tandem with the widening of the human sense of self and the willingness of people to adopt sacrificial measures from motives of reverence and respect for the total system. A related difficulty would be the possibility of accusations of eco-fascism such as are already made against Deep Ecology. The defense would be a measured realism. There is no option other than learning to live within the only systemic unity that can sustain us. Our human need for engagement with nonhuman nature, artistic and religious process will be ongoing. Mary Catherine Bateson notes that “when Gregory first posed the question of possible correctives to the maladaptive effects of conscious purpose, he wrote: Attempts have been made in the last hundred years to create social systems with a minimum of symbolic, supernatural and ritual components. Education has been secularized, and so on. But could a social system be viable with only laws and ethical principles and no play, no art, no totemism, no religion, and no humor?” (M. C. Bateson, 1991, 237) As we move into a more enlightened set of relationships with the world we will still need these healing activities to offset the effects of our “conscious purposefulness.” 5. ENGAGEMENT IN THE NEW MODE OF SACRED INTERACTION WITH THE WORLD

The appropriate consequence of accepting the views outlined above is that we will undertake some learning about the present situation of the living world and possible healing action. We will need to do this at the personal level, with others in our locality, and at regional, national, and international scales. And we will need to do this as art. This will not be easy. The dying Bateson spelled out the challenge: “You have to wait till you get to the core of the problem of pattern meets pattern to reach the notion of art. When you get to the art that matters . . . you get treated to the thing you are up against, the problem of shared biology. Imagine yourself as having an interface between intellect and body. The interface is where things really happen. To be truly human is to appreciate that join, that interface. Art comes out of what is sacred: that recognition, that cross, that interface” (1979d). In accepting the ethic outlined above we will be endorsing Aldo Leopold’s famous claim: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold, [1949] 1989, 224–25). By the intermin-

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gled processes of art, reverence, aesthetic involvement in nature, and extension of our mental and bodily selves, we will move, together, toward either a healing relation with the living world or toward extinction. American naturalist Henry Beston, ending his year-long sojourn on the beaches of Cape Cod, confirmed the possibility of receiving healing insight through extended contact with nonhuman nature: “because I had known this outer and secret world, and been able to live as I had lived, reverence and gratitude greater and deeper than ever possessed me, sweeping every emotion else aside, and space and silence an instant closed together over life” (Beston [1928] 1992, 216). It will be necessary to engage in a program of action. This must include much learning. We will relearn our interrelated nature as components of the living world, our identities as extended selves. We will relearn humility. We will learn a new-old reverence, recover the joy of integrated living and the serenity of knowing that we live as members of a sacred whole that is itself worthy of reverence and awe. We will engage with others in the religious process of celebrating and serving this sacred unity. I suggest that the life work of Gregory Bateson and the other thinkers we have surveyed can enable that engagement. Possibilities for action are the subject matter of chapter 8.

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8

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hat, given the ideas of Bateson and other comparable environmental thinkers, can we do? This final chapter will note some current applications of the insights we have been considering throughout the book. It will offer one possible new approach to wise action. As we have seen, Bateson provides a penetrating diagnosis of our ecological malady and some original suggestions about possible curative action. His recommendation of reengagement with artistic and natural processes, in order to access the grace that may enable a recovery of ecological wisdom, is important. His half-articulated suggestion of a religious approach to the issues may be crucial, offering renewed access to some religious processes that are now inaccessible to us because we can no longer believe in a supernatural, transcendent God. Bateson hesitated to move toward world-saving action but he has provided a structure of thought that can enable us to attempt that now. His prescription is, firstly, to develop our awareness of ecological relationship and thus transcend our illusion of self/world duality. Secondly, we must recognize and develop reverence for this sacred web of systemic relating. What we now have to discover is how to do all this and how to educate, inform, and enthuse very large numbers of people within a limited time. Central to the insights of Bateson and other thinkers is the possibility that a religious attitude toward the world can be generated. It seems probable that nothing less than a revised worldview, based on a new reverence for creation, will be able to transcend the commercial and governmental pressures that now threaten ecological breakdown. We need to find ways of introducing large numbers of people, in all walks of life, to the religious experiences of reverencing, venerating, and feeling awe in the presence of the biological world. They must be enabled to feel the immanence of divinity in the world, to experience gratitude and a sense of belonging, of membership of the planetary community. They must be given confidence to develop their own rituals to foster 209

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these experiences, to celebrate the new understanding of the unity of creation within a worldview of enfolding mental processes. The widespread acceptance of such a worldview would enable wiser decision making about our relating with other natural beings and systems. All this implies a massive learning process. The task is, firstly, to convey to millions of people, worldwide, the understanding of interrelatedness that Bateson and others have made available to us. Secondly, and very soon, large numbers of people must find the confidence and knowledge to undertake ecological action. BEGINNINGS

There has been some movement in formal education toward teaching children and young people about the living world and our dependence on it.1 Among the most interesting of these projects is the Center for Ecoliteracy which, initiated by Fritjof Capra and Peter Buckley, has been fostering eco-centered education in schools and communities in the San Francisco Bay area for the past twelve years.2 This strand of education encompasses both science and spirituality. Zenobia Barlow writes, in a recent issue of the journal Resurgence,3 that the children’s work with natural systems evokes reverence: a profound respect for the mystery and intricacy of life and of our own intimacy with other lives. In one school everyone, staff and students, takes responsibility for the life of the campus as members of over one hundred teams that look after such processes as caring for the fish pond, a “café climatology team,” welcoming visitors, energy efficiency, conflict resolution, or interior decorating.4 Another school has succeeded in reversing the imminent extinction of populations of freshwater shrimp in their area, later extending their activities into a consortium of some thirty schools, which has radically improved the ecologies of a whole watershed. The Students and Teachers Restoring a Watershed website relates this story.5 Other projects flowing from the Center for Ecoliteracy include The Edible Schoolyard,6 Rethinking School Lunch ,7 and the North Coast Rural Challenge Network, which developed from one rural school district to embrace a whole area of schools and communities separated by considerable distances and mountain ranges.8 Another aspect of ecological education is the regeneration of respect for and knowledge of indigenous wisdom. Jeannette Armstrong (an Okanagan “wisdom keeper, artist and activist from British Columbia”) writes, in the same issue of Resurgence (10–11), of her family’s experience of living through the process of “settlement.” This began in her grandparent’s early adult years, ranching and farming became

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endemic in her parent’s time and “schooling” was introduced in the childhood of her older siblings. Schooling replaced an intricate system of family specialisms within an integral community. Sustainable living was learned in the context of the family and provided a belief system reverencing life and including the nonhuman inhabitants of the land as “relatives” who needed respect, love, and protection. The En’owkin Center is now offering an ecoliteracy program that seeks to recover this interaction of family, community, and land, uniting teachers, elders, children, and families in producing lasting and sustainable real-world outcomes such as restoring a black cottonwood riparian ecosystem that is habitat for many endangered species.9 There are interesting and comparable experiments developing in British schools, such as the EcoSchools project.10 Increasing numbers of environmental organizations are active at both large and small scales within the religious faith communities. Among Christian organizations in Britain is the Eco-Congregation program, which originated from the environmental issues network of the ecumenical Churches Together in Britain and Ireland organization.11 Christian Ecology Link is a multidenominational organization seeking to spread environmental knowledge and awareness within the churches and also to encourage Christian perspectives within the wider ecological movement.12 Within the Unitarian Church there is an evolving Earth Spirit Network that is encouraging more “nature-centered worship” in the churches, circulates a quarterly “file”—a compendium of member’s writings—and organizes occasional meetings in different parts of Britain.13 On a wider scale, A Rocha (“the Rock”) is an international conservation organization “working to show God’s love for all creation.” The aim is to “follow the Biblical call to care for all creation.” A Rocha has ecological reserves, projects, and field-study centers in Portugal, Lebanon, France, Kenya, Canada, the UK, and the Czech Republic.14 Christians Aware promotes interdenominational and interreligious action and learning on many issues including land distribution, trade and justice and climate change.15 The Web of Creation is an internet based organization run by the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago to provide resources for faith-based approaches to justice and sustainability, whether Christian, interdenominational, or interfaith.16 The Eco-Justice Working Group of the (American) National Council of Churches links the national bodies of Protestant and Orthodox denominations in efforts “to work together to protect and restore God’s Creation.” They see “Environmental justice” as a “holistic term that includes all ministries designed to heal and defend creation” and “eco-justice” as an even broader concept

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that “includes efforts to assure justice for all of creation and the human beings who live in it.”17 The Environmental Justice Office of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.) has an interesting website18 that sees “restoring creation as God’s own work in our time.” The Lutheran Church (U.S.) has a project called LENS, “an informal network devoted to the task of ‘earthkeeping.’”19 There is, however, a need to transcend the perceived gap between members of the more general environmental movements (such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Common Ground,20 local and national conservation groups, rights-of-way organizations, and more), and the churches or “religious people.” The common Christian suspicion of anything that seems New Age remains a difficulty. These are good beginnings but, as yet, involve only a minority of people. Not more than 10 percent of British people are as yet engaged in any form of environmental activity.21 It is evident that more effective means are needed. Two routes seem possible. First we could attempt to influence members of Christian and other world religions toward incorporating these matters into their religious practice. Second, we could initiate and develop a new and specifically Earth-centered religious process with “oneness” and reverence for the total natural world as its central feature. Conceivably, there may be a middle path that could combine these two processes, a both/and strategy that would encourage ecological emphases within existing religions and offer, to those with no conventional religious faith, a way of developing a spiritual relationship with the ecology of which they are a part. I am inclined to think that the both/and process may have a better chance of success than either of the first two possibilities alone. First, it is probable that the ecologization of established religions would (as, indeed, is proving the case) be extremely slow. Second, there would almost inevitably be conflict between established faiths and any emerging Earth-based spirituality if the latter was seen as competing for members or promoting a nontheistic belief system. It may be thought that initiating a new spiritual approach from scratch would be a hopeless task but I am aware of a number of small groups and organizations that have made some progress in doing this. Among the most significant of these is the Creation Spirituality movement, including its British manifestation, the Association for Creation Spirituality, or GreenSpirit. It will be worth examining GreenSpirit and its operation, both as a national organization and as local groups, in order to estimate the possibilities and limitations of launching an Earthbased spirituality.

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GREENSPIRIT: AN EXAMPLE OF AN EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUALITY

The Creation Spirituality movement began in the United States, developing primarily from the work of Matthew Fox, but also draws on the work of such thinkers as Thomas Merton, Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, and Loren Eiseley. There was an early association with some key figures in “new science” and cosmology, notably Fritjof Capra, Brian Swimme, and Rupert Sheldrake. Matthew Fox was, for many years, a Dominican priest.22 Ordained in 1967 with degrees in philosophy and theology, Fox developed into a postmodern liberation theologian and “progressive visionary” with pronounced tendencies to view the Earth as holy and to substitute “original blessing” for “original sin.” He was eventually silenced by the Vatican and later dismissed from his order. Since then he has described himself as a “post-denominational priest.” He is the author of many books23 and was the effective founder of the University of Creation Spirituality in Oakland, California,24 which runs a variety of academic degree and other courses in Earth-centered spiritualities. Their website summarizes Creation Spirituality: “Creation Spirituality (CS) honors all of creation as an original blessing. Creation Spirituality integrates the wisdom of Western spirituality and global indigenous cultures with the emerging postmodern scientific understanding of the universe and the awakening artistic passion for creativity which reveals the interrelatedness of all beings.” The movement has spread throughout the United States and a number of other countries. It has “connectors” and local groups throughout America, publishes a journal, and actively promotes Earth-centered worship in many ways. It should be noted that, developing from Christian roots, Fox’s understanding of divinity has grown well beyond those limitations. His doctrine is “postdenominational” in the widest sense. The embryonic British GreenSpirit organization was founded in 1987 after Matthew Fox gave a series of talks in London. A follow-up meeting led to the formation of several local groups and, later, the creation of a Center for Creation Spirituality at St. James’ Church, Piccadilly, London. By 1989 there was a paid coordinator, a newsletter linking local groups around the country, and a journal: Interchange. Introductory courses were run by graduates of the Institute for Culture and Creation Spirituality, Matthew Fox’s California predecessor of the University of Creation Spirituality. The British Association for Creation Spirituality (ACS) developed a volunteer-run mailorder book service, became a

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registered charity in 1994, adopted the public name GreenSpirit in 1997 and, since then, has weaned itself from the links with St. James’s Church, partly for financial reasons, partly to clarify its independence from any particular faith or church.25 It is now run by volunteers, with a small number of paid part-time helpers. A new journal, also called GreenSpirit, replaces the previous Interchange. There is a newsletter, GreenSpirit Graffiti, and a website that carries details of national and local events, group activities, and a very useful resource pack of information and ideas for activities.26 There are at present some 360 subscribing members of national GreenSpirit, twelve regional “greeters” or contact persons for new members, and local groups that operate in London (East London and St James’ Church, Piccadilly), Ascot, East Hants/West Sussex, Exeter, Norwich, Reading, North Lancashire/Cumbria, North Devon, West Devon, East Devon and Somerset, Exeter, Southampton and Gosport, South-West Wales, and South-West England. All these groups include many people who are not subscribing members of the national GreenSpirit organization. The local group in my own region serves the North Lancashire and Cumbria area. It originated from an article I wrote for Interchange in 1996 when my wife and I were considering opening an educational center linking spirituality and ecological concerns. There were some twenty responses from ACS members in north Lancashire and a wide area of Cumbria, most of whom said that they wanted a local group rather than a “center.” Early meetings set a pattern of gathering to celebrate the eight Celtic seasonal festivals, sharing food, songs, poetry, and readings, evolving our own rituals—often incorporating the Dances of Universal Peace.27 We have met to study subjects such as Goethe’s approach to science, Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart, environmental concerns, pilgrimage, or sacred dance. A recent development is a series of monthly Sunday evening meetings, held in a local town and open to all, which are more reflective and meditative. These, facilitated by a trained interfaith minister, offer the opportunity for a quite reverent gathering of people to meet—sharing meditation, silence, readings, poetry, prayer, songs and chants, sometimes a circle dance—before joining together in food and discussion. Contact lists are circulated to all members. Since the early years the group has continued with an open-to-anyone planning process in which an informal core of up to a dozen members meet to plan the ongoing program. Attendance has ranged from six to over one hundred people at events of varying types. About 20 percent of the members have roots in Christianity, some of these being active church members. There are two or three members of other faiths but the large majority are people who are seeking a spiritual focus for their ecological concern but find no pro-

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vision for their needs in organized religion. Commitment to the group varies from considerable devotion to the very casual. The age range is wide—teenagers to seventy-plus—but the majority are in midlife, some of whom bring their children to events. The present list of contacts numbers fifty-one, of whom seven are members of the national association. For most of us in this group, Creation Spirituality is a way of understanding our world, our universe, and celebrating it as divine—a possibility that has been largely lost in our society. We are relearning reverence for all of creation, from the distant galaxies to the smallest living beings with which we share this planet. Many of us believe that creation is, itself, the primary form of revelation; it is the way that the divine continuously shows itself to us. For those who are also Christians this is not about ignoring the Bible but it is about restoring a balance, including a balance between God as revealed to the people of the Holy Land two or three thousand years ago and divinity as continuously revealed in the evolving universe now. It is also about recovering respect for some human wisdom that has been forgotten in the rise of materialism and scientific attitudes: the medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Hildegarde, and the “native” spiritualities, including the Native American tradition and both pre-Christian and later Celtic spirituality. A key aspect is our recognition that scientific research is now disclosing a new unity in the world. From the subatomic (quantum physics) to the entire cosmos, scientists are beginning to tell us that all things are related and affect each other, that the whole vast universe is a coherent system, that it hangs together in ways that should not surprise us but do surprise the scientists very much. Creation Spirituality sees the emerging knowledge of the development of the universe and the evolution of life as a new account of creation, a new story that enables a more sane and sustainable understanding of our place in the world. We have been too much immersed in issues of “original sin” and innate human sinfulness. We have believed that we need redemption from this world, which has come to seem fallen, evil, and unimportant in comparison with a “heaven” that is somehow outside and other than the world. In contrast to this, Creation Spirituality emphasizes the ways in which the world is given to us to enjoy, exult in, care for and love. Much emphasis goes into the possibility of loving. Matthew Fox writes that we should be seeking to fall in love with many aspects of the world three times a day. We are meant to find pleasure and rapture in the world. In our group meetings we try to celebrate, in the fullest sense, the beauty and marvelous diversity of the world. The “new creation story” is important. Matthew Fox sets out Creation Spirituality as four paths (or ways or processes) that we engage in with

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the divine: the positive, the negative, the creative, and the transformative. These can be thought of as the paths of original blessing, letting go, breakthrough, and compassion. We see the creative path as growing from both the path of blessing and the path of letting go; together these enable us to offer our own creative power to the divine process of the world. In the fourth path, the way of transformation, compassion is the goal: creativity enlightened by judgment, wisdom, celebration, and play. We attempt to incorporate all these processes into our group celebrations. Mutual support is an important factor too. We try to support each other, to offer sustenance for each member’s personal process of creating. We share together our answers to deeply personal questions. What keeps us going? How do we recharge? How can we invoke the path of letting go? What does this mean for us? For Fox, sin or evil is carelessness: failure to care, apathy, coldness of heart, loss of passion. It is these, he claims, not hate, that are opposed to love. The “great sin of omission” is leaving out compassion, which is justice making and celebration. Sin is indifference and leads to injustice. Injustice is active. Injustice uses creativity to dominate, kill, or refuse to celebrate others: East Timor, Guatemala, the Amazon basin, Palestine, Iraq, London, Lancaster, my village. Sin is allowing injustice to continue. Fox proposes a new version of the Trinity: Cosmology, Liberation, and Wisdom comprise “One Trinitarian symbol that I sense coming together in our time.” Cosmology is our attempt to understand the universe—creation and creator. We attempt this by science, which gives us the new cosmic story; by mysticism, through which we can feel awe that we are citizens of the cosmos who are welcomed here with love; by art, because whatever we create is our attempt at taking responsibility and expressing gratitude. As liberators, the divinity in us breaks through, especially as “prophets” who interfere with injustice and proclaim freedom. The poor are now our children and grandchildren who inherit an earth diminished in health and beauty—plus, I would add, all the other-than-human beings that are suffering the effects of human selfcenteredness. Wisdom corresponds to the third person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit, and is divinity at work in the universe as activity, as process. This trinity, says Fox, is God as mind of the universe—something very close to Bateson’s final position. Thus, Creation Spirituality, GreenSpirit, has developed from Christian roots (though it draws on other world faiths) and remains broadly consistent with a liberal Christian theology. While denying an anthropomorphic God it remains open to a panentheistic understanding of the divine as immanent in and possibly also transcending Earth and the universe.

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In order to assess the usefulness of such an organization and process we must ask how effective experience of it has been. To what extent has involvement in GreenSpirit enabled new attitudes toward the living world in myself and other members? For me, it has been part of a process of learning (and learning to feel) more rooted in and more reverent toward the more-than-human world. That trend has fueled—and been fueled by—my academic work during these years, not least by my learning about Bateson’s thought and by other environmental and philosophical engagements. The sense of mutual support is important. I know that a similar process has been experienced by many local and national members, though others are less influenced and engaged. However, it has to be said that the total British GreenSpirit organization is, after fifteen years of existence, regularly influencing the thought of only a few hundred, at most perhaps two thousand people. The national organization is promoting two significant conferences each year, the website receives some thousands of visits every month and the GreenSpirit Book Service, run by two devoted volunteers, is instrumental in getting ideas and information into the homes of further people in the United Kingdom. However, for many of the people influenced, the process is mainly about reinforcement of the self, or more vivid experiencing of the natural world. Only a minority are in any sense activist, energetically pursuing ways of influencing others. Council members and other active volunteers are busy people with competing demands on their time. Attempts at urging a radically enhanced profile or more public involvement are met by the quite legitimate argument that there is no one with the time, energy, and health to undertake the work. GreenSpirit’s present impact is useful but limited. WHAT IS REALLY NEEDED?

What is required is a very widespread change in grassroots attitudes, flowing from improved knowledge and resulting in a highly motivated moral and political force. There is as yet no process sufficiently strong to produce this change. We need a catalyst, a strategy that can start from small beginnings but then enlarge to influence more and more people. We might remember that the Christian faith was spread and developed in the early years of the church in just this way. Such a selfmultiplying process could well start from the members of ecological organizations of many kinds; these are people with at least some of the requisite knowledge already available. What is needed is to start and facilitate the learning process, the flow of information. The energy for

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response (as Bateson would say) is already there in the metabolism of people. This must become a process of promoting Gaian and Batesonian understandings of the activity of “minds.” It must foster artistic processes of all sorts because they give access to deeper wisdom, enabling those involved to initiate nonpurposive but healing change. It must help people to engage with religious process again. It will be necessary for leaders to emerge, to progressively involve churches, schools, political parties, local government, universities, teacher training, welfare organizations, and employers. It will be important to avoid centralized content, the growth of dogma or bureaucratization. If the growth of this movement is to be organic and sustained, each group and individual must evolve their own beliefs, emphases, and actions. THE MEETINGS FOR EARTH

With all this in mind, I have a suggestion, a challenge, a quest to propose. It is that we (you and I, reader) initiate the Meetings for Earth. Because the state of the natural world (including humanity) is parlous. . . Because time is very short. . . Because the major religions are not adequately engaging with the issues. . . Because individual people feel (and as individuals are) helpless. . . Because, though many people are aware of the issues and the dangers, they cannot act alone. . . Because only a movement of a broadly religious kind can enable massive change in human attitudes. . . Because, though most people are disengaged from traditional religions, they retain their capacity for wonder, awe, and reverence, for necessary unselfishness and sacrifice. . . Because a rapidly spreading network of mutually supportive small groups would provide a growing consensus, a massive learning and enabling process, and a political influence that would be a grounded movement rather than a new religion . . . I propose that we will initiate THE MEETINGS FOR EARTH. By which I mean that those who come to share this vision will each form a small group of six to ten already known personal friends who will meet regularly (perhaps weekly) for the following purposes:

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1. To provide mutual support to each other in all appropriate and necessary ways. 2. To learn together about the ecological, political, social, and psychological aspects of our present world problems. 3. To share in reflective, creative, and aesthetic group activity focused on the sacred nature of the total web of integrated systems that is Universe and Earth. 4. To undertake whatever individual and group activity is practicable to (directly or indirectly) ameliorate ecological hazards and enhance awareness of the integrated, sacred nature of the world. 5. Working in pairs, to form (after a few months) further such groups as a deliberate outreach or mission activity, this process of replication to be repeated in turn by the members of the new groups. Each of these purposes needs some explanation: 1. To provide mutual support to each other in all appropriate and necessary ways. The initiation and membership of such groups can be an easy and enjoyable social process that will give each of us access to other like-minded friends. It is important that the friends we encourage to join our first (and subsequent) groups should be varied. In age, gender, interests, social background, lifestyle, and profession, they should be as varied as possible. This will enable the next and subsequent generations of groups to reach into still wider areas of our society. This should not be (or seem to be) a middle-class endeavor. Thus, we will gather a varied group of friends who will be helpful and supportive in many ways—perhaps in ways not directly connected to issues of planetary well-being (though no issue is truly unconnected with this). It is important that the members should already be friends because the process of cooperative growth and learning that I envisage will involve our more-than-conscious minds. Bateson, as we have seen, warns that strategies planned only with our purposive consciousness will fail because of inadequate perspective about the interrelating of systems. Groups working within the emotional and metaphorical area of play, aesthetic activity, love, and religious process will, I believe, achieve systemic awareness without generating dogma. 2. To learn together about the ecological, political, social, and psychological aspects of our present world problems. This will be the more factual, knowledge-based aspect of the program. Here the knowledge, experience, reading, and

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conversation of the members will be pooled. The aim is to develop a group of people who know and emotionally feel the truth of the many ways in which Earth is being damaged and the ways (however small) in which we can all ameliorate that damage. There will be some overlap with the activity noted in (3) below. 3. To share in reflective, creative, and aesthetic group activity centered on the sacred nature of the total web of integrated systems that is Universe and Earth. This is intended to be the core activity of the whole process. Without taking on the forms or doctrines of any religion, it will be a focus for meditation, prayer, reflection, celebration, and worship. It will also be an opportunity to share in aesthetic or artistic activities—perhaps dance, poetry, song, literature, humor, or the creation of ritual expressions of matters that may be difficult to frame in words. Not least, such activities will include spending time in wider-than-human nature. Again, it was Bateson’s conviction that these activities will enable us to go beyond the limitations of linear “conscious purpose.” This range of activities within the groups will be reinforcing and enjoyable for the members. It will serve the purposes for which prayer and kindred activities have been effective in all religions. What I mean by “worship” needs to be examined and understood. I have been led to the point of making these proposals by study of the work of Bateson. We have seen that Bateson brought his life experience (as biologist, anthropologist, war-time propaganda exponent, psychologist, cybernetician and systems theorist, student of animal communication, of the processes in human art, and of wider ecology) to bear on his last book Angels Fear—An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred. We know that, throughout his life, Bateson was feeling toward and saying increasingly clearly that the living systems of all the world are really mental processes—that we live in a world of minds—and that our particular human form of conscious, language-using, calculating mind has led to our isolation from the wisdom that we gained during millions of years of evolution. Our self-seeking conscious purposefulness has become a pathology. With Bateson’s help we have seen that what matters is the relational “going on” between things, for example: the interrelated dependencies in a forest ecosystem between earth, minerals, air, soil organisms, bacteria, moisture, trees and other plants, mammals, birds and insects, weather, sunlight . . . and so on. Minds or mental process can be seen at every scale from the soil processes, through every size of organism, to the vast weather systems and the total Gaian process of the living planet. The same goes for us: humans are inseparably enmeshed within mental

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“going on” that ranges from submicroscopic processes and our bodysized mind/brain activities to “all the pathways to and from environment”—which makes every aspect of the process of the world a part of what we conventionally call our “self.” This learning is something to be shared within the groups. In the later stages of this book we have seen that Bateson came to believe that the total interconnected system or process (or “mind”) of the universe “is maybe what people have called God.” In other words, God/divinity/the sacred is the totality of the going on within all the linked systems of the world and (in that sense only) may be seen as transcendent—while being wholly immanent as the relating that makes up the process of Earth. Which makes each of us a part of God, a part of the sacred. We can learn to share Bateson’s belief that we can, through the recognition of beauty in art, in poetry, and in nature, recover our sense of membership of the world and that this may (even yet) give us the grace that will enable us to relearn the art of living sustainably in the Earth community. So the group activity I suggest as being close to what we experience (in existing religions) as worship—the expression of reverence toward the divine—is appropriate because we see God or divinity or the sacred as being the living process of the world. I am not proposing that we personify this process, still less see it as an anthropomorphic God, even as Gaia, the Earth Goddess. Rather, I suggest that we see that this is a chance to let go of supernatural theism to the extent needed to bring in those who have long rejected the magical-seeming beliefs about a supernatural God. Such people will be able to accept, given some help, the ongoing revelation of sacred purpose that is our natural world of process. We must remember that the total natural mental process includes humanity, our nations, communities, friends, and families also as mental systems, subsystems of divinity, and that it is at these scales that such aspects of the sacred as compassion, love, pity, and forgiveness become evident to us. Also, this view of divine activity within the world is compatible with all the major faiths. It is an enhanced emphasis on the divine within the material Earth but carries no essential contradiction of any faith’s beliefs. I am not proposing Bateson as the major prophet, but I do suggest that he provides an excellent example of the ways in which scientific and ecological understandings can be integrated with spiritual activity. There are, as we have seen, many other thinkers and writers who can offer us insights and guidance in relearning a reverential relationship with Earth, not least James Lovelock and his Gaia theory. A key point is that the groups, while open to members of any faith, should not become identified

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with particular faiths but will rather, by their process of self-multiplication, extend the ideas of sacredness within Earth into general society. 4. To undertake whatever individual and group activity is practicable to directly or indirectly ameliorate ecological hazards and enhance awareness of the integrated, sacred nature of the world. What each group undertakes will vary with the composition, situation, and interests of its members. These might include: Personal environmentally responsible activities: recycling of waste materials, supporting local currencies and exchange schemes, green/ethical investment of savings, growing our own (or purchasing locally grown) organic foods, adopting vegetarian or vegan diets, avoiding the use of pesticides, insecticides, or other harmful products, use of local rather than distant tradespeople and suppliers of other goods, use of low-energy equipment, home insulation, economy in vehicle use (including car sharing and lift giving), membership in and support of appropriate environmental and political organizations and parties. Group activities: support of (and cooperation with) other members in the individual activities above. Lobbying or otherwise influencing local and national government politicians, churches, and other institutions, support or initiation of local environmental projects, symbolic activities such as developing an ecological or sacred garden, tree planting, putting on informative or educational events and presentations, offering talks to local schoolchildren, and so on. 5. Working in pairs to form (after a few months) further such groups as a deliberate outreach or mission activity, this process to be repeated in turn by the members of the new groups. This is the critical requirement. It means that each person will eventually be part of two groups: their own first group, which will become a support and resource group for them, and the new group formed by them in which they will initially have a leadership role. Remember that these are groups of friends. There is no requirement to go out and seek to influence strangers. Whether those people who have started a second group will then join with others in starting a third is an open question. My view is that membership of three groups would be too demanding, but the evolving dynamic of this process will determine what is appropriate and most effective. There may be much to learn about the dynamics of such groups from the experience of the Roman Catholic “Base Christian Communities” in South America, from Christian house groups or house churches, from the Julian Meetings, and from Quaker experience.

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If, say, 50 readers of this book initiated groups of an average size of 7 people; if each of these spawned 3 further groups after six months and then this process was repeated by the second-level groups, there would be 650 groups involving 3350 people. Repeating this process four more times would mean that there would be 54,650 groups involving over 273,000 people. If the process continued further, the growth in numbers would become exponential—two more cycles of regeneration would mean 492,000 Meetings for Earth with 2.5 million members. If new generations of groups were formed every six months, this could happen in four years—with no central organization. If 5000 readers were to start a group each we could soon be changing the world! I think we can’t risk not trying it! THE NEED FOR ACTION

I believe that something on the lines of this proposal is necessary if we are to make the profound changes that are required in time to avoid major ecological disruption. Bateson has given us some intellectual tools to use for the solution of our problems. I have made a contribution in this book to making clear what these tools are, but the ideas must be taken out of academia and into the world. Bateson’s ideas, his insights for ecosystemic survival, are nested together in a similar way to his “minds.” As we have seen, the central idea is that of minds, mental systems operating throughout the biological world. Within and dependent upon that insight are the other healing concepts: monism, unity, the transcendence of dualities, the use of aesthetic engagement as a source of grace, the ethical necessity of prioritizing the largest system, the value of service, the sacredness of life, the requirement of reverence, the necessity of love. These themes transcend all disciplinary boundaries. They can enable the growth of attitudes and beliefs that will challenge the commercial and militaristic forces that maintain the current ecological pathologies. If, and only if, they can be transferred from the world of conferences, theses, academic books, and articles to the reality of the day-to-day actions of working men, women, and children where involuntary ecological damage originates, will grassroots change develop. By means of the Meetings for Earth (or similar strategies) ordinary people can be equipped with knowledge and ideas. There is no lack of spiritual need, no lack of cultural unease, no lack of willingness to change our ways, if only we knew how, if only we knew the ways of relinking ourselves to a meaningful relationship with the Earth. We can find ways of investing our

224

Understanding Gregory Bateson

lives with meaning. We can remove our half-conscious dread of what the world will be like for our children. And all this is possible, given the education (however informal) and the induction (however homely) of ordinary folk into an understanding of the sacred nature of our planet. There is hope. We should remember Margaret Mead’s often quoted words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” We should remember the first Christian disciples—less than a dozen men and their friends, with little in the way of physical resources, their leader executed, themselves regarded as enemies of the occupying power. Their only tools for starting the process that was to bring a new ethic and a new way of living to much of the world were their passion and the ability to share their conviction with friends, neighbors, and those people they could contrive to visit. Note the words of Mary Catherine Bateson in her afterword to the 1991 edition of Our Own Metaphor: It is clear to me that the human species will not suddenly achieve ecological responsibility and that we and the other species we live with will suffer as a result. But we are moving. I begin to believe that the voices that call for new patterns, the various advocates of cybernetic peace—impassioned, despairing, but also visionary—have become part of the process. If we are ecological thinkers that is the most we should expect.” (1991, 324)

We are part of the process. We can gather our friends and acquaintances and spread the word. We can act. May our actions be wise and beautiful.

appendix

Table of Lifetime Events and Publications Publications are listed in order of composition or first presentation where known. The sequence numbers in the “No.” column and the dates preceding titles in the “Publications” column correspond with Rodney Donaldson’s bibliography in A Sacred Unity and show the order of publication. Year

Date

1904

9 May

1910 1912 1914 1918

October

1918 1921 1922 1922

22 March October

1922 1924 1925 1925

November

Events

No.

Gregory Bateson born, Grantchester, Cambridge, UK Bateson family moved to John Innes Horticultural Institute, Merton Park, near London GB entered Wardenhouse School World War I. GB’s brother John entered Army GB’s brothers: John killed in war. Martin in Army End of World War I. GB entered Charterhouse School GB leaves Charterhouse School Martin Bateson commited suicide GB’sfather,WilliamBateson,became aTrusteeoftheBritishMuseum GB at St. John’s College, Cambridge, reading zoology GB awarded first-class BA degree in Natural Sciences Visit to Galapagos Islands, Equador GB: visit to Switzerland to study partridge plumage

8 February William Bateson died GB awarded MA (1st-class) in Anthropology 1927–30 Anthony Wilkin Studentship. Fieldwork in New Guinea: New Britain, then Sepik River

1926 1926

225

Publications

1 1925 (with William Bateson) “On Certain Aberrations of the Red-legged Partridges Alectoris Rufa and Saxatilis”

226 Year

Appendix Date

Events

1931–33

Publications

2nd period of Fieldwork in New Guinea—Sepik River Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge

1931–36 1931

March

1931

June

1932

2 1931 “Head Hunting on the Sepik River” 2a [Signed as “G.B.” Not listed by Donaldson] Review of F. E. Williams, Orokaiva Society GB met Margaret Mead in New Guinea

1932

March

1932

March

1932

June

1934 1934

No.

Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa

1928

31 July to 7 August

1934

31 July

1934

31 July

1934

1 August

1934 1934

13 December December

1935

December

3 1932a “Further Notes on a Snake Dance of the Baining” 4 1932b “Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River” (Parts 1–2) 5 1932c “Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River” (Parts 3–4) Visit to US. Gave lectures 1st. International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, London 1st. International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, London 1st. International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, London 1st. International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, London

6 1934a “Personal Names among the Iatmul Tribe” (Sepik River) 7 1934b “Fieldwork in Social Psychology in New Guinea” 8 1934c “The Segmentation of Society” 9 1934d “Ritual Transvesticism on the Sepik River” 10 1934e “Psychology and War: Tendencies of Early Man” 11 1934f (Donaldson 1935a— error?) “Music in New Guinea” 12 1935b “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis”

1935

GB visit to US; discussions with Radcliffe-Brown and Mead 1936 February to GB married Margaret Mead March (in Singapore) 1936–38 GB and MM: joint fieldwork in Bali 1936

1936

February

13 1936a Naven: A Survey of the Problems Presented by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View 14 1936b Review of Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Vol. 1, General Ethnography

Appendix Year

Date

1936

February

1936

May

Events

227 No.

Publications

15 1936c Letter “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis” 16 1936d “A Carved Wooden Statuette from the Sepik River, New Guinea” 17 1937 “An Old Temple and a New Myth”

1937 William Wyse Scholarship, Trinity College, Cambridge Fieldwork with Margaret Mead, New Guinea Brief fieldwork in Bali

1938 1938–39 1939 1939

Spring

1939

August

1939

Sept.

1939

December

1940

January

Return to New York. Margaret Mead pregnant Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt re peacemaking: GB-MM WW II commenced. Bateson returned to UK—attempted to find work for war effort Daughter (Mary Catherine) born

GB returned to U.S. and became resident 1940–41 Summer to GB, Mead, et al. “Study of culture at December a distance” project 1940–42 Summer Secretary: Committee for National Morale 1940 28 April Paper read to Seventh Conference 18 1941a “Experiments in Thinkon Methods in Philosophy and the ing about Observed EthnoSciences, New York logical Material” 1941? Member of Institute for Intercultural Studies 1941 19 1941b “Review of E. R. January to March Hilgard, & D. G. Marquis, Conditioning and Learning” 1941 20 1941c “Review of: C. L. Hull, January to March et al., Mathematico-deductive Theory of Rote-Learning: A Study in Scientific Methodology 1941 21 1941d “Age Conflicts and February Radical Youth” 1941 22 1941e “The FrustrationJuly Paper read to Eastern Psychological Assoc. 1940, early psychological Aggression Hypothesis and interest Culture” 1941 8 SeptGB and MM attended Second Symember posium on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, New York 1941 23 1941f (with Margaret Mead) December “Principles of Morale Building” 1941 December Pearl Harbor attack. United States enters WW II 1942 OSS/Navy: Columbia University, teaching Pidgin English 1942–45 Office of Strategic Services; “Psychological Planner,” Washington

228 Year

Appendix Date

Events

1942

January to March May

1942

July to August September

1942

September

1942

Publications

24 1942a (With M. Mead): Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis 25 1942b “Announcement: Council on Human Relations”

1942

1942

No.

GB’s family resident with Frank household, New York

1942–48

Macy Conference: “Cerebral Inhibition” (with McCulloch, von Neumann, de No, Pitts, Mead, Frank, Kubie, Fremont-Smith) 26 1942c “The Council on Human Relations” 27 1942d “Some Systemic Approaches to the Study of Culture and Personality” 28 1942e “Council on Intercultural Relations” 29 1942f “Comment on M. Mead, The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values” 30 1942g “Morale and National Character” 31 1942h “Review of R. Kennedy, The Ageless Indies” 32 1942i “Note requesting ‘materials on stereotypes and attitudes of Americans toward cultures and individuals of those countries engaged in the present war’”

1942

1942 1942

September

1942

October

Film analysis, Museum of Modern Art, New York GB with OSS—in Ceylon, Burma, India, China GB saw the Ames experiments in New York—convinced of the fallibility of perception

1943 1943–45 1943?

33 1943a “Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films”

1943

34 1943b “An Analysis of the film Hitlerjunge Quex” (1933)

1943

35 1943c “Human Dignity and the Varieties of Civilisation”

1943

April

1943 1943 1943

September

36 1943d “Discussion: The Science of Decency” 37 1943e (Collaboration) Melanesian Pidgin English Short Grammar and Vocabulary 38 1943f (Collaboration) Melanesian Pidgin English: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary 39 1943g Remarks in “Psychology—In the War and After . . . General Course in Psychology”

Appendix Year

Date

Events

229 No.

Publications

1st. Macy Cybernetics Conference, Princeton. “Teleological Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems” GB in “dangerous secret mission” in Burma. Awarded Asia Pacific Campaign Service Ribbon

1944 1944–45 ? 1944

February

1944

March

40 1944a “Pidgin English and Cross-Cultural Communication” 41 1944b “Psychology—In the War and After . . . Material on Contemporary Peoples” 42 1944c “Cultural Determinants of Personality” 43 1944d (with Claire Holt) “Form and Function of the Dance in Bali” 44 1944e “Psychology—in the War and After: Use of Film Material in Studying Peoples” 45 1944f (with R. A. Hall, Jr.) “A Melanesian Culture-Contact Myth in Pidgin English”

1944 1944 1944

May

1944

October to December

1945

6 to 9 August

Hiroshima, Nagasaki bombing End of WW II

1945 1945

23 to 27 August

1946

1 March

1946–47

Sixth Symposium … on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, New York. GB present—or submitted remarks in absentia 55 1947b Sex and Culture Conference on Physiological and Psychological Factors in Sex Behaviour. New York Visiting Professor (anthropology) New School for Social Research, New York Second. Macy Cybernetics Conference: Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems. Included Hutchinson, Kluever, Lewin, Northrup, Shannon, Marquis, von Foerster

1946

March

1946

May

1946

21 June

1946

29 January to 19 May

Arts of the South Seas Exhibition, New York Museum of Modern Art

1946

September

1946

September

GB: developing concern for effects 49 1946d “The Pattern of of nuclear weapons on internaan Armaments Race: An tional relations Anthropological Approach” Macy meeting, organized by Bateson; included social scientists von Neumann and Wiener

46 1946a “Discussion” (of books by M. Mead, A. Gesell, and R. A. Spitz, K. M. Wolf, on acculturation and maturation) 47 1946b “Physical Thinking and Social Problems” 48 1946c “Arts of the South Seas”

230 Year

Appendix Date

1946

September to October October

1946

October

1946

1946

Events

8 December

1946

12December

53 1946h “Protecting the Future: Aiding the Work of Scientists is Believed Best Safeguard” 209 1980h “An Exchange of Letters Between Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson” (Refers to “Arts of the South Seas”— 1946c above) GB: Period of personal psychotherapy Guggenheim Fellow: “to synthesise cybernetic ideas with anthropological data” Visiting Professor (anthropology), New School for Social Research, New York

1947 1947–48

1947–48

1947–48

Visiting Professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1947?

Third. Macy Cybernetics Conference Lecture: International House, Columbia University

23 March

1947 1947

September

1948? 1949 1948–50 1949–62

54 1947a “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” 55 1947b “Sex and Culture” 56 1947c Review of J. Fiebleman, The Theory of Human Culture 57 1947d Comments on L. Thompson, “In Quest of an Heuristic Approach to the Study of Mankind,” in L. Bryson (ed.), Approaches to Group Understanding

1947

1948

Publications

51 1946f “Review of J. C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society” 50 1946e The Pattern of an Armaments Race—part 2— An Analysis of Nationalism 52 1946g “From One Social Scientist to Another” Effective separation from Margaret Mead

1946

1947

No.

First of the (later published) metalogues written (MCB then aged 9, GB not living with MM); published in Steps to An Ecology of Mind (1972a) by GB Macy Cybernetics Conference GB: Entry into psychiatric medicine; move to California. Research Associate with Jurgen Ruesch, University of California Medical School/hospital Ethnologist (Anthropology, Psychiatry, Cybernetics), Veteran’s Administration Hospital, Palo Alto, California

Appendix Year

Date

1949

24 to 25 March

Sixth. Macy Cybernetics Conference: New York

Events

1949

8 to 10 April

Western Round Table on Modern Art, San Francisco

1949

May

1949

8 June

1949

1950 1950

1950

23 to 24 March

August

1951 1951–77 1951 1951 1952–54

1952

20–21 March

1952

Autumn

1953

Spring

1953

Summer

1953

Autumn

1954

11 March

Panelist: Open Forum on the Exhibition of Illusionism and Trompe L’Oeil, San Francisco

231 No.

Publications

63 1950b Conference remarks: Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems 58 1949a “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State” 61 1949d “Remarks in: The Western Round Table on Modern Art” 59 1949b (With J. Ruesch) “Structure and Process in Social Relations” 60 1949c “Panelist Comments: An Open Forum on the Exhibition of Illusionism and Tromp L’Oeil”

GB and MM divorced 66 1951c Remarks in Cybernetics: Seventh. Macy Cybernetics Conference: GB, McCulloch, von Circular Causal and Feedback Foerster, Bavelas, Bigelow, Brosin, Mechanisms in Biological and Frank, Gerard, Hutchinson, Kluver, Social Systems Kubie, Marquis, Mead, Pitts, Savage, Teuber, von Neumann, Wiener. Guests: Licklider, McLardy, Shannon, Stroud, Werner 62 1950a “Cultural Ideas about Aging” Married Betty Sumner; birth of son—John Part-time Visiting Professor (Anthropology), Stanford University 64 1951a (with J. Ruesch) Communication: The Social Matrix of Society 65 1951b “Why Do Frenchmen?” (metalogue) Director, Research project: The Role of the Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication—produced double-bind hypothesis (the Weakland, Haley, Fry, Jackson team) 68 1953a “The Position of Ninth. (last) Macy Cybernetics Conference, New York Humour in Human Communication” + conference remarks 67 “Applied Metalinguistics and International Relations” 69 1953b “Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious” 70 1953c “Metalogue: Daddy, How Much Do You Know?” 71 1953d “Metalogue: Why Do Things Have Outlines?” Symposium: Cultural, Anthropological, and Communications Approaches to the Study of Human Personality, Mexico City

232 Year

Appendix Date

Events

1954–75

Vietnam War

1954–59

Director, Macy funded research project on Schizophrenic Communication

1954

GB brought Bateson family books and furniture from England Paper read (on behalf of the Bateson, Weakland, Haley, Fry, Jackson team) by Jay Haley to American Psychological Association, Mexico City, 11/3/54

1954

1955

May

1955

May

1955 1955 1956 1956 1956

1956 1957 1957 1957 1957 1958 1958 1958 1958 1958

Publications

72 1954 Metalogue: “Why a Swan?”

1954

1955

No.

Conference: Epidemiology of Mental Health, Brighton, Utah Epidemiology of Mental Health

73 1955a “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”

74 1955b How the Deviant Sees His Society 76 1956b “The Message: ‘This 7 to 10 Second Group Processes (Macy) October Conference, Princeton, New Jersey Is Play,’” plus additional remarks 75 1956a Autobiographical 7 to 10 2nd. Group Processes (Macy) October Conference, Princeton, New Jersey sketch 83 1958c “Schizophrenic Distor15 to 17 Psychotherapy of Chronic October Schizophrenic Patients conference, tions of Communication” + Sea Island, Georgia conference remarks 7 February GB naturalized—U.S. citizen 77 1956c “Communication in July to August Occupational Therapy” 78 1956d (with Don. D. Jackson, July to First double-bind paper August Jay Haley, John Weakland) “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” 79 1957a “Autobiographical Third Group Processes (Macy) 13 to 16 Conference, Princeton, New Jersey sketch” October 80 1957b Conference remarks: 6 to 7 April Perception and Personality Conference, Beverly Hills, “Conference on Perception California and Personality” 82 1958b “Language and June Frieda Fromm-Reichmann memorial lecture Psychotherapy” 88 1959c “Autobiographical 13 to 16 Fourth Group Processes (Macy) October Conference, Princeton, New Jersey sketch” 87 1959b Remarks in “Memorial 13 to 16 Fourth Group Processes (Macy) October Conference, Princeton, New Jersey to Dr. Fromm-Reichman” GB divorced from Betty Bateson 81 1958a Naven…. (see above 1936) 2nd. edn. with additional Preface and Epilogue 89 1959d Panel Review: Individ10 to 11 Meeting: Academy of PsychoMay analysis, San Francisco ual and Familial Dynamics 85 1958e “The New Conceptual 17 Lecture: Sixth Annual Psychiatric September Institute, New Jersey Frames for Behavioural Research” 94 1960d Conference remarks in: 12–15 Fifth Group Processes (Macy) October Conference, Princeton, New Jersey Group Processes: Transactions of the Fifth Conference

Appendix Year

Date

Events

1958

American Psychiatric Association, San Francisco

1958 1958

1 to 3 October

1959

22 to 24 April

Conference: Chronic Schizophrenia and Hospital Treatment Programs, San, Francisco Macy LSD/Psychotherapy Conference

1959–62 1959–62 1959

6 February

1960

April

1959

7 April

Albert D. Lasker Memorial Lecture, Chicago

1960

June

1960

June

Mary Catherine Bateson married Barkev Kassarjian Conference: Exploring the Base for Family Therapy, New York

1960

June

1960

December 1960

1961 1961

Conference: Exploring the Base for Family Therapy, New York AMA symposium: Expression of the Emotions in Man. New York Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award (for research in schizophrenia) GB married Lois Cammack

1961 17 to 18 March

1962

1962 1963–64

No.

Publications

84 1958d Analysis of Group Therapy in an Admission Ward, United States Naval Hospital, Oakland, California 90 1959e “Cultural Problems Posed by a Study of Schizophrenic Process” 91 1960a “The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia” 95 1960e Conference remarks in: “The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy”

GB developed an interest in octopus communication Principal Investigator, Research in Family Psychotherapy Part-time Professor, California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco

1959

1962

233

Symposium: Society of Medical Psychoanalysts, New York Houston Neurological Society, 10th Annual Scientific Meeting

7 to 8 December

Disorders of Communication conference, New York Associate Director, Communication Research Institute, St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (this or Waimanalo below: “a partial failure”)

86 1959a “Letter in response to S. Morganbesser, Role and Status of Anthropological Theories” 92 1960b “Discussion of S. J. Beck Families of Schizophrenic and of Well Children” 93 1960c “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia”

97 1961b The Biosocial Integration of Behavior in the Schizophrenic Family 98 1961c “Formal Research in Family Structure” 99 1963a “A Social Scientist Views the Emotions”

96 1961a Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832 107 1966a “Communication Theories in Relation to the Etiology of the Neuroses” 100 1963b “Exchange of Information About Patterns of Human Behaviour” + conference remarks 103 1964a “Some Varieties of Pathogenic Organisation”

234

Appendix

Year

Date

1963

March

1963

August

1963

24 December

1964

1964

approx.

Publications

101 1963c (With D. Jackson, J. Haley and J. Weakland) “A note on the Double Bind— 1962” 108 1966b “Problems in Cetacean International Symposium on Cetacean Research, Washington, D.C. and Other Mammalian Communication” 102 1963d “The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution” 104 1964b Preface to P. Watzlawick, An Anthology of Human Communication, text and tape

Adopted Jungian concepts of “Creatura”/“Pleroma” (while working intensively with dolphins, etc.) Associate Director for Research, Oceanic Institute, Waimanalo, Hawaii

1965

1965

22 May

Hawaiian Academy of Science, 40th Annual Meeting

1965

13 to 22 June

Wenner-Gren Conference on animal communication

1966

28 February The Cybernetics Revolution to 2 March Symposium, Hawaii

1966

1966

21 April

1967

27 June to 5 July

1967

April

1967

15 to 20 July Dialectics of Liberation Congress, London 28 July

1967

No.

105 1964c “Patient Therapist Dialogue with Interpretation,” in P. Watzlowick, An Anthology of Human Communication, text and tape 136 Written 1964. 1972e “The Career development award, National Institute of Mental Health Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.” Later submitted as a position paper for the Wenner-Gren Conference on Worldviews, 1968 (See 136a [1972] below)

1964

1965

Events

Lecture: Two Worlds Symposium, California State College Wenner-Gren Symposium on Primitive Art and Society, Burg Wartenstein, Austria

106 1965 “Communication in the Higher Vertebrates” (abstract approved by GB) 114 1968a “Redundancy and Coding” 109 1966c “Threads in the Cybernetic Pattern” 110 1966d “Slippery Theories” (comment on E. G. Mishler, and N. E. Waxler, “Family Interaction Processes and Schizophrenia: A Review of Current Theories” 134 1972c “From Versailles to Cybernetics” 135 1972d “Style. Grace and Information in Primitive Art” 111 1967a “Cybernetic Explanation” 115 1968b “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature” 112 1967b “Consciousness versus Nature”

Appendix Year

1967

Date

Events

December

235 No.

Publications

113 1967c Review of C. Geertz, Person, Time and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis 219 1982c “They Threw God Out of the Garden: Letters to Philip Wyllie and Warren McCulloch”

1967

1968

17 to 24 July

Conference inception and chairman: Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation, Burg Wartenstein, Austria (GB: first overt ecological concern)

1968

September

1968

October

1968

2 to 11 August

116 1968c “On Dreams and Animal Behaviour” 117 1968d Review of: D. Morris, Primate Ethology Wenner-Gren Symposium on World 136 1972e “The Logical Categories Views, Austria of Learning and Communication, and the Acquisition of World Views”

1969

Daughter Nora and granddaughter Vanni born 137 1972f “Pathologies of 17 to 21 Second Conference on Culture April and Mental Health in Asia and the Epistemology” Pacific, Hawaii 119 1969b Comment on H. B. April–June Sarles, The Study of Language and Communication Across Species

1969 1969

1969

140 1972i “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation.” See also M. C. Bateson, Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. 1991 [1972]

1969

118 1969a Metalogue: “What Is an Instinct?” 19 to 28 July Wenner-Gren Moral and Aesthetic 226 1991d “The Moral and AesStructure of Human Adaptation thetic Structure of Human Conference, Burg Wartenstein, Adaptation” (invitational Austria paper, 5/11/68)

1969

2 Sept.

1969 1970

9 January

1970

March

1970

July

1970

Sept.

1970

26 to 31 October

1970

American Psychological Association Lecture to Dept. of Psychiatry, Roosevelt Hospital, New York Korzybski Memorial Lecture, New York Testimony before Hawaii State Senate Committee

Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City Symposium (Wenner-Gren), New York

138 1972g “Double Bind, 1969” 145 1973c “Mind/Environment” 120 1970a “Form, Substance and Difference” 139 1972h The Roots of Ecological Crisis 121 1970b “On Empty-Headedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education” 122 1970c “An Open Letter to Anatol Rapoport” 131 1971h “Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City” 123 1970d “The Message of Reinforcement”

236 Year

Appendix Date

Events

1971

February

1971

15 to 19 March

1971 1971

127 1971d “Remarks on the By-products of the Natural History of an Interview Research Project” June

128 1971e “Comment on S. Ruderman, An Open Letter to Gregory Bateson” 129 1971f “A Systems Approach”

September

130 1971g “A Re-Examination of Bateson’s Rule”

1971 1971

Publications

124 1971a “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” Culture and Mental Health in Asia 147 1974b “Distortions under and the Pacific, Conference, Hawaii Culture Contact” 125 1971b Chapter 1: Communication (Natural History of an Interview Research Project) 126 1971c Chapter 5: The Actors and the Setting (Natural History of an Interview Research Project)

1971

1971

No.

Gregory, Lois and Nora, world travel as a family

1971–72

1972

Return to California; Research bid (unsuccessful) to study the training and learning of religious enlightenment

1972–78

Visiting Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz

1972

132 1972a Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

1972

133 1972b Metalogue: “Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?”(Written 1948) 136a 1972e Expanded 1968 version: “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication” (in Steps to Ecology of Mind) 141 1972j “The Science of Mind and Order” 142 1991 [1972] Comments in M. C. Bateson, Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation M. Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years New York: William Morrow

1972

1972 1972

Margaret Mead publishes autobiography

1972 1973

March

1973

27 May 1973

The AUM Conference 165 1975e Letter in CoEvolution Quarterly: “Counsel for a Suicide’s Friend”

Appendix Year

Date

Events

1973

237 No.

Publications

144 1973b “A Conversation with Gregory Bateson” in L. Thayer, ed. Communication Ethical and Moral Issues

1973

November

1974

143 1973a “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox” (interview: Stewart Brand) 1974c “Letter: Gratitude for Death” 149 1974d “Energy Does Not Explain” 150 1974e Review of C. J. Jung, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos 162 1975b “A Conversation with Gregory Bateson” 161 1975a “Ecology of Mind: The Sacred” 151 1974f “Conditioning”

1974

January

1974

Spring

1974

April

1974

Summer

1974

Summer

1974

152 1974g “Adaptation”

1974

153 1974h “Learning Model”

1974

154 1974i “Double-Bind”

1974

1974

22 to 24 November

1974

Winter

1974

Winter

1974

Winter

1974

Winter

1974

4 December

Visit to Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado Talk to Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado

155 1974j Review of Jay Haley, ed., “Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis and Therapy” Conference: After Robert Moses, 157 1974l “Draft: Scattered What?: an exploration of new ways Thoughts for a Conference of governing cities and on ‘Broken Power’” institutions 156 1974k “The Creature and Its Creations” 158 1974m “Reading suggested by Gregory Bateson” 159 1974n Review of: R. Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons 160 1974o Review of: E. A. R. Ennion and N. Tinbergen, Tracks. 164 1975d “Letter: What Energy Isn’t” 146 1974a “Observations of a Cetacean Community”

1974 End of Vietnam War

1975 1975

24 March

1975

4 to 6 April Association for Humanistic Psychology Theory Conference, Tucson 28 May Public dialogue with Carl Rogers, College of Marin, CA.

1975

Lecture to Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado

184 1978c “Intelligence, Experience and Evolution” (Adapted from Naropa Institute talk) 169 1975i. Comments in conference report 222 1989 “Dialogue between Gregory Bateson and Carl Rogers”

238 Year

Appendix Date

Events

1975 1975

Summer

1975

Summer

1975

10 August

1975

Summer

1975

Autumn

1975

October

GB attended conference: Language and Learning, Abbaye de Royaumont (Paris)

1976

8 January

Speaker: annual Governor’s Prayer Breakfast, Sacramento, California Member, Board of Regents, University of California Fritjof Capra influenced by contact with Bateson

1976–79 1976–80

Lecture to Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado Lindisfarne Conference

1976

1976

February

Symposium: Fifty Years of Anthropology (honoring Margaret Mead), Boston

1976

1976

27–30 July

1976

Summer

1976

Summer

1976

17 November 17 to 21 November

1976

Mind/Body Dualism Conference (GB Chairman), California

Talk to Langly Porter Clinic, San Francisco Symposium on Sepik Politics, American Anthropological Association, Washington

No.

Publications

163 1975c “Introduction,” in R. Bandler and J. Grinder, The Structure of Magic 166 1975f “Some Components of Socialisation for Trance” 167 1975g “‘Reality’and Redundancy” 170 1976a Orders of Change 178 1977a “The Thing of It Is” 168 1975h “Caring and Clarity: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Edmund G. Brown, Jr.,” Governor of California 210 1980i Comments in M. Piatelli-Palmarini, ed. Language and Learning, the Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky 171 (With Edmund G. Brown) “Prayer Breakfast,” remarks and Governor’s response

172 1976c Foreword: “A Formal Approach to Explicit, Implicit and Embodied Ideas and to Their Forms of Interaction,” in C. E. Sluzki and D. C. Ransom, eds. Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family 224 1991b “From Anthropology to Epistemology” 173 1976d “A Comment by Gregory Bateson,” in C. E. Sluzki and D. C. Ransom eds., Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family 176 1976g Invitational Paper 174 1976e “For God’s Sake Margaret: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead” 175 1976f “The Oak Beams of New College, Oxford” 179 1977b “Epilogue: The Growth of Paradigms for Psychiatry” 182 1978a “Towards a Theory of Cultural Coherence”

Appendix Year

Date

1976

Winter

Events

1977

1977

3 to 4 March

Address to conference: ‘Beyond the Double Bind’, New York

1977

239 No.

Publications

177 1976h “The Case Against the Case for Mind/Body Dualism” M. Mead, Letters from the Field: 1925–1975. New York: Harper and Row, London: Wildwood House 188 1978g “The Birth of a Matrix, or Double Bind and Epistemology” + conference remarks 180 1977c Afterword in J. Brockman, ed. About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson

1977

8 April

1977

26 June

Keynote address: Third Annual Meetings, Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, San Diego

181 1977d “Play and Paradigm”

225 Letter to Mary Catherine Bateson: Our Own Metaphor: Nine Years After. Bateson refers to the 1968 nconference. Letter printed in A Sacred Unity, 1991 GB resident Esalen Institute

1978–80 1978

February

GB diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Mary Catherine returned from Iran to assist in the completion of Mind and Nature

1978

18 –20 April Lecture by long-distance telephone to a class at the University of Kansas

218 1982b “Difference, Double Description and the Interactive Designation of the Self”

1978

21 April

187 1978f “The Double Bind Theory—Misunderstood?” J. Brockman ed., About Bateson: Essays on Gregory Bateson, London: Wildwood House 185 1978d “Number Is Different from Quantity” 186 1978e “Protect the Trophies, Slay the Children” 183 1978b “A Conversation with Gregory Bateson Conducted by John Wellwood”

1978 1978

Spring

1978

Spring

1978

Spring

GB commenced Angels Fear, extended remission of cancer

1978

189 1978h “Bateson’s Workshop”

1978 1978

Summer

190 1978i “The Pattern Which Connects” (excerpted from draft introduction to Mind and Nature)

1978

Summer

1978

Summer

191 1978j Letter: “Nuclear Addiction: Bateson to Saxon” 192 1978k Letter: “Nuclear Addiction: Bateson to Ellerbroek”

240

Appendix

Year

Date

1978

August

Events

1978 1978

October to December Autumn Margaret Mead died

1978

5 October

1979 1979

15 to 18 February

Conference in honor of Gregory Bateson, Asolimar Conference Center, Pacific Grove, California Address to conference “From Childhood to Old Age: Four Generations Teaching Each Other,” Michigan.

1979

March

1979

Spring

1979

3 to 5 May

1979

12 May

1979

24 June

GB: letter to regents of the University of California re nuclear arms

1979

October

“Seek the Sacred” seminar. Discussion with Henryk Skolimowski and others at Dartington Hall, UK

1979

28 October “Last Lecture”, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

Publications

211 1981a Poem: “The Manuscript” 195 1979a Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity 213 1981c “Paradigmatic conservatism” + report on discussion. 198 1979d “The Magic of Gregory Bateson” (excerpts from address)

197 1979c Letter in P. Stevens, “Gregory Bateson on Play and Work” Keynote address, Governor’s con- 204 1980c Health: “Who’s ference: “Health: Who’s ResponsiResponsibility?” bility?” Berkeley, California 212 1981b “Allegory”

1979 1979

No.

193 1978l “Breaking Out of the Double Bind” 194 1978m “Symptoms, Syndromes and Systems”

5 December Letter to Terry Evans enclosing draft foreword for her forthcoming book.

Appears as an Appendix to Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. See above 1979a 203 1980b “Seek the Sacred”

227 1991e “Last Lecture” (written 29 September 1979) 196 1979b “The Science of Knowing” 220 Foreword in T. Evans, The Prairie Seen Whole, 1986. 199 1979e “Nuclear Armament as Epistemological Error: Letters to the University of California Board of Regents”

1979

1979

Winter

1979

Winter

1980

1980

24 January

1980

15 February GB: letter of resignation to regents of the University of California re nuclear arms

200 1979f “Letter to the regents of the University of California” 201 1979g “Profile: Gregory Bateson” David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 202 1980 Letter to London Review of Books: “Syllogisms in Grass” 208 1980g Two letters to individual regents of the University of California re nuclear arms

Appendix Year

Date

1980

February

1980

14 March

1980

Spring

1980

9 June

Events

GB completed revision of “Paradigmatic Conservatism” for Rigor and Imagination (see 1981) GB presentation to the Jungian Institute of San Francisco

GB: Taped lecture to the Lindisfarne Community Fellows, San Francisco: “Bateson’s Last Tape” (recorded a month before his death—MCB)

1981

1981 1981

1982

1982

1984

1987

1988

1989

No.

Publications

215 1981e “The Eternal Verities” 205 1980d (with P. Ryan) “A Metalogue: Gregory Bateson and Paul Ryan” 207 1980f “Men are Grass: Metaphor and the World of Mental Process”

206 1980e (with R. W. Rieber) “Mind and Body: a Dialogue”

1980 1980

241

4 July

GB died, San Francisco Zen Community C. Wilder-Mott and J. H. Weakland, ed., Rigor and Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson, New York: Praeger 214 1981d “Excerpt from a letter to Bradford P Keeney” 216 1981f Letter, in A. Leeds and V. Dusek, editor’s note: “Sociobiology: A Paradigm’s Unnatural Selection Through Science, Philosophy, and Ideology” R. I. Levy and R. Rappaport, “Obituary: Gregory Bateson, 1904–1980,” American Anthropologist, 84, no.2: 379–94 217 1982a Foreword, in J. B. Wheelwright, St. George and the Dandelion: Forty Years of Practice as a Jungian Analyst. San Francisco: C. J. Jung Institute M. C. Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, New York: Morrow 221 1987 (with M. C. Bateson) Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred GB and MCB: Angels Fear: An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred (British edition) Rieber, R. W. ed., The Individual, Communication, and Society: Essays in Memory of Gregory Bateson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

242 Year

1991

1991

1995

1995

1995

2000

2002

2004

Appendix Date

Events

No.

Publications

223 1991a G. Bateson (R. E. Donaldson, ed.), A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York: Harper Collins M. C. Bateson, Our Own Metaphor. Reissued, with new foreword, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press P. Harries-Jones, A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press M. Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years,” 1972. New edition, New York, and Tokyo: Kodansha. New introduction by Nancy Lutkehaus H. Geertz, Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995 GB, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, reprinted, with new foreword by MCB, Chicago: University of Chicago Press GB, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, reprinted, Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press M. C. Bateson, Our Own Metaphor (see No. 140 above), reprinted, Hampton Press, New Jersey



8

Notes

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1. See Lean, 2000, in the bibliography. Much of the information in the following paragraphs is from Lean’s article. Additional information is from other sources as credited. 2. See: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bg.html 3. http://www.oecd.org/home/ 4. See the Earth Policy Institute website at: http://www.earth-policy.org/ 5. See the World Development Movement website at: http://www.wdm. org.uk/campaign/resource.htm 6. William Shakespeare. Macbeth, Act II, Sc. 3. 7. 1981a. “The manuscript.” The Esalen Catalog 20, no. 1: 12. Reprinted, edited, in Angels Fear (cf. Bateson and Bateson, 1988), 5–6. 8. Stewart Brand, 1974a, 13. CHAPTER 2. BATESON 1. See the website of The Knowledge Center at: http://66.201.42.16/viewcat. php3?catid=50&kbid=kcbd 2. See, for instance: Nuckolls, C. W., 1995; Price., D. H. 1998; Trensch, J., 1998; Wardle, H., 1999a, 1999b, 2001; Tognetti, S., 1999; Brox, O., 2000; Weber, F., 2000; Rappaport, 2001, Hirschhorn, M. 2001; Harlow, S. and R. Cummings, 2002. (Full references in Bibliography.) 3. See, among others: http://www.oikos.org/baten.htm; http://www.mary catherinebateson.com/; http://www.crazytigerinstitute.com/batesonarch. htm (Guide to the Bateson archive, Santa Cruz); http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Gregory_Bateson; http://www.dircon.co.uk/creativity/guhen/bateson. htm; http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/people/bateson.htm; http:// carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/bateson.html; http://www.edge. org/3rd_culture/bateson04/bateson04_index.html; http://www.gwu.edu/ ~asc/people/Bateson/; http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/ gregory_bateson.html; http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/information/ biography/abcde/bateson_gregory.html 4. The 2002 edition of Mind and Nature and the 2004 editions of Angels Fear and Mary Catherine Bateson’s Our Own Metaphor were all reissued by Hampton Press, Cresskill, New Jersey.

243

244

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

5. See Bateson, G. 1958 (2d edition of 1936a). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested By a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958. Epilogue to the 2d. edition, 280ff. 6. See Bateson, G., 1934b. “Fieldwork in Social Psychology in New Guinea,” 153; and 1934d. “Ritual Transvesticism on the Sepik River,” 274–75. 7. Bateson, G., 1934e. Letter to the Editor, The Times, Thursday, December 13, 12. 8. See Bateson, G., 1942g. “Morale and National Character,” 71–91; 1942d. “Some Systematic Approaches to the Study of Culture and Personality,” 76–82; 1942f. Comment on M. Mead, “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values.” Reprinted in Bateson, G., Steps to An Ecology of Mind. 2000 [1972], 159–76; 1942i. Note requesting “Materials on the existing stereotypes and attitudes of the American people toward the cultures and the individual members of countries engaged in the present war,” 670; 1943a. “Cultural and Thematic Analysis of Fictional Films,” 72–78; 1943g. Remarks in Omwake, L., “Psychology—in the War and After—Part 2: Comments on General Course in Psychology,” 20; 1944b. “Psychology—in the War and After—Part 7: Material on Contemporary Peoples,” 308–11; 1944e. “Psychology—in the War and After—Part 8: Use of Film Material in Studying Peoples,” 427–29. 9. Abram, D. 1977. 10. G. Bateson, 1972f. “Pathologies of Epistemology,” Reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2000 [1972], 486–95. 11. See: Gregory Bateson, 1978j. “Nuclear addiction: Bateson to Saxon,” 16; 1979e. “Nuclear Armament as Epistemological Error: Letters to the California Board of Regents,” 34–41; 1979f. “Letter to the Regents of the University of California: Formal and Educational Aspects of the Arms Race,” 22–23; 1980g. “In July, 1979 . . . ,” 6–7; 1980h. An exchange of letters between Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson,” 18–20. 12. Appendix: “Time Is Out of Joint.” In Bateson, G., 1979a. Mind and Nature, 217–33. A paper previously addressed to the Committee on Educational Policy, University of California, August, 1978. 13. Markus. G., 1984. “Review of D. Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist,” 427–28. 14. “To live in grace is to walk in beauty—as a Native American song proclaims.” Quoted in Skolimowski, H., 1993, 22. CHAPTER 3. MIND AND BATESON’S CLAIMS 1. For some fascinating insights into the notion of “dwelling” see Martin Heidegger’s very accessible 1951 lecture Building Dwelling Thinking, translated: Albert Hofstadter, reprinted in D. F. Krell, ed. 1996. Reprint. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge. Original edition, London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1978. 2. Bateson, G., 1980j. Interfaces: Boundaries Which Connect. Audio tape. Tiburon, California: Big Sur Tapes.

Notes to Chapters 3, 4 and 5

245

3. See: Mary Catherine Bateson, ed., Bateson, G. 1980f. Reprinted in Bateson, G. 1991a A Sacred Unity. 235–42. See also Brand, S. 1980. “Bateson’s Last Tape.” New Scientist, 87 no. 1214: 542–43. 4. See also an analysis of the difference between Bateson’s understanding and that of Maturana and Varela in Harries-Jones, P. 1995: 183–86. 5. Jung’s Septem Sermones ad Mortuos is discussed more extensively in chapter 7 of this book—in the section on “Metaphors of Divinity.” 6. See note 2 above. 7. See, particularly, Bateson, G. 1956b, 145–242. 8. See the brief explanation of feedback processes in ch. 2. 9. Humphrey, N. 1979. “New Ideas, Old Ideas” (review of Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity), London Review of Books, December 6, 1979, 6. CHAPTER 4. THE EVOLUTION OF BATESON’S THOUGHT ABOUT AESTHETICS 4. Note that this is the correct date of the lecture, not “August, 1968” as footnoted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 2. Peace News was and remains a valuable publication in the field of conflict resolution. Contact details: Peace News for Nonviolent Revolution, 5, Caledonian Road, London, N1 9DY, U.K. Tel: +44 20 7278 3344. http://www. peacenews.info CHAPTER 5. AESTHETICS, ECOLOGY, AND THE PATH TOWARD GRACE 1. Buber, M. I and Thou. New York: Scribner’s, 1923, 1970, 31–33. 2. Bateson refers to the Book of Job, chapters 37–39, Holy Bible, King James’ Version. 3. Note the relevance of this thought to James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, discussed in chapter 7. 4. The Sol Tax account comes from W. L. Thomas, ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth: Symposium of the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, 953. Quoted in Bateson, G., and Bateson, M. C., Angels Fear, 1988, 72 footnote. 5. William Paley (1743–1805) was an early defender of the Genesis story. His View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) argues, from the evidence of complexity and apparent purpose in nature, for the presence of a divine “designer.” 6. Publisher’s announcement, Mind and Nature. 1st. ed. 1979. 7. Sutherland, S., “Review of G. Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity,” Nature 285 (12 June 1980), 516–17. 8. Toulmin, S., “The Charm of the Scout,” New York Review of Books, 1980, reprinted in C. Wilder-Mott & J. H. Weakland, eds., Rigor and Imagination: Essays from the Legacy of Gregory Bateson. New York: Praeger, 1981, 357–68.

246

Notes to Chapters 5, 6, and 7

9. In fact, Bateson was slightly in error with this quotation. The character in Wordsworth’s poem is Peter Bell, the central character in Peter Bell: A Tale. 10. Bateson, G. Letter to Terry Evans, 5 December 1979. Courtesy of the Bateson Archive, University of California, Santa Cruz. 11. Coleridge, S. T. Poetical Works: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. W. M. Rossetti, ed. London: Moxon, undated, 1–17. 12. The Book of Job, ch. 39, v. 1. Holy Bible, King James’ Version. CHAPTER 6. AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT AND THE GRACE OF RELATEDNESS 1. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London; New York: Routledge. 2. Harries-Jones, P. A Recursive Vision, 1995, p. 50. Peter Harries-Jones refers to an unpublished Bateson article: Complete Articles File (Bateson Archive, University of California, Santa Cruz) 335–A4/1950. CHAPTER 7. BATESON AND THE SACRED 1. Also quoted and discussed in David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist, 1982, 259–60. 2. See the section on Learning II in chapter 3. 3. Jung, C. Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) written and privately printed, 1916. Not included in the Collected Works. Published: London: Stuart and Watkins, 1967, also printed as a supplement to Aniela Jaffe, ed., Memories, Dreams and Reflections. New York: Pantheon (1966 and later editions only). 4. I have used the translation of Septem Sermones ad Mortuos from the German by Stephan A Hoeller in Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House (Quest), 1982. 5. Bousset, W. Basilides. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th. ed. New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910–1911, 3, 478–79. 6. Dr. Satish Kumar. Personal communication, February, 2001. 7. See Harries-Jones, P., A Recursive Vision, 1995, 220. (From Gregory Bateson’s unedited text for Angels Fear, nos. 13–15. Bateson Archive, University of California, Santa Cruz.) 8. Fr. Thomas Berry. Personal communication, November, 1995. 9. Bateson, G. 1982c. “They Threw God out of the Garden: Letters from Gregory Bateson to Philip Wylie and Warren McCulloch.” Rodney E. Donaldson, ed. In CoEvolution Quarterly 36: 62–67. Also published on the Oikos website: http://www.oikos.org/batesleten.htm 10. Spinoza, B. Ethics. First published 1677, many English translations. I have used the Everyman Classics edition, translated by Andrew Boyle, revised by G. H. R. Parkinson. London: Dent, 1989. 11. Spinoza, B. Ethics, part 2, proposition 21, note. 12. Spinoza, B. Ethics, part 4, proposition 42.

Notes to Chapters 7 and 8

247

13. Naess, A. 1991j. Freedom, Self and Activeness According to Spinoza. The Arne Naess Selected Works Project. Springer, 2005. 14. Arne Naess. Personal communication, Schumacher College, May, 1995. Subsequent quotations of Naess in this section (if not otherwise indicated) are taken from course material or his own statements during this course on Deep Ecology. 15. Sangharakshita A, Bhikku. “The Centrality of Man.” In World Buddhism, Vesak, 1967, 31–32. Cited in Macy 1991, 152. 16. Lovelock, J. Personal letter, 23 August 2002. 17. Much of the material in this subsection is based on my notes of a day-long seminar with James Lovelock at Schumacher College, Devon, 27 June 1996. 18. Daisyworld is a mathematical model developed by Lovelock that simulates a hypothetical planet populated by black (heat absorbing) daisies and white (heat reflecting) daisies. It demonstrates that temperature can be controlled within life-sustaining limits by natural selection of these competing species without any requirement for consciousness or purpose. 19. John Holden’s preface to Midgley 2001b, 7. 20. Ibid. 8. 21. The following material is from a day workshop with Diarmuid O’Murchu at Rydal Hall, Ambleside, UK, in October, 2004 and his four-day course at Scargill House in North Yorkshire in 2006. See O’Murchu’s website at http://www.diarmuid13.com/ 22. See Stone, J. A. 1992. The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence: A Naturalist Philosophy of Religion. New York: State University of New York Press. See also Goodenough, U. 2000. The Sacred Depths of Nature. New York: Oxford University Press. 23. Jerome A Stone. 2000. “What Is Religious Naturalism?” The Journal of Liberal Religion 2, no. 1. Online journal of Meadville Lombard Theological School, available at http://meadville.edu/LL_ JournalLR_2_1.htm

CHAPTER 8. WISE ACTION? 1. See: Thomas Berry. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower (Crown), chapter 7: “The University,” 72ff. Also: J. Huckle and S. Sterling, eds. 1996. Education for Sustainability. London: Earthscan. 2. http://www.ecoliteracy.org 3. Barlow, Z. 2004. “Ecoliteracy: Confluence of Streams.” Resurgence 226: 6–7. For information on this excellent journal see: www.resurgence.org 4. http://dixiesd.marin.k12.ca.us/marysilveira/ 5. http://www.bay.org 6. http://www.edibleschoolyard.org 7. see: http://www.ecoliteracy.org 8. http://www.ncrcn.org 9. http://www.enowkincentre.ca

248

Notes to Chapters 8

10. http://www.eco-schools.org.uk/html/process/process_index.html 11. http://www.ecocongregation.org 12. http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/ 13. Secretary: Jo Rogers, Underscar, Brigsteer, Nr. Kendal. LA8 8AN UK. 14. http://www.arocha.org 15. http://fp.christiansaware.f9.co.uk/ 16. http://www.webofcreation.org/ 17. http://www.webofcreation.org/nccecojustice.org/ 18. http://www.pcusa.org/environment/ 19. Hosted by the Web of Creation website, see note 16. 20. http://www.commonground.org.uk/ 21. R. Spowers. 2002. “Excerpts from Rising Tides: A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age” (London & New York: Cannongate) in Green World 37: 18–19. 22. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MatthewFox-(priest) 23. See, particularly, Matthew Fox. 1983, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality. Santa Fe, NM: Bear, 1983; 1991, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth. New York, San Francisco: HarperCollins; 1996, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest. New York, San Francisco: HarperCollins. 24. http://www.matthewfox.org/sys-tmpl/page9/ 25. See Grace Blindell. 2000, What Is Creation-centered Spirituality? London: Association for Creation Spirituality. Available for free download from: http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/resources/E-Books.htm 26. http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/ 27. See http://www.dancesofuniversalpeace.org; http://www.www.dancesof universalpeace.org/na; www.dancesofuniversalpeace.org.uk/



8

Bibliography

The following pages list all the works cited in the text and some further resources that have contributed to the development of my thought. The list is sequenced alphabetically by the author’s surname and then by date of first publication (or composition if appropriate). Where I have cited or referred to reprint editions, the work is placed in sequence of first publication but the publication date of the reprint is used, followed by the date of original publication in square brackets. For example, Bateson, G. 1958 [1936a]. Reprint. I have included only those of Gregory Bateson’s publications that have been cited in the text. For the full list of Bateson’s publications readers are referred to the excellent and detailed bibliography by Rodney E. Donaldson in G. Bateson, 1991, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, to which I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness. I have followed Donaldson’s sequence numbering (1979a, 1979b, etc.) for those of Bateson’s works that are listed below. Abram, D. 1996. “The Mechanical and the Organic: Epistemological Consequences of the Gaia Hypothesis.” In P. Bunyard, ed, Gaia in Action: Science of the Living Earth. Edinburgh: Floris, 234–47. ———. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World. New York: Vintage (Random House). Anton-Luca, A. Gregory Bateson, 1904–1980. Web document: http://www. indiana.edu/~wanthro/bateson.htm Armstrong, J. 2004. “Natural Knowing: Schooling and Sharing the Okanagan Way.” Resurgence 226: 10–11. Ash, M. 1992. The Fabric of the World: Towards a Philosophy of Environment. Hartland, Devon: Green. Ashby, W. R. 1956. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman Hall. Reprinted 1957. Internet download (1999) http://pcp.vub.ac.be/ books/IntroCyb.pdf. Barlow, Z. 2004. “Ecoliteracy: Confluence of Streams. Resurgence 226: 6–7. 249

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Bateson, C. B. 1928. William Bateson FRS: Naturalist, His Essays and Addresses Together with a Short Account of His Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bateson, G., and W. Bateson. 1925. “On Certain Aberrations of the RedLegged Partridges Alectoris Tufa and Saxatilis.” Journal of Genetics 16, no. 1: 101–23. Reprinted in R. C. Punnett, ed., Scientific Papers of William Bateson. 2: 382–404. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928. Reprint. London and New York: Johnson Reprint, 1971. Bateson, G. 1932b. “Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River (Parts 1–2).” Oceania 2, no. 3: 245–91. ———. 1934b. “Field Work in Social Psychology in New Guinea.” In Congres International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques: Compterendu de la premiere session, Londres, 1934. Summary of remarks delivered July 31, 1934, to Section B: Psychology, at the first International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in London. London: Institut Royal d’Anthropologie, 153. ———. 1934c. “The Segmentation of Society.” In Congress International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques: Compte-rendu de la premiere Session, Londres, 1934. Summary of remarks delivered July 31, 1934, to Section F: Sociology, at the first International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in London. London: Institut Royal d’Anthropologie, 187. ———. 1934d. “Ritual Transvesticism on the Sepik River, New Guinea.” In Congres International des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques: Compterendu de la premiere Session, Londres, 1934. Summary of remarks delivered August 1, 1934, to Section F: Sociology, at the first International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in London. London: Institut Royal d’Anthropologie, 274–75. ———. 1934e. “Psychology and War: Tendencies of Early Man.” (Letter to the editor) The Times, Thursday, 13 December 1934: 12. ———. 1958 [1936a]. Reprint (2d ed. with new epilogue). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Original edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936. Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1937. Excerpted as “The Naven Ceremony in New Guinea.” In M. Mead and N. Calas, eds. 1953. Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology. New York: Random House, 186–202. (Page references are to the 1958 reprint edition.) ———. 1941e. “The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis and Culture.” Psychological Review 48, no. 4: 350–55. Reprinted in T. M. Newcomb, E. L. Hartley, et al., eds. 1947. Readings in Social Psychology. New York: Holt, 267–69. Bateson, G., and M. Mead. 1941f. “Principles of Morale Building.” Journal of Educational Sociology 15, no. 4: 206–20. ———. 1942a. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Special Publications of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Reprint, 1962. Excerpted, translated by A.

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8

Index

a new ethic, adoption of, 200–206 Abram, David: “The Mechanical and the Organic,” 194, 294 aesthetic engagement, 134–158, 160, 181, 183, 206–207 Ames, Adalbert: perception experiments, 154 Angels Fear. See Bateson, Gregory animal communication, 26, 96–97, 101 anthropology, 14–15, 84, 85–89 A Sacred Unity. See Bateson, Gregory atheism, 13, 18 Balinese Character. See Bateson, Gregory Bateson, Gregory Angels Fear, 9–10, 12, 27, 29–30, 59, 66, 130–135, 169–170, 174, 190 “Arts of the South Seas,” 81–84 A Sacred Unity, xi, 77, 249 in Bali, 19, 52, 79–81, 84–85, 110–112 “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State,” 84–85 “Balinese Character,” 79–81 Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 25, 90–94 “Consciousness versus Nature,” “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 99–100, 168–169 cybernetics (systems theory), 21–23, 79, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92–93, 99–100, 141, 172–173, 188–190 on death, 203 “Ecology of Mind,” 123 education, 14–15

273

environmental concern, 26, 98, 99, 101–135, 112–115, 116–118, 119–121 at Esalen Institute, 38 Evans, T.: Images of Ground and Sky, introductory essay to, 129–130 evolution, 12, 35, 60–61, 98, 102, 104, 122, 125, 127 family expectations of, 14–15 “Form, Substance, and Difference,” 120–121 grace, 8, 12, 102, 104, 107, 131, 137–158, 159 in Hawaii, 179 Iatmul (Sepik river, New Guinea) 15, 22, 78, 82–83, 244n5, 244n6 influences on, 12, 17, 18 “Last Lecture,” 128–129 learning theory, 26–27, 51–59, 65 Zero Learning, 53–54 Learning I, 54–56 Learning II, 56–57 Learning III, 57–58, 165 Learning IV, 59 Lindisfarne Fellowship, 39, 63 metalogues, 94–96 Mind and Nature,12, 27, 59, 60, 65–67, 76, 122, 124–128, 130 “Mind/Environment,” 119–120 mind: theory of, 23, 26, 29–30, 31–68, 70, 88–89, 120–121, 122, 130, 156, 161 monism, 39, 77, 161–207 Naven, 15, 78–79 necessary secrecy, 131, 134

274

Index

Bateson, Gregory (continued) in New Guinea, 15, 19–20, 22, 86, 244n5, 244n6 nuclear weapons and technology, 4, 20–22, 82, 244n11, 244n12 in Open Forum on exhibition: “Illusionism and Tromp L’Oeil,” 89–90 pattern which connects, 125, 143–144 Perceval’s Narrative, 25 as psychologist, 23–25, 92–94, 96–98 religion, 5–7, 9, 29–30, 68, 76, 85, 89, 92, 95–97, 113, 115, 118, 121, 123, 130, 132–134, 148, 151, 154–155, 158, 192, 198–200, 209–224 sacred, the, 5, 7, 8, 10, 29–30, 68, 70, 75, 118, 123, 124, 127–128, 131, 155, 159–208 St. John’s College, Cambridge, 14, 16 Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 12, 27–28, 52 “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” 101–113, 160 “The Creature and Its Creations,” 121–123 “The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” 113–114 “The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia,” 98 “The Message, ‘This is Play,’” 97–98 “The Moral and Aesthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” 116–118 in Western Round Table on Modern Art, 85–89 in World War II, 19–22, 24–25, 244n8 Bateson, Mary Catherine, and Angels Fear, 5, 10, 95, 130, 134 birth, 19 Our Own Metaphor, 5, 12, 27, 32, 118, 206, 224 and Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 6, 95 Bateson, W. H., 18 Bateson, William, 13–16, 74

Berleant, Arnold, 8, 144–157, 181 Art and Engagement, 145–148 “The Aesthetics of Art and Nature,” 145, 149–152, 155 Berry, Thomas, 4, 139, 170–171, 247n1 Beston, Henry: The Outermost House, 73, 207 Blake, William, 19, 74–76 Brand, Stewart, 10, 169–170, 243n8 Bunyard, Peter Gaia in Action, 194 Gaian co-operation, integration, community, 194 Butler, Samuel, 16–18, 105 Capra, Fritjof, 11, 39–40, 210, 213 children: new educational initiatives with, 210–211, 247–248nn2–10 Christianity, 171–172, 198–200, 248nn11–19 CIA, 3, 243n2 (chap. 1) Communication. See Bateson, Gregory Common Ground, 212, 248n20 Congres International des Sciences et Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques, 23 conscious purpose, 1, 5, 26–27, 30–31, 60, 88, 90, 99–100, 102, 112–115, 134, 137 Creation Spirituality movement, 188, 212–217, 248nn22–26 University of Creation Spirituality, 213 Dances of Universal Peace, 214, 248n27 Darwin, Charles, 16 Deep Ecology. See Naess, Arne dwelling, 244n1 Earth Policy Institute, 243n4 epistemology and ontology, 43–45 Emmet, Dorothy: The Passage of Nature, 33 ethic of service, 204–206 feedback negative, 15, 22 positive, 15, 22

Index Fox, Matthew. See Creation Spirituality movement; GreenSpirit Gaia Theory. See Lovelock, James Geertz, Hildred, 80, 85, 110 GreenSpirit, 188, 212–217, 248n26 Harries-Jones, Peter, 11, 94, 157 Heidegger, M., 37, 244n1 Heims, S. P., 22 Institute for Intercultural Studies (IIS), 19 Josiah Macy Foundation, the Macy Conferences, 22, 25, 82, 97 Jung, Carl: Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, 166–167 Kant, Immanuel, 149 Kenny, Anthony, 177 Kyoto Agreement, 3 Laszlo, Ervin, 4, 5 Lean, Geoffrey, 2–3, 243n1 Leopold, Aldo, 206 Lipset, David, 13–14, 22, 25 Logical Types, theory of, 48–51, 91–92, 103–104, 127 love, 159–160 Lovelock, James and the Gaia Theory, 190–194 Earth as a single living system, 190–194, 247n18 Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth, 192 Gaia, the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, 191 Gaian thought and the Virgin Mary, 192 The Ages of Gaia, 192 The Revenge of Gaia, 193 and ‘stewardship,’ 193 Macy, Joanna, 188–190 Buddhism, 189 dependent coarising, 188 Mutual Causality and General Systems Theory, 188–189 World as Lover, World as Self, 189–190 Margulis, Lynn, 191

275

Maturana, Varela: and autopoiesis, 245n4 (chap.3) Mead, Margaret, 15, 19, 52, 79–82, 84, 224 meaning, 108 Meetings for Earth, 218–224 Mendel, Gregor, 12–14 metaphor: metaphorical truth, 63–65, 94, 97, 108 Midgley, Mary, 194–198 Gaia, 194 emerging feelings of environmental concern and possible action, 197–198 endemic individualism, separation, selfishness, 194–196 Gaian Theory: of comparable importance to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, 194–195 Mind and Nature. See Bateson, Gregory Naess, Arne and Deep Ecology, 180–188 Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 187 “The Place of Joy in a World of Facts,” 183–184 Naven. See Bateson, Gregory O’Murchu, Diarmuid: Evolutionary Faith, 198–199, 247n21 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 4, 243n3 Peace News, 245n2 (chap.4) Perceval’s Narrative. See Bateson, Gregory Paley, William, 245n5 (chap.5) Pert, Candace, 34 Price, David, H., 20 Primavesi, Anne, 199–200 Gaia’s Gift, 199–200 Sacred Gaia, 199 primary process, 104–107 Rawles, Kate: “Ethical Implications of the Gaia Thesis,” 194, 267

276

Index

religious faith communities: ecological action within, 211–212 reverential monism, 161–207, 247nn22–23 Roberts, Jane, 201 Russell, Bertrand, 48–49 Schismogenesis complementary, 15 symmetrical, 15, 20, 22 Scruton, Roger, 177, 179–180 Spinoza, Benedict., 174–184 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. See Bateson, Gregory Stone, Jerome, A.: “What is Religious Naturalism?,” 203–204

Sparkes, A. W., 44 Sullivan, G., 85 Thayer, Leigh: Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues, 202 Thompson, W. I., 39 Tickell, Sir Crispin, 4 unconscious mind, 36 wise action, a program of, 209–224 World Development Movement, 4, 243n5 Worldwatch Institute, 2, 4 State of the World Report, 2 Wright, M., 4