Love and Trust

This chapter interrogates Gregory Bateson's message to the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in particular, and his ecology of mind in general, on the question of defeatism and despair. If human partiality and purposive action introduce errors into the larger system, and if at scale, these errors are systemically destructive, how are human beings to respond to the social and environmental problems they face? Transcripts from Bateson's final appearance on a congress panel dramatize these questions. Actions and answers offered by Stokely Carmichael, R. D. Laing, and Emmett Grogan, the congress's most discussed participants, are examined. These figures took the position that solutions can be found in the ancient call for individual heroism. Bateson, in contrast, called for an indirect, non-purposeful class of actions that generate love of systemic integrity. These actions include the practices of art, ritual, non-utilitarian science, and "the best of religion." These practices may provide pathways to systemic correction. Because they come from a position of dependence, they call for trust. The debate between Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr is revisited concerning the moral significance of human agency in order to underscore Bateson's argument for the immanence of mind in nature.

Schismogenesis

This chapter describes how a surge of protest over the Vietnam War brought back the classic debate over the nature of revolution. Should change be directed at the interior, at perception and culture, or should it be directed at the exterior, at existing institutions? This debate was framed by 1966's most celebrated play, Marat/Sade. England’s leading culturalist, R. D. Laing, founder of Kingsley Hall in Swinging London, planned an event for the following year: the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. He invited Bateson, an old mentor, to speak. Bateson’s letter of acceptance included a scientific critique of radicalism. In the States, the experience of San Francisco Digger founder Emmett Grogan, demonstrated culturalist and structuralist strains within an emerging counterculture. In March of 1967, as the Summer of Love approached, Grogan and the Diggers disrupted a Michigan executive meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society. The event demonstrated fragmentation within a movement suddenly too large and amorphous for its purported leadership. Before leaving for London, Bateson reads Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal in light of his recent friendship with Konrad Lorenz.

The Back End of the Probe

In this chapter, Allen Ginsberg's reaction to Gregory Bateson and the greenhouse effect is revisited and amplified as an instance of apocalyptic encounter, a central experience of the ecological consciousness and the prospect of ecocatastrophe. That amplification includes the creation of his much-anthologized poem, "Wales Visitation." The trajectory of Bateson's career as a scientist, writer, and public intellectual after 1967 is sketched. This includes a well-documented conference he facilitated in 1968 and the publication of Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972. The year following the events described in this book--1968--is widely recognized as a turning point toward increasing violence and backlash, and the rapid collapse of the liberal consensus that had seen the United States through the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. The epilogue invites the reader to regard that turning point in terms of the emergent ecological consciousness the book has placed in context. The epilogue, too, leaves Bateson at a turning point. In contrast to the other principle figures at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, whose public influence peaked in 1967, Bateson's time as a public intellectual had just begun.

Gregory Bateson and the Spirit of 1967

The introduction claims that ecological consciousness and its sensitivity to environmental crisis--called an apocalyptic encounter--is the foremost intellectual experience of the post-World War II period. Gregory Bateson's double-bind concept distilled ecological thought's challenge to modern perception and human instrumentality. Bateson's extension of the double-bind concept from the psychiatric clinic to human-environmental relations is proposed as a vehicle to better grasp the change ecological consciousness calls for. This argument is placed in two contexts: the broad context of modern disenchantment, and the narrower 1960s context of the debate over the nature of revolution. The first involves postmodern transformations broadly described as the cognitive revolution, complexity studies, and the science of interrelatedness. Bateson drew on science's traditions in natural history to build on the communication theory, information theory, and systems theory pioneered at the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. The second context involves Bateson's appearance at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation in London in 1967, where he introduced a counterculture audience to the greenhouse effect and the prospect of climate change. A historical examination of ecological consciousness is defended as a way to approach the emotional force field surrounding the topic of environmental deterioration and global warming.

The Curious Twist

This chapter is set at the 1967 Congress for the Dialectics of Liberation, held over ten days in July in London. Drawing on transcripts and film of the event, the chapter presents a radical movement roiled by budding radicalisms: identity politics, second wave feminism, and an increasing commitment to militancy–all demonstrated in Stokely Carmichael’s divisive Congress appearances, both alone and on a panel with R. D. Laing, Emmett Grogan, and Allen Ginsberg. Amid this agitation, Gregory Bateson offered his synthesis of systems theory, cybernetics, and the ecology of mind. His speech is carefully explicated and annotated with Bateson's recent readings of T. H. White, Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal, and Irish myth. Bateson aligned with radical opinion in its critique of modernization, but it took that critique beyond the enduring problems of human aggression, political oppression, and psychic alienation, and into a more fundamental analysis of the instrumentalism at the heart of the modern worldview. Challenged by audience members over systems thinking as quietist and reactionary, Bateson defended his approach by explaining the greenhouse effect and the prospect of global warming/climate change. This was perhaps the first exposure of such concepts to a lay audience.