Animal Stories

This chapter narrates Bateson's cultivation of Konrad Lorenz as a friend and colleague in the spring of 1966. The Austrian Lorenz was a famed expert on animal behavior and one of the fathers of ethology. Lorenz and Bateson shared a foundation in natural history and a dislike of behaviorism. These matters featured a debate among scientists over the usefulness of the term "instinct" and were specialized versions of a broader nature-nurture debate. Lorenz sent Bateson his newly-published masterpiece of popular ethology, On Aggression. Lorenz's argument in the book is summarized with examples from the behavior of cichlids, geese, and rats. The chapter touches on suspicions of Lorenz's early work as sympathetic to Nazi ideology and, in turn, suspicions of holist approaches to biology in general as politically reactionary. Bateson's engagement with On Aggression was contemporaneous with a reading of T. H. White's The Sword and the Stone, and the chapter explores the resonance between the two books. Both reflect a postwar rehabilitation of the animal as a symbol of brutality and amorality. They spoke to Cold War anxieties concerning whether aggression in humans was instinctive.

Signals from the Goal

This chapter places Bateson's work with dolphins within a broader 1960s "dolphin mystique"--a cultural site where anxieties over modern science’s physical models went unresolved. Most associated with scientist John C. Lilly, the dolphin mystique had futurist, utilitarian, and romantic components, also found in a similar "outer space mystique." The chapter shows how Lilly's and Bateson's research goals differed through a further substantiation of the sources of Bateson's thought: the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (his theory of play, the concepts of positive feedback, negative feedback, servomechanisms, and the naturalization of teleology); and his father William Bateson and his career amid the ongoing conflict between Darwinist and Lamarckian theories of evolution. In Hawaii, Bateson expressed his isolation from potential peers and research frustrations in letters to old friend and Darwin granddaughter/scholar Nora Barlow. This isolation, however, allowed Bateson to articulate a justification for scientific inquiry that was neither utilitarian nor a value-neutral pursuit of truth, but an effort to establish an accurate depiction of the relationship between nature and the human self, which he called the riddle of the Sphinx.

Difficulties at the Metalevel

The narrative setting for chapter 2 is the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, in the 1950s, where Bateson lead the double-bind research group investigating paradox and disorder in family relations. The chapter traces the early development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and its source in Russellian logical paradox. It discusses the double bind as a resonant and empirically rich example of similar constructs that distilled the modern predicament as an impossible dilemma. Other examples include Joseph Heller's catch-22, Reinhold Niebuhr's reformulation of original sin and his Serenity Prayer; Albert Camus's concept of the absurd and his novel The Stranger; and constructions in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five. Double-bind equivalents as reactions to the atom bomb are described in works such as Joanna Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and the film Rebel Without a Cause. Meanwhile, social critics such as Lewis Mumford used psychiatric and systems theory language and paradoxical constructions to talk about the failure of "pragmatic liberalism," the arms race, and policies of nuclear deterrence.

The Way to Waimanalo

The narrative setting for this chapter is the new Oceanic Institute and its sister facility, Sea Life Park, in Waimanalo, Hawaii, in the early 1960s, where Bateson is studying the way dolphins communicate with each other. Among his colleagues – pioneers in dolphin training for public performance and ocean scientists with military contracts – Bateson was beloved but misunderstood. At issue was Bateson’s deep scorn for modern utilitarian science and B.F. Skinner behaviorism. The source of this scorn can be found in Bateson’s background: his youth in British naturalism and as the son of the founder of genetics William Bateson; his 1936 marriage to Margaret Mead, their work in Papau New Guinea and Bali, and their part, along with Ruth Benedict, in Boasian cultural relativism and the culture and personality school of anthropology; Bateson's anthropological morphology, learning theory, and concept of schismogenesis; and his black ops work with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. In the aftermath of the war, the US government opened its doors to the social sciences to aid in its Cold War policies. Bateson’s marriage to Margaret Mead crumbled amidst his refusal to accompany her through these doors.

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.

The Good Son

This chapter describes how Bateson’s efforts to connect with peers such as Konrad Lorenz and to make his thought assessable to a lay audience resulted in a breakthrough: the recognition of Mind as the central concept in the life sciences. This breakthrough also represents Bateson taking on his father William Bateson's scientific legacy. The chapter tells of the collapse of William Bateson's health and career in the aftermath of his son Martin's suicide. The chapter explicates the essay Bateson sent to Lorenz in the summer of 1966, "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution." By proposing a "simulated Lamarckian inheritance," the essay served as a challenge to the modern synthesis as a fully adequate explanation of evolutionary change. Bateson believed the essay to rescue some of his father's disfavored ideas by using systems theory concepts to disturb conventional Darwinism. These events coincided in 1966 with a chance reading of an old Irish myth, "The Conversion of Tuan MacCairill." The story echoed ideas about descent in both On Aggression and The Sword in the Stone, and the coincidence marked an affirmation for Bateson of his thought.

Faith and Fight

This chapter explores double-bind theory and the concept of power, including the sexist tendency among proponents to blame the mother. Similarly, radicals, liberals, and secular existentialists challenged the “tragic turn” as bourgeois accommodation to status quo power relations. The holism of systemic approaches foregrounded the old problem of whether nature supplies an ethic. Bateson and the double-bind research team struggled to account for power in the schizophrenic family in a way that blamed neither victim nor victimizer. Bateson's recognition of progressive stalemate in the schizophrenic family drew on the systems theory concept of runaway. Runaway in arms race policies, in turn, reflected political and theoretical conflicts between Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann, the leading mathematicians of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. In two essays, Bateson critiques the centrality of power in von Neumann's game theory. Meanwhile, Bateson's conflicts with the more pragmatic research team members, such as Jay Haley, lead him to cast about for a new direction. His eulogy for Frieda Fromm-Reichmann echoed a similar debate over political quietism between Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Niebuhr.

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.