gregory bateson’s spirited culture of refusal

by peter harries-jones

 

One of my teaching tasks in university has been to present a course on social advocacy, discussing the differences between advocacy in countries politically adverse to human rights, and in countries where human rights advocacy was normal procedure but where the effect of all social dissent was filtered through the media. Here, I could always draw upon examples of mainstream media publishing calls by activists for public resistance, doing their duty in reporting the news, but doing so in contexts suggesting that the activists and their movement were on the fringe of society. As new social movements grew in appeal and in numbers, so did media attempts to marginalize their message.

It was therefore with some surprise that I picked up Harpers Magazine recently, a journal that has been impeccably mainstream in North American media for a very long time, and read an extensive article entitled, “The Spirit of Disobedience: an invitation to resistance.” [White, 2006: 39, 40]

It concluded:

“Although the ‘60s counterculture has been much maligned and discredited, it attempted to provide what we still desperately need: a spirited culture of refusal, a counter life to the reigning corporate culture of death. We do not need to return to that counterculture but we do need to take up its challenge again. [We need to forcefully remind ourselves and others that] If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to recreate us in their image.” (White, 2006: 40).

In one sense, a challenge to the ‘corporate culture of death’ could be considered mainstream dissent. After all, it was a theme of the late Pope, John Paul. Yet this particular article was no religious tract and adopted an unusual intellectual position. It suggested that North America is a culture in which death has taken refuge in legalities; in particular, all the legalities of property rights “condemns nature itself to violation even as we support the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the use of private property.” The author proposed a ‘counter-enlightenment’ in the western world, the development of a third option in our intellectual traditions, one that is hostile to the orthodoxies of institutional Christianity yet, at the same time, remains suspicious of the claims of Reason -especially the sort of economic rationalism that defines modern day capitalism.

Unusually he suggested that this counter-enlightenment follow in the footsteps of the English radical poet and artist William Blake. From Blake’s point of view both religion and Reason (Newton’s Ratio) were deeply antihuman and destructive and Blake believed that humanity needed to develop its sense of imagination. In this article, a developed sense of human imagination is at the root of the author’s “third option”.

The article caught my attention because for the last twenty years I have been pondering a profound supporter of Blake’s ideas, namely Gregory Bateson. Bateson also proposed an approach to modern day science reminiscent of Blake’s ‘third option’. Bateson found himself a hero of those who supported the spirited culture of refusal in the 1960s. He achieved his greatest prominence as an intellectual in the heady days of mid-1960s California, and his readers looked upon his writing as a source of sufficient intellectual weight on a range of topics –communication, mind, nature and culture– to challenge the orthodoxies of the times. The major difference between him and many other followers of the Blakean tradition was that Bateson knew only too well that Blake’s line of thinking could lead to its own excesses. Despite personal friendship with well-known people within the counter-culture, he had little time either for New Age spiritualism or the intellectual pretensions of social utopianism among the ‘drop out’ generation. As for the drug scene he was perhaps more open to young people’s experimentation than many of his colleagues, but objected to drug use as a solution to political or social issues. He believed that the effects of drugs on human imagination were ephemeral. He remained, however, a rigorous explorer of human imagination, of the wider awareness that imagination brings, and of the necessity for incorporating a creative aesthetic into decadent utilitarianism so pervasive in modern day natural and social sciences.

Bateson was already a distinguished academic in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and engaged in a social activist opposition to the development and use of atomic weapons. He had sure knowledge that atomic weaponry had changed the position of science in relation to human aspirations. He recognized that science, once the repository of human hopes, had produced the ultimate monster. Human annihilation was now a possibility through the use of a relatively cheap technology. The use of science for annihilation did not stop with the atomic bomb. Physics, chemistry and biology were all directing their efforts towards even cheaper technologies of mass destruction, and the governments of the time strongly encouraged production of technology in support of mass destruction. “Weapons of mass destruction” is by no means a newly coined term. Bateson recognized in the 1940s that utilitarian science, once oriented towards continual production of ‘new tricks,’ increasingly endangered human existence.

From the mid-1960s, he turned towards ecology as did several other scientists and threw in his intellectual lot with the newly minted environmental movement. Bateson saw his task as elaborating upon the presence of a ‘whole’ in ecology, a notion that was already in the public imagination, courtesy of the astronauts who had begun to take photographs of the earth on their respective missions to the moon. What Bateson added to this visual perception was that the “whole” would inevitably react to a reckless transform of its parts in a very quick order of time. Varied parts of local ecosystem connectivity would engage in a new set of dynamics in relation to its self-organization. This is a way of saying that integrated systems of life would become degraded on a planetary scale through runaway effects unless there was a radical re-consideration of invasive aspects of human activity on planetary ecology. Bateson’s guesstimate was that this would occur in thirty years, that is, in the 1990s –a very accurate prognostication since global warming, which he also anticipated, became a matter of public concern at that time.

He believed that the problem confronting society was to undertake an unprecedented leap of human imagination by imagining the characteristics of an ecological whole in the absence of exact scientific knowledge about holism. A corollary was to begin to understand how changing ecological dynamics were affected by human activity. This was a whole new field of enquiry. It could not evolve from human understanding of industrial science. In fact, science itself had to discard much of its presuppositions derived from the mechanics of industrial order and engage in entirely new methodologies. Cognitively, science had to come to terms with principles of cybernetics, of non-linear systems in general, and to devise ways and means of rigorous study of indeterminacy in non-linear events. Meanwhile people, the public, had to understand ecological wholes and their patterns of interconnection, not only the ‘external’ dimensions of change in these patterns and how these would affect them in future time, but also the feedback links to their own patterns of behaviour, and how, at a second order level, how their own understanding of how their own activity would affect this patterning. This was a very difficult message to convey, for mainstream science and its intellectual counterparts in the humanities had always maintained that environmental events on a large scale were completely independent of human activity.

Bateson used the term “epistemology” to characterize this exercise of human imagination about how the relationship of people to their environment entered into the dynamics of environmental change. Yet it was not until the convention on global climate change in 1997 (the Kyoto Accord), seventeen years after his death, that this epistemology became acceptable. Until then Bateson remained a marginalized figure and his understanding of the conditions under which human adaptation occurs, i.e. a co-evolutionary process at a second-order level was not considered to be a premise of either science nor “reason.”
Bateson also makes the case that there is an information or communicative order among all living things and that without this communicative order coordinating energy components, gene flow and nutrient cycling, the cycle of life could never occur.

Fortunately, his assertion about the presence of a communicative order has led to understanding in recent years that there is an unexplored “semiosphere” (Hoffmeyer, 1996). The semiosphere may best be described as a realm of ecological interpretation of significant events by living organisms themselves that science has largely ignored or refused to consider. Nevertheless, mainstream natural science still considers this sort of thinking as an exercise in ‘mysticism’ and continues to observe activity in nature through two main perspectives. The first perspective is that nature is robotic in its response to available bioenergy; the second is that reproductive activity in nature flows in a determinist manner from a blueprint –DNA. The latter was the whole rationale behind the Human Genome Project. Since Darwin –Darwin himself was ambivalent on this issue– mainstream science rebuts all thought that nature has intelligence, intelligence that flows from the activities of inherent sensing organs (1). It is still heresy in modern science to propose that natural activity undertakes ‘subjective selection’ or communicates through activities which we would call “meaningful” in the human world. In mainstream science the cognitive differences between humanity on the one hand and the rest of the living world on the other is taken to be fundamental. Any acknowledgement that there is interpretation among living organisms, supposedly confuses the relation between scientific objectivity and subjectivity, and therefore, cannot be accepted. I have been told by reputable botanists who write about communicative intelligence in plants that the mere suggestion that plants “select” activities results in editors of major scientific journals requiring them to withdraw such implications from their research findings if they wish them to be published.

As the influence of the counter-culture of the 1960s subsided, so did the influence of Bateson’s own writing. My own personal commitment to Bateson’s writing is in one sense an attempt to induce further reflection upon his work. In another sense, I support the spirit of resistance embodied in the counter-culture of which he was an unwilling spokesperson. I am no erstwhile ‘hippy’ nor do I frame my imaginations in Californian terms, even though I was a California resident for a brief time in my youth. I went to UCLA for a year and played soccer for the university but my fantasy of California disappeared in the smog of the mid-1950s. Since I am a decade older than the ‘hippy’ generation my own fights for civil rights had little North American content. They occurred in the late 1950s and early 60s in southern Africa. My main claim to fame in this youthful period was helping prevent a civil war in Zambia at the fragile time of its independence. My engagement in all this was purely fortuitous, somewhat in keeping with the hero of the comic novel Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. No one was more surprised than I was to see these events subsequently recognized in historical accounts of that period.

At the same time, I am a passionate believer that a change of ecological perspective has to alter the corporate culture of death -and the way in which the science supporting corporate culture mistreats nature. Fortunately, the last six months or so has produced a major change of perspective. The western industrial nations are beginning to be concerned about their own future and it would seem that since the corporate culture of death (2) can no longer be denied, it is, therefore, no longer marginal. Previously, the critics of science in the humanities, the post-modernists of the 1980s, were never interested in ecology. The post-modernists of the 1980s were so determined to prove that there were no historical meta-narratives to account for the human condition, that they failed to examine the most dangerous meta-narrative of all: the belief that nature remains a never ending resource to be transformed for human purposes in as many ways as the combination of capitalism and technology can be efficiently put into practice.

Bateson was one of the proponents of a cybernetic epistemology, but it was another proponent of cybernetic epistemology, James Lovelock, who became the most celebrated in this field. He has suggested that nature is more responsive than we imagine and because of its non-linear circularities (recursions) can indeed undertake “revenge” (Lovelock, 2006). In brief, he argues, we face a runaway climate of “unrestrained heat”, a condition that cannot be controlled and one which has been brought about by gross physical changes in ecosystems in many areas. In previous writing Lovelock laid out how our living planet creates physical conditions which, within flexible boundaries of biotic response, are conducive to the recursive maintenance of physical conditions supporting life. For this reason, Lovelock called our planet by the name of Gaia, a Greek goddess, and discussed Gaia as being a single superorganism. Like others I believe that while his identification of the capacity of global biota to create conditions for its own continued existence is correct, Lovelock’s designation of Gaia as superorganism is mistaken. Though I owe much to Lovelock for my understanding of recursion, my understanding of nature as intelligent and the part that intelligence plays in recursive activity is drawn from Bateson rather than Lovelock. Following Bateson, I believe that not only do we require a regenerative ecology in a physical sense but we also need a regenerative ecology of ideas to support such a regenerative ecology. Recognition of the intelligence of nature, and nature as a field of meaning in which human beings are participants, are key propositions for a regenerative ecology of ideas. To repeat: humanity is not free to draw sustenance from nature in any way our intellect imagines. As Bateson pointed out: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself” (Bateson, 1973: 494). There are clearly wrong turns that can be made in the human imagination. Rebuttal of an ecology of bad ideas requires a new set of premises. Nature is alive, it senses; its complex interlinkage of living organisms, and of the biotic with the a-biotic, always ensures that natural activity is recursive (3).

Fortunately there is a Bateson legacy. Biosemiotics, has arisen to provide a counter to the prevailing conceptions of inertness and reductionism in physically oriented sciences. Biosemiotics proposes that it is the sign and not the organic molecule that is the basic unit of life, a position which runs against a total belief in the materialist order of the living universe which pervades the natural sciences. Like Bateson, those engaged in the construction of Biosemiotics argue that a communicative, sign-oriented, study of life will fundamentally enlarge self-understanding of ourselves as human beings in relation to nature, and correct the prevailing narrow vision. The semiosphere (see above) is today easily traced in animal interaction, in primate interaction and in other non-human interaction such as whales and dolphins, in bees and insects. Bateson’s own writing has prompted some of these studies but it would be inaccurate to suggest that all those in Biosemiotics follow Bateson’s lead. Nevertheless, in the last two or three years there has been a number of studies of plant-plant interactions implicating the presence of communication. Among novel questions arising are, is it possible to consider that plants, like animals, have a neurological system? Do they respond to context, as Bateson suggested? As suggested above his intellectual stimulus is also significant is in problematic areas such the Human Genome Project’s portrayal of genetic determinism.

Bateson was a choreographer of ideas. He recognized that whatever the merit of his case for reform of science, it would have to be supported by art, poetry, parables and stories if it were to appeal to human imagination. I have often wondered, especially since meeting with Framemakers, how a choreography of Bateson’s ideas, drawn from his own life, could itself be presented as a sort of parable to be staged or danced. For example as a young anthropologist in Bali, Bateson investigated how the people on Bali danced their ideas. After his Bali research, he maintained an interest in “proprioception” or the way in which bodily movement forms and alters sensibility, and ideas about sensibility. In his Bali study he argues that the highly segmented movements of Bali dance corresponded to forms of segmentation in Bali social organization. This is in keeping with looking at proprioception as coordinated with social interaction, that is to say there is a proprioceptive process by which bodily action becomes embodied or translated from “other” (i.e. the social rules of communicative interaction) to “self.” Bali is a very complex culture whose description and analysis has defied a number of anthropological investigations over the years. Incorporated within the cultural setting of Bali is a form of Hinduism that has its origin in Tantric Buddhism, so effects of religious belief on life is central to its culture.

The people of Bali, as Bateson and others have pointed out, have obsessive concerns with ‘balance’ in their culture. Members of that culture feel an overwhelming need to surround themselves with happiness and harmony. Yet their compelling concerns to be good to others does not relieve them of a pervasive anxiety they have that others may do evil to you; and in a culture which believes both in ‘balance’ and in the actual presence of demons and demonic power, these anxieties can give rise to a sense of threat to their personal lives by the fear that others will engage demons to harm them.

The Bali scenarios can be compared with an opposite theme in the western world, that of imbalance. The setting here is registered in a scientific vision which promises affluence and improvement of the human condition but whose vision of this progress with respect to environment is very narrow indeed. In respect of proprioception, the coordination of environmental possibility with human bodily awareness of its surround is disjoint; “other” is separate from “self.”

The scenario illustrating this would be an incident which the newspapers called “The death of Lake Erie.” This occurred in1969 when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. The river, which runs through Cleveland, Ohio, into Lake Erie, had caught on fire eight or nine times in the previous century. But in 1969 the fire on the Cuyahoga River occurred at approximately the same time as uncontrolled pollution from sewage and agricultural phosphates created a situation in which fish no longer had oxygen (eutrophication), and the mayfly population of the lake was also decimated.

Bateson’s take on “the death of Lake Erie” was as startling as it was abrupt. Instead of highlighting the physical interactions of oil pollution, dead timber and sparks from trains that lead to a seeming combustion of the river, or resort to mythological metaphors for these events, Bateson speaks of an eco-mental system being driven insane: You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products 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 (Bateson, 1973: 484).

If residents around the lake did not grasp the implication of ignoring the larger ecological system, elsewhere the response to the “insanity” was more dramatic. The “death of Lake Erie” became a rallying cry for the first Earth Day of April 1970, and on many subsequent Earth Days, the story of Lake Erie catching fire has been retold, each time becoming its own parable of how, in the environmental sense, “everything is connected to everything else.”

The insanity derived from imbalance between human affluence and human effluence has continued to affect Lake Erie. Recent surveys have uncovered a reduction in human male sperm counts around the great lakes of as much as 50 per cent. This is attributed to the presence of estrogen which shows up in water either through sewage waste or through birth control pills flushed down toilets or sinks. Humans who drink the water are not immune. Once in the waste water fed through to the rivers and the lake, estrogen clearly affects sperm quality. The most bizarre encounter with how “everything is connected to everything else” concern male fish, white perch. The male perch have developed female organs. Studies conducted by a Canadian scientist in 2002 show that white perch caught for research had male and female sex organs, and a second study showed that male snapping turtles had traces of estrogen. There are other results flowing from feminization of wildlife, sometimes benign, some which have lead to pathogenic cancers. The high content of estrogen is not only a result of human waste; it also results from absorption of plastics in the waters of Lake Erie. Recent research indicates that plastics absorbed into water mimic estrogen in their effects on humans and fish (Colborn, Dumanoski and Myers 1996).

Bateson related unhealthy ecological conditions to an imbalance between mind and body. Overall the singular beauty of water in Lake Erie has turned into ugliness many times more dangerous than the demons of Bali. It is the saddest aspect of a dance begun by bad ideas, the bad ideas of Reason. As many other writers have pointed out since, the western world cannot indefinitely avoid recognizing that healthy ecological conditions create so many of our human capabilities necessary for human agency. “Being ecological” includes a dimension necessarily tied to being in a healthy relationship with the natural world, [Bendik-Keymer, 2006: 38]. Currently the residents of Cleveland, Ohio, like the rest of the population of the United States, are concerned about severe obesity among themselves and their children –an imbalance that is shortening their life despite increasing affluence. This is an existential dilemma they can no longer avoid.

NOTES
1) Biology and other natural sciences rest their analysis on impersonal mechanisms, and the most celebrated impersonal mechanism cited to constrain or enable nature, is natural selection. Though Charles Darwin, the progenitor of this idea, meant the term “natural selection” to be a metaphor, whose context he imagined to be was well understood before he introduced it, natural selection has been interpreted subsequently as a deterministic force in nature.
2) One example of the corporate culture of death will have to suffice, the Commission for Environmental Co-operation (CEC). This organization was set up as a sidebar to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the early 1990s to meet fears that a trade bloc between the United States, Canada and Mexico would gut environmental rules in order to let Mexico, in particular, produce goods within a price range which would compete with developing countries. The CEC’s executive director admits that none of the governments concerned wanted it and it was simply “a price to pay” for getting NAFTA accepted. Thus, the CEC, by its own admission, has never done any work on climate change, even though the NAFTA bloc is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. On the other hand, it has done work on the risks posed to Mexico by the importation of genetically modified corn. Keeping “white maize” free from genetic modification is absolutely crucial to the population of the southern provinces of Mexico because white corn is their subsistence crop; furthermore organic white corn by-products are their major source of internal and export revenue. Against all advice from the world’s leading agricultural scientists who recommended a prudential approach to the issue, the CEC accepted the U.S. position that this advice was “fundamentally flawed and unscientific” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto, July 27, 2006 A7). The U.S. is the chief exporter of industrial yellow corn products, genetically modified, to Mexico and relentlessly pursues exportation of yellow corn products into Mexico. Meanwhile, introducing genetically modified corn globally is another step towards industrial monoculture, drastically reducing the flexibilities of seed variety and dramatically increasing chances of famine through crop failure.
3) For a fuller discussion of recursion see my book on Bateson.

REFERENCES
Bateson, Gregory. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bendik-Keymer, Jeremy. 2006. The Ecological Life: discovering citizenship and a sense of humanity. Lanham, New York, Toronto and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Colborn, Theo, Dianne Dumanoski and J.P. Myers. 1996. Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival – A Scientific Detective Story. New York and London: Penguin Books
Harries-Jones, Peter. 1995. A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. 1996. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Lovelock, James. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia- Why the Earth is Fighting Back and how we can still save Humanity. London and New York: Penguin Books. 2006
White, Curtis “The Spirit of Disobedience: an invitation to resistance” Harpers Magazine, April 2006, Vol 312. No. 1871. pp. 31-40.
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published 3 April 08