Bateson Metalogue Impinges on Life

So “Father” convinced “Daughter” that things get in a muddle because there are many more ways of being muddled than of being tidy.

Flip a coin ten times, and there are 1,024 combinations of heads and tails, but in only two of them are there no heads following heads or tails following tails.

I dispatched buses. Let’s say a company drives twenty thousand miles a day, and has a breakdown or accident every hundred thousand miles. It would be preposterous to expect the problems to come every fifth day (“Hey, brother, watch your back, today’s the twenty-fifth”), so the dispatcher goes through periods of multiple crisis and periods of calm. Things don’t happen in threes, but they do bunch up.

Bateson's "Metalogues"

Steps to an Ecology of Mind's first chapter is a series of "Metalogues," ostensible conversations between "Father," the author, and "Daughter," Mary Catherine Bateson. The earliest Metalogue is from 1948, when "Daughter" would have been ten, and ending in 1969.

The conversations cover several of Bateson's interests:

The reason why things inevitably get muddled,

Non-verbal communication,

Games, play, seriousness,

Measuring knowledge,

Why things have outlines,

Metaphor/sacrament/performance/pretend,

and Instinct, explanatory principles, hypotheses.

Bateson wrote that the conversations "should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem, but the structure of the conversation as a whole is relevant to the subject."

Late in his life, Bateson's nine-year old daughter, Nora, asked him if she would understand Steps. He said that she might be able to read the Metalogues. The last two must have been tough for her. "Daughter's" voice matures over the years, even though the conversations are compositions. She asks tougher questions, and gets more complex or ambiguous answers. All of the Metalogues are full of good things to ponder.

Several more Metalogues appear in Angels Fear, Gregory's posthumously published collaboration with Mary Catherine, most composed by a middle-aged "Daughter."

From "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?"

D: Daddy, you didn't finish. Why do my things get the way I say isn't tidy?

F: But I have finished -- it's just because there are more ways which you call "untidy" than there are which you call "tidy."

D: But that isn't a reason why --

F: But yes it is. And it is the real, and only, and very important reason.

Bateson: Creatura and Pleroma

Where Basteson (1904-1980) wound up was dividing the world into pleroma and creatura, ideas he got from Jung. You see pleroma in the photograph of the badlands. Beautiful forms but it’s all uplift and erosion, physics and chemistry. Creatura is life: people, redwood forests, Congress, “mind.” Mind is made of interacting parts or circuits, requires collateral energy, is triggered by difference, and requires circular or more complex interaction. He divided existence this way to avoid the mind-matter Cartesian split that he felt had corrupted enlightenment epistemology. Cogito ergo sum, but I am thinking: something material is doing something mental. Mind isn’t separate, and is fair game for investigation.

For Bateson this was “religious” in so many words, but not mechanical or superstitious. He took a while to get there, though, and there’s a lot of it that leaves me thinking, “Huh?” or “Why does that follow?” Lipset’s biography helps, but I still fall off here and there. I’m reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind studying the building blocks slowly and painstakingly, hoping I’ll be able to make the tough connections.

More Bateson

I wrote a note to an old acidhead buddy to the effect that Bateson either makes me go "wish I'd said that," "wow, I never thought of that," or "huh?" I wrote a very telegraphic five hundred or a thousand words, and only got him out of his teens. I'm less than fluent with things like the relation between logical types/contextual paradox and double-bind theory. To say nothing of the relation between all that and phylogenetic homology. Still going "huh?". So now I've begun "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," the anthology of major Bateson academic papers, and the one among his three popular books I haven't read. Hoping for sort of reverse reductionism, or something like that.

Gregory Bateson

Brushing up on my Gregory Bateson for a profile in Duluth's Zenith City Weekly. Reading David Lipset's Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist.

 It's nice to have a guide. It's also interesting looking forward to explaining Gregory Bateson in under a thousand words. The great systems thinker, he's all of one piece; every idea depends on all the rest.

Gregory Bateson: Atheist Prophet Of The Sacred

The following, starting with the story of the oak beams, is a collection of Gregory Bateson quotes. Bateson was a fourth or fifth generation atheist, fascinated by the sacred.

By default, I guess I'm an atheist, but I imagine there's a high correlation between atheism and Asperger's Syndrome, and I'm fairly empathetic. I wonder what is sacred, and what do we owe to it? Is there anything more important? It must be timeless, and unchanging. Esthetics and ethics must square with it, and those are definitely situational. Bateson seemed to understand.

The teachings of traditional religions become mere metaphors, from an informed 21st century perspective. An expanding universe, evolution, and a periodic table of the elements, filled in like a crossword puzzle, are the beginnings of a hard-won global understanding of existence. Archaeological and anthropological reconstruction of scripture's anecdote, show us the feet of clay, or even emptiness where we had imagined footsteps. We analyze scripture itself for vocabulary and diction to identify and date its authors. How far did Jesus have to ascend before he got to heaven?

Here is a story that Gregory Bateson told.

New College Oxford is of rather late foundation, hence the name, It was probably founded around the late 16th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be eighteen inches square, twenty feet long.

Some five to ten yars ago (circa 1960), so I am told, some busy entomologists went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife, and poked at the beams, and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays.

One of the junior fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be non College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the College itself for some years, and asked about the oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well, sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the college was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became bettly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for four hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the Colege hall.”

A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.

***

I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits together the entire biosphere or creation.

***

Love is contrary to conscious common sense, because love involves the total systemic mind.

***

We never see in consciousness that the mind is like an ecosystem -- a self-corrective network of circuits. We see only the arcs of these circuits. And the instinctive vulgarity of scientists consists precisely in mistaking those arcs for the larger truth, i. e., thinking that because what is seen by consciousness has one character, the total mind must have that character.

***

Magic is what the vulgar and purposive consciousness snipped out of religion.

***

The point is that even before modern technology, something had to be done about the innate split between consciousness and the rest of mind, because the unaided consciousness would always wreck human relations.

***

Religion is what they did.

***


Because the unaided consciousness must always combine the wisdom of the dove with the harmlessness of the serpent.

***

Here is “The Garden of Eden” -- the myth in biblical form (as is so oftent he case) upside down. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, an apple high on the tree. They had to place one box on top of another to reach it. They then ate it -- the sweet reward of a successful short-sighted scheme, consciously planned. This made them drunk with partial arrogance.

The arrogance was partial in the sense that what they were arrogant about was that miniscule part of themselves which achieved the consicous plan (no arrogance is total)”

In this arrogance, they threw out all the rest of themselves -- thus breaking up the total systemic thing they called “mind.”

I. e., they threw god out of the garden.

***

After that, the ecosystem of the garden got out of kilter -- because God is the inner and outer systemic character of everything -- mind and garden. So they said, “It’s a vengeful god.”

***

Cain was, appropriately enough, an inventor. He invented agriculture. God (Cain’s total systemic mind, or the systemic human ecosystem in which Cain lived) refused the cabbages which Cain sacrificed. God then told Cain that Abel loved him (Cain). “His desire shall be unto thee, and thou shalt rule over him.” (c. f. the curse on Eve in the previous chapter -- “Thy desire shall be unto thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”) This was the last straw because love is precisely that to which the pragmatic headstrong purposive consciousness must be allergic.

***

Eve began to resent the process of coition and reproduction, which always somehow reminded her of that larger life which Adam had sacrificed in order to buy her a washing machine -- which she had asked for.

***

The lineal arguments of human purpose necessarily conflict with the cybernetic arguments of physiology, sociology, and ecology, and that therefore, following his purposes, man almost ineveitably messes up his own physiology, social sytem, and ecology.

***

I suggest that one of the things man has done through the ages to correct for his shortsighted purposiveness is to imagine personified entities with various sorts of supernatural powers, 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 non-cybernetic computation in part of that system.

***

We shall have to ask, for example, what sort of corrective is introduced into an otherwise purposive system by the Mass.

Tragedy Of The Commons II, Freedom In A Commons

Today's illustration is a portrait of Gregory Bateson and a quote from one of his letters. It's meant as a comment on the seventh paragraph below, the one that ends "freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

This is the first section in Tragedy after the introduction. It’s headed “Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons.”

The first paragraph in this section is complicated. Hardin says the rebuttal to “the invisible hand” argument is “to be found in a scenario first sketched in a little-known pamphlet (from) 1833 by a mathematical amateur named William Forster Lloyd.”

Hardin calls it the “tragedy of the commons,” and says he is using the word “tragedy” as Whitehead (A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Mentor, NY, 1948) used it and quotes him: “ ‘The essence of tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless workings of things.’” Hardin: “This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama.” It’s futile to escape from the consequences of our actions. Fire burns, bees sting, you fall if you jump off a bridge.

We’re supposed to picture a “pasture open to all,” where each herdsman keeps as many cattle as possible. Various factors -- conflict, poaching, disease -- keep human and bovine numbers below carrying capacity. When these factors abate, “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.” In other words when conflict, poaching, and disease no longer limit human and animal numbers, the numbers crash the commons.

Each herdsman rationally tried to maximize his gain. If the herdsman adds one animal he gets all the benefit from that animal’s meat or sale. The land is overgrazed by one animal, but that cost is distributed among all the herdsmen, so he comes out ahead.

A rational herdsman can’t help but add more animals, but everybody who uses the pasture comes to the same conclusion, so they add a lot more animals. Each herdsman is locked into a system that “compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited.” Hardin says, “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Hardin believes we learned that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” thousand of years ago, but “natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial.” The individual benefits even as his society suffers. Education can correct the tendency to do the wrong thing, but the lesson needs to be refreshed over and over.

Hardin refers to an incident in which a city government facing increased demand for parking at Christmas time mistakenly re-instituted the commons by placing bags over its parking meters. He come back to parking meters later in the essay, calling them a way of legislating temperance.

The logic of the commons has been understood for a long time, “perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property.” He says that understanding needs to be generalized. He mentions western cattlemen’s pressuring the Bureau of Land Management to increase head limits on federal land, and maritime nations’ over-fishing international waters.

He gives the limited National Park System and increased visitor loads two paragraphs, one describing the wear that visitors cause, and another offering suggestions.

* Sell the Parks;

* Entry based on wealth (make fees exhorbitant);

* Entry based on merit (only approved scholars, scientists, and artists admitted);

* Entry based on lottery;

* Entry based on position in a queue.

He believes these are all objectionable solutions, but that we must choose or acquiesce in the destruction of the commons that we call our national Parks.

Got To Find A Way...

Thirty years ago San Francisco writer Anne Herbert wrote that God kicked us out of the Garden because we started keeping score.

About the same time, biological polymath Gregory Bateson said what happened was that Adam and Eve were so full of themselves, because they’d managed to pick the forbidden apple, that they kicked God out of the garden.

Maybe one is a different way of saying the other. Adam and Eve made nature’s purposes subordinate to their own. Scorekeeping amounts to subordinating nature (play) to our vanity. I most definitely keep score, but I’m trying to break the habit, invite God back into the garden. Permaculture is my method, learning to provide for myself in a way that mimics -- and integrates with -- the rest of the biological world.

This is a picture of a young grape vine (given to me, variety forgotten) trellised on the Beacon apple tree. The physical closeness of the two plants isn’t part of a deep ecological relationship. The grape gets a place to hang out, but I can't think of what the apple gets from the grape. In fact, the grape doesn’t naturally grip the slick apple bark, and needs me to tie it up. A defense against vines, maybe, evolved by apple trees? Permaculturalists say that growing food in “guilds,” combinations of plants that do things for each other, yields less per plant but more per acre than monocrops.

Maybe a grape trellised on an apple is getting close to the critique that permaculture is an attempt to mimic climax ecosystems, systems at a stage when they don’t yield a lot of food. I don’t know. You can’t learn less.