Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. His writings include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).

In Palo Alto, California, Bateson and his colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia.

Bateson's interest in systems theory forms a thread running through his work. He was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in Cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences. He was interested in the relationship of these fields to epistemology. His association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence.

Early life and education

Bateson was born in Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904. He was the third and youngest son of (Caroline) Beatrice Durham and the distinguished geneticist William Bateson. He was named Gregory after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who founded the modern science of genetics.

The younger Bateson attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, obtained a Bachelor of Arts in biology at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued at Cambridge from 1927 to 1929.

According to Lipset (1982), Bateson's life was greatly affected by the death of his two brothers. John Bateson (1898–1918), the eldest of the three, was killed in World War I. Martin Bateson (1900–1922), the second brother, was then expected to follow in his father's footsteps as a scientist, but came into conflict with his father over his ambition to become a poet and playwright. The resulting stress, combined with a disappointment in love, resulted in Martin's public suicide by gunshot under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus on 22 April 1922, which was John's birthday. After this event, which transformed a private family tragedy into a public scandal, the parents' ambitious expectations fell on Gregory.

Career

In 1928, Bateson lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney.

From 1931 to 1937, he was a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He spent the years before World War II in the South Pacific in New Guinea and Bali doing anthropology.

In the 1940s, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences.

Although initially reluctant to join the intelligence services, Bateson served in the OSS during World War II along with dozens of other anthropologists. He was stationed in the same offices as Julia Child (then Julia McWilliams), Paul Cushing Child, and others. He spent much of the war designing 'black propaganda' radio broadcasts. He was deployed on covert operations in Burma and Thailand, and worked in China, India, and Ceylon as well. Bateson used his theory of schismogenesis to help foster discord among enemy fighters. He was upset by his wartime experience and disagreed with his wife over whether science should be applied to social planning or used only to foster understanding rather than action.

In 1956, he became a naturalised citizen of the United States.

Bateson was one of the original members of the core group of the Macy conferences in cybernetics (1941–1960), and the later set on Group Processes (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences.

In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco, which was renamed the Saybrook University, and in 1972 joined the faculty of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 1976, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

California Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the Regents of the University of California, a position he held until his death, although he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979 in opposition to the university's work on nuclear weapons.

Bateson spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developed in different fields of science.

Personal life

From 1936 until 1950, he was married to American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. He applied his knowledge to the war effort before moving to the United States. Bateson and Mead had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939–2021), who also became an anthropologist. Bateson separated from Mead in 1947, and they were divorced in 1950. In 1951, he married Elizabeth "Betty" Sumner, the daughter of the Episcopalian Bishop of Oregon, Walter Taylor Sumner. They had a son, John Sumner Bateson (1951–2015), as well as twins who died shortly after birth in 1953. Bateson and Sumner were divorced in 1957, after which Bateson was married a third time, to therapist and social worker Lois Cammack (born 1928), in 1961. They had one daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1968).

Bateson was a lifelong atheist, as his family had been for several generations. He was a member of William Irwin Thompson's esoteric Lindisfarne Association.

Bateson died on July 4, 1980, at age 76, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center.

The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Bateson's relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea.

Philosophy

Where others might see a set of inexplicable details, Bateson perceived simple relationships. In "From Versailles to Cybernetics," Bateson argues that the history of the twentieth century can be perceived as the history of a malfunctioning relationship. In his view, the Treaty of Versailles exemplifies a whole pattern of human relationships based on betrayal and hate. He therefore claims that the Treaty of Versailles and the development of cybernetics—which for him represented the possibility of improved relationships—are the only two anthropologically important events of the twentieth century.

Work

New Guinea

Bateson's beginning years as an anthropologist were spent floundering, lost without a specific objective in mind. He began in 1927 with a trip to New Guinea, spurred by his mentor A. C. Haddon. Bateson suggested the influence of a circular system of causation, and proposed that women watched:

<blockquote>for the spectacular performances of the men, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the presence of an audience is a very important factor in shaping the men's behavior. In fact, it is probable that the men are more exhibitionistic because the women admire their performances. Conversely, there can be no doubt that the spectacular behavior is a stimulus which summons the audience together, promoting in the women the appropriate … behavior.

Until Bateson published Naven, most anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply described social reality. Bateson's book argued that this approach was naive, since an anthropologist's account of a culture was always and fundamentally shaped by whatever theory the anthropologist employed to define and analyse the data. To think otherwise, stated Bateson, was to be guilty of what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." There was no singular or self-evident way to understand the Iatmul naven rite. Instead, Bateson analysed the rite from three unique points of view: sociological, ethological, and eidological. The book, then, was not a presentation of anthropological analysis but an epistemological account that explored the nature of anthropological analysis itself.

The sociological point of view sought to identify how the ritual helped bring about social integration. In the 1930s, most anthropologists understood marriage rules to regularly ensure that social groups renewed their alliances. But Iatmul, argued Bateson, had contradictory marriage rules. Marriage, in other words, could not guarantee that a marriage between two clans would at some definite point in the future recur. Instead, Bateson continued, the naven rite filled this function by regularly ensuring exchanges of food, valuables, and sentiment between mothers' brothers and their sisters' children, or between separate lineages. Naven, from this angle, held together the different social groups of each village into a unified whole.

The ethological point of view interpreted the ritual in terms of the conventional emotions associated with normative male and female behaviour, which Bateson called ethos. In Iatmul culture, observed by Bateson, men and women lived different emotional lives. For example, women were rather submissive and took delight in the achievements of others; men were fiercely competitive and flamboyant. During the ritual, however, men celebrated the achievements of their nieces and nephews while women were given a ritual license to act raucously. In effect, naven allowed men and women to experience momentarily the emotional lives of each other, thereby to achieve a level of psychological integration.

The third and final point of view, the eidological, was the least successful. Here Bateson endeavoured to correlate the organisational structure of the naven ceremony with the habitual patterns of Iatmul thought. Much later, Bateson would harness the very same idea in the development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia.

In the Epilogue to the book, Bateson was clear: "The writing of this book has been an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about anthropological material." That is to say, his overall point was not to describe Iatmul culture of the naven ceremony but to explore how different modes of analysis, using different premises and analytic frameworks, could lead to different explanations of the same sociocultural phenomenon. Not only did Bateson's approach re-shape fundamentally the anthropological approach to culture, but the naven rite itself has remained a locus classicus in the discipline. In fact, the meaning of the ritual continues to inspire anthropological analysis.

Bali

thumb|thumbtime=34|[[Trance and Dance in Bali, a documentary by Bateson and Margaret Mead]]

From March 1936 until February 1938, Bateson traveled to Bali with his new wife Margaret Mead to study the people of the village of Bajoeng Gede.

He discovered that the people of Bajoeng Gede raised their children very unlike children raised in Western societies. Instead of attention being paid to a child who was displaying a climax of emotion (love or anger), Balinese mothers would ignore them. Bateson notes, "The child responds to [a mother's] advances with either affection or temper, but the response falls into a vacuum. In Western cultures, such sequences lead to small climaxes of love or anger, but not so in Bali. At the moment when a child throws its arms around the mother's neck or bursts into tears, the mother's attention wanders".

thumb|200px|right|Bateson and [[Margaret Mead contrasted first and second-order cybernetics with this diagram in an interview in 1973.]]

Bateson's encounter with Mead on the Sepik river (Chapter 16) and their life together in Bali (Chapter 17) are described in Mead's autobiography Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (Angus and Robertson. London. 1973). Their daughter Catherine's birth in New York on 8 December 1939 is recounted in Chapter 18.

Double bind theory of schizophrenia

In 1956 in Palo Alto, Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland

Full double bind requires several conditions to be met:

The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication (for example, love is expressed by words, and hate or detachment by nonverbal behaviour; or a child is encouraged to speak freely, but criticised or silenced whenever he or she actually does so).
No metacommunication is possible – for example, asking which of the two messages is valid or describing the communication as making no sense.
The victim cannot leave the communication field.
Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished (for example, by withdrawal of love).

The strange behaviour and speech of schizophrenics were explained by Bateson et al. as an expression of this paradoxical situation, and were seen in fact as an adaptive response, which should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.

The double bind was originally presented (probably mainly under the influence of Bateson's psychiatric co-workers) as an explanation of part of the etiology of schizophrenia. Currently, it is considered to be more important as an example of Bateson's approach to the complexities of communication, which is what he understood it to be.

The role of somatic change in evolution

Bateson writes about how the actual physical changes in the body occur within evolutionary processes. He describes this through the introduction of the concept of "economics of flexibility". He saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and ecosystems. Within each system is found competition and dependency. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control balance by changing multiple variables. Bateson believed that these self-correcting systems were conservative by controlling exponential slippage. He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis (along with induction and deduction). Bateson, however, thought of "abductive process" very differently. For Bateson, abductive process is the way one context becomes a description of another: "Every abduction may be seen as a double or multiple description of some object or event or sequence." Bateson often used abductive process as a way to compare patterns of relationship and their symmetry or asymmetry (as in, for example, comparative anatomy), especially in complex organic (or mental) systems.

Conscious Purpose. In a series of papers and talks during the late 1960s, Bateson formulated an argument that there was a deep-seated mismatch between the complex, cybernetic, self-corrective loop processes of nature and the linear, causal, selective problem-solving that characterizes much human activity. Bateson referred to this as "conscious purpose" – the tendency to "follow the shortest logical or causal path" to addressing a problem, or in reaching a desired goal.
Creatura and Pleroma. Borrowed from Carl Jung who applied these gnostic terms in his "Seven Sermons To the Dead". Like the Hindu term maya, the basic idea captured in this distinction is that meaning and organisation are projected onto the world. Pleroma refers to the non-living world that is undifferentiated by subjectivity; Creatura to the living world, subject to perceptual difference, distinction, and information.
Information – Bateson defined information as "a difference which makes a difference". This summary, however, is taken out of context and lacks Bateson's reference to the requirement of energy to make a difference, and his definition of a difference as a matter that can be abstract also. For Bateson, information in fact mediated Alfred Korzybski's map–territory relation, and thereby resolved, according to Bateson, the mind-body problem.
Plateau - a continuing state of intensity without climactic sequences.
Schismogenesis – the emergence of divisions within social groups.

Continuing extensions of his work

In 1984, his daughter Mary Catherine Bateson published a joint biography of her parents (Bateson and Margaret Mead).

His other daughter the filmmaker Nora Bateson released An Ecology of Mind, a documentary that premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival. This film was selected as the audience favourite with the Morton Marcus Documentary Feature Award at the 2011 Santa Cruz Film Festival, and honoured with the 2011 John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology by the Media Ecology Association.

The Bateson Idea Group (BIG) initiated a web presence in October 2010. The group collaborated with the American Society for Cybernetics for a joint meeting in July 2012 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California.

The modern view of artificial intelligence based on social machines has deep links to Bateson's ecological perspectives of intelligence.

Bateson's work has been a major influence on the emerging interdisciplinary field of social choreography.

Bibliography

;Books

;Books about or related to Gregory Bateson

Possamai, Tiziano (2009). Dove il pensiero esita. Gregory Bateson e il doppio vincolo. Edizioni Ombre Corte.
Possamai, Tiziano (2022). Where Thought Hesitates. Gregory Bateson and the Double Bind. Mimesis International.

;Published works

Authors "Chapter 1: Communication" and "Chapter 5: The Actors and the Setting" in
With Ray Birdwhistell, H.W. Brosin & N.A. McQuown, authors the chapter "Remarks on the by-products of The Natural History of an Interview research project" in

;Documentary film

, 2 reels.
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, 2 reels. The film was an inductee of the 1999 National Film Registry list.
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References

External links

Bateson Idea Group (official)
International Bateson Institute
Institute for Intercultural Studies