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Treading Where Angels Fear: Gregory Bateson and GreenSpirituality. For information on GreenSpirit / Association for Creation Spirituality see: Gregory Bateson more or less insisted, though he had been dead for thirteen years, on getting into my life, my thoughts, my heart. A five week course with living systems theorist Fritjof Capra at Schumacher College in 1993 saw the start of this process. Capra talked of meeting with Bateson, of the deep influence of Batsonian ideas on his own development. Polish philosopher Henryk Skolimowski, visiting the course for a day or two, talked of meeting with Bateson at Dartington Hall in 1979 when Skolimowski was Philosopher-in-Residence there: “Never let anyone tell you” he said to me “that Gregory Bateson was not a deeply religious man”. Returning home to Lancaster University and my belated (I was 60 at the time) MA course in environmental philosophy, I found Bateson turning up in the course material, in conversations with friends, in other books I read and then, finally, found a copy of his scarce book “Angels Fear - an Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred” in a bookshop in Kendal. Bateson entered my psyche. My ideas about the spiritual, the sacred, the divine underwent a transformation. Bateson became the foundation of my MA Dissertation which grew to embrace Capra, Skolimowski and Theodore Roszak. Since then I have been learning more. Five years ago I started a Ph.D. programme on systems philosophy which, as my research progressed, has narrowed (I use the term in a relative sense - he has 228 published works) to become a study of (guess who?) Bateson and the development of his ideas about the aesthetic, the beautiful, in both human art and in the more-than-human world, being the key to human re-learning of our total inter-connection within the mind-like systems which are the living world - and are ‘the sacred’. I have come to see unique wisdom in this man who traversed about six scholarly disciplines in his career, to see great reverence and humility in this life-long “fourth generation atheist”. I have come to love and respect him. So - who was Gregory Bateson? Born, 1904, in Cambridge, England, son of William Bateson, the famous biologist who invented the discipline of ‘Genetics’, coined its name, became the first Professor of Genetics in the world and named his youngest son ‘Gregory’ after Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose ‘atomic theory’ of heredity (his ‘atoms’ are now ‘genes’) had been a key influence on William Bateson’s work. The young Bateson read zoology but stepped out from under his father’s shadow by taking up anthropology, studied tribal peoples and their processes, met and later married Margaret Mead in New Guinea (Naven: A Survey of… The Culture of a New Guinea Tribe), became a U.S. resident at the commencement of World War 2, worked in intelligence and propaganda (was sickened by it), was one of the founding fathers of the new discipline of cybernetics (the study of circular or more complex systems of control), moved into psychology (Communication: The Social Matrix of Society with Jurgen Ruesch), developing the still famous double-bind theory of schizophrenia, became a key figure in the development of family therapy and then moved into animal communication and learning studies with octopuses and dolphins. He became aware (mid 60’s) of the growing ecological problems and set up some major conferences, developed his central theory of ‘mind’ as existent in all the living systems of the world, taught at Harvard, Stanford and UC Santa Cruz, married twice more (three children in all), was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown as a (very critical) Regent of the University of California, became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons, produced Steps to an Ecology of Mind and came eventually to see the totality of the ‘mental’ systems of the material, living Earth as “the sacred”. He spent his last year or so at the Esalen Institute (“coming round to the view that it is important not only to propagate ideas but to act on them”- to quote one of his Santa Cruz students) and working successfully against time to complete Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity but leaving Angels Fear unfinished when he died in 1980. His daughter Mary Catherine completed the manuscript of Angels Fear “as the collaboration he had intended”. A further collection of unpublished work was edited by Rodney Donaldson, another past student, and published in 1991 as A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind. The earlier books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature have recently been reprinted and there are plans to re-issue the other books. Bateson’s hope was that a proper understanding of the unity of all the systems that are the living world (including humans) might allow us to regain what he came to call “the grace” that the animals still have - the grace of relating directly to the world without language and without conscious purpose - the grace and humility that artists, poets and musicians may still have access to. He came, towards the end of his life, to name the beautiful, the aesthetic, as “the hall-mark of the sacred”. The importance of the aesthetic is that Bateson sees involvement in aesthetic process, whether as creative artist, or ‘appreciator’ of art (and ‘art’ means poetry, music, drama, dance and ‘natural history’ as well as painting and sculpture) as enabling the recovery of our lost sense of oneness with the living world. It can enable, he says, our re-integration with the rest of life on the planet. He offers his understanding of ‘mind’ as a tool for learning about this oneness with all the systems of Earth. So what is Batesonian ‘Mind’? Bateson claims that mind exists everywhere in the living world. This is difficult to understand quickly because we are conditioned to think of minds as existing only in humans, and only in connection with a physical brain. Ever since the ideas of Descartes took hold in the 17th Century we have thought that ‘mind’ was a non-material ‘substance’ which somehow communicated with the thing-like bodies of people, and that nothing else in the living world has a mind. So Bateson’s claim runs counter to all our conditioning about human mentality and consciousness. His claim is that wherever there is a system of sufficient complexity in the living world, there is ‘mind’ or mental process. The ‘mind’ is the relating between the material components of the system: in a wide sense, the transfer and processing of information. We should not, says Bateson, be surprised to find mind at every scale. Human mind is a special (but not unique or superior) case. The world is a single intermeshing hierarchy of processes which are ‘mental’ in kind: “comparable to thought”. Note that Bateson’s ‘mental processes’ do not require consciousness. For him, consciousness is only a small part of mental activity, even in humans. Only a small part of our knowing ever reaches the ‘screen of consciousness’, the bulk is unconscious knowledge shared by all the organisms in the living world. Consequently, perception does not require consciousness either. Perception, for Bateson, includes many types of awareness: all the many ways in which organisms or systems can register and respond to ‘news’ or informational stimulus reporting change or difference. For him, the processes which produce healing in organs, growth in organisms, development in societies or balance in large ecosystems are all “minds”. Bateson asks us to understand that our mental going on is the same sort of process as the systemic activities in a cell (opting perhaps for division or death), a healing organ (rebuilding its symmetry), a forest ecosystem (moving towards a new balance of species), a herd (defending or killing a weak member), a human society (learning the humility of interconnectedness) or the whole Gaian process as it maintains the conditions for life on this planet. So mind or intelligence is found throughout the living world. Evolution, for instance, he sees as an immense process of learning and memory. Bateson believed that our most pathological feature is “purposive consciousness”, our tendency to go for exactly what we want by the shortest path. We want more carrots per acre but there is a problem with carrot-fly so we spray the fields with DDT, which kills off most of the birds. Next year there are few insect eating birds so the problem is worse, the insects become resistant to the insecticide, we spray more insecticide and eventually there is human illness - and so on. It is our greed which is rendering us unfit to live in the Earth community. We rely only on our consciousness which is a small part of our minds. We have a far wider greater-than-conscious mentality which holds all the wisdom we have gained during evolution, and during the whole of our experience. Engagement with the beautiful in ‘nature’ and in art re-enables that wider, wiser mental process. When we spend time in a wood, lying in the grass or with non-human animals, when we engage in processes like making poetry or music, painting, gardening, and so on - we are in touch with the systemic wisdom that, if we learn to use it, may permit us to continue to live on this planet as members of its living community. Mary Catherine Bateson wrote, in the last pages of Angels Fear, that Gregory came to see that “the integrated fabric of mental process”, that is, the totality of the systemic minds that comprise the living world is, itself, the sacred”. She continues: “…. And the principle way he knows that has allowed men and women to approach this (but not necessarily the only way) has been through religious traditions, vast, interconnected, metaphorical systems. Without such metaphors for meditation, as correctives for the errors of human language and recent science, it seems that we have the capacity to be wrong in rather creative ways - so wrong that this world we cannot understand may become one in which we cannot live.”1
Here, it seems to me, lies the task which faces all of us in GreenSpirit: to develop our understanding of how we can use religious process and a recognition of the divinity immanent (or, to use Thomas Berry’s word, ‘inscendent’) in the living world, to make a green spirituality available to the people of this Earth - widely available - and very soon. But we are, necessarily, groping, unsure, uncertain of how such a vast task can be approached. Bateson understood this. Hear the man’s own voice: “We are in extraordinary confusion at this very moment. Our beliefs are undergoing rapid change at a pace comparable to the rate things were changing in classical Greece in, say between 600 and 500 bc, or again in the beginning of the Christian Era. Ours is a strange and exciting world in which the very premises of language are in question. What is the language of the heart?… The old beliefs are wearing thin and there is a groping for new. It is not a matter, you see, of being a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Jew. We do not yet have another answer to the old problems…. We have to have in mind not an orthodoxy but a wide and compassionate recognition of the storm of ideas in which we are all living and in which we must make our nests - find spiritual rest - as best we can.”2 I don’t think I’m wasting my time with Bateson. References: 1 BATESON, G. and BATESON, M. C., Angels fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred. (British edition: Angels fear: an investigation into the nature and meaning of the sacred.) New York: Macmillan, 1987; London, Melbourne, Auckland and Berglei (South Africa): Rider (Century Hutchinson), 1988, p. 200. 2 Ibid. pp. 178-179. |