Laura Rabinow
EcoEd
Annotation #4
Gregory Bateson: “An Ecology of Mind”
Gregory Bateson, son of renowned geneticist William Batson, began his work in
anthropology in the 1930’s in the areas of Bali and New Guinea. In the 1940’s Bateson began to
synthesize his anthropological work with other fields, developing “a new way of thinking about
ideas and about those aggregates of ideas [called] minds” (Visser, 270; Bateson, 1). In this
effort, Bateson drew heavily on the work of behavioral scientists and systems theorists. The
book, “An Ecology of Mind” then presents a compilation of writing and speeches by Bateson
over the course of a few decades of his inquiries in this area of study (Visser, 272).
Bateson’s work on ‘minds’ - and those ideas intertwined within and between them - was
historically grounded in his own experiences as a young person in Britain during WWI. From an
anthropological perspective, Bateson asserts that the two most important events of the last 60
years (at the time he posited this it was 1966) were those leading to the Treaty of Versailles and
the development of cybernetics (Bateson, 475). This assertion relies on the premise that a)
people and all other mammals care about patterns of relationships more so than episodic
events and b) that, shifts in values and attitudes occur at moments when our trust in those
relations (be they trustworthy or not in our estimation) is ‘hurt’ in finding that them to be other
than what we have expected (Bateson, 476).
Tying this assertion of the ‘most important events’ to his other work in behavioral
science, Bateson creates a parallel between the situation arising in the Inter-War Period and
that of the experience of schizophrenia. In both, he see the production of a “double bind” in
which two contradictory orders of message are given, and in which the receiver is not able to
address the apparent contradictions- thereby leading to a breakdown in their ability to discern
‘Logical Types’ (Bateson, 212). In the family dealing with schizophrenia Bateson sees this ‘bind’
in the experience of a child whose parent is both withholding of affection and, upon the child’s
acknowledgement of this, is dismissive of the child’s ability to perceive this insight. Bateson
notes, “if an individual has spent his life in the kind of double bind relationship described here,
his way of relating to people after a psychotic break would have a systematic pat-tern”
(Bateson, 214). In the context of the Treaty of Versailles, he too acknowledges the development
of a systematic pattern, drawing from the initial promise of peace without reparations to a final
agreement predicated on numerous reparations (Bateson, 477). Bateson ties the two seemingly
different experiences/events together, saying in a rather parental fashion of the Treaty:
if you promise your boy something, and renege on him, framing the whole thing on a
high ethical plane, you will probably find that not only is he very angry with you, but that
his moral attitudes deteriorate as long as he feels the unfair whiplash of what you are
doing to him (Bateson, 478)
While some might take issue with the fact that Bateson notes the events that followed
(namely WWII) were an “appropriate response” to this kind of situation, his connection of them
to the general demoralization that precipitated it is poignant. He extends this demoralization
beyond the German people to the global community in connecting it to his investigation of
genetics and evolutionary processes. In the study of these processes, as in the study of cultural
contact, Bateson argues that we have created divisions, boundaries or categories by which to
group what we too often think of as ‘discreet’ entities- be they a cell, the skin membrane or the
religious practices of a cultural. These categories are in Bateson’s (re/de)framing, “not real
subdivisions […] but are merely abstractions which we make for our own conveniences”
(Bateson, 73).
In this categorization Bateson argues that “what gets on the [proverbial] map, in fact, is
difference” and that this difference is what we call ‘idea’ (Bateson, 459). Of the infinite
differences available only few, in his estimation, become ‘information’ that guides our habitual
processes of thought (Bateson, 460). Here, Bateson operationalizes the term ‘deutero-learning’
as the changing rate of learning in a series of successive learning experiments (in or outside of
‘the lab’); in essence, the process of learning to learn (Bateson, 174-6). Of these process, he
argues that there is a need to further iterate on their current classifications or typologies
(Pavlovian contexts of rigid temporal sequencing, instrumental reward/escape, instrumental
avoidance and rote learning), such that we can better conceptualize how the ways that we are
educated and formed to the world impact our outlook on it our interaction with it (Bateson,
181).
Interestingly, Bateson seems to find rote learning, a concept largely eschewed within
the context of EcoEd and the critical pedagogies we’ve read thus far, to be a potentially helpful
tool. So too he appears persuaded by the use of intermittent and vaguely (un)defined rewards,
“the urgency that comes from feeling that great discovery, the answer to all our problems or
great creation, the perfect sonnet, is always only just beyond our reach” (Bateson, 182). Bateson
too places an importance on the role of play and humor in the development of the capacity to
comprehend communication signs as signals, “that is, to recognize that the other individual’s
and its own signals are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified,
corrected and so forth” (Bateson, 184). This capacity for abstract thought, is then what enables
the development of the metacommunicative capacities that enable us to identify our habitual
patterns of thought and to change them (Bateson, 183).
In Bateson’s example of the child in the double bind experiencing schitzophrenia, the
child is denied the ability to access this meta-language of identifying communication as ‘this is
deceptive’. Likewise, Bateson implies that in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, the
demoralization stemming from it, the development of a cybernetics and broader scientific
authority which enumerates the world as discrete entities and denies the ability of
‘evolutionary’ emergence from that which is not (zero), there has developed an “oversimplified
approach to the overlapping roles,” and that we must “recognize that the organism, considered
as a communicational system, may itself operate at multiple levels of logical typing” (Bateson,
352).
In this ‘oversimplification’, Bateson recognizes the way in which the negative side
effects of our own process become obscured, including here the way in which these process
may have impact on the actors themselves (Bateson, 353). In cybernetic language, Bateson
notes that the general direction of events is determined by restraints and the ‘equality of
probability’ of outcomes, like a mathematical proof that posits two mutually exclusive
alternatives (Bateson, 408). This concept of restraints and limited alternatives when linked with
those of feedback and redundancy (under cybernetics), results in an understanding of complex
causation through a set of interconnected and branching chains, but according Bateson they are
nonetheless chains that are closed, whereas in reality, he argues, these systems are always open
(Bateson, 412).
In a reflexive moment Bateson reflects on the time period in which he was writing, the
mid to late 1960’s, noting the confusing nature of the position in which people are ‘now’ put;
having acted according to what they perceived to be common sense, individuals instead find
themselves in a state of confusion, economic-political-sociological-ecological erosion (Bateson,
443). More troubling still, Bateson outlines the ‘double bind’ presented in trying to address this
circumstance, “the terrible thing about such situations is that inevitably they shorten the time
span of all the planning. Emergency is present or only just around the corner; and long-term
wisdom must therefore be sacrificed to expediency, even though there is a dim awareness that
expediency will never give a long-term solution” (Bateson, 444). The development of a metalanguage and those processes that lend to it, such as play & humor, are something we might
consider in the context of ecological education, the proliferating framings of environmental
education within economic and more specifically capitalistic discourses. In this way we may
address Bateson’s question:
is our view of the world changed when we admit an infinite regress of contexts, linked to
each other in a complex network of metarelations? Does the possibility that the separate
levels of stochastic change (in phenotype and genotype) may be connected in the larger
context the ecological system alter our allegiance in the battle? (Bateson, 271)
Karen Wohlwend builds on Bateson’s work in examining the ways that early childhood
teachers (ab)use the ambiguity of the words ‘work’ and ‘play’ to navigate, negotiate or resist
institutionally incoherent discourse related to the two (Wohlwend, 4). In “More than Child’s
Work: Framing Teacher Discourse about Play,” Wohlwend notes how both “work ethos and play
ethos represent oversimplified theories that circulate a narrow set of expectations about
schooling and childhood” (Wohlwend, 3). She further contrasts the value placed on play in early
child hood development literature with a trend to decrease the amount of time devoted to play
in educational institutions and addresses what she sees as the resulting ambiguity in the way
that teachers operationalize and identify what they see as ‘work’ or ‘play’ (Wohlend, 4).
Wohlwend concludes from her discourse analysis that “hybridity is a tactic that enabled these
individual teachers to reconcile their developmental teaching practices with administrative
objectives and to see themselves as compliant- and potentially, when informed by critique, to
free themselves from self-enforced compliance with bureaucratic restrictions” (Wohlwend, 19).
Wohlwend, and the teachers in the study, also try to imagine the way(s) in which the
children themselves perceive an activity, noting that the categories of ‘work’ and ‘play’ are
social constructs that may not apply to the ways children understand their actions, while at the
same time acknowledging the potential effect of teachers’ language in informing what gets
labeled as what. Here, the author cites ethnographic research that echoes the comments of one
teacher concerning how “young children use learner choice as the criterion to distinguish work
and play at school” (Wohlwend, 13). In this way, the role of play and metalanguage perform
complementary functions according to Wohlwend, “language critique deconstructs existing
contradictions and inequalities; play improvises potential alternatives and tries out their
possibilities” (Wohlwend, 20). Opening space for children to have choice within educational
settings may then contribute to a broader application of what gets labeled as ‘play’ and may in a
mutually interacting way also contribute to, gain from, the development of metalanguage. This
metalanguage can then, according to Bateson, act as a means of identifying, understanding and
de/reconstructing the frameworks, narratives, values and assumptions underlying our present
conceptions of the ecological crises that we face, the way that we choose to engage them, they
way that we understand that engagement.
Works Cited
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an ecology of mind. San Francisco. Chandler. 1972.
Visser, Max. “Gregory Bateson on Duetero-Learning and Double Bind: A Brief Conceptual
History.” Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences. Col 39 (3) pp 269-78. Summer
2003.
Wohlwend, Karen. “More than a Child’s Work: Framing Teacher Discourse about Play.”
InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol 3(1). 2007.