Living Systems: Gregory Bateson's approach to culture
By: Richard Currie Smith
Copyright 2005
Following the Gnostics and Carl Jung’s division of the world between the nonliving and the living (Bateson 1972 2000:461-462, Hoeller 1982), Gregory Bateson (1979 2002:6-7) described the latter, living systems, as his area of interest and the subject matter of his final book, Mind and Nature:
In my life, I have put the description … of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impact are the “causes” of events) ... in one box, the pleroma, and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things, crabs, people, the creatura… (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause). The contents of the second box are the subject of this book.
For Bateson (1972 2000:446-447,456), human culture is a living system. The different aspects of the living system that is human culture are linked together in “branching and interconnecting chains of causation” and bounded by self-validating and usually unconscious “epistemological” assumptions concerning “what sort of world it is" (1972 2000:314).1
Culture and cultural change for Bateson are centered on communicative relationships, with cultural systems seen as displaying interactive communication between members through recursive messages that follow circular loops. In Bateson’s perspective, values, perceptions, symbols, meanings, and the social behavior of the members of a culture arise out of the “integral relations of human beings in communication with each other and are a product of the field of communicative activity which their interactions construct…, Consequently there are no social sanctions or arbitrary values external to the cultural communicative process from which they arose” (Harries-Jones 1995:26).
In other words, the living system Bateson envisions as culture is understood by focusing on “deeply embedded” and typically unconscious assumptions about the world and the communicative patterns of social interaction that create and reinforce them. This is because in his view it is the communicative interplay between assumed fundamental beliefs, reinforcing social relationships, and the biophysical environment of the group that forms, propagates, and alters culture.
In the late 1960s Bateson began teaching a seminar entitled “Living Systems” at the University of Hawaii “in which, from a poetic and cybernetic perspective, he teased students with ethical and ecological concerns” (Lipset 1980:275). By the early 1970s, Bateson foresaw the depth of our contemporary environmental crisis and approached the issue through a focus on epistemologically-oriented cultural change. In 1972, he stated “threats to man and his ecological systems," ranging from insecticide pollution to possible melting of the Antarctic ice cap, “arise out of errors in our habits of thought at deep and partly unconscious levels” (Bateson 1972 2000:495). Bateson maintained that only a change in the flawed way modern culture views itself as separate from the natural environment can save the earth from ecological devastation (Bateson 1972 2000:xiv).
For Bateson, the conceptual separation of humans from nature is the essential pathological assumption underlying modern Western culture. He sees this assumption as leading to a futile attempt to “control” nature and as fostering for several hundred years reductionist scientific practices in which the simplest or most economical explanation is accentuated over understanding placed within the context of a larger whole (Bateson 1979 2002:5, 200, 214).
As Harries-Jones explains, Bateson “took the position that the ecological dilemmas that the Western world faces, and would face in the future, stem from a propensity to exert control over nature” (Harries-Jones 1995:7). This pathological desire to control nature propels unchecked technological prowess by modern Western society, which in turn leads it to effectively “create havoc” and to ecologically devastate nature on a massive scale. Bateson sees this faulty cultural premise of “Man against nature…as a basic error that propagates itself…branching out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life.” Because of this epistemological error “you end up, in fact, with Kaneohe Bay polluted, and Lake Erie a slimy green mess" (Bateson 1972 2000:492).
Bateson goes on to express disbelief in the prevailing contemporary natural science approach to environmental problems. He asserts, “technological ‘ad hoc’ solutions to environmental problems are insidious short-term ‘corrections’ that permit causes to grow stronger and become more compounded” (Bateson 1972 2000:497).
The preservation and restoration of nature for Bateson requires an epistemological change in the complex communication system that is modern Western culture.
To accomplish this profound cultural change that Bateson deems essential for long-term ecological restoration, the assumptions leading to environmentally devastating levels of pollution, along with the repetitive and habitual communicative relationships that reinforce them, must be altered. In order to correct this error of separation from nature, modern Western culture must rapidly move to an ecological view of nature that places humankind within the living systems of the earth of which it is an interdependent part.2
Bateson further maintains that the immense task of developing an ecological perspective in modern society can be accomplish most expediently by focusing on aesthetics, because this realm can provide a “short cut” to its realization (Harries-Jones 1995:14). He describes how developing an “inner ‘ecology of ideas’ is a close synonym of what also might be called aesthetic sensibility” (Bateson and Donaldson 1991:256). Cultivating an aesthetic awareness of the intricate and diverse relationships found in nature consequently becomes a way to recognize the beauty and elegance of healthy ecological systems as well as a way to promote a sacred connection with it.
Finally, Bateson sees the development of an ecological epistemology and aesthetic sensibility in modern Western culture as the spontaneous expression of the self-correction tendency in living systems to regain a state of dynamic equilibrium during periods of turbulence. Through the establishment of networks of new ecologically-oriented communicative relationships, ideas regarding nature are altered. Furthermore, the self-correction tendency of living systems to unexpectedly create novel solutions to environmental problems, that are superior to highly planned management schemes, is also able to emerge (Bateson 1972 2000:490-491).
Bateson’s extensive application and refinement of the concept of self-correction, which eventually became known as self-organization, foreshadowed the development of the later concept as one of the seminal ideas in contemporary living systems work (Capra 2002:13-14).
