The Multi-talented Gregory Bateson

Review of Noel G. Charlton, Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), ISBN 978-0-7914-7452-5, 276 pages, Paperback, $21.95.

People who know more about Gregory Bateson than his name often know he was Margaret Mead’s third husband. If they know still more, they may know he collaborated with Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann in the early days of cybernetics; or that by applying “feedback” to psychology he came up with the double-bind theory (or hypothesis) of schizophrenia, which in turn led to family-process therapy. A few may also know that, well before he died in 1980, Bateson became convinced that unconscious mental activity pervades virtually all life. The “capacity to register and respond to information” he said, is the basic trait “common to all mental systems” (quoted on p. 48).

Noel Charlton emphasizes the continuity from Bateson’s early years—such as his youthful fascination with William Blake’s art, and his 1930s collaboration with Margaret Mead in studying Balinese art and dance—on through the rest of his eventful career to his late-life assertion of a sort of panpsychism. His career evolved from biology in his youth through anthropology (a half dozen years spent mostly in New Guinea, then Bali) to cybernetics in the 1940s, psychology in the 1950s and on to philosophy and ecology. Systems fascinated him all along but he rarely paused to systemize his ideas—rather he charged ahead with new hunches and new applications without finding much need to discard his old ones. This book shows the continuity in Bateson’s lifelong intellectual trajectory.

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Born in 1904 near Cambridge (England) as the son of a well-known biologist who was then bringing Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics into mainstream biology, Bateson was named Gregory in honor of Mendel. His biographer says Bateson’s move to the U.S. is what involved him with enough collaborators to fully develop his insights. By 1940 he was based in New York City teaching Pidgin English for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and then spent World War II’s latter years employed by the OSS in South Asia and China, including a dangerous secret mission in Burma (1944-1945). Within several weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Bateson was connected with a conference and follow-up network of scholars who were trying to re-think the roots of human conflict from the interpersonal scale to the international.

In psychology, Bateson in the 1950s formulated the double-bind theory—the theory (or hypothesis) that schizophrenia tends to affect vulnerable, dependent people who experience frustration in their primary emotional relationships, such as young people who cannot do or say anything that their parents consider acceptable. By the 1960s, Bateson was thinking of the human body and mind as a unified “mental system.” He grew interested in collective psychology and came to view actions based on “conscious purpose” as almost invariably inimical to nature, in that conscious purposes distort humans’ innate relationships with other mental systems (pp. 168, 172-174). Bateson believed ecological disaster awaits humanity unless we realize we aren’t separate from the rest of nature simply because we know we’re thinking. Purposive action he saw as almost invariably self-seeking, thereby bedeviling the mutuality that actually sustains our lives. In an early draft of his last (unfinished) book, Angels Fear: An Investigation into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred, Bateson wrote: “It is my thesis that…religion consists in recognizing not little bits of miracles…but vast aggre-

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gates of organization having immanent mental characteristics” (p. 170). Such were the late-life ruminations of a thinker whose mental life had begun in a force-field between genetics and Blake.

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