Reading :: Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Steps to an Ecology of Mind

By Gregory Bateson

This book is a classic collection of Bateson's work across decades. I've read it before, but haven't attempted to blog it. And rereading it, I remember why. It's a lot.

My review, alas, is short. Even though watching Bateson's development was fascinating—and he offers retrospective comments in each section, pointing out where he was struggling to develop concepts in each period—not all of this work is of direct interest to me and some of it is of interest primarily due to how it's been picked up elsewhere. In addition, I don't think I am adequately equipped to review parts in detail.

With that in mind, let's hit some highlights.

Bateson is well known for the concept of the double bind, in which someone faces two unsatisfactory and mutually reinforcing alternatives. In "Toward a theory of schizophrenia" (1956, authored by Bateson and colleagues), they theorize the double bind ("a situation in which no matter what a person does, he 'can't win,'" p.201) as a way to explain how schizophrenia develops. In "The group dynamics of schizophrenia" (1960, with colleagues), they add that the double blind is "a paradigm for human relations. Indeed, this sort of dilemma is not rare and it is not confined to the contexts of schizophrenia" (p.238). And in "Double bind" (1969, at a symposium on the double bind), he clarifies that "Double bind theory asserts that there is an experiential component in the determination or etiology of schizophrenic symptoms and related behavioral patterns, such as humor, art, poetry, etc. Notably the theory does not distinguish between these subspecialties" (p.272). (Here Bateson emphasizes the role of feedback loops, trial-and-error, and comparison in understanding systemic change (p.274), elements that John Boyd would later pick up for his OODA framework.) Bateson concludes that "if this pathology can be warded off or resisted, the total experience may promote creativity" (p.278).

The themes of feedback loops and trial-and-error also run through other chapters. For instance, in "The logical categories of learning and communication" (1964), Bateson argues that "all learning ... is to some degree stochastic (i.e., contains components of 'trial and error')" and develops "an hierarchic classification of the types of error which are to be corrected in the various learning processes" (p.287):

Zero learning: "the immediate base of all these acts ... not subject to correction by trial and error"

 

Learning I: "the revision of choice within an unchanged set of alternatives"

Learning II: "the revision of the set from which the choice is to be made" (p.287)

"...and so on," Bateson adds, emphasizing that the classifications can become more meta. Learning II is "learning to learn" (p.294) and "a way of punctuating events" (p.300). 

Learning III "is likely to be difficult and rare even in human beings" but, Bateson says, "something of the sort does from time to time occur in psychotherapy, religious conversion, and in other sequences in which there is profound reorganization of character" (p.301). "If Learning II is a learning of the contexts of Learning I, then Learning III should be a learning of the contexts of those contexts" (p.304). 

This insight leads us to Part III of the book, in which Bateson becomes interested in developing a theory of context—one in which a given utterance or action is part of a context, not a product or effect. Here is where Bateson draws on the concept of "ecology" in the book's title, in which relationships come to the fore and the phenomena with which Bateson has been concerned "become part of the ecology of ideas in systems of 'minds' whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals" (p.339). It is in this section, in "Form, substance, and difference," that Bateson gives us the illustration of the blind man and the stick (see my review of A Thousand Plateaus for an extended quote, which I won't reproduce here). Bateson also argues here that separating intellect from emotion, and mind from body, is "monstrous" (p.470). 

This book really is a must-read for those of us who are thinking through thought, cognition, and social systems. It's a lot to assimilate, as any book that summarizes an entire life's worth of thought should be. But it's still (generally) accessible and rewarding. Pick it up.