Gregory Bateson: A Practitionner’s Perspective’ in Dietrich, et al., The Palgrave International handbook of Peace Studies

32 Gregory Bateson: A practitioner’s perspective

Victoria Fontan

I turn my eyes to the schools & universities of Europe

And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire,

Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth

In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel works

Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,

Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.

William Blake

A colleague recently told me that Afghanistan has become

a cemetery for peace projects. Over the past ten years,

billions of dollars have been spent to alleviate people’s

suffering, to ensure that the country would embark on a

sustainable recovery, this to no avail, Taliban or no

Taliban. To the average observer, throwing money and

goods at a country’s economy can only serve the overall

goal of its recovery, this for the general good. To the

local farmer, the free supply of grounded wheat from

benevolent nations to post-war Afghanistan means that he

has no choice to abandon the culture of wheat to the

benefit of poppies, hence contribute to the exponential

increment in opium trafficking towards Western nations.

After spending the last ten years visiting conflict areas

and teaching Peace and Conflict Studies, I was left with

the distinct feeling that I would not be able to spend

the next ten years of my life doing more of the same.

Mission after mission, course after course, I came to the

realization that our field is more part of the problem

than it is part of the solution. When peace has become

more of an industry for the general good than a way of

life, how can we, well-intentioned human beings fit in?

How can we reconcile our ethics with our activities?

Gregory Bateson wrote that a message about peace is not

part of the peace and that the more we feel that we can

wage ‘war’ on a problem, eradicate it, the more we

contribute to it (Bateson, 1972a). What would he have

said? Had he been alive to witness the ‘Yes We Can’

campaign of US President Barack Obama? Crowned not by his

election but by his immediate showcase decision to close

the Guantanamo Detention Centre, a decision yet to be

applied? What would he have said to our growing concerns

about climate change, he who more than forty years ago

documented environmental changes on the coastal region of

California? The discovery of Gregory Bateson’s work has

inspired me to spend the next ten years of my career

focusing on how Peace and Conflict Studies can become

part of the peace that is so often taken for granted.

This essay will review Gregory Bateson’s work in light of

the challenges faced by our discipline, this alongside

his life.

Transdisciplinarity in the making

Gregory Bateson was born in England in 1904 and died in

San Francisco in 1980. He owes his first name to

biologist Gregor Mendel, re-discovered by his father

William, a pioneer of modern genetics (Harries-Jones,

1995). Bateson’s youth was dominated by the death of his

two brothers, John, during World War I and Martin, who

committed suicide by shooting himself in Piccadilly

Circus, after a failed attempt at becoming an artist

(Harries-Jones, 1995). While being promised to a career

in zoology by his father and rebelling against the rigid

system of science, Martin Bateson left a deep concern in

the heart of his younger brother: how to reconcile

science with arts. How to ensure that one becomes as

sacred as the other. Gregory Bateson’s fascination for

the work of William Blake, centered on the sacred unity

of mind and spirit, contributed to this search

(Nachmanovitch, 1981). It is at the origins of his

transdisciplinary epistemology.

While modern society can only function ascribing as many

precise names as possible to people, Gregory Bateson

still confuses most academics. This is because he never

chose to pertain to one academic discipline per se, but

instead, to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to the

creation of knowledge and communication as early as

possible in his career. Bateson never focused on content,

but the relationships and patterns linking contents. To

some, he remains an intellectual scattered between

disciplines as varied as anthropology, oceanography,

psychiatry, communication and ecology. To many, he is one

of the fathers of cybernetics, through what he refers to

as the ecology of the mind.

Being destined to a career in zoology after the death of

his brother Martin, Bateson conducted a first field

research in the Galapagos Islands in the mid 1920s, where

he affirmed his desire to embark in a career of

anthropology (Lipset, 1982). His first field research was

conducted in Indonesia, followed by New Guinea and in the

early 1930s Bali, where he met his first wife, the famous

anthropologist Margaret Mead. He then embarked on a

career mostly in the US, where he remained until his

death in 1980 (Lipset, 1982). He first taught at Harvard

University as a visiting professor, before joining the

Veterans Administration Hospital of Palo Alto to head a

study of abstraction within communication. His most

famous finding from those years was to be the theory of

‘double bind’, or dilemma in communication. Later, he led

the Oceanographic Institute at the University of Hawaii,

where he researched communication in porpoises. His last

professional years were spent as part-time Lecturer at

the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Bateson’s bibliography is as eclectic as his scholarship,

most of his thinking being expressed in the recursiveness

of his communication with his readers. Reading Bateson is

a complex undertaking, since he engages the reader to

mentally stretch in a feedback loop both during and in

between the discovery of his articles, speeches and

metalogues. Without active intellectual involvement,

Bateson’s words do not stick; his ideas fail to blossom.

Bateson does not deliver content; he plants seeds of

interconnectedness, he invites the reader to come back to

his works over and over, to discover new ideas and more

importantly, make more connections between ideas, every

single time. Reading Gregory Bateson is like journeying

through the infinite complexity of a fractal.

Cybernetics of Self

There are many entry points into Bateson’s ecology of the

mind, the most relevant to peace studies being that of

cybernetics, where he proposes to rediscover the

territory hidden by the map so commonly discussed in

mainstream peace studies. The map, interventions for

peace, often hides the territory, the patterns of

communication that leads to conflict in the

fragmentations of peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace

building.

The essay he wrote on the cybernetics of the self, a

reflection on the symmetric aspects of alcoholism,

becomes resounding when one studies the many failures of

peace operations worldwide (Bateson, 1972b). In his

essay, Bateson explains how alcoholic pride, deriving

from a Cartesian symmetric epistemology, invariably

maintains the alcoholic in a state of addiction. This

pride alludes to the addict and the understanding of the

situation of his or her entourage as one to be conquered,

won over and dominated. According to this common

assumption, the addict must vanquish his or her desire to

drink. He or she is thought to be in total control of his

situation and locked onto a duel with the substance, a

duel that is inexorably to be won by the substance as

often as the situation repeats itself, with increasingly

damaging consequences for the vanquished.

At the root of this situation lies the epistemological

error of understanding the situation as one of symmetry

between the addict and the substance, as well as the

division between mind, matter and spirit. By believing

that one has complete power over the situation, one is

also left alone to confront it, hence unable to address

the complimentary-related roots of the addiction.

Conversely, the first of the famous ‘Twelve Steps’ of the

Alcoholics Anonymous ‘message to the alcoholic’ is to

make him or her ‘cut through all this mythology of

conflict’ in making them admit that they ‘are powerless

over alcohol – that [their] lives ha[ve] become

unmanageable’ (Bateson, 1972b, pp. 312-13).

The myth of ‘war over’ is therefore diffused towards a

reconnection between body and mind, mind and matter,

matter and society, society and spirit. Combined to this

is also the shock effect of having hit the bottom, which

can be the loss of a job, the failure of a marriage, a

black out of a few hours. The shock generated by this

awakening to one’s situation is understood as a key to

the recovery process. In sum: no hitting bottom = no

recovery.1 Yet, many actors in the life of the addict will

ensure, knowingly or not, that the bottom is never

reached. They can be understood as enablers. This can be

the addict him or herself, the entourage, in their plight

to hide the addiction to themselves, their families,

society. This prevention of hitting rock bottom is a form

of negative feedback. It regulates the addiction so that

the amplifying effect of the shock never materializes.

This is peace and conflict studies’ own entry point into 1 While psychiatric discourse has since disputed this

notion of ‘hitting bottom’, I remain attached to

Bateson’s desire to keep this as prominent as possible in

the understanding of addiction. My own understanding of

this stems from the fact that no one who does not want to

be helped (hence has reached a certain bottom – and it is

understood that bottom can be reached several times in a

lifetime) can initiate a cure without ever falling into

relapse at any given time.

the ecology of the mind: conflict is to addiction what

peace is to negative feedback. Both complement one

another in, among other disorders, leading our world to

its destruction.

From the point of view of a peace practitioner, this has

been a rather grim, sobering, realization. We, from the

vantage point of prescriptive peace as a discipline, can

be seen as enablers to the conflict meme that animates us

on a daily basis. How?

Conflict is to addiction what peace is to negative

feedback

‘War on Terror’, ‘War on Drugs’, even ‘War on Poverty’,

these are the daily aberrations presented to us by

political systems, relayed by the infotainment media

industry (Nacos, 2002). In our certainty over our power

to defeat terrorism, we have forgotten that not only we

are powerless over this symptom, but also that we are

addicted to the social, political and ideological

conflicts that drive us. Terrorism is symptomatic of a

greater conflict meme that animates our lives (Wilber,

2001). Our dualistic view of the world in ‘us’ and ‘them’

has made us unable to realize that we all have conflict

within us and that our illusion of power over the other,

terrorism, drugs, makes us part of the problem.

Bateson (1972b) asserts that we are the mirrors of our

own demons. For as long as we are to engage in a

symmetrical relationship with our addiction, we will be

unable to transform it. The decision by President Obama

to close Guantanamo Detention Centre was a message of

peace, yet his administration’s collateral killing of

civilians in Northern Pakistan renders his message void

in the eyes of the populations towards whom this message

was aimed in the first place (Almeida, 2010). Worse, this

message failing to materialize into concrete actions

deepens political polarization, rendering moderate

discourse obsolete.2

By declaring war on terrorism, or by attempting to hide

skeletons in our human rights violations closet, we 2 Author interviews with various Pakistani political and

intellectual leaders, Karachi, April 2010.

hereby declare war on ourselves, in the same way that the

addict declares war over himself when he or she confronts

the substance in a conflict that he or she is bound to

lose every time. We instead have to examine the patterns

of our involvement in conflict, in order to transform our

symmetrical dualistic relationship into a complementary

one. Bateson’s ecology of the mind asks: can we imagine

‘Twelve Steps’ to our addiction to conflict? Can the

sacred unity between mind, body and spirit help? Let us

examine first if we have hit bottom.

Double bind

Bateson once asserted that ‘language is a remarkable

servant and a lousy master’ (Bateson in Nachmanovitch,

1981, p.11). In his research on communication, he wrote

that digital, linear, communication was often symptomatic

of a double bind that could only be transcended through

an analogical approach to communication (Harries-Jones,

1995). Put simply, if digital communication can be the

expression of robots, analogical communication is

speaking with one’s heart, mind, body and soul.

Double bind is the effect of a contradictory message

given by someone to someone else, often within a power-

dynamic. It results in pathological relationships. An

illustration of double bind can be a parent telling a

child that he or she is loved, but never with the

gestures and actions that are the expressions of that

love (Harries-Jones, 1995). It can be a post-Bush

administration address to the Muslim world, alongside

daily killings of civilians. Words but no hugs, no

closeness, no connection: this contradiction creates

different reactions, one of which being schizophrenia.

Words but no human dignity or justice, this can result in

disillusionment, or acts of terrorism (Fontan, 2007). In

this, the digital communication of the parent or

authority figure creates a pathological reaction

(Bateson, 1972c). Under this light, language can

certainly become a lousy master.

A sacred unity

Can aesthetics save us from ourselves? Can it bring

meaning to our actions as peace practitioners? Bateson’s

deep connection to British painter and poet William Blake

seems to foster this realization. Aesthetics in both the

work of Blake and Bateson takes on the role of

reconnecting the spirit to the mind and body, as well as

nature, humans and the spiritual. It takes the

spirituality out of organized religion and back to the

cognitive domain of the individual and collective self.

Aesthetics brings the territory back to the map in the

same way that it connects both spheres of our brains. It

connects nature, humans and their spirituality through

the acknowledgement of what Bateson referred to as ECO,

or the ‘gods’ of ecosystem (Harries-Jones, 1995). It

redirects the message of peace into peace itself.

Aesthetics is the missing link between our wishful

thinking for the general good and our actions. It derives

in our emotions, our ethics, our values and principles.

It alludes to making peace with peace, to teaching peace

with peace. It tells us that a ‘Yes We Can’ attitude is

devoid of any connection to the reality of us creating

more of the same by seeking to negate the connection

patterns between our actions. Emotions, values and

principles become visible in our actions.

Changing the bias of the system

We want to know that we are hitting the bottom, yet we

refuse to acknowledge it in our belief that we can quit

conflict, pain, hunger and death whenever we want to. We

refuse to admit that we are addicted to conflict, yet it

permeates every aspect of our lives, as deep as our

entertainment patterns or our compartmentalization of

peace building. We say ‘never again’ each time we speak

of Auschwitz, yet refused to call events in Rwanda

genocide (Albright, 2006). We believe that we are better

than them, whoever they are, the Nazis, the Muslims, the

terrorists, the freedom haters: the Others. Yet how would

‘they’ have sprung to life if it were not for us?

Bateson’s essay on the Treaty of Versailles (Bateson,

1972a) is another revealing connection, another kick in

the stomach of the peace practitioner. Evelin Lindner

(2006) started her work on human dignity with an analysis

of the Treaty of Versailles, on the humiliation that

established the systemic bases for World War II to occur.

Bateson made the same proposition, naming our ‘peace’ as

a catalyst to the state of today’s world, via World War

II.

Bateson, in his essay ‘From Versailles to Cybernetics’

(1972a), contended that the treaty of Versailles changed

the bias of the international system, a bias that

inherently led to a century of international conflict.

Bateson explains this with the metaphor of a house

heating system’s thermostat. If the temperature outside a

house falls, the thermostat regulates the temperature in

the house, this according to the temperature range within

which the system operates, the bias. If the bias changes,

the parameters for the room temperature change also.

His argument is that the Treaty of Versailles, with its

short-term good intentions, for the general good, changed

the bias of the international system away from one of

justice for all, including ‘losers’, which in turn

increased the world’s propensity for conflict. Many

observers of the international politics have since also

made the connection (Fisk, 2005). For as long as the bias

of the system will be placed according to a dualistic

understanding of the world, into ‘us’ and ‘them’ and a

fragmented symptomatic solution to conflicts, peace

initiatives will contribute to the overall sustaining of

long-term conflicts (Anderson, 1999). It is the bias of

the system that needs to be changed into a holistic and

sacred one, not our response to its symptoms.

Peace and Negative Feedback

When I reflect on how Afghanistan has been mishandled

since 2001, this by all actors involved in its

reconstruction, I cannot help but wonder how the bias of

the system can be changed, since we were conditioned into

believing that this was a fight between good and evil,

that there was absolutely no way to negotiate with the

‘stone-age’ Taliban rulers. What was not my surprise,

when recently I spoke with the hakim, or ‘witch doctor’,

of Mollah Omar, the former Head of the Afghani Taliban,

in a meeting where he gave a contextualized account of

their rule? He mentioned the founding of a university for

women, something new to me, the reasons behind the

‘banning’ of electricity, which actually was not banned

but unavailable after thirty years of conflict and the

several logical reasons behind for instance the ‘banning’

of kite ‘flying’, which, more accurately called kite-

fighting, has also been banned in Pakistan since 2005.3 He

also mentioned how opposed the Afghani Taliban are to the

Pakistani Taliban, deemed too radical for them.4 I left

his house wondering if western politics in the area had

not created the ‘evil’ that it was denouncing while

justifying its ‘invasion’ of Afghanistan in 2001, albeit 3 For an account on the debate over kite flying, see The

News (2009).

4 Their opposition to the Pakistani Taliban stems from the

incident of the flogging of a girl that shocked the

Pakistani nation in 2009 (The Dawn Media Group, 2009).

in Northern Pakistan. To this day, I am wondering what

was our collective role in worsening the situation in

Afghanistan and now its neighboring Pakistan.

In his resigning letter to the Board of Regents of the

University of California, dated 1979, Bateson laments the

preoccupation of national egos with the possibility of

their own death, hence their need to develop nuclear

weaponry, the reason for his resignation from this

particular board (Harries-Jones, 1995). In his logic, the

impossibility to find a valuable interlocutor and

communicate with the ‘other’ is symptomatic of the

Cartesian bias of the system, hence contributing to the

negative loop of conflict.

We as peace practitioners are led to believe that we can

initiate ad hoc interventions to suppress symptoms of

conflict, to retrocede the collective its good

conscience, in the same way that environmental agencies

address degradation in a symptomatic manner (Bateson,

1972d). We linearly divide peace and conflict studies

into conflict management, resolution and transformation,

combining it with peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace

building and we address the world’s woes in as good a

manner as we can. We intervene, mostly reactively, as a

fire brigade, according to the decisions of an

organization created by and for states, not with

individuals in mind. We intervene within the conflict

bias, instead of holistically addressing the patterns of

interconnections that set the conflict bias. I have seen

the eviction of illegal settlers in Bosnia, but yet have

to see it occurring in Palestine. We say that we care,

that we work for human rights, justice, democracy, but we

only act politically, economically and selfishly

(Easterly, 2006). Sending in rogue peacekeepers that

abuse local populations, as occurred in many UN-sponsored

missions across the world in relation to sexual slavery,

only recently made it to the headlines in connection to

the UN mission in the Congo, this after years of

systematic malpractice on behalf of UN personnel (Firmo-

Fontan, 2003; Lynch, 2004).

We talk of bringing peace to Afghanistan, but through

what means? As Bateson’s double bind creates

schizophrenia, our collective double bind creates anger

at best, terrorism at worst, depending on the person or

group of people it is touching. In this sense, the peace

practitioner that does not bring meaning to his or her

words can be seen as an agent of negative feedback and

not of social transformation. The digital communication

of peace does not contribute to peace. It often spoils

it. The digital communication of peace acts as a

pesticide. It renders the soil sterile for years to come.

Returning to the addiction entry point, the digital peace

practitioner buys us a collective good conscience, hence

prevents us from ever realizing that we have hit rock

bottom.

A Negentropy of Peace?

Bateson might not have wished to paint peace practice

black, or to throw the peacekeeper with the bathwater,

but he would have strongly objected the notion of general

good that is often invoked in most missions. While most

peace practitioners are dedicated individuals, this is

not the question at stake when reflecting on Bateson’s

epistemology. It is fair to assert that ad hoc practices

that do not help to sustain the peace we are all after,

that acting in urgency without sustainability in sight

can contribute to a worsening of a given situation, that

all talk and no walk can alienate people and render them

violent at worst. From our hubris to bring peace at all

costs, to enforce it, stems the negative feedback that

alienates the addict to the substance.

Gregory Bateson wrote of negentropy in terms of

cybernetics and analogical communication. The concept of

entropy stems from the Second Law of Thermodynamics,

concerning the irreversibility of nature and energy.

While negentropy does not completely point out towards a

reversal of the Second Law, it is defined as a ‘temporal

reversal of disorder, when order is considered as a statistical rate of events in

some closed system or channel. In other words, our knowledge of

probable events moves in a direction opposite to the time

path of entropic systems’ (Harries-Jones, 1995, p.107).

In terms of cybernetics and the study of closed systems,

negentropic conditions occur out of analogical

communication, that is to say, a communication that

lives, expresses, means, embodies. While too many peace

efforts can damage peace on the long term, as, again, the

Afghan example illustrates, an analogical

communication/expression of peace can reverse the entropy

created by its digital expression. In sum, peace can be

brought back from the dead through communication.

This communication has to be systemic, transformative

through the positive feedback that it can prompt,

connecting the two hemispheres of our brain. It also has

to be transcendent of our human condition towards ECO,

the greater life system, as characterized by Bateson, of

which we are only a small part (Harries-Jones, 1995,

p.107). All in all, analogical communication generates a

wealth of ideas that live and die, according to their

fitting with one another within their interdependent,

interacting contribution to life of ECO (Bateson, 1991).

Since Bateson’s ecology of the mind is a constant

appraisal of life, ideas that do not contribute to the

life of ECO will die out naturally. An ecological

understanding of peace would embody the same parameters,

hence not repeat the same mistakes mission after mission.

Aesthetics, Consciousness, the Sacred and Ecology

Bateson’s work highlighted the importance of aesthetics

as a shortcut to consciousness (Harries-Jones, 1995). The

connection that he felt with William Blake’s vision of

the world led him to formalize his understanding of

aesthetics as a means to express what cannot be expressed

with words, a means to allow us to enter our

consciousness through our unconscious. Photojournalism

can be an embodiment of Bateson’s aesthetics, as a means

to enter our collective consciousness.5

However, the road to consciousness via aesthetics could

not have sufficed to conceptualize what Bateson

understood as the ‘patterns which connect’ between beauty

and destruction, life and death. The sacred had to come 5 See Photography by James Nachtwey (2010). I believe that

all his shots are interconnected as Bateson highlighted

it in his essay ‘From Versailles to Cybernetics’ (1972a).

to the rescue in order for his argument not to fall

within a Cartesian dualistic pattern (Harries-Jones,

1995). Towards the end of his life, Bateson allowed the

sacred to take a connecting space, it provided a vision

of unity necessary to the ecology of the mind (Bateson,

1991).

According to Harries-Jones (1995, p.213), the author of

an intellectual biography of Bateson, ‘the sacred

indicates a form in which life cannot be opposed to

itself, in which even death is part of the rhythms of

life.’ This trinity represents the ecology of the mind,

whose sacred expression Bateson saw in the Hindi deity of

Shiva the Destroyer. Harries-Jones (1995, p.210)

explains: ‘of the qualities of beauty and ugliness that

pervade the biosphere, these primary rhythms of life and

death are those to which we must pay particular

attention, for these are the “patterns which connect”.’

One can negate death if one does not accept the greater

implicate order of ECO.6 Our modern rejection of it can

account for the current state of resources depletion. Can6 I use here ‘implicate order’ in reference to David

Bohm’s writings (1980).

we seek to live through the ecology of the mind if we do

not understand, accept and live through our own

mortality? Will ECO remind us of our own mortality, as it

does through photojournalism when we allow it to permeate

through our public sphere? Are we ready to surrender to

it?

Bateson’s epistemology of peace

A questioning of the epistemology of modern peace must be

initiated before unethical, fragmented and dualistic

actions spoil the soil where it is being applied.

Recently, more and more NGOs have to resort to private

security to continue their operations in increasingly

difficult environments. Should that not be a sign given

by ECO of our falling into disunity? Does this point

towards the destruction of a dysfunctional industry? Does

it have to be replaced by any alternative? I do not claim

to give answers to the peace industry, but only to frame

it within an ecological meme. More questions will

undoubtedly come before any kind of resolution, if any

ever occurs. If we are not meant to ever live in peace,

then let ECO remain the guardian of the patterns that

connect.

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