Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness

Runaway

1958 portrait of Bateson by Imogen Cunningham

Runaway

Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness

Anthony Chaney

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2017 Anthony Chaney

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

FRONTISPIECE Gregory Bateson in 1958. Portrait by Imogen Cunningham. © 1958, 2016 Imogen Cunningham Trust.

JACKET ILLUSTRATION Photos by Barry Schwartz Photography.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Chaney, Anthony, author.

Title: Runaway : Gregory Bateson, the double bind, and the rise of ecological consciousness / Anthony Chaney.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016053761 | ISBN 9781469631738 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469631745 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bateson, Gregory, 1904–1980. | Anthropologists—United States—Biography. | Human ecology—History—20th century. | Human ecology—Philosophy. | Nineteen sixties. | Postmodernism.

Classification: LCC GN21.B383 C53 2017 | DDC 301.092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053761

To ANDREA

with love and gratitude

and to our children

CLEO and COLE

Contents

Introduction Gregory Bateson and the Spirit of 1967

1 The Way to Waimanalo

2 Difficulties at the Metalevel

3 The Hurly-Burly of Natural History

4 Faith and Fight

5 Signals from the Goal

6 Double-Bind Generation

7 Animal Stories

8 The Good Son

9 Schismogenesis

10 The Curious Twist

11 Love and Trust

Epilogue The Back End of the Probe

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Gregory Bateson at his observation window 19

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson at work in the field 34

The double-bind research group, circa 1956 48

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann 73

Lois and Gregory Bateson 102

Gregory Bateson and spinner dolphins 105

John C. Lilly, Marineland, Florida, 1958 108

Konrad Lorenz with gosling imprinted to surrogate mother 160

W. B. Bateson, 1924 171

Young Gregory Bateson 171

Scene from the 1966 stage production of Marat/Sade 187

R. D. Laing, 1967 191

Emmett Grogan, Artist Liberation Front Meeting, 1967 202

Scenes from the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, July 1967 229

Allen Ginsberg at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, 1967 248

Gregory Bateson and his underwater listening device 256

Runaway

Introduction: Gregory Bateson and the Spirit of 1967

In a 1986 interview, the poet Allen Ginsberg was asked to look back on the year 1967. That was the year of psychedelia, the year of the Human Be-In, where San Francisco’s counterculture came out to the American mainstream. It was the year the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, initiating a season that some called Vietnam Summer and others the Summer of Love. What was the true impact of that fabled year, Ginsberg was asked, and what remained of its spirit?

Ginsberg’s answer may be unexpected. Civilization was conscious now that the planet as an ecological unity was in danger, he said. Beyond changes in style and music, in sex and politics, beyond the drugs and liberation, the most significant and permanent change had to do with humankind’s relationship with the earth. Remember, Ginsberg said, the notion of Armageddon apocalypse before the Sixties was considered eccentric, whereas now it’s a universal awareness.¹

Ginsberg spent a good deal of the summer of 1967 not in San Francisco but in Italy and England. In July he attended a two-week-long London event called the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. Organized by the anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his colleagues, this forum brought together radical writers, artists, social scientists, and political theorists, including Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfort School; Paul Goodman, the author of Growing Up Absurd; and civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who had spent the previous year stirring up audiences on the topic of Black Power. These voices mixed Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, Gestalt psychology, Frantz Fanon and decolonization, and existentialist philosophy. They set one down in the mire, as the novelist Saul Bellow had complained a few years earlier, of post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, next door to the Void. The war in Vietnam, almost two years in escalation, and urban riots in progress in Newark and Detroit provided urgency to the gathering and tipped it toward talk of violent revolution.²

The event’s many programs drew crowds large and small. A number of the participants were members of what seemed a rising nation of discontented, insurgent youth, and the crowd was laced with this movement’s self-styled leadership. Ginsberg himself had appeared at the old railroad roundhouse where the congress was held, on a panel with Laing, Carmichael, and Emmett Grogan, founder of a San Francisco cadre of artist-anarchists called the Diggers. Yet almost two decades after this event, as Ginsberg elaborated on his answer about the legacy of 1967 and the Summer of Love, he did not mention Laing, Carmichael, or Grogan. He didn’t mention Timothy Leary, Che Guevara, or any of the other cultural-political icons of that year. Instead, he spoke of Gregory Bateson.

Gregory Bateson (1904–80) was what might be called today an outlier. He was a generation older than Ginsberg. He was, and remains, relatively unknown. Bateson had never held an institutional post of any distinction. Yet he came from an illustrious family with roots deep in the British legacy of the life sciences. His father was the biologist William Bateson, who had pioneered the field of genetics. Gregory trained in the new field of anthropology and was part of a group of engineers, mathematicians, and social scientists who initiated concepts in systems and information theory in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. He had been married to Margaret Mead. In the 1950s, after his divorce from Mead, Bateson studied communication in a psychiatric clinic in Palo Alto and introduced the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. In 1967 he was sixty-three years old and was living in a sleepy Hawaiian beach town, studying dolphins. Not unlike Ginsberg, there was something of the rebel in him, demonstrated by his willingness as a scientist to move from discipline to discipline in a career where to specialize was to thrive.

Bateson had spoken at the London congress, too. Ginsberg had met and heard him. Very tall, with longish gray hair pushed back from a domed forehead, Bateson was informal and even careless in his posture and dress but rigorous in his thinking and talk. To the audience in London, he spoke of something called the greenhouse effect. Humankind’s large-scale burning of fossil fuels threatened a change in the earth’s climate, a melting of the polar ice caps, and a rising of sea levels worldwide. The greenhouse effect, together with a number of other threats to the environment, was evidence of an ecology undergoing what the systems engineers of the Macy Conferences called runaway. A system in runaway was a system out of balance and accelerating toward breakdown. It was a general lemmings situation, Ginsberg wrote to his friend the nature poet Gary Snyder.³

Ginsberg’s glib remark belies how much the exposure to Bateson haunted him. It was a revelation, he recalled in the 1986 interview, that if man did not destroy the earth by an atomic bomb in one flash, he might achieve the same end by a slow poisoning of the atmosphere. In his poem Howl, Ginsberg had reckoned with the emotional toll resulting from the threat of instantaneous atomic annihilation and the Cold War culture of containment at home and abroad. Now he confronted another kind of toll, another kind of apocalypse.⁴

Ginsberg’s experience in London was an instance of what Richard Falk called the apocalyptic encounter, the stark confrontation with the unsustainability of modern ways of being and of perceiving, an encounter Falk described as the essence of the postmodern. This book takes Falk’s and Ginsberg’s claims seriously: that a shift in thinking about humankind and the environment is the underrecognized legacy of the 1960s and the foremost intellectual experience of our time.⁵

Although the brainchild of R. D. Laing and his colleagues, the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation took on a life of its own, driven by the concerns of a surging protest movement. Debate was most heated over how best to meet foreign and domestic imperialist oppression, by the expansion of consciousness or by militant resistance. Amid familiar calls for political liberation, Bateson raised the less familiar prospect of ecological limitation.

This book unpacks that London moment. It untangles the emerging ecological consciousness from the dissent and political activism with which it was intertwined. The emancipatory and anti-imperialist voices of the age lodged a critique of what was wrong with the modern world, but the ecological critique cut deeper. Fighting for freedom and self-determination was not a new concept. In contrast, ecological consciousness unsettled what it meant to be a human being.

Articulated by Bateson, the ecological consciousness reorganized perception away from the older concepts of substance, power, force, and impact and around a newer set of concepts that had been transforming philosophy, physics, and the life sciences for decades: information, complexity, uncertainty, and interrelationship. By shifting attention from social crisis to environmental crisis, Bateson gave his audience a kind of keyhole through which to glimpse this new postmodern science of complexity and interrelatedness and, in turn, a new accounting of reality. That new accounting suggested not greater autonomy but greater responsibility; it emphasized not emancipation but dependence. Bateson’s message resonated for many who already took a holistic view of the era’s various crises—who already saw individual neurosis, poverty and social unrest, the war in Vietnam, and environmental degradation as interrelated. But as Ginsberg discovered, that resonance raised prospects that were painful and repugnant to the modern mind and with which the postmodern mind has still not fully reckoned.

Repugnance, fear, and other unpleasant emotions are part of the force field the apocalyptic encounter invokes to ward off sustained contemplation. I take this as a sign that it draws close to fundamentals where our most cherished truths lie vulnerable.

GINSBERG, BATESON, AND THE DOUBLE BIND

Toward the end of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, Walter, the much-abused environmentalist and moral center of the book, has a breakdown. He’s announcing plans for a future songbird preserve, a project he has negotiated on behalf of a corporate strip mining interest. Broadcast live on television, Walter’s appearance confirms his standing as a professional environmentalist working at the national level. It represents, too, the moral compromises Walter has had to make to achieve that standing. His personal life in turmoil, his careerism on display before the world, Walter falls apart, making a spectacle of himself with angry and inflammatory pronouncements. Just before he’s knocked off the podium, the last of his rhetorical restraint gives way, and he shouts, WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET! A CANCER ON THE PLANET! However impolitic the admission, this must be what Walter truly believes, at least when he’s no longer able to control himself and is most in surrender to despair. There is something here that speaks to the repugnance I mentioned. In Walter’s testimony to his own apocalyptic encounter, hopelessness and self-hatred are intertwined.⁶

A similar dynamic occurs on the other side of the political spectrum. There, apprehensions like Walter’s are plainly ridiculous. Environmentalism in its extreme form—green guilt, Calvinism, minus God—implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence. Environmentalism is dismissed as an ideology, a creed that gives people a way of validating certain emotions—cringing emotions, one assumes, better suited to a more superstitious time. One thinks of the procession of medieval penitents in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, whipping themselves to expiate the sins that had brought them the plague. We are all sinners, doomed to die, the novelist Michael Crichton scoffed in a much-reprinted 2003 speech, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. This characterization of environmentalism as a substitute or secular religion is commonplace, but the objection isn’t to religion, per se, but to what are perceived as its retrograde aspects: guilt, sin, irrationalism, self-abasement, and a decidedly un-modern lack of faith in human agency and technical prowess. Such thinking is kooky, said Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine. People believe in solving problems, they don’t want to be peasants, they have a knack for innovating their way out of ‘crises.’ To think otherwise expresses, as Walter does, an utter contempt for humanity.⁷

These are the depths to which one is transported by an apocalyptic encounter like Ginsberg’s. What is most feared or hidden, what must be most guarded against, what is most subject to ridicule, it seems, is the paralyzing funk, the state of self-loathing, the despair over human capacities, perceived as characteristic of an earlier age.⁸

The 1967 connection between Ginsberg and Bateson was presaged by another from the Beat era. Ginsberg had dedicated his 1955 poem Howl to Carl Solomon, a friend who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to the Rockland psychiatric hospital. Ginsberg’s mother, too, was institutionalized as a schizophrenic. In Howl, Ginsberg wrote about his mother’s predicament and about the experiences of Solomon, himself, and his friends in a world driven mad by a culture bent on self-destruction. That same year Howl was published, in 1956, Bateson and the research group he led at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, California, published a paper that offered an environmental explanation for schizophrenia. The disease was perhaps not best understood, the paper proposed, as some chemical malfunction inside the victim’s body. Rather, schizophrenics were responding strategically to a communicational environment patterned by what Bateson called the double bind.⁹

The double bind, stated briefly, was an inescapable paradox in which a message was refuted by its context. Don’t be so obedient was one such message. The context was an imperative; the message ordered the listener to ignore that context. One could neither comply nor escape complying. A child who learned to expect punishment when an alcoholic parent gets the bottle out of the cupboard and who was then punished for correctly demonstrating his or her fear of punishment—that was a child who might learn not to know what he or she knows. That was a child caught in a double bind.¹⁰

The idea was sparked by something Bateson learned from the mathematicians and engineers of the Macy Conferences. A computer went into runaway when it met a paradox in its programming. This triggering of breakdown was not about force or energy; it was about information and the disorders of communication. Bateson applied the concept of runaway to the life sciences and called the paradox the double bind.

The trapped feeling, the sense of being pulled apart by contradiction, spoke to something in the postwar zeitgeist. Madness in general, and schizophrenia in particular, became a resonant metaphor, applicable across many registers. Modern people were schizo or schizoid, the modern mind was divided, and so on. Victims and families facing the heartbreak of mental illness were not necessarily well served by this climate of metaphorical promiscuity. But the double-bind concept was never about tracking down and eradicating the cause of schizophrenia. It was always bigger than that and was itself broadly resonant.¹¹

The double bind resembled other impossible dilemma concepts at midcentury, such as Albert Camus’s notion of the absurd, Reinhold Niebuhr’s reformulation of original sin, and, more whimsically, Joseph Heller’s catch-22, to which the double bind is often compared. Similar in formal terms, these impossible dilemma constructions expressed a return to the tragic sensibility in human life against the technological optimism of the modern age and its cult of progress. Camus’s claim was that any philosophy that didn’t acknowledge the absurd was shallow and escapist. Niebuhr insisted that any theology that didn’t acknowledge original sin was insufficiently profound. In a similar way, Bateson’s double bind restored profundity to naturalistic accounts of the human condition. What it might mean to restore profundity, I intend to explore. That’s what this book is about. But let a few general statements serve as a first stab at greater clarity.

The double-bind paradox distilled a stark confrontation with the failure of modes of organizing perception that are associated with the modern age. In terms of humankind’s relationship with its environment, it expressed the overwhelming trapped-ness and runaway still associated with ecological crisis—that painful experience when the correct response to environmental problems seems to produce no solution but only to exacerbate those problems at an accelerating rate. As a naturalistic concept, tied to the empirical world, the double-bind paradox gives these emotional experiences some purchase in the real, allowing us to investigate and contemplate them rather than dismiss them out of hand. As our environmental challenges grow larger, the double-bind paradox helps to expose the modern project of mastery over nature as shallow and escapist. It proposes the more profound notion of responsibility without control.

BATESON AND THE ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Gregory Bateson’s emergence as a public intellectual begins, roughly speaking, with the publication of the double-bind hypothesis in 1956 and ends with the publication in 1972 of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, the career-spanning collection of essays that would become the bedrock of his legacy. Exactly what that legacy is is difficult to get a bead on. He fits into no clear canon. Much of today’s science, though certainly not all, has long since shed the strong materialism that Bateson disfavored. It includes and continues to investigate the concept of information, which Bateson strived to make central in the life sciences. Because this shift from substance to information is spread across so many disciplines, no single descriptive term has emerged to capture it. Broad phrases such as the cognitive revolution and complexity studies are attempts to do justice to this transformation. The concept of information is central to linguistics and semiotic theory—the logical analysis of communication—and the crossover influence of these disciplines has run from philosophy to the social sciences to literary studies to biology and back again. And this is only to cover the shift as it applies to the academy. The revolution in digital technologies—the age of information—has remade the global economy and the experience of everyday life.

Bateson’s thought bears on all of this development, though to what degree is as of yet unclear. The reason for this is partly due to the nature of scientific work, which is more about the present than the past, and the novel contributions of individuals to that work is less important than collaboration across the field. Whereas, for instance, the double-bind hypothesis today gets little play (and scant respect) in the field of clinical psychiatry, the present constitution of that field is unthinkable without the techniques of family and group therapies that came out of the environmental view of psychological disorder that the double bind so vividly illustrated. Add to that the fact that Bateson did not devote his life’s work to clinical psychiatry or indeed to any particular disciplinary practice.

Bateson moved from discipline to discipline as the needs of his own intellectual inquiry demanded and within the limits that opportunity allowed. In consequence, individual thinkers from across the disciplines—environmentalists, philosophers, postmodern theorists, and scientists of all kinds—cite Bateson’s influence on their work, while overviews attempting to chart general change tend to mention him in passing, if at all. Bateson’s work pointed in a particular direction more than it refined pathways already mapped out. University of California–Berkeley anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence Deacon has said this of Bateson: Like many who were far ahead of their time, his legacy has been and will probably remain thin for a while longer, as the world catches up. Was Bateson marginal, or is he, as a New York Times commentator has recently put it, a lost giant of twentieth-century intellectual history? The answer to both questions may be yes.¹²

Establishing Bateson’s canonical status is not, however, the aim of this book. Nor is this book a proper biography of Gregory Bateson. Rather, I mean to use Bateson’s life and thought as a contextual vehicle with which to break through the emotional force field surrounding the apocalyptic encounter so that at least one instance of it may be explored and its meaning may be better understood. I use the term contextual vehicle because Bateson’s life and thought transport one into exactly those historical contexts necessary to grasp that meaning.

Bateson’s father, William Bateson, began his career as a scientist amid the bitter late nineteenth-century conflict in the British life sciences over accounts of evolution in the aftermath of Charles Darwin. Strong Darwinists such as T. H. Huxley fought a public battle against the Bishop Wilberforces of the world. But at the same time, they held biologists such as William Bateson, who were interrogating Darwin more critically, to be suspect of an unreconstructed romanticism too friendly to the church. Although his pioneering work in Mendelian genetics brought William Bateson into the Darwinist fold, it also required of him a certain intellectual contortion he later came to regret. The position he struck fell apart at the onset of the Great War. The war and its aftermath delivered a tragic blow to the Bateson family: the loss of Gregory’s two older brothers, in whom William Bateson had hoped to secure the survival of his thought.

Gregory came of age in the 1920s, and he imbibed the rebellious bohemianism of that period. But the form of bohemianism he enacted made most others seem like affectation. Bateson spent the bulk of the interwar years about as deep in the exotic as one might get, doing anthropological fieldwork among tribal peoples in New Guinea and Bali. It was during this time he married the indomitable Margaret Mead, who had already achieved success and not a little notoriety with her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Together with Mead, Ruth Benedict, and other anthropologists, Bateson helped advance a social scientific avant-garde of the period’s more general progressivism. During World War II, working as an anthropologist with the Office of Strategic Services, Bateson would apply his anthropological ideas to the war effort. But he would emerge from the war in a state of depression, with the sense that he had betrayed both his and his father’s belief of the proper practice of science as a near-sacred calling.

As the consolidation of American power in the aftermath of the war (the so-called liberal consensus) took shape in ideological opposition to Soviet communism, the U.S. government opened its doors to the social sciences, even to those branches most critical of the American experiment. Bateson’s marriage to Mead crumbled amid his refusal to accompany her through these doors. The refusal took a toll on Bateson. It alienated him in the specialized and increasingly careerist atmosphere of postwar science. But it also gave him the transdisciplinary freedom that would prove crucial to the development of his thought. Bateson’s refusal to join the liberal consensus anticipated the Great Refusal of the discontented youth of the 1960s, which was in turn decisive to the collapse of that consensus. This anticipation also helps to explain the fit between Bateson and the audience that would prove so receptive to his thought.¹³

This was an audience of non-scientists, and in a climate of social and political unrest, most prominently surrounding the war in Vietnam, it was an audience for whom discontentment had become a kind of moral pain. What do you do when a child is on fire? was how one dissident of the period put it. It was an audience sensitive to the critique of modern ways of thinking and being but also one pressed by an urgency to act.¹⁴

This moral crisis, though a direct response to the war in Vietnam, can be understood as a local outbreak of a more general problem with the strong materialism of modern science. Discontentment with mechanistic depictions of reality was prominent among the complaints of Berkeley students involved in the free speech movement in 1964, prior to the war’s escalation. Students claimed they were being shaped into machine parts, punch cards, cogs in a vast, malicious system by the multiversity—an institution corrupted by its alliance with the military-industrial complex, the technocracy, the Combine—the great malicious Moloch of Ginsberg’s Howl. These students sought liberation from a machine existence to lead lives of relevance and meaning. Models for both liberation and meaningfulness were available in a decade of civil rights activism and, later on, in groups associated with the New Left. Models could also be found in the program promulgated by the spiritual generation in San Francisco across the bay by Ginsberg and the Beats. This model was about rebellion against and liberation from the constraints demanded by a schizoid culture, especially those constraints regarding recreational drug use and sexual behavior.¹⁵

During a year and a half of war escalation, a movement against the war grew, bolstered by this insurgent youth nation and encouraged by coalitions between the approaches represented by the available models—the civil rights activists, the New Left, the spiritual generation. But the same urgency that created convergence between models created pressures around any program for action. Change was called for, but what form should it take? Positions among radicals tended to divide along the lines of the ancient debate over where change is properly located: in culture or in structure, in ways of thinking or in collective action against the institutions of power. To simplify the division for the purpose of argument: culturalists located the necessity for change on the inside and advocated a program aimed at hearts and minds; structuralists located that necessity on the outside and advocated a program of political revolution. The debate was not a new one, but it was shot through with the prospect of violence. If there was any single public event where the debate over the locus of change and its implications for violent action was played out, it was the event Ginsberg and Bateson had attended in London, the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. There, as one participant put it, the revolutionary left met the mindblowers.¹⁶

It was here, amid a hunger for programs of action, that Bateson interrogated action itself. Consciousness was partial, screening only an arc of what was a much more complex cybernetic circuit. That partial view introduced a pathological error that the greater system had to somehow absorb. What worried Bateson were the collective actions of scale that had come to predominate modern industrialization. The results were pathologies of scale that threw the system out of balance and set it on its runaway path to disaster. As exemplified in Ginsberg’s response to Bateson’s message, the portent of disaster linked to the bomb was extended beyond mere human aggression and pointed to something more cherished and fundamental in human nature itself. At the same time, it shifted attention away from social relations and called attention to ecological relations.

In Ginsberg’s case, a shift from human-human relations to human- environment relations was not wholly new. On the night in 1955 when Ginsberg first read Howl in public, Gary Snyder read The Berry Feast, a poem representative of the Buddhist discipline of reverence Snyder brought to his writing about nature. Bateson’s message, however, was on the one hand constructed in the authoritative language of science and on the other rather more analogous to the Christian concepts of original sin, judgment, and the prophetic tradition. This may partly explain the sobered, chastened quality of Ginsberg’s reaction. Bateson’s critique of action complicated the liberationist character of both culturalist and structuralist responses by placing focus on the more central problem of human agency. If what was called for in the human-environmental relationship was some kind of atonement, it would not be atonement through new freedoms but perhaps through new checks on freedom, not least of which would be a repudiation of what Bateson termed, variously, the instrumental way of life, the purposive philosophy, and our philosophy of control. Bateson’s stress on dependency was an even further affront to the modern cult of the individual and suggested that renunciation itself was a species of control and therefore beyond human capacities. This was the essence of the bind. Certainly, Rachel Carson had raised the prospect of ecological crisis as spiritual crisis in Silent Spring, her seminal work of 1962, but when it came to concrete solutions, she too had proposed addressing the crisis with better control.¹⁷

In 1967, at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, Bateson’s ideas were avidly received by a radicalized audience steeped in the literature of alienation and hungry for a new worldview. But these were also the ideas that aggravated the uncertainties and fears generated by this group’s political and cultural experiments in living a new worldview and by its factious, ongoing debate over the nature of revolution and the proper locus of change. Any new ecological worldview, insofar as it could be imagined, blurred boundaries and destabilized the human self in ways similar to those described by the period’s psychedelic enthusiasts. But it also threatened to sink the human subject into nature to the extent that this subject was no longer recognizable and moral action could no longer be clearly discerned. Did ecological consciousness call for a posthumanism that would expunge the hard-won moral achievements of a millennium of humanist thought? Does an indictment of human agency preclude the collective action many believe necessary to address social injustice and arrest modernity’s destructive path?

The apocalyptic encounter generates obstacles that remain for a postmodernism that wishes to retain the commitment to human dignity and egalitarianism that represents the best of the modern project. As Jedidiah Purdy puts it in his recent book, After Nature, the understanding that we are not entities but ecologies and other strange intuitions of posthumanism continue to trouble our striving to grasp the political meaning of our new ecological imagination. But all were implicit in Bateson’s address to the London congress.¹⁸

BATESON AND THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

In his masterful overview The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas identifies Bateson’s double-bind concept as an accurate distillation of the dilemma at which the Western mind had arrived by the middle of the twentieth century. The dilemma, as Tarnas summed it up, was that we perceive ourselves as meaning-making souls within a universe that is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. This speaks to the resonance of the double-bind concept. It also suggests that there is a much broader way one might tell this story.¹⁹

In this telling, the story is about the exhaustion of modern thought played out against what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Catastrophe (1914–45). The Great War, rising out of the inequities and conflicts of the modern political and economic orders; worldwide economic collapse; the rise of genocidal authoritarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan; and World War II—all were knitted together in causal loops and packed into the space of three decades. Together, they made a troubling case against the achievements of Western civilization and the promise of the modern worldview: that the liberation of the individual, under the auspices of rational humanism and the scientific method, would lead to material and social progress. The broadest way to understand the emerging ecological consciousness is as the closing argument, so to speak, in this case.²⁰

The critic Lewis Mumford would have sympathized with this general sketch. What I called the promise of the modern worldview, Mumford called the New World Promise. As for worldview, Bateson preferred the term epistemology, which he used in an idiosyncratic way. A transformation as fundamental as that from the medieval to the modern necessarily entails a transformation in the way perception is organized and in how reality is thought to be known. That’s what I mean by worldview, roughly—the everyday metaphysics, the concepts and metaphors with which reality is semiconsciously accounted for. These deep-down truths, not often consulted or revised, are the depths, following Ginsberg and Falk, that the apocalyptic encounter speaks to and disturbs.²¹

Saul Bellow, as quoted above, was himself disturbed by what he perceived as post-Renaissance, post-humanistic, post-Cartesian dissolution, and his categories are useful here. Renaissance humanism affirmed man’s place among the higher beings, apart from the brute beasts, apart from the rest of nature, and championed man’s ability to shape the natural world as he saw fit. (Man is the proper term here, for this process was gendered, to be sure.) René Descartes and the thinkers of the scientific revolution built on and refined these affirmations by drawing a sharp line, as a first principle, between matter and the individual mind. Prior to that, the line had been rather porous in comparison. The modern, in contrast, would increasingly claim mind as its own.²²

By now this is a familiar story. The postulates of Descartes and Isaac Newton allowed causality to be explained in a mechanistic, quantitative, linear fashion, translatable into the language of mathematics. In this manner, the mind-matter line was leveraged to construct new forms of power and order. Old constraints were de-authorized; everything on the matter side of the line (including women, children, and others, when deemed expedient) was freely available for use by the individual mind of man. The notion of freedom was paramount: the freedom to think and act, apart from received knowledge; the freedom to build a new body of knowledge based on rigorous inquiry into nature; the freedom to use that knowledge for greater mastery over nature via technical prowess; the freedom to fashion, so to speak, a seat of command.²³

Criticism of this procedure was ongoing. Much of the criticism focused on the incoherence of the central mind-matter split. In accordance with the new scientific modes of inquiry, materialist accounts of reality were based on measurable, quantifiable, empirical evidence present to the human senses or that could be made present via technological means. In contrast, phenomena not present in this way—value, judgment, purpose, and the like—belonged to the transcendent mind, spirit, or soul of the individual and was explained as a gift of God. This content was prevalent in supernaturalist and mytho-theological accounts of reality, but it must be noted that belief in the supernatural is not required to recognize that mental or spiritual phenomena not present to the senses is nevertheless pervasive in human experience. The contents of mind include such phenomena as how we feel about things, what perspective we take on things, the what-might-be, the what-might-have-been, and all the ways one thing can be made to signify another thing, in language or in gesture. None of these phenomena are present to the senses, none are locatable in matter, yet they are the human stock-in-trade.²⁴

The situation, as Tarnas puts it, became profoundly unintelligible. Incoherence between mind-exclusive and mind-inclusive accounts of reality made for further incoherence between numerous and much argued-over pairings: fact and value, means and ends, science and religion, nature and culture, and so on. As the modern moved into its later nineteenth-century phase, strong materialists attempted to provide coherence by explaining mind-oriented phenomena as derivative of and thus reducible to material interactions at the microscopic level. The contents of mind, so common to human experience, were explained as epiphenomenal, as a kind of froth upon the physical-chemical processes of the real, material world. Despite almost constant attack, this reductionism came to dominate the modern worldview. Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism—those interpretations of the most influential theorists of modernity’s later phase—all partook of it.²⁵

Thus, whatever one calls this strong materialism, whether positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism (to quote William James, himself casting about for a term), critics objected not only to the incoherence between mind- and matter-oriented accounts of reality but also to the subsequent granting of greater authority to materialist accounts and the increasing delegitimization of accounts that included mind. It was as if the modern devaluation of the contents of mind resulted in the disenchantment of the world, in Max Weber’s enduring phrase. The critique of disenchantment was commonly put in starker theological terms: disenchantment meant the loss of God. Friedrich Nietzsche’s assault on mind-oriented accounts posed for him, as his American interpreter Walter Kaufman put it, the greatest and most persistent problem of whether universally valid values and a meaningful life are at all possible in a godless world. In the well-known phrase commonly attributed to Dostoyevsky’s fictional character Ivan Karamazov, without God, everything was permitted.²⁶

This was only the most pointed expression of what was, in general, the modern problem of value. When commentators speak of the acids of modernity, they refer to a burning away of the apparatus surrounding the attribution of value. The result was the modern experience of alienation. Certainly, the modern worldview had championed value-focused concepts, such as natural rights, open and rational discourse, democracy, and the legitimacy of individual experience. But in modernity’s later phase, even these suffered corrosion. If there is no higher law, Walter Lippmann wrote in a 1937 updating of Dostoyevsky, there is no ground on which anyone can challenge the power of the strong to exploit the weak.²⁷

Against charges that the strong materialism of the modern worldview drained human society of its moral foundations, defenders typically responded by holding the line between the human and