The Reenchantment of the World (55 page)

Les enfants du paradis
(Children of Paradise), Jean-Louis Barrault does
a mime sequence about a pickpocket. The purpose of this sequence was not
to reveal the nature of the unconscious, but to expose the theft of a
watch. It is really straight psychodrama that Bateson is talking about,
I think, rather than every type of analogue communication.

 

 

13. "A Conversation with Gregory Bateson," in Lee Thayer, ed.,
Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues
(London and New York: Gordon
and Breach, Science Publishers, 1973), p. 248.

 

 

14. The discussion that follows is taken from "A Conversation with
Gregory Bateson," p. 247; Mary Catherine Bateson, ed.,
Our Own Metaphor
(New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 16-17; John Brockman, ed.,
About Bateson
(New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 98;
Psychology Today
, May 1972, p. 80
(interview with Lévi-Strauss); and
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, pp. 95,
303, 410, 434-35, 459-60 British edition, and pp. 122-23, 332-33, 434,
460, 483-84 American edition. Cf. also Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,"
Science
155 (10 March 1967), 1203-7.

 

 

15. On acclimation versus addiction see
Mind and Nature
, p. 172-74,
178, and
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, pp. 321, 416-17, 465-5, British
edition, and pp. 351, 441-42, 488-90, American edition.

 

 

16. Some of this information is available in the 1979 article by Pacific
News Service (San Francisco), entitled "Global Comeback of Once-banished
Malaria," by Rasa Gustaitis.

 

 

17. Sources for the following include the interview with Lévi-Strauss
cited in note 14 of this chapter; Mary Catherine Bateson,
Our Own
Metaphor
, pp. 91, 266-79, 285;
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, pp. 420,
426, 475, British edition, and pp. 445, 451, 499, American edition; and
Murray Bookchin "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," in
Post-Scarcity
Anarchism
(Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1971), esp. pp. 63-68, 70-82. The
importance of diversity is also discussed in most textbooks of ecology
or genetics.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 9. The Politics of Consciousness

 

 

1. Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
,
trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribners, 1958; orig. German
publ. 1904-5), p. 182.

 

 

2. See Chapter 7, note 24.

 

 

3. This statement may be wrong. The perception of colors in the human
aura, and their relation to healing, may prove to be such an avenue of
inquiry. Cf. my discussion of color at the conclusion of Chapter 6.

 

 

4.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(London: Paladin, 1973; New York:
Ba!lantine, 1972), p. 436, British edition, p. 461, American edition.

 

 

5. Christopher Hill,
The World Turned Upside Down
(New York: Viking,
1972).

 

 

6. I am not personally active in "planetary politics" and therefore
cannot speak with authority on these matters. What follows, then,
should be understood as a report on certain trends that fall into this
category. In this discussion, I shall be drawing on the literature cited
below to construct the argument, but I wish to state my great indebtedness
to Peter Berg for opening my eyes to the subject in general. Many of the
ideas presented in the discussion that follows have been the focus of
his own political and educational efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area
for more than a decade now, through his journal
Planet Drum
, his book
Reinhabiting a Separate Country
(San Francisco: Planet Drum Books,
1978), and numerous other activities. The nature of planetary culture,
and its existence as a political alternative, was also the subject of a
four-day conference titled "Listening to the Earth," which was codirected
by Berg and myself in San Francisco April 7-10, 1979. Some of the
discussion presented below draws on ideas articulated at this conference.

 

 

The general literature on the subject is fairly large at this point,
so I can do no more than cite my favorites:

 

 

Fiction: Ernest Callenbach,
Ecotopia
(Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books,
1975); Ursula K. LeGuin,
The Dispossessed
(New York: Avon, 1974);
Marge Piercy,
Woman on the Edge of Time
(New York: Knopf, 1976).

 

 

Futures research: Willis W. Harman,
An Incomplete Guide to the Future
(San Francisco: San Francisco Book Company, 1976); Kimon Valaskakis et
al., eds.,
The Conserver Society
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Hazel
Henderson,
Creating Alternative Futures
(New York: Berkley Publishing
Corp., 1978); Edward Goldsmith et al., eds.,
Blueprint for Survival
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Peter Hall, ed.,
Europe 2000
(London: Gerald Duckworth, 1977); Michael Marien, "The Two Visions of
Post-Industrial society,"
Futures
9 (1977), 415-31, and
Toward a
Devolution
, "Social Policy," Nov./Dec. 1978, pp. 26-35.

 

 

Political and economic commentary: Leopold Kohr,
The Breakdown of
Nations
(New York: Dutton, 1975; orig. publ. 1957); Gary Snyder, "Four
Changes," in
Turtle Island
(New York: New Directions, 1974); Gordon
Rattray Taylor,
Rethink
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972); Michael
Zwerin,
Case for the Balkanization of Practically Everyone
(London:
Wilddwood House, 1975); E.F. Schumacher,
Small is Beautiful
(New York:
Harper & Row, 1973); Herman E. Daly, ed.,
Toward a Steady-State Economy
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973); "Ecology Party Manifesto,"
The New
Ecologist
9 (1979), 59-61; and the literature of a number of anarchist
writers and/or social critics, particularly Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich,
Lewis Mumford, and Murray Bookchin (on the connection between anarchism
and ecology, see the essay by Bookchin entitled "Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought," in
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
[Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1971],
and also George Woodcock, "Anarchism and Ecology," in
The Ecologist
4
[1974], 84-88).

 

 

Ecology: Arne Naess, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology
Movement. A Summary,"
Inquiry
16 (1973), 95-100; Paul Shepard,
The
Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game
(New York: Scribner's, 1973);
Bill Devall, "Streams of Environmentalism,"
Natural Resources Journal
19 (1979), no. 3; John Rodman, "The Liberation of Nature?"
Inquiry
20 (1977), 83-131; Raymond F. Dasmann, "Toward a Dynamic Balance of
Man and Nature,"
The Ecologist
6 (1976), 2-5, and "National Parks,
Nature Conservation and 'Future Primitive,'"
The Ecologist
6 (1976),
164-67; and the marvelous essay by Jerry Gorsline and Linn House, "Future
Primitive," which appeared in
Planet Drum
, no. 3 ("Northern Pacific
Rim Alive"), 1974, and was reprinted in
Alcheringa
2 (1977), 111-13.

 

 

Religious renewal: Eleanor Wilner,
Gathering the Winds
(Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), and Jacob Needleman,
A Sense
of the Cosmos
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975).

 

 

7. Unfortunately, parapsychology has, for many years now, been taken quite
seriously by the CIA and the KGB, which are interested in its possible
military applications. I discuss the political dangers of Learning
III later in this chapter, but the reader should be aware of the heavy
American and Soviet investment in psychic research per se, most of it
classified information. There have been a few public revelations of CIA
experimentation with LSD (for example, Project MK-ULTRA) as a result
of material being released under the recent Freedom of Information Act,
but otherwise little is available. See Michael Rossman,
New Age Blues
(New York: Dutton, 1979), pp. 167-260; John D. Marks,
The Search for the
"Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control
(New York: Times Books,
1979); "Soviet Psychic Secrets,"
San Francisco Chronicle
, 16 June 1977;
John L. Wilhelm, "Psychic Spying?"
Washington Post
, 7 August 1977.

 

 

8. Fernand Lamaze,
Painless Childbirth
(New York: Pocket Books, 1977);
Frederick Leboyer,
Birth Without Violence
(New York: Knopf, 1975).

 

 

9. I am using "self" here in the Jungian sense rather than in Bateson's
sense of ego (see Chapter 8).

 

 

10. The American video artist Paul Ryan has been working on just such an
experiment for years, which he calls "triadic practice," in which groups
of threes learn to avoid escalation to conflict. Some aspects of his work
are dealt with in his book
Cybernetics of the Sacred
(Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1974), and more explicitly in "Relationships,"
Talking Wood
1 (1980), 44-55.

 

 

11. Jerry Gorsline and Linn House,
Future Primitive
.

 

 

12. Murray Bookchin,
Post-Scarcity Anarchism
, p. 78; Gary Snyder,
Four Changes
, p. 94.

 

 

13. There is by now a large literature on what is called "appropriate
technology," or "technology with a human face." Two of the most well-known
works are Ivan Illich,
Tools for Conviviality
(New York: Harper & Row,
1973), and Schumacher,
Small is Beautiful
.

 

 

14. Murray Bookchin,
The Limits of the City
(New York: Harper & Row,
1973); Lewis Mumford,
The Culture of Cities
(New. York: Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1938). The quote from Ariès is in
Centuries of Childhood
,
trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 414.

 

 

15. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, "Reinhabiting California," in Peter
Berg,
Reinhabiting a Separate Country
, p. 219.

 

 

16. Roszak's work, especially
Unfinished Animal
(New York: Harper &
Row, 1975),
Where the Wasteland Ends
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor, 1972), and
Person/Planet
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978),
is premised on the Roman Empire model. Cf. Harman,
Incomplete Guide
,
and Robert L. Heilbroner,
Business Civilization in Decline
(New York:
Norton, 1976).

 

 

17. Percival Goodman, "The Double E" (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
Anchor, 1977).

 

 

18. "A Future That Means Trouble,"
San Francisco Chronicle
, 22
December 1975.

 

 

19. Leopold Kohr, "The Breakdown of Nations"; Kevin Phillips, "The
Balkanization of America,"
Harper's
, May 1978, pp. 37-47; Peter Hall,
Europe 2000
, esp. pp. 22-27 (in general, all of the trends I have
sketched in the vision of a planetary culture are laid out in this book,
including some of the sources for change). See also Zwerin, "Case for
the Balkanization of Practically Everyone."

 

 

20. Hall,
Europe 2000
, p. 167.

 

 

21.
I Ching
, trans. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, 3d ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 186 (Hexagram 445,
The Well).

 

 

22. William Coleman, "Bateson and Chromosomes: Conservative Thought in
Science,"
Centaurus
15 (1970), esp. pp. 292-304.

 

 

23. Bateson's work has important political implications, but these are
not particularly emphasized or utilized in his own analyses. In the
case of schizophrenia, for example, the largest unit of Mind under his
consideration is the family, and the family is hardly isolated from a
wider political context. Authority relationships of the larger society
are duplicated within the family structure, but this problem is never
addressed. The power relationship that obtains between parent and child
does not always produce schizophrenia, of course, but as Bateson pointed
out in 1969, it is a necessary condition for it: the victim must be
unable to leave the field. Hence Bateson's focus on disturbances of
metacommunication is important in the analysis, but perhaps incomplete.

 

 

24. Anthony Wilden,
System and Structure
(London: Tavistock Publications,
1972), p. 113.

 

 

25. Anatol Rapoport, "Man, the Symbol User," in Lee Thayer, ed.,
Communication: Ethical and Moral Issues
(New York: Gordon and Breach
Science Publishers, 1973), p. 41.

 

 

26. The following critique of logical typing and hierarchy is the
contribution of Paul Ryan, and I am grateful for his help in this
difficult area. I hasten to add that Ryan does not share the other
criticisms of Bateson's work which I have presented in this chapter.

 

 

For an elaboration of Ryan's critique, see "Metalogue: Gregory
Bateson/Paul Ryan," in a special issue (Spring 1980) of the magazine
Talking Wood
titled "All Area."

 

 

27. G. Spencer Brown,
The Laws of Form
(New York: The Julian Press,
1972), p. x.

 

 

28. Warren S. McCulloch, "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the
Topology of Nervous Nets," in
Embodiments of Mind
(Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1965), pp. 4O-44.

 

 

29. Hierarchy certainly exists in the animal kingdom, as shown by various
studies of the behavior of wolf packs and other animal groups; but there
is no way to prove the existence of a carry-over to human nature, as
advocates of class society frequently wish to do. In Murray Bookchin's
opinion, there "are no hierarchies in nature other than those imposed by
hierarchical modes of human thought, but rather differences merely in
function between and within living things" (