January 30, 2020
Nora Bateson is the daughter of the systemic thinker Gregory Bateson. In continuation of his work she is researching our being and acting in the many contexts in which our lives take place. She also believes that we will only be able to understand the climate crisis properly if we take these many contexts of our individual and social lives into account.
evolve: How do you understand the shift that is going on with the climate crisis? What is happening? How can we human beings respond?
Nora Bateson: It's important that we don't get distracted by the climate crisis that we're facing. The climate crisis is one of many consequences of what happens in a complex living system when, from multiple directions, the life within it is weakened. In order to remain viable in any ecology, an organism needs to be relevant in that ecology, which means that it has to be in relationship in multiple contexts, not just one. For example, what the earthworm does for the tree is different from what the earthworm does with the bacteria, or with the mycelium and so on. All those different contexts are the relevance of the earthworm.
We humans need to be relevant. But what does it require for us to be relevant? When you look at social ecology or cultural ecology, you see that we need education, we need money, we need sleep, we need safety, we need all sorts of processes from a good tax standing to a good reputation of our ancestors to many other things. But somehow the context of relevance that we have within our social systems is not relevant to the biological systems we live within. So, the problem is deep and that's why it's really important to be careful when we're addressing the climate crisis. We must not lose sight of the loss of biodiversity, the wealth gap, the fact that huge populations of Western so-called democratic countries are so discontent that they're using the democratic process to disrupt that same democratic process. It is not insignificant that there are these deep oceans of brokenness. These levels of brokenness are connected to ways of being that are destructive to each other and therefore to the biosphere.
Nora Bateson is the daughter of the systemic thinker Gregory Bateson. In continuation of his work she is researching our being and acting in the many contexts in which our lives take place. She also believes that we will only be able to understand the climate crisis properly if we take these many contexts of our individual and social lives into account.
evolve: How do you understand the shift that is going on with the climate crisis? What is happening? How can we human beings respond?
Nora Bateson: It's important that we don't get distracted by the climate crisis that we're facing. The climate crisis is one of many consequences of what happens in a complex living system when, from multiple directions, the life within it is weakened. In order to remain viable in any ecology, an organism needs to be relevant in that ecology, which means that it has to be in relationship in multiple contexts, not just one. For example, what the earthworm does for the tree is different from what the earthworm does with the bacteria, or with the mycelium and so on. All those different contexts are the relevance of the earthworm.
We humans need to be relevant. But what does it require for us to be relevant? When you look at social ecology or cultural ecology, you see that we need education, we need money, we need sleep, we need safety, we need all sorts of processes from a good tax standing to a good reputation of our ancestors to many other things. But somehow the context of relevance that we have within our social systems is not relevant to the biological systems we live within. So, the problem is deep and that's why it's really important to be careful when we're addressing the climate crisis. We must not lose sight of the loss of biodiversity, the wealth gap, the fact that huge populations of Western so-called democratic countries are so discontent that they're using the democratic process to disrupt that same democratic process. It is not insignificant that there are these deep oceans of brokenness. These levels of brokenness are connected to ways of being that are destructive to each other and therefore to the biosphere.
Think about the spectrum of problems in one simple act like buying a suit jacket from Zara before giving a talk on ecology somewhere: from the exploitation of the people who make it, to the destruction of the chemicals in the cotton and in the soil, to the transportation and the carbon and how it's distributed, to the weird avarice of needing such a thing and perceiving myself in a culture in which this is totally normal and expected. By using a transcontextual relevance approach, you can start seeing how bizarre this is. This is why I think it's good not to get caught thinking that what we're dealing with is the climate crisis. We are dealing with questions about our way of life that go deep into our own lifestyle and decisions, as well as being deeply intertwined with social and global contexts. That is why we must also understand and perceive the impending climate catastrophe in these multiple contexts.
It's about letting an alchemy of intimacy work in the mutual connection.
A trans-contextual view
e: Some people have come to the point that they see the human experiment as a failed experiment. They argue that we should just accept the fact that probably in the next century the wisdom of the Earth biosystem is probably going to push most of us into the sea.
NB: It's probably better to remain alert to that option, that seems likely to me. But it's also likely that something can come out of left field that no one has considered yet. I don't think technology is going to save us. I don't think politics is going to save us. I don't think revolution is going to save us. There's incredible possibility because you can't underestimate the human spirit and you can't underestimate that life wants to keep living. In the end we are part of life and nature.
Right now two of the very best aspects of the human being create a deadly mix: we want to be loved and we want to create. Right now we have runaway innovation—innovation for the sake of innovation. I find really interesting that these most precious aspects of what it is to be a human being are actually at the core of why we're going so far awry. However, some transcontextual way of seeing could pop in and soak in, and we could create a different way of being.
e: What is a transcontextual way of seeing?
NB: This is a word that I got out of my dad's work and it's been so useful to me. It has made my work with systems and complexity much more dimensional. When you try to describe any living process, if you are to take its existing complexity onboard, it requires that you be very careful, because so much of the information is actually moving. Most of the time when we go to get information, we pull things out of context so that they can be measured and defined. But as soon as you put them back in context, those same things are something completely different.
Transcontextual is a way of looking at the description of a complex living process that allows for things outside of the context you think you're talking about. This is what I mean by multiple contexts. Multiple contexts mean a lot of information that is not extractable, measurable, definable, or even repeatable, because it's moving. We're talking about climate but that is not just about counting units of carbon in the sky, it's about registering what it means for two young people to impress each other on a college campus or for a young family to get to visit their ancestors. It's easy to get lost by honing ever closer, ever tighter into the thing we think we should focus on. If you do that in a complex system, you will make mistakes.
So many of us now are trying to identify who we are using smaller and smaller categories and in doing so there is a really high risk of not being able to perceive ourselves in the complexity that we are actually in. If we can't see ourselves in that complexity, we certainly can't see other people. Additionally, this ties into a problem around responsibility and accountability. Right now, I am dealing with people under 30 who have grown up in a world that is so dissimilar to the world that you and I grew up in. They are feeling a level of despair and are asking questions like “Should I bother falling in love?”, “What is a life goal?”, “Do I have children?”, “Am I a good person?”, “How can I be a good person? Everything that I touch makes me connected to exploitation and extraction.”
We should not underestimate the human spirit because we should not underestimate that life itself wants to live.
There's a need to recognize that in the existing set of sense making processes of our sociocultural matrix, if you will, we don't even have language for what we need to work with. Our capacities for description and sense making are so limited by our language and what we have grown up with. But we do know that we've been cooking in the same pot of really destructive behavior for hundreds of years, thousands of years.
Intimate complexity
e: Do you think we can hold the ultimate unknowability of another's experience within a context of sense making and sensing that allows us to be attuned to resonance?
NB: I believe that resonance is part of life. Rhythms and resonances run deep into the communication of all organisms. If you want to know from me what I think our work is when we deal with the climate crisis, it's that.
e: Is that what you're doing with the warm data process?
NB: Yes, the warm data process allows groups of people to experience the interdependency of life through the richness of idiosyncratic and particular conversations. It allows for there to be a kind of mulching, a kind of bacteria meets bacteria environment of ideas, a kind of overlapping of patterns. It's all unexpected. You have no way of knowing what people are going to say; there is no charted outcome. It's merely about moving around through the contexts and exploring a question, for example, “What is health in a changing world?”
You'll hear about people's grandmothers and you'll hear about their college degrees and you'll hear about some meme they saw last week and you'll hear about a joke they heard. The textures of things that come out are actually in keeping with the complexity we need, so it doesn't become a flat discourse of factoids or bullet points around “What is health?” It's about allowing an alchemy of familiarity with the interdependency to brew.
There's so much happening and it's only a couple hours, but in those couple hours that everyone in the room gets a really deep and profound exposure to the complexity of something that they're dealing with. It's a deeply personal and intimately felt complexity. It's resonant with the other people, and it's resonating also across your own memories, understandings and experiences well beyond the verbal realm.
Compost for the change
e: This also is an experience of creativity, is it not? But it's a different kind of creativity than the one that's generated by me, my creativity, or even our team or whatever that's going to create the next new thing that will gain us relevance or love.
NB: Right and you can't trace anything back to anywhere or anyone either. So, the warm data lab process generates a shared sense of that experience of perception. The ideas and the notions and the images and the visions and the tones find each other, because that's where a new perception really lies.
e: How do you see this responsive to where we are at the moment?
NB: We need to be able to perceive interdependency together. Interdependency has got richness to it but it is also messy and curly and squishy and sticky and kinky and it's not clean and clear and elegant and definable. It's not a strategy or a goal. It's the compost of the soil from which we make sense of everything. That's where we have to make the change in us as human beings. That's not some idea that you can tell people about and have them get it and just carry on. That's not how that works. It has to attach to your memories of your grandmother and your childhood memories and your understanding of your relationship to your children and your body and your sexuality and your bank account and the minutiae of the way that you think about how you crave chocolate when you know it's produced by slaves. We have to go there. We have to get to a fundamentally different way of understanding because we're up against our instincts to be relevant and to do creative things. What's important is that we're talking about it at a cultural level.
The interview was conducted by Elizabeth Debold.
Nora Bateson is the director of the International Bateson Institute, headquartered in Sweden. She works worldwide as a lecturer, researcher, author and filmmaker. About the work of her father Gregory Bateson, she produced the award-winning documentary film
"An Ecology of Mind," which she also directed.
www.batesoninstitute.org
