A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson

Evan Simpson is a philosophy professor and dean of humanities at
McMaster University and the editor of Anti-foundationalism and Practical
Reasoning: Conversations Between Hermeneutics and Analysis.

This book pursues three themes: the development of a brilliant holistic
scientist; his notions of pattern in nonlinear or “recursive”
systems; and a steadily growing perspective on the modern ecological
predicament as a product of “epistemological error.” Many people
remember Gregory Bateson as a husband of the anthropologist Margaret
Mead, but his full intellectual range is suggested by the fact that he
was a founder and then critic of cybernetics, a theorist of evolution,
and a magnet for countercultural enthusiasms. His style of argument
includes an enormous “interactive gestalt,” including connections
between art and science in general and an approach to ecological
understanding through aesthetics in particular. He was deeply interested
in patterns of communication and their disorders in contrast to
metaphors of power that can be associated with Darwinism. These
metaphors, he thought, betray an attachment to mechanistic explanation
in Western sciences, whereas social systems, like ecological systems,
are primarily defined by flows of information. Since power is a matter
of degree, focusing on it leads scientists to depend on quantitative
analyses, which cannot reflect the many levels of value that are
characteristic of human organization. Among his notable conclusions is
that “sustainable development” as a program for environmental action
is a paradoxical notion.

None of these thoughts are easy. They threaten explaining the obscure
by the obscure. When in the 1950s Bateson took up the connection between
two domains—genome and environment— as analogues of communicative
activity, the accessibility of his work proved very difficult. As
Harries-Jones observes, “even friends and intellectual acquaintances
who knew his train of thinking over a long period of time now found
Bateson’s inquiry difficult, if not impossible to follow.”
References to his letters indicate that he realized this himself. A
Recursive Vision thus faces a formidable task, which it can hope to
achieve only incompletely. The author sometimes resorts to repetition
and relegates a number of technical details to four appendixes, but
these techniques do not suffice to reverse the fact that “modern
environmentalists have generally ignored Bateson.” That seems a pity,
since the alternative paradigm suggested here may well be worth trying
to master.