Gregory Bateson – at Naropa – continuing from yesterday’s posting
On August 12, 1975, Gregory Bateson was interviewed by Duncan Campbell at Naropa.
A transcript of some sections of that interview follows here: (full audio – here)
DC: My name is Duncan Campbell and I’m welcoming you to “Open Secret”, which is a series of programs which is sponsored by Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, Naropa Institute having been founded in the summer of 1974 by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to provide a space in which the academic and experiential disciplines of the West and the East could encounter each other in some kind of creative interaction. One of the aspects of that is the show “Open Secret”, which is a series of programs on various topics by faculty members who have been at Naropa, either the last summer or this summer, and with us this evening we have Gregory Bateson, who, for the past several weeks at Naropa this summer (1975), has been teaching in an educational module with fifteen students all of whom have lived together and studied together for this period. Gregory Bateson also taught a course at Naropa last summer, and among his many fields of exploration in the past are anthropology, psychiatry, biological sciences and genetics and ecology. He has done field work in New Guinea and Bali, Indonesia, has been research associate with the Langley-Porter Clinic, the chief of biological relations at the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii, and for the last three years has been at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to three prior books that he’s published, his most recent book, Steps To An Ecology of Mind was published in 1972 and is now in a thick and hopefully readable paperback edition put out by Ballantine Books and I thought that maybe one way we could start the conversation Gregory was with respect to one of the essays in that book where you talk about your notion of ecology and how it relates to urban society and the present (“Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization”)
GB: Yeah. That was a conference, what? in 1970?
DC: I think back in about 1969.
GB: 1969 or ’70. Somebody in (Mayor) Lindsay‘s office in New York in their town planning department complained they’d got no idea that was worth anything from the ecologists
and that complaint traveled as gossip and we picked it up as a challenge and set up our own conference for half a dozen people out of Lindsay’s office and.. what? about half a dozen ecologists, and one or two general citizens of New York, and various private agencies,
to look at ecological theory with a view to answering the question “Is this theory any use
to you people with a town planning proposition?
Now, the town planning proposition was a pretty big one. They were really planning for,
I would guess, forty or fifty years ahead there on mid-town New York. And it was a pretty serious and, I thought, rather successful conference really. The thing really, you see, is that if you’ve got a living thing (your body, my body, or New York City as a body, or the United States, or the planet) that living thing will always, so to speak, fill space. What people do is to do the arithmetic on it, they count the number of babies and they count the population, and they count the number of automobiles and they discover the annual income, and so on, and so on, and so on. Alright, from that they prepare curves, then the curves show that in five years, for example, there will be insufficient space on the roads for the automobiles
(the automobiles are breeding too fast for the roads, right?) So, they then persuade the government to increase the roads. So that you get then an enormous commitment of billions of dollars to the direction of change, which in the end is a pathological increase in change, the increase in population. What you do is you see the symptoms and then make the world comfortable for those symptoms..
DC: …which creates new symptoms
GB: which creates new symptoms and gets you irreversibly addicted, so to speak, to whatever it is that’s going wrong. Now this goes, you know, for all sorts of details of life, (even for our medication of ourselves, our taking antibiotics tends to have that pattern,
our use of insecticides has that pattern, we measure the amount of malaria in the world, discover that DDT will kill the mosquitos who carry the malaria, we then make the DDT available to all places that have both mosquitos and malaria, and this is considered very noble and very white of us, you know – and the next thing we know those places are
over-populated). We continue to prepare the way for the disease, in a curious way.
DC: Well do you recommend a going back to famine as some kind of natural cure for this situation?
GB: Well at least I would recommend living the.. some of the pinch-pinch (in which case, people will go away from the place where it pinches, to a considerable degree), make arrangements for their going away rather than making arrangements for their staying.
There are large sections of the country that are relatively uninhabited. If you ploughed up the roads, they’d go away very fast. It would be actually more sane to plough up a lot of roads than just to make new ones
DC: Was this one of the recommendations that was made at that conference?
GB: I wouldn’t say that exactly. But it’s a sort of opening way to start to think, to realize
that, on the whole, the more “common sense” we talk in this conference (or indeed in this room tonight) the harm we can do. Common sense is dreadfully dangerous and it’s almost always on the side of disease!………
GB: Well that (myopic attitude) is (habitual) (and) the habit of ecological problems is to become irreversible, unexpectedly, you know. You kill off the woodpeckers.. Well, you kill off the beetles. The woodpeckers then die (and there’s the poison you fed the beetles) just from having no beetles to eat. And then, before you know it, some other bird or something, has stepped into the niche of the woodpeckers and when the beetles come back the woodpeckers don’t come back to deal with them because their niche has been occupied by someone who doesn’t eat beetles, or eats.. and so on, This is how the game… “how the cookie crumbles”, as they say
DC: Well I guess one of the parts of an ecological vision would be how…how psychologically one could lay the groundwork for a receptive public as part of the system
GB: Ah, now you”re talking, now you’re talking!
DC: As I recall, in that essay, you were mentioning that obviously that kind of thing cannot be legislated and we really have to look more towards education
GB: You can’t really do much until you’ve got a very heavy climate of opinion. Now, where that starts and ends, and how you do it. First of all, does it pay? (this was one of the things we faced). Suppose you decide.. what shall we say?…that your going to make Madison Avenue into a mall. Now your reasons for this are ecological theory of one kind or another and you run up against a self-interest group, (small compared to the number of other self-interest groups involved but still enough to be… to have a veto power) . Should one have, essentially, prejudiced the issue by seducing them in (you know, by political means, by whatever might be available, giving them political quid pro quo, conceivably, or such a thing – those who know about politics know about such things) – or is it more important to stand by the actual issue of the ecology, and be ready to scream “I told you so!, I told you so!” if and when the thing, the pinch, comes? You see it may actually be better to sacrifice a lot of issues rather than cover up the whole logic of the situation. The education may be more important than whether you can turn Madison Avenue into a mall. And one doesn’t know how much has to be sacrificed in order to achieve the education. And this goes from, you know, the scale of a small building or street or something, up to planetary scale.
“One of the major questions for the next twenty to fifty years (sic – Bateson is speaking in 1975. please note) is in what form is the major crisis going to come? It could come as an economic crisis (or economic and political) or it can come as a biological crisis. We can destroy the plankton (the destruction of the plankton will hardly be perceptible, you know, for fifty years, gradually the world will become less habitable and less habitable.
The Bateson-Campbell interview continues, and concludes, tomorrow