Nora Bateson talking about her father Gregory

Nora Bateson interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 25th February 2012

0:05:07 Grandfather, William Bateson, probably best known for coining term
'genetics'; less known for work that resurfaced later with my father, Gregory
Bateson; those threads had to do with looking at the way messaging and
communication happens inside living things; he referred to those communication
patterns in terms of vibrations; in some ways we are just getting back to some
of William's work now in genetics and other fields; for a long time it was
pooh-poohed with a more linear causation of chromosomes and other means of
detecting genetic inheritance; my grandmother, Beatrice Durham, was a
formidable woman, an intellectual, who helped William with his research; he was surrounded by powerful women; his sister was a poet, and there were others; I think that speaks volumes of a man; he worked on peas and feathers, looking for patterns, which was not so dissimilar to what Gregory was doing; he was a stern man; there is a photograph of him looking straight at the camera with a dour face, and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth; he clearly wanted to be photographed in this way; he was a traveller and studied the Steppes, but I
need to learn more about him

5:22:00 The fact that my father was the only survivor of three sons [one killed
in First World War, another committed suicide] must have put great pressure on him; must have been devastating too for Beatrice and William; Gregory did talk a little about his brothers but he was pretty young at the time of their
deaths; the weight of what fell to him to carry was more than he wanted to bear
and was one of the reasons that he left zoology and went to become an
anthropologist; I don't know much about his childhood; he was interested in
childhood and studied it in Bali, so something may have stirred in him through
that research and made him look at ways of raising children in different
cultures; he didn't say much about his own childhood and most of what he said
about W.B. was that he was very stern

7:56:08 Gregory and Margaret Mead remained great friends; he was always very loving to me but not dominating; there was never any discussion of achievement, or any portrayal of what I might or might not become; I think he did not want to tamper with that part of my path-making; I have not been quite as hands-off with my own kids; he did read to me - Blake, a lot of Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling; he liked things that played with the frame, and very often this occurs in books for children written by clever people; 'Wind in the Willows' did feature, and 'Mary Poppins'

12:48:12 I do have brothers and sisters from my parents' previous marriages;
there are big age differences between us and we all grew up in completely
different places, with a father who was in a different career for each of his
children; my sister was there during the Macy and Wenner Gren conferences when
he was involved with the beginnings of cybernetics; my brother was with him
during the time he was at Paolo Alto working on psycho-therapy; my father was
writing 'Mind and Nature' and was a teacher at U.C. Santa Cruz, teaching on the History of Consciousness program; so I have siblings with whom I share a love for Stilton cheese, but a lot that we don't share

15:07:05 I think the question that lay behind my father's work was how is the
world organized, what is the order of life; this is my own conjecture and maybe
projection, but the second part of that might have to be, what is it to be a
participant in that sort of order, because we are inside whatever the
organization of life is; at the deepest level, part of that study is looking at
the way the parts are related and how they learn together; the fact of that
learning being mutual is really important to what he was looking at; looking
between the parts, whether in a family, or between species on a hillside; there
is a kind of delight and ecstatic participation in that, that for Gregory was
an ethics, a reflection of a very deep and courageous affection for life in all
its forms; it was courageous in the sense of advocacy and noticing the very
delicate pieces of the puzzle, and not being swept up by the current rhetoric
or schools of knowledge were defining; he was willing to step outside the
protocols which would have deemed him viable in an academic professional
framework, because he wanted to find out something else; that is a huge risk;
love makes you flaky - it is a word that I am using, but he does use it once,
and my sister wrote it up in her book 'Our own Metaphor'; this was based on a
transcript of conference papers where he defines love; his definition sounds so
cold and scientific at first, it goes: "I am a complex system and I see you as
a complex system with lots of relationships. I regard your system with
affection, within the larger systems within systems, into the natural world of
which we both are part, which I also regard with affection"; I think he saw the
grace with which things came together essentially as sacred, meaning the
processes and context of life are sacred; he was not a believer and would not
allow me to be baptized

24:20:04 The film that I have made about my father came in to being because my sister asked me to do something as there was not any audiovisual material on Gregory for the centennial celebrations that were going on around the world in 2004; once I got into it I decided I wanted to make a film; one reason for doing it was that I wanted my children to get to know their grandfather, and as it was the medium I worked with it was best way I could do so; another reason was that when I started looking at the video tapes of his lectures what I found was that the ideas he was working with were really relevant, and they didn’t feel as difficult as I remembered; I used to sit in on a lot of his lectures
and I remember that people were confused by him; what struck me was that the audiences were not going to be as confused as they used to be, that something had changed in the outer world; some vocabulary has changed - we use the word interconnected all the time now - we talk about linkages and interdependency in terms of the Internet; this is not a language now that is a huge distance from us; in that capacity it was much easier to get at some of these things, still not easy to understand the root from which they were coming, but at least the scaffolding around him was not at hard to get inside; the other reason for making the film was that I just felt it was important, that there was a kind of thinking that he was doing and that his work had been to leave behind some tools for us to gain leverage in our ability to see the kind of traps that we
are in and begin to unravel them; so I decided to make a film, and from there
it was a long process; I think it took about five years but I was raising
children at the same time and self-funding; I would do a little bit and then
stop, spend time with my children, raise more money and do a bit more; part of
this was the feeling of the hypocrisy of leaving my children to make a movie on
my relationship with my father; it was difficult to work out how to organize
the material; first I collected some bits, then I came up with a plan once I
knew what I had to work with; I then wrote a script which I changed many times; the most tenuous piece was my being in the story and I was reluctant to do that; finally I was working with a cameraman who told me that I must be part of the movie

30:55:17 What I wanted to get across was that he wanted to do something to make the world a better place; he wanted to ease the suffering caused by the traps we get into as well as increase the joy of the beauty of life; it is really
difficult to integrate that into a body of intellectual work; he would have
travelled on, I'm sure of it; I think he died really dissatisfied; he used to
complain that he wrote good books that people then put on coffee tables; he
felt that no one understood him; I think he was lonely because the nature of
the work he was doing put him in all disciplines and none; there is a paradox
to that so that its hard to have a group of peers to share your ideas with when
they are all located in the various pockets of knowledge; wherever he was he
was an outsider; on that level I think he left feeling sad, but he did leave
great tools for the next generations to play with; I am watching an incredible
traction begin and I am not sure it is related to my film or is a collective
return to some of these ideas; there are other system scientists who have
carried the weight of cybernetics but I think it has become clear that Gregory
was offering something different, and that with his version of systems there is
something that has a deeper kind of integration; in our present world there is
a level of anxiety where we are desperately trying to find solutions to large
problems; we need new thinking tools with which to approach them; maybe for
those reasons there is a new interest in his work