Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead married in 1935, en route to an extended period of anthropological fieldwork in Bali, collaborating on the production of Balinese Character (Bateson and Mead 1942a) and moving on to further anthropological study in New Guinea before the 1939–45 war broke out. Bateson failed to find a useful place in the British war effort and, after his daughter Mary Catherine was born in 1939, became a United States resident, working with a number of United States government agencies. With Margaret Mead, Lawrence K. Frank, and other anthropologists (Yans-McLoughlin 1986a, 184–217) he became a member of the Institute for Intercultural Studies. He taught U.S. Navy personnel and troops who were about to be posted to the South Pacific to speak and understand Pidgin English. Later, he became Secretary of the Committee for National Morale, undertook interviews with ex-German immigrants in an attempt to understand “culture at a distance.” Later still Bateson worked in Washington, writing papers for
the use of U.S. soldiers on how to understand the British or other Euro-peans; a type of comparative anthropology very different from his previous experience. Toward the end of the war he was stationed in the Pacific: Ceylon, India, Burma, and then China, working on propaganda and social interpretation for the U.S. forces; tasks that he found manip-ulative and distasteful. Much of this work was undertaken for the Office of Strategic Services, which later became the Central Intelligence Agency.
At the commencement of the war Bateson had major reservations about the application of anthropology and psychology (in the context of inter-national conflict) to the manipulative purposes of government and the military. In spite of this, he seems to have involved himself wholeheart-edly once he was actually engaged. His Pacific area activity attempted to discredit Japanese “news releases” by faking broadcasts that ridiculously overestimated their claimed successes; an application of Bateson’s own concept of “symmetrical schismogenisis.”
David H. Price, an American scholar researching the effects of inter-national conflict on the development of anthropology, obtained access to CIA papers that reveal that not all Bateson’s war work was either seden-tary or undertaken with misgivings (Price 1998, 379–84). In August 1945, Bateson “volunteered for a dangerous secret mission” to attempt the rescue of allied agents believed to have escaped from Japanese cap-tivity. In recommending the award of the Asia Pacific Campaign Service Ribbon to Bateson, his operations officer stated that he had “volunteered to penetrate deep into enemy territory . . . shared all the very consider-able dangers of this operation and in view of his civilian status, his courage in doing so resounds [?] greatly to his credit” (Mosgrip 1945).
After the end of the war Bateson quickly reverted to his earlier atti-tude of distaste and revulsion for the manipulative uses of science. Very soon a profound and lasting concern about the dangers of nuclear weapons and technologies was to be added to this. It is arguably not an aside to comment here that when, in the August of 1945, a scant two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Sixth Sympo-sium on Science, Philosophy, and Religion convened in New York, a much sobered gathering chose to issue a “statement.” This document stressed how the “dramatic events which marked the end of the Second World War” had given new emphasis to some basic problems “the most important of [which] is the need for collective thinking and coopera-tion among men of different backgrounds, for the pursuit of great goals in our time.” The preface to the conference record containing this state-ment lists the most cherished goals of the conference as peace, material and cultural progress, security, and understanding. It notes: “The most
threatening obstacle to the attainment of [these goals] . . . is . . . the shocking failure of communication among men.” The statement goes on to quote the words of President Truman, words that (writing in the years following the terrorist attacks on buildings in New York and Wash-ington and consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) sound all too familiar in tone, characteristic of the nationalistic pride and arrogance with which the government of the United States has promoted its “war on terrorism.” President Truman applauded the “greatest marvel . . . the achievement of scientific brains in putting together infinitely complex pieces of knowledge held by men in very different fields of science . . . the greatest achievement of organized science in history.” The confer-ence’s “statement” goes on to insist that cooperation is as vital to the aims of peace as it had been to the aims of war. It points out that “the problems of peaceful civilization require . . . the collaboration of scholars, men of letters, leaders of the economy, and leaders of philo-sophical and religious thought.” They cite the fate of Germany and Japan as something “that should warn us of the perils of seeking salva-tion by sheer power.” They urge that “America . . . must in these days be careful not to be dazzled with the prospect of world power which has come to her. . . . To hope for a peaceful world which will be permanently dependant on us, economically and militarily, is to hope for that which cannot be, because it should not be. . . . No one now living knows how to deal with the problems of educating a whole people to the type of responsibility which is falling upon us.” And the last paragraph of the statement begins with words that resonate with warning for today: “We cannot bomb ourselves into physical security or moral unity.”
It is not clear whether Gregory Bateson had already returned from his duties with the military in Burma and was present at this conference, or subsequently read the conference papers and was able to contribute
“remarks” to the edited record that was eventually published in 1947 (Bryson, Finkelstein, and MacIver 1947). Either way, it is worth noting that he was profoundly influenced by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the presence in the world of a newly awesome and dangerous technology. This was the beginning of Bateson’s opposition to nuclear weapons and his more general ecological concern.
CYBERNETICS
After the war came cybernetics. Study of the self-regulating systems in airborne missiles had engendered a new view of purposiveness (in machines and organisms) based on the mutual communication of error
between a desired pattern and actuality. Catalyzed by a seminal paper in Philosophy of Science (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943), a whole group of cyberneticists emerged, their early focus being the Macy confer-ences. These were funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which was primarily concerned with seeking knowledge about medical issues that required interdisciplinary study involving biology and the social sciences.
The cybernetics group met from 1946, at first biannually and later annu-ally until 1953, on the theme of “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” For much of the infor-mation about the membership of the Macy conferences I am indebted to David Lipset’s biography Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (1982, 178–79) and also to S. P. Heims, for his paper “Gregory Bateson and the Mathematicians” (1977, 141–59). These meetings brought Bateson into contact with such figures as mathematician Norbert Wiener, computer engineer Julian Bigelow, Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, Hungarian mathematician and computer designer John von Neumann, logician Walter Pitts, neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, and psychol-ogists Lawrence Frank and Lawrence Kubie.
Characteristically, Bateson was attracted by the interdisciplinary nature of the group and its focus. Wiener (1948, 8) wrote that he had shared with Rosenblueth the conviction “that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those that had been neglected as a no-man’s-land between the various established fields.” Starting from a focus on feedback processes “in” the nervous system, their interest widened to biological and ecological systems, engineering, information theory, and learning processes. English ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson (a one-time school friend of Bateson), German biologist Heinrich Kluever, German psychologist Kurt Lewin, philosopher F. S. C. Northrup, information theorist Claude Shannon, learning theorist Donald Marquis, and German engineer Heinz Von Foerster all became members of the group. From those beginnings cybernetics has developed to embrace a whole range of ideas about information flow and control within systems, particularly in circular or more complex causal systems. The impact of this new science on Bateson’s thought cannot be overestimated. Its ideas of circular or recursive causal systems and the consequent emergence of concepts of
“feedback” permitted him to develop a new understanding of the social dynamics of the Iatmul people he had studied in New Guinea.6His initial puzzlement as to why societal systems of “schismogenesis” did not develop into full-scale conflict was resolved by the cybernetic notion of negative feedback. Feedback concepts and the concept of circular or more complex systems of causality were to revolutionize Bateson’s thinking,
notably in the development of his theory of minds as existing in organ-isms and living systems throughout the biological world.
Such “minds” are the flow of information around circular or feedback systems, thus maintaining more complex circuits or “loops.” Systemic feedback is a vital part of this mental activity, especially negative feedback.
Negative feedback systems are those where information travels round loops in which the links between components are such that deviations from the existing state of the system are corrected in succeeding circuits of information. Such corrections result in an approximately stable state (homeostasis) or, in more complex situations, a stable trajectory of devel-opment (homeorhesis). For example, a population with a limited food supply might increase its numbers until malnutrition forced a reduction to the sustainable population level. Such systems are “negative” to change.
Positive feedback systems are those where successive cycles of infor-mation amplify any deviation from the norm, resulting in increasing change: the “vicious-circle effect.” A society in which a majority is preju-diced against a minority group, seeing the minority as idle or stupid, may restrict access to education or employment for that group. The real attainment level of the minority group will fall, so reinforcing the prej-udice of the majority, leading to further deprivation, and so on. These systems are “positive” to change.
Cybernetic systems are now seen to include:
• biological systems: processes within cells, organ growth, embryo development, organisms and groups of organisms (including human persons), and the processes of evolution.
• food supply and habitat.
• social, political, financial, and management systems in groups, communities, nations, international relations, economies, companies, and corporations.
• mental systems: in and between minds, communication, the spread of ideas, the growth of attitudes, ethics, and norms of behavior.
• engineering systems: control of automatic machines, computer theory.
Every one of these areas of systemic theory was to be crucial for Bateson’s later work.