Gregory Bateson

Life

Bateson was the son of the geneticist William Bateson, who coined the word “genetics” and named him after Gregor Mendel. He studied zoology and then anthropology at Cambridge and did fieldwork among the Iatmul of New Guinea, the basis of his book Naven (1936). He married Margaret Mead in 1936, and together they made a pioneering photographic study of Balinese culture.

After the war he moved between institutions and disciplines rather than building a career in one. He studied communication in schizophrenia at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, communication among dolphins in the Virgin Islands and Hawaii, and in the 1970s taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lived at the Esalen Institute. He died in San Francisco in 1980.

Influences

His father’s biology and the writing of Samuel Butler shaped his sense that mind and evolution belong together. From Whitehead and Russell he took the theory of logical types, which became central to his ideas about levels of learning and communication. The Macy Conferences, which he attended with Mead from the start, gave him the cybernetic vocabulary of feedback and information that tied his interests together.

Contributions

In Naven he described schismogenesis, the way relationships escalate through mutual reinforcement, a positive feedback process years before the term was common. With Don Jackson, Jay Haley and John Weakland he proposed the double bind (1956), a contradictory message at two logical levels, as a factor in schizophrenia; it shaped family therapy for decades. He distinguished levels of learning (learning, learning to learn, and so on), and defined the unit of information as “a difference which makes a difference”.

His essays, collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), argued that mind is a property of systems of interacting parts, including organisms in their environments, and that the ecological crisis comes from an error of thinking that separates the two.

Why it matters today

Bateson’s systemic view of mind anticipates embodied and extended cognition, and his warnings about conscious purpose overriding ecological circuits read as a commentary on climate change and optimisation-driven technology.

Further reading

• Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
• Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979)
• Nora Bateson (dir.), An Ecology of Mind (2010, film)