MARY CATHERINE BATESON
Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, was the same age as myself. We were born in 1939. She died last year, which I just found out yesterday. Must have been hiding under a rock. Like many others, my mother admired Margaret Mead, but she took special care for Mary Catherine, believing that our shared name and age made some kind of connection between us. She had the feeling that she’d somehow created that link and should support it as it put her in a category with Margaret Mead.
If she thought I were being an achiever and fulfilling a destiny, this was fine, but if I left her idea of how I should be, that was a source of wounds. Entirely unconsciously, she hoped I would be the person she had hoped to be before the compromises she made to marry and have children. The impossible plan had been for me to be a boy, because of the cultural pattern of English primogeniture. Her other cultural belief was that my father, first-born and educated, would be a great success, which he seemed to be for about a decade. In the end she gave up on all this stuff and made a good life for herself, carrying the rest of us along with her.
Mary Catherine was born into a community of a special sort, mostly women working in the new discipline called anthropology. This valuable vid linked below about cybernetics is from 2018. It’s a little awkward but worth attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpjnVVWXZMs
At eight years old she stepped into her mother’s role of an anthropologist, with her mother’s guidance. She speaks of the great value of being able to leave the subjective victim role so as to see it objectively and relate it to a larger system. She calls this “cybernetics.” I know nothing about cybernetics, but now I’ll make it my business to find out more. (Gone for a bit — now back.) Turns out that the way she’s using it is no different from “Language & Thought”, Dean Barnlund’s class I took in 1957, and the key idea of workshops ever since, whether on peace or leadership — which might be the same thing.
There are principles: one must be a participant, and even observing is a way of participating. (We called it “bird-caging” — every discussion circle appointed someone to sit just outside and note process.) She speaks of “ethical trust” in this combination and of being able to resist the culture, even able to recognize it. Her example is our present culture’s obsession with winning and how it interferes with clarity.
American society does NOT want people to be able to do this observing from outside the circle. The practice interferes with controlling. It causes them to question everything. Her message is crucial to what is happening in politics right now.
“Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory and purposive systems — their structures, constraints, and possibilities. The core concept of the discipline is circular causality or feedback — that is, where the outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action. Cybernetics is concerned with such processes however they are embodied, including in environmental, technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, and conversation.” (Wikipedia, which is designed on that premise.)
A lot of fancy words here, but it looks to me like our dear familiar scientific method: defining what is usually taken for granted, esp. in cultural terms; looking for feedback; revising the assumptions and scrutinizing the new results. Most seem to think of cybernetics as some kind of electronic thing, specific to computers.
Its very pervasiveness has diluted and changed it. For instance, my father, though a proponent of cooperatives, had this incomplete grasp of the cybernetic strategy in the family: “We’ll all take a vote, and then I’ll decide.” That is, he saw it as information gathering, like research for voting or advertising.
There’s an ugly truth I must admit. When I returned to teaching after during the Sixties being away, and tried to teach what I knew after that, things didn’t go well. The students were in revolt. In 1990–91 the kids were different again and the administration had no idea how to deal with them aside from making them play sports and calling the cops to control the worst.
In 2003 I was suddenly hired to teach because no one would take a job in a small white town where the sports strategy had made monsters of the boys so that they ran off all teachers. It was impossible to prepare five classes with two weeks notice. So I stopped being a teacher and became an anthropologist. What system was making these classes this way?
The girls felt they did not need school, that they were in control and ready for the exciting pop world, because they looked sexy and got straight A’s. I mostly ignored them, which enraged them since they were used to being movie stars in the high school video.
The boys turned out to be desperate and suffering. They knew they were being “red meat” for coaches and townsmen, taking physical damage. They knew about the back alley bare-knuckles fights staged by townsmen for betting. They were yearning to escape, but they also thought that they might hit the scholarship jackpot. I just listened.
Then I gave up — in the same state of despair as theirs, not even daring to explain anything. It was a dark time. I quit. Even then, no new credentialed teacher would take the job. I could have been sued for breaking my contract except that a trial would be pretty ugly — for both parties.
Margaret Mead suffered the same kind of situations, I think. But not Mary Catharine because of that intelligent, open-minded, adaptable, generous community that had formed around Ruth Benedict. I wonder about the daughter of Luther Cressman (Mead’s first husband) and his second wife. Cressman had been an Episcopal priest until he followed Margaret, more or less, into academic archeology in Oregon. He found the cache of sagebrush sandals so old that they were covered by ash from Mount Mazama, the mountain that exploded, creating Crater Lake. Older than any other remnants of first people.
Mary Catherine and I looked a bit alike. She has not fought the kind of stress I have and that has been telling. Without intending it, I’ve been doing field work in Western America. Once, attending a Minneapolis workshop for teachers on reservations, I shook hands with Mead and tried to talk to her, but because of the noise of the long line of other teachers waiting for their contact, we essentially made sounds and nodded. She had her famous thumb-stick with her but was seated.
Riding circuit was sort of like a mini-lecture tour except that I came back to the same people and the groups were small enough that I knew most people. I spoke to responding faces and tried to talk about things they cared about. Once again I was a participant/observer as recommended by Mary Catharine in the name of cybernetics. After researching a bit, I think the name “cybernetics” is misleading, but the concept as she describes it is sound and vital. I know this from experience. But what happened to all those things we knew and practiced? They worked.
