Gregory Batesons ideas - relevant to addiction (long)

I ended up ordering Ecology of Mind after reading this article today. There's an essay in there that has to do with cybernetics of self and a theory of alcoholism, which you can find online as a PDF. It's almost 30 pages so this post is not even that long in comparison. If you are willing to put in a little time it'll be worth it:

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-gregory-bateson-matters/



Let me present a thumbnail sketch of his many vocations, not just for your admiration (although it’s hard not to admire such flexibility in vocation), but to help you understand how Bateson was uniquely situated to integrate the disparate threads of the counterculture.



Bateson started out a biologist, and with an exceptional pedigree — his father, William Bateson, had actually coined the term “genetics.” Bateson demonstrated a deep understanding of Darwinian processes that he first learned at home during his earliest days. In the late 1920s, he taught linguistics at the University of Sydney. In the 1930s, he was a high-profile anthropologist and did important fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali (often in tandem with his wife at the time, Margaret Mead). After World War II, he became a well-known psychotherapist and developed his famous double bind theory, which initially aimed at explicating the causes of schizophrenia, but could be applied to a wide range of other areas, including comedy, art, poetry, and organizational behavior. In the 1960s, Bateson researched the effects of LSD at a Veterans Hospital near Stanford University, where he and Dr. Leo Hollister recruited future novelist and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey to participate in his experiments. Later still, he moved to the Virgin Islands and ran a research laboratory funded by the eccentric John Lilly, who wanted to find ways of communicating with dolphins. But through all of this, our intrepid researcher maintained his greatest passion: the study and propagation of cybernetics, which aimed to explain the systems of human behavior and thinking with a kind of precision and scientific rigor akin to what Newton had applied to physics or Euclid to geometry.



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The Two Kinds of Systems: Bateson believed that one of the greatest innovations in human history was the feedback loop. He frequently talked about the steam engine as an analogy for healthy human interactions, focusing on the controls in the engine that check the process and keep it running at a steady pace. When looking for similar feedback loops in human interactions, Bateson saw that they didn’t always exist, or operate in the way they should. As a result, he recognized that there were two kinds of systems: ones that relied on feedback to create stability, and others that tended to escalate and create runaway trends.



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Why is this especially relevant today? An obvious answer is to point to the internet as the most extreme example you could imagine of a runaway system. The business plans of the companies that flourish on the web are always built on what entrepreneurs call the scalability of the internet, its amazing capacity to spread trends and processes everywhere in the world at lightning speed. In the old days, a company might spend decades developing production capacity and distribution networks in different parts of the globe, but nowadays the fastest-growing business models — whether an app or website or cloud-built service — can reach everywhere almost immediately. To describe this in Bateson’s terms, the digital age is built on the backs of runaway systems. And in an uncanny, disturbing way, even our day-to-day lives away from screens and digital interfaces seem to mimic this tendency, riding a wave of escalating trends with no feedback loop to keep them in check.



When you see these processes from Bateson’s perspective, you suddenly understand why something as innocent as a search engine (Google) or social network for family and friends (Facebook) can create so many unanticipated problems, whether we are talking about the invasion of privacy or the distortion of daily news. Not only do these systems lack reliable checks and balances, but they were actually created with the goal of eliminating checks and balances.



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Bateson’s Definition of Mind: This leads us to the strangest ingredient in Bateson’s worldview — what he meant by the word “mind.” And his quirky approach to mental processes is hardly a small matter — after all, his larger quest was an ecology of mind.



For Bateson, mind existed as part of an integrated system that also involved elements of the world. He gives the example of a lumberjack cutting down a tree with an axe. Bateson argues that any definition of this woodcutter’s mental processes that doesn’t also include the axe, the tree, and the feedback loop back to the human body, is both incomplete and dangerously misleading. Although Bateson doesn’t make this comparison, his view is aligned with Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world, which allowed the German philosopher to bypass many of the paradoxes and problems created by out tendency to divide our schemas into subject and object.



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If we exclude our surrounding habitat from our projects of self-care — in the plugged-in, screen-obsessed manner of contemporary culture — the larger systems we have ignored will eventually degrade and fail to support us. By all indications, that danger is far greater today than it was during Bateson’s lifetime. Indeed, we may be approaching a breaking point.



When global connectedness goes hand in hand increasing self-involvement, everyone suffers. As theorist René Girard — who drew on Bateson’s concept of the double bind in his own studies of runaway violence — once commented: “When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”



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The Double Bind: Bateson originally developed the double bind model, the most famous concept to come out of his research, as a means of understanding dysfunctional families, but he soon saw that it could be applied to a wide range of other situations.



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Described in the simplest terms, the double bind represents a situation in which a person is required to do two things simultaneously, but these things are in conflict with each other. In the words of the well-known proverb, you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. The intensity of these situations is enhanced by the fact that they often occur in contexts where those involved aren’t allowed to mention the double bind. The root of the problem remains, by definition, unspoken.



In Bateson’s classic example, a mother is emotionally distant from a child but forces the youngster to take the blame for the breakdown in intimacy. The child now faces a double bind: speaking the truth will get the mother angry and lead to denials and even greater separation, while accepting the lie turns the youngster into the enemy who is now assigned responsibility for the underlying rupture and all its attendant problems. And because these are, by definition, unsolvable problems, participants in the double bind are forced to confront this insurmountable dilemma over and over again.



One of Bateson’s key insights was that the double bind usually takes place simultaneously in two different contexts. In the example cited, the mother’s hostile behavior takes place at one level and the explanation of the hostile behavior operates at a higher level. “[C]onsequently it is of a different order of message,” he explains. “It is a message about a sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existence of those messages which it is about, i.e., the hostile withdrawal.”



This is why the double bind is the source of so much humor: what makes sense at one level is absurd at another.



Consider the Bob Newhart quip: “I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down.’” Or Robin Williams: “Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?” Or Steven Wright: “I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.” Each of these gets laughs by mixing up behavior and the context for the behavior.



The first thing you learn about the double bind is that the evidence is always indirect: the participants won’t (or can’t) admit its influence. But to the outsider, the signs are clear: the main symptom of the double bind is a persistent and structural insistence on saying things that every disinterested party can see are simply untrue.



This is different from lying or hypocrisy, which are merely human weaknesses, not structural constraints. And it goes far beyond the well-known professions that deliberately spread untruths, such as used-car dealers and politicians. But those vocations are useful in understanding the dynamic at play here. Why do politicians or shyster lawyers or spokespersons for big corporations say things they know aren’t true? Well, the answer is obvious: these individuals are embedded in a larger structure that demands falsehood and, even worse, rewards liars for assimilating the party line with total conviction.

 

Here's the link to the essay on a cybernetic theory of alcoholism mentioned at the beginning of the OP. You might try reading just page 452 (or 13 of the PDF) to get an idea of his perspective. You probably won't hear an interpretation of AA like this at a meeting, though he finds it positive but in a different way: http://ift-malta.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-cybernetics-of-self-A-theory-of-alcoholism.pdf