May I Have Your Attention

These words sometimes come across the public address system in my apartment – usually in response to a fire inspection to warn us that the alarms are not signaling a real fire. But I noticed a connection in a recent article by Charles Warzel, who interviewed Michael Goldhaber and called him a Cassandra for our current age.

Goldhaber was a physicist but also something of a prophet. In the eighties he predicted that society would become totally a world of online technology – with its political rudeness, social media over-sharing, information hijacking, reality TV, influencers and bloggers. Distraction affects our action – or the lack of it.

Goldhaber later termed this “the attention economy”. Everyone from presidents to parents want to have global influence. It used to be that modesty and humility were the pre-eminent virtues but not any more. Everyone is busy seeking attention – or getting it. Attention has become the currency of advertising, journalism and social media where the numbers of likes or subscribers are the only thing that counts.

There is a certain amount of pushback lately with requests for content moderation and censorship. But there is also an appeal to first amendment rights - where what a president Tweets is just a personal expression of his point of view – or even after pushback explained away as sarcasm.

What really matters is that attention is power gained through tweets and rallies carried by cable news. Complaining about it or opposing it as some channels do doesn’t take away the attention. It enhances it.

What Goldhaber wonders about – and we should too – is the effect of this attnetion on democracy. What used to be nuanced discussion now come in the form of slogans. They are easy to say and obvious and become rallying cries. Difference of opinion now gives way to tribalism where every opponent becomes the enemy to be both feared and hated. It’s easy to voice and publish what used to be unmentionable and become a spokesman. These often are views that others have been afraid to say, but are willing to give power to anyone who can say it. That’s precisely the power of the former president.

What is to be done? We need to start to pay attention to personal our habits and hobbies. They simply relate to how we spend our time, a limited and precious commodity. A pandemic could be an unanticipated moment of grace to do that. We also need to see how we relate to the social issues of our era. We also need to re-evaluate our relationship with those closest to us and how to connect during a lockdown. Loneliness and discouragement are common emotions for all of us along with hope for better times. It is not insignificant that a reporter who followed the life of conspiracy enthusiasts found that much of their conversation is social – wishing one another happy birthday in the midst of spreading hateful or ridiculous information. What was desired and met was companionship.

I’ve been a fan of Howard Rheingold since I first encountered him in the eighties. I even wrote him once and was pleased when he took the time to write back. He says:

“Attention is a limited commodity – so pay attention where you pay attention”.

Gratitude

Last year on the day after Christmas, family members and I boarded a plane in Toronto. Five and a half hours later we were enjoying a late lunch at a lovely Chinese restaurant in Richmond, British Columbia. We texted relatives that we would catch the six o’clock ferry to join them on Bowen Island and anticipated the celebration of marriage of a family member and her new husband the next day.

This year some of the same family members picked me up to transport me to the one permitted household - with presents for exchange,, a floral arrangement sent from the BC relatives, home-made cookies from an exchange among Toronto friends, and my dinner contribution of an English trifle.  We settled in for a leisurely lunch, while my son did the cooking and viewed an interchange on his laptop in the kitchen and the rest of us visited with extended family members on another one in the dinning room – one from a recently purchased schoolhouse getaway in Eastern Ontario, one from a dacha outside Moscow, another from an apartment in Winnipeg, Manitoba at minus forty degrees – where Fahrenheit and Centigrade temperatures actually meet – colder than the home of one of the residents from Finland – and another stuck in Ottawa where the meeting of the Canadian Senate kept him from flying home in time. 

 On Christmas Eve we had gathered on Zoom for an even larger gathering where another family member read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”.  Three generations of one family had lived there, either teaching at or attending one of the United World Colleges. Members were now spread out in different countries but still seeing one another on the screen.  Another presented a radio presentation, where he acted as Trinculo in Shakespeares’ The Tempest - reprising a performance that his grandfather had done decades earlier. Another accompanied himself on a guitar while singing a Psalm in both Hebrew and English. His sister played and sang a carol. His aunt played a clarinet to show us what she could do after working with one for only six months. I read my Covid parody.

And all this is seen as possible – and normal during a pandemic. And we would never have thought to connect with so many at once - until we couldn’t do so in person.

 How different it is from the pandemic of 1918. My father was 18 years old that year and my mother was 15.  I never thought to ask them what that pandemic was like for them. This morning’s paper details some similarities with the present one.  The number of patients strained the hospital and the number of deaths - 50,000 in Canada – 50 million around the world – meant the large number could not be interred quickly enough.  Businesses were shut down.  Prime Ministers caught the flu.  The Stanley Cup was postponed.  But there were differences too.  Children and young adults were the most threatened. There was little government help – either national or provincial – and local governments had to work on their own.

 Let’s hope that some of the patterns don’t recur.  There were swings between opening up and needing to shut down again.  There was initial avoidance of the severity of the pandemic. There was resistance to closings.  Public health officials were both congratulated and denigrated.  Health workers were infected and shortages were severe.  Quack cures prevailed.  Indigenous communities were hit hardest. The disease faded away in most countries but Canada continued to have sporadic outbreaks until 2020.

 The key difference is the development of vaccines. Some were developed in 1918 at Queen’s University and by Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto.  What scientists did not know then was that the disease was produced by a virus.  Their vaccines did reduce the severity but vaccine development with both new understanding and speed of production were decades away.  We are so fortunate to live in the new century where over time we will overcome the effects of the current one.

 The amazing opportunities afforded by technology where we can see each other from a distance and be safely together in new ways is so taken for granted that we forget the creators of so many inventions.  I searched for a timeline and found one here

 And I was fascinated by those with impact on my own life:

My Mediaeval Manuscript

The handwritten page from a psalter hanging above my electronic piano had some precursors. Anod of course they were followed by the printing press to allow books to spread through the known universe, open up learning and change the world

My great grandfather hated the telephone

When the family in Parry Sound installed on the first in the town, he hated the idea of people intruding on his privacy. Now I text my grandchildren.

This doesn’t even show how I do it now

A Google Nest responding to my oral request to play some Christmas Carols on Combo - with a number of the best ones sounding in three different rooms on three small units.

My TV watching at home started in 1950

Now I ask my TV to head toward Prime or YouTube on the big screen with hundreds of choices in spectacular colour - or switch back to one of the many cable stations - not exactly like the small screen of the past.

Communication machines

In university, the weekly newsletter in my college was printed on a ditto machine - and I still have a purple version. Then came the fax machine in the 80e where in 1985 one board member had one - and 1986 where only one member didn’t - and no parctically no one does. I’d still like it better if my all in one printer would print in colour even though only the demo does.

From turning on a desktop in 1984

To meeting the family on Zoom in 2020. It’s been an amazing journey through it all.

As I write, I am restricted to my apartment but my life is both safe and rich.  It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am compared to most of the world during a pandemic.  Mu family came up with an innovative way to enjoy company on my balcony in cold weather – electric fleece throws. The view from there of the canopy of trees is beautiful even missing their former leaves and the lake and sky still dominate the extensive built environment.

An obituary of  famous nature writer Barry Lopez reminds me to put all this technology in perspective.  We, like the wolves he spent time with and wrote about so lovingly, are also creatures of the planet.

 The New York Times quotes the British writer Robert Macfarlane as he  put it this way in The Guardian in 2005 writing about the author. “Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”

 The technological and the natural are part of our lives in the Anthropocene and both bring us grace..  Many of our journeys this season involved a much smaller carbon footprint, though they depended on electricity and that is a small benefit to the planet.  The human connections in my small world were made well – while all around us there are evidence of such connections and care that are made badly. So much will depend on our choices and sense of a sacred that we must receive with grace as we move ahead.

A Summer of Batesons

It started with an email from University of Toronto’s McLuhan Centre. A conference had issued an open invitation to attend a movie entitled An Ecology of Mind by Nora Bateson. The filmmaker would be present.

An Ecology of Mind is a beautiful tribute by Nora to her father, Gregory Bateson, a noted anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist and film maker himself. Though I knew his name as a husband of Margaret Mead, I knew very little else about him. Gregory was born in 1904 and his youngest daughter was born in 1968, 12 years before his death in 1980. Nora Bateson has spent much of her own life getting to know the work and influence of her father through his own films, writings and lectures, and the people he has influenced. The resulting film, as well as being loving, is both informative and inspiring.

Many of those he has influenced and depicted in the film were familiar to me – among them, Fritjof Capra, Stewart Brand, Jerry Brown – as well as his other daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Intensely curious, he delved into many fields and became one of the leading proponents of systems thinking. In an age of experts, he remained a generalist and if anything was overly modest in expressing his originality. He understood and championed the move from seeing the world as a machine to that of a relational network. Many common expressions - the double bind, connecting the dots, the map is not the territory the difference that makes a difference – are ones we owe to Bateson.

The substance of the film is significant in terms of Bateson’s teaching – he wrote a book with that title - and I will deal with it at more length later. He was an early advocate that all living systems have minds whether conscious or not – using “mind” as the signifier of layers of relationships that surround us like concentric circles and make us less like individuals and more like participants in levels of culture and meaning. Cosmology and deep history came naturally to him.

As a memoir, the film is charming – rich with insights from Bateson himself in numerous film clips, both with his young daughter and as a lecturer using examples from Through the Looking Glass in a delightful way. The last scene shows Bateson instructing small Nora on the importance of climbing an extra mile to reach the heights and telling her he told her that first. She replied quite forcefully for a small girl, “But I thought it first”. “All right”, her father said, contentedly. The film is also an excellent summation of his work. Sections of it can be accessed online and it is still available for purchase.

Watching the film made me realize that I knew her older sister, Mary Catherine Bateson as a writer of a favorite book on my shelf for years, and it was a good time to re-read it. It is called Peripheral Visons, Learning along the Way. As the daughter of Bateson and Margaret Mead, it is no surprise that Mary Catherine Bateson also became an anthropologist and this book is based on her experiences of several different countries and their cultures.

She is an excellent storyteller. In an early chapter we meet her in Iran heading with her two and a half year old daughter to witness a ceremonial sacrifice of a sheep, a ritual with roots in several religious traditions. She calmly explains what is going on to her young daughter as the gardener lays out the sheep’s internal organs, with an awareness that children take their emotional lead from a parent, no matter how bizarre a different cultural ritual might seem – and notes that the local children take it in as a totally normal event. Later in the book she explores the different ways that babies behave depending on their cultures by contrasting visits to a classroom by mothers and babies from America and Iran. Still later we hear of experiences on a writing fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New England as well as her time in the Philippines. As a writer, Mary Catherine Bateson is thoughtful and filled with humanity; any reader is bound to learn from her. I’ve enjoyed her other books too.

Back to Gregory. I am much indebted to Noel Charlton’s book, Understanding Gregory Bateson, Mind, Beauty and the Sacred Earth, a splendid biography and study of the Bateson’s life, teaching and works. Charlton notes at the beginning of the book that he will cover Bateson’s what – to recover the grace of realizing our interrelated membership of the community of living organisms on the planet, as well as his how – the personal relationship with the more than rational processes of both the natural world and human art – poetry, painting, dance, music, humor, metaphor, the best of religion and natural history”. At the end of his life Bateson was prepared to call both nature and the arts inspired by them ‘the sacred”. He saw the devastation of the planet and its effect long before his death and noted that the human capacity to be responsive also meant that we must be responsible.

Bateson claimed to belong to four generations of atheists, but he grew up in a home where the Bible was read daily at breakfast. His grandfather and father were both scientists and like his father, he was a life-long admirer of the poets, William Blake and Samuel Butler. The loss of his older brothers, one in World War I and the other by suicide, placed much expectation on the surviving son. He started in zoology but quickly switched to anthropology and traveled to Samoa where he met and later married anthropologist Margaret Mead. Their marriage produced another one, Mary Catherine Bateson, who collaborated with her father at the end of his life.

Early in his career Bateson realized the limitations of specialization – knowing more and more about less and less. He was a key figure in the founding and development of the Macy Conferences that facilitated informal interdisciplinary exchange. Leading scientists from many fields and their collaboration ultimately resulted in the new field of cybernetics, systems that included biological, social, political, financial, mental, communication and engineering ones. For Bateson, this led to a later shift of interest to psychology and clinical psychiatry. His “double bind” theory of schizophrenia was largely rejected at the time, but led later to family systems theory, and contributed to other fields of study such as addiction, play theory, international relations and environmental studies.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind was written in 1972 followed by Mind and Nature in 1979. Both remind us of the need to rethink accustomed patterns of belief that are part of our heritage. He particularly questioned the notion of individualism and the sense of autonomy in western culture. We think our individual perspectives are unique and that we are separate from the things that we observe. We also think that we are rational beings and that progress is linear; both views are reinforced by our capitalistic system and by technology. In contrast, Bateson sees individuals as part of systems whose boundaries are not limited by their body or skin. What counts instead are the relationships between and among things. Our use of language causes us to abstract ourselves from the systems of which we are part and we tend to define ourselves by bits of information – a social insurance number, a job title, a student grade, a salary. We ignore the reality that we are part of a larger system upon which we are also totally dependent – the air we breathe, including the chemicals in the atmosphere, the genetically-modified food we eat, the water or other liquids we imbibe.

Many of our patterns of thinking have roots in stories and myths of the past and these are carried forward in our use of language. We name the things omitting the spaces between them, which also makes us think that we can measure and separate anything. While this way of thinking has been beneficial to the development of science and technology, it is not the whole story. It is especially problematic in our relationship to nature. Words like map and territory are metaphors for larger systems. We take for granted that a growing economy is a good thing and fail to recognize that at the same time the growth is polluting the atmosphere; the difference makes a difference that we fail to observe. We are similarly unaware when a non-native tree planted in a ravine affects the insects, and bees and birds no longer have food to eat. The difference that makes a difference happens in both space and time. We need to assess our metaphors to limit our effect on the surrounding environment.

We take it for granted that we know how to interpret reality, but Bateson stresses how much we are influenced by the cultural narratives that precede us. These, he says, must be constantly rethought and re-evaluated and we need to examine the wider context of relationships, interaction and interdependence. He credits natural systems with intelligence since these often can self-correct. In contrast, we use ideas from the past – that wilderness is dangerous and must be tamed, that oceans are vast and we can throw our waste in them, that indigenous people are uneducated and must learn our ways. We can destroy nature but we can’t create it. In 1972, he wrote.

“The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races, and the brutes and vegetables. If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell.”

Bateson’s response was the need to learn - and he divided learning into several classes. What he terms zero learning means that we show no response to an item of sensory input. At a first level of learning, we notice that the context has changed. “No one can enter the same river more than once”, his daughter Mary Catherine observes in her sister’s film. Bateson himself is even more witty observing, “No man can go to bed with the same girl for the first time twice”. We are aware of new information in a new way and the context changes completely. Charlton has a further example of how we understand context, by noting that when we witness a murder in a play on a stage, we don’t rush to the phone and call the police.

Stage two learning is described as focusing on the learning experience itself – learning to learn. Stage three is more difficult and means a rethinking of our sets of assumptions or world view. We shift our character and even rethink our cosmology where we undertake a profound reorganization of the way we think. Stage four is akin to evolution itself and is beyond human capability to do more than glimpse occasionally. All evolution for Bateson can be described as possessing a mental process, an intelligence within. Our response to this is identified by Bateson as the sacred and he sees it also in the aesthetic process. We are part of nested systems of energy and beauty. The literal and the metaphorical are not “either/or” but “both and”.

C. A. Bowers also has a good summary of Bateson’s key directives for learning:

• Awareness of how we are influenced by earlier patterns of thinking and the need to become conscious of them.

• Knowledge and awareness of cultural patterns and systems other than our own

• The need to see ourselves as part of natural systems, neither separate from them nor superior to them

Bateson’s ideas resonate in certain ways with those of Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, James Lovelock, Matthew Fox and Vandana Shiva. He was more of a thinker than an activist. Noel Charlton notes that even two decades ago there were many organizations working for change in our attitudes toward environmental issues, but there is still a need to go further. He urges us to take action in spreading the ecological message and envisions groups of eight to ten friends meeting regularly for as long as a year, spending time on research and reflection to increase awareness and response. At the end of this period, the group needs to split up into pairs and start new study groups, while also staying anchored in the original one for personal support – a model akin to the early spread of Christianity. In so doing, we can follow the writings and ideas of Gregory Bateson and his daughters who point the way.

Resources:

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life.. New York: Grove Press, 1989

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Peripheral Visions - Learning Along the Way. New York: Harper Collins, 1994..

Bateson, Nora. An Ecology of Mind, A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson. http://www.anecologyofmind.com

Bowers, C. A. Perspectives and Ideas of Gregory Bateson, Ecological Intelligence and Educational Rreforms. Eugene: Eco-Justice Press, 2011.

Charlton, Noel. Understanding Gregory Bateson, Mind Beauty and the Sacred Earth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.

Parenting

(I'm recycling some old posts before closing an old site down.  This is one of the better ones:)

And perhaps, even more important, grandparenting….

Last evening I sat in a meeting and heard a participant saying, Why don’t our children ……….?  You can fill in the blanks, but what he was really saying was, why aren’t they doing what I want them to?  Why aren’t they conducting their lives just as I do?

He might have benefited from Robert Genn’s message this morning.  Robert is a visual artist who has also published a twice weekly newsletter for many years that now appears in multiple languages all over the world.  The wisdom he has gleaned as an artist benefits us all. Here’s what he has to say about parenting:

Show is always better than tell.
Your kids already know your opinions.
Kiss them regularly if they’ll let you.
Be alert when they approach you with ideas.
“Encourage them to colour outside the lines.
Keep in touch. Let them know where you are.
Let you and your spouse be sails, not anchors.
Field trips are more valuable than classrooms.
One of the best things you can say is “try it.”
Non-judgmental curiosity beats seasoned guidance.
When kids hang out in the studio, you pick up tips.
Let the kids visit with weird friends and relatives.
The development of imagination requires their privacy.
Always have materials available. Try not to be stingy.
Encourage enterprise. Let them make and sell lemonade.
They understand if you travel during the drum-set stage.
A kid’s opening sentences are not always topic sentences.
If they don’t know what you think, they are likely to ask.
From time to time be dull and stupid. The kids will rally.
Before making suggestions, give it some thought. They have.”

Family Retreat - A Literary Summary

The Setting

The beautiful Pleasant Bay House in Hillier close to several wineries in Prince Edward County - a mini-Sonoma or Niagara Peninsula converted from a farming and lake recreation area to a more sophisticated network of wineries, restaurants and inns.  Two and a half hours from metro Toronto makes it an easy trip.

The Cast of Characters

Three generations - a widowed grandmother and her two sons and their families and two dogs - but with a backstory that means it is a truly modern three generation family.

The grandmother has been a widow for 12+ years - after remarrying the same husband for the second time. The oldest son is also divorced and happily remarried as is his wife. Their children are her son, 21, and their daughter, 13. The second son's wife died more than six years ago and he is joined by his two sons 13 and 10 and his partner of several years. The oldest son's dog is 10 years old and slowing down.  The youngest son's puppy is seven+ months and speeding up.

The Theme - Family Togetherness.

The Plot:

Leaving taking was delayed by a lost wallet and after a fruitless hunt we headed for the crowded superhighway with the hope that a later phone call would reveal that it was left in the pub the night before.  It was. The boring highway was livened by NPR reruns though the cold winter landscape was beautiful. GPS didn't like the location name and insisted it was elsewhere but Google maps showed us the way.   We overshot the house and a sharp turn to come back meant a slide into a snow covered ditch - just as the wide snow plow was approaching. Everything ground to a halt but freeing it was not on. Luckily a pickup truck arrived, went back and brought the tractor to haul it out. The snow plow man didn't mind at all since he was paid by the hour, as he reminded us several times.  We sat down a little late to homemade lasagna and explored the new home environment.

The house was magic - with its glass door wood stove, copious living room windows that let in the bright sunlight of the 19 below zero cold day.  some braver scond generation souls departed to stock the already over-flowing larder while the senior and younger set settled in for an introduction to The Settlers of Catan - the perfect game for the place.  Later we sat down for tacos, newly purchased wine, a word game and another round of Catan.  The two dogs fought for attention and all the benches had to be pushed in to keep the puppy off the dining room table.  The beds soon beckoned with their duvet covers that even allowed us to depart from the slow burning fire.

After breakfast bagels, the next morning started slowly.  More eyes were focused on familiar screens than on the beautiful views - thought the grandmother and the two boys didn't participate - the first because it was a deliberate choice and the second because they were deprived of them.  New participants were introduced to Catan.  A tourtiere for lunch and another winery visit happened.  Supper consisted of an eclectic assortment of leftovers with more word games and one last round of Catan - with lots of reading of  real books by the non participants. After many ins and outs and opening of doors that let in the chill, even the dogs snoozed.

Morning breakfast was Spanish - Huevos - with Mimosas for the adults just to finish off the leftovers. Then it was time to clean up and pack.  One car departed for Toronto with the other stopping to visit with friends - but not before the family tried to capture the puppy who resisted being put on a leash..  Maybe it is still running there.  An uneventful ride merged into snow squalls as we hit the city.  

The outcome - Excellent.  I can remember family gatherings full of arguments and too much discussion and drinking, fights among siblings, too much of everything.  All the drama this time was provided by the dogs!