3
DEMOCRACY, DECENTRALIZATION, AND FEEDBACK
DANIEL BELGRAD
Among the metaphors that Americans of the Cold War era used for thinking about their world, that of the feedback loop has proven one of the most persistent and most powerful. Once recognized, the image of a decentralized system held together by feedback loops can be identified as a key component of the democratic vista from the 1940s through the 1970s. This chapter closely examines three disparate works from the period—Gregory Bateson’s anthropological Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Max Neuhaus’s “Feed” (a realization of John Cage’s musical score Fontana Mix), and John Updike’s story “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dead Cat, a Traded Car”—in order to suggest the pervasive presence of this metaphor in Cold War American culture and to explain its history and implications. The importance of the feedback loop as an idea derives from its usefulness in modeling an alternative to the centralized authority structures that came to predominate in postwar society, profoundly reshaping American life.
The centralization of power is a defining characteristic of modernity. Whether we speak of the power of national or federal governments over regional ones, of the power of large cities over their hinterlands, or of the integration of economic processes under a single corporate entity, the organization of large-scale enterprises through the concentration of power in a hierarchical “central command” structure is one of modernity’s prevailing dynamics. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the centralization of power developed in tandem with new industrial technologies and new organizational techniques such as the “scientific management” of Taylorism.1 The culture of the Cold War was profoundly affected by this, since both the United States and the Soviet Union were transformed in the mid-twentieth century by the rapid centralization of economic power and political authority.
From the American perspective, the centralization of power in the Soviet Union and China became one of the most potent symbols of the wrongness of Communist politics. Manifested in social and economic planning as well as in cultural directives that emanated from the central authority, it epitomized the totalitarianism of the police state. Yet American society was itself undergoing a parallel, though less visible and less violent, process of economic and political centralization. According to historian George Lipsitz, America’s mobilization for World War II left behind an economic landscape radically changed from what it had been in the past. More than half a million small businesses disappeared during the war, at the same time that the federal government paid a hundred billion dollars in war contracts to just thirty-three corporations. As a result, large corporations emerged from the war with oligarchic control of America’s economy, and, as Lipsitz and many others have argued, of its government as well.2
The threat to democracy posed by this concentration of power was a source of widespread concern a good decade and a half before 1960, when Eisenhower in his presidential farewell address warned Americans against the “military-industrial complex.” George Lipsitz’s statistics and conclusions are themselves based on a report prepared for a special Senate investigating committee in 1946, titled Economic Concentration and World War II.3 In that same year, political theorist Dwight Macdonald wrote in the journal Politics that fascism, Communism, and monopoly capitalism were all versions of the same social structure, which he called “bureaucratic collectivism.”4 Sociologist C. Wright Mills is now probably the best-known critic of the centralization of power in Cold War America. In his essay “The Structure of Power in American Society,” Mills described “the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power—in economic, in political, and in military institutions.”5
As the impact of centralization increasingly shaped how life was lived in the United States, however, the idea persisted that decentralized organizational structures were both more desirable and in some ineffable way more powerful than centralized ones. Thus Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, writing on the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, insisted that “democratic morale has far greater potential strength” than the engineered social unity of totalitarianism.6 In 1941 and 1942, Allport was among a group of social scientists recruited by the Council for Democracy to form a Committee on Public Morale: 350 expert consultants enlisted to devise ways of boosting American commitment to the war effort. The privately funded Council for Democracy had been founded in August of 1940, following the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, to counter anti-interventionist propaganda emanating from Germany and the Soviet Union. It represented a broad constituency of American interventionists, ranging from internationally minded corporate liberals such as Henry Luce to anticommunist labor leaders such as David Dubinsky. A precursor of the federal Office of War Information, its Committee on Public Morale considered how best to go about changing some habitual ways of thinking that could compromise wartime unity, such as isolationism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Its list of consultants included many distinguished social scientists, among them Ruth Benedict, Hadley Cantril, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson.7
The wartime information campaign ultimately came to be dominated by advertising executives and social engineers who favored centralized authority structures. But anthropologists Mead and Bateson spoke out vociferously against such “social engineering” techniques, which they insisted were antithetical to democratic values.8 “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this war is ideologically about just this,” wrote Bateson in 1942. “Could deliberate social planning be reconciled with the democratic ideal?” Deliberate social planning, he asserted, was characteristic of centralized, bureaucratic systems such as fascism and Communism. By contrast, democracy had to be embraced as the means as well as the end of the American war effort. As Margaret Mead argued, “If we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life.” Bateson agreed, asserting that “a basic and fundamental discrepancy exists between ‘social engineering,’ manipulating people in order to achieve a planned blue-print society, and the ideals of democracy.” The paradoxical solution, Bateson suggested, was that a democratic leadership must “discard purpose in order to achieve our purpose.”9
From these beginnings, Bateson’s thinking about the value of “purposelessness” in social organization developed over the next three decades into a ramified articulation of one of the most powerful principles in postwar American thought. Even as decentralized structures faded from American economic and political reality, the ideal re-emerged in American intellectual and cultural life, linked to the origins of a vision that we now call “postmodern.”10 At the core of this image of decentralized authority is the model of autopoiesis, or the self-adjusting network of feedback loops. This dynamic is now thought to describe the “chaotic” functioning of complex systems as diverse as human subjectivity, the global market, and the ecosystem.
On a practical level, Bateson’s 1942 recommendations regarding how to encourage the development of democratic values did not so much involve “discard[ing] purpose” as focusing on “second-order” purposefulness, or, as he termed it, “deutero-learning.” Deutero-learning is the process of learning how to learn, the habits of thought and perspective that are cultivated by the first-order learning experience. Bateson gave as an example the practice, in totalitarian societies, of teaching children to spy on their parents. Such a practice might be justified on the level of first-order learning (that is, in terms of its ends) by an appeal to the national good; but on the level of deutero-learning (that is, in terms of its means), it is self-defeating. For “they [the children] will build this experience into their whole philosophy of life; it will color all their future attitudes toward authority” (“Social Planning” 164). Similarly, if a man were to lecture before an audience and pronounce that “democracy is good; fascism is bad,” the message on the level of first-order learning would be prodemocratic. The message on the level of second-order learning, however, would be to the contrary, because the epistemological dynamic is that of an authority figure telling others what to think. For democracy to be operative in second-order learning, the “audience” would have to become active participants in a process of examining the relative merits of democracy and fascism and arriving at their own conclusions. Then, if on the next day another lecturer (or the same one) were to return and announce that “fascism is good; it is democracy that is bad,” the inculcated habits of deutero-learning would militate against the acceptance of his message.
In this sense, deutero-learning is a form of feedback: it is a learning output produced by the culture that is fed back into the system as information that affects its subsequent operation. Bateson’s argument was that the real cultural work of democracy could not be achieved by focusing on the transmission of information, but could only be accomplished indirectly, through deutero-learning feedback mechanisms cultivating open habits of mind. From this perspective, cultures are decentralized, autopoietic systems of social order, sustained by self-reinforcing processes (information feedback loops) of learning and deutero-learning.11 This vision is the link between Bateson’s earlier anthropological work and his subsequent turn to the field of cybernetics, which he helped create.
Cybernetics developed from a series of eight conferences beginning in May of 1942 and ending in 1953 on the topic of “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.”12 Bateson and Mead were among those who participated with American mathematician Norbert Wiener in this series of conferences. In 1942, the same year that Bateson articulated his theory of deutero-learning, Wiener worked out an algorithm to enable an antiaircraft gun to predict the future location of its target. In collaboration with engineer Julian Bigelow, he devised a mechanical system with electrical circuits that measured the targeted plane’s evasive maneuvers and modified the gun’s position accordingly, creating an information feedback loop that made the gun self-guiding, or “intelligent.”13 Wiener then theorized that the feedback loop was the essence of all intelligent systems, whether biological or artificial. In 1948, he gave the emerging field of artificial intelligence a lasting name when he published Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Yet Wiener’s focus in cybernetics was electrical engineering; it was Bateson and others who developed the field in the direction of studying societies as intelligent systems.14 Between 1942 and 1944, for example, American agronomist Aldo Leopold wrote an essay that he called “Thinking Like a Mountain”; as its title suggests, it described the system of feedback loops governing animal populations as a decentralized form of intelligence (“thinking”). Leopold was writing against the long-standing practice of killing wolves in order to eliminate their threat to deer, cattle, and sheep.
I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life . . . but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.
The danger of unintended consequences that Leopold’s essay emphasizes (“too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run”) echoes Bateson’s contemporaneous argument against “purposive” intervention in favor of second-order strategies. Today Leopold is considered one of the founders of modern ecology.15 In his later work, Bateson adopted ecology as the governing metaphor that he used to describe autopoietic systems.
Clearly, the vision of the decentralized, autopoietic network was a key image on the cutting edge of Cold War American thought. It appeared not only in sciences as diverse as computer engineering, anthropology, and ecology, but also in music, literature, and the visual and performing arts. The remainder of this essay is devoted to exploring the development of this idea through a few key texts from later in the era. Max Neuhaus’s “Feed” (1963) uses feedback loops to bring harmony and form to John Cage’s anarchic musical conception Fontana Mix (1958). John Updike’s short story “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dead Cat, a Traded Car” (1961) describes a universe in which life’s quotidian details are given meaning by immanent, recursive patterns. Bateson’s later essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) tread the same path scientifically that Updike mapped creatively, integrating ecology, psychology, and theology in a holistic view of the universe as an autopoietic network.
John Cage and Max Neuhaus: An Infinite Play of Interpenetrations
Beginning in 1963, percussionist and electronic music pioneer Max Neuhaus staged a number of musical performances featuring the structuring principle of feedback loops. Of these projects, the one that was most often performed and recorded was a realization of John Cage’s score Fontana Mix of 1958. In keeping with Cage’s philosophy, that score leaves most of the aspects of the musical performance indeterminate. Therefore, Neuhaus’s realization, titled “Feed,” is best understood as a collaborative work between the two men. This collaboration has a time dimension that stretches beyond the ten-minute duration of the piece itself: from the late 1950s, when Cage’s score posed the question of decentralization, to the mid-1960s, when Neuhaus answered it with a network of feedback loops.
The decentralization of authority is in fact a key concept in understanding the work of John Cage, who earned a place in music history with his radical refusal of the authority of the composer. “A composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do,” he wrote in A Year from Monday (1967). “I find this an unattractive way of getting things done.”16 Cage’s alternative to the traditional model of a composer—someone who thinks up music for a listener to hear—was to promote what might be called “second-order listening,” because of its parallel to what Bateson called second-order learning. That is, Cage was not interested in communicating emotions through the manipulation of a musical “message,” but in changing the listener’s idea of what music could be.17 “New music: new listening,” he wrote in his 1961 manifesto Silence.18
The Western musical heritage, Cage complained, represented a deeply ingrained listening habit (Silence 4). Cage wanted to challenge his listeners to discard their habitual expectations and value judgments and instead to adopt a frame of mind open to all experience—an aesthetic expressed in the Zen Buddhist maxim, “before the beautiful and the ugly were differentiated.”19 Cage’s compositions therefore allow for no distinction between “musical” sounds and “noise.” Typically they are filled with thumps, screeches, and snippets of radio broadcasts or tape recordings in addition to notes played on conventional musical instruments.
Because sounds (noises) are everywhere, if the process of deutero-listening that Cage promoted were to take hold, the listener would always be surrounded by music. But what is meant by music is radically redefined in the process. “Not an attempt to understand something that is being said . . . just an attention to the activity of sounds,” Cage wrote in Silence (10). In a manner similar to Bateson in 1942, who had written that democratic leaders must “discard purpose in order to achieve our purpose,” Cage called in 1957 for “a purposeful purposelessness” that would register as “an affirmation of life” (Silence 12).
For Cage, then, to eliminate the authority structure by which the composer traditionally affected the emotions of the listener through music was not to sacrifice the emotional power of music. Instead, he wrote, by “giv[ing] up the desire to control sound,” he “let sounds be themselves” (Silence 10). Emotions would continue to arise in the listener, but not in response to sounds that the composer had commandeered as vehicles of his or her own emotion. Cage wanted his music to lead the listener instead “to the world of nature, where gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together” (Silence 8). His Zen Buddhist practice of disengaging from egoistic musical action inevitably contributed, he believed, to an ecological vision in which humans were embedded in—rather than outside of and opposed to—nature.
Cage’s thinking in this respect is in keeping with what we know about the influence among the postwar avant-garde of what is often called “field theory.” (As Jackson Pollock is famously said to have stated, “I am nature.”)20 According to field theory, all things that we perceive as discrete entities are actually interrelations. As Natalie Schmitt has explained in reference to Cage’s work, “If we abandon the idea of discrete unified wholes . . . an elementary particle is . . . a set of relationships extending outward to other things.”21 Similarly, Cage wrote that music should bring us to realize that “an individual, having no separate soul, is a time-span, a collection of changes. Our nature’s that of Nature. Nothing’s fixed.”22
This intellectual context offers insight into Cage’s particular investment in decentralized structures. Paraphrasing Ananda Coomaraswamy’s 1934 treatise The Transformation of Nature in Art, he often insisted that the purpose of art was not to present the face of nature but to present “nature’s manner of operation” (Silence 9). Therefore one purpose of his work was to dispel the notion of simplistic causal relationships in favor of the more chaotic complexity of actual events. “There are an incalculable infinity of causes and effects . . . [because] in fact each and every thing in all of time and space is related to each and every other thing,” he wrote in Silence (46–47); and “there is no need to minimize the complexity of the situation.”23 This sense of interpenetration was an important aspect of the consciousness that he hoped to encourage through second-order listening. To emphasize it, he made works that demand an attitude of “poly-attentiveness” in the listener.24 He once suggested that five simultaneous activities constituted a bare minimum for a good performance, in order to maintain a sufficient level of “perplexity” (Silence 173).25 “This disharmony,” he asserted, “to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed” (Silence 12). He compared the decentralized quality of attention that resulted to that evoked by the “allover” painting style of Abstract Expressionism pioneered by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s. Such painting, he wrote, “carries one’s attention not to a center of interest but all over the canvas.”26
As this musical practice illustrates, Cage’s commitment to the principle of decentralization extended from the role of the composer to the forms of the music itself. Instead of composing a complete musical score, for instance, he composed the parts of a piece and left indeterminate the manner in which they were to be combined, because, he insisted, “the requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness, is not an accurate representation of how things are” (Silence 10, emphasis added). Without a score to provide a centralized coordination of the musical experience, the plurality of the listeners’ experiences was emphasized. “The central points where fusion occurs are many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are” (Silence 10).
Cage felt that such strategies of decentralization achieved an important ideological effect by means of deutero-listening: a pluralism in which every point was its own center, in lieu of having a single center that subordinated everything else. As Natalie Schmitt has explained:
Central focus in space, like central focus in time (climax) is a system of subordination of all the rest of the space or time, controlling the audience’s attention. But if the audience itself is not to be subservient to the work, the idea of getting and holding their attention must be relinquished.27
Instead of attempting to hold the attention of the listener, Cage’s strategies of decentralization throw back to each listener the problem of what it means to listen.
One of the most famous expressions of this principle is Cage’s 4′33″ from 1952, a piece in which the musicians onstage play nothing: the music is whatever sounds from other sources are heard by members of the audience.28 In this extreme statement of Cage’s musical philosophy, the implicit connection between decentralization and feedback emerges, because the output of the system (the sounds made by the listening audience) is an input of the system (the very music that the audience is listening to).
Max Neuhaus’s realizations intensified the role of feedback as an organizing principle in Cage’s decentralized aural field. In the early 1960s, Neuhaus pioneered the use of electronic feedback as a source of musical sounds. In his performances, he used microphones resting on drums in front of loudspeakers to create a system of feedback loops. The microphones picked up room sounds, creating electrical signals that passed through a four-track mixer and were sent out through the speakers, which converted the electrical signals back into sounds. The sound waves created by the speakers caused the drums on which the microphones were resting to vibrate, and these vibrations and sounds were once more encoded by the microphones into electrical signals, which were mixed and sent out again to the speakers, and so on.
To Neuhaus’s initial surprise, the “noise” generated by these multiple feedback loops is not random but forms standing electronic wave patterns similar to conventional musical tones. As he described it:
In 1963, while exploring ways of changing the timbre of percussion instruments through amplification, I had discovered a means of generating sound which I found fascinating—the creation of an acoustic feedback loop with a percussion instrument inserted inside it. Instead of the usual single screeching tones of acoustic feedback, this created a complex multi-timbered system of oscillation.29
The feedback loops functioned as an organizing mechanism for the decentralized field of sound.
The result was an autopoietic system that caused pattern, variety, and even beauty to emerge from chaotic complexity in a manner that reminded Neuhaus of natural processes. “Feed” used Cage’s score Fontana Mix to determine the power settings of the four channels of the mixer for the duration of a ten-minute performance. Even at this level of determinacy, however, the pattern of sounds was never reproduced from one performance to the next: small differences in initial conditions (the instruments, the spatial configuration of microphones and speakers, the acoustics of the room, the ambient room noise) made each performance unique. Neuhaus compared the system in this respect to a living organism: “The factors here are so complex that even if the piece were to be performed twice in the same room with the same instruments, and the same loudspeakers, it would have completely different sound and structures each time. It seems something alive.”30
“Feed” embodies dynamics of interaction that were being described at the same historical moment by the emerging field of chaos theory. Chaos theory developed in the early 1960s from efforts to use mathematical equations organized into feedback loops to model the behavior of complex systems like weather patterns and cotton prices. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz found by accident that small differences in initial conditions caused great disparities after a few cycles (iterations) of the feedback functions. For this reason, the behavior of the system was virtually unpredictable and therefore “chaotic.” Yet Lorenz discovered that mapping multiple versions of the system’s behavior on top of one another revealed a hidden pattern within the chaos. Though a specific outcome could not be predicted, an overall shape to the outcomes could be discerned.31
Among these larger patterns is that of “self-similarity,” in which a part of the system reiterates the pattern of the whole, reproducing exact smaller copies of the larger system within it. The most famous mathematical example of self-similarity is the graph of the Mandelbrot set.32 A related phenomenon is “bifurcation,” in which the difference attributable to:
something as small as a single photon of energy . . . is swelled by iteration to a size so great that a fork is created and the system takes off in a new direction [leading it] . . . to stabilize a new behavior through a series of feedback loops.33
Neuhaus observed this phenomenon in his execution of Cage’s score: “As the amplification controls are gradually changed, the feedback channels suddenly break into different modes of oscillation; sound seems to swing through the room.”34
Neuhaus’s “Feed” thus fulfills, better than many of Cage’s own performances, Cage’s dictum that music should imitate “nature’s manner of operation.” Cage worked to liberate composing, performing, and listening from the conventions of centralized planning, in favor of an anarchy of sound. Neuhaus discovered the role played by feedback loops in bringing order to such a decentralized system. “Feed” gathers every stray vibration into an “infinite play of interpenetrations” (Silence 14–15). These feedback loops offer an alternative method of organization to that of the centralized authority, creating an autopoietic system that seems to model ecological processes.
John Updike: The Fruit of a Single Impossible Tree
The major theme of Neuhaus’s work—the emergence of pattern from chaos in a decentralized system—is shared by John Updike’s short story “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dead Cat, a Traded Car.” This story was written in 1961 and originally published in Pigeon Feathers (1962), where it had pride of place as the last story in the collection. In fact, it is not so much a short story as a collage, since, as the fragmented quality of the title suggests, there is no narrative thread tying together its four sketches. Instead, its coherence is achieved by other means. But this story is for that reason quintessential to Updike’s oeuvre, for he claimed that his stories were primarily spatial rather than temporal arrangements: “the books are conceived, as objects in space, with events and persons composed within them like shapes.”35
Updike’s explanation of his method resonates with the Abstract Expressionist artist Robert Motherwell’s description of his relationship to collage from 1946:
The sensation of physically operating on the world is very strong in the medium [of collage]. . . . One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again. In any case, shaping and arranging such a relational structure obliterates the need [for conventional narrative representation.]36 Motherwell’s statement emphasizes the collage artist’s sense of working in close contact with the world of material objects, wresting meaning from the way they are finally juxtaposed. In 1974, Updike offered a related description of his process for “work[ing] several disparate incidents or impressions into the shape of a single story.” He used an anecdote from his childhood to develop a key visual metaphor:
I would draw on one sheet of paper an assortment of objects—flowers, animals, stars, toasters, chairs, comic-strip creatures, ghosts, noses—and connect them with lines, a path of two lines, so that they all became the fruit of a single impossible tree.37
This is an embellishment of an image that he first introduced in his Paris Review interview of 1968:
When I was little, I used to draw disparate objects on a piece of paper—toasters, baseballs, flowers, whatnot—and connect them with lines . . . these little connections—recurrences . . . are in [my stories] as a kind of running, oblique coherence.38
What gives Updike’s collage “Packed Dirt” its coherence are exactly such recurrences of objects and images, the way it returns, recursively, to topics such as deacons or patches of bare earth.39 The fabric of its reality is woven from these successive reiterations.
Updike uses writing to connect the dots of seemingly disparate objects. Therefore a characteristic feature of his prose is its evocation of concrete, circumstantial detail. This stylistic feature makes sense in relation to Updike’s world view and his sense of the writer’s role. Truth, he asserted, is not captured in abstractions or generalizations but “is anecdotal, narrative, the snug opaque quotidian.”40
In the story “Packed Dirt,” this motif of circumstantiality is presented through a catalog of the artifacts in a natural history museum. This far-flung assortment of objects, gathered according to the principles of an outmoded “natural history,” makes a single impossible tree:
Black swans drifted through flotillas of crumbled bread. As a child I had believed literally that bread cast upon the waters came back doubled. I remembered that within the museum there were mummies with astonished shattered faces; a tiny gilt chair for a baby Pharaoh; an elephant tusk carved into thousands of tiny Chinamen and pagodas and squat leafy trees; miniature Eskimo villages that you lit up with a switch and peeped into like an Easter egg; cases of arrowheads; rooms of stuffed birds; and, upstairs, wooden chests decorated with hearts and pelicans and tulips by the pious “plain people” and iridescent glassware from the kilns of Baron von Steigel and slashing paintings of Pennsylvania woodland by the Shearers and bronze statuettes of wrestling Indians that stirred my first erotic dreams and, in the round skylit room at the head of the marble stairs, a black-rimmed pool in whose center a naked green lady held to her pursed lips a shell whose lucent contents forever spilled from the other side, filling this whole vast upstairs—from whose Palladian windows the swans in their bready pond could be seen trailing fan-shaped wakes—with the music and chill romance of falling water.41
The museum is reassuringly premodern and also suggestively postmodern in its refusal of rational ordering principles. Opposed to its benign space in the story is the hospital where the narrator goes to visit his dying father. This hospital is described as a “linoleum maze” with corridors “lined with petitioners waiting for a verdict” (“Packed Dirt” 116). As a modern space, it is characterized by rigid geometries and hierarchical relations.42 By contrast, the natural history museum possesses a chaotic coherence, emphasized by the repeated image of the black swans that thread their way through a pond littered generously with flotsam.
The self-consciousness that is often noted as another feature of Updike’s prose style (the volume of memoirs that he published in 1989 is even titled Self-Consciousness) derives, like his emphasis on the concrete, from his belief that truth can be captured in words only through a faithful description of how it is reiterated in the “opaque quotidian.” For Updike, the great hazard of writing is always the sin of omission, the risk of sacrificing the “enigmatic concreteness” of circumstances and the “verbal and psychological accuracy” of human interactions in favor of the simple solution and the foregone conclusion.43 For this reason, he was particularly reluctant to discuss the meanings of his stories in interviews. As he observed self-consciously to one interviewer in 1968, “My relationship to you and my linear way of coping out loud are distortive . . . everything is infinitely fine, and any opinion is somehow coarser than the texture of the real thing.”44
Because in Updike’s view truth inheres only in the “infinitely fine . . . texture of the real,” slicing through it with the “rigid patternings” of a master plan or an externally imposed order is a presumptuousness akin to evil.45 In “Packed Dirt,” this error is symbolized by the construction of a new curve of highway next to the narrator’s house. Like John Cage and Aldo Leopold, Updike associates this misguided purposefulness with a self-defeating alienation from nature’s processes. Contrarily, the virtue of packed dirt lies in that it is “unconsciously humanized”: “It seemed precious because it had been achieved accidentally, and had about it that repose of grace that is beyond willing.”
We in America have from the beginning been cleaving and baring the earth, attacking, reforming the enormity of nature we were given, which we took to be hostile. We have explored, on behalf of all mankind, this paradox: the more matter is outwardly mastered, the more it overwhelms us in our hearts. Evidence—gaping right-of-ways, acres mercilessly scraped, bleeding mountains of muddy fill—surrounds us of a war that is incapable of ceasing, and it is good to know that now there are enough of us to exert a counter-force. (“Packed Dirt” 103)
Road building is the antithesis of the process that Updike associates with packed dirt; as a result of the highway construction, he writes, “the beaten path that does for a sidewalk in front of my home was sheared diagonally by a foot-high cliff” (“Packed Dirt” 102–3).
Packed dirt offers evidence of an alternative kind of order that supersedes the conscious planning and imposed control that the highway represents. Like the subtly ordered chaos of the natural history museum, it connotes an order that inheres in the accretion of apparently random and contingent events. Updike’s story explores the possibility of this kind of inherent order, implying that the microcosmic patterns connecting its quotidian details are indexical of macrocosmic patterns governing the universe.46 As he explained in an interview, “In writing, I try to adhere to . . . the undeniable little thing. Somehow, I hope the pattern in the art will emerge, and I guess I must have some such hope cosmically.”47
The decentralized authority that Updike conveys through the image of packed dirt is manifested in other aspects of his narrator’s life as well: in his churchgoing, in his help for a dying cat on the night his daughter is born, and in the trip that he makes to his father’s bedside in a car that he has already traded away. Decentralized authority—the vision of creation as an autopoietic network—is the underlying theme that unifies these different episodes. It is both the story’s theme and its organizing formal principle, so that as the collage becomes a story, its form functions as second-order storytelling in Bateson’s sense.48
Updike equates spiritual faith with a trust in the organizing power of such patterns of seemingly incidental events as his story brings together. Significantly, when defining his vocation as a writer—a term that connotes a religious calling—he describes it as just such a coalescence of incidents, in which “a number of personal accidents drift us toward the occupation . . . which pre-exists [our conscious choices].”49 Ultimately Updike felt that this was the only evidence of God’s presence compatible with human freedom. As he later wrote in his memoirs, “a loud and evident God would be a bully, an insecure tyrant, an all-crushing datum. . . . [Instead] his answers come in the . . . facts of our lives, strung on that thread running through all things.”50 Updike’s God is an autopoietic network, as the alternative to His being a tyrant.
In a parallel to John Cage’s Zen Buddhism, Updike’s faith in the presence of divinely immanent patterns minimizes for him the importance of the boundaries that set each individual apart as a discrete and unified entity. The self as ego is less relevant, writes Updike, than the self as conduit or “point of focus” for larger, transpersonal processes, what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once called a “concrescence of prehensions.”51 In an essay in Self-Consciousness titled “On Being a Self Forever,” Updike observes that the self is in truth neither unified nor individual:
The frangibility and provisionality of the self is well within our modern competence to perceive. . . . Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?52
Updike’s characters are (as the poet Allen Ginsberg described himself in 1974) “already in eternity while . . . living on earth.”53
In a useful critical essay written in 1970, Richard Rupp argues that “Updike’s style circles relentlessly on the circumference of experience, seeking entry into its center.”54 In historical hindsight, we can assert more confidently that Updike’s style circles relentlessly across the surface of an experience that has no center. Significantly, in the story “Packed Dirt,” the question of God’s existence is subsumed by the practice of churchgoing. Churchgoing, like packed dirt, acts as a synecdoche for the unconscious group processes that order human social behavior in a decentralized universe. “Belief builds itself unconsciously and in consciousness is spent,” Updike asserts in the story (“Packed Dirt” 104). Churchgoing is a ceremony, a pattern that accrues meaning through its persistent repetition; Updike concludes, “We in America need ceremonies” (“Packed Dirt” 121).
The topological space of the closed surface is the trope by which Updike conveys his idea of a decentralized universe. When the narrator of “Packed Dirt” succumbs to existential anxiety, he imagines himself as a hollow shell: “I was dismayed to see myself, a gutted shell, appearing to [my children] as the embodiment and pledge of a safe universe” (“Packed Dirt” 111). In the course of the story’s last segment, however, this negative image of a “gutted shell” is supplanted by the positive image of another closed surface: a habitable shelter. Specifically, this is represented by the narrator’s first car (the “traded car” of the title). Its space is hallowed by the coalescence of personal events, similar to the process of packing dirt: “Not only sand and candy wrappers accumulate in a car’s interior, but heroisms and instants of communion” (“Packed Dirt” 108).
By the story’s end, the car has also become a metaphor for the human body. “My car, beginning as a mechanical assembly of molecules, evolved into something soft and organic and consciously brave . . . [that,] though its soul the driver had died, maintained steady forward motion” and arrived home (“Packed Dirt” 121).55 This metaphor is so consistent that the reader may not at first realize that Updike has accomplished a significant inversion of the familiar idea of a religious afterlife: here it is the physical surface that persists and the inner individual essence, the “soul,” that is sloughed away. The physical world’s “steady forward motion” is auto-poietic and maintains itself without the control of “the driver.”
This is the decentralized dynamic that informs Updike’s religious and social vision. The reiteration of ceremony replaces the wish for a transcendent purpose, in the same way that packed dirt clothes the raw landscape: “As our sense of God’s forested legacy to us dwindles, there grows, in these worn, rubbed, and patted patches [of dirt], a sense of human legacy—like those feet of statues of saints which have lost their toes to centuries of kisses” (“Packed Dirt” 103).
Gregory Bateson: The Processes of Ecology Are Not Mocked
Gregory Bateson’s work from the 1960s shares with the works of Neuhaus and Updike this vision of an autopoietic network in which systemic feedback mechanisms create an invisible net of order. “No man . . . has ever seen or experienced formless and unsorted matter; just as no man has ever seen or experienced a ‘random’ event,” Bateson writes in the introduction to his book of collected essays Steps to An Ecology of Mind (1972).56 He argues that in this sense the universe must be understood as intelligent, in keeping with the definition of intelligence formulated by the pioneers of cybernetics during the Second World War: “Wherever in the Universe we encounter that sort of complexity, we are dealing with mental phenomena. . . . Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will.”57 In his later writings, he used ecology as a universal metaphor for autopoiesis—hence the title of his book. “‘Mind’ [is] immanent in the . . . ecosystem,” he asserted in a lecture that he first gave in 1970 and later included in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. “There is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God . . . immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”58 Bateson envisioned human individuals (both biologically and psychologically), human societies, and the global ecosystem as cybernetic systems, one nested inside another.59
By the time Bateson wrote the last essays collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, America’s postwar corporate-liberal culture had entered a period of crisis. Radical movements like the hippie counterculture, antiwar protests, Black Power, and radical feminism actively rejected the postwar social order and the assumptions on which it was based. In addition, many “middle Americans” were frustrated by the failure of the technocratic society to deliver on its promise of a better quality of life and withdrew their support for the liberal consensus.60 In this context, decentralization again emerged as an explicitly political vision. Bateson’s work from the late 1960s brought the idea of autopoiesis back into the political sphere, insisting that it offered the necessary model of social governance.
Expanding on the thoughts of his 1942 essay against propaganda, Bateson in 1968 polemicized against all social planning directed by a single-minded effort to accomplish an objective without due attention to the system of interactions through which such an effort would be inflected. Such misguided “purposiveness,” he argued, typically devised actions inconsistent with ecological thinking.61 He used as an example the effort at Prohibition, which did not end alcohol consumption but instead brought both bootlegging and policing to a higher level of organization. Predictably, he wrote, these hypertrophied criminal gangs and police forces were then united in their opposition to the repeal of Prohibition. Bateson saw the war in Vietnam as another self-perpetuating system that had originated through a similar “excessive purposiveness” and that subsequently fostered the development of interest groups that were opposed to ending it.
Because of the feedback mechanisms governing autopoietic systems, Bateson insists, “lack of systemic wisdom is always punished.”62 Paraphrasing the biblical verse from the book of Galatians, “God is not mocked,” he writes, “The processes of ecology are not mocked.”63 Pursuing the religious analogy, Bateson compares the development of purposive thinking and the discarding of ecological thinking with the loss of the Garden of Eden. But in his version, it is people who have cast God out of the garden, rather than vice versa.64 In Bateson’s opinion, the Industrial Revolution in particular led to an “increase of scientific arrogance” that has to be tempered by the understanding “that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole. . . . We do not live in the sort of universe in which simple lineal control is possible. Life is not like that.” Therefore our penchant for surgical interventions and quick fixes has to give way to a slower process of “learning” by the system as a whole. The “self-maximizing” purposes of various subsystems must not be allowed to outweigh the general interest.65
Bateson contrasts “consciousness,” the attribute that he uses to denote purposive, centrally directed planning, with “wisdom,” the goal of systemic thinking. The latter, he writes, is cultivated chiefly in areas of human activity dangerously far removed from the typical policymaking apparatus of Cold War America. These include “the arts, poetry, music, and the humanities”; what Martin Buber called “I-Thou” relationships; and “contact between man and animals.”66
As with the conclusions arrived at in John Updike’s story “Packed Dirt,” Bateson’s thinking in the 1960s led him to imagine “a profound redefinition of the self” that challenged the individualistic ethos of liberal society.67 As he explained in 1970:
It is understandable that, in a civilization which separates mind from body, we should either try to forget death or to make mythologies about the survival of transcendent mind. But if mind is immanent not only in those pathways of information which are located inside the body but also in external pathways, then death takes on a different aspect. The individual nexus of pathways which I call “me” is no longer so precious because that nexus is only part of a larger mind. The ideas which seemed to be me can also become immanent in you.68
Bateson’s own ideas were given extended life through the work of Stewart Brand, founder and editor of that counterculture bible The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968–71). Brand championed Bateson’s ideas throughout the mid-1970s. He promoted Steps to an Ecology of Mind by writing extended reviews of it for Rolling Stone and Harper’s magazines; the former included an account of several days that Brand spent visiting and interviewing Bateson in California.
In 1974, Brand began publication of the CoEvolution Quarterly, which featured Bateson’s ecological thinking and related ideas. In the summer of 1975, the CoEvolution Quarterly was the first to introduce the American reading public to the “Gaia hypothesis,” which imagines the entire biosphere as a single living intelligence.69 Gaia, like the image of existence that recurs in John Updike’s story, is a closed surface, a hollow sphere (with a thickness extending from the subsoil to the top of the atmosphere) constituted by patterns of ecological interaction.
As these few examples illustrate, from the beginning of World War II and into the 1970s, the decentralized, autopoietic system was clearly an important idea in American intellectual life. The history of this idea is part of the story of the evolving image of American democracy. It is also part of the story of the development of postmodernism, for identity in modernity is centralized and interiorized, as epitomized by the stream-of-consciousness technique of modernist writing, whereas identity in postmodernity is exteriorized in cultural constructions and generic conventions.
As a persistent metaphor, the vision of a decentralized system that governs itself through feedback loops offers us, as historians and cultural critics, a new interpretive paradigm to bring to the task of interpreting Cold War American culture. As such, it offers us a new lamp with which to look at the texts of the era, bringing with it the possibility of reassessing their social meanings. Reexamining them in its light may cause them to shine back at us with a new light of their own, casting new shapes and new shadows.
NOTES
1. See Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1979). See also Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
2. George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 57, 61.
3. John Blair et al., Economic Concentration and World War II, Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946).
4. Dwight Macdonald, “The Root Is Man (Part I),” Politics 3 (April 1946): 112.
5. C. Wright Mills, “The Structure of Power in American Society,” British Journal of Sociology 9, no. 1 (March 1958): 31. See also C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); and C. Wright Mills, “The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society,” Politics 1, no. 4 (April 1944): 69–71.
6. Gordon W. Allport, “Liabilities and Assets in Civilian Morale,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 216 (July 1941): 91.
7. Cedric Larson, “The Council for Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Summer 1942): 284–85. See also Patti Clayton Becker, Books and Libraries in American Society during World War II: Weapons in the War of Ideas (New York: Routledge, 2005), 65.
8. See Margaret Mead, “The Comparative Study of Culture and the Purposive Cultivation of Democratic Values,” in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Second Symposium, ed. Lymon Bryson and Louis Finkelstein (New York: Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., 1942), 59, 66. For more on the struggle over information management during the war, see Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22–25.
9. David Lipset, Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 166. Gregory Bateson, “Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 160–62. Subsequent quotations from this section of Steps to an Ecology of Mind will be cited parenthetically within the text as “Social Planning.”
10. See Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerich, Labyrinths of the Mind: The Self in the Postmodern Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 5.
11. See Gregory Bateson, “Morale and National Character,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 88–106. Bateson believed that what distinguished the members of one culture from another were exactly these habitual ways of thinking and contextualizing that were inculcated by characteristic processes of deutero-learning. See also Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 167.
12. Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 178–80.
13. See Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” in Science in Culture, ed. Peter Galison, Stephen R. Graubard, and Everett Mendelsohn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 57–58.
14. See Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 219, 180. The conceptual connection between cybernetics and social governance was far from new: the Greek cybernetes is rendered in Latin as gubernator, the root of such words as government and governor. Indeed, one of the earliest mechanical feedback mechanisms, devised in the 1800s to regulate the speed of a steam engine, is called a “governor.”
15. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 140–41. See Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974); and Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, introduction to The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 4–8.
16. John Cage, A Year from Monday (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), ix.
17. Richard Kostelanetz, “Inferential Art,” in John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Praeger, 1970), 107–8.
18. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1995), 10. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically within the text or notes.
19. Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (New York: Kodansha International, 1978), 185. See also Richard Kostelanetz, “Conversation with John Cage,” in Kostelanetz, John Cage. In connection with this idea, Cage liked to quote the ninth-century Buddhist text The Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind: “Imitate the sands of the Ganges who are not pleased by perfume and who are not disgusted by filth” (31).
20. Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 104, 109.
21. Natalie Crohn Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 30, 34. Emphasis mine.
22. John Cage, M: Writings ’62–’72 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 3.
23. John Cage, quoted in Michael Zwerin, “A Lethal Measurement,” Village Voice (6 January 1966), reprinted in Kostelanetz, John Cage, 164. Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers, 25.
24. See Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 162.
25. Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers, 16.
26. Cage, A Year from Monday, 31. For more on Pollock’s painting and field theory, see Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 109–14.
27. Schmitt, Actors and Onlookers, 31.
28. Cage wrote, “In this new music nothing takes place but sounds. . . . Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment” (Cage, Silence, 7–8).
29. Max Neuhaus, liner notes for Max Neuhaus, Fontana Mix—Feed (six realizations of John Cage). Alga Margnen, 2003. Emphasis mine.
30. Ibid.
31. See John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 68–69, 74, 77.
32. Ibid., 90–91, 98–101.
33. Ibid., 143.
34. Neuhaus, liner notes for Neuhaus, Fontana Mix—Feed. David Ernst, The Evolution of Electronic Music (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 161–2.
35. John Updike, “Why Write?” in Picked-Up Pieces (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 36, 35.
36. Robert Motherwell, “Beyond the Aesthetic,” quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., The Collages of Robert Motherwell (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1972), 91.
37. Updike, “Why Write?” 34.
38. Conversations with John Updike, ed. James Plath (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 27. Emphasis mine.
39. See Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike. In the story, Updike refers to the job that he shares with his father as that of “usher,” but in later interviews he identified it as “deacon” (75). See also the discussion of exempla in Kenneth J. Knoespel, “The Emplotment of Chaos: Instability and Narrative Order,” in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 109–11.
40. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 234.
41. John Updike, “Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car,” in Olinger Stories (New York: Vintage, 1964), 115–16. Subsequent quotations from this work will be cited parenthetically within the text or notes.
42. These themes are also explored in Updike’s 1959 novel The Poorhouse Fair. In that story, a new prefect in an old-age home for the poor undertakes a campaign of rational control and discipline that is ultimately controverted by the fair. The old people themselves “look at nature sensing that there are mysteries beyond the legible regularities of man-made patterns and propositions.” Tony Tanner, “A Compromised Environment,” in John Updike, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 40–42.
43. Updike, “Why Write?” 36. See also Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike. This idea is borne out by Updike’s critical opinions, for example, his preference for the works of J. D. Salinger over those of Saul Bellow, whose endings, he complained, always attempt to leave the reader on a firm moral footing, “endings which would point the way.” Instead, he praised Salinger as one who “made new room for shapelessness, for life as it is lived,” and even Kerouac, because “maybe something can get into sloppy writing that would elude careful writing” (Plath, Conversations, 42–43).
44. Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike, 31.
45. Tanner, “A Compromised Environment,” in Bloom, John Updike, 42.
46. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 227. I take issue here with the conclusions of D. Quentin Miller in John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), for I do not believe that existential anxiety is the main point in “Packed Dirt.” I believe neither that its presence in the story is due to a “fear of nuclear annihilation” that is “suppressed,” leaving the characters psychically numbed, isolated, hedonistic, and “not able to communicate effectively or connect with one another” (25), nor that Updike’s elegiac tone can be attributed to a “painful longing to return to the earlier, unfallen, innocent world of 1950s middle-class suburbia” (3). These are all well-worn clichés about Cold War culture as an age of anxiety and suburban anomie, but they fail to get at what is really going on in Updike’s writing.
47. Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike, 99. Emphasis mine. The comment was made in explication of some lines from “Midpoint,” (John Updike, Midpoint and Other Poems [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969]), a collage poem written by Updike in the late 1960s:
Atomically all writers must begin, the truth arises as if by telegraph
One dot, two dots, a silence, then—a laugh,
The rules inhere and will not be imposed. (38)
48. See Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike. Updike calls this, following Henry James, the “figure in the carpet” (184). The reference is to a James story in which the characters are themselves unknowingly participating in constructing the meaning that they seek to discover. The obstacles and rewards that the characters encounter seem to them to exist objectively but are actually feedback generated by their own behavior and assumptions.
49. Updike, “Why Write?” 33.
50. Updike is here alluding to a passage from Emerson: “a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads: and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread.” Updike, Self-Consciousness, 227–29. This world view accounts for Updike’s emphasis on continuity, as opposed to the sense of apocalypse that gripped many other Cold War writers. See also Plath, ed., Conversations with John Updike. As Updike said in that interview, “I do see the world much more in terms of persistence. I feel that it’s going to limp along” (103).
51. Updike, “Why Write?” 38. For more on Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity and its influence among the postwar avant-garde, see Belgrad, Culture of Spontaneity, 126–33.
52. Updike, Self-Consciousness, 218–19, 221.
53. Allen Ginsberg, Composed on the Tongue: Literary Conversations, 1967–1977 (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1980), 95. For another example of this idea in Updike’s writing, see The Centaur (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963).
54. Richard H. Rupp, “John Updike: Style in Search of a Center,” in Bloom, John Updike, 15.
55. In keeping with this metaphor, Updike earlier in the story refers to cars as “dreaming vehicles of unitary personhood” (Updike, “Packed Dirt,” 108).
56. Gregory Bateson, introduction to Steps to an Ecology of Mind, xxxii.
57. Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 434, 440.
58. Gregory Bateson, “Form, Substance, and Difference,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 466.
59. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind436.
60. See Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001), 2–20.
61. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 441–42.
62. Ibid., 440.
63. Gregory Bateson, “Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 512.
64. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 441.
65. Ibid., 443–44; and Gregory Bateson, “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 447–48.
66. Bateson, “Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 452–53. For more on “I-Thou,” see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970).
67. Gregory Bateson, “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 304.
68. Bateson, “Form, Substance, and Difference,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 471.
69. Lipset, Gregory Bateson, 285–86. This idea continues to engage the popular imagination, surfacing most recently in James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009). Stewart Brand, “Review of Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” Rolling Stone, 9 November 1972, 77. Stewart Brand, “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” Harper’s, November 1973, 20–37. Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, “The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere—the Gaia Hypothesis,” in News that Stayed News: Ten Years of “CoEvolution Quarterly,” 1974–1984, ed. Art Kleiner and Stewart Brand (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 15–25.