Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

There is no language to define the spiraling processes of the vast context we are participants in. We do not have names for the patterns of interdependency. To lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous. Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters.

Niels Bohr said that “the opposite of a great truth is also true,” and that was good, but what about the not-quite-opposite-that-was-sorta-true-at-one-point-and-now-feels-suddenly-relevant… that is the one that needs another go around. I would love to see the authenticity of a negotiation rhetoric that does not beget rigid binary positions, without a winner and a loser, something wider please….

I am giving up on interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and even meta-disciplinarity. The world is not made of disciplines. I still hold the work of my academic colleagues in high esteem, but I no longer place the academy at the center of the solar system of knowledge. I now see the academic contribution to learning as one aspect of knowledge—amongst many. Life is not divisible into the departments of a university, nor is our understanding of life greatly increased by standard research practices, which tend to pull their ‘subject’ matter out of the larger contexts they exist in, to facilitate focused study. The studied subjects never get put back into their relationships, and the contexts never seem to be describable in the data.

An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within community, culture and, ultimately, the natural world. Margaret Mead noted the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Indeed, the responsibility for the world the child grows to understand lies in the collective impressions that the village provides. In the same way, the behavior of institutions lies in the contextual expectations and valuations of each organization’s relationships within the larger community, as well as at the level of each employee. This is a tricky set of boundaries to draw, influenced at meta levels by lurking habits of thinking that tend to individuate. The responsibility is in the village, and the way the village interacts with its institutions. In the same way, the institutions interact with each other to form the linking zone where the blending of culture, economy and education happens. In our dissatisfaction with the behavior of our institutional or corporate organizations, we, the village, with our wish for ‘change,’ may feel impotent. Politics, business, law, education, medicine, and media are all substantiating each other. Politics needs business to thrive, education is the link to employment and scientific importance, medicine and law try to support both the political and personal codes of health and justice in respect to business and governmental policy. We cannot after all vote on the board or rewrite corporate policy from the sidelines. ...

The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox. The confusion lies with the idea of individuation. The entity (organism, person, or organization) is bound to its unique perspective or epistemology, and in that sense is identifiable as a separate source of responsibility. But, there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions. On closer examination we begin to see that agency is diffused into the larger contextual processes that are shared by the entire community. Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture.

In scientific circles, the systems sciences have become a haven for a modeling and explanatory language for how to deal with complex problems. This would be OK, except that the linearity and the mechanistic principles of reductionism in western culture have wormed their way into the systems vocabulary. The result is that we get strategic methodologies and defined models for fixing isolated issues within complex living interactions that have a living context. To put it more bluntly, the old way of addressing problems—by defining causality and applying predetermined formulized ‘actions’ to ‘solve’ the problem defined—has become painted into the terms and language of the new systems and complexity disciplines. The vocabulary has changed, but the thinking remains the same. ‘Recursive’ becomes a word that brings to mind a series of boxes connected by arrows, and ‘decoupling’ seems now to refer to a mechanistic split in systems linkages.

But uncertainty has also become a sort of island of intellectual excuses—reasons for deferring deeper study. The problem with making a place for mystery is that it so easily gets co-opted into an eddy, where ideas go in easy circles instead of lending themselves to the movement of a wider stream. While there is a kind of sweetness and beauty to this deferral, it is also an entry point to binary thinking. There soon exist in that epistemology just two categories: that which we know and that which we do not. This is a divide that soon gains potency and can contaminate our work: both in terms of what we feel we can understand, which assumes a more rigid and possibly arrogant form, and that which we can’t, which turns to fluff and quickly blows away in the wind. I would suggest a more modest motivation, which is neither to completely understand nor to label as mystery, but to simply deepen our understanding. The deepening is not finding the answer, not looking for a final truth, but becoming increasingly familiar with the many

complexities that surround all that we study. We will never understand it completely, but we can continue (endlessly) to increase our comprehension of the variables at play.

Art is unreasoned. It does not apologize. My father, once said, “Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.136.)

So, the point, the deliverable, the practicality of my work is not to offer concrete solutions, or stepped improvement plans. It is to offer an invitation in to a world that does not sit still, and encourage an increase in sensitivity to the complexity in all of its glory and gore. My work is premised on the idea of mutual learning between and within living contexts. This learning does not stop. It is not always progressive, or good: sometimes learning to be in a context includes addiction, pathology, and so on. We cannot control mutual learning; we cannot solve it. But, we can become more able to take in and consider the complexity we are faced with if we approach it from this stance.

We cannot know the systems, but we can know more. We cannot perfect the systems, but we can do better. The evolution of our own ability to understand and interact with the world around us is an increase in our ability to be sensitive to information we have previously been blind to. That is learning to learn.

With this in mind, I have combined the Greek words syn/sym (together) and mathesi, (to learn), to create symmathesy (learning together). A working definition of symmathesy might look like this: Symmathesy (noun): (Pronounced: sym-math-a-see)

1. an entity formed over time by contextual mutual learning through interaction. For example, an ecosystem at any scale, like a body, family, or forest is a symmathesy. 2. the process of contextual mutual learning through interaction. Symmathesize (verb, intrans.): to generate contextual mutual learning through the process of interaction between multiple variables in a living entity.