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by
Nora Bateson
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February 7 - June 24, 2019
He was asking the right question.
Trevor and I were now off script. The counselors and the diagnoses were no longer on the table as remotely relevant.
So it was my turn; I took a risk and made a deal with Trevor.
Trevor is an actor, and he was already studying performance at that time. So I offered him his first paid acting job. I promised him 100 dollars to play the part of the Straight-A student until the end of the school year, (it was already February).
I wanted him to know that he had an advocate.
Besides that, I only wanted him to know that his fear was real and beautifully articulated.
I knew then that educational institutions have no vigor for those of us who question them.
yuh, that’s my problem too!
When I went to my mom that night in tears, having just dreamed of a classroom in which everyone was just mindlessly performing their tasks, no individuality, no talking, no freedom, I thought “Oh no, my mom’s going to just tell me to go back to bed and that it’s nothing.” But, of course, my mom is a Bateson, so she said, “Let’s talk about this in the morning.”
A few minutes later as we were driving along the man suddenly had a knife in my father’s side. He was demanding money; he was pumping with adrenaline. I think this qualifies as an emergency. A two-lane road with nowhere to pull over. A kid in the back seat, and it would be another 30 years before the invention of the mobile telephone. But I never noticed. I did not see the emergency because my father’s response was to cheerfully look down at the knife, then into the man’s eyes and say in his most droll Englishness, “Well hello, what have we here?”
His curiosity in the young man was piqued, and his inquiry reflected that. He did not see a knife… he saw a person with a story.
As I look back now at that situation I can only say that I hope one day to be able to see context as well as my father did.
Sometimes the way through is at an entirely unseen angle.
Your touch telling mine a story It illustrates in epiphanies.
We are mapping ourselves in illegible script.
I am giving up on interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and even meta-disciplinarity. The world is not made of disciplines.
Totally agree!
There was a time when I would have said that the context is what is missing in our current research practices.
But I have come realize that even context is not enough. Living systems especially require more than one context of study if we’re to get a grasp of their vitality.
Transcontextual description as a starting place opens the possibilities of better understanding the interdependency that characterizes living (and arguably many non-living) systems.
All of these contexts, shared and otherwise, come together to form the ‘causalities’ of the family.
when the larger intertwined contexts are in focus, agency is diffused.
There is toxicity in the flat numbness of singular study; the blending of contexts is where the study becomes alive.
The lack of such characters now, we are told, suggests a vacuum in our capacity to generate the old-school kind of hope for the future that these courageous individuals embodied.
I would like a moment to call bullshit.
There is no such thing as an isolated individual—we are all interdependent. Period.
The very word ‘leadership’ has become cringe worthy. It reeks of colonialism and lopsided history-book listings of individuals successful in taking, making, and claiming.
This is an obsolete but undead dream of heroes and rescuers pioneering innovations.
What is the ecology of leadership?
I think there isn’t one. When we look to nature for models, we find that there is not an ecology that would accommodate the existing model of leadership.
This makes the ‘relationship of dominance’ perceived, contextual, and not fixed. What we see as deference is a collaborative, communicational relationship that can be disrupted if the ‘leader’ or the ‘followers’ reorganize the communication.
Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong… willing to learn, to explore new ideas, to go off the map, out of the known, and together grope in the shadowy corners of new ideas, new plans, new territories.
This means big oil is not to blame, big banks are not to blame, big pharma is not to blame. Big weapons, and bad guys—not to blame.
Whether we like it or not. As uncomfortable as it is, the lens of contextualizing leadership reveals that the responsibility we would like to hold our institutions to, does not in fact lie inside the institutions, but between them.
The linkings between institutions, where no governing body lies, is the zone where integrity or corruption actually rests.
growing systemic transformation is always relational; the ecology is what changes, not the individual bits.
To trust the context requires a second order shift in purposing our agendas.
if there is a shift in shared tastes and values within the community—a general trend that does not include those drugs—the suppliers will seek other opportunities.
We might inquire more broadly (while at the same time trying to change policy)—what kind of civilization we want to live in.
The millions of people who are forced now for economic, ecological, and political reasons to start new lives in new lands, are dangerous not because they will deplete the social services of the ‘developed’ countries they enter, but because in the act of refusal by the developed countries the integrity of ‘civilization’ is being condemned.
The notion of the individual entity having agency is confused by a paradox.
leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual.
The danger of the world’s fascination with celebrity is that it distracts from our ability to perceive larger interactions in context.
This is our tribe. Just the 7 billion of us… and the animals, plants and microorganisms. Those who came before, and those who will follow. That’s all.
If you look out the front window of your home you will see something very different than if you look out the back window. It is not our doors that hold us in our trenches, not the gates or walls—it’s the windows.
It is not,
after all, in the monetary interest or the political interest of our existing institutions that they come together and alter the patterns of our living, as they must.
art is impatient, skips over decades of theory, and is either baffling, or stretches perception into new territories of knowing.
Through subjectivity, art brews the healing salve of multiplicity.
It was written in an effort to
console Gregory after his brother Martin had committed suicide.
