Fresh take on religion and the enviroment
One of my favorite anthropologists Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) photo below with his third child
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson
says in his ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind‘ something profound about environmental attitudes and therefore about conflict on perhaps the most important issue for our future:
“If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you.
And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. 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 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. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of this world are finite.”
Bateson was a heavy user and proponent of LSD, but it was alcohol and tobacco that ultimately caused his death.
My father met him at the Macy Conferences on LSD and Cybernetics, it was a god that died.
Invented realities and framing have a sordid history from that era, as a youth I talked with Bateson in Esalen just before his death, he said the whole thing was a boxed canyon and an opportunity for frauds and liars and self promoting charlatans.
He seemed sincere about that in his last days before he moved to the SF Zen Center to die.
Storming Heaven, through the LSD experience was a fraud according to Bateson as is the whole basis of constructivism, inventing your own reality, etc Watzalwick said the same thing at his last lecture at Stanford.
He said that that theory is a dead end.
Based on my own experience of Bateson’s 60s era, I very much agree with @victor’s comments. My views on post-modernism and framing (see separate postings) reflect Philip Kitcher’s ‘modest realism’ in his ‘Science, Truth and Democracy’, plus a strong dash of Karl Popper on falsifiability. In passing, I am not a fan of Thomas Kuhn’s incommensurability, though I think his idea of paradigm shift has some value for showing the nature of ‘frame change’.
My own fairly varied experience suggests we (myself included) do adopt somewhat arbitrary frames (especially in conflict), and the first step is to know that, and try to identify what frame we are using and see if any other frame or paradigm works better: is more realistic, tests better, and in some cases is more creative of good solutions. Knowingly using two frames of the two sides at once has been very powerful for me as a mediator. I do like Bateson’s ‘the map is not the territory’, but as I say in my posting on Post-Modernism: that does not mean maps/frames can be arbitrary if they are to be useful. Some maps or frames are truer than others, though there is an element of Popperian doubt in our use of any particular frame.
But Bateson’s work on ecology, at least as mapped out in ‘Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson’ by Peter Harries-Jones, seems to have some interesting things to say. I find Bateson’s ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ taken neat often incomprehensible. The quote above resonated with me when I read it some years ago.
I suppose many of the world’s greatest thinkers, poets, musicians, artists had drug or alcohol problems. So do many lesser beings who are legends only in their own minds.
Seeing reality in all its gory glory does not necessarily make for a quiet soul, but it also does not mean they have nothing of value to say. I have found interesting insights in the most unlikely places: 3am on the night shift in a car plant or from ex-Special Forces officers who I seem to find particularly insightful.
Raymond Chandler says: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid’, which has provided a useful perspective in navigating these interesting places.
Thanks Victor for your personal insight of Gregory Bateson.
Whoops fruit bats seemed to have elided over onto a discussion of Gregory Bateson. Oh well. Posting not quite at our standards of civility and balance. But here is my reply. Though I doubt anyone else is listening.
Relative to the Dylan Evans case, I have not even looked at the case from an HR viewpoint (my profession), because there seem to me from what I know to be procedural flaws in the approach that I suspect the forthcoming judicial review will uncover, if Irish labour law is anything like UK law. That will damage UCC, which I was hoping to avoid.
Leo Abse expert UK labour lawyer and MP used to teach us the handling of UK Industrial Tribunals with three principles: was there a clear rule that was broken; was there good due process that established the fact that the rule was broken; and was the punishment proportional to the offence? It seems to me in this case, the rules at stake are conflicting and ambiguous and the conflicts not addressed. I had to let off several probably guilty parties because our rules were not clear, and we used the cases to re-write the rules to remove ambiguity. The process was not as disciplined as I would have liked to defend to a Tribunal and its reporting out ambiguous. I think the punishment for the residual ‘offence’ is disproportionate. I therefore don’t think this investigation passes Abse’s tests. But the judicial review on June 30th will decide if I am appropriate in my application of UK labour law to Ireland. So much for positional thinking that I tried to avoid in my original posting.
It doesn’t matter if academic freedom is a Dylan Evan’s afterthought, red herring or whatever; the rules of the university under section 14.2 are quite clear and should have been brought into the original investigation by UCC itself, if only to make a balancing judgement: on the one hand potential harassment, on the other hand academic freedom. There really is an issue about free flow of evidence in universities and the initial outrage reflected this. I don’t know if Roe or Dred Scott or others in pivotal cases were good people: their cases highlighted fundamental legal dilemmas and this is what we have on our hands here: the clash of the principals of Dignity at Work and Academic Freedom, regardless of the subjective factors at work. I think the Irish High Court recognized this and that is why they most unusually took this case of internal disciplinary procedure on.
Dylan Evan’s moral character and other actions outside the investigation’s remit are utterly irrelevant legally to the very narrow offence (article being handed over) being considered, once the investigation found what it found. Now if the investigators had worked for me, I would have hoped they would have presented a much clearer conclusion that would have not left Michael Murphy with his dilemma. Dylan Evans and the complainant will I suspect both survive this issue; Michael Murphy may not. That would be a tragedy.
Finally, I don’t like mobs of whatever hue, and from childhood have gone into the mob to rescue their victim. In this case there are three victims of mob violence to their reputations and my approach was an attempt to rescue all three without injury, and in their interests as best I can see them without consultation with them. For those who criticize this: consider that you might be wrong, as indeed the judicial review may find my thinking mistaken too.
PS I have presided over the firing of hundreds of employees for a variety of offences (from serious assault, drugs, harassment, racial slurs, sabotage, to most commonly simply not showing up often enough) over the years. Some of my colleagues never managed to fire anyone. I never lost an industrial tribunal (though fought a number), or took a strike over one of my firing decisions, even though the toughest decisions were often unionized supervisor assaulted by unionized hourly employee, both unions with the ability and habit of striking when they didn’t like the outcome. So I have some track record of finding the just solution, which is why my findings were so rarely disputed. Abse’s principles were my guide to all of this from the start of every investigation.
Thanks for your clarification about the UK laws.
In the USA there would be a number of issues
1/ the initial allegations and results– Murphy MD did not fire Evans, he ordered counseling, if Evans did not like that he could have just resigned. Evans was still in a probational period and Murphy was his boss.
2/ Evans contacted his union to contests the order by Murphy– very well– they would have negotiated– my guess is that Evans would have ended up with a brief counseling-
3/ Before the Union process commenced Evans went nuclear claiming restrictions on his Academic Freedom (deleted references )
In the USA if a junior faculty did that then they could proceed through the courts, but they would end any chance of tenure anywhere for ever.
4/ The issue in framing and re framing is that you have what happened– the facts– then you have the narrative about the facts– the meaning.
The worst thing you can do in a court of law is to keep on changing the story.
Back to Bateson– he actually did a lot of harm by his Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia– it was just a theory with no evidence and perpetuated the myth that parents and particularly mothers caused schizophrenia.
When I talked to Batesons colleagues, Weakland and Watzlawick, about this they said they did it for the funding, because that was the dominant Freudian theory at the time and that was the only way they could get funded for their projects– they had run out of funds from the Office of Naval Research– which paid for Batesons LSD experiments
Your points on Bateson are in line with what I have heard, though I still see references that seem to ignore all the evidence to the genetic sources of schizophrenia. I think Double Bind has had some uses in philosophical discussion, but not where he applied it. One of his colleagues in the half way house, Charles Hampton Turner seems to me to have taken what is benign in Bateson and used in matters cross-cultural, seeing each world cultures as differing way of resolving dilemmas.
As for the Dylan Evans case, I would have expected things to have gone exactly as you suggest. But they did not and I understand all the union negotiation had taken place before this went public; indeed it seems that UCC would not negotiate at all. I think this was a mistake and would not have been my advice to UCC if asked. The next step was industrial tribunal, which, so far as I know, would have been public and fully covered by the media (if it had been in the UK at least.)
The first I heard was that someone had posted some really nasty stuff about Evans on the net using the documents and he reacted defensively. But I am not here to defend his actions. I might have handled it differently, but then I am used to being under pressure, media scrutiny etc. and have no future career to protect.
As for changing his story, there is little dispute about the core facts of the case, except if there was someone else present; and I would have nailed that one way or another irrefutably as part of the investigation in signed statements by Evans and complainant. The rest of the argument is all in the framing by the participants. Or Evans speculating: ‘Why are they doing this to me? Why won’t they negotiate?’ The external investigation concluded in a way that would have fully supported your suggested solution: counseling/sensitivity training. I would have added formal apology for unintended offense. And Evans offered both of these solutions I understand.
Instead it became a likely tenure buster and in UK normal employment law that might have been construed as ‘constructive dismissal’ and disproportional to the offense found as per Abse. However, I am not sure about the legal nature of academic contracts in Ireland or UK. Anyway, we don’t really have to worry about that now, as the judicial review under Irish law (which may well have different case law, not to mention statute than UK law, but is likely to be closer to UK law than US) will determine all this I assume on June 30th.
My real worry, and reason for re-framing the case as non-zero sum, is that the case as a win-lose judicial review could either undermine protection against harassment (and I put in place perhaps the UK’s first shop floor protection of female line workers against harassment rules in 1986 when women were first legally allowed to work shifts) or academic freedom so that academics will not feel able to offer anything remotely sexual to a colleague of a different gender (or perhaps even same gender if sexual orientation is a factor). There is a real dilemma and I hope that the judicial review will recognize this and suggest a way out.
If this were my work place, I might put in place a procedure in which colleagues might send an email note on any potentially sexually offensive/sensitive data, saying there is this data, it has this academic abstract, do you wish to receive it? They could even label it a ’14.2.1 situation’: ‘useful evidence of a sexual explicit nature that is relevant to the discussion’. The colleague would then reply yes or no, and thus both sides would be protected by a matter of electronic record. Or if there is to be an on-going discussion on sexually explicit material, there could be a general waiver, again recorded electronically or in a signed document. Messy and cumbersome, but perhaps necessary to protect from harassment, while protecting academic freedom.
Thanks for continuing this dialogue in now measured way: your contesting has helped clarify my thoughts on this issue; something that I believe conflict can do: create improved insights if we listen, without necessarily simply agreeing.
PS There is a whole other issue around academic tenure worldwide. A worthy idea to protect free expression of opinion in academia, in practice it seems to require a lot of orthodoxy to obtain. Is there much evidence that promising academics whose work is completely counter to or undermines their institution’s tenured professors research are likely to get tenure? Do we reward those who overturn existing paradigms convincingly? So is this is another dilemma: to prove you are worthy of tenure you have to be ‘reliable’: and does this mean methodologically rigorous, which seems reasonable, or does your conclusions content have to be acceptable too?
I love the story told about Karl Popper (I paraphrase from memory) who in New Zealand in the 1940s saw a colleague who was looking depressed. He asked him: ‘what’s the matter?’ and his colleague said: ‘I have just disproved the theory I worked on for ten years’. ‘Marvelous’ said Popper: ‘you are a real scientist and have achieved something remarkable’.
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