Intelligent Design and Gregory Bateson

The question of what children are to be taught about evolution is being rerun as a debate about “intelligent design".

Here we are, at the beginning of a new century, caught up in a replay of old debates between religion and science, and the question of what children are to be taught about evolution is being rerun as a debate about “intelligent design” which President Bush has declared should be taught in schools.

Bateson and Mead both grew up in dogmatically atheistic households and might be said to have approached religion first through the arts. Margaret chose in adolescence to join the Episcopal church and remained a member throughout her life. Gregory never formally joined a religious community but he hung out with Buddhists at the San Francisco Zen community and at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he taught for several years. Both were willing to deal, with curiosity and courtesy, with a variety of other unorthodox belief systems: parapsychology, spiritual healing, UFOs, channeling…oh, my. Gregory referred to his interest in the sacred as breaking a taboo and going “where angels fear to tread.”

Gregory once said during an experimental LSD session, when he was shown a rose (and told to be less analytical about his experience), “Think of all the thought it took to make that rose.” This reads like an endorsement of intelligent design, which argues that when we look carefully at the natural world we see an order of complexity that can only be explained by assuming the existence of a designer. But Gregory was precisely not arguing for an external designer. He spoke of learning (or thought) and evolution as the “two great stochastic processes,” each of which occurs within a mind capable of responding selectively to random inputs and of integrating these in an ongoing pattern. For him, an organism (like the rose bush) was a mind, but so was a forest or lake – living systems. Any relationship created a larger mind: the gardener, plants, insects, bacteria in the soil, and even the gardener’s tools which also become parts of that larger mind. So for Gregory, equating evolution and thought, every organism could be expected to show the characteristics of intelligent design. And because, as Gregory argued, the unit of survival is always the organism in its environment, it is essential for human beings to see the mental characteristic of the larger systems that enfold our lives. For him, awe was the appropriate response to a walk in the woods. If the walkers needed to imagine pixies hiding under mushrooms in order to respond to the life around them, they might be better off with pixies than without, but design was a characteristic of the system.

P. S. When people ask me about Margaret’s attitude toward religion, I describe her habit of promptly dozing off during sermons. She prayed and joined in the liturgy, but she largely set aside doctrinal and moralistic lectures. For her too, religious experience represented an essential way of knowing that should not be understood as literal fact. I think both Margaret and Gregory, therefore, would have viewed fundamentalism as a sad and dangerous error in understanding mythopoetic insight. Fundamentalists and materialists have this in common: both are unable to sustain a poetic wonder and humility in the living world.