VIFF Review: An Ecology of Mind

An Ecology of Mind
Granville 7 Theatre 5
Saturday, October 2, 2010 9:00pm

From the film synopsis you think this would be a typical biography of a scientist and his work in a narrow field of study. But director Nora Bateson manages to convey the connectedness of thought that underpins the work of her father scientist Gregory Bateson. Gregory was a modern Renaissance man whose areas of study and ideas threaded together anthropology, biology, psychology, technology, and ecology. Interviews with wide ranging figures like Internet pioneer Steward Brand, physicist and author of The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra, and former California governor Jerry Brown attest to the influence and importance of Gregory's ideas. For Gregory, understanding something in isolated detail was just an exercise in cataloging. Without understanding its relationships to surrounding objects you completely miss the big picture—context matters.

There is much footage of Gregory with his measured and eloquent English accent, as he lectures, and discusses the importance of understanding relationships. He was an avid documentarian, taking thousands of photos and hours of footage when he worked with his then wife anthropologist Margaret Mead in Indonesia. Nothing seemed beyond his purview. He was a formidable and rigorous thinker, but a caring man who was especially tender with his youngest daughter.

Gregory's ideas about systems and relationships form an ecology of mind. He comes up with the concept of the "double bind" as a Catch-22 situation caused by dead-end thinking characterized by false dichotomies like the economy versus the environment, man versus nature, conservative versus liberal. As Gregory points out, divisions and definitions are often arbitrary conveniences which lead to restricted thinking about politics, economics, and the world.

In the filmmaker Q&A after this world premiere screening, Nora points out how this film could not have been made 20 years ago and how her father's ideas can only now become mainstream. It took the rise of the environmental movement, and the computer revolution and Internet to make systems thinking of the interconnectedness of things to be mainstream. As human society must recognize and solve deeply interconnected problems, the solutions will only come through deep understanding of the systems and relationships we depend on.