The Good Son

This chapter describes how Bateson’s efforts to connect with peers such as Konrad Lorenz and to make his thought assessable to a lay audience resulted in a breakthrough: the recognition of Mind as the central concept in the life sciences. This breakthrough also represents Bateson taking on his father William Bateson's scientific legacy. The chapter tells of the collapse of William Bateson's health and career in the aftermath of his son Martin's suicide. The chapter explicates the essay Bateson sent to Lorenz in the summer of 1966, "The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution." By proposing a "simulated Lamarckian inheritance," the essay served as a challenge to the modern synthesis as a fully adequate explanation of evolutionary change. Bateson believed the essay to rescue some of his father's disfavored ideas by using systems theory concepts to disturb conventional Darwinism. These events coincided in 1966 with a chance reading of an old Irish myth, "The Conversion of Tuan MacCairill." The story echoed ideas about descent in both On Aggression and The Sword in the Stone, and the coincidence marked an affirmation for Bateson of his thought.

The Curious Twist

This chapter is set at the 1967 Congress for the Dialectics of Liberation, held over ten days in July in London. Drawing on transcripts and film of the event, the chapter presents a radical movement roiled by budding radicalisms: identity politics, second wave feminism, and an increasing commitment to militancy–all demonstrated in Stokely Carmichael’s divisive Congress appearances, both alone and on a panel with R. D. Laing, Emmett Grogan, and Allen Ginsberg. Amid this agitation, Gregory Bateson offered his synthesis of systems theory, cybernetics, and the ecology of mind. His speech is carefully explicated and annotated with Bateson's recent readings of T. H. White, Philip Wylie's The Magic Animal, and Irish myth. Bateson aligned with radical opinion in its critique of modernization, but it took that critique beyond the enduring problems of human aggression, political oppression, and psychic alienation, and into a more fundamental analysis of the instrumentalism at the heart of the modern worldview. Challenged by audience members over systems thinking as quietist and reactionary, Bateson defended his approach by explaining the greenhouse effect and the prospect of global warming/climate change. This was perhaps the first exposure of such concepts to a lay audience.

Celtic Tradition: The Guiding Force of William Butler Yeats

The folklore, myth, and legends of ancient Celtic traditions inspired William Butler Yeats a lot. By not falling into the trap of overly romanticizing his work, as many other authors of the time would do, Yeats was able to begin a tradition of another sort, the Irish literary tradition. By giving importance on the Irish culture in his work, Yeats fulfilled his own sense of national pride to the delight of his readers and audiences and to the chagrin of many of his English contemporaries who felt that nothing of value or worthy of study could come out of Ireland. From 1890 he was a member of the occult group of the Golden Dawn1, which fuelled his fascination with the mystic symbols of rosicrucianism and cabbalism. Because of these activities his thinking gave an emphasis on magic and apocalypticism that would remain a constant feature of his work. This article aims at exploring the Irish myth, folklore, occultism and the tradition that inspired William Butler Yeats. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/iiucs.v6i0.12248 IIUC Studies Vol.6 2010: 53-64