Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work touched many other fields. He wrote *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (1972) and *Mind and Nature* (1979). In Palo Alto, California, Bateson worked with Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland on what became known as the Bateson Project (1953–1963), which produced the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. A consistent theme in his work was an interest in systems theory. He belonged to the core group of the Macy conferences on cybernetics (1941–1960) and later the Group Processes conferences (1954–1960), where he represented the social and behavioral sciences, and he explored how these fields relate to epistemology. His influence grew through his connection with editor and author Stewart Brand.

Bateson was born in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, England, on 9 May 1904, the third and youngest son of Beatrice Durham and geneticist William Bateson. He was named after Gregor Mendel. He attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, earned a BA in biology at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued at Cambridge until 1929. His life was deeply affected by the deaths of his two brothers. John Bateson (1898–1918) died in World War I. Martin Bateson (1900–1922) wanted to be a poet and playwright, which put him in conflict with their father; after a romantic disappointment, he shot himself publicly under the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus on 22 April 1922, John’s birthday. This scandal shifted the family’s expectations onto Gregory.

In 1928, Bateson taught linguistics at the University of Sydney. From 1931 to 1937, he was a Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Before World War II, he did anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali. During the 1940s, he helped apply systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. Though initially reluctant, he served in the OSS during the war alongside other anthropologists, sharing office space with Julia Child and Paul Cushing Child. He designed ‘black propaganda’ radio broadcasts, worked on covert operations in Burma and Thailand, and also served in China, India, and Ceylon. He used his theory of schismogenesis to create discord among enemy fighters. The war troubled him, and he disagreed with his wife about whether science should guide social planning or only promote understanding. In 1956, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute (later Saybrook University) and joined the faculty of Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz in 1972. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the University of California Board of Regents, where he served until his death, though he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979 over the university’s nuclear weapons work. His final decade was spent developing a “meta-science” of epistemology meant to unify early systems theories from different scientific fields.

He married anthropologist Margaret Mead in 1936; they had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939–2021), who also became an anthropologist. They separated in 1947 and divorced in 1950. In 1951, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Sumner, daughter of Bishop Walter Taylor Sumner; they had a son, John Sumner Bateson (1951–2015), and twins who died shortly after birth in 1953. They divorced in 1957. He married therapist and social worker Lois Cammack (born 1928) in 1961; they had a daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1968). Bateson was a lifelong atheist, like his family for generations, and belonged to William Irwin Thompson’s Lindisfarne Association. He died on 4 July 1980, at age 76, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center. Lily King’s 2014 novel *Euphoria* fictionalizes his relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea.

Where others saw inexplicable details, Bateson perceived simple relationships. In “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” he argued that twentieth-century history can be seen as a history of malfunctioning relationships, citing the Treaty of Versailles as an example of a pattern based on betrayal and hate, and linking it to the development of cybernetics.