Mary Catherine Bateson
Anthropologist and Author,
Daughter of Anthropologist Margaret Mead
"Composing Community in a Diverse, Changing World"
October 4, 2001

Mary Catherine Bateson: One of the things that people have been repeating since September 11^th is that everything is different. It is that repeated statement and the experience behind it that I want to start from. Because, of course, it is not true that everything is different. The New York skyline is different. There is a material change, an absence. It is very interesting to go and look at an absence. Many peoples’ lives are changed by the loss of relatives and friends, individuals, and those are changes that are going to be very direct and immediate. But, for most of us, when we say that everything is different, what we are talking about is a change in our perception—a difference in the way we see the world and ourselves in it. Part of that difference has to do with a sense of vulnerability: America, which has felt safe behind its oceans most of the time, feels vulnerable in a new kind of way.

Another way in which everything is different has to do with the wave of patriotism that is sweeping across the country. Some of it I find rather disconcerting—I have never been much of a flag waver. But I asked a student about all the flags and he said to me, "You know, it never occurred to us to think about what it meant to be American. It was just something we could take for granted." So, for him, something that he had taken for granted suddenly became central. That is a very fundamental change in perception.

The last change in perception I want to talk about has to do with the financial structure of our country and its interconnections with the financial structure of the entire world. Now, you all know that money doesn’t exist—that those green and gray pieces of paper are intrinsically worthless and useless for most purposes. The importance of money comes from a social agreement to give it value. One of the things that we are seeing is that although the social agreement has not fallen apart, the whole complicated structure of value associated with corporations and the whole structure of credit—this incredible virtual reality of credit we live in the middle of—is shaking, with very real implications.

A friend of mine said to me the other day when I was talking about money, "I see what you mean. We live in one of the great ages of faith." Because we believe that this incredible mythological construct represents a reality, and as long as we believe it, it does. So, seeing that, we are shaken. This is another kind of vulnerability.

All this, if you stop and notice it, it raises questions about your perceptions of reality. Americans have experienced, since September 11^th, a number of profound changes in our perceptions of the world we live in and the way we believe other people perceive us. It tends to be very surprising to Americans when they are reminded that there are people who regard them with great enmity and anger. I may say it is also surprising to discover the friends they have around them. Both of those things have been happening.

The first thing that I want to say to all of you at this time when we are surrounded with a great deal of emotion, is to invite everyone in this room to reflect on what it means when, from one day to the next, your perception of the world is changed. That is a very important experience. It is an experience to reflect on because what it says to you is that you always see the world through a lens of assumptions that are shared, to greater or lesser degree, with the people you live with. What we are talking about is the discovery in your own mental process that your understanding of the world is relative. It depends on experience—who you are and where you come from. I imagine there are a fair number of anthropology students in the room. We say this over and over again in anthropology—look at the world differently, and it is very difficult to see the world through different peoples’ eyes. This was central to the work of my mother, Margaret Mead. She used to have a sort of list that she used when talking to people about the experiences that produce "insight." I realize, now, that what she meant by "insight" was that awareness. What you see and what you think does have some relationship to what others see and think, but there is a relativity there, depending on point of view. And, there aren’t very many experiences that lead to a situation when you can say, "last week I saw the world this way, this week I see the world this way." That is an important moment to look at in yourself.

Now, of course, the way we see the world changes steadily through the course of a lifetime (one of the reasons we often disagree with our parents). And we are constantly learning ways of looking at the world. As a society, we are changing our opinions all the time. Sometimes it is very superficial—a lot of us grew up being told that if you go swimming less than an hour after eating, you will drown. Even though they tell us something different now, you won’t get me into a swimming pool. Or, we used to learn that when you burn yourself in the kitchen you put butter on it“biomedical fact. Now they say that you are supposed to put it under ice water. I notice that there are a few people in the audience who haven’t quite caught up with that one. I have a feeling that the story about cholesterol is going to keep changing a lot. It is really useful to be aware that one has held a belief, accepted it from the environment, and discarded it.

I grew up in an anthropological household. I thought of myself as growing up with a very liberated set of attitudes, without prejudices against people. One of the things that I have discovered is that the attitude I grew up with toward physically handicapped people was really very inadequate. I was brought up not to make fun of the handicapped and to be helpful. Nowhere in my consciousness growing up, sixty years ago, was the idea of access and full participation as basic issues in how we look at people with physical disabilities. It just wasn’t there; it wasn’t part of my perception of the world. So I had to learn that. I also had to learn that the attitude that I have grown up with did not stand the test of emerging ethical understandings. That is a very important experience to notice in yourself. Any prejudice or piece of bigotry that was in your environment when you grew up that you have outgrown (I hope) is a signal there may be some others; that attitudes have to keep changing.

One of the things I often suggest to people is to reread a book that they love and that has been important to them after a long span of time. Something read in college and then something read when you’re forty—I’ve got to tell you, it is not the same book. Somebody got in there and erased the ink and rewrote it to say something different. And a place that you loved when you were six years old and you go back there at twenty—it is so little. Someone got in there and shrunk it (maybe Alice in Wonderland). Going back to a place, a person or a text is in fact a way of becoming aware of the relativity in perception. One of the examples that my mother used to give was undergoing a religious conversion and then stepping back and recovering from it. One day you saw the world one way, the next day you saw it another way, and maybe ten years later that way of seeing the world no longer makes sense. If you have one religious conversion it is easy to just say that you were wrong before and reject the previous way of seeing. But, when you have been through this kind of thing more than once, you have to accept that the way you see the world is not fixed and absolute. I like to use the autobiography of Malcolm X in my teaching is because it starts out as a straight conversion narrative, but then you have essentially a second conversion when Malcolm is exposed to the orthodox Islamic tradition and has to shift again. There aren’t many books that record an unfolding, developing conversion like this.

Another experience of realizing that the way you see the world is not absolute is having a psychotic episode and recovering from it. You can remember what it was like to live in a universe that felt very different. Of course, a lot of people pursued this experience in the 60’s and 70’s by taking LSD. They took LSD as a way, among other things, to relativize their sense of what the world was like—the colors were different. This will happen when you fall in love, too. "Mind-blowing."

Mead would raise this point in the context of anthropological fieldwork, going and living in another culture that is very different from your own. Gradually you will arrive at a different view of the world. She felt that people who work closely with infants, observing their behavior, trying to understand what is going on in the mind of a 3-year-old, or working with trying to understand animals, will see this. The same thing happens.

There is a famous essay written by a man named Warren McCulloch, who was one of the founders of cybernetics. He wrote an essay about "what the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain." We think our eyes tell us what is there, but what they tell us is a rather specialized and highly evolved version of what is there, with some corrections and distortions built in. The frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain what it needs in order to catch a fly. That simple. Almost no information about anything except something moving of about the right size, which is what the frog needs to know to survive. What our eyes tell us is rich and complicated, but we always have to remember that it is only what our eyes tell us and what the lens of our experience allows us to think about.

Mead used to end her spiel about different ways of seeing the world, arriving at insight by saying, "You could fall in love with an Old Russian." By this, she didn’t mean an elderly Russian, she meant a pre-Revolutionary Russian—New York used to be full of "White Russians" (the common phrase, as opposed to "Red Russians"). The point being that falling in love with someone from a totally different culture combines the experience of falling in love with the experience of cultural difference. She kept on saying this for years and years. Time passed and the available White Russians grew fewer and fewer! Finally a student put up her hand and stood up and said, "Does he have to be old?"

My sister lived in Thailand for a couple of years with a Thai boyfriend. And she said something to me that I quote quite often: "It was the most wonderful preparation for marriage because every time he did something that upset me, instead of feeling that he was doing it on purpose to hurt me, I would step back and say, ‘but he comes from a different country, maybe it has a different meaning." But then she went on to say (she’s now married to an American), "I find that is still what I have to do."

The first step toward community in spite of difference is relativizing your own perception, your own way of seeing the world. You are not going to give it up or throw it away. You will just get it really clear in your mind that it is one of many possible ways of looking at the world, and not the absolute way. The second step is to realize that the people you see everyday—the people you go to bed with or have breakfast with—also see the world rather differently.

This has to be, you know. The whole point of the human institution of the family is a way of getting a group of people working together who are different from each other—male, female, old, and young—contributing different things to the household. Of course they have different values, of course they have different priorities and see things differently. The only circumstance under which one can assume that all family members see the world the same way is if you happen to be in a culture where there is one person who is allowed to say how the family will think. And you know who that one person is.

As soon as everybody gets a chance to express their views and be listened to, what you discover within a household is a lot of diversity and a lot of change going on,a pluralistic family. So I have been arguing for a long time that a necessary precondition to community building across lines of religious, ethnic, and racial difference, is to become generally aware of the difference we live with—the diversity of the people under the same roof at a given point and time. How on earth can we deal with people who are profoundly different in their ways of viewing the world unless we honor the most intimate kinds of diversity?

I started out today by inviting you to reflect on your own reactions, emotional and intellectual, to September 11^th, as a way of learning about yourself and about changes in perception. You know, they say experience is the best teacher, but most of us are very bad students, because experience is only a good teacher if we reflect on it. So it is very important to combine a subjective and an objective reaction, to approach these events with an awareness of feelings of anger and outrage, but also to approach them with an urgent curiosity—how is it that these people see the world? What is it that they are thinking? What is it that is making them to behave this way?