Book completed

[eve_prime]

Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson. Whew! My assigned book for May. The author would have been a very interesting person to know; this book collects a variety of essays and talks he wrote on multiple topics. Trained as an anthropologist, he also spent years working with schizophrenic people, then his ideas about cybernetics (information systems and how they work with feedback, redundancy, etc.) became important in the environmental movement in the 1970s. I read his Mind and Nature many years ago, but this one has always daunted me. And with good cause – his thoughts remain somewhat opaque, but the ideas he raises are also fascinating. I don’t think his thoughts on how family communication feeds into schizophrenia are necessarily current, but his ideas about confusion between metaphor and literal speech could be relevant for talking with people with autism. The chapters on genetics are probably seriously outdated, because they didn’t know about epigenetics back then, but I bet he would have loved all that. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. I would have welcomed more clarity, though – maybe I should reread Mind and Nature.