This afternoon (for me) I happened to be reading the chapter in Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Circles, “Parts & Wholes, Hope & Horror”. The “horror” part has to do with an interview she had been asked to do that turned out to be for a neo-Nazi individual/organization/website that was using cybernetics and systems theory to justify its own designs for national and racial purity.
Two things immediately flashed to mind. One was the end of the Kripal interview when the discussion turned to the political consequences of “flipping”. His answer was generally affirmative, but, fortunately, not without a number of significant caveats. Ultimately, he thinks “the humanities” (as we generally understand the academic term) were going to be a potential avenue of thwarting the apocalypse towards which are hurtling ourselves. The other was the brief exchange on the Generations III thread (posts 10-15) where, among other things, the notions of algorithms and technology were being sorted in regard to finding solutions to many of the seemingly unsolvable problems confronting us.
What caught my eye in Bateson’s piece was her engaged plea for us to reevaluate not only our most fundamental assumptions about “how things (e.g., the world) work”, but also the presuppositions that enable those assumptions. Both Kripal and the Generations discussants favor reactivated/rejuvenated/revitalized/reconfigured metaphysics as an essential aspect of seeking relevant approaches, and that, in turn, brought R.G. Collingwood’s Essay on Metaphysics to mind in which he argues quite specifically that the metaphysical undertaking itself need be understood as the arduous and relentless (my words, not his) search for and discovery of absolute presuppositions, true starting points if you will.
What is interesting about Nora Bateson’s ruminations is that she thinks we have a better chance of finding these when we start thinking about life as mutual learning contexts. This has the advantage of overcoming what she believes is a lot of presupposed mechanistic thinking about the systems we’re trying to deal with. It reveals other, perhaps more yielding, ideas than the overworked and underquestioned mechanized notions we consciously, or unconsciously, apply . She may be onto something.