The revenge of the good fairy - Reality Club lecture on human fallibility and technology

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1987 by Mary Catherine Bateson

We have not yet exhausted the repertoire of typesof wishes. Others that come to mind are youth and sexual pleasure. In the stories, eternal youth is a disappointment because of the pain of losing loved ones. The stories assume an inability to form new relationships--that the freezing involved in ceasing to age also involves ceasing to learn, grow, create new involvements--that change through time is extraneous. It may be that the stop-frame view of the self is an illusion that parallels the crop-frame view that excludes the environment. One useful approach to the recognition that what we value in others involves continual change is to consider how quickly the care of a severely learning-disabled child becomes burdensome--childhood evanescent is entrancing, childhood partially stagnant far less so.

With regard to sex, it is often speculated that marriage(and monogamy) are female inventions--that women wish to domesticate men, which is to say that they wish to persuade them to behave as parts in a larger system. Women apparently see sex as an essential process in that larger system, an ongoing basis for bonding, while it seems to be more common for men to externalize sex and not see it as creating (and sustaining) relationship. One of the ironies here is that if unlimited sexuality is a widespread human dream, AIDS does come to look rather like another variation on the revenge of the Good Fairy. There is a familiar kind of irony in the symmetry between the rapid dissolution of so many boundaries maintained by custom and the collapse of the body's own capacity to repel invasion.

I have not listed wishing for power separately, forall wishing involves power in some sense, power over nature, power over others, power to get what you want, power to prevail, even power to help. But the expression of wishes in terms of the notion of power is a way of highlighting the centrality of the illusion of being separate and outside the system over which one wishes to have power.

ARGUABLY THEN, ambivalence is the mirrorimage within the person of certain characteristics of hierarchically organized systems, where the individual is a subsystem in some larger system. When the individual wishes too efficiently, he may disrupt the larger system-- and his entire wish-mechanism may have evolved to push against environmental constraints, but not to succeed. When the individual who has matured under these circumstances finds himself suddenly able to make wishes come true, he may subvert that possibility. Phrasing it rather differently, we could say that ambivalence is not only a neurotic residue of childhood but a form of wisdom, a memory of what it is to be a part of a larger whole. Kierkegaard once said, "purity is to will one thing,' but it seems possible that a divided will is the beginning of wisdom.

Back in 1968, my father Gregory Bateson argued inpreparation for his Conference on Conscious Purpose and Human Adaptation that a large number of the pathologies occurring between human beings and their environment might have to do with the phenomenon of consciousness, because consciousness is incomplete and selective, and this selection is dictated by considerations of purpose, specifically, that "the cybernetic nature of self and the world tends to be imperceptible to consciousness.' In our collaborative book that appeared this spring, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, the issue for him was no longer the deficiencies of consciousness per se, but the identification of consciousness with knowledge, and the exclusion of unconscious modes of cognition from decision-making. In fact, Gregory had shifted to celebrating at least some aspects of the selectivity of consciousness and emphasizing the importance of separation between the conscious and the unconscious, emphasizing the need for a certain secrecy or "unknowing' between different parts of mind, to protect the "sacred.' The interface between conscious and unconscious may function as an analog to the interface between organism and environment. The man who obtains his phallic wishes is indeed a double amputee-- cut off from connection with the natural world, cut off from his own unconscious wisdom.