Gregory Bateson

By Victoria Fontan

A colleague recently told me that Afghanistan has become a cemetery for

peace projects. Over the past ten years, billions of dollars have been spent
to alleviate people’s suffering, to ensure that the country would embark
on a sustainable recovery, this to no avail, Taliban or no Taliban. To the
average observer, throwing money and goods at a country’s economy can
only serve the overall goal of its recovery, this for the general good. To
the local farmer, the free supply of grounded wheat from benevolent
nations to post-war Afghanistan means that he has no choice to abandon
the culture of wheat to the benefit of poppies, hence contribute to the
exponential increment in opium trafficking towards Western nations.
After spending the last ten years visiting conflict areas and teaching
Peace and Conflict Studies, I was left with the distinct feeling that I
would not be able to spend the next ten years of my life doing more of the
same. Mission after mission, course after course, I came to the realization
that our field is more part of the problem than it is part of the solution.
When peace has become more of an industry for the general good than a
way of life, how can we, well-intentioned human beings fit in? How can
we reconcile our ethics with our activities?
Gregory Bateson wrote that a message about peace is not part of the
peace, and that the more we feel that we can wage “war” on a problem,
eradicate it, the more we contribute to it. i What would he have said? Had
he been alive to witness the “Yes We Can” campaign of US President
Barack Obama? Crowned not by his election but by his immediate
showcase decision to close the Guantanamo Detention Centre, a decision
yet to be applied? What would he have said to our growing concerns

1
about climate change, he who more than forty years ago documented
environmental changes on the coastal region of California? The discovery
of Gregory Bateson’s work has inspired me to spend the next ten years of
my career focusing on how to Peace and Conflict Studies can become
part of the peace that is so often taken for granted. This essay will review
Gregory Bateson’s work in light of the challenges faced by our discipline,
this alongside his life.

Transdisciplinarity in the making

Gregory Bateson was born in England in 1904, and died in San Francisco
in 1980. He owes his first name to biologist Gregor Mendel, re-
discovered by his father William, a pioneer of modern genetics. ii
Bateson’s youth was dominated by the death of his two brothers, John,
during World War I, and Matrin, who committed suicide by shooting
himself in Picadilly Circus, after a failed attempt at becoming an artist. iii
While being promised to a career in zoology by his father, and rebelling
against the rigid system of science, Martin Bateson left a deep concern in
the heart of his younger brother: how to reconcile science with arts. How
to ensure that one becomes as sacred as the other. Gregory Bateson’s
fascination for the work of William Blake, centered on the sacred unity of
mind and spirit, contributed to this search. iv It is at the origins of his
transdisciplinary epistemology.
While modern society can only function ascribing as many precise names
as possible to people, Gregory Bateson still confuses most academics.
This is because he never chose to pertain to one academic discipline per
se, but instead, to adopt a transdisciplinary approach to the creation of
knowledge and communication as early as possible in his career. Bateson
never focused on content, but the relationships and patterns linking
contents. To some, he remains an intellectual scattered between

2
disciplines as varied as anthropology, oceanography, psychiatry,
communication and ecology. To many, he is one of the fathers of
cybernetics, through what he refers to as the ecology of the mind.
Being destined to a career in zoology after the death of his brother
Martin, Bateson conducted a first field research in the Galapagos Islands
in the mid 1920s, where he affirmed his desire to embark in a career of
anthropology.v His first field research was conducted in Indonesia,
followed by New Guinea and in the early 1930s Bali, where he met his
first wife, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. He then embarked
on a career mostly in the US, where he remained until his death in 1980. vi
He first taught at Harvard University as a visiting professor, before
joining the Veterans Administration Hospital of Palo Alto to head a study
of abstraction within communication. His most famous finding from
those years was to be the theory of “double bind”, or dilemma in
communication. Later, he led the Oceanographic Institute at the
University of Hawaii, where he researched communication in porpoises.
His last professional years were spent as a part-time Lecturer at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bateson’s bibliography is as eclectic as his scholarship, most of his
thinking being expressed in the recursiveness of his communication with
his readers. Reading Bateson is a complex undertaking, since he engages
the reader to mentally stretch in a feedback loop both during and in
between the discovery of his articles, speeches, and metalogues. Without
active intellectual involvement, Bateson’s words do not stick; his ideas
fail to blossom. Bateson does not deliver content; he plants seeds of
interconnectedness, he invites the reader to come back to his works over
and over, to discover new ideas, and more importantly, make more
connections between ideas, every single time. Reading Gregory Bateson
is like journeying through the infinite complexity of a fractal.

3
Cybernetics of Self
There are many entry points into Bateson’s ecology of the mind, the most
relevant to peace studies being that of cybernetics, where he proposes to
rediscover the territory hidden by the map so commonly discussed in
mainstream peace studies. The map, interventions for peace, often hides
the territory, the patterns of communication that leads to conflict in the
fragmentations of peacekeeping, peace making and peace building.
The essay he wrote on the cybernetics of the self, a reflection on the
symmetric aspects of alcoholism, becomes resounding when one studies
the many failures of peace operations worldwide. vii In his essay, Bateson
explains how alcoholic pride, deriving from a Cartesian symmetric
epistemology, invariably maintains the alcoholic in a state of addiction.
This pride alludes to the addict, and the understanding of the situation of
his or her entourage as one to be conquered, won over, and dominated.
According to this common assumption, the addict must vanquish his or
her desire to drink. He or she is thought to be in total control of his
situation, and locked onto a duel with the substance, a duel which is
inexorably to be won by the substance as often as the situation repeats
itself, with increasingly damaging consequences for the vanquished. At
the root of this situation lies the epistemological error of understanding
the situation as one of symmetry between the addict and the substance, as
well as the division between mind, matter, and spirit. By believing that
one has complete power over the situation, one is also left alone to
confront it, hence unable to address the complimentary-related roots of
the addiction. Conversely, the first of the famous “Twelve Steps” of the
Alcoholics Anonymous “message to the alcoholic” is to make him or her
“cut through all this mythology of conflict” in making them admit that
they “are powerless over alcohol – that [their] lives ha[ve] become

4
unmanageable.”viii The myth of “war over” is therefore diffused towards a
reconnection between body and mind, mind and matter, matter and
society, society and spirit. Combined to this is also the shock effect of
having hit the bottom, which can be the loss of a job, the failure of a
marriage, a black out of a few hours. The shock generated by this
awakening to one’s situation is understood as a key to the recovery
process. In sum: no hitting bottom = no recovery. ix Yet, many actors in
the life of the addict will ensure, knowingly or not, that the bottom is
never reached. They can be understood as enablers. This can be the addict
him or herself, the entourage, in their plight to hide the addiction to
themselves, their families, society. This prevention of hitting rock bottom
is a form of negative feedback. It regulates the addiction so that it the
amplifying effect of the shock never materializes. This is peace and
conflict studies’ own entry point into the ecology of the mind: conflict is
to addiction what peace is to negative feedback. Both complement one
another in, among other disorders, leading our world to its destruction.
From the point of view of a peace practitioner, this has been a rather
grim, sobering, realization. We, from the vantage point of prescriptive
peace as a discipline, can be seen as enablers to the conflict meme that
animates us on a daily basis. How?

Conflict is to addiction what peace is to negative feedback

“War on Terror”, “War on Drugs”, even “War on Poverty”, these are the
daily aberrations presented to us by political systems, relayed by the
infotainment media industry.x In our certainty over our power to defeat
terrorism, we have forgotten that not only we are powerless over this
symptom, but also that we are addicted to the social, political, and
ideological conflicts that drive us. Terrorism is symptomatic of a greater
conflict meme that animates our lives.xi Our dualistic view of the world in

5
us and them has made us unable to realize that we all have conflict within
us, and that our illusion of power over the other, terrorism, drugs, makes
us part of the problem. Bateson asserts that we are the mirrors of our own
demons.xii For as long as we are to engage in a symmetrical relationship
with our addiction, we will be unable to transform it. The decision by
President Obama to close Guantanamo Detention Centre was a message
of peace, yet his administration’s collateral killing of civilians in
Northern Pakistan renders his message void in the eyes of the populations
towards whom this message was aimed in the first place. xiii Worse, this
message failing to materialize into concrete actions deepens political
polarization, rendering moderate discourse obsolete.xiv By declaring war
on terrorism, or by attempting to hide skeletons in our human rights
violations closet, we hereby declare war on ourselves, in the same way
that the addict declares war over himself when he or she confronts the
substance in a conflict that he or she is bound to loose every time. We
instead have to examine the patterns of our involvement in conflict, in
order to transform our symmetrical dualistic relationship into a
complementary one. Bateson’s ecology of the mind asks: can we imagine
“Twelve Steps” to our addiction to conflict? Can the sacred unity
between mind, body and spirit help? Let us examine first if we have hit
bottom.

Double bind
Bateson once asserted that “language is a remarkable servant and a lousy
master.”xv In his research on communication, he wrote that digital, linear,
communication was often symptomatic of a double bind that could only
be transcended through an analogical approach to communication. xvi Put
simply, if digital communication can be the expression of robots,
analogical communication is speaking with one’s heart, mind, body and

6
soul. Double bind is the effect of a contradictory message given by
someone to someone else, often within a power-dynamic. It results in
pathological relationships. An illustration of double bind can be a parent
telling a child that he or she is loved, but never with the gestures and
actions that are the expressions of that love.xvii It can be a post-Bush
administration address to the Muslim world, alongside daily killings of
civilians. Words but no hugs, no closeness, no connection: this
contradiction creates different reactions, one of which being
schizophrenia. Words but no human dignity or justice, this can result in
disillusionment, or acts of terrorism.xviii In this, the digital communication
of the parent or authority figure creates a pathological reaction. xix Under
this light, language can certainly become a lousy master.

A sacred unity
Can aesthetics save us from ourselves? Can it bring meaning to our
actions as peace practitioners? Bateson’s deep connection to British
painter and poet William Blake seems to foster this realization. Esthetics
in both the work of Blake and Bateson takes on the role of reconnecting
the spirit to the mind and body, as well as nature, humans and the
spiritual. It takes the spirituality out of organized religion and back to the
cognitive domain of the individual and collective self. Aesthetics brings
the territory back to the map in the same way that it connects both spheres
of our brains. It connects nature, humans and their spirituality through the
acknowledgement of what Bateson referred to as ECO, or the “gods” of
ecosystem.xx It redirects the message of peace into peace itself. Aesthetics
is the missing link between our wishful thinking for the general good and
our actions. It derives in our emotions, our ethics, our values and
principles. It alludes to making peace with peace, to teaching peace with
peace. It tells us that a “Yes We Can” attitude is devoid of any connection

7
to the reality of us creating more of the same by seeking to negate the
connection patterns between our actions. Emotions, values and principles
become visible in our actions.

Changing the bias of the system

We want to know that we are hitting the bottom, yet we refuse to
acknowledge it in our belief that we can quit conflict, pain, hunger and
death whenever we want to. We refuse to admit that we are addicted to
conflict, yet it permeates every aspect of our lives, as deep as our
entertainment patterns or our compartmentalization of peace building. We
say “never again” each time we speak of Auschwitz, yet refused to call
events in Rwanda genocide.xxi We believe that we are better than them,
whoever they are, the Nazis, the Muslims, the terrorists, the freedom
haters: the Others. Yet how would “they” have sprung to life if it weren’t
for us? Bateson’s essay on the Treaty of Versailles is another revealing
connection, another kick in the stomach of the peace practitioner.xxii
Evelin Lindner started her work on human dignity with an analysis of the
Treaty of Versailles, on the humiliation that established the systemic
bases for World War II to occur.xxiii Bateson made the same proposition,
naming our “peace” as a catalyst to the state of today’s world, via World
War II.
Bateson in his essay From Versailles to Cybernetics contended that the
treaty of Versailles changed the bias of the international system, a bias
that inherently led to a century of international conflict. Bateson explains
this with the metaphor of a house heating system’s thermostat. If the
temperature outside a house falls, the thermostat regulates the
temperature in the house, this according to the temperature range within
which the system operates, the bias. Is the bias changes, the parameters
for the room temperature change also. His argument is that the Treaty of

8
Versailles, with its short-term good intentions, for the general good,
changed the bias of the international system away from one of justice for
all, including “losers”, which in turn increased the world’s propensity for
conflict. Many observers of the international politics have since also
made the connection.xxiv For as long as the bias of the system will be
placed according to a dualistic understanding of the world, into “us” and
“them”, and a fragmented symptomatic solution to conflicts, peace
initiatives will contribute to the overall sustaining of long-term
conflicts.xxv It is the bias of the system that needs to be changed into a
holistic and sacred one, not our response to its symptoms.

Peace and Negative Feedback

When I reflect on how Afghanistan has been mishandled since 2001, this
by all actors involved in its reconstruction, I cannot help but wonder how
the bias of the system can be changed, since we were conditioned into
believing that this was a fight between good and evil, that there was
absolutely no way to negotiate with the “stone-age” Taliban rulers. What
was not my surprise, when recently I spoke with the hakim, or “witch
doctor”, of Mollah Omar, the former Head of the Afghani Taliban, in an
meeting where he gave a contextualized account of their rule? He
mentioned the founding of a university for women, something new to me,
the reasons behind the “banning” of electricity, which actually was not
banned but unavailable after thirty years of conflict, and the several
logical reasons behind for instance the “banning” of kite “flying”, which,
more accurately called kite-fighting, has also been banned in Pakistan
since 2005.xxvi He also mentioned how opposed the Afghani Taliban are
to the Pakistani Taliban, deemed too radical for them.xxvii I left his house
wondering if western politics in the area had not created the “evil” that it
was denouncing while justifying its “invasion” of Afghanistan in 2001,

9
albeit in Northern Pakistan. To this day, I am wondering that was our
collective role in worsening the situation in Afghanistan, and now its
neighboring Pakistan. In his resigning letter to the Board of Regents of
the University of California, dated of 1979, Bateson laments the
preoccupation of national egos with the possibility their own death, hence
their need to develop nuclear weaponry, the reason for his resignation
from this particular board. In his logic, the impossibility to find a valuable
interlocutor and communicate with the “other” is symptomatic of the
Cartesian bias of the system, hence contributing to the negative loop of
conflict.
We as peace practitioners are led to believe that we can initiate ad hoc
interventions to suppress symptoms of conflict, to retrocede the collective
its good conscience, in the same way that environmental agencies address
degradation in a symptomatic manner.xxviii We linearly divide peace and
conflict studies into conflict management, resolution and transformation,
combining it with peacekeeping, peacemaking and peace-building, and
we address the world’s woes in as good a manner as we can. xxix We
intervene, mostly reactively, as a fire brigade, according to the decisions
of an organization created by and for states, not with individuals in mind.
We intervene within the conflict bias, instead of holistically addressing
the patterns of interconnections that set the conflict bias. I have seen the
eviction of illegal settlers in Bosnia, but yet have to see it occurring in
Palestine. We say that we care, that we work for human rights, justice,
democracy, but we only act politically, economically, and selfishly. xxx
Sending in rogue peacekeepers that abuse local populations, as occurred
in many UN-sponsored missions across the world in relation to sexual
slavery, only recently made it to the headlines in connection to the UN
mission in the Congo, this after years of systematic malpractice on behalf
of UN personnel.xxxi We talk of bringing peace to Afghanistan, but

10
through what means? As Bateson’s double bind creates schizophrenia,
our collective double bind creates anger at best, terrorism at worst,
depending on the person or group of people it is touching. In this sense,
the peace practitioner that does not bring meaning to his or her words can
be seen as an agent of negative feedback, and not of social
transformation. The digital communication of peace does not contribute
to peace. It often spoils it. The digital communication of peace acts as a
pesticide. It renders the soil sterile for years to come. Returning to the
addiction entry point, the digital peace practitioner buys us a collective
good conscience, hence prevents us to ever realize that we have hit rock
bottom.

A Negentropy of Peace?
Bateson might not have wished to paint peace practice black, or to throw
the peacekeeper with the bathwater, but he would have strongly objected
the notion of general good that is often invoked in most missions. While
most peace practitioners are dedicated individuals, this is not the question
at stake when reflecting on Bateson’s epistemology. It is fair to assert that
ad hoc practices that do not help to sustain the peace we are all after, that
acting in urgency without sustainability in sight can contribute to a
worsening of a given situation, that all talk and no walk can alienate
people and render them violent at worst. From our hubris to bring peace
at all costs, to enforce it, stems the negative feedback that alienates the
addict to the substance.
Gregory Bateson wrote of negentropy in terms of cybernetics and
analogical communication. The concept of entropy stems from the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, concerning the irreversibility of nature
and energy. While negentropy does not completely point out towards a
reversal of the Second Law, it is defined as a “temporal reversal of

11
disorder, when order is considered as a statistical rate of events in some
closed system or channel. In other words, our knowledge of probable
events moves in a direction opposite to the time path of entropic
systems”xxxii In terms of cybernetics and the study of closed systems,
negentropic conditions occur out of analogical communication, that is to
say, a communication that lives, expresses, means, embodies. While too
many peace efforts can damage peace on the long term, as, again, the
Afghan example illustrates, an analogical communication/expression of
peace can reverse the entropy created by its digital expression. In sum,
peace can be brought back from the dead through communication. This
communication has to be systemic, transformative through the positive
feedback that it can prompt, connecting the two hemispheres of our brain.
It also has to be transcendent of our human condition towards ECO, the
greater life system, as characterized by Bateson, of which we are only a
small part.xxxiii All in all, analogical communication generates a wealth of
ideas that live and die, according to their fitting with one another within
their interdependent, interacting contribution to life of ECO.xxxiv Since
Bateson’s ecology of the mind is a constant appraisal of life, ideas that do
not contribute to the life of ECO will die out naturally. An ecological
understanding peace would embody the same parameters, hence not
repeat the same mistakes mission after mission.

Aesthetics, Consciousness, the Sacred and Ecology

Bateson’s work highlighted the importance of aesthetics as a short cut to
consciousness.xxxv The connection that he felt with William Blake vision
of the world led him to formalize his understanding of aesthetics as a
means to express what cannot be expressed with words, a means to allow
us to enter our consciousness through our unconscious. Photojournalism
can be an embodiment of Bateson’s aesthetics, as a means to enter our

12
collective consciousness.xxxvi However, the road to consciousness via
aesthetics could not have suffice to conceptualize what Bateson
understood as the ‘patterns which connect’ between beauty and
destruction, life and death. The sacred had to come to the rescue in order
for his argument not to fall within a Cartesian dualistic pattern. xxxvii
Towards the end of his life, Bateson allowed the sacred to take a
connecting space, it provided a vision of unity necessary to the ecology of
the mind.xxxviii According to Harries-Jones, the author of an intellectual
biography of Bateson, “the sacred indicates a form in which life cannot
be opposed to itself, in which even death is part of the rhythms of
life.”xxxix This trinity represents the ecology of the mind, whose sacred
expression Bateson saw in the Hindi deity of Shiva the Destroyer.
Harries-Jones explains: “of the qualities of beauty and ugliness that
pervade the biosphere, these primary rhythms of life and death are those
to which we must pay particular attention, for these are the ‘patterns
which connect.’”xl One can negate death if one does not accept the greater
implicate order of ECO. Our modern rejection of it can account for the
current state of resources depletion. Can we seek to live through the
ecology of the mind if we do not understand, accept and live through our
own mortality? Will ECO remind us of our own mortality, as it does
through photojournalism when we allow it to permeate through our public
sphere? Are we ready to surrender to it?

Bateson’s epistemology of peace

A questioning of the epistemology of modern peace must be initiated
before unethical, fragmented and dualistic actions spoil the soil where it
is being applied. Recently, more and more NGOs have to resort to private
security to continue their operations in increasingly difficult

13
environments. Should that not be a sign given by ECO of our falling into
disunity? Does this point towards the destruction of a dysfunctional
industry? Does it have to be replaced by any alternative? I do not claim to
give answers to the peace industry, but only to frame it within an
ecological meme. More questions will undoubtedly come before any kind
of resolution, if any ever occurs. If we are not meant to ever live in peace,
then let ECO remain the guardian of the patterns that connect.

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Newspaper. Islamabad, The Dawn Media Group.
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Bateson, G. (1972). The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism. Steps to an
Ecology of the Mind. G. Bateson. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G. (1972). From Versailles to Cybernetics. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind.
G. Bateson. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G., Ed. (1972). The Roots of Ecological Crisis. Chicago, University of
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Bateson, G. (1991). Ecology of the Mind: The Sacred. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps
to an Ecology of the Mind. R. E. Donaldson. San Francisco, Cornelia &
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Easterly, W. (2006). The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest
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Lindner, E. (2006). Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. London,
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14
Nachmanovitch, S. (1981). Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers. Free
Play Productions. Ivy.
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Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield.
Wilber, K. (2001). A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics,
Science, and Spirituality. Boston, Shambhala.

15
i
Bateson, G. (1972). From Versailles to Cybernetics. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. G. Bateson. Chicago, The
University of Chicago Press.
ii
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto, University of
Toronto Press.
iii
Ibid.
iv
Nachmanovitch, S. (1981). Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers. Free Play Productions. Ivy.
v
Lipset, D. (1982). Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist. Boston, Beacon Press.
vi
Ibid.
vii
Bateson, G. (1972). The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind.
G. Bateson. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
viii
Ibid. pp. 312-313.
ix
While psychiatric discourse has since disputed this notion of “hitting bottom”, I remain attached to
Bateson’s desire to keep this as prominent as possible in the understanding of addiction. My own
understanding of this stems from the fact that no one who does not want to be helped (hence has reached a
certain bottom –and it is understood that bottom can be reached several times in a lifetime) can initiate a cure
without ever falling into relapse at any given time.
x
Nacos, B. (2002). Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and
Counterterrorism. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield.
xi
Wilber, K. (2001). A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and
Spirituality. Boston, Shambhala.
xii
Bateson, G. (1972). The Cybernetics of "Self": A Theory of Alcoholism. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. G.
Bateson. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
xiii
Almeida, C. (2010). Civilian deaths in drone attacks: debate heats up. Dawn Newspaper. Islamabad, The Dawn
Media Group.
xiv
Author interviews with various Pakistani political and intellectual leaders, Karachi, April 2010.
xv
Nachmanovitch, S. (1981). Gregory Bateson: Old Men Ought to be Explorers. Free Play Productions. Ivy.,
p.11
xvi
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press.
xvii
Ibid.
xviii
Fontan, V. (2007). Understanding Islamic Terrorism: Humiliation Awareness and the Role for Nonviolence.
Nonviolence: An Alternative for Defeating Global Terror(ism). R. Summy and R. Senthil. Hauppauge, Nova Science
Publishers.
xix
Bateson, G. (1972). Culture Contact and Schismogenesis. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind: . G. Bateson. Chicago,
University of Chicago Press.
xx
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto, University of
Toronto Press.
xxi
Albright, M. (2006). The Mighty and the Almighty. New York, Harper Collins.
xxii
Bateson, G. (1972). From Versailles to Cybernetics. Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. G. Bateson.
Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.
xxiii
Lindner, E. (2006). Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. London, Praeger.
xxiv
Fisk, R. (2005). The Great War for Civilization: the conquest of the Middle East. London, Fourth Estate Publishers.
xxv
Anderson, M. B. (1999). Do No Harm: How can Aid can Support Peace - Or War. Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner
Publishers.
xxvi
For an account on the debate over kite flying, see http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=167136, accessed
on May 18th, 2010.
xxvii
Their opposition to the Pakistani Taliban stems from this incident that shocked the Pakistani nation in 2009:
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/govt-condemns-sc-acts-on-swat-
girl-flogging--zj, accessed on May 18th, 2010.
xxviii
Bateson, G., Ed. (1972). The Roots of Ecological Crisis. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
xxix
See Annex 1
xxx
Easterly, W. (2006). The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and
So Little Good. London, Penguin Press.
xxxi
Firmo-Fontan, V. (2003). Responses to Human Trafficking: from the Balkans to Afghanistan. The
Political Economy of New Slavery. C. Van den Anker. London, Palgrave.; Lynch, C. (2004). U.N. Sexual
Abuse Alleged in Congo. The New York Times. New York.
xxxii
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press., p. 107
xxxiii
Ibid.
xxxiv
Bateson, G. (1991). Ecology of the Mind: The Sacred. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of
the Mind. R. E. Donaldson. San Francisco, Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book.
xxxv
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press.
xxxvi
See James Nachtwey’s website: http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/, accessed on August 4th 2009. I believe
that all his shots are interconnected as Bateson highlighted it in his essay “From Versailles to Cybernetics.”.
xxxvii
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press.
xxxviii
Bateson, G. (1991). Ecology of the Mind: The Sacred. A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of
the Mind. R. E. Donaldson. San Francisco, Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book.
xxxix
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto,
University of Toronto Press., p. 213.
xl
Ibid., p. 210