Author and Hero -- Rereading Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist

Abstract

Part of the original motivation that provoked my biography of Gregory Bateson Lipset 1980) was to arrive at an understanding of the course of his odd career and thinking in terms of his family background. In celebration of his 100th birthday, rereading it for the first time in twenty-five years, I find that my perspective of at least one dimension of this problem has changed somewhat. My earlier interpretation of the relationship between Gregory Bateson's life and thought was guided by an implicit kind of psychodynamic suggestion. That is, I viewed the text as informed by identity-shaping experiences that had taken place amid relationships in the family of orientation. My current view, as I say, does not start with the relationship of text to kinship. By rereading the Bateson family tragedy in terms of the social and moral implications of aesthetic consumption, I think that different, but significant, dimensions of it can be gleaned. It can be elucidated, I want to say, by focusing attention on the distinctions actors made and attitudes they held, distinctions and attitudes I now want to contrive as tactics in service of the goal of sustaining class status. In doing so, of course, I follow Bourdieu (1984). However, instead of stressing the direct assertion of class superiority through aesthetic taste as did Bourdieu, my purpose in this essay is to develop a theme of status ambivalence, as I now see it partially exposed in the outcroppings of my earlier account of the Bateson family, and then relate it to the subsequent career of its lastborn son. In conclusion, I comment briefly on the abiding, yet changing, relationship between myself and my biographical subject. Upward Mobility It is a truism that the Industrial Revolution was one of the great periods of capital accumulation in English history. And, the origins of the Bateson family assets go right to its most productive moment, the middle of the 18th century when the apical ancestor, the paternal great grandfather, Richard Bateson, made his fortune as a cotton merchant in Liverpool. To claim identity for his lineage among families that owned them already, he purchased armorial bearings in 1809, complete with bat wings. In other words, although the Bateson family moved into the commercial classes during this volatile time, they remained marginal to the landed gentry, like Darwins, Huxleys or Keynes, with whom they would later become involved. Their rise continued. The fifth born son of Richard Bateson, the cotton merchant, was William Henry (1812-1882), who became Master of St. John's College, Cambridge. St. John's was a center of [t]he spirit of the Liberal rentiers...whereas that of the Conservative...[landed aristocracy] was centered in Trinity (Crowther 1952:256). William Henry Bateson, as arriviste, led modernizing forces at Cambridge University, in the midst of the famous cosmological and political controversies between the authority of religious and scientific explanation that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). The period of reform at St. John's (1857-82) became known as the 'age of Bateson' such was the extent of his influence over the college (Miller 1961). The Master opposed religious oaths for the professoriate, established new curricula in the sciences and improved teaching. As a result of his leadership, sons of nonlanded professionals, like himself, came to outnumber those of clergymen for the first time and graduates began to take employment outside of the Church of England. As a result of his own success, Bateson was allowed to marry and did so in 1858 to a woman who belonged to his own economic class, Anna Aiken (1829-1918). Her father, a Scot, was a prosperous Liverpool shipping merchant and her mother, an American, also hailed from a successful family. They had six children, beginning in 1860, four daughters and two sons. The family was atheist and liberal. They attended church for appearances not from conviction. …