The Interviews

1. The Invisible Causes of Positive Change: Interview with Nora Bateson by Jeff Carreira
2. Ecology, Christianity, and a Logic of Future Coexistence: Interview with Timothy Morton by Jeff Carreira

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Nora Bateson and Timothy Morton are my two favorite ecological thinkers. Nora Bateson is the president of the International Bateson Institute, and Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University.

When I read Timothy Morton's book Ecology Without Nature, I gained a deeper understanding of how the modern world divorces the idea of nature from human beings. We tend to think of nature as trees and landscapes and animals and plants – things that are not human. At the same time, we think of cities, machinery, and other man-made things as not part of nature. But the idea that human beings are somehow separate from nature is the root cause of our ecological problems. When I spoke with Nora and Timothy I noticed that neither of them were speaking about nature in terms of forests, trees, and animals. They were both speaking about human nature and our human connection to reality.

Nora Bateson explained to me that her current thinking is contained in her new book Combining, which grew out of an inquiry into the nature of evolution. Nora was asking herself questions about how evolution occurs. How do things evolve? What changes are fundamental and deep enough to be called an evolutionary change? Nora realized that by the time a change of that magnitude becomes visible it has been building through unseen influences for a long time.

When we think about deep changes that are negative we use the word insidious to describe their invisible causes. What we mean by an insidious cause is something dysfunctional or unhealthy has been building under the surface for a long time, and only emerges visibly as a negative effect later. Nora wanted to know what the positive version of insidious would be, and we spoke about how positive change builds slowly in unseen territory. We ended our conversation feeling like we needed to follow up with a second discussion, because she wanted to speak more about why these unseen factors need to remain unseen. She explained that our tendency is to want to bring the invisible into the light of awareness so we can work with it, but if we do that, we will be imposing the very seeds of the problems we're trying to solve. We need to find a way to allow, strengthen, and energize the unseen, invisible influences that cause positive change without knowing what they are.

I later talked with Timothy Morton, and was fascinated to discover that he was exploring something remarkably similar. He started by describing the uncanny nature of human experience, which is something he's written about for years. When we have an experience, touching something for instance, the feeling of that touch always happens a few milliseconds after the physical touch occurs because it takes time for the signals from my fingers to be processed by my brain and emerge as an experience. That means that the reality we live in, the one that we actually experience in this moment, is always a few milliseconds behind what is occurring. We are always in contact with a reality that we have not experienced yet, and there's an unavoidable gap between our contact with reality and our experience of it. That gap creates an uncanny sense of having forgotten something.

In the middle of exploring the nature of our experience of reality, Timothy started to ask himself the same question Nora was asking: how does change occur? A big part of the context for this question was a spiritual experience he spoke with us about in an earlier issue of our magazine. Since then, he’s been wondering how such an unusual change could occur in his life. Timothy realized that the key to change is hesitation. Have you ever been in the middle of something and suddenly hesitated, wondering why you were doing whatever you were doing? In that gap of hesitation, a different possibility emerges: the possibility of not continuing and doing something else instead. That gap of uncertainty and not knowing is where change occurs. That gap where uncertainty can arise is the same gap that exists between our contact with reality and our experience of it. That is the gap of possibility.

It will be well worth your while to read both interviews, Nora’s and then Timothy’s. In the end you will understand that if we want positive change to occur then we need to leave space for it, because in the space of not knowing something new can arise.

The Interviews

1. The Invisible Causes of Positive Change: Interview with Nora Bateson by Jeff Carreira
2. Ecology, Christianity, and a Logic of Future Coexistence: Interview with Timothy Morton by Jeff Carreira