Jeff Carreira: I've been reading your book, Combining, and it felt like the ideas you share in your book should be included in this issue that focuses on the meaning of ecology. I think you would agree that the standard definitions of ecology appear to be insufficient to allow us to effectively respond to the complexities of the world. Your work is helping to deepen our understanding of the true vastness of ecology. I thought we could start with your elevator pitch definition of what an ecology is.

Nora Bateson: Yes, I do share your concern that the understandings of ecology are largely inadequate because they suffer from another ecological problem, which is a problem of our perception and those aspects of perception that are trained to be limited to receiving only particular kinds of information and patterns. Ecological learning is the nature of nature. Many different aspects of organisms are changing each other as they learn to be together, which is an ongoing learning. It's not something they learn and then it's learned. It's an ongoing, ever-shifting thing. But arguably, starting thousands of years ago, with aqueducts and agriculture, into industrialism, into the factory, a habituated perception has developed about how causality functions. That understanding of causality is learned, and we've learned to work with that form of causality. Babies learn to put things in their mouths to alleviate the chewing need. We learn how to get love, how to go through school, how to become a respected member of our community. We learn how to find a partner, how to raise children, how to pay taxes, etc.

We learn how to do so many things through a habituated perception of causality, but that habituated perception then looks at ecology, and perceives it through the same habits. I think if we're going to talk about what is ecology, the first thing we need to acknowledge is that we are bred into a world of various kinds of efficiencies, theories, optimizations, categories, and ways in which things have been separated so that they can be operationalized and instrumentalized. And because of that, we have to be very, very careful about believing what we are perceiving in the natural world. This is a tricky thing because then when you want to define ecology, the first thing you're going to run into is a problem of language. The second thing you're going to run into is a problem of metaphors. The way those metaphors sneak into and carry the baggage of a lot of other metaphors that are linked to the industrial world.

If you look at the way a factory is organized, you have lots of different parts that are producing. They're all doing the thing they do, and they produce something. They're purposive. There is a production line. And if you take that version of what is real and productive and purposeful, and you look at a forest, the unfortunate thing is that you can find that purposiveness there. You can itemize out the organisms of a forest. You can assign purposeful ecological duties to them. The soil is making it possible for the tree to grow, which makes it possible for there to be oxygen, which makes it possible for the next thing, and you are seeing a mechanistic causality.

It's very, very easy to slide down that rabbit hole of our existing confusions. So, what is ecology? And how do we describe it? And how do we hold back those habits that are itching to come through, so we might be able to recognize the ‘inconvenience’ of the way life actually moves. I think one of the biggest pieces for me around the perception of and the description of ecology is the problem that it's a noun. That's problem number one. This thing is moving. It's responding, it's shaping, it's calibrating, it's reshaping, it's learning, it's morphing and re-morphing, so that every organism, in a forest, in a tide pool, in your body, are all responding all the time to other organisms, which means they're all changing.

If you think about how Jeff is when Jeff is with one friend, and how Jeff is when Jeff is with another friend, and how Jeff is when Jeff was five, and how Jeff is when Jeff is going to be 85, and how Jeff is with this person that you have a sexy relationship with, and how Jeff is with that person that you have a practical relationship with, those are all different aspects of you that are there all the time. Just like in an ecology, different organisms bring out different types of possibility of communication, not the common notions of communication, which are like signals and responses, but something else, something I would refer to as communing, something that's a mutual communion. But there's another noun, so better to keep it communing. In this communing, we are shaping. What's happening right now? I am taking in the various gestures of your eyes, your breath, your movements, and I'm thinking, moving, sometimes not thinking, responding to how I can be when I'm with you right now.

We live in a world in which everyone's asking, who are you? How do you make yourself better? How can I be a better person? That's a really non-ecological question. Who can I be when I'm with you? Who can I be in this circumstance? Who can I be in this other context? What can I learn about being in responsiveness and in communion with other organisms in different contexts? I'm putting it in that framework right away because the intimacy of the perception of ecology is the most important part. If it stays as some scientific abstract, academic definition, the grokking, the holding in your body of that ecological movement doesn't happen. You can learn a lot of vocabulary, but still be a jerk because you're trampling all over these very delicate moving interdependencies that are all around you all the time. You're never not in all these ecologies.

So, there are Ecologies of ideas. A family is an ecology, your body is an ecology, a forest is an ecology. The way in which the Webster definition talks about ecology is that it's a pattern of patterns that are interdependent. What's wrong with that definition is that then you go looking for patterns. We have lived in a world of savvy systems-speak for a while, where people saw themselves as cool when they were pattern hunters. That was the groovy thing to be. But the problem with patterns is they are static rhythms. The rhythms and the resonances of ecological relationships are not static. The rhythm of Jeff changes depending on who you're with, what you ate, how you slept. I mean, 1,000 dependencies are in the rhythm of Jeff.

Jeff Carreira: I'm fascinated by the evolution of your thinking. We spoke a while ago about your conception of symmathesy as the ongoing, utterly, mutually responsive, co-learning event that is life. And right now, you are insisting that we can't see ourselves as separate from it. It doesn't exist independent of us somewhere else. It's just the way life unfolds. Then you started talking about warm data, which was a way of seeing the reality of symmathesy, changing how we see so that we perceive interconnectedness, not as an idea, but as an actuality of our lived experience. Now in your new book you talk about aphanipoiesis. I find your latest thinking to be the most exciting yet. You claim to have come to the idea of aphanipoiesis by asking what makes change possible? Before we go into that further, I want to ask you about eugenics. Eugenics was an attempt to control genetic change and you say it is backed into our thinking.

Nora Bateson: That is a really important piece, especially right now. I am looking at the idea of eugenics through different lenses simultaneously, and one of those is that my grandfather coined the term genetics, and it was his colleagues that were developing eugenics. I think this is an important piece because it demonstrates the difference between a mechanism and an ecology. In an ecology, you have genetics. That's a study of how organisms change. In a mechanism, you have eugenics, which is a study of how you can make change happen. That's a very different thing. In one case, there is respect and awe, almost a mysticism, but it's a mysticism with a lot of scientific rigor for the way that organisms are changing each other. If you look at an ecological evolutionary process, you can ask how does an organism know how to evolve? Where did that information come from? What you will quickly find is organisms are in communication with a lot of other organisms, receiving messages and learning.

If you have a domesticated organism that hasn't been allowed to commune for several generations, like chickens, they cannot evolve because they don't have the information from all the other organisms. They don't have the caches of unseen communication. One is a mechanized version; one is an ecological version. This thread of eugenics is part and parcel of the industrial mindset of modernity. It is the, “What is the change you want to make and how are you going to make it?” mindset, which is all about setting goals for yourself and then making them happen.

Every Fitbit, every SAT test, the way we're looking at health right now, or the way we look at economics was produced out of eugenics. Every single statistician, every mathematician, the person who first started statistics was a eugenicist. So, this thing is baked in. Then there was a calling out of eugenics as a way of controlling breeding, and Hitler got a hold of it, and then we got rid of Hitler, and we got rid of eugenics. Wrong. We did not get rid of eugenics. It never was only about breeding. It was about optimizing the human being.

This is where it dipped into all kinds of spirituality. The sticky muck of this epistemology is everywhere. It's really hard to find your way through it. I mean, a lot of people are stuck in it in their yoga. It's not actually something that's easy to get. You want your kid to have a high IQ. The IQ test came out of eugenics.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, what I was getting from your book is that it is all predicated on an assumption that some form of being human is more valuable than other forms of being human. And that thinking has infected our whole thought process.

Nora Bateson: The question is, whose version of ‘better’ are we using as the standard? What is the epistemology that's feeding that notion of better? Is it better to be super rich? Well, in some context, it might be. But if you happen to be living in the middle of the Amazon or in the desert, you need to be able to be in relationship with the people around you and to read the signs of where the water is and where the danger and the animals are. And that's much more important than being rich. So that rubric doesn't work there. So what rubric is it?

Jeff Carreira: Tying this back to the term aphanipoiesis. you say in the book that you were thinking about the question, how do we know how to evolve? How do we know how to change? How does change happen? And your realization was that something happens that creates the possibility of change. You mentioned Charles Sanders Perce in your book. Perce had this idea he called firstness. Which is the possibility of change that needs to exist before the change can actually emerge. What you focus on in your book is that what we see as change is not the first step in the process of changing. Before any change is visible, unseen conditions are coalescing to create the possibility for it. Aphanipoiesis is that unseen coalescence of factors that create the possibility for an emergence. Your book is an invitation to discover how to work with the unseen elements that create the possibility of change. When you speak about unseen elements, what you mean is that they are outside of our current perceptual habits. So the question is, how do we learn to see them? How do we start to work with the vast, unseen elements and their coalescence to create the possibility for change? It seems to me that if we aren't doing that, we aren't able to participate in the activity of change. Can you speak about aphanipoiesis?

Nora Bateson: The Greek prefix, aphani, means unseen. But like you said, it doesn't mean hidden. It doesn't mean invisible. It means unseen. In the pandemic, the Greek caregivers in the hospital, the nurses, they were the aphani caregivers. They were unseen. Aphani is a shyness. It's a just-out-of-reachness. We see that in the word diaphanous. We see it in the words phantom and fantasy.

Then poiesis means to become, to be. We see that in the word poetry and a lot of people are familiar with the term autopoiesis, which is a self-reproductive process.

We're really deep in the woods in relation to several insidious processes. This entire investigation for me started with an inquiry about how exactly do things become insidious. What does that mean? We have things that are insidious: greed, corruption, misogyny, racism, addiction, etc. The need for control is an insidious problem. What we mean when we call something insidious is that it's somewhere deep down where you can't quite get to it. In the etymology of the word you find that it means something that has been accumulating gradually over time in a way that no one was paying attention to until it emerged as a harmful problem.

Then what we try to do is talk about the emergence of the harmful situation and to fix it where it emerges. But by then, all those processes that have been coalescing and gradually shaping each other have been cooking for a long time. By the time we get to the emergence, it's too late. We're too late. What we're talking about is pre-emergence, before it emerges, what's going on downstairs in the dark and making it possible for things to take place in other ways.

For me, that has been a huge part of warm data, because for many years, I could never describe to people what's happening here, and why it is important. People would tell me to try to make my ideas deliverable, or to ask people to explain what they learned and what it was all about. I've never wanted to do that because that's sacred territory. That's not for me to say. The way that things are combining and shifting and moving for them, they don't know how it comes together. I don't want them to know. What I want is to create a space where things can combine and coalesce in ways they haven't before, and to offer enough possibilities that you actually generate an ecological combining, an ecological coalescence of stories, of overlaps, of under-swirls, of steeping around, of inter-weavings, of ideas, of memories, of thoughts, of words, of non-words, like a dream.

And you shouldn’t have language for that. You don't have language. There's no way to say, I learned this thing from the warm data lab. And if you say that, I know that it's super sweet that you're trying to say it, and I love that, but at the same time, don't get attached to those words because they get in the way of the learning, which is much more profound and much more multiplicitous. If insidiousness is a gradual combining toward harm, what is it to produce the conditions for a gradual combining of multiple processes toward life, toward vitality, toward healing, because surely, they are made in the same way. What we're talking about is the deep stuff. You can go to a course and you can learn to speak a new language, and you can think that because you now can speak in this new way, you are no longer a racist. But actually, you still are. You just have a different vocabulary. You can do the same thing. You can make laws for corruption, and you can make everybody abide by the laws, but the corruption is still there.

You can't fix these things in the seen world. They're not fixable there with any depth. You can get people to change their language, and you can put in new laws, but it doesn't change the culture. We typically think of culture as language and education and various institutional processes and this and that. But you can also remember that yogurt is a culture. Fermentation is a culture. What's happening in a culture is that there are organisms that are changing over time. Whenever you talk about culture, time is an implicit part of that. What is culturing, what's in the rhythming, what's in the resonances that will produce something. I don’t mean to say that we should do this or should do that, or should think like this, or should meditate like that. Instead, the question is, how do we produce a cauldron of conditionings from which the behavior generated will have the narrative of life intrinsic in it. It's not instructed. That's the big piece. Ecological change is intrinsically moving toward another thing, not instructionally.

Jeff Carreira: That's beautiful and I definitely feel like we need to talk again because there are ways to engage with this that I am sure you are working on – a different way of engaging with possibility that I want to explore with you.

Nora Bateson: It took me years before I was willing to actually say, the thing is unseen, and it must be unseen. That's what we have to talk about next time. It's important because when something is unseen we want to put some light on it and find it. But if we, we put it back into the perception of the familiar, and it gets metabolized back into the familiar.

Jeff Carreira: There are so many parallels to spiritual practice because spiritual practice happens in the invisible. But we always want to make a technique out of it or understand it, and then the magic is gone. So next time we talk, we can discuss the magic.