Beyond Goodies & Weasels

Goodies and Weasels: a pox  on both
houses of course but  I confess: goodies
intimidate & somewhat nauseate: their
appalling  outrage not-going- to-take-it
-any-more “damned  moral sense” (the
horror! the  horror!)  that my  heart goes
out to baddies  swimming in  a sea of
righteousness; no wonder they’re slip
sliding  away: you might say it’s the
goodies that generate the weasels of the
whirl & the cops who cause the criminals..   
 
Speaking systemically.
Not symptomatically.
 
Gregory Bateson: life-long  hard-core
British  positivist  scientist raised a decent
atheist by his  father  William,  committed
himself to genesis & genetics & patterns in
biology and psychology  that generated
systems of organization gestalt people
might call  self-organizing holistic emergent
cybernetic self- correcting relationships
beyond  good & evil or locating any
particular individual parts as  responsible
for the whole
 
Blame Obamacare if  you  want,   his
insufficient  stimulus packaging. cozy
kid gloves with bankers, deficit disaster,
jobs of course, housing, illegal immigration:
the whole is more than parts and sum of
parts & our causality  & because-&- affects
scapegoat  not even close to the reasons-why
the deal goes down the way it does but never
the less we have to find the origins. Pinpoint
pinheads. . Righteous  rectification.
 
How can we live without interpretations?
Account ability?
 
Bateson spent his dying days at Esalen,
figuring New-Age  nonsense was at least
a counter- balance to hard core empirical
science.
 
“Pox on both houses,” said  Gregory:
Science & Saintliness & their inadequacies.  
But his heart went out to the misty muzzy
mystics in  these  days of troubled turbulence:
compensating in his mind for the rationalistic
logically  positivistic aims & goals & measure-
mental  environmentality  of his empirical
upbringing &  collegial, professional status.
 
His last book, which his daughter finished in
collaboration  (MC Bateson, former dean  of
Amherst College) was called Angels Fear:
Toward an  Epistemology of the Sacred.
 
How can I live without goodies & weasels?
good guys & bad? righteous & wicked?
daemons & demons? walking  on eggs (woe)
walking  on water (wow). Goodies intimidate
me: their surround sound hysteria, but who can
blame them? .

Tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner.