 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-24 01:16
I said that I’d post here something that I wrote around 20 years ago. It contains a fuller exegesis of the ideas of Gregory Bateson, and I think an important part of it is relevant to our concerns.
Of course, there may be people who disagree, and anyway find that it’s too long.
To them I say: please just skip it, rather than complain.
I wondered whether to edit it, and just post the musical bits; but I think the ideas come across more clearly in the complete piece. However, that means I need to set some context so that you can understand why I wrote it:
At that time, there was a mailing list called TCS (for Taking Children Seriously) set up by someone called Sarah Lawrence in collaboration with the famous physicist David Deutsch, that took as its fundamental presupposition that one of the major difficulties of our society lies in how we bring up our children. To quote David Deutsch (from memory):
“In order to have the ability to create and follow through on intelligent plans in our adult lives, it is essential to have the repeated experience of doing so successfully as children. Further, it is permanently damaging for children to have the early experience of being repeatedly thwarted in doing so.”
In other words, when we coerce our children to follow our agendas because we don’t understand the importance that theirs have TO THEM, we may well be setting the scene for many of our current malaises.
I could and can understand that; but I was interested in WHAT WE MEAN by ‘coercion’. It seemed to me to be a slippery concept. I wanted to clarify the issue.
Whether or not I did so, you must judge:-)
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Beyond non-coercion?
I want to suggest a possible change to the primary characterisation of our concerns in this forum so that it is not that we are 'avoiding coercion'. Most definitions of coercion I find confusing and unsatisfactory in some way or another. It may even be that coercion is not a coherent concept for the way we want to use it, particularly at the limits of the way we want to use it. I think there is a more inclusive and positive way of looking at the matter.
Not everyone will agree, of course. But if someone were to replace non-coercion as their fundamental concern, it would be because there was something more fundamental that they wanted; and the replacement would capture more of that something than non-coercion did.
My suggestion here may have the advantage of appealing to two groups of people. One of Sarah Lawrence's main concerns, it seems to me, is to make sure that children have intellectual independence. Her interest and advocacy of the philosophy of Karl Popper is a strong thread in this concern. Another concern, shared by many, is that our children grow up and develop in the world of relationship, so that they may be unafraid and creative, yet supportive and nurturing to others.
My fundamental assumption here will simply be that we may approach the outcomes of these two concerns in different ways. The *practice* of either has much in common with artistic behaviour, but the outcomes live in different worlds. Creative scientific enquiry yields great insight into the world of theories, objects and things; the practice and the understanding of relationship and communication speak to us in a different way. Many of our problems are to do with mixing up the two worlds.
If I wanted to give something fundamental to my children, it would be to be able in both worlds, the Newtonian world and the world of communication; and to have the capacity to distinguish between them.
I would like to think that an examination of the consequences of this capacity to distinguish the two worlds would satisfy many of us that it is worthwhile adopting the above as a fundamental principle.
(Notice, by the way, that we need some fundamental principle. If we do not choose one, one will choose us. You could say that much damage is done in the world by people acting out of unexamined and unnoticed fundamental principles. Of course, much damage is done by people acting out of freely chosen fundamental principles, too.)
I think that the discussion should be abstract. I know that abstract argument isn't very popular, but it may allow us to see helpful analogies with other areas of life. And *if* an abstract argument is followed through, and the conclusions seem justified, we may have an economy of thought process when we are interacting with a difficult situation - we may be able to 'dance with the world' more freely. One of the intentions of justifying a 'non-coercive' line is just such a simplification of complex reactions. I am not alone in thinking that 'non-coercion' doesn't quite do the job.
The concerns of this forum as already expressed are very important. 'Non-coercion' is such a good first approximation to a *description* of what we want that we would be foolish to abandon it as a slogan without considerable reflection. All the wise things that have been written about the unacceptability of learning under duress, and the necessity of children following their own choices, still stand.
The point of questioning non-coercion is not that one would want to be able to justify a particular act of what others might see as coercion. It is that whether or not a particular interaction is characterised as coercive is, as I shall try to show, dependent on the interpretation that is put on that interaction by the parties involved. So it is very possible for one party to be worrying that they may be coercing the other party in a difficult situation and fail to achieve satisfaction for either. Satisfaction might well have been achievable had the situation been perceived at the outset in another way. Apart from this aspect of the notion of non-coercion, another problem is that non-coercion is assumed to occur in the realm of 'doing', or description of doing. The realm of doing is a part of the Newtonian realm, in which there are things, forces and objects. Our proper realm is the realm of communication and persons. While we are thinking too directly about 'not-coercing', we are not inhabiting this other realm. The communicative realm is the realm of art and the practice of creativity, which includes scientific creativity. Bringing up our children is no less creative.
The questions and problems raised by non-coercion may divide rather than unify us. We cannot agree in the abstract about what we should *do or not do*, both because non-coercion is a confusing idea and because there are no completely general things to do or not do when we are interacting with a situation creatively. In any creative enterprise, artistic or scientific, rules about what we should or should not do sometimes run up against limiting cases in which they are not appropriate. We then risk failing to achieve possible solutions if we stick with those rules. We need to expand the context in which we view the situation. I think we do better if we are already operating in a suitably expanded context.
I do not mean that no analysis is possible. Yet we cannot reduce an art to a technique or a rule, even if that technique or rule be seen after the event to be a reasonable description of the behaviour of the majority of those people who are creative practitioners of that art. I suggest that the notion that people who have consistently successful and nurturing relationships with others have done so by following the rule that they should be 'non-coercive', under some Newtonian description of 'non-coercive', fails under this 'meta-rule' about creativity. This would be particularly true if it turned out, as I believe is the case, that the concept 'non-coercive' had other difficulties associated with it.
We need something to say to ourselves in what may possibly be a very difficult situation, to replace the idea that what we are going to *do* will be non-coercive. This something should live in the world of communication - indeed, it should call that world into being. (I shall explain later how that might be possible.) It will therefore be an opening or possibility of what we may *be*, rather than *do*.
The most appropriate word I can come up with at the moment for this state of being is the word "listening". I should be clear that this word involves not only the usual connotation of paying attention to the other person, but the connotation of listening *both* to ourselves *and* to the other person in a special, extended way. (By the way, I think that the word sits suggestively with the fact that children often complain that their parents *don't listen to them*.) We shall also see that the idea of 'non-coercion' survives as another idea - that of 'giving up control'. It might be claimed right at the outset that there is no difference, in practical terms, between what I am suggesting and what someone here - for example, Sarah - might characterise as 'incomplete non-coercion', or just plain 'coercion' of our children. It might, you see, be true that someone committed to non-coercion would say after the event that what we did in a particular circumstance *was* coercive.
Though I agree with Sarah that how we hold what we do (what she might call 'our theoretical framework') has a significant effect on the outcome of what we do, I am arguing for an even larger alternative context: another *sort* of theoretical world from the world in which we construct theories of what to do. In this world, as may become clearer, what we 'do' may be present in a different way. We may understand the damage done by what we call coercion more deeply, so that we may be more elegantly able to avoid it. The quotes from Bateson and the following discussion, below, present this possibility, as do some of the examples from the world of music. In the world of our relationship with our children, the examples remain to be created (and, I might add, will be only fully appreciated by the participants).
Another consideration is whether this discussion will actually be of any use to anyone here. I hope you may be persuaded to read it, though it is long (unavoidably, I have decided); but I cannot pretend that there are any knockdown arguments in it, or that it is of any use unless it is approached as a possibility, rather than as something to be criticised. (Of course, my formulation is open to criticism.) Perhaps it will be of most use to those of us who actually are already creatively involved, perhaps against major odds, and worried that they may be doing damage by coercing their children; but confused about how to represent this to themselves, or do better than they are already doing. This may be particularly worrying if other people seem to be in much less trouble with the idea of non-coercion.
There is also a political issue. When we are arguing for children's rights, we may have to interact with people who disagree with us in a world which is not particularly subtle. Though I would suggest that we always do better if we operate in the world of communication when we are communicating, discussions about the ontological status of that very world may not be the most appropriate subject-matter for a debate or a slogan. The difficulty is even more extreme in this case than in the analogous situations encountered by the feminist movement and aids activists, for example. Non-coercion here may be best left under-examined, though I confess that I am myself undecided on the issue.
My plan here will be first: to indicate how the world of communication provides a description of our situation in which the damaging effect of the experience of what we call coercion shows up in a clearer light; then to make it plausible that it is possible to inhabit such a world by analogy with art and music; and finally to expand the frame of reference beyond the passive attributes of our relationship with our children by showing how the proposed replacement for non-coercion is nurturing and supportive. Sarah was careful to include in 'non-coercion' the notion that we encourage our children to fulfil their own plans and ideas, as much as the notion that we avoid forcing them into our plans and ideas for them; any alternative formulation must do likewise.
The world of communication
I have suggested in previous posts that we may be operating in an impoverished view of the world with regard to the ideas of coercion and relationship, and perhaps asking the wrong sorts of question. In particular, I have discussed the possibility of coercion being *not a given*. In "Dave without his penguin" I briefly suggested that coercion is a property of a system, and thus involves the attitude of the coercee, and in "Agreements" I tried to show that coercion is not a term that necessarily applies to the attempt to hold us to our word.
Though I would stand by much of this, I now think it does not go far enough. I want here to put it all into a more inclusive context, again heavily influenced by the formulations and insights of Gregory Bateson.
I do want to make it clear that nothing I say is intended in any way to make it 'all right' to coerce children, whatever that may mean to the coercer. I believe, however, that we serve our children better if we understand just how coercion works against them, and if we are open to showing them, among other things, that they need not *necessarily* be victims, even of those who would generally be agreed to be behaving coercively. Indeed, one could argue that this is precisely the case in which it might be most useful to them.
I have mentioned Gregory Bateson several times before in this forum. I need to say again that it is very difficult to do him justice in the space available here. What I am trying to do really needs treatment in greater depth to be satisfactory. I advise anyone who finds difficulty with my much simplified and abbreviated account of him to read his collection of essays, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", or (particularly) chapters 7 and 8 of his "Communication - the Social Matrix of Psychiatry" (with Jurgen Reusch, Norton Books).
Bateson makes a clear distinction between the world of communication and the world of things. A 'thing' *can* be a communication - but it requires a context. Indeed, in a context, 'nothing' can be a communication. (Bateson's example was the tax return that you *don't* make!) You can see fairly easily that the crucial thing about communication is that it involves the transmission of *difference*. This difference is the difference between what is transmitted and what might have been transmitted. If only one thing can be transmitted, then communication cannot take place. And a difference is not a 'thing', but an 'idea'. It does not require substance, force or energy. (Think of the non-existent tax-return, which is a communication, in the context of the world of tax law and tax officials.)
On the other hand, you only need two things (which can be 'nothing' and 'something'), and a suitable context at the receiving end, to be able to communicate words, pictures and music. This is the basis of modern telecommunication. It offers what you may well think to be an impoverished model of we normally think of as communication.
But Bateson pointed out two further things about human communication as we normally understand it, and for me, these observations move his analysis into an area appropriate for the generation of some of the 'right questions' for our purposes.
The first observation is that we customarily communicate on several levels at once. For example, our tone of voice and body gestures may send additional messages about what we are saying. Usually this has the effect of clarifying the message, but it *may* negate it. Bateson was the inventor of the term 'double-bind', his name for a characteristic element of family pathology. A double-bind occurs when contradictory messages are sent to the person in the double-bind, together with a dismissal as 'crazy' of any attempt to comment on the contradiction. The situation occurs most commonly between parents and children. It is possible to detect forms of this pathology in which the prohibition on discussion is milder and implicit in many human relationships, and I think it would be a good idea if it were more generally recognised.
When we have a multi-level message that involves a particularly subtle relationship between its component parts, we may well describe the result as *artistic*. There is a particularly powerful essay in "Steps" which comes as close as I know to describing the processes involved in the performance of music or dance, without in any way de-mystifying or trivialising the magic spell cast by a masterly performance. The power of the essay is drawn from Bateson's second observation, which is the central idea I want to throw into relief in this post.
Bateson's second observation is that the path traversed by what he calls "the news of difference" in the world of communication is in general a *closed* one. For him, our crucial mistake in life is to treat such a path as open, with a beginning and an end, which turns it into something like a manipulation. By speaking of the path as open, we perpetuate a tendency to ask 'wrong' questions, and block the asking of 'right' ones. We mix up the world of communication and the world of things.
What does this mean?
Bateson at one point uses the example of a man cutting down a tree with an axe. He subjects it to analysis *in the world of communication*. He gives us a view of a simple series of events from an unusual standpoint. This standpoint will prove to be a very suggestive one for more complex events. Bateson says, in part:
"Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e. mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-stroke-axe-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind.
"More correctly, we should spell the matter out as: (differences in tree)-(differences in retina)-(differences in brain)-(differences in muscles)-(differences in movement of axe)-(differences in tree), etc. What is transmitted around the circuit is transforms of differences. And, as noted above, a difference that makes a difference is an *idea* or unit of information.
"But that is *not* how the average Occidental sees the event-sequence of tree-felling. He says, "*I* cut down the tree" and he even believes there is a delimited agent, the 'self' which performed a delimited 'purposive' action upon a delimited object.
"It is all very well to say that "Billiard ball A hit billiard ball B and sent it into the pocket"; and it would perhaps be all right (if we could do it) to give a complete hard-science account of the events all around the circuit containing the man and the tree. But popular parlance includes *mind* in its utterance by invoking the personal pronoun, and then achieves a mixture of mentalism and physicalism by restricting mind within the man and reifying the tree. Finally the mind itself becomes reified by the notion that, since the "self" acted upon the axe which acted upon the tree, the "self" must also be a "thing." The parallelism of syntax between "*I* hit the billiard ball" and "The ball hit another ball" is totally misleading.
"If you ask anybody about the localization and boundaries of the self, these confusions are immediately displayed. Or consider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man's self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line *across* this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man's locomotion."
In this example Bateson does not say anything about the part of the circuit within the brain. Elsewhere, though, he points out that it is impossible for us to be conscious of everything. (A television set cannot depict *everything* on its screen, including its inner workings.) Therefore, the part of the circuit '(differences in retina)-(differences in brain)-(differences in muscles)' will typically pass into, and out of, the subconscious. There are important consequences for artistic performance, which mostly has powerful sub-conscious components; we shall return to this later.
An unusual aspect of the example is its restriction to a man plus what we would normally call a 'thing', namely the tree. It shows clearly that in the communicational universe, our self-imposed division from the world is an arbitrary one. However, the tree itself has systemic connections with other living things. The word "Ecology"' in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" is suggestively echoed.
There is another suggestive point to be made about coercion. Bateson indicates that confusion arises in the example with the axe when we ask about the boundaries of the self. He then immediately passes to the example of the blind man. But according to where the boundaries of self are drawn in the 'axe' example, we can see that the man can see himself as part of a system of interaction with nature, or alternatively coercing or being coerced by nature. These experiences are a result merely of 'punctuation' rather than of reality - they are false simplifications of the reality of the interaction.
Two worlds
Throughout his work, Bateson goes out of his way to make it clear that the systemic, communicational view of the world stands as an alternative to the Newtonian view of the world. We live in *both* worlds. Elsewhere, he says, in part:
"It is necessary first to insist that in the world of communication the only relevant entities or "realities" are messages, including in this term parts of messages, relations between messages, significant gaps in messages, and so on. The *perception* of an event or object or relation is real. It is a neurophysiological message. But the event itself or the object itself cannot enter this world and is, therefore, irrelevant, and to that extent, unreal. Conversely, a message has no reality or relevance, qua message, in the Newtonian world: it there is reduced to sound waves or printer's ink.
"By the same token, the "contexts" and "contexts of contexts" upon which I am insisting are only real or relevant insofar as they are communicationally effective, i.e., function as messages or modifiers of messages.
"The difference between the Newtonian world and the world of communication is simply this: that the Newtonian world ascribes reality to objects and achieves its simplicity by excluding the context of the context - excluding indeed all metarelationships..... In contrast, the theorist of communication insists upon examining the metarelationships while achieving simplicity by excluding all objects.
"(In) this world of communication....relevance or reality must be denied not only to the sound of the tree that falls unheard in the forest but also to this chair that I can see and on which I am sitting. My perception of the chair is communicationally real, and that on which I sit is, for me, only an idea, a message in which I put my trust......
"In this world, indeed, I, as a material object, have no relevance and, in this sense, no reality. "I", however, exist in the communicational world as an essential element in the syntax of my experience and in the experience of others, and the communications of others may damage my identity, even to the point of breaking up the organisation of my experience."
This might seem rather mystical, but in truth it is just more than usually explicit.
We can also see that a chair is a 'chair' only in the communicational world. The communicational world is *our* world. And the Newtonian description of a video game is incredibly complex, even at the relatively high level of description of the computer language it is written in. Yet we deal with it communicatively with relative ease.
What is coercion?
When we replace the axe by something like language, and the tree by another person, we can see that the situation is more complex. We have two already complicated systems which together constitute a larger and even more complicated system. It still remains true that the total systemic circuits are closed. However we now see that it is possible for one of the persons to make the mistake of adopting the same reifying behaviour towards the other person that Bateson criticised us for adopting towards the tree, and ourselves. This sort of reification can lead us to pose questions that have a perplexing quality. The existence of such perplexing questions is often an indication that we are operating in a mixed system, and confusing the Newtonian world and the world of communication.
Let us return for a moment to the simpler example of the man and the axe. Although we suggested that it could be interpreted as the man coercing nature *or* as nature coercing the man, the first interpretation would seem to be overwhelmingly the most probable. But actually it is a common experience to feel the other way round. If the axe is blunt, and the tree unusually hard, and I am the one who has to get the job done.... The fact of the tree's hardness is invested with meaning, and I myself become impotent.
It is interesting to speculate how this strange and 'obviously' irrational feeling may come about. It seems possible that it arises by analogy with situations where two people are involved. In any interpersonal encounter considered communicationally, a single communication can be interpreted in two distinct ways. Bateson calls these at one point 'command' and 'report'. If someone telephones you, the ringing telephone 'means' that you have to answer it (or not). On the other hand, it also 'means' that that someone wants to talk to you. We can in fact see that both are normal punctuations of a sequence which begins with the antecedent communicational event that prompted the making of the telephone call, includes the ringing of the phone, and ends with the answering of it (or not. Notice here, by the way, that the non-answering of the telephone, if someone knows you are there, is also a communication.)
Now we may start to become clearer how the notion of coercion of ourselves by nature arises. We are able to punctuate any communicational sequence we receive either as a sequence of orders to which we give acquiescences/non-acquiescences, or as a series of reports followed by intitiatives of our own. So if I adopt the second attitude, I will have more power and flexibility in the world. I will be 'responsible'. I will not see myself as a 'victim'.
But we have to remember the fact that human beings typically make the mistake of reification. (I shall try to show in the next section that this is a consequence of our concentration on what we should *do*.) This tends to throw us out of the communicational world into the world of things and forces. In this world, the second attitude will look to me like manipulation, which is a covert version of the first, but with myself in the driving seat.
Thus there is a tendency for the world to slide towards being perceived in terms of dominance and submission, unless we are careful. In Bateson's terms, it amounts to the habit of seeing the arcs of communication as 'open', with real beginnings and ends, rather than 'closed'. And in particular, someone who is forced to see the world in this way early on may well find it impossible to do otherwise later. Such a habit would mean that all interactions would be recognised and initiated in such a mode of understanding, irrespective of who was playing the dominant role. This is possibly why victims of child abuse may become child abusers themselves, or why the saying "it takes one to know one" is true.
But notice that we do our children an equal disservice if we allow them to be manipulators, or if we allow manipulation to be a common pattern in their lives. It is the habit of punctuating situations in the first way which is damaging, not *necessarily* how that habit is acquired. So the damage we do our children by allowing them to perceive themselves as manipulators of us may be the *same* damage we do them by allowing them to perceive us as coercers of them. We need to communicate with them in such a way that they do not make either perception, though; *doing something to stop them* obviously fails in the way we are trying to avoid!
You can also see that children who learn to manipulate will tend to experience being coerced, even if they become effective at fighting back. This is a positive feedback loop well worth avoiding. We can see many of the world's ills here. (Bateson has an analysis of 'complementary' and 'symmetrical' behaviour that has something to say about it.)
I said in a previous post that we do not experience being coerced by gravity. But we now see that this is not the case. In extreme circumstances, we can experience being coerced by *anything*. And -- by **nothing**.
Coercion, in short, whether we like it or not, is an interpretation *we* bring to a situation. We need to minimise the probability that it is so brought.
Now, this argument may sound callous when taken to its extreme, and applied to a case of child abuse, or of rape. But it is one of the facts of the world of communication that what you want to say about a situation depends very much on whom you are saying it to. It is indeed possible for someone subject to horrifying experiences not to be damaged by them - the case of the American imprisoned for years in China springs to mind. Such examples may be an inspiration to other sufferers.
The most effective way to avoid someone being damaged by such experiences is clearly to avoid them having those experiences. The next section may help us to do this. The damage is nevertheless independent of the experience, and we need to see that this is so even in order to avoid them having the experience.
The analogy with Art and Music
I entitled this post "The Art of Taking People Seriously". I think that taking people seriously has much more in common with Art than it does with Science. I also think that probably the actual practice of Science has much more in common with Art than it does with Science.
The communicative universe is most clearly demonstrated in artistic and creative behaviour. Artists are people who have trained themselves to be especially sensitive to the communicational world in a particular area. In this area they have usually also developed the unconscious segments of their systemic pathways, by practice, so that they have a skill which is partly conscious and partly instinctive.
But they reach out to us because we are all creatures of this sort. Consider the elegance and flexibility of someone beginning to fall in love with someone else, say, at a party. Suppose such a couple begins to be engaged in intimate conversation. Consider the unconscious modulations of voice that each of them uses, and the way these are unequivocally decoded as signs of interest in the other person, by the other person. These skills are partly conscious and partly unconscious, too. But consider also, by contrast, what occurs to us in these circumstances when we try to manipulate our behaviour, and be interest*ing* in a self-conscious way to someone else. In this case, instead of being part of a whole, we are trying to *do* something. In my experience, we lose all our grace when we concentrate too closely on what we should *do*.
As a performing musician I spend some of my time teaching performers. One of the main difficulties that inexperienced musicians have is that they ask a 'wrong' sort of question: being inexperienced, they want to know what they *should do* at a particular point in a piece of music. It's quite difficult to persuade them that they are better off *not knowing* what they should do, and that the best performers don't think in this way. Of course, there are certain general things that one can say one should or shouldn't do, but the details aren't fixed. They may be rehearsed; but it is quite normal that an actual performance will contain many unexpected features. You could say that the rehearsal is for the *rehearsal*, not for the performance!
This is because musicians in performance allow themselves to be prompted not only by their subconscious instincts but by what their fellow-performers do. In other words, they *listen* to themselves and the others at the same time. Bateson's systemic circuits are operating, and though the context is limited in classical music by what the composer has written, it is nevertheless a context in which something is being brought to life. It is being brought to life by being moved from the Newtonian universe, in which it is just black marks on pieces of paper, into the communicational universe, *our* universe. If someone does something that kills off what the performance has seemed to require until that point, everyone's commitment will be to make that something *retrospectively right*, which will give a different life-history to that particular performance. Even in a solo piece, a performer is responsive in this way to the small things that are different on the night, by accident or subconscious prompting. The experience of doing this is very often like giving up judgement, and going with the flow.
The sort of question which is wrong, is: "Should I play to the end of this piece in tempo?". One might want to say, yes, but don't *not slow down*! (The mystery of how you may do something without *doing* it is clear to most good performers.) Another interesting one is: "Are you going to play that bit as loud as that, tonight?" The only proper answer may well be, "I don't know. I shall be listening to all of it at the time. *And so will you*."
We begin to see that asking what we should to *do* can be the wrong sort of question because it blocks off for us too much of the communicative universe. What we want to be is *listening*; but listening in a special way. We want to be listening for what is possible, so that the context of our listening naturally generates our actions. And we want to be listening to what is actual, in order to generate the next possibility. Though this might sound impossible, it is what is available to us if we can give up what we should *do*, and concentrate on listening.
This listening needs to be on many levels, too. The idea of one systemic circuit is all we considered in Bateson's simple example, but clearly the idea needs extending. Not only are there many circuits in operation simultaneously; we also commonly perceive a sequence of communications as one communication. For example, a sequence of words is often perceived as one idea.
Giving up *control* is what is required, in our normal use of the word. Many artists say this, in many ways. A common way is to talk about it all coming from 'nothing'. This 'nothing' that we want is a 'no-thing' - by throwing away the Newtonian world, we are in the world of communication, context and metacontext - our world, no less than the Newtonian one. Those who believe that the only worthwhile truth is arrived at by criticism will be lost here, if only because there is no 'truth' to be arrived at. The difficulty is unavoidable, and is the reason why the practice is very often dismissed out of hand.
Surely something that almost all practising artists will tell you is worth translating into the most creatively worthwhile field of all: that of relationship? There is a very suggestive resonance for 'non-coercers': 'giving up control of a relationship' is very like embracing non-coercion. But the difference in experience is profound.
'Wrong' questions?
I recently saw a video of a debate the BBC broadcast some years ago, about the future of television in Britain. There was a lot of discussion about whether we should change over entirely to a commercial system. Several Americans told us that it would be a terrible mistake, and having seen what passes for television under such a system in the US, I agree with them. But the fundamental question that came up again and again was the question of whether television should be 'educative' or 'entertaining'. Some people thought that it was important to provide programmes that not everybody wanted to see, because they might be *good* for them. Others thought that this was elitist nonsense, and that people should be given *what they wanted*, even if that meant that television became, as in the US, mostly crap. The second argument obviously appeals to advertisers, because what they are primarily interested in is that the maximum possible number of people see their advertisements.
The most striking speech in my opinion was made by the late Huw Wheldon, someone whose working life was a major contribution to the excellence of British television. He said, in essence, that we should *avoid asking* the question: "Should we give them what they want, or should we give them what we think they should have?"; because, of the only two possible answers, one led to mediocrity, and the other to totalitarianism. In his view, it was a question that was never asked by anyone who made a real difference in the world. Shakespeare, he said, had never asked it. Therefore, anyone who wanted to make a difference, and who found themselves asking this question, should find a *better question* to ask themselves.
I don't propose to say here why Wheldon's question is a 'wrong' one, or to analyse the assumptions it makes that make it impossible to answer satisfactorily. Perhaps I shall do that in another post, because questions that are in some sense wrong ones have occurred throughout the history of philosophy and science. You can probably guess anyway what my answer would be. Here I would like to consider a related question of our own: "Should we let our children do what they want, or should we make them do what we think is best for them?"
This is wrong too, and wrong for the same reasons that the questions in David Deutsch's questionnaire are wrong. Somebody recently suggested subtler questions, but these fail for the same reasons.
I have already argued that 'what people want' is not fixed. So though I want to answer "yes" to the first part, this answer has all the complexity associated with a communicative interaction between myself and my children. Sometimes, the answer might be "no".
The second part is confused, and I want to replace it with another sort of question. I don't want to "make them do" anything, but I do want to answer the question, "Should I show them what will allow them to make a difference in the world?" in the affirmative. I do want them to be enabled in a particular way that gives them freedom.
As I said at the beginning, we have to have a fundamental assumption. We have to want *something* for them. Otherwise we would never have thought that 'non-coercion' was the way forward. What would make a difference in the world in general would be not to have people (us) tend to think of other people, or themselves, as things; and for them to be able to see those things that *are* things, *as* things and not meanings.
So, I would like my children to have the world of communication be a real one; to this end, I will deal with them as part of our system - I will listen to them. 'Part of our system' also means their autonomy, if they choose - I will listen to myself, as part of our system. I would also like them to make the world of agreement real, so that they may be taken seriously in that world. And an agreement has no 'meaning', beyond its content - it is not systemic. Gravity does not reify us - in the world of gravity, we *are* a thing. An agreement is just a more complicated version of gravity. So I want a distinction between the worlds for my children, and myself.
We live in both worlds. But *primarily* we live in the world of communication. Jung called it the 'creatura', as opposed to the 'pleroma'. It has been identified many times, and in many ways.
Are we 'listening'?
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Tony
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2014-05-24 10:29
I recall a friend of mine told me her mother forced her to take piano lessons. Literally as I was saying that I was sorry to hear that something was foisted upon her, she said, "There is NOTHING wrong with that."
But I wonder as someone who is dipping his toe in the "30 minute lesson," what can we as teachers possibly do that is meaningful if it is not in some way coercion. With so little time even to put your instrument together and take it apart, it almost seems incumbent upon the instructor to knock the instructee over the head with something that could be construed as knowledge.
.............Paul Aviles
Post Edited (2014-05-24 20:55)
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Author: Bruno
Date: 2014-05-24 20:43
Aside from not agreeing with your premise, I'm wondering what was the purpose of posting that here on the clarinet forum? I venture to say that every poster here is a well-motivated and enthusiastic clarinet player or a serious wannabe.
As far as children are concerned, many parents/"adults" today suffer a misconception. Children are not small adults, they are immature offspring in body and mind, and need to be aimed in the right direction by adults who know what's best for them using tried and true methods. Animals do a better job of raising their offspring than today's humans. The thing to remember is that left to their own devices they will bury their faces in an iPad and assume that's reality. Children won't do what is right for their development on their own.
How many musicians, amateur and professional, have you heard say, "I'm so glad my mother/father insisted that I take clarinet, piano, violin, trombone, accordion (oops! check that) lessons."
"Entropy is Time's arrow." is a time-honored axiom of physics. Without direction and purpose, however applied, the universe will end up as a giant city dump.
B>
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-24 21:54
>> Children are not small adults, they are immature offspring in body and mind, and need to be aimed in the right direction by adults who know what's best for them using tried and true methods."
I suppose what I'd rather say is that, just like adults (if they are willing adults) children can be influenced by other adults (and children) to adopt good, self-critical approaches to their own ideas and actions.
Then, their adult behaviour may turn out be more useful in the world, and supportive both of themselves and of the others they encounter.
Tony
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-24 22:37
>> I'm wondering what was the purpose of posting that here on the clarinet forum? >>
It was because I think that Bateson's ideas are very useful for performers. I say that partly because I have found them useful myself.
There are parts of the post that are relevant, not to musical performance, but to other ideas: in particular, ideas about how we relate to our children.
Nevertheless, consideration of those parts as well as the musical parts makes Bateson's ideas clearer.
I apologise to those people -- I have just had an email from one such -- who think that how we relate to our children is off-topic for such a sophisticated, dedicated and intelligent BBoard.
(Nah:-)
Tony
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Author: MichaelW
Date: 2014-05-25 01:01
Thank you for your posting. It reminded me of Bateson's enormous influence upon my generation of young psychiatrists fourty years ago.
It is a joy for me to see that parents, teachers and choir directors seem to find the right balance in the musical education of my grandchildren. I'm not sure what will be more important for their lives: their till now really fine musical achievements or their social learning. The oldest girl, now 13, still(!) loves to go to her choir practice twice a week and meet her friends there. She and her younger brother are accustomed to public perfomances and like them without much stage fright or presumption.
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Author: Funfly
Date: 2014-05-25 02:38
Tony, a well constructed academic dissertation but I would respectfully suggest that those families who encourage their children to pursue a musical instrument already posses sound parenting skills.
Anecdotally my mother at the age of 10 (in 1920) was, in her words, 'forced' by her parents to study the piano. At the age of 15 she became one of the youngest persons in the UK to graduate and we still have the picture of her in her cap and gown taken at the time.
She went on to play in silent movie cinemas and continued to play for the family all her life, I remember now her impressive "Rustle of Spring' party piece. She was the person that imbued the love of music in me.
As a female in what was then a male dominated society (at least it was in my home) she had little opportunity to acquire a life of her own and playing the piano was an area where she was able to demonstrate that, although a woman, she still had talent.
All her life as my mother she 'blessed' her parents for the gift of 'forcing' her to learn the piano.
Martyn Thatcher Mature Student Cheshire U.K.
Clarinet - Yamaha SE Custom
Alto Sax - Yamaha YAS 480
Guitar - Yamaha FG 375-S
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-25 19:29
Like, I heard there was like this man who like smoked 40 a day and lived into his nineties; so, like, it did no harm to HIM!
But my purpose wasn't to start a debate about non-coercive parenting, or link it with instrumental teaching. It was to illustrate the ideas of Gregory Bateson.
Tony
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Author: ruben
Date: 2014-05-25 21:29
It's good to have a discussion on this forum about a subject other than flaming barrels and the advantages and drawbacks of synthetic reeds.
rubengreenbergparisfrance@gmail.com
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Author: JKL
Date: 2014-05-26 01:31
I am not an english native speaker so I am not sure if I understand you well enough. But, Mr. Pay - imagine you were teaching Reginald Kell to play the Stravinsky pieces well - if I were Kell, I would use your ideas as a perfect answer to you - giving up control, you are better off *not knowing* what you should do, "giving up judgement", "going with the flow", and so on. If so, your ideas are TOO abstract to be of any benefit for the daily teaching work - did you consider that your philosophy could work as excuse for nonsense as well?
My impression is that your ideas restrict your possibilities as teacher because you are forced to match every action with your "philosophy" or "system". Why do you need a "system" or a philosophy at all? Why not simply say: There are issues wich are clear-cut, so you have to say what is right and what is wrong. And there are issues wich are left to the discretion of the player - and there are issues which are clear-cut in the concrete situation of the concert or the playing situation, for example, if the piano player is louder than usually you have to match the piano, so it cannot be decided in the teaching situation what to do. (You see I am a fan of simplifying things) For all that I don't need, not at all, a philosophy hovering above my operations.
And there is no need to disprove statements which nobody claims. I don`t think that many teachers would describe their activity as "controlling", even less as coercing.
And I think what you said is a contradiction to your earlier posts, for example:
I spend quite a lot of my time teaching students the elements of the classical style, precisely so that they can use those elements in an expressive way when they play. Some of them find this an imposition; but many of them come to understand that resisting it in principle has something in common with being annoyed that the structure of sentences is different in French and German, and insisting on their right to choose to do it their way regardless of the norms of those languages.
"Every task involves constraint,
Solve it now without complaint.
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains;
Structures, strictures, though they bind,
Strangely liberate the mind."
(James Falen, translator of 'Eugene Onegin'.)
(If you find my thoughts inadequate, don't answer. But perhaps there is a need for the advocatus diaboli to make things clear and intelligible.)
Post Edited (2014-05-27 14:27)
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Author: Funfly
Date: 2014-05-26 01:48
>It's good to have a discussion on this forum about a subject other than flaming >barrels and the advantages and drawbacks of synthetic reeds.
Agree with that.
Martyn Thatcher Mature Student Cheshire U.K.
Clarinet - Yamaha SE Custom
Alto Sax - Yamaha YAS 480
Guitar - Yamaha FG 375-S
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-26 13:07
>> I am not an english native speaker so I am not sure if I understand you well enough. But, Mr. Pay - imagine you were teaching Reginald Kell to play the Stravinsky pieces well - if I were Kell, I would use your ideas as a perfect answer to you - giving up control, you are better off *not knowing* what you should do, "giving up judgement", "going with the flow", and so on. If so, your ideas are TOO abstract to be of any benefit for the daily teaching work - did you consider that your philosophy could work as excuse for nonsense as well? >>
I think the answer to this lies in seeing that what we do in the communicative universe is RESPOND to the CONTEXT of every given moment. Now, it's true that in the Stravinsky pieces there are no other performers, so that that context has in it what has just gone before only in our own part. Then, 'going with the flow' might be thought to license taking the sort of liberties Kell does, because we're not constrained by any other performers.
But the context is also the notes, dynamic instructions, phrase marks etc that Stravinsky has provided for us, PLUS his meta-instruction to take those markings seriously.
Consider another example: a game of tennis. What is the context of a game of tennis? What do you need in order to play a game of tennis?
Well, obviously a PHYSICAL context, to begin with: a court, a net, two players, rackets and a ball.
But there's an invisible something without which you can't play tennis: namely the RULES of tennis. That's what stops you walking up to the net, smashing the ball into your opponent's service court, and claiming an ace:-)
>> My impression is that your ideas restrict your possibilities as teacher because you are forced to match every action with your "philosophy" or "system". Wy do you need a "system" or a philosophy at all? Why not simply say: There are issues which are clear-cut, so you have to say what is right and what is wrong. And there are issues which are left to the discretion of the player - and there are issues which are clear-cut in the concrete situation of the concert or the playing situation, for example, if the piano player is louder than usually you have to match the piano, so it cannot be decided in the teaching situation what to do. (You see I am a fan of simplifying things) For all that I don't need, not at all, a philosophy hovering above my operations. >>
As I've often said, I don't think of it as a philosophy or system; it's descriptive rather than normative. (In other words, it's not trying to tell you what you SHOULD do, it's just trying to characterise what good players DO do. I suppose that's the purpose of teaching.)
I say that although you might think that I'm making things unnecessarily complicated, I also say that though DESCRIBING things in these terms – Bateson's terms – may seem unnatural, the actual experience is very simple. It's what we do when we read a story to a child, following the text literally but not mechanically, allowing ourself the small improvisations that bring it to life.
You might find Bateson's essay 'Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art' a bit tough going, for example, partly because we're not used to thinking in this way. But that's a statement about OUR THINKING.
(Have you given that essay a try, by the way?)
Bateson was used to encountering confusion. Here's something he wrote:Quote:
I used to teach an informal course for psychiatric residents in the Veterans Administration Hospital at Palo Alto, trying to get them to think some of the thoughts that are in these essays. They would attend dutifully and even with intense interest to what I was saying, but every year the question would arise after three or four sessions of the class: "What is this course all about?"
I tried various answers to this question. Once I drew up a sort of catechism and offered it to the class as a sampling of the questions which I hoped they would be able to discuss after completing the course. The questions ranged from "What is a sacrament?' to "What is entropy?" and "What is play?"
As a didactic maneuver, my cathechism was a failure: it silenced the class. But one question in it was useful:
A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother?
We devoted one or two sessions of the class to exploring the many ramifications of this question, and it became clear to me that all the needed additional information concerned the context of the mother's and son's behavior. In fact, the phenomenon of context and the closely related phenomenon of "meaning" defined a division between the "hard" sciences and the sort of science which I was trying to build.
Gradually I discovered that what made it difficult to tell the class what the course was about was the fact that my way of thinking was different from theirs. A clue to this difference came from one of the students. It was the first session of the class and I had talked about the cultural differences between England and America—a matter which should always be touched on when an Englishman must teach Americans about cultural anthropology. At the end of the session, one resident came up. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure that the others were all leaving, and then said rather hesitantly, "I want to ask a question." "Yes." "It's—do you want us to learn what you are telling us?" I hesitated a moment, but he rushed on with, "Or is it all a sort of example, an illustration of something else?"
"Yes, indeed!"
But an example of what? >> And there is no need to disprove statements which nobody claims. I don`t think that many teachers would describe their activity as "controlling", even less as coercing.>>
I try to teach students how to think, rather than teaching them what to do. I wouldn't naturally think of the latter as coercion, but in a way, I suppose it is.
>> And I think what you said is a contradiction to your earlier posts, for example:Quote:
I spend quite a lot of my time teaching students the elements of the classical style, precisely so that they can use those elements in an expressive way when they play. Some of them find this an imposition; but many of them come to understand that resisting it in principle has something in common with being annoyed that the structure of sentences is different in French and German, and insisting on their right to choose to do it their way regardless of the norms of those languages.
"Every task involves constraint,
Solve it now without complaint.
There are magic links and chains
Forged to loose our rigid brains;
Structures, strictures, though they bind,
Strangely liberate the mind."
(James Falen, translator of 'Eugene Onegin'.) >>
I hope what I wrote above helps with that.
>> (If you find my thoughts inadequate, don't answer. But perhaps there is a need for the advocatus diaboli to make things clear and intelligible.) >>
Indeed there is:-) Thank you.
Tony
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Author: Funfly
Date: 2014-05-27 15:48
Very important point about rules.
People, especially young people, need defined fences within which to operate. My personal opinion (and I am opinionated) is that the lack of control by some parents over their offspring leads to some of the problems with them in parts of our society.
Children need to be led rather than followed but there are different ways of leading. The 'old school' discipline seems to produce dysfunctional people and we see this in the aristocracy here in the UK where the so called 'public schools' have a reputation for strong discipline, early morning cold showers - that sort of thing (and abuse if it comes to that), but that doesn't take away the requirement that the parent must control the child not the other way round.
Some parents seem to have a natural talent with their children and don't need us older and wiser sages to tell them what to do.
It might be that those who don't have an understanding of good parenting are those who are not receptive to ideas, i.e. won't listen and can't be taught.
Might be getting a bit off subject here - sorry.
Martyn Thatcher Mature Student Cheshire U.K.
Clarinet - Yamaha SE Custom
Alto Sax - Yamaha YAS 480
Guitar - Yamaha FG 375-S
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Author: JKL
Date: 2014-05-27 23:49
Thank you Mr. Pay - I discovered that "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" is available in German - I will definitely give it a try (and in German for me a little bit less tough going).
JKL
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2014-05-28 06:33
Tony –
I read your long posting from beginning to end with the closest attention, marking parts I wanted to read again. I then skimmed through, pausing at the marked parts -- for example, the references to what others in your original audience had said -- trying to figure out who these people were, what they had said and why the references were relevant.
I also marked passages where you repeated your thoughts, almost word for word, asking myself whether you had a reason for doing this and whether you intended a different shade of meaning.
Finally, I marked the small number of passages regarding music, almost all at the end. I had intended to ask you to enlarge your thoughts on Bateson's relevance to music.
However, on the third time through, I recognized how brilliantly you had paralleled Alan Sokal's article in Social Text, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," with which I'm sure you're familiar. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_hoax.
Like Sokal, you gave an aggressive, blustering introduction, designed, I realized, to stifle criticism or even questions. Then you gave numerous references to matters unknown to the reader. Finally, you used constant buzz-words and references to arcane knowledge that any literate reader *of course* would know to understand your thought.
Congratulations, sir. You really had me going for a couple of days, until I recognized your larger meta-purpose.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-05-29 01:49
So, that last ‘long’ post talked about the two worlds that we can choose between. It wasn't that the WORLD changes — it was that how we look at it changes.
I think that that’s important for us, because I think a very striking difference between two sorts of players — especially student players — lies in how they are thinking about what they’re doing.
They may both get better, as they study; but one group UNDERSTANDS what they’re doing, and the other doesn’t. One is ‘telling a story’, the other is ‘trying to do better’. It’s very hard, particularly in the later stages, to get a member of the latter group to enter the former.
Now, another way of looking at the difference between the world of communication and the Newtonian world is to concentrate on the idea of CONTEXT.
In the last post, I highlighted ‘listening’ as the pivotal idea: the idea that we respond instinctively to context as we ‘listen’.
But we can also FOREGROUND context, not as part of the flow, but as what we can deal with on an intellectual level: something we can think about and even write down.
When a student is wondering how to play, we may very well encourage them, routinely, to LOOK AT THE CONTEXT:
“You don’t know how to play that bit? So, what has gone on before? What is going on NOW? What’s in the orchestral part? Does it suggest anything? Has IT changed from what went on before?
“Is this piece like other pieces by this composer? How does the scoring differ? What does the composer write ABOVE what you’re playing?” etc etc.
And when we evaluate the playing of someone, say in an orchestra, we may well want to consider whether or not THEY have been sensitive to an appropriate context:
Were they responding to the context: “I want to show myself to be a great player...” Were they responding to the context: “I don’t want to make a fool of myself by making a mistake...” Were they responding to the context: “What contribution should I make here? Should I be a hero, a foot soldier, or a LEG?”
THIS post, about ‘Agreements’, uses Bateson’s ideas about different contexts, and different LEVELS of context, to show that someone persuading someone to keep their agreements is doing something DIFFERENT from simply MAKING THEM DO SOMETHING.
My purpose in posting it is to encourage us think in terms of context, routinely. It helps:-)
I also like the bit about Harry Frankfurt's 'wantons'. (I know far too many wantons in the profession:-)
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Agreements: The fundamental structure of Taking People Seriously
There has been some discussion in this forum of the possibility of children of any age being legally responsible, and being able to enter into contractual obligations on equal terms with adults. I would like to argue here that although this is a worthwhile subject for debate, it is equally important and interesting to consider how we may make everyday contracts (what we may call "agreements") *within* families. Indeed, this might be considered a necessary apprenticeship for the experience of entering into *legal* contracts with adults. However, I personally believe that enquiry into how agreements work is actually much more important and fundamental.
In the adult world, to agree to the enforcement of a legal contractmight seem to be recognising something like a moral face of coercion. Under contract, people are obliged to do something that they may well have decided they no longer want to do. Some degree of force or pressure may enter the equation. I shall argue later, though, that this enforcement is *not* coercion - and that when we come to look again at family agreements, this distinction will clarify matters.
We make legal contracts with each other only when we see that we want to commit ourselves to enterprises that will not survive our behaving capriciously. Thus we voluntarily restrict our freedom of action because it is the only workable way forward. To lay ourselves open to the consequences of breaking a contract is to face up to the challenge of being *responsible*; it is to be willing to be *taken seriously*.
Of course, there is no obligation upon anyone who wishes to continue to behave capriciously throughout their lives to enter into any *legal* contract whatever. Such a person is simply restricted to enterprises of a kind and degree that will tolerate caprice.
In our personal relations, with the exception of marriage, we do not usually bind ourselves with legal contracts. Yet it still seems to be the case that it is painful to break our word. There are degrees and degrees of this, of course: at one extreme, someone climbing a mountain should be aware that members of the team have to rely on eachother, particularly when the going gets rough. A climber who tries to back out of his or her commitment in such circumstances, and do what his or her immediate wants dictate, is unlikely to have a comfortable time when the descent is complete. But even at the other extreme (say, in breaking an arrangement to go to the cinema), to do merely what we feel like at the time does little to make us popular. And it's not even necessary for other people to be around for *us* to be uncomfortable: perhaps the most painful experience of all is to break one's word to oneself, even if no-one else knows. After all, "I'm a pretty important person in *my* universe!"
When we say of someone that they are "a man (woman) of their word", we are paying a compliment that we all recognise. Such people do not necessarily bind themselves with agreements all the time; however, they can be counted on for the agreements that they *do* make. Pretty clearly, it is intelligent and mature behaviour to manage one's life in such a way that both caprice and serious endeavour have their place. So, when you don't intend necessarily to do something, it's wiser not to say that you'll do it.
What would be the reason for entering the world of agreement at all? How about *never* saying that you can be counted on to do something? Well, the consequence would be that you would have (only) certain sorts of friends and (only) certain sorts of relationships. This is not to say that those relationships might not be nurturing or valuable to you. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that most people, though perhaps not all, would find such a life insufficiently meaningful. After all, how would most other people treat you? The answer is, they might love you, they might play with you, they might hang out with you, or go to bed with you, but they *wouldn't take you seriously*.
One of the most noticeable things about children is that they like to be taken seriously. They like to be treated as "persons, no matter how small". Above all, they like to do what the grown-ups do, as a matter of course.
Now, at the beginning of their lives, children are what H. Frankfurt marvellously called "wantons": they are driven by their current "wants". Of course, at that age, they are delightful too: but to deal with wantons requires what the Buddhists call "skilful means". Because children want to copy us, our most skilful means may be to present such things as teeth-cleaning as a game which we play ourselves, together with them. There is scope for inventiveness here, and if the budget will allow, an electric toothbrush may help. But there comes a point where this strategy won't work, because we ourselves naturally want to play games that we may not particularly want them to copy -- like staying up late. "Skilful means" here may involve concealment, distraction, clarity... (tell me about it!) But if we want to avoid coercion, our lives may be difficult. We must do the best we can.
As they get older, though, children master language and start to want to participate in a community in which agreements are made and broken. This occurs at different ages for different children, but above all, again, they will look to us for example. If we are wise, we will deal very carefully with the agreements we make with them. Notice that there is no shortage of offers: "Dad, can we....?" "Mum, can I....?" "Will you stay with me when I go to bed????!"
The point is that we have here a lever on *personhood*. H. Frankfurt argued that being a person entailed a movement towards the appreciation of second-order wants, i.e. wants that transcend the comprehension of a wanton, who is at the mercy of his or her first-order wants. If our children begin to understand that we are like them, and that we honour our agreements with them *even if it turns out that we don't feel like it at the time*, they may begin to see the value of making agreements themselves.
For example, both my children take part in the Oxford Karate Academy, and they are very enthusiastic about it. The discipline is hard but rewarding, and it is presided over by a Sensei who has commitment, a sense of humour, and an understanding of himself and those he is dealing with. By "those he is dealing with", I mean: young people with commitment, a sense of humour, and an awakening understanding of themselves and whom *they* are dealing with. You don't *have* to be a member of the Oxford Karate Academy; but if you are, there are consequences, and they are not always comfortable ones. Karate is not for everyone. But it is not for anyone special, either - beyond the truth that we are all special. If you enter this discipline, you are sometimes *made* to do things that you may not *want* to do at the time. And you get to see the value of such discipline. You may be outraged if others play about, and "don't understand".
On the other hand, my children from time to time watch television, generally lay about, and behave like the wantons they are.
Taking children seriously means having a commitment to them, having a sense of humour, and understanding who they are. This includes that they, like us, are both wantons *and* serious. It means both allowing them not to make agreements, and holding them to the agreements they do make. It means giving them the opportunity to be people of their word as well as wantons. It means, among other things, making the category "someone who keeps his word" a *real* one.
But what does it mean, to hold them to their agreements? Is this not necessarily coercion? Even if our intention is to have them learn something valuable?
Gregory Bateson wrote about learning, and the logical categories of learning, in an essay in his book: "Steps to an Ecology of Mind". He pointed out, among other things, that we not only learn, but we *learn to learn*. (He called this second-order learning "deutero-learning". In fact, he argued for a whole hierarchy of learning, starting with zero-learning, and progressing through learning 1, deutero-learning and so on.) The detailed presentation of this thesis would be inappropriate here, but one aspect is something we all know, though sometimes forget: that when we are coerced to learn, particularly when we are young, we may well learn more about our relationship with the coercer than we learn about what the coercer is trying to coerce us to learn. Further, we may well hardwire (make unchangeable decisions about) relationships in general, and our own abilities in relationship in particular.
We learn, as it were, a complex reaction to the learning experience *which we cannot then vary*. The next higher order of learning would be to learn to choose an appropriate other complex reaction - say, to ask provocative and intelligent questions - if the circumstances were different. (And not to do that if *that* turned out to be inappropriate.) It seems that we cannot naturally move on into the higher orders of learning (which involve being able to be wrong without fault in our choice of context, and therefore able to correct ourselves) if we have had too many negative and level-confusing experiences early on. Of course, all is not lost; it is possible to overcome such difficulties later, with insight and application. But they are better avoided in the first place.
It is important to see that there has to be *another person* for coercion to occur. Coercion is a *systemic* property, and involves dealing with at least two people and two levels at once. We would not say that we are coerced by gravity, for example, although we may be severely penalised, indeed killed, for trying to "disobey" what it "wants". Gravity is indifferent to us. Being coerced is not being forced to do what you don't want to do - it is being forced to do what *someone else wants* you to do, and can be experienced even when you yourself actually want to do it! (Remember the small child crying: "I *will* do it, if you won't let me!" What he wants is: "not to be coerced", rather than: "to do it". He may even not want to do it, *and have to*, in order to try to communicate this!) In the case of Karate, and other sports, Sensei is not making you do what *he wants you to do* - in fact he doesn't care one way or the other. He's just doing his job. (That's Karate, man.)
This is why the enforcement of a legal contract is not coercion. We have agreed to throw away the higher levels, and the contract is become a mechanism, like gravity, indifferent to us. The same applies to games - we are not coerced by the rules of a game. (At least, that's the theory - but look at what's happened to football, and even *cricket*, never mind the law! People drag the higher levels back in, you see!)
Returning to the matter of "holding people to their agreements", the important thing is to return to the ground of the agreement, which is our relationship with them. The substance of the matter is then that someone is about to do (or not do) something they said they wouldn't (or would). Our power is paradoxically both great and small. The best we can do is to point out, as clearly and strongly as we can, the identity of our human situations. We will do better here if there is already evidence that we keep *our* word. But if we move into 'real'coercion, and call our relationship as equals into question, we immediately destroy our argument. Essentially we are speaking to the author of the agreement as a person who can be taken seriously. If we are unsuccessful, the person who made the agreement is simply not ready to make agreements. Unfortunately, many people do not see the logic of this, and destroy the relationship regardless. But this does not mean we always need to be "nice" about it. Honest relationships
contain many things.
There is no way to spell out how all this works in practice. Perhaps Popper had the most useful thing to say here: quoting an American President (I can't remember which): "We don't know exactly what we should do. We'll try this, and if it doesn't work, why, we'll try something else." Because we are persons, and our children are persons, we cannot be predicted. Often what seems to be the difficult point in a relationship turns out to be quite different when we communicate about it.
With children, it may be useful to look again at the analogy between the readiness to make agreements and the readiness to enter taxing physical situations. It may be safe for our children to renege on their agreements with us, but it may be less safe with others. Climbing a mountain involves making an agreement with gravity and the physical situation in which our partners are implacable. The consequences of breaking our agreement with gravity can be very grave. The consequences of failing to learn the power of making and keeping agreements may be less immediately fatal, but it may be ultimately destructive nonetheless.
The most chilling consideration is this. If we do not allow others to take us seriously, we lose the power to take ourselves seriously. The consequences are graver than the decline of football as an honourable sport. After all, how do we *know* that we are at home in the world? How do we *know* we are loved? Only because we say so. And if we are not people of our word, where are we then?
Dave is without his penguin.
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Tony
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2014-05-31 21:19
Tony Pay wrote:
> Here I would like to consider a related question of our own:
> "Should we let our children do what they want, or should we
> make them do what we think is best for them?"
>
Tony, when I got to the end of this post (it's taken me a long time - you were competing with some much easier Tony Hillerman novels that I've been reading lately) my first reaction as I read this was nearly anger, that all of the preceding theoretical discussion had ended up in a question so obvious as to be almost equivalent to asking "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" After all, American educators - at least the good ones - have long ago disowned (in their words if not always in their actions) both the laissez-faire approach of the first clause and the authoritarianism of the second.
But then, as I ate lunch, I heard a CNN report about the flap over mandating quality foods in U.S. school cafeterias. There was the anchor-moderator, a smart person but not an educator initiated into the lingo of teacher-speak and learning psychology, saying (I'm paraphrasing, but very nearly verbatim) "Isn't it the job of the adults [parents and school personnel] to make children do [eat] what's good for them?" It reminded me in the clearest way possible, that such a question is still asked *out loud* by perfectly bright, well-intended people who haven't been steeped in the last century of learning/teaching theory and philosophy.
The trouble is, they won't probably be reading Bateson, Dewey, Rodgers or any of the others who have so heavily influenced the teaching profession.
Karl
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Author: Tony Pay ★2017
Date: 2014-06-01 22:55
As I said before, the idea of these posts was to illustrate the use of Gregory Bateson's ideas.
I'd probably now not want to say some of what I wrote 20 years ago. In particular, I think that a lot of what I wrote in 'Agreements' needs a deeper analysis.
The 'two worlds' that we may inhabit remains a fundamental structure. That structure, however articulated, embodies an important distinction in the world of musical performance.
Tony
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2014-06-02 01:01
It's Tony's responsibility to explain his gnomic references. Otherwise, his ship arrives too late to save the drowning witch. In other words, I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there, and Tony's simply a rich sardine with a private can.
Ken Shaw
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The Clarinet Pages
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