Review: Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

I have a confession to make: I'm cheating on my very first book review. Because events in life have conspired to cut in on my reading time, I'm going to review a book I've already read:

Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

If you need your logical toolkit expanded and your critical thinking skills honed, I can recommend no book more highly than this one. Logical toolkit expanded, because the text introduces a useful methodology of thought; critical thinking skills honed, because Bateson makes fully as many unsupported, ridiculous or logically plausible but long-since-disproved assertions as he does brilliant ones.

The book, actually a collection of "Metalogues" and papers published and/or presented by Bateson prior to the book's original publication date of 1972, touches on a variety of topics while maintaining a consistent underlying theme; included are papers on cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, information theory, and so on. As a result the text is dense and the vocabulary used sometimes gratuitously technical, which makes for a slow read. If the idea of picking up and reading a random trade publication at the library makes you nervous, this book is probably not for you.

If, on the other hand, you can read between the lines of well-written academic texts for method applied and you're interested in expanding the scope and clarity of your ability to analyze the world around you, this is a good book to read. Additionally, many of the papers collected in the book are simply interesting to the reader with interdisciplinary interests; even where the ideas they contain are obsolete, great value can in many cases be gleaned from the contents. For example: Bateson's theory of the Double Bind, disproved as a possible cause for schizophrenia, is nevertheless central to a great deal of work in the field of family therapy.

In the overall, Steps to an Ecology of Mind earns:
4 stars for interest
5 stars for usefulness
2 stars for readability
2 stars for style

And that's all she wrote.

Reviews and Links

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. In the interests of making the time-investment I put into all of this reading useful to other people, I'll be posting a review each week of some on-topic book, movie, or website that presently holds my interest.

Current reading material includes: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Conflict, Decision and Dissonance by Leon Festinger, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity by Gregory Bateson, The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, and The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand.

If anyone would like to request a review of a book, movie, or website that I might plausibly gain access to (budget is a serious limit), you can do so in a comment on this (or any) post.