Composing a Life

Mary Catherine Bateson

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780802196316
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Profiles of five women that aim "to shed light on personal and career obstacles women face in achieving success" by a cultural anthropologist ( Publishers Weekly ). Mary Catherine Bateson has been called "one of the most original and important thinkers of our time" (Deborah Tannen). Grove Press is pleased to reissue Bateson's deeply satisfying treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women. Using their personal stories as her framework, Dr. Bateson delves into the creative potential of the complex lives we live today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities. With balanced sympathy and a candid approach to what makes these women inspiring, examples of the newly fluid movement of adaptation—their relationships with spouses, children, and friends, their ever-evolving work, and their gender—Bateson shows us that life itself is a creative process. "A masterwork of rare breadth and particularity, encompassing all the rhythms of five lives and friendships, and interweaving their stories in ways that reveal grand social truths and peculiar personal graces."—The Boston Globe "Well-formulated and passionate... Offers nothing less than a radical rethinking of the concept of achievement."— San Francisco Chronicle "As stimulating as it is hopeful... shakes up well-meaning truisms... adds new dimensions to our views of the world."—Elizabeth Janeway, author of Man's World, Woman's Place "Bateson has an extremely interesting mind and the ability to express herself with extraordinary literary felicity... Too much truth steams behind the quiet elegance of these passages."— The New York Times Book Review

TEN
VICISSITUDES OF COMMITMENT

ANOTHER KIND OF DIVIDEDNESS haunts our efforts even more than multiple and conflicting commitments—the dividedness created by distrust or doubt. All too often, we find ourselves investing passion and belief in individuals and institutions that cannot be trusted but must instead be approached warily in the face of corruption or potential rejection. The women I have been working with are all idealistic in different ways, committed to abstractions like justice or intimacy and searching for the practical expression of these ideals, but perhaps this is because I came to this project deeply puzzled about the viability of such idealistic commitments in an imperfect world. It is hard enough to put together a graceful composition from diverse components, harder still when the components are shoddy and flawed. Some contradictions cannot be resolved.

I have been especially curious about the relationship between the idealism of dependency, an unquestioning belief in social myths, and idealism as a form of criticism, defining what ought to be even while knowing that it is often not so. It is especially important for women to avoid mistaking the fear of questioning the foundations of their security for commitment. Women have traditionally been vulnerable and have translated vulnerability into a simulacrum of trust. It is possible to be deeply committed to a marriage and still open-eyed, to hedge one’s bets against the reality that marriages do come to an end—and then proceed in the belief that careful commitment to a new marriage is still worthwhile. It is also possible to be deeply critical of a person or an institution and still to be committed to it. It may be worthwhile to invest time and resources passionately in support of a cause, but it is wiser to avoid burning bridges or putting on blinkers as the tokens of commitment. A degree of caution need not be equivalent to disloyalty; blindness is not a virtue. My mother once wrote a book about the American national character whose title was drawn from the proverb “Trust in God and keep your powder dry.” Women, especially, all too often test the Lord’s good will by leaving their gun-powder kegs out in the rain.

The capacity to combine commitment with skepticism is essential to democracy. Since her student days, Johnnetta has taken positions calling for radical change, criticizing what exists. When she became a part of what used to be called “the system,” she brought her skepticism with her, reshaped into a building tool. It is not easy to find the right balance between trust and skepticism, commitment and independence. Many people marry again after divorce, but if they have learned from experience the balance will be different.

One of the lines of disillusionment that most people follow is the discovery that parents are less than we as children believed, and this carries over to discoveries about all the structures of authority and institutions in which we work. Oddly enough, as we all know from adolescence, it is possible to question authority passionately, to argue that it is entirely wrongheaded, and still at some level to believe in continuing good will. The real loss is the awareness that good will is absent.

At one level, trust is the premise of a child, a necessity for survival in a position of dependency. Children need to believe in the good will of parents, even when they are neglected or beaten. Often they become convinced that they deserve their sufferings because it is easier to embrace a sense of diffuse guilt and unworthiness than to believe in the malevolence of all-powerful beings. Today, I am unwilling to work from a position of dependent trust, and I believe the capacity to be self-supporting is a precondition to genuine partnership and responsible participation. At the same time, adult trust is a necessity of human social life. When it is violated, it is not easy to build again.

My husband and I went to Iran in 1972 aware, inevitably, that the shah was widely regarded as a corrupt tyrant and that many people were longing for the overthrow of the monarchy. Still, it seemed to us possible to work for improvement within the existing structure, and both Barkev and I looked for openings for constructive change. The Iran Center for Management Studies, where Barkev worked, developed institutional styles for maneuvering within the larger framework. Which member of the royal family would, as a patron, respect the integrity of the institution? How much of a subsidy was it possible to take from the government without losing autonomy? How could one resist pressures to corrupt admissions or hiring without creating antagonism? I had reviewed the work of other social scientists who had characterized Iran as a society built on distrust, so my initial research questions were where to find the kernel of trust that must nevertheless exist for the society to function, and how individuals forged new trust with each other.

Both of us, like our Iranian friends, were ambivalent about the society as it was, even as it was changing in front of our eyes. Corruption was not new to Iran, but in those final years of the monarchy we could see an ancient balance of tolerable corruption becoming unstable. Change was so rapid that it compounded existing abuse, new forms encrusting the old, so that even the cynical were shocked. Gradually, we became aware of an underlying theme in Iranian culture that rejected the ancient arts of compromise and sought absolutes; this theme blossomed under Khomeini’s tutelage. In retrospect, however, Iran’s earlier patterns of ambiguity and negotiation seem healthier than the burst of blinkered and wasteful euphoria that accompanied the revolution. The Iranian revolution left me with the conviction that moral ambiguity can be a source of strength.

To do research in Iran, I felt it was essential to be a real participant, so I found a variety of jobs in education and educational planning. In 1973 and 1974, I was working in Tehran on the plan for a new university to be built in the city of Hamadan, on the ruins of ancient Ecbatana. Those I was working with were idealists who believed that it would be possible to construct an educational system that would not alienate people from their own culture and set them on the track toward emigration or migration to the capital. The plan, partly modeled after the American land-grant colleges, was to offer regional training in agriculture and education, facilitate the development of health-delivery systems, and help traditional crafts evolve into local industries.

One of the pleasures of my migratory life has been the diversity of institutional types I have worked in, including the University of Hamadan. I have taught in three countries, at large and small institutions, public and private, old and new. I have worked at huge Northeastern University in Boston’s center city, founded to train the children of immigrants in nursing and business and engineering; and at tiny Amherst College in a charming small town, offering an intimate version of the liberal arts to the children of privilege. Willy-nilly, many women experience such diversity as part of the discontinuity of their lives. Alice has worked at General Electric and Polaroid, with their totally different corporate cultures, as well as in academic research labs; Ellen has practiced the most privileged kind of individual therapy and has worked in huge state hospitals. Today, Johnnetta is president of Spelman College, which has only 1,600 students; she used to work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has an enrollment of 25,000. I make choices now out of the habit of enjoying diversity.

At the University of Hamadan, I had been hired to develop a core curriculum in the social sciences. I saw our task as changing the way students looked at familiar patterns and contexts so that they could be both analytical and respectful. They would have to become compassionate observers, pausing to enjoy the perception of patterns that might be enriched or modified, rather than rushing ahead to impose new ones. I was planning on using film and sending students out to do the kinds of fieldwork I have always assigned to my students—interviewing grandparents, learning to look with new eyes at the commonplace.

In Iran at that time, a new university was being established about every two years to absorb the ever increasing numbers of applicants convinced that education was the path to advancement or escape. Bright ideas for different kinds of institutions were batted around the ministries and the court and, like all development projects in Iran, were pulled between the shah’s preference for impressive modern developments, hi-tech capital-intensive industries and grandiose constructions, and the concerns of others about more gradual transitions and appropriate technologies.

On the Hamadan project, these two pulls were very obvious. The ministry had assigned the university a site on a hilltop separate from and above the city, perfect for gleaming new buildings insulated from the life of the city, but the architect wanted to build in an old caravanserai in the bazaar, where students would be in constant contact with traditional merchants and artisans. Most serious of all was the fact that the university was really a marriage of two projects developed separately: one was for a populist university, rooted in the traditional sectors; the other was for a Francophone university. At that time, Iran already had several English-language institutions and one emphasizing German, but there was no university based on close current collaboration with France—even though the entire Iranian educational system, with its emphasis on memorization, hierarchy, and competitive examination, with the University of Tehran at the center, had originally been modeled on the French system.

When I had taught earlier at the University of Tehran, I would bring first an American and then an Iranian mother-infant pair into the classroom for observation, to give students a heightened sense of how early and deeply children are shaped to different cultural patterns. As word spread around the campus of this strange event, I could see a succession of eyes pressed to the judas window in the doorway. One year, a member of the class sat ramrod straight and looked out the window for an hour and a half, unable to accept something so trivial as a ten-month-old infant as part of a university lecture. I knew quite clearly, then, the impediments to constructing an educational system on observation rather than authority. Given the historical role of French culture in Iran, collaboration with France was precisely the worse context for this effort. But still, we hoped something would get across.

We were caught in a contradiction, a milder version of the kind of contradiction my father and his colleagues in the study of schizophrenia called a double bind, the requirement that we be both French and not French. The essence of that double bind for me was that I was not supposed to exist. All the Iranians in the project had had a portion of their education in French institutions. Although they were convinced of the inappropriateness of the French model, they could pass as Francophiles. I learned to prefer having my ideas adopted to getting credit for them; I would write informal memoranda that would simply be absorbed into my colleagues’ reports for outside circulation. Only once was I publicly included in a gathering of the planning group. I sat demurely opposite Prime Minister Hoveyda at a formal luncheon, as invisible as that infant in the Tehran classroom until the very end, when large and expensive cigars were passed. He suddenly looked straight at me and said, in English, “Of course you won’t want one of those.”

In the seventies, an Iranian university was attempting to develop a working relationship with Harvard. That relationship was finally declined by Harvard’s president, who was quoted to me as saying, “I don’t want to lose my virginity on that one.” An interesting metaphor. At the simplest level, it was a statement that the collaboration was likely to lead to embarrassment and disillusionment, better to be avoided. At the next level, it could have been an acknowledgment that any such collaboration, like a marriage, would involve a necessary loss of innocence by both parties and the gradual construction of trust in a partner who is never all that one hoped or believed and yet who is someone worth caring about in ways that yesterday one was too simple to imagine. Any collaboration with the shah’s Iran was a mixed blessing, but responsible adult participation, like adult sexuality, requires an end to innocence, metaphorical or otherwise, and an acceptance of ambiguity.

There were achievements in those years that still make us feel that our efforts were worthwhile, and odds and ends of our work survive. Some students keep in touch, a few colleagues carry on with a changed sense of what is possible. A portion of our vision for Hamadan survives in the remodeled section of the bazaar, but now it is part of a more radical turning back toward the past. Barkev’s institution, the Iran Center for Management Studies, was taken over for the training of revolutionary mullahs. For months when it was being built, I argued for the inclusion of traditional-style toilets that allow religiously correct cleansing, and these have no doubt been constructed. Efforts to incorporate a respect for traditional ways in moving toward modernization were insufficient to overcome the bias of the larger system toward polarization.

The old regime was ridden with moral ambiguity. Today, Iran’s leaders seek ideological and religious consistency—and their own power—by looking backward. It is not possible to combine a realistic acceptance of the future with the expectation of consistency; change is inevitably uneven and full of surprises, carrying all the moral uncertainty these changes are likely to entail. The alternative to the fundamentalist call for total reconstruction that produced the present Iranian theocracy was the hope that it would be possible to build within ambiguity, a hope that made it possible for us to work—warily—within the system.

Vanni and I were together on the Caspian in 1978, as the Iranian revolution heated up, and it was easy to become frightened as friends urged us to keep off the streets and try to be invisible. A little girl and her baby brother were killed by a stray bullet as she stood holding him, hidden behind a gate in a nearby village, and I worried that a bereaved father might seek victims for his vengeance. I had Vanni sleeping in my bed and kept a small bag with shoes, passports, and traditional veils, a big one for me and an eight-year-old size for Vanni, beside the back window in case we had to leave in a hurry. But most of the Iranians we had direct contact with were protective. When I had the chance to walk through demonstrations in Tehran, where armored cars of soldiers rolled along the avenues firing tear-gas canisters up on the rooftops, strangers would draw me into sheltered doorways and would respond warmly when I spoke to them in Persian. Barkev and I lost a great deal in the Iranian revolution, years of work and cherished possessions, and had to start again like refugees. We were spared memories of personal hostility and betrayal, but it was the end of a chapter in our lives.

Johnnetta commented to me on her innocence when she went off to college, but black children learn early that the good guys don’t always win, and disenchantment had begun for her with the discovery of the bigotry waiting for black children beyond their front doors. After that, she went through a series of disillusionments that have ultimately been empowering and brought her to the point of being an effective critic and reformer, far more moderate and realistic than she once was. The discovery that the first man she loved was addicted to heroin was a disillusionment with a curious core of reassurance, the decency of her potential father-in-law, who refused to let her waste her life and vitality on the conviction that a good wife could be the young man’s salvation. Of all the women I worked with, Johnnetta has been the most ideologically committed. She had had to work toward an understanding of the flaws and blind spots in those with whom she shared passionate convictions in the civil-rights movement, in postrevolutionary Cuba, and at the University of Massachusetts. The fact that a cause is right is no guarantee of fairness and decency in the people that espouse it or benefit from it. The very people who are most committed to some significant frontier of social justice or compassion are likely to become locked in self-serving battles for dominance. The corruption of progressive hope in Maurice Bishop’s Grenada into dogmatism and internal conflict and the resultant takeover and assassination probably marked the end of Johnnetta’s early idealism. Anyone who has been involved in trying to support and encourage outsiders to move into full participation knows something about disillusionment. All too often, the noble disinherited and their advocates prove to be fractious and inept, or even vicious and corrupt.

Each of us has repeatedly had to salvage a capacity for commitment as we became aware of the flaws of institutions and indeed of the individuals who seemed to embody those commitments. Like all the other discontinuities we have faced, this implies possibility as well as loss, the need to construct a new mode of self-preservation, and, finally, commitment without dependency.

At Amherst, as in Iran, I worked for gradual change within a system that I knew was flawed, but I did not work warily enough. Ambiguity is perhaps easier to endure when you are a visitor, an outsider who has her own place to return to. One of the costs of living abroad, for me, was that I remained unduly hopeful about my own society, expecting to feel at home, but Amherst was still caught in the set of inherited attitudes that defined any woman as an outsider. My optimism, which survived the Iranian revolution, was shattered by my experiences there, but today I find myself believing once again that it is worthwhile to try to work gradually within an imperfect system, to look for ways in which values already embedded in it, however ambiguously, can find fuller expression.

I experienced Amherst at its worst, partly by accident and partly because the ordinary and partial decencies of the system failed to function for a woman. My initial honeymoon on that gracious campus had been followed by a dip and a reappraisal. I had overcome the initial obstacles and felt happy and confident, with a sufficient mix of criticism and hope. I had a wealth of growing friendships and a sense, after two and a half years with only minor crises, of broad faculty respect and support. Then in January 1983, I rolled my car on an icy road in New Hampshire. I was not significantly injured, but within the same twenty-four hours Julian Gibbs, the Amherst president, died suddenly, and my entire experience was turned around.

There were certain things that were crystal clear to me immediately—too clear, for one of the effects of shock is a certain spurious simplification. The immediate formal responsibility for the college in the president’s absence lies with the dean of the faculty; the college had, in fact, always tended to function more smoothly when he was away. I decided that I would not want to be a candidate for the Amherst presidency when a new search was mounted. I would conceal my accident and devote myself to ensuring calm and continuity, with the illusory clarity that comes from having laid self-interest aside. I ignored my bruises and the steady ache in my neck and worked around the clock, exactly as I would have concealed a headache if Vanni had come to me in some distress.

The chairman of the board arrived in a near panic and pressed me to agree to accept the acting presidency during the interim. Worried about precedents in which women are said to have declined responsibility, I reluctantly said that I would do it. Then in a flurry of conflicting advice, I gradually became intrigued by the possibility of doing well, on a temporary basis, the tasks I had seen done badly. Under the pressure of emergency arrangements, I didn’t really grieve for Julian until the college memorial service, but when the chaplain reached the phrase, “and light perpetual shine upon them,” I suddenly saw Julian’s face turned up to the sun, boyish and free as it must have been on his sailboat, away from the administrative tasks he hated, and started sobbing helplessly. The portrait that hangs now in Johnson Chapel, with the array of other men who have been presidents of Amherst, captures exactly that look and makes me want to weep for this sweet willful man who was such a poor president and was so easy to mother.

The six-person executive committee of the faculty normally meets with the president as chairperson and the dean as recording secretary. Because I felt that I had a conflict of interest, I suggested that the group meet without me, before meeting with the board. I was probablv more trusting than normal because I was grieving and in shock, a state in which one hopes for friendship and reaches out for shared values and commitments. Then too, if you work all day in your garden, you can forget that your neighbor may covet it as real estate. In the event, a majority of the Committee of Six advised the board of trustees against making me acting president. Several of their own number, they noted, would be “more reassuring” to the faculty in that role. It was only weeks later that I began, like a good detective, to ask, not cherchez la femme, but cui bono, who benefits?

In any long-term community, there is a certain check on the crudest forms of self-interest because the wise know that everyone benefits from continuity and cooperation. But there is always a tendency to grab when a chance comes along—perhaps as a result of an emergency—to divide up the pie. Some people rescue survivors after a natural disaster; others turn to looting.

In places like Amherst some grow to feel that the institution is their personal property, so they are more concerned with whether their writ runs than with outcomes. There was an odd mirroring between the distortions in my vision and those of a handful of senior men, equally caused by identification with the institution. I tended to identify my interests with those of the college; they identified the interests of the college with their own. The same kind of complementary distortion often happens in marriage. Women are taught to deny themselves for the sake of the marriage, men are taught that the marriage exists to support them.

It took several months for me to unravel the sequence of eve...