279
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_30
Chapter 30
Ecological Double-Binds
30.1 Survival Against Our Best Interests
In the tradition of our late colleague Gregory Bateson, whose work on schizophrenia in the 1950s first elicited the phrase “double-bind,”
1
(a time-sensitive, highpressure, lose–lose paradigm), French philosopher René Girard described “a
contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory
imperatives.”
2
If the imperative is to survive, an underpinning of every caveat
implicit in the annals promulgated by Darwin and his peers (and continued famously
in the debates between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould), then clearly there
are flaws in the biological and fossil records. Records are dead records. Living testaments make for a very different set of schematics and scientific questions.
We can’t ask questions of the dead, although we count on our own living instincts
and observations as meaningful surrogates. But every comparison between present
and past, life and death, fails, in the end, because consciousness, however selffulfilling, is incapable of filling that gap. No theory—whether some version of
Aristotelian or Newtonian kinematics, punctuated equilibrium, gradualism, or any
of a dozen other keynotes in the analysis of eco-dynamics, from the position of driving forces toward complexity, orthogenesis (directed evolution), to neutral, molecular hypotheses, or postmodern prokaryotic synthesis—can account for the
double-binds of being human (Fig. 30.1).
Lewis Carroll’s character of the Gnat in Through the Looking-Glass, and What
Alice Found There described a certain “Bread-and-butter-fly” whose fragile morphology relies on a food-source, “Weak tea with cream in it,” which was not easily
had, and, moreover, when it was obtainable tended to melt the fly’s wings. In either
1 See Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, “Toward a theory of schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 251–264.
2 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by
Y. Freccero, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1965, pp. 156–157.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_30
Chapter 30
Ecological Double-Binds
30.1 Survival Against Our Best Interests
In the tradition of our late colleague Gregory Bateson, whose work on schizophrenia in the 1950s first elicited the phrase “double-bind,”
1
(a time-sensitive, highpressure, lose–lose paradigm), French philosopher René Girard described “a
contradictory double imperative, or rather a whole network of contradictory
imperatives.”
2
If the imperative is to survive, an underpinning of every caveat
implicit in the annals promulgated by Darwin and his peers (and continued famously
in the debates between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould), then clearly there
are flaws in the biological and fossil records. Records are dead records. Living testaments make for a very different set of schematics and scientific questions.
We can’t ask questions of the dead, although we count on our own living instincts
and observations as meaningful surrogates. But every comparison between present
and past, life and death, fails, in the end, because consciousness, however selffulfilling, is incapable of filling that gap. No theory—whether some version of
Aristotelian or Newtonian kinematics, punctuated equilibrium, gradualism, or any
of a dozen other keynotes in the analysis of eco-dynamics, from the position of driving forces toward complexity, orthogenesis (directed evolution), to neutral, molecular hypotheses, or postmodern prokaryotic synthesis—can account for the
double-binds of being human (Fig. 30.1).
Lewis Carroll’s character of the Gnat in Through the Looking-Glass, and What
Alice Found There described a certain “Bread-and-butter-fly” whose fragile morphology relies on a food-source, “Weak tea with cream in it,” which was not easily
had, and, moreover, when it was obtainable tended to melt the fly’s wings. In either
1 See Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, “Toward a theory of schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 251–264.
2 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by
Y. Freccero, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1965, pp. 156–157.