Learning Is Key to Bridging the Intergenerational Gap: An Interview with Mary Catherine Bateson

from Leverage Points Issue 64

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Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer and cultural anthropologist who is currently focused on finding effective patterns of communication between the generations during this time of rapid social change. She has written and coauthored numerous articles and nine books, including Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery, Composing a Life, and With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.

We are thrilled that Mary Catherine will be sharing her research and work in a keynote presentation at the 2005 Pegasus Conference (learn more). In the following interview with Leverage Points editor Kali Saposnick, Mary Catherine discusses the promise of new thinking and new kinds of activism that can come out of intergenerational dialogue.

Leverage Points: How is your work on effective communication across the generational gap connected to the idea of "embracing interdependence"?

Mary Catherine Bateson: The relationship between generations is a relationship of interdependence. Children depend on their parents and other caring adults, and parents, as they age, depend on the love and support of their children, while seniors in general depend on those still in the workforce. We know the interdependence is there but we have not yet learned to use it fruitfully. What I tend to emphasize is a more essential part of that interdependence—that learning moves in two directions: children learn from their parents, and parents learn from their children, and we can act on that learning.

Recognizing this interdependent relationship is particularly critical in a society where there is rapid change and adults have to continue to learn throughout the life cycle. As you get older, you learn from people who are younger than you. For example, if you want to learn about online computer gaming, you probably want to ask a 13-year-old. But it isn't just that. Adults today learn ethical ideas from children. They may have grown up with some kind of bigotry, sexism, or prejudice against minority groups. Often it is children who ask their parents not to make jokes at the expense of these groups. Even more conspicuously, over the last 20 years, children have been learning about the environment at school and talking to their parents about it.

The point is that we tend to think about learning as being passed down lineally from parent to child, or teacher to student, or elder to apprentice. But because of the rate of change in our society, unless the pattern is recursive and adults are learning from children, they're falling behind, becoming obsolete in their knowledge.

LP: Your most recent book, Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery, emphasizes the importance of being open to learning as a key trait in navigating today's rapidly changing world. Why is this characteristic so important?

MCB: There are various pieces to this question. Are there people who are unwilling to learn? Yes, there are. Some say, "I'm an adult, I graduated from college, I know the answers, so listen to me. I know better than you because I'm older." There are the Archie Bunkers of this world who say, "My mind is made up, don't trouble me with facts." There are a lot of people who are not willing to consider the experiences and opinions of others or to adjust to changing circumstances. They think they don't need to learn because, by definition, as adults, they know what they need to know.

Sometimes I ask an audience, How many of you think you will be wise when you're old? Most people raise their hands. Some seem to think wisdom automatically comes with age. At one time it probably did, because things weren't changing very rapidly. But in a society that's moving as quickly as ours is, you have to be learning constantly and adjusting to change. So if somebody digs in and says "I'm not going to learn anything new after the age of 40," you don't really want to be taking their advice when they're 70.

Younger people still have something to learn from older people too. Within the corporate world, for example, there are plenty of savvy young technical people who don't feel they have anything to learn from older people in the company, but these seniors are the ones who preserve the corporate memory, who know the traditions and play a very important role. Knowledge can get lost. And knowledge from different contexts can combine in exciting ways.

LP: How did you come to recognize the value of learning?

MCB: My parents were anthropologists, and I'm an anthropologist also. I grew up with the instruction to be observant and learn from the people around me who might have different backgrounds and think differently.

Anthropologists tend to look at human communities holistically. When they talk about the culture of a particular community, they're talking about a learned way of being and thinking that has developed over many generations. You can't be an anthropologist without thinking about the relationship between generations or about what it is that people learn as part of growing up in a particular society.

Having said that, I've been particularly interested in how people deal with change in their societies. For a long time, I've been looking at the way women have adapted to changes in their roles over the last 50 years. Today women have to think out who they're going to be because most of us can't be like our mothers—our mothers grew up in a different world. You're on stage without a script in a society that's changing rapidly. Men are also dealing with the same kinds of challenges. This raises questions such as How do you learn fast? How do you adapt? How do you improvise? Whom do you learn from?

LP: What are the characteristics of a person who can adapt and change rapidly?

MCB: There are some prerequisites for adapting and changing. One is curiosity. If you have no curiosity, you're not going to be able to adapt. Another is tolerance for ambiguity. How do you cope when something you were taught in your childhood doesn't seem to be true anymore? Do you become rigid and angry? Or can you handle that change?

It isn't that you have to accept every change you see going on around you. I'm not into body piercing, for instance, except that I do have my ears pierced. But neither am I going to be outraged or disgusted by this current phenomenon. I'm going to be curious and try to understand it.

So it's not about adopting every change that comes along. It's about being open to change and willing to try to make sense of it. We're going to live long lives. The world is going to be changing around us rapidly. We're going to be meeting people from every corner of the earth. To do that, you do have to be willing to learn.

LP: You have written about how demographic changes are affecting decision-making on issues critical to all of our futures. Which demographic changes do you think we should pay particular attention to? How have you been engaging older people and others in caring about what's going to happen to our planet?

MCB: We tend to make short-term decisions in our culture, which is ironic since we're going to live longer. We seem to live longer and think shorter. Demographically, we now live 20 years longer on the average than we did at the end of World War II. A steadily rising percentage of the population is over 60. People who retire at 65 may live another 30 years, many of those years in energetic good health. This means there is an unprecedented group of healthy older people, and we need to empower them so they feel they can continue to contribute to society.

A group of women, all of us over 60, started a group called "Granny Voters" in the context of the last presidential election (http://www.grannyvoter.org/). We were concerned that political candidates increasingly try to please voters by addressing their short-term interests. In particular, politicians assume that senior citizens are only interested in "senior" issues such as benefits and entitlements, but in fact older people, who turn out to vote at very high rates, are thinking about what the world will be like for future generations. Even social security is a long term issue-senior voters want their grandchildren to have the same security they have had.

Starting next year, I'm hoping to take Granny Voters to a new stage, where people are having conversations to figure out where they stand on long-term policies. One interesting thing we discovered is that, while Granny Voters started out as a group of women, we found that grandfathers are a little more focused on their grandchildren's future than grandmothers are. So whatever we do next, it won't be just for grandmothers; it will be for grandfathers too.

LP: Is there anything else that you'd like the readers to know about you and your work?

MCB: What I would like to emphasize is that if we can develop new kinds of dialogic processes across the generational line, it's going to be extraordinarily productive and lead to new ideas and new understandings. A lot of conversations just aren't happening at the moment that could. Today we can hope for the same kind of intellectual cross fertilization that has happened in the past at the meeting points of cultures.