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Instructions: Read and consider all the ten questions. Choose one of these to be the subject of a considerable essay (10 pages or more).
Attempt one question in each of the other three sections, treating this question more briefly (5 pages or less).
Section A
Discuss the implications for Man’s relation to the rest of the natural world of one of the following documents:
l. The story of Creation; Genesis, Chapter I
2. The Book of Job. (Consider especially the beginning and the end and Chapters 38 and 39 .) Was Job’s suffering the inevitable result of his being too pious, too “straight” in a world which ecologically includes both “good” and “evil”?
3. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. (What are the ecological and ethical implications of the premise that God made both the Tiger and the Lamb?)
Section B
Discuss one of the following:
4. The concept of flexibility and/or acclimation in an eco-system.
5. Should custom be made explicit and enforceable by Law? (See my paper on “Somatic Change.”)
6. The analogies and differences between crime, deviance, and sickness, (Laing, The Politics of Experience; Samuel Butler, Erewhon).
Section C
7. Is war ecologically necessary? Is peace (without threat of war) possible? What problems would the transition to such a state of peace propose? (See Report from Iron Mountain.)
Section D
Try to organize the questions which a wise government should ask before permitting one of the following:
8. The distribution of a new invention.
9. lntroducing a new organism into an existing eco-system; or exterminating an existing organism.
10. Making a new law.
Source: Examination, Living systems, Box 80, Gregory Bateson Papers, UCSC Special Collections and Archives.
I wish to thank Phillip Guddemi for his generous assistance in helping to connect this exam to a course Bateson ran at the College of Survival, University of Hawaii.
The Living systems course was one of the subjects taught at the Survival Plus program(1970) at the University of Hawaii. The Survival Plus program explored how the human race can survive under conditions which might make survival worthwhile. The program allowed undergrad students to organise the whole of their undergrad training around a main crisis and interpret the concept of “environment” more broadly than in common usage. The course promoted both knowledgeability and involvement. The course outline consisted of three types of thematic courses (ex: human alienation, pollution and depletion, war and peace, urban decay), contextual subjects (ex:history, religion), and tool subjects(ex: fundamentals in public policy, planning). “SUR 135 Living Systems” was part of tool subjects. According to the course introduction “SUR 135 Living Systems” focused on pattern and process in biological systems and introduced cybernetics and systems theory as ways of rethinking traditional approaches to the subject.
The College of Survival, July 31 1971, Box 8, Folder 322, Gregory Bateson Papers, UCSC Special Collections and Archives.
I am thankful to the Bateson Ideas Group for granting the permission to reproduce these questions in this online format.
Dulmini Perera, February 2025.