Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Bateson takes the grandest possible riddle - the Sphinx as shorthand for the question of what humans are and what life is - and yanks it out of mythology into systems discipline. The bite is in “first-class importance”: he is not offering a philosophical parlor game, he is warning that a civilization’s operating assumptions become its infrastructure. Get the riddle wrong and you don’t just misunderstand reality; you build institutions, economies, and technologies that reliably misfire.

The sentence is built like a feedback loop. Our “answer” shapes “how we conduct our civilisation,” which must then stay “in step” with “the actual workings of living systems.” That repeated phrase is doing quiet rhetorical work: it frames ethics, politics, and epistemology as coordination problems. “In step” implies rhythm, timing, reciprocity - a dance with constraints - not domination. Civilization, in this view, is either coupled to ecology or it trips over its own abstractions.

The subtext is a critique of reductionism and the industrial habit of treating life as a pile of parts: forests as “timber,” minds as “brains,” relationships as “data.” Bateson’s broader project (cybernetics, anthropology, ecology, the “ecology of mind”) insisted that what matters in living systems is pattern: interdependence, context, circular causality. That’s why the line lands now: it reads like an early diagnosis of climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, and brittle technocratic governance. He’s arguing that survival is not about stronger answers, but about answers that behave like the world they claim to describe.