Bateson's Work And Life: Servant And Master

Work and Life: Servant and Master

Waiting for a friend on the Upper East Side on an unusually fair day, an endearing sight caught my eye. Two adults were carrying a baby in a stroller up the steps of the Met. Besides the parents, there were other adults in the group accompanying the infant like bodyguards to a celebrity. I marveled at this entourage of relative giants huddled around this tiny being, servants lifting the sedan of a little emperor off to view the fruits of his court painters. Without his parents’ care, this frail and helpless creature would essentially perish as fast as he would fall if they suddenly decided to drop his stroller, yet he also had so much power over their lives—power derived not from coercion or election but

She calls our attention to an Arabic ode that describes a mother distracted during love-making by her baby’s crying: “When he cried from behind her, she turned away to him with a half, and under me half of her was not turned” (119). This mother symbolizes women everywhere who simultaneously endeavor to please their lovers and themselves while still serving as care-givers to their children. In modern days, this would characterize only one side of what she would have to do, for she would have to spread herself amongst her husband, her family, and her professional career. I believe Bateson’s “multiple lives” are really multiple servitudes. The woman in the poem must care for the baby not because he commands her but because she is tied by the bond of maternal love. As a lover, she is directly and even physically responsible for pleasing her partner—as well as herself, but whereas sex or dinner dates occur in limited time periods, she is indentured to being a mother at all times of the day, seven days a week. And if that were not enough, the modern woman must work at a career where there are certain needs for her and expectations of her, fulfilling duties at work as well as at home. Bateson writes that despite the division and challenge that comes with working with a family, this sort of strife is a source of admiration and “fascination” for her (129). She rejects reducing multiple service

In being a servant of parents, friends, professors, grades, my own ideals and dreams, I have more than simply enriched my life as Bateson would say; I have more than arrived at being my whole self by being a societal participant as Tillich would insist, and my services go beyond serving my future happiness with past experiences as Aciman would advise. There is a truer and more powerful drive than enrichment, sense of self, or happiness that propels service to many. It is the force of necessity—sometimes called love, sometimes instinct, or morality. Whatever it is termed, this is what keeps parents at home with their children while their office phone rings, and it is what keeps children listening to their parents while their peers and hormones give a different opinion. I must keep on excelling in college, caring about others, improving myself, constantly obtaining, abstaining, sacrificing, cherishing—not because I have committed mutiny against the individualistic forces that drive the American psyche (in fact, acquiescing to only one cultural ideal be it however egotistical is an act of servitude in itself), but because I have to figure out who I am. It is beautifully ironic that by way of these services to multiple masters, I can still serve myself and be happy with my life. Indeed, this idea of servitude is hardly a