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DEEPECOL.OGY
This is a transcript of a public lecture that was made by
Fritjof Capra on Thursday, April 3, 1986, 7:30p.m. in Dale Hall, Room
200, 455 West Lindsey, The University of Oklahoma Norman Campus.
Theoretical physicist, writer, lecturer; founder and president of The
Elmwood Institute, a "think and do tank." Current research at
Lawrence Berkeley Lab, University of California, on bootstrap theory of
particles. Publications include:
The Tao of Physics Write to: Elmwood Institute
The Turning Point P.O. Box 5805
Green Politics Berkeley, CA 94705
The public lecture was sponsored by the Scholar-Leadership Enrichment
Program (SLEP) which holds statewide academic programs for Oklahoma
college and university students. SLEP Office: Monnet Hall, 630
Parrington Oval, Rm. 559, Norman, OK 73019, Phone (405)325-4309.
I have attempted to exactly reproduce this lecture from a recording.
All errors in this transcript from the original lecture are my own.
Whitney L. Boutin, Jr. SysOp: Constitutional Pathway Thirteen
P.O. Box 3186 300/1200/2400bps, 8 bit, no parity
Norman, OK 73070 (405)329-6464 FOG #13 -- RCP/M
Before beginning the transcription I want to leave you this
parting philosophical comment.
To know places limitations on realizations of truth.
No mind knows all. Is not respect all we seek?
Freedom springs giving another example to know.
Respect holds and/or breaks the limitations we hold dear.
As individuals, reciprocity is essential for growth.
DEEP ECOLOGY: THE NEW VISION OF REALITY
I am here to speak partly about science and partly about social
change, and I have worked on a combination of those two issues and
concerns for more than ten years now, and have dedicated a major part
of my work to these issues. I must say that I am motivated to do so
by two interests and concerns that are equally strong. On the one
hand, I am very concerned about our social and political situation
now, and I believe that it is very urgent that we do everything we
can to further social change. On the other hand, I realize that this
change is happening. It is happening theoretically in the sciences,
and it is happening in society at large. I am very excited by the
new ideas that are emerging, and so the excitment about new ideas and
the concern for change, as the desire to help the social change, are
equally strong. You will probably get an idea of both these
motivations from my lecture.
Now when you look at society and at our political situation then
you will see that it is becoming increasingly clear that the major
problems of our times are not isolated problems, but are part of one
and the same crisis. I am now talking about, to just list the three
maybe most important and urgent problems:
1. The threat of nuclear war.
2. The destruction of the natural environment.
3. The persistance of hunger and poverty around the world.
These three problems and many others are just different facets of one
and the same crisis, which I have come to believe is essentially a
crisis of perception, and this is my main thesis that the crisis of
today is a crisis of perception. It comes from the fact that our
social institutions, and we as individuals, try to solve our problems
by applying an out dated world view to this task. The out dated
world view is basically the world view of 17th century science and of
the 18th and 19th century mentality, and it is inadequate to solve
the problems in our globally connected, interdependent, and over
populated modern world. What we need then is a new world view. A
new vision of reality, or as it is often called today, a new
paradigm, and such a new paradigm, such a new vison of reality, is
indeed emerging. Researchers at the leading edge of science and
various fields, numerious social institutions and various informal
networks and groups are now promoting this new vision of reality that
will form the basis of our future technologies, economic system, and
social institutions. My theme then is the current fundamental change
of world view in science and society. A change of paradigms that
amounts to a profound cultural transformation.
The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our society and
culture for several hundred years. During that time it has shaped
our modern outlook on the world, and through the exportation of
western science and technology around the world it has significantly
influenced other parts of the world. The world view that I am
talking about consists of a number of ideas and values. Among them,
the idea of the physical universe as a mechanical system made of
isolated building blocks, isolated objects that in terms consist of
basic material building blocks, a mechanistic image of the world.
Correspondingly, the idea of the human body as a machine. The idea
of life in society and life in general as a competitive struggle for
existence. The belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved
through technological and economic growth. And last but not least,
the belief that a society in which the female is everywhere subsumed
under the male is one that follows some basic law of nature.
Well during recent decades all of these assumptions have been
found severly limited and in need of radical revision, and such a
revision is now indeed taking place. The new paradigm that is now
emerging can be described in various ways. It can be called a
wholistic world view emphasizing the whole more than the parts. It
may also be called an ecological world view, and thats the term that
I prefer, and I use the term ecological in a much broader and deeper
sense than commonly used. Ecological awareness in this deep sense
recognizes the fundamental interdependence and interconnectedness of
all phenomena, and it recognizes the fact that, as individuals and as
societies, we are all imbedded in the cyclical processes of nature.
This deep ecological awareness is now emerging in various areas in
our society both within and outside of science.
Ultimatly deep ecology is based on an awareness that is
spiritual or religious awareness. You see when you understand the
human spirit as the mode of consciousness in which we feel connected
with the cosmos as a whole in which we feel in communion with the
cosmos as a whole then it becomes apparent that ecological awareness
is spiritual awareness in its deepest essence, and it becomes then
not suprising that many of the concepts that emerge from modern
science and that give rise to this ecological vision are paralleled
by concepts in mystical tradditions, wheither we talk about Eastern
mystical tradditions or about Christian mystics or mystics in the
Judaic traddition or in Islam or about Native American cultures. Any
of these tradditional spiritual tradditions will show these
similarities to the new ecological paradigm. Now to discuss the some
aspects and consequences of the current shift of paradigms, I want to
first outline the old world view and its consequences, its influence
on science and society, and then go on to discuss the newly emerging
vision of reality and its implications.
The mechanistic world view was developed in the 17th century in
the time that is often called scientific revolution at the end of the
middle ages or the age of reason. The key figures were Copernicus,
Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, and there were several others.
Descartes is a very central figure in this development. Descartes
based his view of nature on the fundamental seperation between two
independent realms that of mind and that of matter. The material
world for Descartes was a machine, and it could be explained in
principle by taking everything into peices and understanding the
whole from its parts. Descartes extended the mechanistic conception
not just to the material world but also to the living world. Animals
and plants were for him just machines. Humans were inhabited by a
rational soul, but the human body for Descartes is a machine just as
an animal or a plant, more complex, but still a machine.
Now the central metaphor that Descartes used for his description
of living organisms and reality in general was the Clock Work, and
you have to remember that clocks had reached a high degree of
perfection in the 17th century. At the time of Descartes people
delighted in artificial automatic singing birds and other animals,
automatic ballerinas and so on. These were constructed with great
skill, and delighted people throughout Europe, and so Descartes
naturally took this metaphor, and compared the human body to a Clock
Work, and he wrote, "I consider the human body as a machine. My
thought compares a sick man and an ill made clock with my idea of a
healthy man and a well made clock." Now if you think of that then you
will realize that this image of the human body as Clock Work still
dominates modern medical science and medical practice.
The human organism is seperated from its environment both from
its natural environment and its emotional and social environment in
our medical practice, and it's treated like a machine that can be
analysed in terms of its parts. Disease is seen as an outside entity
that invades the body, and attacks a particular part, and then the
role of the doctor is to intervein and correct the malfunctioning of
the specific mechanism, the biological mechanism. This is done
either through physical intervention in surgery, with radiation, or
through chemical intervention in drugs, chemotheropy, and by
concentrating on small parts and forgetting the whole over the parts
physicans often have lost the ability to see illness as the
disturbance of the whole organism, and have lost in fact the whole
human being out of sight, and also have lost the ability to
understand the entire phenomenan of healing by just concentrating on
the little small mechanisms.
Now recently I have discovered a very interesting parallel
between the enthusiasm of Descartes and his contemporaries for clocks
and the enthusiasm that we have today for computers, and the use of
the metaphor of the computer to discribe human brain and also the
mind. Now you see at the time of Descartes the clock was a unique
machine. All other kinds of machines you had to work. They were
extention of muscle power, extention of the senses, and you had to
run them or work them in some way. A clock you just wind up, and
then you put it there, and then it runs by itself. It is autonomous.
It functions autonomously according to some kind of model of reality.
A part of reality that it incorporates in this case a model of the
planetary system and our measurement of time.
The clocks of the 17th century were the first autonomous
machines, and until the invention of the computer they were the only
machines of that kind. Well the computer is again a machine of a
very new kind. It is again autonomous, but not only that it does
somthing new. It processes information, and once it is programmed
and turned on then it will do this autonomously. Now since the human
brain also processes information it was natural to use the computer
as a metaphor for the brain and even for the mind just as Descartes
had used the clock as a metaphor for the human body, and like the
Cartesian metaphor for the body as Clock Work the metaphor for the
brain as computer is quite useful at times, but we always have to
remember that this is a metaphor. It is a rough model.
Our body often carries out machine like functions, but it is not
a machine. It is a living organism, and our brain processes
information, but it is not a computer. It is not a machine. It is
also a living organism, and this difference is crucial, but is often
forgotten today by computer scientists and even more by the lay
public, and since computer scientists use these expressions like
intelligence, memory, or language we tend to believe that these are
the well known human experiences, but they are not. They are
somthing very different, and this great misunderstanding is the main
reason why computer technology, out modern computer science, is
perpetuating the mechanistic image of the human organism as a
machine.
As humans we face problems that even the most sophisticated
machines will never be able to handle. Although we certainly process
information we do this in a way that is very different from a
computer, and therefore we have to draw a clear distinction between
human intelligence and artifical intelligence as it's called. Human
intelligence, human judgement, human memory, human decisions are
never completely rational, but are always colored by emotions even
though we tend to suppress this often, and we tend to want to make a
completely rational decision we're not able to because our mind is
embedded in our whole organism, and the whole organism influences the
decision. So our thinking is always accompanyed by emotions and by
bodily funcitions by sensations and bodily processes, and the
computer of course dosn't have a body. It has a machine body, but it
dosn't have a human body, and therefore a computer decision is
somthing totally different. Therefore truly human problems will
always be foreign to the intelligence of computers.
Now before the development of artificial intelligence it was
never possible for humans to make completely rational decisions.
Today it possible by just leaving the decisions to computers, and as
you know this is indeed done. To take just the most extreme example,
the Generals in the Pentagon and in the Kremlen and in the various
defense departments around the world don't make human decisions they
compute, and the consequences are all too well known. Now these
considerations imply in my view that certain tasks should never be
left to computers. Namely, all those tasks that require genuine
human qualities. Qualities like wisdom, compassion, respect, love,
understanding all these have to be left to decisions that require
those qualities have to be made by humans and not by machines,
otherwise, we will dehumanize our lives, and these are for example
decisions of a Judge or of a Psychotherapist or of a General. These
are essentially human decisions. In particular the use of computers
in military technology should not be increased, but has to be
radically reduced. It is tragic that our government and the business
community has removed themselves very far from such considerations.
Now let me pass on now from computer science and technology to move
on as another example of old and new paradigm thinking to social
sciences and in particular economics.
As physicians tend to separate the human organism from its
natural environment when they study it and treat it so economists
tend to separate the economy from the web of ecological and social
relations in which it is embedded, and they describe economic
phenomena then in terms of highly unrealistic models; unrealistic
because the basic concepts have been narrowly defined. Concepts like
efficency, productivity, gross natural product, and so on are defined
generally without taking into account environmental and social costs
that are connected with all economic activity, and consequently most
of the current economic concepts models are inadequate to map
economic phenomena in a fundamentally interdependent world, and hence
economists generally have been unable to understand the major
economic problems of our time.
Now this situation is further aggrivated by the fact that most
economists in the classical ideal of a rigorous objective science
pretend that their science is value free, and avoid acknowledging the
value system on which it is in reality based. Since economics deals
with the buying and selling of goods and the production of goods and
services and distribution of them it deals very much with values.
What I buy depends on what I like and what I don't don't like and so
on. So values are very intrensic and very basic too in economics,
and when we look at our society then we see that what economists
tacitly accept is a very highly imbalanced set of values. These
values have lead to an over emphasis of hard technology, on wasteful
consumption, on rapid exploytation of natural resources all motivated
by a persistant obsession with growth.
Undifferentiated and unqualified economic and technological
growth is still regarded by most economists as a sign of a healthy
economy, but it has now brought us ecological disaster, social
disintegration, and all kinds of very drasitic and harmful
consequences. The threat of nuclear war is certainly the most severe
consequence of our imbalanced value system. It is brought about by
an over emphasis on self assurtion, control, power, by excessive
competition, and by an obsession with the whole concept of winning
which is also one of these concepts that has become outdated because
nobody wins in a nuclear exchange.
Now you have to imagine for a moment being one of those generals
in the Pentagon, Chief of Staff, Five Star General, sixty or sixty
five years old somthing like that, and you have worked your whole
professional life to win a war. You've done it in real wars, and you
have done it theorieticly. Most recently in computer modeling games
and so on. The whole emphasis is how would I win a war how can I win
a war, and now you realize or sombody tells you, "Look this whole
concept of winning is outdated.". Now that's not an easy shift to
make, and yet it is a very necessary shift because it is outdated in
the nuclear age. Nobody wins, and holding on to this concept and
therefore holding on to the arms race and building up of more and
more weapons in a process that nobody can win is perhaps the most
tragic case of people holding on to an old paradigm that has lost its
usefulness.
Connected with this is the fragmented world view that we have
and which leads us to seek security in isolation rather than seeking
security in communication, in cooperation, and so on. We tend to
isolate ourselves, and the last and most extreme expression of this
erronious and unwise stratagy is the SDI or Star Wars project. To
build a shield around the United States that would isolate it
completely from any aggressor. Now I'm not going to talk about the
technological folly of this concept. There is not a single scientist
who has stated that he or she believes that it would work. It's
absolutly clear that it's not realistic, but I just want to point out
here the philosophical background of it; that it is an extreme case
of seeking security in isolation rather than seeking security in
communication, in relationship, in cooperation.
So we now need to change this situation. It is absolutly vital
for our well being and survival to change it, and change will be
possible only if we are able as a society to shift to a new and very
different vision of reality, and indeed such a shift is now
occurring. Being a scientist I have been especially interested in
the scientific formulations of the new paradigm, and I have come to
the conclusion that a theoritical framwork known as Systems Theory
and in paraticular a recently developed theory called Living Systems
is the most appropriate scientific formulation of this ecological
world view, and I would just like to give you a brief overview of
what the formulation is.
The systems view looks at the world in terms of relationships
and integration. Systems are integrated wholes whose properties
cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. Instead of
concentrating on basic building blocks the systems approach
concentrates on basic principles of organization. Now examples of
living systems abound in nature. Every organism is a living system.
Every cell, every single small bacterium, every plant, every animal,
and also parts of organisms are living systems. The heart, the
liver, the brain, and mussle tissue always are living systems, and
living systems are not limited to individual organisms and their
parts. There are also social systems for example a family, or a
community, and then there are ecosystems in which individual
organisms and inanimant matter are woven together in a network of
interactions. So you see the systems approach is very powerful
because it can be applied to a very wide range of phenomena through
the study of individual organisms, social system, and ecosystems and
how all these interact.
The study of integrated wholes all have properties and
structures all have properties that arise from the interdependence of
their parts, and by disecting a whole into isolated elements you
would destroy these properties. Either physically doing it,
actually, and cut somthing up physically or even conceptually to
understand it. Although we can discern individual parts in any
system the nature of the whole is always different from the mear sum
of its parts. Another important characteristic of these living
systems is the intrensic dynamic nature of living systems. All
processes are seen as primary and all structure is seen as a
manifestation of underlying processes. So there is a shift in
thinking from the part to the whole and from structure to process.
An important aspect of living systems is their tendency to form
systems within systems like in the human body we have a nervous
system or a digestive system, and these consist of individual organs,
the organs of tissues, and the tissues of cells, and at each level we
talk about living systems that interact with all the other levels.
Now we can go a little further and ask what is the organization
that is characteristic of the living system. What are the patterns
of organization characteristic of life, and you find suprisingly,
that has been worked out over the last 15 years or so, that there is
a single dynamic principle that can be used to describe the
characteristic of living systems, and that principle is called Self
Organization. Living systems are self organizing systems which means
that their structure and their pattern of organization is determined
by the system itself not by the environment. It's not imposed on the
system by the environment, but it is determined by the system itself.
In otherwords there is a certian autonomy of the living system vis-a-
vis its environment.
Now we have to be careful not to confuse autonomy with
isolation. Living organisms are not isolated. They interact with
the environment all the time, and we all know that we need to breath
and to eat and drink in order to stay alive. We need to take in
energy and matter and food, and all living organisms have that very
essential requirement. Then there is this whole process of
matabolism that is characteristic of life. So living organisms or
living systems are not isolated, but they are autonomous. There
interaction with the environment does not determine their
functioning. It will influence their functioning, but it does not
determine it. They determine it themselves.
Now over the past two decades a theory of self organizing
systems which is a new systems theory of life has been worked out in
considerable detail, and one of the very exciting aspects which I
just want to mention without going into further details is that this
theory includes a radically new conception of mind where mind is not
seen as a thing but as an activity, and in particular it's seen as
the organizing activity of these living systems. The process of
self organization. So you have a structure, and you have an
activity, and if you take say the brain as a living system the
neurophysiology of the brain would be the structure and the activity
that is involved in maintaining that structure and maintaining the
functions that it has is a mental activity. So mind is not a thing,
but we talk about mental activity or mental process, and the
relationship between mind and brain is the same as the relationship
between process and structure. That to me is a very new step which
allows us for the first time to go beyond this Cartesian division
between mind and matter or mind and body.
Well the systems view of life is appropriate not only for
biology and psychology but also for social sciences and in particular
is also appropriate for economics and in fact is very useful there to
give economist the urgently needed ecological perspectives. We can
learn alot from studing natural ecosystems, and I want to just give
you one example from what we can learn. When we study ecosystems or
any other living systems we observe that all the interactions and all
the pathways of energy and matter that travel in these systems occurr
in cycles. There are no straight lines. Everything goes in curves
and cycles and more complicated pathways. It's a highly nonlinear
system, and the recognition of this nonlinearity to me is the very
essence of ecological wisdom, ecological awareness, and I'll give you
two rules that you can derive immediately from the recognition that
everything in nature moves in cycles.
One rule is when you do somthing that is good the more of the
same will not necessarily better because when things move in cycles
we may just shoot straight out in a line and miss the curve so to
speak. You have to adapt your activity to these natural cycles in
other words there is an optimal size for everything. The question is
not to maximumize things but to optimize things, and the question of
scale becomes very important. There is an optimal size for every
organization, for every company, for every university, for every
city, and so on, and just by growing more and more and more you will
necessarily be destructive to the system as a whole. Of course
growth is a very important aspect of life, but growth has to be
qualified. It's good for some things or for some living systems, for
some people. It's not good for others. I have a two and a half
month old baby at home, and she grows alot, and I'm going to be away
a week now, and I'm sure when I come home she will have changed alot.
She will have grown alot, and that's very good and very healthy and
very wonderful to observe, but if I grew alot it would be a disaster.
So growth is relative and has to be qualified. Not all things can
grow all of the time, and this is what, for example, our economists
have not yet learned and our politicians have not yet learned. They
continue to tell us about economic growth and technological growth
without qualifying it.
The second rule that follows from this nonlinear way of cyclical
transportation. The more a society and its economy are based on
continual recycling of its substances the more it will be in harmony
with nature, and the more stable it will be. When you observe a
natural system like a forest for instance then you will observe that
the same molecules, the very same molecules of earth, water, air, and
so on are being recycled, and have been recycled not only for
hundreds of years or for thousands of years or for millions but for
billions of years. Life has existed on this earth for about maybe
four billion years, and the very same molecules have been recycled
and reused over and over again. So there is tremendous wisdom in
this recycling that nature shows us, and a stable society is one, and
a wise society will be one that copies that wisdom, and tradditional
societies have done that. Recently I have traveled to India, it's a
few years ago now, and I went to some villages in south India, and I
noticed there dosn't seem to be any garbage collection, and there are
no trash cans or anything like that simply because there is no trash.
Everything is recycled. The materials they use are organic, and they
throw away alot of things, but the things are organic so they
disintegrate. For instance they take clay from the rice fields, and
they make pots, and when they don't use the pots and the pots get too
old they just throw them out. They throw them to the earth where
they disintegrate and recycle into the earth, and the same way they
use wood and fiber and various other materials for their tools and
instruments, and there is just no trash, no garbgage. The garbgage
is fed to the animals as we use to do on our farms. So it's
continual recycling, and there is great ecological wisdom in that.
Now another observation is that a living system will be healthy
when it is in a state of balance that manifests flexability so that
it can adapt to new situations. The more flexable a system is the
healther it will be, and this can be more even a wide variety of
flexability. Physical flexability in terms of resources, flexability
of ideas, social flexability, technological flexability, and so on.
Small scale units will be more flexable than large centralized
societies and enterprises.
Now the restoration of balance and flexability in our economies
and technologies and social institutions will be possible only if it
goes hand in hand with a profound change in values. Contrary to
conventional beliefs value systems are not peripheral to science and
technology, but are their very basis and driving force, and therefore
the shift of world views of paradigms that I'm talking about will
have to also include a shift of values. From excessive competition,
dominance, and control to cooperation and to more social justice,
from expansion to conservation, from material aquisition to inner
growth, and those of us who have begun to make this shift have
recognized that it is not at all a restriction, but on the contrary
is liberating and enriching to make this shift.
Now these new values together with new attitudes and new
lifestiles are now being promoted by a large number of social
movements. We have the peace movement. We have the feminest
movement. We have an ecology movement. We have the wholistic health
movement. We have various ethnic liberation movements. Numerious
citizens movements and initiatives. We have spiritual movements.
There is a whole range of movements that have emerged over the last
20 years or so. During the 60's and 70's those movements operated
rather separately, and didn't quite recognize how their purposes
interrelate, but over the last maybe 5 or 6 years they have come to
realize that they address to just different facits of the same new
vision of reality, and they have indeed begun to emerge and to
coalesce, and I believe that this process of coalescence will
continue as we go through the 1980's, and will give rise to a
powerful force of social transformation. I've called this newly
emerging social force the Rising Culture. Borrowing this image from
Arnold Toynbee's description of patterns of rise and fall in cultural
transformations and cultural development.
Toynbee, a cultural historian, has described in great detail how
a culture rises slowly and then reaches a culmination and then
declines and disintegrates, and while it goes down and disintegrates
a new rising culture is emerging. When you compare his description
in its details to the situation we experience today you can see quite
clearly that there is a declining culture, and there is a rising
culture. The declining culture is broadly what we call the
Establishment. Of course it dosn't look like it's declining because
it has all the power, but if you take a static view a sort of
snapshot then you see it's on its way out, but it is going down and
in fact it recognizes that it is going down. It recognizes that
things are not working quite the way they use to, and so what the
establishment culture does is instead of changing its views and
values and attitudes it goes even further back to the old values that
don't work and becomes more ridged and therefore declines even more,
and it is bound to decline unless it changes, and the rising culture
is bound to rise and eventually take the leading role.
Now I don't want to give the impression that there are two
camps, and there are us over here. Who are the good guys, and we are
the rising culture, and them over there. They are the bad guys, and
they are going down. It's a process that takes place in each
individual. We all are part of the old world view and part of the
new world view at the same time. Its a change and a struggle that
takes place in each of us, and the realization that evolutionary
changes of this nature are somthing much larger than day to day
events and short term political activities provides in my view our
greatest hope for the future.
Thank you.
y
events and short term political activities provides in my view our
greatest hope for the future.