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.