Life on earth
John Stewart Collis
The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture Fritjof Capra (Wildwood House £9.50) I t has always seemed to me an extraord- inary thing that Descartes should have made such a reputation on the strength of having said 'Cogito, ergo sum' — 'I think, therefore I exist'. All right, it wasn't just ,because he said that, nor was it the premise to a philosophy, but rather a summary; still, for the rest of us roaming about the world, who feel and stiffer as well as think, it must always re- main an exasperating axiom. Yet the great thinkers are not just men of vvords. They are responsible for the men of deeds. For everything starts as a thought the idea of a house must precede the mak- ing of a house. And when the mighty tilhilosophers proclaim their manifestoes, 1en revolutions are already decided upon, and histories unwritten are written. When 'Iegel walks up and down his study at Heidelberg thinking in terms of Thesis, Anti-Thesis, and Synthesis, we already at- tend at the eclipse of nations and the death of kings; and when Einstein declares the equation E = mc2, we prepare to visit the Moon.
Descartes set going the great game of epistemology (the term for seeking the validity of knowledge), which in Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant waxed
into a Three Hundreds Years' War that at once stimulated and devasted modern philosophy, and is still going on. Descartes took a knife, plunged it into what he called Reality, and made a neat separation bet- ween two substances: on the one hand there was Matter, where everything, including the human body with its circulation of the blood and reflex actions, was mechanical; and on the other hand there was a substance called Mind, completely separate.
So beguiling was Descartes as a writer that the mechanistic world view of Cartesian-Newtonian science prevailed for a long time and by its analytical approach to Nature made possible the growth of Western Civilisation. Since the main characteristic of mankind is the tendency to go to extremes, we have now reached such disintegration that we don't know where we are, and see only the blind leading the blind and the squinting the squinting. Are we awake or dreaming, are we sane or mad we ask ourselves as we look around upon a world where any man with a bit of oil is crowned king. Not to worry, says Dr Capra. We have come to the Turning Point. The road of ex- cess leads to the palace of wisdom. Our ac- tions are governed by our conceptions. We had conceived that. Nature was composed of atoms solid as marbles, held in chemical combination, and subject to further com- bination by the will of man. Then came the New Physics. We opened the atom, only to find that there was an atom within the atom which we called the nucleus and which we discovered was no longer Matter but Energy — the Point when they became interchangeable terms to be finally express- ed by Einstein as E = mc2. From that mo- ment natural phenomena could no longer be regarded in a mechanistic light but rather as a dynamic unity. Once that con- ception is grasped we will take no more liberties in manipulating or exploiting Nature but will form an alliance. The general term for this is called Ecology. Dr Capra is a physicist of international reputation who has also taken for his pro- vince the problems which confront our time, inflation and unemployment, the energy crisis, the nuclear scare, the state of medicine and psychiatry, pollution and other environmental disasters, the rising wave of violence and crime — all of which he sees as arising from our faulty philosophic standpoint. He has striking facts and observations to make on all of them. I will quote a single passage here, on ecology pure and simple, as a fair sample of the exactitude and completeness of his ap- proach. His book is a blueprint for a New Age. And why should there not be a new aRenaissance?ge WhI Who could coquulodte: have foretold the A fertile soil is a living soil containing billions of living organisms in every cubic centimeter. It is a complex ecosystem in which the substances that are essential to life move in cycles from plants to animals, to soil bacteria, and back again
to plants. Carbon and nitrogen are two basic chemical elements that go through these ecological cycles, in addition to many other nutrient chemicals and minerals. Solar energy is the natural fuel that drives the soil cycles, and living organisms of all sizes are necessary to sustain the whole system and keep it in balance. Thus bacteria carry out various chemical transformations, such as the process of nitrogen fixation, which makes nutrients accessible to plants; deep-rooted weeds bring trace minerals to the soil surface and loosen its texture; and all these activities are interdependent and combine harmoniously to provide the nourishment that sustains all life on earth.
After which Dr Capra makes an almighty swipe at the agriculturalists (especially American) who have ignored this balance — and caused vast unemployment to boot. But the main burden of his book is to show the signs of how the present culture is disintegrating, while the rising culture of what he calls ecosystems will eventually assume the leading role.
Dr Capra is fond of pointing out — it is a big part of his programme — how the find- ings of the new physicists support the ex- perience of the mystics and poets. But he thinks that he is doing them a favour by making this assertion. The celebrated A. N. Whitehead in his Science and the Modern World made the same mistake. He praised Shelley's poetry because of the poet's knowledge of chemistry. He looked with approval upon Wordsworth's apostrophes to Nature in The Prelude because they 'ex- hibited entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with model presences of others.' True enough no doubt; but if that had been the point of the poem Wordsworth might just as well have written in prose. Such sup- port means little to your genuine poet or mystic (often the same thing). There will always be conflict between science and theology, .but never between science and mysticism — (by which I do not mean anything in the way of occultism or spiritualism). Your mystic is not parasitic upon any intellectual concept. A drop of truly experienced harmony is worth an ocean of intellectual synthesis. He is not im- pressed by the term Meditation used by out- siders, since it is the modern cover-up word for laziness, looseness, ignorance, folly and sin: a bunch of modern meditators is often inferior to a bunch of penguins. And know- ing that the answer to the riddle of the world is to see the world, he is not impress- ed by anyone who calls it a mechanism or says that it is governed by chance, for look- ing at the finished article he is bound to ex- laim 'Well done Mechanism! Well done Chance! I can only wish you had a more im- pressive name such as God Almighty or Supreme Being or Divine Cause.' And if someone says that Nature is red in tooth and claw he will feel constrained to reply in the words of a philosopher who was not a philosopher, but the playwright Chekhov
who wrote in a little notebook: `So long as a man likes the splashing of a fish he is a poet. But when he knows that the splashing is nothing but the chase of the weak by the strong, he is a thinker; but when he does not understand what sense there is in the chase, or what use in the equilibrium which results from destruction, he is becoming silly and dull as he was when a child. And the more he knows and thinks the sillier he becomes.'
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