Extract from The Web of Life

SCHUMACHER COLLEGE
An International Centre for Ecological Studies

Extract from The Web of Life

by Fritjof Capra

published by HarperCollins, 1996

Crisis of Perception

As the century draws to a close, environmental concerns have become of paramount importance. We are faced with a whole series of global problems which are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible. We have ample documentation about the extent and significance of these problems [...]

Ultimately, these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.

There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican Revolution. But this realisation has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders. The recognition that a profound change of perception and thinking is needed if we are to survive has not yet reached most of our corporate leaders wither, nor the administrators and professors of our large universities. [...]

The Paradigm Shift

My main interest in my life as a physicist has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that occurred in physics during the first there decades of the century, and which is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our worldview; from the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton to an holistic, ecological view.

The new view of reality was by no means easy to accept for physicists at the beginning of the century. The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought them in contact with a strange and unexpected reality. In their struggle to grasp this new reality, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe atomic phenomena. Their problems were not merely intellectual but amounted to an intense emotional and, one could say, even existential crisis. It took them a long time to overcome this crisis, but in the end they were rewarded with deep insights into the nature of matter and its relation to the human mind.

The dramatic changes of thinking that happened in physics at the beginning of this century have been widely discussed by physicists and philosophers for more than 50 years. They led Thomas Kuhn to the notion of a scientific ‘paradigm’, defined as ‘a constellation of achievements – concepts, values, techniques, etc. – shared by a scientific community and used by that community to define legitimate problems and solutions.’ Changes of paradigms, according to Kuhn, occur in discontinuous, revolutionary breaks called ‘paradigm shifts’.

Today, 25 years after Kuhn’s analysis, we recognize that paradigm shift in physics as an integral part of a much larger cultural transformation. The intellectual crisis of the quantum physicists in the 1920s is mirrored today by a similar but much broader cultural crisis. Accordingly, what we are seeing is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena. To analyse that cultural transformation I have generalised Kuhn’s definition of a scientific paradigm to that of a social paradigm, which I define as ‘a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions and practices shared by a community, which forms a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organises itself’.

The paradigm that is now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of entrenched ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine,
the view of life in society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth, and – last, not least – the belief that a society in which the female everywhere is subsumed under the male is one that follows a basic law of nature. All of these assumptions have been fatefully challenged by recent events. And, indeed, a radical revision of them is now occurring.

The new paradigm may be called an holistic worldview, seeing the world as an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. It may also be called an ecological view, if the term ‘ecological’ is used in a much broader and deeper sense than usual. Deep ecological awareness recognises the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. [...]

It is generally not recognised that values are not peripheral to science and technology, but constitute the very basis and driving force. During the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, values were separated from facts, and ever since that time we have tended to believe that scientific facts are independent of what we do and are therefore independent of our values. In reality, scientific facts emerge out of an entire constellation of human perceptions, values, and actions – in one word, out of a paradigm – from which they cannot be separated. Although much of the detailed research may not depend explicitly on the scientist’s value system, the larger paradigm within which this research is pursued will never be value-free. Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research not only intellectually but also morally. [...]

Shift from Physics to the Life Sciences

By calling the emerging new vision of reality ‘ecological’ in the sense of deep ecology, we emphasise that life is at its very centre. This is an important point for science, because in the old paradigm physics has been the model and source of metaphors for all other sciences. ‘All philosophy is like a tree,’ wrote Descartes. ‘The roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches are all the other sciences.’

Deep ecology has overcome this Cartesian metaphor. Even though the paradigm shift in physics is still of special interest because it was the first to occur in modern science, physics has now lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. However, this is still not generally recognised today. Scientists as well as non-scientists frequently retain the popular belief that ‘if you really want to know the ultimate explanation, you have to ask a physicist’, which is clearly a Cartesian fallacy. Today, the paradigm shift in science, at its deepest level, implies a shift from physics
to the life sciences.

Fritjof Capra is a regular teacher at Schumacher College.

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