Conscious Choice: Fritjof Capra, Not Your Average Physicist

February 2002 | Citizen at Large

Fritjof Capra, Not Your Average Physicist

by Jay Walljasper

In a surprisingly high-profile career as a scientist and ecological philosopher, Fritjof Capra has boldly questioned many fundamental assumptions of our civilization. Nothing should be automatically accepted as accurate, he maintains, not even our "belief in the scientific method as the only valid approach to knowledge." He refutes the prevailing views that the universe functions like a mechanical system, that society is a competitive struggle for domination, and that human advancement is the outcome of economic and technological growth.

For a trained theoretical physicist — with a Ph.D. from Vienna University, post-doctoral work at the University of Paris, and research positions at Berkeley and Imperial College in London — such ideas are almost unthinkable. But Capra is not your average physicist. Physicists seldom write best-selling books like Capra’s The Tao of Physics, an investigation of the common ground between scientific breakthroughs and Eastern mysticism. Physicists seldom make movies, as Capra did with Mindwalk, an exploration of social and scientific values starring Liv Ullmann, John Heard, and Sam Waterston. And physicists almost never admit that fields other than physics are more central to our understanding of the universe.

"I found that the paradigm of physics was not appropriate to discussions of social phenomena, economics, or even biology," he says. "The study of living systems — ecology — is really the appropriate concept for talking about broader issues. Ecology is a more practical framework. It’s the principle underlying all subjects.

"The essence of an ecosystem is that all things are interconnected," he continues. "Understanding ecosystems, therefore, leads us to understanding relationships. Understanding relationships is not easy for us, because it runs counter to the traditional scientific enterprise in Western culture. In science, we have been taught to measure and weigh things. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; they need to be mapped."

Adopting ecology rather than physics as the central model of scientific inquiry leads to an entirely different view of the world. Because ecology is the only branch of science that focuses on relationships, Capra says, it can help us understand a forest, a city neighborhood, and even global problems in new ways. Instead of breaking things down to examine their most minute parts, we can study how these parts work together as a whole: the relationships between different species, between activity on the street and crime, between the status of women and birth rates.

Capra explores the far-reaching implications of this thinking in his best-selling book, The Turning Point, which became the basis for Mindwalk. Both book and movie make the case that an emerging paradigm is replacing — or at least competing with — the view of the universe that has guided our civilization since the days of Isaac Newton and René Descartes. Rather than believing our universe is an inert chunk of matter, this new view looks upon it as a living system that resembles an ecosystem more than a machine.

Capra made the film with his brother, Bernt, a Hollywood production designer whose credits include Baghdad Cafe and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Nine years after its theatrical release, Mindwalk still does a brisk business in video stores — a sign that such seemingly abstract ideas strike a chord with many people.

But the audience Capra seeks now is the preteen set. The Center of Eco-Literacy, which he founded in 1992, is working in twenty schools throughout Northern California, training teachers and administrators both to teach ecology "and to orient the whole school curriculum around the principles of ecology," he says. "You can make a link between ecosystems as communities of animals and human communities. In fact, the principles of ecology can be seen as the principles of community."

Hands-on experience of nature is emphasized, with each school growing its own garden or working to restore a local creek. Capra says surveys of students show these activities to be one of the most popular school activities — second only to field trips.

In management seminars, he brings a similar message to business and civic leaders: "We live in a time of unprecedented technological and social changes. And yet, our business organizations seem to be incapable of dealing with change. CEOs have reported that up to 75 percent of their organization’s efforts to change did not yield the promised results. I have come to believe that one of the main reasons for this paradox lies in our outdated perceptions, our mechanistic view of the world."

Human organizations need to mirror natural organisms, Capra counsels. He points to the work of Chilean neuroscientists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, who define organisms as living networks that respond to disturbances in their environment. "This insight contains profound lessons for how to facilitate organizational change," Capra says. "In the mechanistic model of management, a lot of energy and money are spent on trying to sell new organizational structures, designed by outside experts, to the people who work in the organization, and this very often creates resistance."

Resistance is simply a natural response to outside disturbances, says Capra. It’s not a problem; it’s actually the source of creativity. The lessons of living systems suggest that if people within an organization participate from the very beginning in plans for change, their natural creativity — applied through the networks of relationships and spontaneous cycles of conversation and feedback that form the real core of any organization — might be directed toward making improvements, not resisting someone else’s vision of change.

This all seems a long way from the rigorous scientific training Capra underwent as a student in the 1960s. What happened? A lot of things, he replies in a calm voice with traces yet of an Austrian accent. His imagination was expanded as an undergraduate by reading Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel-laureate founder of quantum physics, who was pondering many of the same questions in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, while teaching in California, Capra met Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead’s husband and a seminal figure in establishing new paradigm thinking. He also cites the 1960s themselves as influential in pushing him to look beyond the narrow confines of physics to probe the inner workings of the universe. "My first postdoctoral job was in Paris in 1968," he recalls, "and I got very much politicized. I was a research physicist by day and sort of a hippie by night. I was hanging out with artists, writers, and filmmakers, and many of them were interested in Eastern mysticism. That struck me as a whole new way to understand the world. "

Adapted from the book, Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life by Jay Walljasper, Jon Spayde and the editors of Utne Reader (New Society Publishers). Available at bookstores or from Utne Reader, 800-880-UTNE.

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