THE jacket blurb promises a brilliant and radical new synthesis of mind after, a new foundation for ecological policies, a new paradigm with profound implications. Oh dear. I'm always wary of anything that promises "profound implications", so I did not get off on a good footing with Fritjof Capra's latest book. Moreover, we're also told he spent 10 years researching it, and anyone who has invested that much energy will to want to produce something - anything.
So what has Capra produced? Well, he says himself it's a continuation of a chapter from an earlier book, The Turning Point. It is a critique of what he sees as the outdated mechanistic worldview that has its roots in Descartes and Newton and that has led us to a shallow, human centred ecology (the terms are his).
Capra would rather we developed an Earth centred ecology and spiritual awareness (not surprising, perhaps, from the man who gave us The Tao of Physics). Instead of hierarchies we will have networks. And the "deep ecological" view will permeate everything, giving us transpersonal ecology, eco ethics and even ecopsychology.
There follows a rapid tour of the development of science, from the Neolithic peoples who, we are told, worshipped Mother Earth, to modern science via Descartes and Newton.
After 20th century developments that include ecology and cybernetics (the science of mind) it's on to information theory, neural networks, self organisation and - you re one step ahead of me - chaos theory and non linear systems (and, yes, the cover is taken from the Mandelbrot set, de rigueur these days in popular science).
Reader, forgive me, but all this brings out the cynic in me. Having said that, the explanations of fractals, complexity and chaos are well done, starting with the very basics of algebra and calculus; but to what end? I ask myself.
By now, we're half way through the book but still on background reading. Then on page 153 comes his thesis (I think) that a new, non mechanistic, post cartesian understanding of life, with a mathematical language and consistent with deep ecology, is now emerging. It is, he says, a synthesis of mind, matter and life.
Existing theories of evolution, he argues, are fatally flawed (no doubt the creationists will cheer this criticism from a trained physicist) so he proposes a new view of evolution as life's inherent tendency to create novelty.
Then we're into more background material as he reviews our understanding of life on Earth from earliest times (even earlier now, with the recent news that it may have begun 3.8 million years ago) to the storytelling era of the Cro Magnon people.
Ultimately, he argues for an identification of mind and cognition with the "process of life", and hence new areas like cognitive science and even cognitive immunology. Specifically, he writes that an organism's nervous system does not process information from the external world but brings forth a world in the process of cognition.
The final pages call on us to regain our full humanity with a spiritual grounding in deep ecology and the interconnected web of life. Sustainability is essential, he says, in education, management and politics (he is, we note, director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in California) and our survival depends on it. Now this last point struck me as rather human centred for one who has just spent 300 pages arguing the alternative.
The background explanations were good, if sketchy, but the overall, argument was poor and simplistic - as where he says that massive species extinctions will stop when the southern hemisphere's burden of debt is removed - and, significantly, does not seem to me to offer anything new. "Gaia" said it all before when it comes to "sustainability", a term already in common use.
Capra's criticism of a reductionist approach in science makes no acknowledgement that to understand the whole one must first understand the parts. And as for his new cognitive approach, based on work by Maturana and Varela, there was no insight into what its "profound implications" would be. Will it change how we see things? The results of previous experiments? What new experiments can we do to investigate it? None of that is here.
In fact, there really is very little here, when you remove the 10 years of background reading. Or maybe I missed the point. Or maybe I'm locked in an outmoded world view, guilty of the sins Capra would accuse so many scientists of. You'll have to be your own judge, but be warned these 300 pages left me tired and unimpressed.