Participating in the Tao The natural and human history of mental states and the ecological crisis
A Review Article of Fritjof Capra's "The Web of Life. A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter". HarperCollins Publishers 1996
Introduction
The question which this book addresses is "what is life?". The answer given is that life exists when three things (or better said three processes) are found together. The three essential features found in living organisms are:
1. A structure through which matters continually flows which, despite this flow, maintains its structural nature.. This is called a "dissipative structure". Non-living analogies are whirlpools or flames - there is a flow of matter through whirlpools or flames. They "feed" on matter to maintain their structure and grow. A flow of materials also occurs through living organisms. We humans, for example, give the words 'food' and 'drink' for the matter flowing through our body being metabolised into energy, transformed for its uses and then being expelled, or left behind, as waste products like excretion, sweat, dead skin etc.
2. Unlike whirlpools or flames living structures also develop, reproduce and evolve. Their dissipative structures have an internal network, a pattern of self organisation, called an "autopoetic structure". The internal production/transformation processes going on inside each organism exists in an interrelated system consisting of biological components/organs.These internal components maintain the processes of digestion, storage and metabolism of energy, and waste removal inside cells. In more complex multi-cellular organisms (like humans and other animals) organs of a more complex type evolve with specialised functions (e.g.. digestive system and excretion systems, livers, hearts and circulation systems for the blood and lymphatic fluids, and nervous and hormonal systems). Each component or organ helps produce and transform the other components inside the pattern of self organisation. So to speak, the organs or components inside the organism "play together as a team" (to risk an analogy from human social organisation). This networked whole is more than the sum of the parts and we cannot understand it merely by reducing it to these parts and imagining they work together like the parts in a clockwork machine. There are multiple feedback interactions within and between the different components. Like footballers on a field the actions of each player is determined by the evolution of actions of the whole team. Indeed Capra points to research which shows how human anatomical systems, previously thought of as separate, and serving different functions, are actually more tightly inter-connected one with another than has hitherto been thought - the nervous system, the endocrine system and the immune system.
3. These feedback loops and the pattern of interactions in the network of self organisation inside the dissipative structure enables this structure to respond to its structural environment - to feed on, respond to and change its environment. This is the "cognitive process". To continue the football analogy the system evolves in response to the flow of actions by the other team as well. (We must beware of taking this analogy too far as it would be misleading to understand the evolving responses of self organised organic structures as arising solely out of "competition" - although Darwin's 'struggle of the species idea' lends to this way of thinking.) In order to survive and flourish living organisms must respond continually in their interaction to their structural environments. These are the features of the environment that each organism can perceive/respond to relevant to their its 'needs'. The responses of the organism to its environment are what the life process is and enables the organism to evolve, reproduce and grow - its responsiveness is its 'cognitive process'.
In this review article I shall concentrate mostly on the cognitive dimension. My intention is twofold. I want to suggest that Capra, despite the magnificant synthesis of so many different approaches, is in fact to a degree "biologically reductionist" in his view of human cognition. He understands inadequately system evolution in human social organisation and the implications for how human cognition is structured. While human social organisation is based in natural processes it cannot be reduced to them and has its own dynamic which has implication for how we understand human language, human emotions and behaviour. Towards the end of this article I draw out the implications for the field of psychotherapy and psychiatry in so far as Capra's work has relevance to human life. In this respect I want to develop Capra's ideas further where I think they are somewhat undeveloped - in the field of emotions. I want to demonstrate some of the complexity that can arise in this field. Before this I sketch in more detail the implications of evolving human social organisation. Social, economic and cultural structures should also be considered in system dynamic terms and particularly the "avalanche tendencies" in this system towards an ever greater accumulation of socio-economic power in a few hands. Avalanche effects in the socio-economic power system have profound implications for human consciousness, as well as for the impact of human technical organisation on material and energy flows in Gaia. Capra has a unified vision of the evolution of life based on a growing number of new, and not so new, forms of systems thinking - general systems theory, cybernetics, chaos theory, gestalt, ecology and the like. He is aware of political, economic and social dimensions but these have not been his main fields of study. In consequence, I would argue, some of his ideas must be further developed and to some degree modified.
Cognition
To Capra 'cognitive process' should not be thought of in the way in which humans habitually conceive of it. We tend to regard cognition as the processing of linguistic and symbolic representations about an external world - when we use words and symbols to describe things to ourselves and each other. Capra by contrast follows 2 scientists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, as seeing cognition in a much wider sense - that process which is going on when an organism is responding to its environment. Thus a bacteria is engaged in the act of cognition when it moves towards sugar and away from acidity. Its cognition is the perception/responses of the organism to its environment which enable it to continue its self organisation and evolve. The cognitive process arises out of the specific structural coupling which the organism has to its environment. Different organisms evolve tuned into different environmental stimuli (whether bacteria, sheep or human) and in that sense each living organism "brings forth a world" - its own world. The "world brought forth" is the range of stimuli in its environment which it can recognise and respond to - thereby aiding and sustaining its self organisation. Different organisms and species 'evolve into different worlds' in this sense. Cats or birds, for example, perceive light in different frequency ranges to humans thus the shapes and textures of the world they "bring forth" will be different from ours. We therefore do not live in the world but as different species we all live in different worlds. (As I shall argue later individual humans also live inside often contesting and conflicting individual worlds formed out of the different evolving contexts of people's lives). The different worlds do, of course, overlap and they are, to be sure, interrelated but it is impossible, and will always impossible, to claim that our own human view or our own individual view is the only valid one. This is to merely assert greater priority for ourselves - a claim to power over other species or people. (Something which Capra denies from the philosophical standpoint of "deep ecology")
At this point I feel tempted to argue that it might have been better if Capra had used the words "we all bring forth a unique cognitive process out of our collective world." (The "we" in my sentence refers to all species and each individual of each species). This unique cognitive process is bounded by the specific structural coupling of our species in the flux processes in the universe. The uniqueness is also determined by the always different life histories as individual members of whatever species we belong to when we participate temporarily in the processes going on in nature and the universe ( for want of better words - "participating in the Tao"). If formulated in this slightly different way we can accept the notion that our individual cognitions can only ever be our partial responsiveness to a vastness much of which remains unknown. We always are limited to, and by, our evolving place in the Tao and no cognitive process can encompass everything that there is to be known. ( As Lao Tzu put it "The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao" - Lao Tzu). Nevertheless we do "live in" the Tao together and our relationships inside the universal flux are our chief concern. However for the purpose of this review I will stick with the Capra, Maturana and Varela phraseology for now.
"Bringing forth a world" is an evolving process and a learning process - learning being a growing range of possible responses. The range of interactions a living system can have with its environment defines its "cognitive domain".
Feelings
To repeat again, the word 'cognition' here is not meant in the usual sense (in my world) as the internal processing of words or concepts. Feelings and emotions play a vital part in our cognition - in fact I would argue that what Capra calls "cognition" is mostly, though not exclusively, awareness of feelings. For humans and presumably for animals feelings are sensations in the body - pain, hunger, thirst, frustration/anger, fear and so on. Each has a "motivational" function in the response repertoire of the organism. For example anger mobilises tension and energy in the muscles to act to strike at or or in other ways destroy or check a threat. Fear motivates running away if the threat is assessed as too dangerous.
For responding to the environment feelings are often enough. If a human or any other species pricks itself on a thorn the pain leads us automatically to draw away. Our learned response - being careful about thorns in the future - is something does not require words. We do not have "to say in our heads" " I must be careful not to prick myself".
What then is the evolutionary place of language in cognition?. Although it is true that saying "I must be careful not to prick myself" will not help my learning about thorns, saying "Ouch" might be really quite useful. This has a dual function - firstly it warns our companions that there is a danger about and secondly, if we are lucky, it might get us help (a plaster) motivated by sympathy. This leads us into two dimensions - one of which is developed by Capra and one of which is almost, but not quite, missing. The first dimension is communication and language and the second is emotion - a word which tends to be used to describe feelings which arising in relationships and which have a function in those relationships. For example 'love' is a word which tends to be used to describe feelings which arise in contexts where relationships are close, trusting, secure and where co-ordinated behaviours meets mutual needs. The word 'close' is likely to have a quite literal meaning and loving behaviours are likely to involve a high level of physical contact. Feelings in such relationships can be understood quite literally as well as in a more general sense.
Communication and Language
Capra again follows Maturana in outlining the place of communication in what he calls cognition. Maturana argues that communication is co-ordination of behaviour. We should again beware of projecting our own human experience and assumptions about this onto other species. The co-ordination of behaviour is determined by the dynamics of structural coupling. The mechanisms for co-ordinating behaviour may be instinctive or learned. Where the mechanism are learned Maturana calls them 'linguistic' . This is not quite language in the human sense but shares many features. When honey bees indicate the location of flowers they do so by dancing intricate patterns to each other - the dance is instinctive but the linguistic (or learned) aspects of the dance are specific to the context and social history of the beehive - so to speak, bees in different hives have different "dialects".
Emotion - the communication of feeling
Before following the ideas of Capra further it is helpful at this point to develop the ideas about emotion which are underdeveloped in Capra's writings. I suggested earlier that if we say "Ouch" we communicate our feeling. In this case we will communicate feeling not only by the sound but also by the expression of our faces. Actually we can communicate and co-ordinate behaviour without words through the observation and expression of feelings. As infants, before we have learned to speak, we cry if we are distressed and we smile if we are pleased. This alone communicates feeling between parents and babies who as yet have no language. When we communicate our feeling and it evokes a response we have emotion - communication between people on the direct level of feeling. For people (or species) which have not lost or repressed their compassionate abilities this communication of feeling may be not only the awareness of the feelings of another it may the real evocation of a similar feeling in themselves in response to another. (Empathy). When the baby cries the healthy mother/father responds with empathy. They literally feel distress - but not for themselves rather for the baby and their attention to the child calms both the infant and the parent. Communication as a co-ordination of behaviour can therefore occur through what one can term "emoting". However the awareness of, and respect for the feelings of each other in the form of empathy implies, as I shall show later, equalitarian social organisation.
Languaging
According to Maturana 'language' arises as communication about communication. A cat that regularly meows for its milk in the morning is communicating but it is not 'languaging'. It would be 'languaging' if, one morning, it did not get the milk, and was able to communicate "I have meowed three times so why is there no milk?" - i.e. could communicate about its communication. As far as we know only humans and to some degree chimpanzees can do this. (Chimps can use sign language - an upset chimp that communicates "Lucy cry" is communicating about her emoting. She is languaging - and since she is also aware of her own cognitive state - she has 'consciousness' which is awareness of awareness.)
The world brought forth in and through language
Languaging brings us to the distinctive features of human consciousness. As far as we know humans use languages the most. (Sea creatures like whales have communication patterns across vast distances which we know little about but they are increasingly being deafened by ship noise pollution). Humans live in a "semantic domain" created by our languaging and one unique aspect of being human is being able to jointly weave the linguistic network in which we are embedded.
As tiny babies we are only aware of what our sense organs tell us about a directly experienced environment. Only by learning to speak and entering language do we become aware of the world beyond our cot, the front door and the corridors of space through which our parents take us. All the way through life we continue to live in a world bounded by familiar physical surroundings, and familiar people and the corridors between them where our experience has a quality of direct hearing, seeing, touching, and smelling and eat familiar meals that match a range of tastes with which we are familiar. This inner cortyard of our experience and relationships is however vastly extended through language. Speech vastly extends the realm which we can know when we are told, or later, read about things of which we have had no direct sensory experience. In that sense I would argue that the representational patterns used in speech functions as an extension of our primary sense organs. We can react to processes or people who we have never seen, heard, felt, smelled, tasted or touched. We can find a sense of orientation to our life. The printed word and now electronic communications have extended these possibilities again.
The inner stream of conscioussness as word stream
Humans can also use internal speech to describe their own feeling and cognitive states, to describe the patternings that we find in our lives. Thus words enable processes which gives us a medium for reflection, consciousness and self consciousness. It has been suggested that early societies did not really experienced consciousness as we think of it. They experienced inner speech as "hearing voices". (Julian Jaynes: The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1976).Jaynes argues that language comes into being in the form of involuntary cries of reaction to threats; and are put into use within a given group by a leader, for the purpose of warning about encroaching danger. Next special catch words evolve and are used by the leader to assign tasks to group members. As tasks become more complex the individuals voice develops and people begin to have hallucinations of the leaders voice giving orders. I understand this as the person being filled with a sense of what they consider the leader would say - an absorption of the leaders orientation to situations which people are aware of as if they are hearing the leaders voice and then following that voice. When such leaders (proto-monarchs) die their voices are still heard (the leadership orientation that they have given is followed and "heard" and the inner voice "of the leader" is taken to be the voice of a god. (During past psychiatric crises when I lost my sense of personal orientation my thinking took the form of imagined commentaries by people I knew - what I thought they would say to my situation. My thinking became, as an experience, like a dialogue with inner representatives of the the important people in my life. Only retrospectively did I recognise that this was the form that my stream of consciousness was taking during a grave crisis where my whole belief system and was failing to give me the orientation I needed to manage my life. I can therefore relate very closely to what Jaynes says and accept that in early civilisations people heard the voice and followed the wll of god which to them meant following an inner voice that was not perceived as their own, which, in a sense, was not their own)
. Jaynes argues that in the Greek classic the Iliad there are no words relating to consciousness and mental acts - the Gods take the form of consciousness. The Gods spoke to the people by their voices and they performed their deeds. Will power, planning and initiative were all carried on at the level of the Gods and the deeds of human beings were to fulfill them.(I have not read Jaynes but am taking this account from the excellent summary by Patsy Hage in "Accepting Voices", edited by Professor Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, MIND Publications, London, 1994)
Jayne's assumption that there is straight away a social power hierarchy and voices emerge in conditions where people are responding mainly to threats might be questionable. For example infant- adult behaviour co-ordination would also evoke regular sounds - calling attention to hazards as well as expressing pleasure and good feelings when things are harmonious or making a change for the better. However we can retain the basic idea of Jaynes. (The gods were often fathers and mothers after all). Appropriate word streams in the field of consciousness were evoked by significant situations in which people found themselves - perhaps in danger a person would "hear the voice of a community leader" suggesting what they should do to save themselves. Voices as "internal events" come to act as orientation systems for individual and social action - and in power societies the voices of leaders, setting whole societies in motion, might indeed be interpreted as the voice of gods.
"Hearing voices" and interpreting them as externally generated events, when no one else can, is mostly understood in todays world as a psychiatric sympton. However recent researches have found that many people have this experience and live stable lives. The denial of the psychiatric patient, that these voices are internal may be, in a sense, correct. The voices arise from the people in the past of the person, perhaps from the pre-verbal phase. Such voices do not express a precise idea merely a mood, the background noises of situation that were experienced in the past - often which the voice hearer wanted to cut off from but could not - e.g. aggressions states in the family, boredom states and soon. If such voice hearers say that these are not their voices they are quite right - they may be the voices of adult bores from their past, or frightening people one did not want to listen too closely too - alongside the voices that were soothing and calming.
When words help co-ordinate behaviour and social orientation they may reinforce the hold of some people who do not necessarily know what is in the best interest of all concerned. They may interpret their interest as everyone else's best interest even though this leads to destruction. Languaging not only allows positive possibilities to enhance human awareness and human life but allows huge scope for deception and self deception. The "sense organ extension" can be very unreliable. (As can the other media). Language systems tend to be distorted to the world view of powerful interests. Rather like Internet mainly offers information from an English speaking and an American perspective. Capra does touch on the unreliability of language as an information source for guiding human responses in our environment but only very briefly.
Linguistic Structures as evolved systems
As a natural scientist Capra cannot be expected to know and have read everything but he seems to be unaware that over the last century those very same interrelational and systems approaches which examine things in their contexts have also been developed in human linguistics and the relationship between human linguistic systems, natural systems and social systems. Ferdinand de Saussure followed by anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss show one cannot understand words taken on their own but only in their patterns and in their specific contexts. Words function as signs in contexts and we must be careful not to mix up words or symbols with those things for which they are a sign.In the jargon of semiology, the science of signs, there is a difference between the signifier (word sound, or string of ink based letters) and the signified (the object/ event/process to which it points). You cannot smoke the word "pipe". Nor can you know that I am referring to the implement for burning and inhaling tobacco smoke from, rather than a tube to supply water, outside of the conversational context in which I use this word.
Semiology "studies the life of signs in our social interaction". (Ferdinand de Saussure). In fact not only words convey meaning between people. Other things may function as signs which are any physical entities to which a community attributes meaning. Clothes, words, gestures, possessions, pictures and colours - we give meaning to them all in our daily interactions. Over time the meaning may grow by association. As an example the white coat worn by doctors and nurses is not simply an item of clothing. It has become a sign to denote " scientific technician".
Claude Levi-Strauss used structural linguistics to study the languages and cultures of tribal people. His findings should not surprise Capra and provide a bridge between the biological and social view of language.. Levi-Strauss found that these peoples "living close to nature" had evolved languages from classification and ordering systems based on their structural environments - i.e. the languages were based on categorising and ordering the multiplicity of plants and animals in their biological environment. The language system then developed further. The words signs and sytems of signs were adapted for new uses. These words systems were used for descriptions and explanations of non biological entities and events "by analogy" with the features of these plants and animals. (In a similar way much of Capra's explanation of life is "by analogy" to mathematical models which evolve and show self organisation). With these language systems Levi Strauss showed it was entirely possible to develop a logical and abstract thinking. This was however entirely lost on the colonial invaders who could only see these people as primitive. The "world brought forth by the European invaders" had evolved a different linguistic patterning. Their linguistic patterning was one that had originated in a different biological environment. Even more significantly this language had been adapted and evolved to co-ordinate behaviour in social systems of dominance and stratification.
Words as deceivers and self deceivers
Following Maturana and Varela, Capra sees language as the distinctively human dimension of communication. Communication is the co-ordination of behaviour. But the language involved in co-ordinating the behaviour of lovers is not like language involved in the co-ordination of the behaviours within a colonial social system. True lovers are trying hard to communicate their reciprocal individual worlds. They 'language' to co-ordinate their behaviour so as to co-ordinate their feelings harmoniously. They try hard therefore to understand each other's point of view. They recognise, in other words, that the other exists in a world that has been brought forth differently. They seek to empathise and atune to this other world. This brings forth, or rather this evokes, the emotion of love which bonds them closer together, creating security as well as better conditions for mating and child rearing.
The languaging of slave traders could not be more different. It consisted of one way commands and has feed-back in regard to the feelings of slaves only in so far as profits might be effected. The terror and pain of the slaves might only be registered as indicators that part of "the cargo" would die before they were sold and that would reduce profits. It will be remembered that shipwrecked merchant adventurer Robinson Crusoe taught Man Friday his language - he was not interested in leaning Man Fridays language. Robinson Crusoe had the musket and knew how to use it. So Man Friday learned Robinson's Crusoe's language. As we shall see power effects communication and language profoundly. This is co-ordinated behaviour but it has no reciprocity - and no feed back. The feelings of the other party now have little of no place in the communication. The languaging and emoting parts of the communication have a different form. The "world brought forth" by the dominating agent is held to be the only valid world.
It is worthwhile here saying the obvious - in such a world lies come to play a role. Lies can function as defences against exploiters or as part of a repertoire of responses to protect and enhance power positions. As Adolf Hitler put it "It also gives us a very special pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them".
On 29th April 1868 the Contract of 1868 was ratified which guaranteed for all times the Black Hills to the Sioux nation. "For all times" lasted only a few years. The white invader "spoke with forked tongue". The white people who negotiated such a contract may have suspended the memory of their history and believed that the contract would be for all time. To lie to others you are likely to lie to yourself first.
The human creature that can hunt other species can also hunt other people - if they "live in different worlds" they are "fair game". Capra quotes Maturana to the effect that we can understand human consciousness only though language and the whole social context in which it is embedded. "As its Latin root - con-scire ('knowing together') - might indicate, consciousness is essentially a social phenomenon." (p283). But the "social context" interrelates with an economic and political context of vast and growing inequalities. To use a metaphor from physics - when the view (world brought forth) of the powerful social groups has greater "mass" it has a sort of 'gravitational effect' and its preponderance tends to obliterates the possibilities of including the perspective (world brought forth) by vulnerable social groups (and other species) in inter - species communication. Communication tends to become one way and loses its reciprocal function. It is less and less "knowing together" and more and more "knowing what is best for you" or simply "taking instructions because I say so" (i.e. I have greater power, you are inferior, be obedient or else).This power system then effects what is said and even infects the individual word elements. For example Capra is an "author", he is an "authority" in his field.When he teaches he "instructs". His approach is inter-"disciplinary". Because the possession or processing or communication of word based knowledges is so integrated into the power system some words have evolved to carry authority (power) connotations and knowledge connotations simultaneously.
Self reflection in stratified societies
This language/power system also then effects the way in which individuals reflect on their own place in the scheme of things - it effects their word self definitions, their identities. When an American millionairess said "only the little people pay taxes" she expresses beautifully what she thinks about herself in terms which the author of Gullivers Travels, Jonathan Swift, would have understood very well. (The biting social satire of Swift work is often not noticed) She is a person with a "big me-size". She is "very important" and people like her cannot be expected to travel economy class. She must be contrasted with those people whose lives have little value "because", as the high priests of economics would put, their capitalised future income stream is so small. The process of "knowing together" in the language of economics allows the little people of little value to be seen as the ideal people to work in, and live alongside, polluting and toxic industries. (Andrew Blower and Pieter Leroy, Power, Politics and Environmental Inequality, Environmental Politics, Vol. 3 No.2 Summer 1994). If they are poisoned or die " the loss of income" to the world economy, the thing that really matters, will be small. Economic words say that environmental costs can be measured by what people are prepared to pay not to be polluted. People with a lot of money and their intellectual sycophants would say this. This market measure does nothing to protect communities whose members cannot afford to pay anything.
Co-ordinating power systems - word systems as orientation systems
The problem here is deeper than being misled by economics and cannot be solved merely by counterposing different concept systems to economic thinking. Economics is the "world brought forth" by people who own the economy and use it to accumulate themselves yet more money. Economics is a way of thinking that arises in the structural relationships of those involved in money making. It is the world they have brought forth. Capra writes " Among all the species we are the only ones that kill their own kind in pursuit of religion, free markets, patriotism, and other abstract ideas." (p. 286) The point is that it does not help to view religion, free market and patriotism only as "abstract ideas" - they arise out of the evolutionary dynamic of human society as orientation systems that bind together societies. The market is not an "abstract idea". There is a signified reality behind the signifying word.
If humans are to have any specialisation in producing their energy, food and other needs then they must exchange their specialist products and services with each other. In the smallest of social institutions it is possible to organise a co-ordination of specialised production and reproduction behaviours in a way which is personal, takes eveyone's feelings into account and does not involved transactions, prices and money changing hands. The inventor of Permaculture, Bill Mollinson, in his book on Permaculture design suggests that 7 people is the limit for group functioning sensitively to the feelings of everyone. Inside families and tribal societies the division of labour occurs without transactions involving buying and selling - co-ordinated activities can organised in such a way as to enhance and maintain social cohesion and conviviality. When specialisation occurs between tribes there may be an exchange of gifts - in the sense that two way giving is meant to cement relationships and maintain peace. In societies that are not yet full market societies haggling about prices in markets can also enable the poor to secure a lower price.
However there are tribes in which arrangements are not so harmonious. Eipo males in New Guinea struggle fiercely over access to pigs and women. (Ungehemmte Angriffslust, Der Speigel, No.7 1997, 00198-199). When exchange is very extensive and goes beyond the point where buyers and sellers know each other intimately, particularly where trust has disintegrated because people hunt each others and may even sell each other as slaves, then exchange is played according to different rules. A market emerges. A market in its developed form facilitates the division of labour where no structural reciprocity of human feeling occurs. People pursue self interest and compete with others. Economics is the system of ideas which describes what happens.
Adam Smith did not "invent" the market economy - he provided some orientation for it.
Professor of Moral Philosophy Adam Smith was one of the first thinkers to describe what happens in the market and thus helped reinforce the emerging relationships by providing it with some conceptual orientation. (i.e. Economics). However he did not invent the "free market" and his thinking on closer inspection can be seen to be partial and misleading. He claimed that ' the invisible hand of the market' supplied people's needs through everyone pursuing their individual self interests. Actually it is not at all the case that the market works as a socially co-ordinative system because people are pursuing their self interest. What makes the market 'work', to the extent that it does, as a co-ordinative system, is only that everyone is playing the same life game. The drive for money as a common criteria for social action leads to a common life style. The way people play or are obliged to play the same money making game glues society together on a particular path of development. Because everyone is playing the same game in terms of motivations, criteria and measures of success, interdependency in capitalist social relationships is thereby made possible. However because the greed-logic motivations and criteria of this game puts people at each others throats (competition), and drives the weak to the wall - it is inherently destructive of people, communities and environment.
Concept systems as social orientation systems
Social orientation systems bind society together not in a "general interest" but subordinated to the interests of the most powerful groups in those societies. "Economics" is the theology of the powerful moneyed groups in society. Ideas from economics like the idea of "free" market evolved to enhance and protect the interests of groups with most power. In the "free" market the strongest in market competition can drive the weak to the wall. The pain and suffering of those people, as well as the damage done to the environment by the "more efficient" production technologies is not fully "calculated" in economic decision making. Power structures calculate the benefits to themselves as winners while losers, struggling to survive, find it difficult to "find their voice". In economics their misery does not have a money value and is overruled in the language of efficiency and competition. This is spoken in the louder voice of the people who can buy newspapers, hire politicians and fund university professorships to interpret their needs in clever books. They get heard most often and most people just take for granted that they are "right" and "know best".
The market society was the outcome of the evolution of a complex social process in exchange between people as they organised the process of keeping their biological dissipative structures supplied with a throughput of food, salt, and drink, and protected it with clothing and shelter. Because of the complications of barter some easily divisible commodities came to act as mediums of exchange (gold and silver which were later replaced by notes and then bank balances). These commodities, which became money, allowed the sale of what you supplied to be separated from the purchase of what you needed. When you sell then money gives you a store of "purchasing power". Powerful people began to accumulate purchasing power on the assumption that everything could be bought and, if couldn't be bought then it should be. As more and more things became tradable, including labour power and other means for production, money moved from being a medium of exchange to being the goal of exchange. It moved from a means to an end, from servant to master. (In the jargon of chaos theory there is a bifurcation point where some commodities came to perform the role of money because of the limits of barter. There is another bifurcation point when money turned from means to end. At each point the systems begins to behave differently - there is a different form of social evolution. Matching languages and thought patterns also emerge.)
"The love of money is the root of all evil"
In the process motivations based on empathy, collective responsibility to the whole community and protecting the vulnerability of those in the community have tended to wither away. Vulnerable people became a source of profits where their weakness makes them exploitable - or a "cost to the community" where looking after them is not offset by what you can make out of them.
People with this world view were the money junkies who organised the slave trades and the expeditions of European colonialism abroad and the Poor Laws that punished the incapable poor at home. Their successors organise world trade rounds called GATT and chop way hard fought for welfare rights. The early merchants made money by buying cheap in one market and selling dear in another. It was cheaper if you pointed a gun at people's heads and robbed them. You did this by conquering ('protecting') them as, horror of horrors, they were not Christians. Sometimes it was more convenient to get them to work for you as slaves. Conquered peoples who were the victims of these money fundamentalists rightly saw the people from the invading civilisation as suffering from a kind of collective insanity. The vindictive hung up barbarians totally disregarded the embeddedness of individual life in shared human feelings and their thought patterns had little of no reference to dependence on the biological environment. The biological environment, like the people, was there to be used and therefore destroyed in mono-cultures and mining operations aimed at making money in exports. The white people thought with their heads in a calculating way. As an American Indian Chief told the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, "sane people think with their hearts". (i.e. with their total feeling and emotional structure).
Capra writes in great depth about the Cartesian world view that relied heavily on mathematics and metaphors from machinery like clockwork. However any world view, as an overarching orientation system in human society, can only emerge in conditions where there are many people to whom the pioneering thinkers can communicate with their metaphors and analogies. The Cartesian world view was a mechanistic world view in which the universe was thought as running like the mechanisms in clockwork machinery, to be taken apart, measured and understood though subjecting it to (linear) mathematical measurements and calculations. It was no co-incidence that this view emerged in world in which clocks were appearing everywhere on church towers to regulate measured- out purchased labour time in the fields and double entry bookkeeping was being invented to keep records of commercial transactions with numeracy also on the increase.
Nowadays it is the commercial pressure to sell and use computer systems which is changing the way in which people understand and perceive their relationships and activity even further in a "calculating and measured direction".. Computers encourage and allow quantitative records to be kept and processed on all aspects of human activity so that there is a pressure to measure what were previously intangible human activities and relationships in quantifiable packages - for example "care services". This process allows activities to be understood and organised in a way that can be bought and sold as marketable commodities. However, as one moves towards homogenous measurable "packages of care" it becomes more and more difficult for the care relationship to include any authentic emotion of concern, sympathy and empathy between carer and their dependents. Calculated and measured care is a matter of learned "technique" rather than arising in an emotional relationship of sympathy and empathy.
The macro processes of a collective insanity
This collectively crazy civilisation continued to accumulate more and more wealth and power.Towards the turn of the 18th century the money and wealth accumulated by genocidal theft in the Third Worlds, the availability of human labour power as a purchaseable commodity, the new transport systems and the new technologies using coal power made it possible for gentleman entrepreneurs to "assemble resources" to build production systems where productivity was amplified by fossil fuel driven machines. They could produce cheaper and faster than handicraft producers especially as the misery of the employed factory workers and the ruined hand workers, as well as the despoiled state of the environment, were of no consideration. Later waves of connected innovations changed the use of energy technologies used in the production, transport and military systems. The changes in the natural sciences of which Capra has written so graphically ran in parallel as in integrated part of this process.
Imagining that these historical process can be turned back merely by schools of ecological literacy is naive. Capra writes about how humans are the only species which will kill for "abstract ideas". However "abstract ideas" articulate, hold together and are rooted in these dense patterns of inter relationships and are like lighthouses - points of orientation. Letting them go can be very frightening - as he himself acknowledges several times. He shows how physicists schooled in the classical physics of Newton were shocked by the discoveries of Heisenberg and Einstein. It was as if "the ground would be cut from under science" according to Heisenberg. But there is more than a problem of disorientation - the orientation systems serve social structures where powerful vested interests are at stake. Heisenberg and Einstein had it easy compared to Copernicus. If the world did go round the sun then this discredited the catholic church which was one of the most powerful institutions of the day because the catholic church said and believed otherwise. This was far more shocking!
Capra lacks a dynamic systems analysis of the way in which human society has evolved. Most seriously he lacks a view of how social stratifications between powerful, less powerful and powerless social groupings have evolved over time. Since the beginning of civilisations, for perhaps 7,000 years there has been a growing inequality/differentiation in the social/ economic/`political process - because of a variety of "runaway feedback loops". And these also feed back multiple effects into human consciousness evolution considered in its collective dimensions as well as in all the other dimensions of Gaia.
Micro- trends in Gaia - conflicts and complexity inside human consciousness
Therapists regularly use the phrase that people are "out of touch with their feelings". Being out of touch with feelings occurs when we cease to be aware of the broader pattern of body feelings and emotions in which our 'word stream thought processes' are embedded. Being out of touch with one's feelings occurs routinely in power stratified societies.
Capra, Manturana and Varela are aware that every human conversation is not only exchanges of words. The words emerge out of the deeper structures and processes that he elaborates from bacteria, to bees, through to chimpanzees and then to humans. "In a human conversation, our inner world of concepts and ideas, our emotions, and our body movements become tightly linked in a complex choreography of behavioural co-ordination. Film analyses have shown that every conversation involves a subtle and largely unconscious dance in which the detailed sequence of speech patterns is precisely synchronised not only with minute movements of the speaker's body but also with corresponding movements of the listener." (p. 282)
The problem is that feelings and emotions do not fit neatly into power stratified system. If you show your anger to the boss you are likely to get sacked. If you respond to fear on the battlefield by running away the discipline in the ranks will have collapsed. If you respond to boredom by doing something else on the factory floor the production line will stop. No horse likes to be ridden by humans - they are "broken". But feelings may remain inside the body - for example anger may remain as an arousal state that is "bottled up". If the boss has wound you up the anger may be discharged somewhere else - for example it may be discharged at home. The anger state effects the way in which other words and situations are interpreted at home so that an innocuous remark or a very mild confrontational remark may explode in a furious response. The displaced fury, separated from the place it was generated, may drive perceptions and thought processes in another place so that other situations are interpreted as challenges and lead to explosions. These processes may become systematised - in which cases scapegoating is occurring. The frustrations of a crazy civilisation were projected into the sadistic scapegoating of colonial peoples (racism) and those vulnerable people whose lives and minds had disintegrated in the metropolitan centres. (The "undeserving poor" and the insane).
Thoughts and feelings may end up mismatched in other ways as well. In order not to show vulnerability in front of those lower in the status hierarchy "superior people" tend to suppress the display of vulnerable feeling. This would be risky as it would signal weakness. The British colonialists were therefore always "stiff upper lip". But all warlord aristocracies are essentially protection rackets. The victimisation and exploitation of weak and vulnerable people becomes institutionalised. They have to be "protected" because they are weak. Who from? From other protection rackets.(The warlord aristocracy of other states. In their decadent phases the aristocracies of such societies typically hire mercenaries and may take a back seat in the fighting.)
Patriarchy
This way of thinking and relating is frequently found in the relationships between men and women. Men in highly patriarchal societies do not think of themselves as dominating women they think of themselves as protecting them. Women's greater tendency to express feelings and emotions which arise because they are vulnerable to male dictats are seen as those very feature of femaleness that justifies their protection. This protection is really subordination. The irony that partly keeps this whole thing going is that many women then transfer/displace their feelings about it all onto their male children. Because men "are supposed to be hard" mothers have an ideal opportunity to offload bad feelings onto their sons, or deny them sympathy, and affection. The little boys grow up resenting women and whole cycle is kept going).
Other complex patterns emerge. Individuals grow up with the idea that they should and do love their parents and associate the word "love" with the terrified awe and obedience they feel for these bullying giants. This creates the right psychological structure for intimidated populations who are mobilised to serve tyrants. These rulers and powerful people want reassurance - they want to be celebrated, loved and admired - even though they are ruthless interfering tyrants.Populations then oblige these megalomaniacs and parrot praise for the power structures and individuals who are bullying them - populations really did "love" Hitler and Stalin in the sense described here. Love as an empathy, a compassionate protective feeling, love as intimate tenderness, as closeness, comes to mean surrending one's will, "falling for" macho tyrants who are celebrated for their strength of will. People come to be "out of touch" with their feelings".
Out of touch here means just what it says. Touch is the first sense to develop and as babies it is primarily though our tactile experience that we first make sense of the world, long before we speak. The loving touch of parents is essential to psychological growth but in our own society industrialisation and professionalisation of child rearing has led to a decline of direct contact. There are stone age societies where contact with babies and infants is far more intense.. Jean Liedloff in her book "The Continuum Concept" describes the Stone Age Yeaquana Indians in the Venezuelan jungle. Babies and infants are always in contact with adults and sleep with parents.They do not lack protective tactile contact as in our society. The result is a differently evolved psychological structure. Liedloff suggests that the absence of touch in our childhoods, an absence of protective reassurance is a sensory deprivation which creates pervasive anxiety and neurosis in later life.
In Yeaquana society relations between people are regulated to minimise tensions and produce pleasurable social interaction. The expression of emotion is integrated into relationships in a non-coercive fashion. This allows for a high degree of autonomy to individuals as people do not have to repress any feelings. People are active together in a convivial sociability and work to enjoy the performing of joint tasks. Yeaquana adults can cry without shame whereas in our own culture, the urge to cry as an adult is usually repressed. Unlike the chimpanzee Lucy, quoted by Capra as speaking freely about its feelings of distress most adults in power civilisation have gone backwards in evolutionary terms. This is accounted for by the fact that crying reveals vulnerability - and in a power society vulnerability is exploited, it can be attacked or is at least regarded as weakness where weakness is not something you want to show.
In other conditions other Stone Age societies evolved differently from the Yeaquana. The Eipo in New Guinea are a society of extremely aggressive warriors living in a fiercely inwardly looking society that defines all outsiders as inferiors. A quarter of all males die violent deaths in wars and aggression that are sparked at the smallest real or imagined provocation. Societies like the Eipo demonstrate what can be seen everywhere in our own, namely that the potential for anger and aggression found in humans, and in other animals, can evolve in particular circumstances into the central basis for social organisation It was presumably societies like the Eipo that came to dominate societies like that of the Yeaquana and, in the process, civilisation came into existence.
The point here is that the structural interrelationship between language and emotions may vary a very great deal between different cultures, forming quite different psychological structures. One of the most worrying tendencies in the modern world (to my point of view/in the world I have brought forth) is that the dynamics of the power system in human society are tending to wither the influence and possibilities for compassion as an effective influence in collective and mass living. Humans frequently lose awareness of (particular) emotional states and are unable to communicate them. The direct communication of feeling is usually allowed only to babies, and to a lesser degree children, lest power structures are threatened.
Character Armouring
This severely reduces the "cognitive range" for humans in the sense meant by Capra, Varela and Manturana. In early infancy there is no gap between feeling, emotion and its expression. If the baby feels hunger, discomfort or fear it expresses it immediately - the tears, the cry and the muscles of the crying face, the sobbing brething or the sucking in of air are all one. Anger to is also expressed directly as tantrums. But when we are subjected to the will and discipline of parents and other giants - learning about power - we may learn to repress emotional expression. We may be told it is "bad" to be angry so we try to hold it back. Other feelings may also be held back and this becomes part of our ordinary reality. Then we cease to be aware that we are using effort to "hold" our emotions. In holding our emotions we immobilise and limit our breathing. We hold our feelings in particular parts of our bodies and its muscular systems. Our blocked feelings then have typical postural manifestations which are described in phrases like "weak kneed", "lacking backbone/spineless", "stiff necked", "twisted". This quite literally means the energy flow between different sections of the body is limited. In his book "Bioenergetics" Alexander Lowen argues that the typical posture of the "schizoid" personality is twisted and unintegrated. Typically the body structure has angulations that do not flow together - the head and neck, the trunk and the rest of the body do not line up. The trunk is angled in the opposite direction to head and neck, the legs are angled in another direction to the trunk. The body does not flow together under the force of gravity and a great deal of energy is used just staying upright. Since the person is his or her body the splitting at the personality level exists also at the body level.
Many adults may be described as less conscious than chimps like Lucy who can language that she is crying. Their cognitive domain in the non-semantic realm is shrunken and distorted and may stand in bizarre relationships to the somatic level. Considered in evolutionary terms, it means we are suffering from a form of collective insanity and most people never develop the basis for a full self awareness. Melanie Klein was the first person to notice that infants go through a phase akin to psychosis and this is probably when they discover with horror and terror that their feelings do not count in the world of the speaking giants. They are being "socialised" into a power society and get smacked when they enjoy their bodies.
Psychiatry - another self reinforcing loop sustaining/generating inequality
When Capra writes abour language and feeling he is in the realm studied by psychotherapy and psychiatry. Indeed he is critically sympathetic to the ideas of Gregory Bateson and also quotes the psychiatrist R D Laing who was much influenced by Bateson. However he has not gone into psychotherapy ideas in depth and "The Web of Life" is limited by this.
In fact ideas like these throw grave doubt over the relevance of much medical psychiatric thinking. The idea of self organisation can be adapted to explain psychiatric breakdowns. Adults are involved in the self organisation of the pattern of their lives, co-ordinating the interrelated management of their relationships, their habitats and their economic arrangements. As with any other organism with a pattern of self organisation the pattern of responses available to the individual is dependent on his or her previous history. A psychological crisis occurs when an inadequate previously learned self management pattern is confronted with a set of challenges or blocks on the normal pattern of growth and renewal for which it has no prior learned responses. If the challenge is not too large then this situation may be experienced as perhaps being unpleasantly stressful (frightening and or frustrating). Or it may even perhaps be experienced as an exhilarating or exciting challenge which is an opportunity for new life ( what humanist psychologists might 'psychological growth'). However if the challenge is too large the person breaks down. The breakdown is not only a psychological process it is the inability any longer to co-ordinate a pattern of habitat/relationships/economic arrangements. Practical arrangments for washing, eating, sleeping and relationships break up as the mental state disintegrates. It is the structural disrelationship between the repertoire of learned (coping) responses and the environment together that creates the breakdown. Not surprisingly this will typically occur at points of major transition in life - like separating from the parental home.
Within this theory human power relationships are likely again to play a major role. If you have a lot of money, for example, you may be able to buy your way out of many problems but less so if you are poor. If you have a highly authoritarian upbringing it will effect your flexibility in response to crises later in life. The regimented child, for example, may not have a sufficient independence (i.e. has not learned a sufficiently large repertoire of autonomous responses) from its previous experiences to live independently. It has been, so to speak, been "institutionalised by its own family". Many of the features of breakdown are not understandable to the powerful people in the lives of the broken down person because they might not want to acknowledge their part in creating that breakdown. The jittery, flustered, untogether behaviours of "the patient" is not seen as a result of their inability to break away from nagging overinvolved relatives.
The thinking of Capra, Maturana and Varela is very helpful in understanding specific features of craziness. Madness is typically accompanied by what psychologists call "regression" - reliving in the body of an adult a memory of infantile thoughts and feelings. This fits very neatly the Capra/Varela/ Maturana view. In the crisis the human organism is "reviewing" its record of responses in the search for a new pattern - the review process is a replay of "organismic memories" or regression. As I have argued elsewhere much psychotic behaviour is in fact play behaviour. Animals not only respond to environments - in the early stages of their life they may "anticipate" the responses they may be required to make when they are themselves fully developed. Play is based on absorption of the social and cultural environment and fantasy responses to possible future challenges. ( It is not, of course, that when I played cowboys and indians that I was preparing to be a cowboy - more that I was absorbing and trying to prepare for fighting and warfare. It seemed when I was a child that to grow up meant inevitably going to war. All males had to, it seemed. )
The human organism in its life crisis, looking for an adequate range of new responses, may "act out" fantasy scenarios in an exploratory fashion to aid its reorganisation. When psychiatry intervenes biochemically in this process, defining the process as "incurable genetically based illness" it can block or freeze the natural transformation process. It thereby turns acute crises into chronic problems. This may be one reason why, in the Third World, where the "mental health services" are not so developed as in the First World, recovery rates after a first breakdown are much better. ( For a fuller analysis of Madness see my "Meaning, Madness and Recovery" in Clinical Psychology Forum May 1997. Here I am only sketching an explanation for some features. The others are also relatively easy to explain. We should, of course, be aware that a human being in a crisis of the kind may attempt to re-organise his or her psyche in a way that is dangerous to everyone else - if their previous history is one where the use of violence can seem to be a way out of the crisis)
Capra follows two computer scientists Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores who point out in their book "Understanding Computers and Cognition" that "rational thought" - i.e. word bound thoughts "filters out most of the cognitive spectrum" in humans. Although our thoughts are always coloured by emotions, and embedded in body sensations and processes this filtering out of the rest of the cognitive spectrum can create "blindness of abstraction". Instead of a "world brought forth" "particular patterns of words are brought forth" .
However feelings may be brought forth for which no words can be found - confused incoherent rage at domineering parents is difficult to explain when you have always lived with them and when it oscillates with fear of independence because they have always decided for you. Feelings can be generated in situations where no coherent word stream can be brought forth to explain what is going on, or only inarticulate and confused words. Then we have "madness". Hitherto society's arrangements to cope with madness has allowed many people to earn a very good living from those who could find no words to explain and match their feelings and thoughts. Psychiatrists and nurses and drug company earn money which allows them to feed and clothe and house themselves - i.e. maintain their self organisation and a flow of energy and materials through their own biological structures by rendering chronic the problems in other people's lives. Here again there is a self reinforcing feedback in the loops generating inequality.
Capra follows Maturana in scorning "the currently fashionable attempts to explain human consciousness in terms of quantum effects in the brain or other neurophysiological processes". These are "bound to fail" as the unfolding of our inner world of concepts and ideas are "innaccessible to explanations in terms of physics and chemistry; they cannot even be understood through the biology or psychology of a single organism." This is because we can understand human consciousness only through language and the social context in which it is embedded. Within this framework it is however possible to argue that "each cognitive experience is based on a specific cell assembly in which many different neural activities - associated with sensory perception, emotions, memory, bodily movements etc. - are unified into a transcient but coherent ensemble of oscillating neurons. The fact that neural circuits tend to oscillate rhythmically is well known to neuroscientists, and recent research has shown that these oscillations are not restricted to the cerebral cortex but occur at various levels in the nervous system" (p 284-5) (My added emphases).
In conclusion
Capra is a natural scientist criticising other scientists for their reductionist approach. However in his own approach he can be criticised to a degree for biological reductionism as he has not absorbed and synthesised the implications of evolving human social systems. (As I also said he cannot be expected to know everything - as has been pointed out to me I have not read Chomsky on these questions which might further amend my view. His idea that languaging is innate to humans suggests that our brain has co-evolved with our languaging abilities). However Capra's knowledge gap does, in my view, weakens his grasp of human cognition and it weakens his approach as to what to do about the ecological crisis.
The author of a book called the "Tao of Physics" seems not to have noticed enough that the "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu, as well as later Taoist classics, are principally writings about the way human power relationships warp our integration in the process of nature. The structural relationship to the world of academics like Capra is that they earn their bread and shelter by writing for and lecturing to willing audiences. This activity has a role to play in transforming the "knowing together" but only for a tiny portion of humanity. Mass "knowing together" cannot be transformed in this way. Mass consciousness arises out of the day to day relationships formed in earning a living and in reproduction- or if you like maintaining food, drink and shelter for one's dissipative structure inside a social network of relationships, inside a habitat. This means that the intellectual tasks must be at the service of practical transformation in relationships between people as they make their living and their habitats together. These new production and reproduction relationships patterns cannot be "built" in the manner envisaged by Marx to blueprint or prior plan. We do not have the resources (purchasing power) to assemble resouces for a new society on a sufficient scale and in any case to try to "build an ecological society" is to miss the point. We must grow it starting from small networked activities which bring people together in convivial social activities to transform their local environments using the new decentralised technologies and design systems devised by green thinkers.(Permaculture, forest gardening, renewable energy technologies, ecological architecture, new ways of working with water and so on). This must happen principally through habitat renewal and in our domestic and neighbourhoods it is possible to redevelop our relationships, our emotional life and conviviality. The emphasis on emotional life is most important because power society creates dynamics which run counter to the feelings of countless millions of people. Recreating a society in which the feelings and emotions of people are again a part of their consciousness is the same as reconnecting with Nature Within. Working to bring out and realise those emotional needs not met, and/or repressed in our society is an integral part of creating responses that are in every sense felt to be superior to what the market society can offer.
This cannot be done without challenging much current psychiatric thinking. In the past psychiatry has always been on the side of the powerful. It invented a psychiatric diagnosis for slaves that tried to run away, it upheld and argued for the murder of psychiatric patients in Hitlers death camps, it colluded and helped the Stalinist dictatorship, it currently(in the USA) seeks funds to prove a genetic basis for the desperate acts of people caught in urban areas in indutrial and economic decline. It functions to push pills to tranquilise the misery of the wretched of the earth thereby coining this misery into yet more profits for the chemical industries.
The growth of a green society must involve the conscious re-integration of the wretched of the earth (as black psychiatrist Franz Fanon called them.) Social groups currently being expelled from an insanely competitive society can be helped to take the initiative to use their unutilised time to reduce dependencies on oil based agricultures, energy guzzling homes, chemical intensive clothing, tranquiliser stabilised minds - finding a place and creating environments that protect other threatened species. Such project activities cannot, and will not be able to, compete on price, packaging and "convenience" against the supermarket economy. But their starting points and motives are different. People would benefit from their own labour in a package with gives enjoyable community activities, chances for self fulfillment and expression of creativities while participants improve their living environment and improve their emotional relationships. The organisations and social networks thus created may provide the basis for more formal economic initiatives later.
For this to occur there is a need for supporting frameworks. This means places where resources are pooled for community use - centres with ideas, tools and workshop space, office equipment and computers, media equipment, advise and counselling, small grants for seed money. Examples of such services exist and should be generalised. There needs to be land to work on - but there is plenty of derelict land. There needs to be labour market policies which do not discourage these new beginnings. In summary this means developing some pooled access to means of production in the fields of home making, small scale cultivation, food preparation, community care, fibres and clothing, media and comunications and freeing up people's ability to develop a vernacular economy embodying ecological technologies, local exchange and mutual aid.
Brian Davey
Nottingham April 1997
© BRIAN DAVEY