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Literary Review
Making the hidden connections
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In The Hidden Connections Capra argues that life's basic construct is that of a network, not a machine, says S. RAMACHANDER.
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THE sub-title of this book is long but fully deserved, as we shall see presently. Written by a physicist (author of Tao of Physics) renowned for his wide-ranging sympathies for the mystic and religious elements in life, it displays his own transition from mere outsider's curiosity to a scientific interest in the world's religions and spirituality to a progressive understanding of the subtle inter-connections between life and thought, brain and consciousness. Someone once described the difference between the social and the physical sciences as the gap between the way we humans live and what we know of the world. Capra has lived through and managed to bridge this gap.
A familiar generalisation of drawing room conversation is that the Western mind is given to a linear, atomistic and analytical approach, while the oriental mind thinks in loops and circles. The latter thus manages to maintain a wholeness of perception, with synthesis. This is said to lead to an inclusive and compassionate view of life, which extends beyond the sphere of religious belief. Like all generalisations, this too is only sometimes true, and there are significant exceptions on either side of Rudyard Kipling's great divide. This book is an excellent instance of it. Capra's method of enquiry is eclectic and not exclusive, one most suited to an integrated understanding of phenomena, over the past 25 years — a style that "relies heavily on dialogues and discussions" amongst small groups of friends similarly inclined. It is very different from the image we have of the secluded scientist at his experimental desk. And the resulting smorgasbord is a rich treat, an interweaving of cross-disciplinary knowledge and insight starting from the nature of life, its structure and processes, to a meditation on the self-generating network as the ultimate paradigm of living beings and social organisation. Finally an activist note is struck, a rousing defence of a sustainable, nature-friendly, alternative to the current model of the industrial, mass market, global capitalism. His thesis is lucidly explained at the outset. The core idea of the book is profound — that the design principles to follow in framing any human institution must be consistent with the principles of organisation in nature evolved through millennia, to sustain a web of life.
While some of us might find this intuitively obvious, it is significant to reflect on the fact that such an understanding would not have been possible but for the development for the first time, in the 1980s of a branch of mathematics and science that explored non-linear reality and complexity, which is a more accurate representation of the universe than what earlier theories had done. Most important of all, a school of thought suddenly found that the basic frameworks or ways of looking in widely separated branches of learning such as sociology, biology, ecology and physics, were in fact converging. This represents a conceptual watershed, and explains the origins of this work.
Since the 1960s a new age generation had grown up in the world that straddled this so-called division between cultures. It was evident during the Ravi Shankar-Maharishi phase, the Beatles, the Flower People and the New Age writers. A less known predecessor of this unique blend was Aldous Huxley who compiled an excellent anthology under the evocative title of The Perennial Philosophy, some 50 years ago. Since then famous scientists such as David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake and Fritjof Capra have shared their research-based intimations of a deep, underlying unity in all creation. Bohm's implicate order underlying all creation of which even consciousness itself is an explicated version, and Sheldrake's morphic resonance which explains the instantaneous transmission of knowledge across species, as well as the holographic principle of the brain's working as formulated by Karl Pribram — all were mind blowing ideas when they first arrived. They carried echoes of "something far more deeply interfused" that pervades all living beings, celebrated the Romantic poets. This book title reflects the culmination of such an approach, bringing together in one sweeping, unifying view the biological, sociological, cultural and the environmental aspects of life. It also proves that such a synthesis alone can rid the sustainable development movement of its sentimental or purely subjective overtones, and give it a strong, scientific and human basis.
The starting point of the book may well be that at its most fundamental level the cell is a self-sustaining, growing, evolving system and not a linear process from input to output. Life's basic construct is that of a network, not a machine. Nature as Capra wryly observes knows neither success nor failure because it has no ego-driven intent, nor indeed competitiveness, only humans do — and impute the way they live and think to nature as well. All living systems have a way of mutually feeding off each other. In nature there is no net waste product unlike in the industrial system. One system's waste is the input of another. Nature has neither purpose nor design in the sense in which the human mind uses these words. Yet it has a great beauty and symmetry and an abiding sense of integrity its own, which the poor mortal mind can but try to approximately understand. Non-linear characteristics of living systems can never be captured by mathematical equations alone nor are they totally predictable or controllable in the sense in which the classical physicists would have liked it to be. It can only be captured in the probabilistic approach of post-quantum physics and philosophy, which allows for a discussion of the observer and his consciousness as a part of what he is observing. Metaphors and myths serve to record and pass on to succeeding generations some part of the mystery that life is. And yet, it can never be understood by mere knowledge, or logical explanation, which is the only instrument of thought that we know. So we need a different sort of looking that is all encompassing, and therefore a different kind of educating the young. The purpose of such education in the words of Vaclav Havel which inspired the book's title is the "ability to perceive the hidden connections between phenomena".
The network as the very basic pattern of organisation in all living systems extends all the way "from the metabolic networks of cells to the food webs of the ecosystems". The components and processes are interlinked. Extending this understanding to the social domain means seeing organisations as live social systems in much the same manner. Here we find a deep resonance with the works of thoughtful management philosophers such as Chris Argyris, Charles Handy, Peter Senge and Arie de Geus, all of whom have deliberately and openly distanced themselves from the mechanical paradigms of management thought to the learning, living organisation. Here Capra also acknowledges his intellectual debt to many others, notably Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana. From a consideration of organisations as living systems Capra moves on to the entire human community. He is obviously inspired by the Seattle coalition of NGOs who have tried to formulate an alternative to the mindless adoption of resource-draining route of industrial and market-led globalisation. Driven by ever accelerating information technology and the greed of the affluent, this process is leading inexorably to an enfeeblement of the weak and alienation of the poor. The poor countries can no longer have an agenda of their own except what is in their best interests as interpreted by the Western capitalist system. The picture he paints of the global casino of financial markets is very real, and when contemplated, truly frightening. Trillions of dollars cross shores of continents everyday, at the flick of a mouse key and people are enriched or impoverished according to an imperfect logic of market information and risk perception. Underlying this is a philosophy that puts money, as a tool to making more money, as more important to man than human rights, environmental protection, democracy or any other value. In an increasingly unipolar world politically, his words (written before the Iraq conflict) are ominous. "The US projects its tremendous power around the world... to make sure that it has global access to natural resources and that markets ... remain open to its products... the central goal of its vast empire." However he does not give up hope that something can be done even now, despite all indications to the contrary, quoting Vandana Shiva that life has its own ways of not becoming extinct. He goes on to argue passionately, and with scientific basis, that increasing resource productivity and reducing pollution can also increase employment opportunities and revitalise local communities thus supporting human diversity, against the onrushing tide of the American monoculture. The author eloquently describes how the deeply fulfilling pleasures in life (meeting friends and relations, playing with children, and protecting wilderness) do not call for resource-depleting consumption. So the assumption that to consume more is to be happier is a pathetic fallacy. Just as much as it is a fallacy, in the words of J. Krishnamurti, to think that life is a problem to be solved — instead of a mystery to be lived.
The Hidden Connections: Integrating the Biological Cognitive and Social Dimensions of Life into a Science of Sustainability, Fritjof Capra, Doubleday, 2002, p.300, Rs. 750.
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