Fritjof Capra’s Systems View of Life
By: Daniel Christian Wahl
Tags: Systems Thinking, Regeneration, Sustainability, Education, Science

Fritjof Capra’s Systems View of Life

A Conversation between Fritjof Capra and Daniel Wahl (Transcript Part I — still unedited)

Daniel:

Hello, Fritjof. You have, thank you so much for making time. I’ve been looking forward to this all day, for me this is a really special moment.

Fritjof:

Oh wonderful, yeah. Hello, Daniel. It’s really nice to talk to you again. We’ve had some stimulating conversations in the past, both personally, and on video. So, I really look forward to that.

Daniel:

Great. So, I’ve prepared a couple of questions for you, and I always like to give people an opportunity to start a little bit from their story. Your story is so fascinating, because you started your professional career very successfully as a research physicist.

Fritjof:

Right.

Daniel:

Worked in a number of really well renowned institutions as a physicist. Then, somehow something happened that made you look at life as a planetary process, and ecology, and biology in much more detail. So, I would love for you to take us on a journey, to tell what made that change.

Fritjof:

It’s actually a long journey and I have to try and summarize it and it all began in the 1960s. This was a period in which I experienced a profound personal transformation. These were my formative years, I was in my 20s. I graduated in physics at the University of Vienna and in 65, and then had my first postdoc appointments. I was very much influenced by the cultural movements of the 1960s and looking back now, I can say that there were two main cultural movements. Both of them had to do with an expansion of consciousness, an expansion of consciousness in two different directions. Into the spiritual dimension of consciousness and into the social dimension. So, in the spiritual dimension, you had a very strong interest in meditation, in Eastern spirituality, in indigenous spirituality. With the books of Castaneda for example, and this was supported by the arts, by music, by literature.

Fritjof:

There was this famous book, a Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, the magic realism. That was really very characteristic of the 60s and of course there was experimentation with psychedelics. So, all of that combined to a very strong expansion of consciousness into the spiritual domain. Then, there was the social consciousness, raising as it was called in those days. That I see essentially as a very broad questioning of authority. So, we had the civil rights movement in the United States, questioning the authority of whites over blacks. We had the women’s movement questioning patriarchal authority, the student movements questioning the authority of teachers and university administrators, the Prague Spring and the Dubcek, questioning the authority of the Soviet regime. Again, this was supported by the arts, the films of Antonioni Fellini, Korda and so on. Theater played a big role, the living theater, for example. So, I was very much influenced by all that and in the 1970s, I first went into the spiritual dimension in my work. Exploring parallels between modern physics and Eastern spirituality. In my first book, The Tao of Physics published in 1975.

Fritjof:

Then, I went into the social and ecological direction with my second book the Turning Point published in 1982. Where I explored this paradigm shift that had happened in physics from a mechanistic worldview to a holistic or ecological view. I explored it in various areas and examined various issues such as, health care management, the economy, psychology, and psychotherapy, and so on. Sometime, between the late 70s and early 80s, I realized that all these problems had to do with life. Actually, I realized that under the influence of Gregory Bateson, with whom I spent a lot of time in 1980, 81, 82. So, I realized the role-

Daniel:

Sorry, was that all that Esalen?

Fritjof:

Yes, he lived at Esalen and I also went there to give seminars. So, I had long discussions with Bateson. So, I realized that these issues all had to do with living systems, with individual organisms, social systems and ecosystems. So, my focus shifted from physics to the life sciences, because physics, although it’s relevant, but it really can’t tell you anything about the essential nature of life. So that’s, what I became interested in and then for the next 30 years, I put together a synthesis of an emerging new conception of life. In terms of networks, in terms of patterns, in terms of relationships and already in my book, the Turning Point, I called this, The Systems View of Life. At the end of this trajectory, is a textbook that I wrote with my friend and colleague Pier Luigi Luisi a biochemist at the University of Rome, and we called it The Systems View of Life. This is for me, my grand synthesis of this new conception of life, which integrates four dimensions of life. The biological dimension, obviously, but also the cognitive dimension, the social dimension and the ecological dimension.

Fritjof:

So that’s, a long trajectory from the 60s, when I got my inspiration, to the 1970s, when some conceptual framework began to emerge. To the 80s, where I got involved in green politics and just went on and on

Daniel:

Having really lived so intimately with some of the pioneers as well. You know so many of the early actors in the environmental movement, who really raised awareness about the global situation and these converging crises, as you’ve called them yourself Because, what you just said, that in the 1960s, and even early 1970s. This social change and environmental change movement was very much also accompanied by cultural change. By the arts theater, music, all of that, right now, there seems to be another upsurge of issues or like that. But, we still haven’t reached that broad social movement, that includes the arts and culture enough. Having already lived through it 50 years ago, are you hopeful that this time around we see it-

Fritjof:

Well Daniel, looking back, I feel now that social change, of course does not happen smoothly. It’s not a broad trajectory toward a different society, different economics, different culture. I came to see it more like a pendulum, but not irregular pendulum, a chaotic pendulum. This is something we studied in chaos theory, this is a pendulum that is highly irregular, unpredictable, and goes back and forth, but never in the same way. So, we had the early inspiration, the change of awareness in the 1960s and 1970s. We had the political manifestation in green politics and in the 1980s. I believed towards the end of the 1980s, that we were now ready to embrace this new vision of reality, and embody it politically, and really change the world. Well, what happened then was something totally unforeseen, which nobody had predicted and that was the information technology revolution. Which led among many other things to a new materialism really and of course a new global economy. Which was and is dominated by corporations, and brought with it materialism, and greed, very much the opposite of the values we had developed in the 60s, and 70s.

Fritjof:

It took us a whole decade, the decade of the 90s, to really deal with that. Because globalization, that was the umbrella term. It’s not only economic globalization, corporate economic globalization, but also cultural globalization. You and I today, and even more so younger people live in a networked world, in a globally networked world. So, we were very excited about that, but the shadow side is the corporate economy. Which is, geared toward exploitation and toward shifting wealth as the occupy movements at the 99% to, to the 1%. So in 1999, there was the meeting of the WTO, The World Trade Organization in Seattle. Where a new global civil society emerged and so now we have two main forces. We have the corporate world, the corporate economy, and we have the global civil society, and they are on a collision course. The crisis, that I described and foresaw in the Turning Point in the late 70s, has now intensified. Of course, it has been exacerbated by climate change, really climate breakdown. Which we also foresaw, I wrote about climate change or global warming as it was called then in 1988.

Fritjof:

So that’s, a long time ago and of course we could have alleviated it much easier than we can now. So, there is a sharp crisis. Well, am I hopeful? I am hopeful, yes. But in a particular sense, I have been very much inspired by what’s Vaclav Havel. I met Havel in 1997, when he invited me to a symposium called forum 2000 and I’ve been very much inspired by something he wrote when he was a dissident and was actually in prison. It is a meditation on hope where Havel sees hope, as he says, “As a dimension of the soul and not as the result of an assessment of the situation in the world.” Let me read to you what he writes, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” So, I’ve tried to live like that, I’ve been very inspired by that.

Daniel:

Yeah, no, that’s so true. It really rings true. You rightly spoke to the many faceted dimensions of that globalization process that year liberal globalization that took hold of us in the 1990s. One of them is a globalization or colonization of the mind, which has been going on for a long time. We need to re educate and begin to see the world from a Systems View of Life. There’s still so few institutions in the world that actually really focus on that education, that is now so needed. You co-founded the Center for Ecoliteracy and spent a long time actually looking at how do we start through education to create this mind shift. We first met at Schumacher College in 2001. I would love to take, to take this opportunity for you to say a little bit about you’ve had a relationship with Schumacher since the beginning. Because, in those days that was the only place you taught regularly.

Fritjof:

Yes.

Daniel:

Could you say a little bit more about what you appreciate about the college?

Fritjof:

First let me say that it is true, that systems thinking and the ecological values, the values of deep ecology, which are essentially spiritual values. All that is not in the mainstream however, it is very broadly embraced in the global civil society, which is very powerful. It has hundreds and hundreds of NGOs, with research institutes and centers of learning. Where this thinking is developed and practiced, and Schumacher College for the last 30, 40 years has been at the forefront. It is a very unique center of transformative learning, learning where you’re not only absorb ideas and information. But, where you’re really transformed in your very nature. As you know, it was founded by our friend and mentor Satish Kumar. Who thought, and I discussed this with him several times. That this transformative learning would best take place in community, in a locally rooted community, although rooted there only for a short time. But, he has been able to create a very strong sense of community, where people from all over the world take short courses of two or three weeks and not only learn together.

Fritjof:

But also, live together and work together, run the college in terms of cooking, cleaning, gardening, and so on. So, while they’re doing this, they talk, they talk around the clock. They discuss things in the lectures in the morning, and then they talk while they’re cutting vegetables, they’ll talk while they’re preparing rooms for special events. They end up late at night, talking in the bar, tasting Scottish single malt whiskey.

Daniel:

Edge of Chaos

Fritjof:

Yes.

Daniel:

That’s the name of the bar.

Fritjof:

So, this creates a very strong sense of community and in particular. In my courses, when the subject of learning is patterns of relationships, because that’s what systems thinking is all about. When you experience patterns of human relationships at the same time, that’s very powerful. So that’s, why I think Schumacher College is so unique.

Daniel:

Yes. I’m a testimony for it, because basically it was your work and to some extent, John and Macy’s work and John Seed’s work. That first made me aware of the college and that made me want to go there, because I’d found out that all three of you were occasionally teaching there. Then, being there for 18 months between 2001, 2003, really did exactly what you just described, it transformed my life.

Fritjof:

They have these longer courses also, the MSC programs. That’s what you took, right?

Daniel:

Yes, exactly. I was on the Masters in Holistic Science, the 4th year of it running, and then I stayed on as a helper, and part of the college community for another half year after the course.

Fritjof:

Yes.

Daniel:

But, since so much has moved on, even then I think Satish is absolutely right. The most transformative experiential embodied learning experience happens in community. Even the Buddha, you said that one of the columns of Buddhism is the Sangha, the community.

Fritjof:

Yes.

Daniel:

But now, these days, because we’re such a globally interconnected human community around the planet. Online learning is something that while at the beginning, we might’ve looked at it not as ideal and not as powerful as face to face learning. We’ve realized it can do wonderful things and you yourself have set up a wonderful online course. That I’ve also had the pleasure now to take twice already the Fritjof Capra Course.

Fritjof:

Yes.

Daniel:

I also think you have created a really nice schedule for it, but not only has it been a very well received course. You have grown it into a community of global graduates from that course. I find that really interesting, can you tell a little about that story?

Fritjof:

So, the subject of my course, which is called officially, The Systems View of Life, but for PR purposes, Capra Course. Because it’s easy to remember, and it has a website, capracourse.net. So, it is based on the textbook that I wrote with Luigi, the Four Dimensions of The Systems View of Life. Integrating the biological, the cognitive, the social and the ecological. It consists of 12 prerecorded lectures of about 40 minutes and they were recorded for some reason in Brazil. In the home of an architect, a beautiful living room with a very small group of participants. I can tell you, I don’t know whether you realize this watching the lectures. That this is really modeled after Schumacher College, because when you see people sitting on the floor and on couches in this intimate environment discussing things. That’s what I’ve done with people at Schumacher College for 20 years. So, I modeled my lectures after that and in addition to the lectures, there’s a discussion forum. `

Fritjof:

An online discussion forum, where people post comments and questions, and I participate in that during the whole course. So for 12 weeks, one lecture a week, I’m there every day for about half an hour to an hour answering questions. That has been a real experience for me because, although I don’t have the face to face contact with people that I have in a classroom. The conversations and the discussions are much more substantial because in a classroom, when you teach in a classroom and somebody asks you a question. You have to say something, you have to answer whether you know an answer or not, you have to say something. Online, that’s not true, I can go away and do some research, I can look at books, I can browse the internet, I can think about it. Usually, what I do in the morning when I brush my teeth during the course and shave. I check the questions first, when I get up and then I think about it and mild them over. Then, I go and discuss things with my students.

Fritjof:

So, as you mentioned, the course has now run for four years. We have 1300 more or less alumni around the world, I think in 70 countries now on all continents and even in the single course. The next course is starting on the 26th of February and I have these postcards. We have over a 100 registrations now for the 26th of February, from about 30 countries around the world, from all continents. So like a Schumacher College, it’s this multicultural, global community. We have so many alumni now, that we have alumni meetings on Zoom, like you and I have right now. But also, face to face because whenever I travel somewhere I meet alumni. Whether they go to Italy or to Austria, or to London or to Sweden, I have alumni meetings and I don’t need to be there. They have alumni meetings in Rio de Janeiro, and in Buenos Aires, and various places around the world. So, I’m really realizing my dream here to grow a global community, a global network of systemic thinkers and activists. It’s very fulfilling to me.

Daniel:

For me, this is so wonderful. I’m going to in a minute, stop this, and then we’d go into the second part. But, one thing that I learned from our common friend, Brian Goodwin, while at Schumacher College. Is that you can’t really predict and control complex dynamic systems. But, the one way of influencing emergence in a way that it is more likely to be positive properties, that emerge rather than negative ones. Is to pay attention to whose connected to whom in the system and the quality of the connections. Also, what information flows in the system and the quality of the information. What I hear you doing with this course, is actually building a network of global systems thinkers that are imbued and understand the systems view of life. Because, they had the privilege of learning directly from you and then engaging them with each other and so much beautiful things can happen from that.

Fritjof:

Yeah. Also, underlying it all is a system of shared values and a certain spiritual attitude, which is implicit. This is also something I learned from Satish Kumar at Schumacher College Satish, who is a spiritual teacher, does not push Jainism or Hinduism or any religion. He doesn’t even push meditation, when he comes to the college, as you will remember what he does, he goes to the kitchen and he cooks with students. So, it’s in fact, a Gandhian type of spirituality. So, in the Capra Course also, there is a very strong connection, which is an emotional and partly spiritual connection.

Daniel:

Yes, I completely agree. Actually Satish himself gave me this beautiful image of saying, “It doesn’t really matter.” The ecological view of life, the systems view of life and spirituality are really sides of the same coin. You can go into the door of spirituality and if you really go deep into our interbeing and interconnection with life, you ended up learning about ecology. The other option is you go in as a scientist, and you go deep into ecology, and the systemic interconnection, and a complex dynamic system that is constantly transforming. Suddenly you have insights that are deeply spiritual insights.

Fritjof:

Well, of course as a system’s thinker. I would say since everything is interconnected, it doesn’t matter where you start.

Daniel:

Okay, wonderful. Let’s stop here. And then we just immediately go for the next one.

Fritjof:

All right, thank you.

See also this summary with the link to the recording:

—

If you like the post, please clap AND remember that you can clap up to 50 times if you like it a lot ;-)!

Daniel Christian Wahl — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on regenerative whole systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development and bioregional regeneration.

Author of the internationally acclaimed book Designing Regenerative Cultures

Please consider becoming a Patron of my ongoing work:

https://www.patreon.com/DanielChristianWahl?fan_landing=true