A holistic or ecological worldview of reality

This is an excellent summary of a new scientific paradigm and a challenging new social worldview that is gaining acceptance in the twenty-first century. Even as there was nothing inevitable about the mechanistic paradigm of science, there is nothing inevitable about the survival and contribution to the evolution of human civilization of this new paradigm. It makes sense to me, however, and informs my writings about ethics and consciousness, as well as my self-understanding and interpretation of near-death experiences. So I am sharing it on this blog.

Physicist Fritjof Capra writes: “What we are seeing today is a shift of paradigms not only within science but also in the larger social arena. To analyze that cultural transformation, I have generalized Kuhn’s account of a scientific paradigm to that of a social paradigm, which I define as ‘a constellation of concepts, values, perceptions, and practices shared by a community, which form a particular vision of reality that is the basis of the way the community organizes itself.’

“The social paradigm now receding has dominated our culture for several hundred years, during which it has shaped our modern Western society and has significantly influenced the rest of the world. This paradigm consists of a number of ideas and values, among them the view of the universe as a mechanical system composed of elementary building blocks, the view of the human body as a machine, the view of life in a society as a competitive struggle for existence, the belief in unlimited material progress to be achieved through economic and technological growth and—last but not least—the belief that a society, in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male, is one that follows from some basic law of nature. During recent decades all of these assumptions have been found severely limited and in need of radical revision.

“Indeed, such a revision is now taking place. The emerging new paradigm may be called a holistic, or an ecological, worldview, using the term ecological here in a much broader and deeper sense than it is commonly used. Ecological awareness, in that deep sense, recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and societies in the cyclical processes of nature.

“Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, which is the root meaning of the word religion (from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind strongly’), it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the emerging new vision of reality, based on deep ecological awareness, is consistent with the ‘perennial philosophy’ of spiritual traditions, for example, that of Eastern spiritual traditions, the spirituality of Christian mystics, or with the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American traditions.

Fritjof Capra, “Systems Theory and the New Paradigm” in Carolyn Merchant, editor, Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory (Humanities Press, 1994), 334-341.