Fritjof Capra's worldview

Burton Guttman's analysis of Fritjof Capra's worldview (July/August 2005) awakened old memories. About 1977, Capra was a guest speaker on the campus where I was a faculty member. He had been invited (and paid well) to discuss his macaronic theological opus, The Tao of Physics. What he really wanted to talk about, though, was his new devotion to traditional Chinese medicine. Being a young, healthy man at the time, Capra had found that his tar ch'i teacher could fulfill all his medical needs. He was voluble on the subject, and finally made the flat statement, "Modern medicine never cured anybody of anything."

I happened to be on the panel that was to discuss his talk, and I couldn't let that pass. At the time, the worldwide smallpox-eradication program was nearing its conclusion. There was only one small focus of smallpox left, somewhere in Somalia, and that was eradicated soon afterward. So I said, "The human race has plenty of things to be ashamed of, but if there is one thing it can be proud of, it is the eradication of the horrible scourge of smallpox."

With a straight face, Capra replied, "Modern medicine has had nothing to do with that."

My jaw dropped. I asked, "How do you explain the fact that smallpox is about to disappear from the face of the earth?"

"Oh," said Capra, "it's just been going away by itself."

Needless to say, I never again felt the need to take seriously anything Capra had to say.

Lawrence S. Lerner

Professor Emeritus

College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

California State University

Long Beach, California

Burton S. Guttman rightly points out the sloppiness of Fritjof Capra's thinking and the shallowness of his knowledge. However, he's a little too quick to ridicule General Systems Theory. In fact, General Systems Theory is yet another branch of knowledge that Capra knows little about.

General Systems Theory is a small but respectable interdisciplinary school of thought that flourished between about 1940 and 1980. Although its adherents included mathematicians, philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists, its main contributions were probably to cybernetics and advanced modeling techniques.

Where Capra goes wrong is in seeing General Systems Theory as a replacement for reductionism in every circumstance. Although it is hard to generalize about a large group of diverse thinkers, major figures in the school such as Gregory Bateson did not see their work as replacing reductionism but as supplementing it. In particular, they thought it self-evident that reductionism, although obviously successful in the hard sciences, was often not very useful in the social sciences.

As he does with almost every thought he stumbles across, Capra overextends, oversimplifies, and over-mysticizes General Systems Theory and makes it something far removed from what it originally was: a critique of science made mostly by working scientists.

Bruce Byfield

http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield

COPYRIGHT 2005 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group