Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Huff, Peter A. "The Current State of Unbelief" Quest 110:2, pg 20-24

By Peter A. Huff

Unbelief has no president, pope, or CEO. Many people speak as unbelievers, but no one speaks for unbelief as a whole. To understand the phenomenon today, we have to investigate a broad spectrum of interrelated dimensions of life.

The evidence, from shifting demographics and moral sensibilities to the latest publications and trends in social media, suggests that unbelief in its many forms is a cardinal feature of our time. From all accounts, the current state of unbelief is vibrant, increasingly visible, rapidly evolving, and complex.

Atheism and agnosticism, to name two familiar types of unbelief, are essential ingredients of contemporary experience. Without them, everything we call modern (and postmodern) would be different, perhaps unrecognizable. The entire modern project, springing from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolves around freedom: freedom to question authority, reject oppressive institutions, and invent new ways of constructing selfhood, organizing community, and pursuing happiness. Atheism, agnosticism, and all the variants of unbelief express these defining freedoms of the modern age: inquiry, revolution, invention. They permeate every sector of modernity—from politics, economics, and science to literature, education, entertainment, art, and even religion. 

Recognizing the importance of atheism and agnosticism and cognate forms of doubt and dissent is one thing. Understanding what they are is another. Many discussions of atheism and agnosticism suffer from simplistic assumptions about the meaning of the terms and the phenomena to which they point. Atheism and agnosticism are routinely reduced to questions of belief. According to conventional wisdom, atheism is belief in the nonexistence of God or disbelief in the existence of God. Agnosticism, caricatured as timid or tepid atheism, is seen as the inability or unwillingness to believe in God’s existence or nonexistence.

These approaches tell only a fraction of the story. As intellectual shorthand, they get a conversation started. For people who identify as atheist or agnostic, they may get the conversation started in the wrong way or aimed in the wrong direction. Just as there are varieties of religious experience, there are varieties of atheist and agnostic experience. The meaning of unbelief is neither obvious nor simple.

Concentrating on belief or unbelief, in fact, contributes to distorted portraits of atheism and agnosticism. A brief review of atheist and agnostic literature reveals a number of factors shaping these distinctive outlooks and orientations: critique, defiance, disenchantment, discovery, liberation, and exhilaration, just to name a few. These themes offer not only a sense of atheist and agnostic beliefs or ideas but also a glimpse of the lived experiences that make atheism and agnosticism so multifaceted. Acknowledging that beliefs about God may not necessarily constitute the main characteristics of atheism and agnosticism is an important step toward allowing these realities to speak for themselves. Unbelief is not just about unbelief.

Language itself is a challenge when it comes to understanding atheism and agnosticism. Too often, atheism and agnosticism and their adherents have been pictured exclusively in terms of negation or lack: not believing something, not having something, not being something. A long train of synonyms with negative prefixes or suffixes reinforces this trend: unbelievers, nonbelievers, irreligious, antireligious, nonreligious, antitheist, nontheist, infidel, godless, and misotheist (“hater” of God). Even twenty-first-century nicknames such as None (as in “none of the above”) and Done (as in “done with religion”) fit the pattern. This trend goes back to the Greek basis for each word: átheos (a + theós = “without god”) and ágnostos (a + gnosis = “without knowledge”).

In ancient Mediterranean cultures, people labeled as átheos, including Socrates, promoted not a worldview antagonistic to divine beings but a critical approach to society’s unquestioned assumptions. In the first century CE, Roman pundits called Jews and Christians atheists. The allegiance to only one deity challenged the folk religions of the empire, threatened the cult of the emperor, and stumped the Roman imagination.

Once the church gained worldly power, it turned the tables and called practitioners of the older religions atheists, saying pagan gods were not gods. Three centuries later, Muslim authorities issued similar declarations. By the early modern period, Western writers and their Arab, Turkish, and Persian counterparts used words derived from átheos as all-purpose terms of abuse, not precise references to a specific point of view.

Today, any number of atheists and agnostics may capitalize on the negative charge of the root terms, defying what they take to be the oppressive nature of religion and the God idea. Some people who find religion meaningless and God a useless hypothesis, however, avoid atheist and agnostic precisely because of the negative stigmas associated with the labels. Many gravitate toward freethinker, humanist, and secularist, or the twenty-first-century neologism Bright. Some suggest that godfree may be the best way to state what appears to be a negative in a positive way.

When it comes specifically to atheism, the vast literature on the subject by atheists themselves reveals more nuanced understandings of unbelief. Some writers recognize that the God denied by atheists does not always correspond to the God affirmed by believers. Aware of the complexities within theism, they share Martin Buber’s conviction that God is the “most loaded of all words.” Others, especially since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in the nineteenth century, have endeavored to move the discussion of atheism beyond the categories of belief and reason. They portray atheism as a life orientation or the default position of the human mind, not simply a set of ideas. Atheist novelists, playwrights, artists, composers, and poets express atheism as a cluster of moods, intuitions, and sentiments. Criticism of religion and religious institutions, especially accompanied by disappointment or outrage in light of religion’s intellectual incoherence or moral failure, can be a mode of atheism. Anger at God can be a kind of atheism.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the appearance of a new class of confident advocates for secularity and nonreligion, eager to present atheism and agnosticism in a positive light. For them, these stances are far more than a nay-saying to a question of belief or a refutation of somebody else’s worldview. Phil Zuckerman, founder of the first academic secular studies degree program in the U.S., exemplifies this approach in Living the Secular Life. He maintains that atheism is not a reversal of something or a rejection of a competing viewpoint. It is a constructive, affirmative way of being in the world, based on courage and awe and yielding authenticity and contentment. Likewise, Lesley Hazleton, in Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, argues that cultivated not-knowing can be the effective basis for a life marked by intellectual adventure and generous empathy for other human beings. Questioning and questing, she claims, lead to richer ends than rigid avowal or denial can provide.

Such forthright recommendations of atheism and agnosticism have been rare in history. They are stark reminders of how new open, organized, socially active, and legally protected atheism and agnosticism truly are. Our premodern ancestors could not have imagined organizations such as Humanists International or public relations initiatives such as the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain, with its ads proclaiming “There’s Probably No God.”

The track record of atheophobia is as long as the history of atheism itself. In some countries, blasphemy and apostasy laws still inflict severe punishment on the individual who will not conform to fixed standards of belief and behavior. Even in societies with constitutional protections for free speech and conscience, outspoken atheism can wreck a career, a reputation, or a relationship.

The academic study of the history of atheism and agnosticism is in its early stages. Until the late twentieth century, it was little more than a footnote to the history of philosophy and theology. Too often it was blurred with accounts of religious heresies and other deviations from reigning orthodoxies. Greater acceptance of intellectual diversity in present-day society has fueled growing interest in unbelief’s past. Unfortunately, undisciplined quests for atheist and agnostic forebears, portrayed as pioneers or heroes, have been largely exercises in wishful thinking and anachronism.

At least three significant challenges face the historian of atheism and agnosticism. One is the convention of the periodization of history. Carving history into preconceived chapters, such as ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and the like, is still standard practice in the academy and the popular media. These titles are frequently woven into the stories of atheism and agnosticism. Freighted with assumptions that may distort more than they describe, the labels should be employed with caution and self-awareness. Referring to the intellectual innovation of highly literate male European thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the “Enlightenment” highlights that era’s revolutionary new ways of studying nature and imagining society. At the same time, “Enlightenment” grants dangerous cover for the cultivation of notions of race and progress that subsidized enterprises such as the international slave trade, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and Western imperialism and colonialism.

 Another challenge to the historical study of atheism and agnosticism is, again, terminology itself. Atheism first appeared in English during the mid-1500s, initially as a term of derision, not self-description. Cambridge theologian Henry More’s Antidote against Atheisme, published in 1653, was as much about witchcraft and religious fanaticism as what people today call atheism. The word agnosticism, by contrast originally a matter of self-identification, was coined only in 1869, during the initial controversy over Darwin’s theory of evolution. These terms, while remarkably flexible, have come to be seen as relatively reliable indicators of recognizable positions or mindsets in various phases of modern history. It is a matter of debate, though, whether the terms effectively correspond to states of mind harbored by some people in earlier phases of history. If no language existed to describe the state of affairs, and especially if the danger to person and freedom was so grave that admission of atheism or agnosticism would have meant possible prison, exile, or death, how can anyone point to individuals in the premodern past, individuals lacking words or safety to speak up, and confidently identify those figures as atheists or agnostics? Could there be something peculiarly modern about unbelief itself? Is modernity the age of atheism and agnosticism? Or is the modern period one chapter in the story of these worldviews?

A third challenge to the construction of atheist and agnostic lineages is the built-in Eurocentrism of most inquiries into their backgrounds. The majority of histories of atheism and agnosticism have been written by Western writers, for Western readers, about a certain set of Western people. The standard narrative, tracing skepticism from ancient Greek suspicion about the gods to twenty-first-century North Atlantic New Atheism, tends to confirm this conclusion.

Haunting every study of atheism and agnosticism, past and present, is the question of the relationship between atheism and agnosticism and the specific styles and assumptions of Western intellectual life. Are atheism and agnosticism primarily Western phenomena? If they are, then they would appear to be among not only the most important products of the Western world’s cultural economy but also some of its chief exports. If they are not, then what are the signs of atheism and agnosticism in cultures that have not been substantially influenced by Abrahamic traditions—in cultures, that is, without a history of obsession with the concept signified by the term God? Are there compelling reasons to describe certain forms of philosophical outlook in African or Australian or American indigenous cultures, or in south or east Asian cultures, as varieties of atheism and agnosticism?

Despite the challenges, a number of historians have attempted to construct a chronicle of atheism and agnosticism stretching from ancient to modern times and around the globe. Most begin their narratives in the first millennium BCE. Few examine the full time of Homo sapiens on earth. Almost none consider the lives and strivings of other Homo species, which would extend the story of the human mind to at least 2,500,000 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that magic and religion have shaped human experience for millennia. God and gods have been rela­tively recent additions to human cultural life.

Depending exclusively on written evidence, many historians see possible first signs of atheism and agnosticism in India’s nontheist Samkhya philosophy or the traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, dating from around 500 BCE. Some point to folk traditions in ancient China that evolved into Daoism and Confucianism, some to systems of thought that planted the seeds for Africa’s ubuntu ethic—the humanist philosophy, often translated from Zulu and Xhosa languages as humanity toward others, which has flourished in postapartheid South Africa and many other sites of the global African Renaissance. Many scholars, writing from a Western perspective, claim to find atheist and agnostic ancestors in ancient Mediterranean nonconformists: Greeks such as Protagoras of Abdera, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Diagoras of Melos, author of On the Gods; and Romans such as Cicero, author of On the Nature of the Gods, and Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things. The difficulty with these efforts is the problem of demonstrating the connection between ancient people who thought gods irrelevant and modern people who see gods as imaginary. The quest for the world’s first atheist or first agnostic, while tantalizing, is fraught with trouble. Some critics say it is wrongheaded from the start. Atheism and agnosticism have no origins, they contend. They are names for the natural state of the human mind, as old as human existence.

The student of atheism and agnosticism is on firmer ground investigating these phenomena today. One of the most striking features of these ways of life and thought is their variety. A diversity of types of atheism and agnosticism confronts the open-minded researcher. Often the types can be grouped into pairs of contrasting forms: rational versus emotional, organic versus organized, active versus passive, naive versus sophisticated. Some unbelievers are raised in nonreligion. Some have transformations of mind along the lines of a religious conversion. Some are in the closet, some are out. Some have no argument with religion. Others wrestle with gods for a lifetime. Some insist that atheism and agnosticism have intellectual content. Others say they represent independence from all creeds, even anticreeds. Some worship science as a substitute deity. Others are suspicious of scientism. Some seek social change. Others are aloof, content with the status quo. Some are happy. Some depressed. Still others nostalgic, reluctant unbelievers mourning a lost faith. Some could not believe if they wanted to. Others, spiritually homeless, find themselves somewhere between belief and unbelief, half conscious, as Martin Heidegger put it, of the “trace of the fugitive gods.” André Comte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality evokes an unbelief bordering on mysticism.

Forms of everyday unbelief include the methodological atheism that reigns in the natural sciences (evident every time researchers assume that no supernatural force will influence their experiments) and the pragmatic atheism displayed in religious communities (when, as the saying goes, people pray as if everything depends on God and act as if everything depends on them). Religion also houses more profound strains of atheism. Atheists can be found in foxholes, of course, but they can also be found in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and covens. Jewish atheists are relatively uncontroversial, especially since the Holocaust. Christian atheists less so, even after the rise of “death of God” theologies in the 1960s. Harvard philosopher George Santayana communicated his unique brand of Catholic atheism with the memorable line “There is no God, and Mary is his mother.” Islam, still coming to terms with the Enlightenment legacy, has yet to reckon fully with what Walter Lippmann dubbed the acids of modernity.

One issue that illustrates the diversity within contemporary unbelief is morality. Critics wonder how unbelievers can be responsible without religion. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil fueled such suspicions, as did the widely quoted comment by a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Some atheists embrace hedonism, rejecting all values except the pursuit of pleasure. Others believe in moral relativism, understanding morality as an invention of society, constantly evolving. A significant number of atheists believe that reason and science can lead to universal ethical principles that religious and nonreligious people can share. Good without God by Harvard’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein represents the current state of this conversation within atheist circles. A body of self-help literature, by atheists for atheists, focuses on issues such as life-cycle ceremonies and parenting. Today, atheists are active in campaigns for racial justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of conscience, science education, and environmental justice.

 A notable feature of contemporary unbelief is the growing prominence of women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Independent LGBTQ+ voices include Camille Beredjick, author of Queer Disbelief, and Greta Christina, author of Coming Out Atheist. Eminent figures associated with what Candace Gorham has called the “Ebony Exodus” from religion include Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers Inc., and Sikivu Hutchinson, author of Humanists in the Hood. African American atheists, agnos­tics, and Nones of all genders represent a visible and vocal dimension of twenty-first-century nonreligion.

As it turns out, counting these diverse individuals around the world is becoming less daunting. More social scientists are specializing in the study of nonreligion. More atheists and agnostics are feeling safe enough to speak up. Nomenclature, however, remains a challenge, distinguishing between atheist and agnostic, humanist, secularist, and freethinker—terms often used interchangeably by the same person.

Self-declared atheists are easiest to quantify. Some estimates place the worldwide atheist population at 500–700 million. Others set it closer to one billion, making unbelief the third or fourth largest “faith” in the world. Factoring in covert atheists would raise the number significantly. Nations reporting the highest percentages of people who identify as atheists, all in double digits, include China, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Australia, Iceland, Belgium, and Denmark.

In the United States, the many forms of nonreligion are rapidly growing. According to the Pew Research Center, from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of adults who identify as atheists doubled, from 2 percent to 4 percent. Agnostics increased from 3 percent to 5 percent. People with no religious affiliation, the so-called Nones, grew from 12 percent to 17 percent. By 2019, over one quarter of the U.S. adult population claimed no religion—an unprecedented moment in the history of a country still described by some as Christian. All studies indicate that the highest rates of unbelief and nonaffiliation are among young adults. Even the most sober analysts are forced to imagine a soon-to-be majority American population for whom the national motto “In God We Trust” is not only a relic of the past but a bewildering and insulting one at that.

 All of which confirms that unbelief has enormous social, political, and cultural consequences, especially, as Michel Onfray, author of Atheist Manifesto, has said, “when private belief becomes a public matter.” The growing visibility and normality of unbelief, broadly defined, affect everything we do—from the way we raise children and configure our calendars to the way we relate to our planet and respond to someone who sneezes. Especially at stake is the definition of the good life, not to mention the all-consuming question of truth. Perhaps options for all humans throughout the storied past of the species, atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of unbelief have intimate ties to modernity and the yearning for freedom at the heart of the conflicted Enlightenment project. The current state of unbelief is vast, multivalent, and unprecedented.

Peter A. Huff teaches religious studies and directs the Center for Benedictine Values at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. The author or editor of seven books, he is active in interfaith and intercultural dialogue. This essay draws from his recently released book, Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues (ABC-CLIO, 2021).

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Patterns of Connection: An Interview with Fritjof Capra" Quest 110:2, pg 14-19

By Richard Smoley

We make up boundaries and objects, but reality is fluid and always changing. 

We have heard endless amounts about Taos and Zens of physics and everything else; they have become clichés today. This was not the case in 1970, when Fritjof Capra published his groundbreaking (and much imitated) work The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, paving the way for a new worldview. Since then, the book has sold over a million copies. Other works of his include The Turning Point; The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems; Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People; and The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance.

The essence of Capra’s thought is what he calls the systems view of life, and he has pursued and promoted it in the past fifty years. This perspective is meant to replace the old (but still prevalent) mechanistic worldview, which views objects and living things as isolated elements interacting in a more or less automatic way. Capra’s view holds that everything is interconnected and is best understood as a system of interrelated, constantly shifting, living processes.

In 2021, Capra published Patterns of Connection: Essential Essays from Five Decades, which traces his thought from the earliest days to the present. Essays include “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? Reflections on the Spirit and Legacy of the Sixties”; “The Dance of Shiva: The Hindu View of Matter in the Light of Modern Physics”; “The New Physics as a Model for a New Medicine, Psychology, and Economics?”; and “The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systemic Analysis.”

            In October 2021, I conducted a Zoom interview with him to discuss his new book.

Richard Smoley: Let me start with a question that my eleven-year-old son asked me last night: is reality there when no one is looking?

Fritjof Capra: That’s pretty profound for an eleven-year-old.

Actually, this is part of the new systemic understanding of life that I have explored and synthesized for the last thirty or forty years, and which I call the systems view of life. I have published several books about that, and my grand synthesis is published in a book with that title: The Systems View of Life, coauthored with Pier Luigi Luisi. This book is related to Patterns of Connection, which represents the evolution of my thinking over five decades.

In response to your son’s question: we have discovered that if nobody is looking, reality is still there, because it’s independent of the observer. What happens with the human mind, or the process of knowing, is that we bring forth a world.

Wherever there is life, we find this cognitive dimension. For example, when we look at a tree, we know that a bird or an insect looking at the same tree will see something quite different. Even if we, say, were to have a couple of glasses of whiskey and look at the tree, we would see something different, because our mind would be influenced by the alcohol.

There is an existing world out there—I’m not saying that we made it up—but the way we divide the world into patterns and structures and parts depends on our process of observation, so we bring forth a world. If nobody were there, there wouldn’t be objects, patterns, and things as we define them in the process of knowing. It’s quite a complex issue.

Smoley: One fundamental theme that pervades your thought and your book is this: “In order to maintain themselves effectively, living organisms must be able to discriminate between the system itself, as it were, and its environment. This is why all living organisms have a physical boundary.”

That certainly makes sense in light of what you’re saying, but could one also say that about the supposedly inanimate world, since all things have physical boundaries? Does the electron have some kind of capacity to distinguish between self and other, even though it would be in a form that is radically different from our own?

Capra: I don’t know whether “distinguish” is the right word, because as far as we know, there are no mental processes going on in electrons or atoms, whereas, linking the mental or cognitive process to the process of life, we can specify, say, how a bacterium distinguishes between a greater and a lesser concentration of sugar. Mind, or cognition, requires a certain complexity. That complexity arises with the living cell, which is the smallest unit of a cognitive system, of a living system.

Smoley: Very good; thank you. You discuss Hinduism and Buddhist thought in your book and relate them to current scientific discoveries. Yet one of the basic insights of Hinduism and Buddhism is the concept of delusion—avidya, maya, whatever you want to call it—the idea that this cognition of ours is somehow defective. How do you integrate that idea into your system?

Capra: I will relate this exactly to what we were talking about before. There is a material world, which we don’t make up. I would say from the scientific point of view that we introduce the division of reality into objects and events, and that would be the maya.

I should also say that in my collection of essays, spirituality forms sort of a set of bookends. I begin with my interest in Eastern spirituality in the 1960s, as well as the parallels I discovered between modern physics and the basic ideas of Eastern mysticism. At the end of the collection, I end with a reassessment of my view of science and spirituality, so this is a very important dimension of my work. Spirituality is always an underlying dimension to my whole work.

Smoley: What you say makes sense: we construct reality as we understand it through our cognition. But to pursue this line of thought, these Eastern systems say not only that our perceptions are delusory, but that we can go further to a true or accurate understanding of the world beyond these categories; this is called enlightenment. How does this fit into your system?

Capra: The way I read mystical traditions, they are saying that we can experience a true understanding, but when we express it in words, we are always limited. In the Chinese Taoist tradition, for instance, the Tao Te Ching opens by saying, “The Tao that can be expressed is not the real Tao”—Tao meaning the ultimate reality.

This is the bedrock of my comparison between modern physics and Eastern spiritual traditions: they are both empirical. These disciplines are based on observation and experience, and they both say that whenever that experience is expressed in words, we have limitations. The deeper we go into the nature of reality, the more severe these limitations become.

Smoley: Still, what these traditions seem to be saying is not that it’s simply a matter of being ineffable or inexpressible in words, but that our minute to minute cognition—the way we experience the world on a day-to-day, moment to moment basis—is somehow flawed.

The classic Advaita metaphor tells us that we are like a man who sees a rope and thinks it’s a snake. So this illusion is not merely a matter of expressing something in words, but of what we see moment by moment.

Capra: From the point of view of cognitive science, which is a whole new interdisciplinary field, we perceive the world in a certain way: we make up the boundaries; we make up the objects and events. And of course we don’t just do this individually, but culturally, because we’re all bound together by linguistic and cultural tradition and tradition. We make up these boundaries and these objects, but reality is fluid and always changing. We tend to hang on to objects, fixed ideas, and fixed categories instead of realizing this fact. This is the most profound insight of the Buddha and of the whole Buddhist tradition.

Smoley: Let me turn to a different question, which has to do with particle physics. My background is in the humanities, I have no scientific training, but, as I understand it, at one point there were believed to be atoms that were supposedly indivisible. Then they were divided into protons, electrons, and so on. Later, these were divided into still simpler particles, known as hadrons, quarks—whatever the terms are. In your book, you mention one of the latest theories, which is string theory. It says that subatomic particles are composed of vibrating strings in a bizarre nine-dimensional space.

So what are these strings supposed to be made of? Is there something that makes them up in turn, and so on? Is this an infinite regress, or are you going to end up with some fundamental particle, like the indivisible atoms of Democritus?

Capra: It seems to be an infinite regress, although the strings are very abstract. They are mathematical vibrating structures that are not material. The activity, the vibration, involves certain patterns of energy which, according to Einstein and relativity theory, are equivalent to certain masses. String theory is a very elegant theory that says at this level of abstract strings, everything is self-consistent: there is a fundamental vibration in the universe that creates the various patterns, which then manifest as subatomic particles.

The problem is that it’s not a proper scientific theory, because it doesn’t explain the observed quantities in the subatomic world. Also there’s not just one string theory; there is a whole range. You can vary the parameters and get different theories, and you can’t decide which one is the most accurate. Still, its elegance is compelling, and that’s why most particle physicists today are working in this world of string theory.

Smoley: I’d like to move on to something slightly different, which goes back to an essay in your book that I believe was written in 1982. In it, you say that these holistic perspectives need to be brought into other disciplines, such as medicine, psychology, and economics.

Again speaking as a layman, I see nothing like this in those disciplines. Medicine seems as fragmented, or more fragmented, than ever. Psychiatry has basically become a matter of prescribing drugs. So to what extent has this vision been realized? Am I missing something?

Capra: No. I actually address this question in the epilogue of the book. I say that after five decades, it is fair to ask, has this paradigm shift, which I have written about and promoted during my whole professional life, actually happened?

The answer I come to is that it is not a smooth transition.

 In various disciplines at different times, it has happened in various countries and regions of the world to different extents. Even in those places, there have been backswings.

To describe this situation, I use the metaphor of a chaotic cultural pendulum. I go through the various phases of this pendulum from the counterculture of the 1960s to the New Age, ecology, and feminist movements of the 1970s, then to the rise of Green politics and the Gorbachev phenomenon. With the end of the Cold War, there was the so-called peace dividend. We were all very excited, saying, “Now we can really change our economic system. We don’t need all these military expenses.” Of course, today military expenses are vastly higher than they were then.

Finally, there was the information technology revolution, the new global economics, based on electronic networks, a new global capitalism, and a countermovement in the rise of a new global civil society, so the answer is not straightforward.

You can say that, yes, medicine is still very fragmented, but on the other hand, there is a lot of a more holistic or systemic approach to health and health care. For instance, I have a general practitioner to whom I go regularly; I have known him for twenty or thirty years. He prescribes herbal teas to me. He gives me a full standard medical checkup, but he is very preventive, and he actually has on his business card that he practices preventive medicine. So there are two parallel movements. There’s a huge popular movement around healthy eating and healthy living.

In the academic world, most of our big universities are still committed to a fragmented view. They find it very hard to overcome it, because the university departments and scientific journals are structured that way. Academic degrees and tenure tracks remain fragmented, but on the other hand, there are smaller universities and colleges, and pockets in larger universities, where they teach a more systemic, holistic view.

Two trends that are quite obvious today have helped the breakthrough of the systemic view. One is that people in all fields realize that we live in a complex world. Secondly, people realize that networks are extremely important, especially young people, who live in social networks in their day-to-day world. They find it natural to talk about complexity, systemic networks, and systemic thinking. I find that very hopeful.

Smoley: One area that seems to have retrogressed in the last forty years is psychology, not only as an academic discipline, but in terms of the mental health of Americans, which is probably worse than it’s ever been. Clinical psychology cannot be blamed for that, but it doesn’t seem to be helping very much. Do you see any breakthroughs in psychology that will help deal with this epidemic of mental illness in America?

Capra: I haven’t followed the field in detail in recent years, but I heard a lecture some time ago by Dan Siegel, who is a psychologist and neurologist in Los Angeles, and he says the same thing. He advocates an integrative vision.

Smoley: It seems that psychology has hit a wall in focusing on individuals. It seems there’s been fairly little work done on mass psychology: how people think as a mass, both as a mob in the street and as a social network community. It has always seemed to me that this needs to be understood a lot better before even individual psychology can progress. This fits into your idea of a systems way of thinking, so I’m wondering if you have any observations along those lines.

Capra: I agree with you that it’s extremely important to get some clarity about cultural and social dynamics, especially in politics today. We have populist political leaders arising in several countries who notice the malaise of the population, which in many countries is suffering from the effects of economic globalization and the maldistribution of wealth—the systematic shift of wealth from the poor to the rich. A population suffering from such economic effects is very susceptible to those manipulations. To study those from a systemic point of view, I think, would be very important, but I am not aware of any such study.

Smoley: Another question that comes up in people’s minds these days is a real or imagined revival of fascism. You grew up in postwar Austria, so you saw the effects of that much more immediately than, say, someone like me. Do you see fascism arising again as any serious threat?

Capra: Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. The most extreme version of this populism is fascism, and there are a lot of fascist elements in populist politics. You could say that various radio shows of the far right are almost like the propaganda ministry of the Nazis.

Now the situation is by no means as extreme, and I think our democratic institutions today are much stronger than they were in Austria and Germany in the 1930s, so I’m not worried about it, but I think that the tendencies are definitely there.

There are two trends, focusing on two problems: the climate catastrophe and economic inequality. The two are also linked, so I see a very interesting connection.

This year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had a creative idea of pinpointing social injustice and economic inequality by saying we are the 99 percent and the superrich are the 1 percent. This has had any number of political repercussions since then. To me, this is very hopeful, because it shows that a grassroots movement with the right values, which is often pooh-poohed as not being effective, has in fact had a tremendous influence.

Smoley: In the economic sphere, you have mentioned thinkers like E.F. Schumacher, who have attempted to integrate a holistic systems approach into economics. How do you see this influence pervading economic thought these days, or do you observe it at all?

Capra: I have written quite a lot about economics in these essays. I see something that is almost incomprehensible: the persistence of economists, and also of corporate and political leaders, in this illusion that unlimited economic growth is possible on a finite planet. This is irrational, yet it is pursued by almost all political and corporate leaders and economists.

Together with my colleague Hazel Henderson, I advocate a shift from purely quantitative and differentiated growth to qualitative growth, because that’s what happens in nature. Growth is obviously an essential part of life, but in nature, not everything grows all the time. While certain parts of an organism or ecosystem grow, others reach maturity and decline. This integrates and liberates their components, which become resources for new growth. I call it qualitative growth to distinguish it from GDP [gross domestic product] growth, which is promoted by our economists.

This shift is happening: there is a European organization called Beyond GDP and various other organizations that promote different economic indicators, but it’s still a minority view.

Smoley: I think of the announcement made in 2019 by the Business Roundtable in a double-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, according to which corporations were now going to consider the interests of “stakeholders”—everyone affected by their activities—instead of just the shareholders.

Capra: Yes, I was very excited about that, but subsequently not much happened; it seems it fizzled out.

Smoley: Let’s go on to something more personal. How does someone go about integrating some of these principles into their own daily life?

Capra: The first step would be to educate yourself. When you speak of integrating those principles into your lives, I would ask which principles? Educate yourself to really know what an ecological view and a systemic view means.

I have mentioned The Systems View of Life, my 500-page textbook. I also teach a course about the systems theory of life, which is known as the Capra Course. I’ve been teaching it now for six years, and I have an alumni network around the world of over 2,000 people. They discuss precisely how to integrate this view into your lives.

I would say the good news is encapsulated in the bad news, because our crisis is so multifaceted that it doesn’t really matter where you start. Whatever you do, you can change your way of life. If you are a teacher, you can teach differently; if you’re an architect, you can do architectural design differently; if you are a greengrocer, you can sell different kinds of fruits and vegetables and connect with organic regenerative agriculture; if you are a doctor, you can practice medicine differently.

No matter what activity or profession you are in, you can involve yourself in this change of paradigms from the fragmented, mechanistic view to the holistic, systemic view. It’s so broad and deep that you can start anywhere; you can just start recycling or invigorating your local community.

I would also say to people, you’re not alone; there are already thousands and thousands of grassroots organizations that are involved in this project. My colleague Paul Hawken has written a book called Blessed Unrest, in which he portrays numerous grassroots organizations. You can just go on the Internet, type in the area you want to look at and the region you live in, and you will find an organization pursuing precisely what you’re seeking in your area: it’s that widespread today.

Smoley: Apart from involving oneself in these groups, could you say how this works in terms of practical day-to-day ethics? How does, or should, this outlook affect people’s day-to-day ethical behavior?

Capra: It does, absolutely. It affects the way you live, your daily life. When you go shopping or post a letter, do you drive, or do you walk or bicycle? Do you take a paper bag from your supermarket, or do you have a cloth shopping bag? How are you dealing with your own health and nutrition? How are you dealing with your community? Do you have a local community of neighbors that you can rely on for mutual support? It affects all aspects of daily life.

VOLUME 110, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS

Patterns of Connection: An Interview with Fritjof Capra
Richard Smoley

The Current State of Unbelief
Peter A. Huff

Dualism or Nondualism? Your Choice!
A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan

Duality: The Problem and the Solution
Glen Kezwer

From Duality to Polarity in the Works of Jean Gebser
Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer

Suffering and Soul Making on the Mean Streets of Planet Earth
Ray Grasse

Piercing the Trance: The Wholeness Process
Judith Sugg

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Beyond Duality 
Barbara Hebert

Members' Forum: Oneness Is Not Sameness
Clare Goldsberry

Printed in the  Winter 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 110:1, pg 2

We all have our critics, I suppose, and the Theosophical Society in America is no exception.

What do these critics accuse us of doing?

Nothing.

I mean it: they accuse the TSA of doing nothing. By these accounts, the Olcott staff are sitting proud at our national headquarters, living like rentiers from the proceeds of our investment trust and the largesse of The Kern Foundation, oblivious to the rest of the world.

Indeed we rely on these sources of support and remain grateful to those who have provided them. But these sources are limited and do not permit us to do all the work we do and wish to do.

One important, but often overlooked, aspect of our work is featured in this issue: our Prison Program. National secretary David Bruce outlines some of its history and accomplishments in his article in this issue. In their articles, longtime program members Chadwick Wallace and Aaron Krocker talk about their experience from a first-person perspective.

I don’t participate directly in the Prison Program, but even so, I get any number of letters from prisoners on a variety of topics, indicating that their interest is not only real but often quite advanced.

I occasionally see glimpses of the strange distortions of prison life. A few years ago, by an odd sequence of events, I got a now deceased prisoner thrown into the cooler. I had exchanged a letter or two with him, and he even sent me a copy of a book on the Advaita Vedanta, which I still have.

This prisoner mentioned that he wanted a copy of Schopenhauer’s classic The World as Will and Representation. I looked it up on Amazon, and there was a copy that cost only $15. It was around Christmas, so I thought, “What the hell,” and ordered one to be sent to him.

According to Amazon on the day I ordered it, this book was available. A few days later, Amazon decided it wasn’t and, instead of the book, sent the prisoner an Amazon gift card for the equivalent amount.

Unfortunately, prisoners aren’t supposed to have money on hand, and an Amazon gift card was close enough to get him into trouble with the authorities.

Eventually I had to write to the warden to explain all of this and to intervene for mercy.

This episode taught me that people on the outside can watch all the Shawshank Redemptions and Green Miles they like, but they’re still not going to understand the pervasive strangeness of American prisons.

I have no interest in ranting against the gross dysfunctions of America’s penal system: plenty of other people are doing that. My purpose is simply to point out that the Theosophical Society does a lot of good work that largely goes unnoticed.

It has done so with remarkable frugality. Over the last decade, the TS has offset income losses through any number of means, one of which is staff cutbacks. Last year, a couple of management consultants came in to take a look at our operation. One of them said that our workforce is not only lean but “emaciated.”

As you may have noticed from the house ads in recent issues, the TS has taken steps to remedy these deficiencies. One of the most important has been the addition of a full-time fundraiser in the person of Dave Forsell. I was greatly heartened when Dave came on staff.

Then there is the Olcott headquarters. One recent visitor described it as her “spiritual home,” even though she had never been there before.

Community is a tough issue in America. We are a nation of loners and drifters. Classic American literature shows us this side of ourselves: crazy Ahab on the Pequod, isolated by his madness; Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi on his raft; Gatsby pining away in his ostentatious mansion.

In 2000, sociologist Robert Putnam published a famous book on the solitude of American life, entitled Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. It is, no doubt, sad that people bowl alone these days, but a bowling league is a rather frail and adventitious community. In an age where people lose their faith as often as their car keys and move an average 11.7 times over their lives, churches and towns are scarcely more durable.

We seem isolated even in our contributions. One always comes back to the same question: how much good am I doing? It is commonplace to say that if you make a difference to even one life, you have accomplished something great. I have no quarrel with that, but often it does not feel that way. As René Guénon said, we live during the reign of quantity, and even if one contributes something of quality to a small number of people, it may not seem to have much value.

There is not really much of an answer to that complaint, except to return to the principle of nonattachment: one does what good one can without regard to results or consequences, most of which are invisible to us anyway. Is it enough? Possibly, possibly not; but I have the strong impression that paying attention to quantity in this regard is little more than a distraction.

Richard Smoley