Examples of manifestation of Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm
The Biomedical Model
This worldview sees the body as a machine. Disease is a malfunction of the machine. The doctor is the mechanic. Doctors concentrate on the body at the expense of the psychological, social and environmental factors in illness. In this model “healing” is a difficult concept. It involves too many disparate factors for the mechanistic view to account for. This “scientist” view is suspicious of folk healers and finds it hard to admit their efficacy.
Many societies (China, India, Persia (sic)) see medical knowledge as a mix of empiricism, lore, and science and do not require that professionals practice it, although there exists a professional elite which has the high level knowledge. It is more of a holistic practice. In Western medicine a male elite has taken control and promoted the rational scientific approach thereby taking control of women’s bodies. Here Capra is referring to the dominance of the yang in the biomedical culture.
The focus of medicine became more and more reductionist as researchers focused on smaller and smaller phenomena (microbiology). Pasteur proved the relationship of germs to disease. This led to the taxonomy of microorganisms. It all fit into the “machine” view of things. Pasteur was concerned with the ecology or “terrain” of the organisms. He wanted to know how the conditions in which the germs existed would affect their viability. However, this has never been the focus of subsequent study.
The 20th Century delves into molecular biology. Here we find more reductionism. We get vaccines, endocrinology, which leads to insulin for diabetics, and antibiotics. However, much research has led to treatment of symptoms and not causes of disease. “By reducing biological functions to molecular mechanisms and active principles in this way, biomedical researchers necessarily limit themselves to partial aspects of the phenomena they study” (133).
We can extend life expectancy, eliminate some diseases, yet social and psychological pathologies are on the rise. Capra suggests we are socially ill He cites rises in alcoholism, suicide, crime, political terrorism.
He talks about the relationship between health and medicine. Medicine, he says, takes too much credit for the increase in public health standards. The rise in life expectancy can be attributed to the fall in infant mortality. Improved food production, lower birth rate and improved sanitation have done more for public health than has medicine. Now heart disease, cancer and diabetes are the big problems. These are diseases of the affluent. Medicine, however, is still treating the symptoms and not the causes. Medical people will say that environmental or social aspects of a problem are outside the bounds of medicine. Capra says they need to look at the whole picture, and not just their Cartesian building blocks.
The Cartesian school of thought has led to a split into medical and psychological fields of study. They are separate. They generate two streams of literature. This is a split that Capra cannot support. He again advocates a holistic approach to psychological care.
Medical schools are competitive and stressful. Doctors talk of “aggressive” treatments and use military language to describe them: bombard, invade, kill. They work too hard, and deal without emotion when constantly faced by patients in emotionally stressful situations. Medical technology (CAT scanners, dialysis, etc) has led to focus on machines. This is no surprise, says Capra, in the Cartesian/Newtonian view of things.
It’s driving costs through the roof. Patients are getting injured by their doctors through complications from drug therapy and diagnostic procedures. Iatrogenic illnesses are caused by the doctors.
The biomedical world says, “one disease, one cause.” Capra disagrees. He says the doctors don’t treat people who are ill; they treat diseases. This leads to dependence on drug therapy which treats, “an attack from the outside, rather than a breakdown within the organism” (153). No study, or little, is done to see how the mind and the body work together in the event of infection. The reductionist approach applies. The pharmaceutical industry exercises great influence on the choices made by doctors. It is almost the only source of information about drugs they have at their disposal.
We refine the active ingredients from traditional cures at the expense of removing the trace elements which turn out to be part of the natural medicine. The doctor is predicated as a serious expert whose intervention is required. No thought is given to self-healing by the patient. Only the doctor knows what to do. This is ingrained in the population. We believe that only the doctors have the knowledge or expertise required to cure us. It has become dogma.
The Impasse of Economics
Guess what? Present day economics is characterized by the Newtonian, reductionist approach too. Economic policies are fragmented from social policies. Economic systems evolve quickly, but the theories of economics are static. There are unstated values behind economic theory and practice. The system values consumption and production. It is a quantitative science which ignores the big picture, “the social, ecological, and psychological dimensions of economic activity” (191). Capra says economists need to rework theory to match reality, as many of the theoretical models by which they work are no longer functional.
The theories evolved by Adam Smith do not apply to today’s markets, yet they are unconsciously assumed to be applicable. Again, all theories were weighted to the yang side of the equation. No account was made for the inferior classes or women. It was a male driven, competitive, aggressive phenomenon. “The systematic efforts of Ricardo and other classical economists consolidated economics into a set of dogmas that supported the existing class structure and countered all attempts at social improvement with the “scientific” argument that “laws of nature” were operating and the poor were responsible for their own misfortune” (202).
Capra thinks Marx was a god. He had an organic, or systems, view of the world. He predicted boom and bust cycles, the concentration of wealth, exploitation of the workers. He did not foresee globalization and the transition of the Third World population into the proletariat. The Depression was a manifestation of his predictions.
After that, Keynes showed up. He supported social and economic intervention by governments. He believed you could stimulate the economy by investing, thereby creating employment, thereby increasing consumption. Economic growth ensues and wealth “trickles down” to the poor. This theory ignores the global aspect of economies, the power of multinationals, and politics. Capra says it has been debunked.
More recently, theorists, according to Capra, have continued to view economics as fragmented and separate from other aspects of life. Current theories support growth of economies at all costs. If growth is good, then more growth must be great. Consume more. There is no regard for the depletion of resources or the increase in pollution. It’s more of the yang thinking at play. Compete. Get bigger. Win.
We need to slow down growth and population growth. The population of the Third World continues to grow. A highly developed, comfortable society has a natural, built in tendency to reduce the birth rate. This has happened in the West. This level of comfort has not yet been attained in the Third World due to economic exploitation by the developed world. Our comfort is causing their population boom.
Technology – We view it as a solution to everything. The yang (are you sick of that yet?) aspect of our society has us focused on bigger, better, more competitive technology. The ultimate manifestation of the yang as applied to technology: nuclear weapons.
Large corporations are growing unfettered. They are inhuman and larger, in terms of output, than some countries. They, too, are very heavy on the yang. They behave badly in the Third World, distorting consumption patterns and using resources to generate wealth which is then removed from the source country.
MY RESPONSE
Capra is fun to summarize. Making the same argument he makes is even more fun, and, for future cocktail parties, (should I actually ever go to one) I will use his ideas as my own. Of course, I won’t suggest that I have a solution, because that is where the argument would fall flat on its face, especially if I tried to suggest that Systems Theory is the answer. Perhaps in the seventies that worked, but now it does not.
I would argue that the Newtonian/Cartesian worldview was always naturally heading towards a more holistic approach. Not so much because humans are intrinsically brilliant, but because science could divide the world up into smaller and smaller parts only so much before it stopped making sense – vis-à-vis genetics. What is a gene? No one knows. How does it work? No one knows. Solution? Let’s study systems. Systems theory, in my opinion, is the natural next step of a worldview that keeps looking for smaller things that already tiny things are made up of. Things can only get so small. Science will never stop. What else can it do but start looking at the big stuff? Okay, we zoomed in; now let’s zoom out.
Capra’s critique of the biomedical model is a pleasure to read. It is chock full of Aha! moments in the form of things I agree with, things that have frustrated me as I have been forced, on rare occasions, to navigate Western medical institutions. Those Aha! moments do not come in the form of solutions.
In fact, I would argue that the medical establishment already looks at the whole person and not the parts in a vacuum. For heart disease doctors recommend exercise, better diet, reduced stress, less television more human contact, pets, hobbies, etc. This is the definition of treating the whole person, and not just the one broken part. I have read umpteen medical articles in magazines such as Maclean’s, Newsweek and Time about studies that are being done to determine what is making people sick. They are looking at life in the city versus the country, levels of income, levels of education, sleep patterns, etc. These studies are not looking at the pancreas, heart or liver. They are looking at the ways in which people live, play and rest. Again, they are looking at the whole person and in many cases at society as a whole.
Systems Theory is being applied in more and more fields, and nothing is getting better. The poor are getting poorer. Their air is getting more and more poisonous, and their water is undrinkable. The West is richer and richer, and a new crusade is under way. In some ways the West has taken the step Capra suggests is the answer, and in others it is repeating mistakes already made nearly a thousand years ago. What is the answer? I think that if it was possible to know that, than we would not be in this mess. I also think that the problem is human nature, and that cannot be changed. The strong destroy the weak the world over. The only variation is how that strength is defined.
In short, Capra is a man of his times. The general atmosphere in the late 70s and early 80s was that of massive change, a rebirth of conservatism, the birth of the “me” generation. Change breeds fear and Capra’s book seems to me to be a “there-there it’s gonna be okay” and a pat on the back rather than a scientific solution to what ails the world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Capra, Fritjof. 1982. “The Turning Point.” New York: Bantam Books.
