by Kathleen Kesson
In 1982 Fritjof Capra published his book The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture, in which he outlined a major shift in worldview that would influence all of the human systems that governed our lives—science, health, education, psychology, politics, economics. His ideas built on concepts that had emerged in the early part of the 20th century from the study of the physical world, captured in the phrase “the new physics”—a field of study that was revolutionizing our understanding of the material world, and the implications for space, time, and matter, much as the Copernican Revolution had uprooted a thousand years of astronomical theory with the shift from a geocentric vision to a heliocentric vision, essentially removing human beings from the center of the universe.
Capra had come to believe that this new view of the universe rendered our old worldview, grounded as it was in centuries-old Cartesian and Newtonian understandings of the world as a giant machine, a material world devoid of meaning, purpose, intention, life, and spirituality, inadequate for solving the multi-dimensional crises of our time. What we need, he said, is “a new ‘paradigm’ – a new vision of reality; a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values” (1982, p. 16). We were in desperate need of an “ecological” worldview, one that took into account the essential interrelatedness and interconnectedness of all phenomena. He saw the widespread social movements of the 1960’s and 70’s as aligned with this new vision of reality and expressed the optimistic thought that once these various social movements became aware of their shared intentionality, they would “flow together and form a powerful force for social change” (p. 16), a radical revision of our social, economic, political, health, biological, and spiritual systems.
Optimistic that the paradigm shift Capra anticipated was just around the corner, I joined a group of educational rebels gathered at a small conference out of which grew the document Education 2000: A Holistic Perspective and the ensuing Global Alliance for Transforming Education. The concepts central to holistic education explored at that early gathering offered a hopeful vision of humanity’s possibilities, expressing a belief in the goodness that lies in the heart of every human being, the potential for human “greatness,” a psycho/social arc that stretches towards peace and justice, and a trajectory toward a more spiritual world.
Over 40 years have passed since Capra published The Turning Point. It feels like a long wait for the changes we felt in our hearts were just over the horizon. But the years that ensued were characterized by a conservative backlash against the social movements of the time, an intensification of wealth inequality, decades of brutal conflicts, and the resilience of multi-national capitalism despite the multiple and catastrophic threats to the natural world from the extractive, consumption-based economy: a warming planet, deadly floods and fires, and mass extinctions of hundreds of species. Scholars now refer to this period as the Anthropocene, a new geologic era in which the human impact on the earth’s systems has had devastating effects which have brought us to multiple tipping points. It is not at all certain that even the human species will survive. Is all hope lost? Are we at a “tipping point?” Or have we finally reached a “turning point?”
A convergence of global thinkers—cosmologists, scientists, indigenous scholars, and religious thinkers, as well as social activists—are deeply engaged in outlining the contours of a new worldview that might support the creative problem- solving necessary to carry us through the turmoil into what P.R. Sarkar termed “the dawn of a glorious new era” (N.D.). The emergent story is informed by further developments in quantum physics and from the power of cosmological observations enabled by advanced telescopes, and from the intricacies of the plant and fungal worlds revealed by the electron microscope and time lapse photography. The new story from Western science and contemporary philosophy parallels Indigenous and ancestral knowledge in multiple ways: in the recognition that there is no separation between us and the whole of nature; that everything exists not as inert (mindless) matter, but in relationships and fluctuations at the boundaries of matter and energy; that nature is not a collection of objects but a flux of processes, and that everything is truly ALIVE, requiring a new ethics of the relationships between human and non-human entities. In short, the new story reminds us of the importance of attending to the basic interconnectedness of nature and to the sensitivity and complexity of natural systems. It really is a moment in time when East and West, ancient and modern, science and religion, may be meeting in a new synthesis.
Key Ideas in the New Story
Our elemental interconnectedness
The new story recognizes our spiritual, as well as our physical “oneness” with all of creation. Contemplative science, with its vast amount of research on meditation is pointing toward unrealized dimensions of mind, a causal level of cognition encompassing everything in the universe, past and present, akin to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, and the realization we are deeply interconnected in what people variously call cosmic consciousness, the “noosphere,” or the planetary mind. Many versions of this narrative believe in the ultimate unification of the individual mind with the cosmic mind, or a Supreme Being, named variously God, the Implicate Order, Allah, Brahma, the Tao – any number of names that variously refer to the deepest mystery of the universe.
A Systems Understanding of Reality
It is a story that understands all of creation to be alive, intelligent, and self-organizing – a story that tells of our “entanglement” in a wondrous web of life, one in which we have been freed from the false sense of separation from the rest of nature. As we have long known from systems theory, everything really is connected to everything else.
A Biocentric Vision of Humanity
This vision of a “new human” challenges the idea of human exceptionalism and requires an ethical perspective that holds every life as sacred. Drawing upon ideas shared widely by many Indigenous peoples, the new story is a kinship model, one that recognizes that we humans are only one strand within the web of life; and that we are dependent upon all of the other strands in order to survive. In this story, we become ecological beings, not merely social beings.
Taking Responsibility
The new story requires admitting the causes and conditions that have brought the planet to the tipping point and compels us to challenge injustices and unsustainable systems. We must recognize the high costs of what we have termed “progress” and collectively create new visions for what might constitute abundance, prosperity, well-being, and the “good life” for all.
Global Futures Thinking
One version of this new worldview can be found in a 2020 report by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). That report, titled Becoming With the World calls for a posthumanist paradigm that implores us to:
- preserve the best of humanism – justice – but extend it beyond the human;
- acknowledge that we are ecological – not just social – beings;
- cease promoting human “exceptionalism,” while also accepting responsibility for the differential positioning and treatment of other species;
- discard conventional individual and social developmental frameworks in favor of fostering collective dispositions and convivial, reparative human and more-than-human relations;
- learn to become with the world, not stand apart from it;
- embrace multiple and diverse human worlds;
- adopt an ethics that might begin to repair the harm that has been done (through colonization, racism, corporate capitalism, genocide, and ecocide).
The UNESCO report, a futuristic vision, speaks of the need for a “new humanism” —an acknowledgement that the old “humanistic” ideal of the individual emancipated person is an inadequate definition of the inhabitants of the planet. We must, it claims, go beyond anthropocentric claims of humanist, humanitarian, and human rights perspectives and recognize the “multiplicity of interconnected worlds and our entanglements in multispecies ecologies that include different knowledges, practices, and technologies” (CWRC, 2020, p. 7).
The new story hinted at by the UNESCO report is very much aligned with the narrative in Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar’s 1982 book The Liberation of Intellect – Neohumanism. In that critique of modernity and of the centuries old humanist philosophy that has structured our modern thought and education, he advocates a way out of the maladaptive worldview we seem to be stuck in, offering the choice of abundance, sustainability, justice, deep connection and peace. At the core of this philosophy is the urgent necessity to move people through an ever expanding “circle of love”—recognizing the limits of narrow allegiances to self, family, nation, religion, caste, social class, race, and species—to a universal spirit of care and connection and the cultivation of an ethical way of life that accords with this.
Many of the prescriptions for a new worldview offer a vision of what ought to be, but do not actually propose a method to get there. It is a tall order for modern people to find our way into the sense of oneness with all of creation, and begin to truly understand everything as deeply interconnected, as relational. For this new story is essentially about relationships —connections with the “pluriverse” of beings—plants, animals, and animate and inanimate matter; connections with other humans. It must begin in the very early years of human life, with new considerations of how we parent and how we educate.
A Neohumanist theory of education proposes that if we are to cultivate the “new human” imagined by this new worldview we need to rethink the very fundamentals of the modern educational system, re-imagining everything from our theories of child development, to the role of the academic disciplines, to where learning occurs, to the procedures of testing and grading, to our instructional methods and curriculum designs, to our sources of knowledge, and to the very purposes of contemporary education, which, if we are to be honest, are to prepare workers for an expanding, extractive global economy, and for the limited forms of democratic citizenship available in most capitalist countries (Kesson, 2024).
It has long been my sense that humans are born into this sense of oneness and kinship with all created beings. I believe that much of what modern parenting practices and education accomplish is about diminishing this joyful animistic spirit and molding young children to meet the demands (academic and social) of modern life. Our task then is great – we must design ways of being with children that keep alive the bliss and connection of an enchanted world (Berman, 1981), and also prepare them to lead productive lives in whatever the future may bring.
In the final chapter of The Turning Point, Capra concludes that while the revolution is occurring, the decaying culture refuses to compromise, clinging to old notions with increasing tenacity; and the dominant social institutions will not relinquish their leadership roles to the new cultural forces. We are certainly witness to this now. However, they will, he claims, inevitably collapse, while the developing culture will continue to rise and finally take over as the dominant culture. As the turning point advances, the awareness that large-scale evolutionary changes cannot be halted by short-term political manipulation gives us the most optimism for the future.
So, let us hope, and work toward, a world that is not at the “tipping point” forecast by the current scientific consensus, but at a “turning point” envisioned by the new story. Shrii Sarkar reminds us that there is an element of human choice in this:
“Human civilization now faces the final moment of a critical juncture. The dawn of a glorious new era is on its one side and the worn-out skeleton of the past on the other. People have to adopt either of these two.” (N.D.)
References
Berman, M. (1981). The reenchantment of the world. Cornell University Press.
Capra, F. (1982). The turning point: Science, society, and the rising culture. Simon & Schuster.
Common Worlds Research Collective (CWRC) (2020). Learning to become with the world: Education for future survival. Education Research and Foresight Working Paper 28. Paris, UNESCO
Kesson, K. (2024). Becoming one with the world: A guide to neohumanist education. Information Age Publishing.
Sarkar, P.R. (N.D.). Ánanda váńii saḿgraha: A collection of the spiritual messages of Shrii Shrii Ánandamúrti.
Sarkar, P.R. (1982). The liberation of intellect: Neo-humanism. A’nanda Márga Pracáraka Samgha.
You can download a copy of Education 2000: A Holistic Perspective at the following website: https://ties-edu.org/gate/You can find a copy of the UNESCO report cited at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374032