Guest Article: Fritjof Capra Introduces The

Patterning Instinct
May 15, 2017 by Simon in Mental Models.
Credit: Capra Course

Simon writes: We are

now coming towards the
end of the Spring edition
of Fritjof Capras Capra
Course. For the last two
weeks there has been a
hugely interesting
conversation on how to
instigate meaningful
change inside
organisations and the
human quest for meaning
and values. Fritjof as
always has been extremely active in these conversations, including this comment in reply to a
question on what predisposes a system (for example a social system/ an organization) to find an
element meaningful. Fritjof replied as following:

First of all, meaning is relevant only in human systems, as it is part of human consciousness and
culture. Nonhuman systems, e.g. plants and animals, will respond according to their structure,
selecting disturbances that can be picked up by their sensory apparatus. In human societies, social
systems generate cultures that represent common contexts of meaning, as I explained in Lecture 8.
So, an organization, or a community of practice, will find a disturbance meaningful if it resonates
with its culture.

Some aspect of the disturbance may indeed have already been incorporated into the systems culture,
which will then be reinforced, while others may be novel. Also, we need to realize that, when a
certain community finds a disturbance meaningful, this does not necessarily imply that it will be
beneficial for society as a whole. For example, in todays political landscape we can observe several
false populist movements (Trump, Brexit, Le Pen), which offer promises (disturbances) that are
meaningful to certain segments of the population but then turn out to be harmful for the very people
who voted for them. In other words, the values of a culture, or sub-culture, are not necessarily
beneficial for the whole; and this brings us once more to the issue of cultural transformations
(paradigm shifts, etc.).

During this conversation, Fritjof referenced a new book on meaning-making, which

a friend of his, Jeremy Lent has just published. The book is called The Patterning
Instinct and Fritjof wrote the foreword. It identifies the root metaphors that cultures
have used to construct meaning in their world and for this reason I thought it would
be really interesting to share the foreword, which you can read below.

Jeremy Lent is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that
have led our civilization to its current crisis of sustainability. He is founder of the
nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview, both
scientifically rigorous and intrinsically meaningful, that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably
on the earth. If you would like to explore the themes in the book more deeply, you read more on
Jeremys website: The Patterning Instinct.

For those of you who may be interested, the autumn 2017 of Capra Course starts on 1st September,
with registration opening on 1st July. Please see the website for further information.

Foreword to The Patterning Instinct, by Fritjof Capra

When I went to high school in Austria in the 1950s, history was taught exclusively as military
history, which I found utterly boring and studied only minimally, just
enough to pass my exams. My main academic interests were
literature, foreign languages, and, above all, science and
mathematics. Then, as a young physics student, a decisive moment
came when I read Werner Heisenbergs Physics and Philosophy, his
classic account of the conceptual revolution triggered by quantum
physics and relativity theory.

Heisenbergs book had a tremendous influence on my thinking and

determined the trajectory of my entire career as a scientist and writer.
One passage, in particular, planted a seed in my mind that would
mature, more than a decade later, into a systematic investigation of
the limitations of the Cartesian worldview and the wide range of its
scientific, philosophical, social, and political implications. The
Cartesian partition, wrote Heisenberg, has penetrated deeply into
the human mind during the three centuries following Descartes, and
it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different
attitude toward the problem of reality.

This passage also triggered in me a new interest in history, but this time in the history of ideas, a
subject that has fascinated me ever since. The history of ideas is endlessly captivating because well-
known sequences of political and cultural events of the past, again and again, appear in a new light
when we look at them through a different narrative lens. I have no doubt that this is the reason for the
tremendous success of books like Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs and Steel, and Yuval Hararis
Sapiens, and of documentaries like Kenneth Clarks Civilisation, and Jacob Bronowskis The Ascent
of Man.

The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent continues this tradition of broad interdisciplinary historical
narratives, written in non-technical language, eminently readable, entertaining, yet sophisticated and
intellectually fascinating. In this book, the author introduces a new perspective, which he calls
cognitive history. Instead of the traditional approach of assuming that the direction of history is
determined, ultimately, by material causes geography, economy, technology, and the like he
argues that, following the fundamental human urge to endow our surroundings with meaning,
different cultures construct core metaphors to make meaning out of their world and these
metaphors forge the values that ultimately drive peoples actions.

By calling his approach cognitive history the author implies that he traces the human search for
meaning through the lens of modern cognitive science, a rich interdisciplinary field that transcends
the traditional frameworks of biology, psychology, and epistemology. The key achievement of
cognitive science, in my view, is that it has overcome the Cartesian division between mind and
matter that has haunted scientists and philosophers for centuries. Mind and matter no longer appear
to belong to two separate categories, but are seen as representing two complementary aspects of the
phenomenon of life: process and structure. At all levels of life, mind and matter, process and
structure, are inseparably connected.

The Santiago theory of cognition, in particular, identifies cognition (the process of knowing) with the
very process of life. The self-organizing activity of living systems at all levels of life is mental or
cognitive activity. Thus, life and cognition are inseparably connected. Cognition is embedded in
matter at all levels of life. Moreover, the theory asserts that cognition is not a representation of an
independently existing world, but rather a bringing forth or enacting of a world through the
process of living.

Jeremy Lent applies this insight to history, recognizing the power of the human mind to construct its
own reality and arguing that the cognitive frames through which different cultures perceive reality
have had a profound effect on their historical direction. Engaging the reader in an archeology of
the mind, he shows how, in different epochs of history, dominant cognitive frames can be defined in
terms of certain fundamental patterns of meaning: everything is connected, the hierarchy of the
gods, split cosmos split human, the harmonious web of life, nature as a machine, and so on.

From this cognitive perspective Lent proposes new answers to some age-old questions of human
history: Is it our true nature to be selfish and competitive, or empathic and community-minded? How
did the rise of agriculture set the stage for our current ecological crisis? Why did the Scientific
Revolution take place in Europe, and not in Chinese or Islamic civilization? What are the root causes
of our modern global culture of rampant consumerism, and is there a way we can change that
culture?

In our time of global crisis, which desperately needs guidance through new and life-affirming
metaphors, the answers to these questions are more important than ever.