"The Turning Point" by Fritjof Capra
Review of Chapter One, Part One: Sophoclean Irony
It's full of interesting ideas, and I'm very much in favour of the pro-feminist hippie message, but he's wrong about a lot of stuff. Not wrong "in my opinion"; just wrong. Despite the fact that he's clearly making an effort to be as vague as possible, perhaps not having enough conviction in his own points, he does occasionally make solid statements and predictions which can be refuted.
For instance, Fritjof predicted that Peak Oil would occur in 2000. This was incorrect; Peak Oil is nowhere near occurring even now, and it looks like it might not happen at all, or if it does, it will be in a highly modified form.
He predicted that spikes in oil prices would be caused by shortages. This was incorrect; price spikes in oil are almost exclusively caused by speculators trading commodities in regulation-free markets.
He predicted that feminism would be the most important driving force of society since industrialisation. This was incorrect; feminism achieved most of its equality goals in the 1960s.
He talks about quantum physics having a "relation to the human mind". This is incorrect; quantum physics has nothing at all to do with the human mind, consciousness or the thought process - it is a system for predicting the behaviour of sub-atomic particles and nothing else. He praises the "intuitive wisdom" of American Indian cultures, and primitive cultures in general. This is an insultingly romanticised view of primitive cultures, which most American Indians reject as patronising.
He talks about primitive cultures having a "highly refined awareness of the environment". This is incorrect; there are many, many examples of primitive cultures having so little understanding of their environment that they effectively wiped themselves out. The most famous example that I can think of is the Rapa Nui culture on Easter Island, whose misunderstanding of the basic relationship between resources and consumption effectively led them to cultural suicide.
He claims that a massive cultural transformation is occurring right now (1982). This has, at worst, completely failed to materialise, and at best been greatly overstated. It is a recurring error of cultural commentators (and others e.g. Pastor Harold Camping) to think that the times they're living in are very important, or in some way cataclysmic. This almost never turns out to be true. Ironically, people who are ACTUALLY living in cataclysmic times are usually too busy (maybe getting killed) to reflect on how amazing their milieu is.
He claims that the "antinuclear movement ... is likely to become one of the most powerful political forces of this decade", which of course was the 1980s. He was incorrect about that, too. Gorbachev pretty much castrated the antinuclear movement when he unilaterally decided to decommission everything in 1986. As for energy policy, no one pays any attention to antinuclear lobbies now. Even after the disaster in Japan, no one regards it as politically viable to suggest shutting down the nuclear reactors in the US.
Review of Chapter One, Part Two: Regular Irony
In another part of this chapter he trashes the idea of using money to determine value, and then complains that women are not being paid for working in the home.
He points out that people have always seen themselves and the world in terms of the most current scientific understanding, (so when Newton was around, people saw the world and themselves as machines and machine parts, nowadays we are likely to hear human brains described in terms of computers, etc.) while ignoring the fact that he's doing the same thing.
He talks about how scientists had to rework their understanding of reality after quantum physics was discovered, while rejecting the very same scientific method they used to rework that understanding. There are many more examples.
Review of Chapter One, Part Three: Non-Ironic Fail
He may have the Chinese philosophy stuff correct. I don't know enough about that to judge. But if he's taken the same attention to detail that he has about the other stuff, he's made mistakes. And it goes on and on. I'm not going to list all the nail-downable mistakes he's made, but there are many. And there are many more mistakes made in a much more vague sort of way, that are impossible to nail down, but they are mistakes anyway.
There is a general feeling throughout the book that the "ancient Chinese" way of doing things was more harmonious to body and mind and so on; that their way was better than our materialist, Western, technology-driven civilisation. However, in ancient China, slavery was common, they lived in a constant state of war, women were regarded as property, sanitation was a pipe dream (geddit?) and life expectancy was something like 35 years. So let's not get too misty-eyed about how amazing these people's lives were. Their lives sucked. Their lives were short and brutal and filled with hunger and poverty and stupidity.
There is also a disturbing trend in New Age books that I've noticed, not just in The Turning Point, but pretty much all of them: while trashing scientific advances which allow us to read their books in relative peace, health and security, they then turn around and use that same science to bolster their mystical theories. For instance, a common idea in these books is that "modern medecine/engineering/chemistry/physics/biology/etc. has only recently come around to realise that the Ancient Peoples were right all along". Well, fancy that! All that work and time and effort put into the scientific method, all those years of research at universities and all they had to do was drive into the desert and ask the guy with the most feathers on his head. As you can tell, I find this sort of thing very frustrating.
He talks about the opposing forces in Arthur Koestler's "holons", which are so axiomatic as to be irrelevant, namely that discrete biological units have a need to both assert themselves as biological units and to act as part of a greater whole. He then goes on to make the tired connection with people, that we need to assert blah while also community blah. WE GET IT. We got it about 80 years before The Turning Point was written, when Freud explained these psychological impulses. This is not revolutionary information.
He talks about modern competition hurting society to the detriment of what could happen through co-operation. He's certainly correct about that, but he blames yangish tendencies instead of the real problem - free market capitalism. Free market capitalism rewards greed and ambition without restraint. The good news is that science is not a concomitant of free market capitalism; it's nothing to do with it at all.
Review of Chapter Two: I Didn't Make It That Far
It's full of interesting ideas, and I'm very much in favour of the pro-feminist hippie message, but he's wrong about a lot of stuff. Not wrong "in my opinion"; just wrong. Despite the fact that he's clearly making an effort to be as vague as possible, perhaps not having enough conviction in his own points, he does occasionally make solid statements and predictions which can be refuted.
For instance, Fritjof predicted that Peak Oil would occur in 2000. This was incorrect; Peak Oil is nowhere near occurring even now, and it looks like it might not happen at all, or if it does, it will be in a highly modified form.
He predicted that spikes in oil prices would be caused by shortages. This was incorrect; price spikes in oil are almost exclusively caused by speculators trading commodities in regulation-free markets.
He predicted that feminism would be the most important driving force of society since industrialisation. This was incorrect; feminism achieved most of its equality goals in the 1960s.
He talks about quantum physics having a "relation to the human mind". This is incorrect; quantum physics has nothing at all to do with the human mind, consciousness or the thought process - it is a system for predicting the behaviour of sub-atomic particles and nothing else. He praises the "intuitive wisdom" of American Indian cultures, and primitive cultures in general. This is an insultingly romanticised view of primitive cultures, which most American Indians reject as patronising.
He talks about primitive cultures having a "highly refined awareness of the environment". This is incorrect; there are many, many examples of primitive cultures having so little understanding of their environment that they effectively wiped themselves out. The most famous example that I can think of is the Rapa Nui culture on Easter Island, whose misunderstanding of the basic relationship between resources and consumption effectively led them to cultural suicide.
He claims that a massive cultural transformation is occurring right now (1982). This has, at worst, completely failed to materialise, and at best been greatly overstated. It is a recurring error of cultural commentators (and others e.g. Pastor Harold Camping) to think that the times they're living in are very important, or in some way cataclysmic. This almost never turns out to be true. Ironically, people who are ACTUALLY living in cataclysmic times are usually too busy (maybe getting killed) to reflect on how amazing their milieu is.
He claims that the "antinuclear movement ... is likely to become one of the most powerful political forces of this decade", which of course was the 1980s. He was incorrect about that, too. Gorbachev pretty much castrated the antinuclear movement when he unilaterally decided to decommission everything in 1986. As for energy policy, no one pays any attention to antinuclear lobbies now. Even after the disaster in Japan, no one regards it as politically viable to suggest shutting down the nuclear reactors in the US.
Review of Chapter One, Part Two: Regular Irony
In another part of this chapter he trashes the idea of using money to determine value, and then complains that women are not being paid for working in the home.
He points out that people have always seen themselves and the world in terms of the most current scientific understanding, (so when Newton was around, people saw the world and themselves as machines and machine parts, nowadays we are likely to hear human brains described in terms of computers, etc.) while ignoring the fact that he's doing the same thing.
He talks about how scientists had to rework their understanding of reality after quantum physics was discovered, while rejecting the very same scientific method they used to rework that understanding. There are many more examples.
Review of Chapter One, Part Three: Non-Ironic Fail
He may have the Chinese philosophy stuff correct. I don't know enough about that to judge. But if he's taken the same attention to detail that he has about the other stuff, he's made mistakes. And it goes on and on. I'm not going to list all the nail-downable mistakes he's made, but there are many. And there are many more mistakes made in a much more vague sort of way, that are impossible to nail down, but they are mistakes anyway.
There is a general feeling throughout the book that the "ancient Chinese" way of doing things was more harmonious to body and mind and so on; that their way was better than our materialist, Western, technology-driven civilisation. However, in ancient China, slavery was common, they lived in a constant state of war, women were regarded as property, sanitation was a pipe dream (geddit?) and life expectancy was something like 35 years. So let's not get too misty-eyed about how amazing these people's lives were. Their lives sucked. Their lives were short and brutal and filled with hunger and poverty and stupidity.
There is also a disturbing trend in New Age books that I've noticed, not just in The Turning Point, but pretty much all of them: while trashing scientific advances which allow us to read their books in relative peace, health and security, they then turn around and use that same science to bolster their mystical theories. For instance, a common idea in these books is that "modern medecine/engineering/chemistry/physics/biology/etc. has only recently come around to realise that the Ancient Peoples were right all along". Well, fancy that! All that work and time and effort put into the scientific method, all those years of research at universities and all they had to do was drive into the desert and ask the guy with the most feathers on his head. As you can tell, I find this sort of thing very frustrating.
He talks about the opposing forces in Arthur Koestler's "holons", which are so axiomatic as to be irrelevant, namely that discrete biological units have a need to both assert themselves as biological units and to act as part of a greater whole. He then goes on to make the tired connection with people, that we need to assert blah while also community blah. WE GET IT. We got it about 80 years before The Turning Point was written, when Freud explained these psychological impulses. This is not revolutionary information.
He talks about modern competition hurting society to the detriment of what could happen through co-operation. He's certainly correct about that, but he blames yangish tendencies instead of the real problem - free market capitalism. Free market capitalism rewards greed and ambition without restraint. The good news is that science is not a concomitant of free market capitalism; it's nothing to do with it at all.
Review of Chapter Two: I Didn't Make It That Far