Lecture by Prof. Ervin László

Part 1

Spring Congress 2006, HaKfar HaYarok

14 April 2006

I am happy to be hereand to continue our discussion from two days ago. I will not introduce the main topics; I want to pick up where we left off and provide some more details, especially on two points.

We discussed this major point—the bifurcation point, our chaos point—saying that it emerges when the existing system becomes unstable. It is a process that repeats itself time and time again in nature, affecting species’ survival, the viability of species in the environment, and human societies, with cultures and civilizations.

How does it come about? Let me again recall the process of an existing system’s gradual destabilization. This happens in nature because of a constant series of mutations that change both the environment and the species. Sooner or later the species is no longer attuned to its environment. It becomes incapable of sufficiently reproducingor finding food, and its habitat is in question.

So how does this happen in human society? This is today’s topic:“How does it happen and where does it lead?” These are the two questions thatI would like to discuss today.

It happens through a series of steps that can basically be looked at as a series of four steps, or four phases. There is the first, what I call “the trigger phase”: something that launches a process.

You have a perfectly functioning society, and then what happens? Changes take place because human beings have a capacity to innovate: a more up-to-date society has more capacity, and thus more innovations.

In the stone ages, it took hundreds of thousands of years before a microlift, a small tool, became a little bit smaller,and the knife became a little bit sharper…it took a very long time. The changes were very small and took a very long time.

The last ten thousand years, innovations have come one after another and they become strong faster and faster. So what happens? Innovations are occurring either in the relations between people or between people and the environment.

Innovations between people are cultural innovations. They are basically the kind where you say, “we are now going to operate in a different way; we have different administrative structures, a so called ‘traditional society.’” It is a very free kind of society; men go out hunting, women take care of the house, and there is perhaps a tribal council, a council of elders.

Sooner or later societies develop a more complex structure with several layers. Thus, these relationships constantly change.

What is the difference between one society and another,between a traditional society and a modern society, and between societies of African, Asian, American and European cultures? It is in the way they relate to one another, the kinds of structures people have. There are constant innovations on this level, and once these innovations take place, people have to adapt to them.

Now, they will normally learn to adapt over a period of time so that a new culture can develop with a more complex form of organization, and a new way of maintaining itself. However, when that complex culture interacts with its environment, then there is more at stake than human beings.

You cannot change the environment that easily. You have to adapt to the environment or adapt the environment to yourself. So, as you have innovations in culture, the relations of people to the environment also changes. And these changes mean that what worked up until now may not work so well after this. Maybe we used to bebetter, but how we worked then would probably not work well now.

The point is this:Over time, peoples’ relationsto the environment changes, society’s relations change, and these changes have to be constantly accommodated by the culture. The culture produces these changes, but it also has to accommodate them so that there is a constant interaction, a constant mutual adaptation between the society and the environment.

This starts in the first phase. In the second phase, these innovations, these changes accumulate. I call this “the accumulation phase.”They accumulate in such a way that sooner or later a point is reached when there is a real stress in the culture, and things do not work the way they used to.

Think of it in very practical terms. All these new technologies that we have here, including our cellular phones, the latest editions—it has been hardly five, ten, fifteen, or maybe twenty years that we have these kind of technologies. So now we can be connected, and the entire society has to adapt to the new technologies.

It is not so much of a problem adapting to, perhaps, information technologies, but when you have nuclear technologies, transportation technologies, or energy technologies, of course, they impact on nature. And we constantly have to see that those impacts do not exceed the limits of what nature and the environment can take. Therefore, our innovations create problems, create stress, and create a need for adaptation.

A point then comes where something has to happen. I call it “the decision phase.”The decision phase is when you have to make fundamental changes, adaptations in the culture, to the changes that the culture itself has produced. So now, for example, we have to create a culture that we can call “a culture of altruism,”one that is capable of coping with the impact of the technologies we ourselves have created. We have to cope with our own impact. If we continue like this, nature will be inhospitable, and the environment will become unlivable.

This has happened in the past locally. The Middle East, for example, was initially, in Biblical times orin the times of the Old Testament,a green area. It was over-forested; then it became worn down and turned into a desert area. Now, in Israel, you have to reforest it again.

Thus, locally, the environment has been overused, and now they are overusing our environment globally. This is why we are at a decision point. Can we adapt to the changes that we ourselves create, or not?

We are now at the pointwhere the fluctuation becomes very wide. Now, the question is really this:“Which way are we going to move when we reach a point of no return?” The point of no return is the bifurcation point. Do we reach a point where the environment becomes inhospitable, when our essential resources become over-exploited, extremely expensive and difficult to access? Do we reach a point when the quality of the air around the cities, the quality of the water that we have, and the quality of the soil that we need, becomes overused and polluted? Do we reach that point and then move toward a breakdown of the system?

Or do we use these instabilities?Do we use these fluctuations to create something new? This “something new” can be something very old. It can be based on ancient wisdom, on the wisdom to move toward each other, to recognize our connections to one another.

Nevertheless, this is the decision, the “decision window.” I believe we live at a time when we have a very limited decision window. It is very good to keep in mind the prophecies of many, many cultures, which say that by 2012, this planet will experience major changes. It is very likely that, when you look at climate change, when you look at air, water and soil pollution, when you look at the polarization of the rich and poor, and the stress and frustration between cultures, you would conclude that if you do not adapt, if you do not make changes, by 2012, there could be a serious problem, a serious breakdown which is then like a point of no return. I call this“the chaos point” or “the bifurcation point.”It is the fourth phase.

The fourth phase has two outcomes:either you adapt, or you go down. It is very simple: grow or die. We have to keep growing, but how? And that is the second point I would like to come to. We have to move from a negatively-oriented path, a path of breakdown, to a positively-oriented path, the path that breaks through. What is involved here?And in the next ten minutes, I would like to speak about what is involved in this switch from the negative to the positive.

I can put it in terms which are familiar to you. What is involved is moving, basically, from an egoistic, self-centred, short-sited, materialistic culturetoward a broader-based altruistic culture. I will now put it in my own terms.

In my own terms, we have a civilizationalshift. We have a shift as basic as we have had before, only that before were much lower shifts with much longer periods between them. Now we are at a point were we have to shift very fast, and very, very basically.

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in a mythological culture. Thewhole environment was alive, the trees, even the thunder, everything indicated a cosmos around you that is living, that has a soul—it was an ensouled universe. This carried through the stone ages, until the great classical Archaic Civilizations arose, in Babylonia, in Egypt, in India and in China, claiming a higher order in the world, that this higher order is there for us to use as guidance, “as Above, so below.”

These were theocratic societies. Thus, from mythos they moved to theos. Some of these cultures, these civilizations, lasted five thousand years or more, but compared to the hundreds of thousands of years of mythos, they were relatively short. Then, time continued to compress.

The Greeks had a major renovation.The Greeks, namely the Isocratic philosophers of two and a half thousand years ago, said that we should try to look at our experience, try to use our reason, not only obey a higher celestial order, but that we will figure it out ourselves. The republic of the Greek philosophers was basically, like Plato and Aristotle, based on reasoning, logos, as the main element.

Logos became a hallmark of western civilization. Over the middle ages, over the Christian period in Europe, it was mixed with theocratic, theological elements, but still, even if you look at the arguments of the great theologians, St. Augustine or St. Thomas, they are rational arguments. They used elements of faith as a basis, but their arguments were rational ones.

Now, logosbecame a major force when it became integrated with handicraft. In Europe, handicraftswere highly developed, with such things as windmills and clocks…in China as well. They were never really used as a major force, a major social force. They became used at that time when Galileo, Newton, Copernicos, Kepler, and so on, created a basis in science for applying mechanistic principles to nature and to ourselves.

And then technology, modern technology, was born. That is the point where we have modern-age logos. Modern-age logos is something that still dominates our world. We are still living at a time when we think that we can solve all of our problems with our reasoning.This reasoning, however,is based on egoistic or short-sighted materialistic thinking. Thus, when people apply technology, it is applied through their immediate needs, through their will to receive, as you learn here. And the result, as you say and as I discussed yesterday, is a point where the system is nearing a breakdown.

So we have to move to the next step. Where do we move from logos? What is this basic change—the change in civilization? How could we call it?

I believe that the next step is holos. Holoscomes from Greek and it means “whole,” wholeness or oneness. I believe that has to be the key element of a new civilization.Let me say just a few words about that and then end up with a few ideas, guiding principles about how a holistic civilization could develop.

Holosis wholeness. It is a major principle in the way people live, in values, in lifestyles, and it is now also becoming an evermore pronounced and clear cut principle in the sciences. Much of my own work over the past twenty years or so, even moreso, in the sciences, has been developing the notion that wholeness, in physics, in biology, in psychology, even in cosmology, is really a basic principle.

Why is that? Very briefly because my time is very short, it is because we find the connections. You cannot have a whole system unless its parts are connected.

Why is my body and your body a whole? Every healthy, living body is a whole. Why? It is because all the cells, all the organs, all of the human body’s parts are so interconnected that they work together to maintain the whole organism.

Interconnection can make for wholeness. If a family is a whole, it is because the family members feel that they are connected and want to maintain the family. If a society is a whole, it is because the society’s members work together to maintain their society. Ecology is a whole, because even though there is competition between individuals and between species, all of the species, all of the dynamics are so organized that they maintain the overall system, the ecosystem. This is the way nature operates. So, in human society as well, we have to develop this wholeness.

Now we are recognizing in science that there are connections we had never thought of before. Up until the 1980s, we knew theoretically (it was not proven by experiment) that a particle is connected to another particle, no matter how far apart it is. Once it has been in the same state, the so called“same quantum state,” you can remove the particle, no matter how far, and it remains connected. So what you do to one particle immediately has an effect on the other. What’s more, this interconnection is faster than the speed of light. It is instant, and it does not involve ordinary forms of energy.

Thesekinds of connections, which are called “non-locality,” are known to exist throughout the physical world. However, in the last several years, it has become clear that not only the physical world, but also the living world, is non-local. What happens to an organism in one parthas an effect on the other.

You can check it in individuals’ brainwaves:You stimulate one person in certain ways, and another person can pick this up, provided the two people have been acquainted and have good relations with eachother. Once you have goodwill between people, you are connected, instantly. And these kinds of connections operate all over the biosphere, in nature, and in the cosmos as a whole. Now they have books published called “The Non-Local Universe.” Famous scientists have come up to saying that non-locality might be the most important scientific discoveryaltogether or certainly over the past hundred years.

Therefore, holism can be based on the fact that everything that happens in the universe is connected in some way or another with all other things. Nothing is purely local. And that is a very, very important element if you move toward a holistic civilization.

The last thing I would like to say today is:What does this imply in terms of our development? Must we stop developing or can we develop in some other way?

In the 1970s, the Club of Rome came up with this concept of the limits to growth. It was widely felt that this meant zero growth, meaning that you need to stop growing, and this was resisted. I think, for now, we need to understand that we can grow, but in a different way.

I use the term “evolution,” because systems, when they grow, when they develop, they evolve. We call it “a system’s evolution,” and I say that we need to change the way we evolve.

We have so far evolved in a particular way, which I call “extensive evolution.” Extensive evolution is oriented toward three C’s. I call it (in English at least it works out with the letter C)“Conquest, Colonization and Consumption.” Extensive evolution means that you want to increase your power and your range of influence on the earth’s surface. You want to extend your power, either by military force, conquests…this has always been the tradition.Then you want to extend your power by colonizing other people, other cultures, and imposing your ways of consumption, through marketing, PR, and so on. So in essence, you are basing your production and technologies to extend your thinking, your power over ever larger groups of people and using evermore energy, evermore resources.

This kind of growth cannot continue on a finite planet without destroying that planet, without destroying the balances, the equilibrium. Thus, I am suggesting that we have to move in holos: we have to move to a different kind of evolution which I call “intensive evolution.”

Now, “intensive evolution” has the key principle—the altruistic principle—but it also has a very good scientific basis. It is also based on three C’s (the letter C again), but these three C’s are “Connection, Communication and Consciousness.”

Connection, for the reason that I just mentioned a moment ago:we have to recognize that we are connected. If we do recognize that we have instant connections with each other, as I am sure animals recognize. Animals, as we know, do not have a high level of consciousness: they feel their connections to each other, and to their environment, and traditional people feel that. We have lost that in modern times through our intentiveegoistic orientation. If we recover this connection, then we will behave with greater solidarity to one another. We will extend our solidarity that exits in family or community, to, perhaps, even the state; we can extend it over larger areas, over the whole human family and to the living environment, to the whole planetary environment.