The J.K. Rowling Effect

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

I continue to be fascinated with Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, subtitled A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. For many days I have been struggling to figure out how I ought to discuss its spiritual aspects. The topic is complicated, to say the least.

Capra's "systems approach" to the life sciences has many names, one of which is "deep ecology," since all life is deeply interconnected with all other life and with every supposedly "nonliving" aspect of the physical environment. Capra writes, "Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence." (p. 7).

Capra's thinking resonates satisfyingly with what he calls the "perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American tradition."

But notice that Capra picks out "Christian mystics" as the delegates of monotheist religion to the halls of perennial philosophy. One reason is that traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have very often supported, at the level of their theological presuppositions, "the fundamentally antiecological nature of many of our social and economic structures and their technologies [rooted in] the 'dominator system' of social organization. Patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and racism are examples of social domination that are exploitative and antiecological" (p. 8).

I'd like to agree two hundred percent with that radical assessment, but I can't:

• I am instinctively non-radical.
• The very philosophy Capra extols and I echo is intrinsically averse to drawing sharp distinctions, such as ecology-good/patriarchy-bad.
• If the schema "X is good and the opposite of X is bad" is intrinsically suspect as drawing too sharp a distinction, then any pronouncement of the form "the new way of thinking is right, so traditional religious/philosophical assumptions are wrong" is suspect as well.

Or, put it this way. The "new way of thinking" Capra describes inherently deprecates absolutism. Ergo, the claim "Absolutism is always a mistake" is ruled out for the very reason that it is absolutist.

Yet traditional religious thinkers are well known for claiming that their belief systems are founded on the bedrock of unassailable truth, no? How we "new" thinkers ought to feel about absolutely rejecting the absolutism of "old" thinkers is a puzzle.


It's crystal clear to me that the spirituality of the old thinkers is inextricably bound up with absolutist assumptions. One of these assumptions is that in any pair of opposites, the two terms are at war with each other. Light is at war with darkness; we need to be on the side of light. Good is at war with evil, and we need to be on the side of good. And so on.

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Capra, on the other hand, in his The Tao of Physics extols the Taoists' recognition that light-darkness, good-evil, etc., are poles of a single unity they call yin-yang. No matter how you slice it, that's a different kind of spirituality, based on a different set of underlying philosophical commitments.

Using the concepts of self-organizing systems Capra discusses in The Web of Life, the two kinds of spirituality can be seen as two distinct realms of stability in the abstract "phase space" of the mind.

Complex, self-organizing systems of all types manage to converge upon "steady states" of relative permanence and stability, even though they are open systems whose unceasing internal energy flow takes them far from thermodynamic equilibrium, in the deathlike state physicists call maximum entropy. In biological systems, a steady state of homeostasis prevails. Similar steady states are achieved in nominally nonliving, merely physical systems that likewise self-organize.

One of the most familiar types of self-organizing physical systems to us today is the laser. If you have a CD player or a DVD player, you depend on a tiny laser to read your discs. Laser light is "coherent" because the individual atoms emitting the light manage to coordinate the light emission among themselves. That doesn't happen in an ordinary light bulb. Coordinated light emission in a laser is an example of self-organization in a physical system.


This quality of stability in far-from-equilibrium self-organizing systems was puzzling to scientists until a few decades ago. In the 1960s, Nobel Laureate chemist-physicist Ilya Prigogine studied "dissipative systems" — systems through which there is an energy flow that holds them far from thermodynamic equilibrium — and found a number of common characteristics. Among the common characteristics of these dissipative systems is that "when the flow of energy and matter through them increases, they may go through new instabilities and transform themselves into new structures of increased complexity" (Web of Life, p. 89).

Stripped down to essentials, the idea here is that organisms, their internal organs, and their external societies are, as self-organizing systems far from thermodynamic death, capable of generating different patterns of organization, depending on how the energy flows through them. The available steady-state patterns a system may pass through are separated along the pathway of its evolution by critical points of transitional instability.

My thought is, accordingly, that the two spiritual outlooks which parallel what I referred to above as the "old way of thinking" and the "new way of thinking" are alternate steady-state patterns in the human mind. I personally have experienced a transition from a traditional Christian spirituality to a spirituality, akin to that of Capra, which I am calling the spirituality of organicity. In transitioning from one to the other, I have passed through a point of instability which I experienced as confusion, frustration, and a certain amount of guilt that I was not holding true to my Christian commitment. These negative feelings have been mixed with a certain elation that a mode of spirituality that seems to be more "me" is finally emerging in my life.

The spiritual mind is itself a self-organizing system with a complex "phase portrait," I am coming to realize. That is, it is like any other dynamical, far-from-equilibrium system in that its available "steady states" each comprise a set of points in abstract "phase space" that cluster around and gravitate toward a particular "attractor" in one "basin of attraction" or another. The spiritual-mind-as-system dynamically passes from one point in its phase space to another, but unless there is a change in the topography of the various basins of attraction, it tends to stay on one attractor, or at least remain in one basin of attraction.

But the topography can change (see Web of Life, pp. 135-137). Various things can cause the system to experience a "bifurcation," also known as a "catastrophe," in which there there may be a transition to a basin of attraction that didn't exist before. When the spiritual-mind-as-system comes to a point of bifurcative catastrophe, I imagine the experience will be one of spiritual confusion.

J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, recently talked about the Christian imagery she quite intentionally put in her books, as well as her own Christian faith. According to this article:

But while the book [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows] begins with a quote on the immortal soul — and though Harry finds peace with his own death at the end of his journey — it is the struggle itself which mirrors Rowling's own, the author said.

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," [Rowling] revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

I take it that the interior struggle Rowling describes — "my faith is sometimes that my faith will return" — indicates that her own spiritual mind is subject to what I am calling bifurcative catastrophe. Hers concerns (at least in part) whether her Christian spirituality requires a belief in life after death. Whether there is indeed an afterlife and whether I myself can still call myself a Christian if I no longer am sure there is one are questions that have plagued me also.

I can't answer those questions for J.K. Rowling, but I can say that the spiritual "instability" that goes along with asking such questions is entirely natural and normal. I accordingly dub it and other natural and normal agonies of religious faith the "J.K. Rowling effect," in her honor.