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The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God by Rupert Sheldrake,
Century, pp 215, 14.99 Pounds.

Rupert Sheldrake’s latest book will probably invite as much critical
resistance as his previous works A New Science of Life and The Presence
of the Past. His controversial theory of ‘formative causation’ – the hypothesis
that self-organising systems (both living and dead) operate within resonating
fields that span the Universe – might almost have been designed to outrage
orthodox scientific opinion. While his previous books were full-frontal
(if meticulously argued assaults) this time, his tactic is different. As
in the martial art of jujitsu, Sheldrake seeks to throw his opponents by
blending with the force of their movement. In The Rebirth of Nature, he
counts the ways in which the advance of mainstream science, after destroying
the animistic view of nature, has gone on to call every element of its own
mechanistic-reductionistic paradigm into the question, including the concept
of physicality itself. After all, what is there left to build the world-machine
from once its atomic components have dissolved into waves, vibrations or
‘structures of activity’?

For that matter, was classical mechanism ever really as soulless as
it purported to be? Sheldrake reminds us how Isaac Newton struggled to avoid
using the animistic overtones of gravitational ‘attraction.’ Eventually
this suspect idea, so cruelly ridiculed by the French Cartesians, passed
into the scientific vernacular with all its ‘occult properties’ glossed
over. Later, when Newton’s limitations became clear, Michael Faraday conjured
up the field theory, which, Sheldrake feels, smuggled an ancient neo-Platonic
conception of the all-pervasive anima mundi (world spirit) back into modern
physics.

A contemporary example comes from the ‘new biology.’ In seeking to explain
away the purposiveness of morphogenesis, Sheldrake observes that geneticists
have resorted to a ‘crypto-vitalist’ conception of DNA. He has in mind the
extreme anthropomorphism of Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene,’ a ‘nothing
but’ explanation that finishes by attributing all the properties of life
and mind to an inanimate chemical mechanism. This reminds us only that Darwin
himself constantly personified nature, apologising that he did so ‘for brevity’s
sake’ – although he would have been hard-pressed to find another way that
was not absurdly convoluted to present his ideas.

In the history of science, this struggle is constant. The militant campaign
to purge animism and vitalism from nature has repeatedly finished by conniving
at the return of the repressed under some other guise. Once science stops
speaking the language of mathametics, it seems to find no other way to make
philosophical sense of the ordianry world it has laid before us, except
to invoke that most desperate and inscrutable phrase ‘in principle.’ Thus
Stephen Hawking, convinced that ‘ .. quantum mechanics enabls us in principle
to predict nearly everything we see around us within the limits of the uncertainty
principle,’ finishes by saying that ‘in practice .. the calculations required
for systems containing more than a few electrons are so complicated that
we cannot do them.’

The ordered complexity of the Universe has by now become so fully demonstrated
that Sheldrake believes ‘nature is coming alive again within scientific
theory.’ By this he means that a sense of nature as old as the paganism
of our ancestors is finding its way back into intellectual respectability
as modern scienctific thought discovers more and more self-oranising systems
in the Universe. The Gaia hypothesis is only the most obvious case in point,
though, like ‘the selfish gene’ it, too, is usually dismissed as a ‘mere’
metaphor. Similarly, our realistation that cosmology and biology are linked
by an evolutionary history, that stars and galaxies have a life-cycle that
connects them intimately with organic chemistry represents a significant
departure from mechanistic orthodoxy.

Sheldrake’s own research in ‘morphic fields’ is part of this ‘greening
of science.’ He prefers to refer to the regularities of nature as ‘habits,’
borrowing a world from biology and psychology rather than the study of inert
matter. While he scrupulously labels his work at every point as still hypothetical
and eagerly identifies posibilities for experimental verification, he clearly
believes that science is moving towards an organismic worldview. He would
like that new paradigm to combine qualities of both mechanism and vitalism:
the romantic warmth of the vitalists without dualism, the unity of mechanists
without their reductionistic arrogance.

Sheldrake belives that ‘nothing less than a revolution is at hand’ in
the culture of science. He welcomes the prospect as a larger blessing for
humanity. ‘The scientific and technological conquest of nature expresses
a mentality of domination’ whose environmental cost has become too high.
The link he sees between deep ecology and green politics is a potent mixture;
it may contain within it the same moral appeal that the science of Newton
once lent to the great cause of democratic revolution.

The latter pages of Sheldrake’s book – dealing with such matters as
mystical experience, sacred places and the power of prayer – are bound to
grate upon his agnostic readers. The material here is so briefly coverad
that it reads more like a manifesto or a personal profession of faith than
a philosophical treatise. Even so, if for no better reason than to exercise
their wits against a first-class polemic, his critics should value this
work. Finding answers to his questions will fortify their ideology.

Theodore Roszak is professor of history at California State University,
Hayward. He is the author of The Cult of Information. His novel Flicker,
a secret history of the movies, will be published next spring.