Chris Marsh, 1 July 2007

Twenty years ago I discovered Rupert Sheldrake’s ‘hypothesis of formative causation’, and his terms ‘morphic resonance’ and ‘morphic fields’. What delighted me about Rupert’s (he and I have been on first name terms) ideas was their potential for world change, not in science, where he sought to get the ideas accepted, but in society, in how people live on and use and abuse the planet. When I discovered that Rupert was not interested in exploring that potential, I lost interest in him for some years. But the ideas were still lurking in the back of my mind, and this year I decided to reinterpret Rupert’s science as a philosophy, naming the new concept ‘habitude’ for brevity and convenience, and to put the emphasis on habits, as patterns in time, because that is more relevant to world change, and in any case orthodox science happily embraces patterns in space, and calls them ‘fields’: electromagnetic, nuclear and gravitational fields, so to postulate a new kind of field in space is a weak kind of challenge to orthodox science.

After the 1980s to 90s, his years of being talked about as provocative and original, Rupert settled down to a programme of experimental work to prove morphic fields, his kind of patterns in space. The focus of these experiments: telepathy between people, and between people and their pets, gives them an appealing charm and quirkiness, and the lectures Rupert gives are witty and amusing. The supposedly serious science behind the experiments comes into the category of ‘New Science’, and thus appeals to those seekers after anything ‘alternative’, the ‘New Age’ movement. Too self-absorbed to make any difference to the world of business and exploitation, New Agers are nevertheless great readers of alternative books, so Rupert is able to make a living as a writer, his publishers requiring him to promote himself, rather than his ideas, which disappeared into a page of his website which nobody bothers to read.

During the years between my two phases of interest in Rupert’s science, I have been exploring ways that revolutionary world change might come about (see Design for Revolution). In parallel to that, I have been making good the deficiencies in my knowledge and understanding due to my early education in maths and science, having been steered in that direction in the 1950s and 60s when science was all the rage, and the arts, literature and the humanities were on their way off the curriculum. Now equipped with an MA in Literature, and knowing how to carry out research into the vast archives of human knowledge, my perspective on Rupert’s science, and science in general, is critical in more authoritative ways. One realisation which stands out is how recent is the idea of science, as that word is currently understood. It is only 370 years since Descartes’ Discourse on the Method, and 320 years since Newton’s Principia, a period which coincides with the rise and the heyday of capitalism. That coincidence is significant, because a popular belief in the whole universe being governed by laws, is very convenient in a world controlled by central government on behalf of the capitalist class, which is why that model of science has not been swept away by the doubts cast upon it. Science as the study of a material universe, determined by and obedient to eternal laws of nature, has been brought into question by the last century’s theoretical physics, which questions objectivity, and where absolute law has given way to tentative models expressed as new kinds of mathematical functions involving probability and uncertainty. In recent years, popular respect for science has weakened due to fears of the actual and potential damage caused by some new technologies. There has been a series of concerns: the various risks from nuclear weapons and energy, toxic waste, acid rain, hybrid seeds, agrochemicals, CFCs, and most recently genetic engineering. Nevertheless, the popular mindset still accepts science as an authority, and expects proof if anything is to be believed.

The idea of proof by repeatable experiment is part of orthodox science, the science that continues to suppose a material universe ‘out there’, which the detached observer can study in order to discover the laws governing it. As I have explained elsewhere (in ‘what is habitude?’) such a universe requires the existence of a Creator with a mind like the human mind, else why would the universe have been running, according to the kinds of laws our minds can understand, billions of years before we came into existence? Descartes and Newton and many of their successors studied science in order to understand the mind of God, and saw the regularities that they were able to identify, and express as mathematical formulae, as proof of the existence of God.

So why, I came to wonder, has Rupert spent twenty years trying to prove the existence of his morphic fields? And how is it that he hasn’t noticed that the people who buy his books are happy to believe in his fields whether he proves their existence or not? Why is he trying to persuade his one-time peers in the orthodox scientific community that he is one of them?, and given that he conducts his experiments with commendable rigor, why are they never going to be persuaded? And does it matter?

Perhaps the answer to all of these questions is to be found in India, not India as a newly industrialising nation with soaring economic growth and a thriving IT sector, but the India of spirituality, mysticism, meditation and mind altering techniques and substances. Rupert’s turning point: away from orthodox science to his ‘new science of life’, was accompanied by his discovery of ‘psychedelics, India and meditation’. In the process he gave up on years of being an atheist in favour of joining the Christian Church, but he cannot see that his new science sits uneasily with Descartes’ and Newton’s Creator God, whose Mind devised the material universe, established its eternal Laws, the study of which gave the world the mechanistic paradigm. Rupert does not seem to know where he and his ideas belong, he is in a hopeless muddle, his brain perhaps addled by exposure to ‘psychedelics, India and meditation’.

I have wondered if habitude could move on, and be developed independently of Rupert’s science, particularly his obsession with proof by homely experiment. The way to go with my new philosophy may be to set aside the new science it issued from, and focus on the other aspect of Rupert’s work: the rediscovery of the animate universe, which I interpret as bridging the three hundred year old anomaly of the law-abiding world machine which is capitalism’s bedfellow, to reconnect with concepts of the world more in keeping with the culture of the rooted community.

It must be obvious from the forgoing that I am angry – or perhaps just disappointed and sad. In particular I am obviously disillusioned with Rupert Sheldrake, whose work I once thought so brilliant. From time to time he has apologised for ‘failing to meet [my] expectations’, and has said that I make him feel bad. So what were those expectations, and what went wrong?

I am no longer as familiar with Rupert’s early books as I once was, although I recently re-read A New Science of Life, and was reminded why it was such a revelation to me all those years ago, and I’ve just skimmed through the others that I own. The Presence of the Past was my favourite, my signed copy being a treasure. Looking through it again I can see why it impressed me, with its breadth of coverage, seeming to include every philosopher from Plato to Chomsky, Aristotle to Whitehead, and every ism or wasm I’d ever heard of, and some I hadn’t. But that was before my re-education in the humanities, and now I am struck by the meandering superficiality and general dismissiveness, although one of my favourites, Bergson, is embraced, with his élan vital. But maybe it is the title which still, for me, says it all, and it was published at the height of my enthusiasm for how world changing these ideas could be. I still find The Rebirth of Nature too ‘New Agey’, and I remember wondering if it was written for his wife, Jill Purce, to whom it is dedicated. The last book of Rupert’s which I bought was Seven Experiments that Could Change the World, which seems to be a retreat back ‘home’ to science, and in it he suggests that it is the role of science to change the world, an assumption that I would take issue with, but I understand why he would think that.

I can see what I once found so exciting in those books, but it doesn’t add up or go anywhere. At some point Rupert ‘lost it’ – well, he certainly lost me – and there is nothing in what he now says in his lectures or on his website to suggest that these ideas could be world changing, unless one believes that it is out of science that social change, good or bad, arises. The question that perplexed me when I first read A New Science of Life still does. Is Rupert’s scientific model meant to replace the mechanistic paradigm, the material universe, its laws and universal constants, its thermodynamics and ultimate heat death, in its entirety? Does he postulate a new model, with a single ‘substance’ or – which is the same thing – no ‘substance’ at all, based on form rather than on matter and energy, born at the Big Bang and evolving into more and more complex forms, restrained into repeating patterns by recognition, resonance and memory? Or is Rupert’s science merely ‘a science of the gaps’, invoked only to explain phenomena for which orthodox science has little or nothing to offer? Rupert’s theory gathers dust in a corner of his web site, while he clings to the hope that experimental proof – of doubtful relevance to the theory – will exonerate him from being a heretic and traitor to the scientific community of which he was once a proud member. Meanwhile he makes a living selling New Science for a New Age spiralling blissfully into its own navel.

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