Empathic Civilization

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Book: Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness. In A World In Crisis. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2009, 675 pp.

URL = http://empathiccivilization.com/ [1]

Review

Gary Olson:

"Rifkin is conversant with the evolutionary and biological origins of our brain’s hard-wiring for empathy. He clearly grasps the importance of mirror neurons and how they’ve fundamentally recast our understanding of human nature. However, beyond summarizing this robust evidence his muddled guidance for realizing an “empathic civilization,” won’t raise any serious objections at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business where he lectures in the Executive Education Program.

The problem, as Rifkin defines it, is our “intensive energy flow-through” which may well doom the planet before our empathic disposition prevails. To avoid extinction of our ecosystem and the human race, Rifkin advocates a Third Industrial Revolution of “distributed capitalism.” It will be led by visionary entrepreneurs and global business leaders who will achieve ecological salvation by adhering to four pillars: renewable energy, green infrastructure, reliance on hydrogen fuel cells (the subject of an earlier book), and reconfiguring power grids with a premium on sharing.

Rifkin believes that biosphere consciousness will only occur if people in wealthy societies like the United States seek personal happiness in something other than materialist values and accumulation of wealth. Why will this occur? Because people want to contribute to the common good and will experience “joy” in doing so.

Consistent with his accommodation to ruling politico-economic interests, Rifkin attributes the recent high public profile for empathy—Homo empathicus—to President Obama’s frequent references to the topic. This leads Rifkin to write that “The president has made empathy the core of his personal philosophy and the centerpiece of his political decisions, from the conduct of his foreign policy to the selection of Supreme Court Justices” (p. 177).

Except for the chapter on his vaguely defined distributive capitalism there are only two references to capitalism in the index and both are uncritical historical citations. Rifkin envisions a transition from outmoded, entropy-producing geopolitics to forward looking, twenty-first century biosphere politics. That new world is collaborative, responsible and reflects a new consciousness, not unlike what political theorist H.Y. Jung has termed ecopiety, where we all live in harmony in a new digital commons. Again, barring an unlikely Saul to Paul conversion experience by elites, how this will occur remains murky at best. The problem is that capitalism requires the methodical foreclosure of our moral instinct for empathy and the manufacture of cultural indifference to quell this response.

Tellingly, Rifkin lavishes praise on new management styles that incorporate empathic sensibility toward employees and in selling products. [2] Caring bosses will be a priority. Again, he fails to acknowledge the empathy-denying imperatives of capitalism itself. Michael Parenti, in explaining how ecology is subversive of capitalism states the motives of global plutocrats, states that “. . . like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is at stake for them is something more immediate than global ecology. It is global accumulation. The fate of the biosphere seems a far-off abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate investments.”

(http://teachempathy.com/book-review/review-and-critique-jeremy-rifkin’s-the-empathic-civilization-and-p-w-singer’s-wired-for-war/)


Discussion

Evolutionary Changes in Psycho-social Development: Relational Consciousness

By Irena Ateljevic:

"In his latest book (Rifkin, 2009), The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Rifkin elaborates on this call to become more oriented towards mutuality and interconnectedness by providing a historical analysis of empathy, showing that humans are fundamentally empathic beings, and that society has become increasingly empathic throughout history. Referring to the beginning of biosphere consciousness, this latest book asks whether we can “reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth” (Rifkin, 2009, p. 3).

In his work, Rifkin (2005) also draws on the psychoanalytical view of the global political economy and its history. He makes reference to Owen Barfield, the British philosopher who views history as an unfolding of human consciousnesses which can be divided in roughly three stages, which dovetail with Freud’s theory of individual mental development (cited in Rifkin, 2005).

In the first stage of hunter-gatherer societies, humans had little sense of self and regarded Mother Earth as a primordial mother, treating her with the same love, respect and awe as they might confer on their own tribal mothers (similar to the infant-mother relationship when the infant still feel oneness with her/his Mother). The beginning of agriculture marked the onset of the second great period of human consciousnesses when humans in their activities of domestication of animals and land slowly began to lose the intimate participation and communion with the natural world. It is comparable to the child/adolescence/adulthood stage of psychoanalysis, when the void left by our own sense of separation from our bodily connection with our own mothers is compensated by endless substitutes - material things, ideologies, unconditional love of God, sex, various addictions - you name it. The unhappiness of the modern era and its status anxieties (de Botton, 2004) become more explicable in light of a statement given by the psychologist Norman Brown (1985, p. 297) and used by Rifkin (2005,): “The more the life of the body passes into things, the less life there is in the body, and at the same time the increasing accumulation of things represents an ever fuller articulation of the lost life of the body” (p. 373).


Barfield suggests, however, that we are on the cusp of the third great stage of human consciousness—the stage in which we make a self-aware choice to re-participate with the body of nature. It is this new relational consciousness in which we are increasingly becoming aware of shared risk and vulnerability, and economic, social and environmental interdependencies, which leads to the emergence of process-oriented behaviour and willingness to accept contradicting realities and multicultural perspectives. In many ways, Barfield’s view reaffirms Eisler’s (1987) evolution theory of human development from the ancient, matrifocal times, via the domination system of patriarchy to the emerging partnership model between men and women; nature and humans; mind, body and soul. So, instead of denying our own mortality (so characteristic to the youth’s sense of invincibility), the current era brings about a maturity stage in which we realize that we can’t really begin to live until we accept the inevitability of our own death. But how do we come to terms with our own death and make the choice to live?


Rifkin (2005, p. 374) again provides guidance: [We do it] by making a self-aware decision to leave the death instinct behind, to no longer seek mastery, control, or domination over nature, including human nature, as a means of fending off death. Instead, accept death as part of life and make a choice to re-participate with the body of nature. Cross over from the self to the other, and reunite in an empathetic bond with the totality of relationships that together make up the Earth’s indivisible living community.

(http://www.integral-review.org/issues/vol_9_no_2_ateljevic_visions_of_transmodernity.pdf)


More Information

Author intro at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/the-empathic-civilization_b_416589.html