Jeremy Rifkin on Global Relational Consciousness

Discussion

Irena Ateljevic:

"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."

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