[LINK] "Jeremy Rifkin on The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in C

[rfmcdonald]

While I've usually found Jeremy Rifkin to be a pedantic bore, what he says about his new book in this interview with eye weekly's Edward Keenan actually makes me interested in him. Or is this just a case of my biases confirming themselves? Regardless.

what’s been driving us all along, Rifkin convincingly argues, is a sense of empathy that science has recently shown is “soft-wired into our neural circuitry.” Competition and aggression are secondary drives, he says, that emerge when our empathic nature is frustrated. The story of our history then, is a millenia-long quest for human connection and community, which has grown while twinned revolutions in energy and communications make the world bigger and reshape human consciousness.

Forager-hunter societies — without exception — developed oral languages that allowed them to organize their communal harnessing of energy (gathered or hunted food). Those languages created a group identity, “a fiction of what constitutes a family,” in Rifkin’s formulation, that extended empathy to a circle suited to the way communication works.

“Oral language is shouting distance,” says Rifkin. “So you can empathize, with your central nervous system, just with those within shouting distance, blood relations, tribal. Everyone in the other valley? Not a human.”

A great shift in consciousness is obvious when you look at the “hydraulic agricultural” civilizations that emerged next. All over the world — in the Indus Valley, China, Mexico, the Middle East — the emergence of written language allowed for the organization of economies that harness energy in agricultural production. These societies, again without exception, developed a theological consciousness, and through it we see an empathic connection to religion.

Jump ahead to the first industrial revolution when the emergence of coal and steam power and the development of the printing press — without which the industrial economy simply would not have been possible — led us to an ideological consciousness, with group identity and empathy enveloping the nation-state.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the dawn of electricity and oil, came television and radio communications. Suddenly we begin to have a concept of the global village, the multinational family fiction and a psychological consciousness.

[. . .]

Perhaps luckily, we’re at the dawn of another great shift in human consciousness. The internet has created what Rifkin calls “distributed communication” — look at Facebook and Twitter and cellular phones, for example — a worldwide communications network that allows everyone to connect in real time, with minimal or nonexistent government or corporate intervention.

We’re also seeing a “distributed energy” revolution — solar, wind, geothermal — that increasingly allows each household to become energy producers, and to create a surplus of energy and make it available to others. These new forms of energy inspire hope because they don’t increase the destruction of the earth; they can effectively halt the empathy-entropy cycle.

This, Rifkin projects, will give rise to a new era of “distributed capitalism” — a concept that sounds much like the vision of early internet pioneers, where each person joins a global community and can be both producer and consumer of energy on a human, individual scale in a very global context. The technology and the global community it creates provides all the tools needed both to organize and to structure this new world order.

The great shift in consciousness Rifkin expects is toward an empathic view of the world. “If our neuroscientists and cognitive scientists are right — and they clearly are, we’ve seen enough evidence — that we’re actually soft-wired and predisposed for empathy, to be homo-empathicus, not homo avarice, then is it possible to imagine human beings extending that empathy to the whole human race as a family? And our animal relatives, as part of the evolutionary scheme and the biosphere. Because if it’s possible to imagine that then we could actually make it.”