Empathetic civilization: the next development in man?
February 19th, 2010 by Jim JustAmanda Gelder has a great interview with Jeremy Rifkin at Culturelab. What I find most intriguing are the connections Rifken draws among psychology, politics, and economics. We find ourselves in a pickle of historic proportions at the moment at least in part because of errors in thinking about these things.
I’ll try to pull together a couple of threads to focus on economic thinking and its relationship to the global crisis we face:
The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. . .
A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.
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Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, excercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That’s why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren’t thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics. Everyone was looking out for their nation’s self-interest.
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A lot of business people would say that you can’t be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution–it’s an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that’s what is happening now.
Rifken thinks the new world of distributed knowledge and distributed energy means we’ve moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus. His vision is attractive. I wish I could share his optimism. Still, we too often forget that philosophy does not live just in acedemia – it has real world implications. The “market” we have come to deify today is really nothing more than a myth, a powerful one that has turned destructive and threatens to consume civilization itself.
Rifkin has just published a new 600-page book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which he expands on the ideas explored in the interview. I recall in my college days (note we were flower children of the 60s) reading books about evolving human consciousness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. Lancelot Law Whyte’s The Next Development in Man. Remember Charles Reich’s The Greening of America? Answer: not without some embarrassment.
So count me skeptical. My remaining aspirations are much less ambitious than forging a new human consciousness, rather just to eat well and live warmly in an increasingly uncertain world.