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The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin – review

This is a must read book for a long but nimble romp through the history of ideas about human emotional growth. Rifkin defines and discusses the basic turning points of his kind of emotional history and makes a case for the modern world now beginning a new phase in the evolutionary growth of humanity. There is a dark side to this expansion. With each growth spurt of human development there was an intimately related greater consumption of Earth’s natural resources. The trend continues and presently the most empathetic people on Earth are also the ones creating the greatest ecologically negative impact and currently the masses of the most desperate people are incapable of developing or expressing empathy because they live too close to survival to make the effort.

Rifkin makes a case for those people who have access to the internet and other high-tech tools as being empowered for this kind of powerfully positive empathic growth. He also recognises that almost half of humanity is outside of his growing edge of empathy and they must satisfy their basic needs before even considering his alternatives. When the have access to a little more wealth the quickly convert it to survival necissities.

The huge glaring limitation of this book was its total lack of awareness of the exploding population problem. After reading the book I wondered at this and searched the index for key words which I might have missed or forgotten: Thomas Malthus, population, Planed Parenthood, evolution, positive feedback, — war, Doomsday, bomb, atomic bomb, H-bomb, etc., nothing. How can a historian have missed the most important things during his lifetime? … There are three times as many people on Earth than when he was born! And, there are more than 20,000 H-bombs armed and ready to explode right now. He tossed these concepts away un-analyzed in the final paragraphs. That is they are important but he was going to write about the nice things like how nice the newly empowered techy rich kids are becoming and how that is going to save the world.

It’s a beautiful book in so many ways, well written and thoughtful and beautifully presented and many of todays youths, (Gen X and Y and Millennial), are very nice people but this dewy-eyed book is like a smiling Pied Piper leading them happily to early deaths. Perhaps there is nothing that can be done to save humanity from catastrophe but this book reminds me of the band of musicians on the Titanic knowingly facing catostrophy but choosing to play their music as their ship sank and they persihed. What’s to be done but keep smiling and doing what your good at?

Throughout this book there was the intellectual undercurrent of the rhetoric of Albert Parsons of Chicago Haymarket fame. In Rifkin’s penultimate paragraph we have a perfect example of the attitude of the 1886 revolutionaries with their phrasing having slightly modernized tone.

Only by concerted action that establishes a collective sense of affiliation with the entire biosphere will we have a chance to ensure our future. This will require a biosphere consciousness. The Empathic Civilization is emerging. We are fast extending our empathic embrace to the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the planet. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

That is a whiney way to end such a well written book. Along the way there were many things which I liked very much. For example, buried in mid-paragraph on page 605, “The aim of all knowledge is existential: that is, to come ever closer to understanding the meaning of existence as well as our place in its evolution through our shared experiences and the meanings we glean from them.”