La Civiltà Dell'empatia. La Corsa Verso La Coscienza Globale Nel Mondo In Crisi (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
The message Rifkin has to tell is one of the most important in our social and cultural history, and the only aspect keeping me from giving the book a solid five stars is the slight caveat attached to any Rifkin books, which is related to the way he tells a story. Rifkin is a pop-scientist and culturalist, hence his work won't go as deep as, say, Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' or Peter Turchin's 'War and Peace and War.' The advantage to taking the 30,000-foot approach as Rifkin does is not just that his ideas become more comprehensible to a wider audience, but that he can integrate a broader array of cultural and environmental trends in making his case. The disadvantage is that, when we don't dive deep into how the selfish gene and altruistic gene interact, or in how mirror neurons have evolved in larger neural networks, Rifkin's case sounds less convincing. Particularly as he brings in elements of entropy trends and energy-use trends that Rifkin has written about before, there is a danger in pulling in any random element to prove the case for an emergent empathic civilization.The best part of Rifkin's book resides in its center section about the shift over centuries from magical hunter-gatherer to faith-centered medievalists, to Enlightenment rationalists and nineteenth-century Romanticists, and on to the 20th-century psychology-centric and 21st-century altruists. Cognitive neuroscientists would buy into much of what Rifkin poses as a history of consciousness, and it seems almost intuitive and obvious how the empathic gene takes center stage over time - but also showing why each step in moving to multi-conscious empathy was a necessary step that would be difficult to skip. I find Rifkin to be a little too kind to the 19th-century Romanticists - I love Rousseau and Goethe, to be sure, but Byron and Shelley displayed an underside that showed that an excess of Romanticism can lead to Mussolini-style fascism. Just ask Ezra Pound.Rifkin's opening Part 1 seemed less necessary, somehow, since he spends the first few chapters taking apart Sigmund Freud. In the 21st-century, this seems almost like a straw-man exercise. Does anyone believe in Freudian theory any more? Maybe among the humanists Rifkin hangs with, residual trust in Freud remains, but my jaded postmodern and neuroscientist friends dismissed Freud years ago. Rifkin almost could have started with Part 2 of his book and formed a coherent whole.Many will criticize Part 3 of the book as being far too "kumbaya" for a world still dominated by materialist greed and war, but there are many who dismiss Pinker and Turchin, as well. The trends toward an empathic, universal consciousness emerging are real ones, but as Rifkin says, they emerge on a backdrop of humans befouling their own environment. The point is, we fully recognize it and are trying to confront the damages we cause. Selfish acquisition and slaughter of the Other will always be with us, but empathy does indeed seem to be coming front and center. Those who dwell in visions of Apocalypse will deny this, but the reasons for limited optimism are everywhere. Rifkin makes an important point when he says that in any era, remnants of the consciousness style of older eras remain, as evolutionary vestiges of unwanted limbs. Therefore, we should expect to still retain some forager mysticism, some Medieval monotheism, some Newton-era neutral objectivism, some Byron Romanticism, some 20th-century promotion of self-esteem, and some 21st-century multiculturalism. The trick lies in getting the balance right.Rifkin's argument in Part 3 that the dramaturgical self makes the issue of "self-authenticity" less relevant is an important one, and I applaud the way he has applied that to social networks. Rifkin thinks that narcissism in the era of Facebook and Twitter is actually less of a problem than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, and he might have a point, though there are still a plethora of fame (and infamy)-hungry narcissists on Facebook.Rifkin's 2009 book concludes with a nod to the 2008 election of Barack Obama, a mention that might sound dated because of all the problems Obama has faced. But the results of the 2012 elections reinforce his point somewhat, but not so much in the fact that Obama was re-elected. Most Republicans gnash their teeth, not so much over four more years of Obama, but from a universal shift to gay marriage approval, pot legalization, rejection of politicians like Akin and Mourdock, etc. It isn't so much that Obama himself represents a turning point, as much as the Millenials are ushering in the victory of multicultural hippie-paganism over Judeo-Christian traditionalism, and this probably will ease the way to the empathic civilization Rifkin describes. Skeptics would say there still are far too many Islamic Salafists, Russian Orthodox traditionalists, and East African evangelicals out there, but Rifkin would argue that this does not necessitate wars - the dominance of English-language pop culture and its multicultural support for women's rights, gay rights, etc., assures that the battle is won without a shot being fired.I only regret that in the last few pages of the book, Rifkin returns to Goethe's critique of the scientific method. I agree with the notion of a compassionate method of neutral inquiry, but if we go too far down the route Rifkin suggests, we end up in the post-modernist mush where any narrative is equal to any other narrative. It is true that what we consider a solid objective world is actually a series of probability wave fronts, and that strengthens Rifkin's argument that the self is a process, not an object. Nevertheless, there is a physical world of wavefronts that exists outside the sentient self, and Francis Bacon had a point in describing a way of studying the external world so that we don't bring in our biases. The scientific method may be updated for the 21st century, but if we throw out the baby with the bathwater, we find that there would be as much validity for blaming Hurricane Sandy on witches or a vengeful God, as on climate fronts disrupted by human behavior. And we don't want to go back to a world dominated by magic and divine intervention.Rifkin is a very sharp guy who has always displayed a few annoying tendencies in pop-psychology, whether writing about biotechnology or Europe or entropy. But if you can apply the right filters, you will find 'The Empathic Civilization' filled with some of the most important cultural ideas yet expressed this century, and you can always go back to Pinker or Turchin for a deeper dive. I'm taking my time reading this book because this is the most comprehensive, detailed, sophisticated, wide-ranging, all-encompassing books I've read....so far it has given me more than several plates full of food for thought. It leaves no stone unturned and goes at religion, government, and our energy crisis with gusto. All the while adding to my vocabulary words I rarely hear or use in daily life and giving me a greater perspective....one from self-interest and loneliness to a view that is more universal and cosmopolitan in nature. Written by Jeremy Rifkin, it has a global view and a personal touch to it so you don't feel like your reading a textbook, boring yourself to death. I'm taking alot from this, and I have to write notes and think about sections to absorb them. If you've got the time I highly suggest reading this over any other book about crises and what we can do about them.
What do You think about La Civiltà Dell'empatia. La Corsa Verso La Coscienza Globale Nel Mondo In Crisi (2010)?
Interesting premise, but quite mixed reviews, due to its length (600+p), and poor organization.
—dancer1992w
Eye opener on how society depends strongly on the first two laws of Thermodynamics.
—ldpederson
