I’ve been watching a bunch of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts’ videos lately, and I especially have been enjoying their animated lectures. There’s one narrated by Jeremy Rifkin that talks about the myths of human nature and the need to achieve an empathic civilization. It raises important issues about human consciousness and how humans have related to each other in the past and how we need to learn to relate if our survival is worth ensuring.
Rifkin, in this video, shows the progression of communal relations by a series of periodic examples tied together by his axiom that “to empathize is to civilize.” The hunter/gatherer saw her community as those immediately around her and those that lived over the next hill as the “Other”, thus empathy only stretched as far as one could yell. With written language and theology this sphere grew to include anyone of the same faith system. When technology erased enough of the distance between people, nation-states became the new borders of empathy and the Others were those that belonged to other nation-states. How then, he leaves open, can we make the next step to a global community? Or is that even the next possible step?
We can make no mistake that the need is there to disregard the fiction of nation-states in order to survive as a species. Sooner or later, if left as is, the horrors of war will destroy us (if our destruction of the natural environment doesn’t do it first). Accepting this, it now becomes an issue of how humanity moves to that next step. In Rifkin’s examples, he always presented an Other that united Us against Them, with the Other always assuming an opposite correlation with our new uniting factor. So, assuming Rifkin’s premise is correct, who or what becomes the new Other? I’ve talked with a couple friends on this and received responses ranging from, “the Other becomes obsolete as an after-effect of globalization”, “Others will be those that negatively define themselves, so as to separate themselves from the community”, “we need to discover life outside of this planet, intelligent or not, to announce the meme that we are not so special and actually exist in fragility, thus our interdependence is paramount.”
So, is any of this correct? Do we need to first unite on a continental level like the European Union? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and let me know if Rifkin is full of shit as I hardly know anything about him other than he made an intriguing lecture in a Youtube video.
