Trend-seer Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work (1995) predicted that electronic commuting would doom the workplace, The Biotech Century (1998) that genetics would redraw the blueprints of all species, including our own. The Hydrogen Economy (2002) envisioned the "forever fuel" replacing oil; in The European Dream (2004), Europe's "post-industrial future" eclipsed the American dream; and The Age of Access (2006) foresaw globalization creating an era of "hypercapitalism."
Now, in The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Rifkin has synthesized his previous visions into a cornucopian oracle of world and time. The book is nothing less than an attempt to review the economic history of the biosphere (from the Neolithic to the 21st century) as a race between ecodoom and connectivity, entropy and global empathy.
Were I a betting man, I'd put my money on entropy. If life is a conspiracy in restraint of entropy, Earth, as the Roman poet Horace observed, opens impartially for paupers and the sons of kings. But Rifkin's horse is empathy, ridden hell for Naugahyde.
"Viewing economic history from an empathic lens," Rifkin asserts, "allows us to uncover rich new strands of the human narrative that lay previously hidden. The result is a new social tapestry - the Empathic Civilization - woven from a wide range of fields, including literature and the arts, theology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, and communications theory."
Mixed metaphors can't lend predictive functions to the above-cited logoi. Political science is not a science; philosophy has been saving the world since time began; and "communications theory" is merely the shuttle that Rifkin must throw through the warp of his narrative "strands" to form his "new social tapestry."
Rifkin's "discovery of Homo empathicus" doesn't explain how an inter-psychic ideal, empathy, can vanquish a physical principle, entropy. Only as a myth, "Rifkin syndrome," say, as opposed to "Spengler syndrome" (vatic optimism versus terminal pessimism), does The Empathic Civilization join the shelf of apocalyptic tomes that includes Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Book of Revelation.
"All societies prefer myth to the truth," British economic historian Richard Grassby remarked in The Idea of Capitalism Before the Industrial Revolution. "But knowledge is not advanced by generating fantasies, no matter how entertaining."
The Empathic Civilization is entertaining. Rifkin's potpourri starts bubbling with the First World War's spontaneous Christmas, 1914, truce. It briefly ameliorated all that brutish Hobbesian mud in which the combatants had been killing one another. "The men at Flanders," Rifkin says, "expressed a far deeper sensibility [than 19th-century Utilitarians]- one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence and that transcends the portals of time and the exigencies of whatever contemporary orthodoxy happens to rule. … They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another."
Ah, if only one could transcend the portals of time to see the very marrow of human existence blown sky-high after Christmas week, 1914. But Rifkin, a history-user, isn't interested in historiography or why "the men at Flanders" went right back to it. After all, "our official chroniclers - the historians - have given short shrift to empathy as a driving force in the unfolding of human history."
What babies, puppies and elephants really want is empathy, which is mediated by mirror neurons. Rifkin approvingly cites Jeffrey Masson's When Elephants Weep, in which an empathic elephant tries to rescue a mired rhino calf. This brings Rifkin to the aptly named British sociologist, Wilfred Trotter, who in 1919 argued the animal origins of human altruism. Freud is explicitly blamed for failing to treat humans as herd animals.
The Empathic Civilization lacks empathy for earlier thinkers. Rifkin attacks Thomas Hobbes for an "aggressive and self-interested" view of human nature. René Descartes's "thought processes" allegedly resemble "what psychologists and neuroscientists today might think of as a high-functioning Asperger's personality." And "even at the beginning of the Age of Reason, not everyone agreed with Francis Bacon's approach to ferreting out the truths of nature. Goethe, for one, took exception. He argues that nature is best approached as a participant rather than as a disinterested bystander."
A truth Rifkin has ferreted out for himself is that "in prehistoric forager/hunter cultures and even in early horticultural societies, death didn't loom as large in people's psyches. While aware of death, the fear we associate with it in contemporary times did not exist." How could Rifkin possibly know this? Empathy.
Critics have compared Rifkin to Jared Diamond, another big ideas man. Whereas Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse can be analyzed empirically, The Empathic Civilization is beyond that. It has more to do with faith than science, with fiction than history. Like the old millennial mystery tales, which foresaw the dawning of a golden age somewhere over the rainbow, The Empathic Civilization proposes a gnosis, a Gaian doctrine the aspirants of which espouse biospheric consciousness.
The next time you see bomb-sniffing dogs at the airport, think of interracial marriages, Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, "mass intimacy" (which "may no longer be oxymoronic," Rifkin advises), the 6.6 degrees of separation that unite us, and American Idol. When you've learned how to shape your participatory reality, all will be well.
Chris Scott philosophizes from St. Joseph Island, Ont.