The Big Picture

New paperback out: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, by Jeremy Rifkin.

Sorta explains why we really gotta care about why we care. 'Bout how we gotta get our empathic asses in gear in this flat world. Kinda backs up the idea that empathy matters on a bigger scale, has a bigger role to play, not just in our own mini-dramas, as it were. He argues we've gone from the Age of Spirituality, to the Age of Reason, to the Age of Empathy. I haven't read it yet, but here's some quotes from a Huffington Post piece:

"In the modern era, with its emphasis on rationality, objectivity, detachment, and calculability, human emotions are considered irrational, quixotic, impossible to objectify, not subject to detached evaluation, and difficult to quantify. Even today, it is common lore not to let one's emotions get in the way of sound reasoning and judgment. How many times have we heard someone say or have said to someone else, 'Try not to be so emotional . . . try to behave more rationally.'"

"New developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and psychology are laying the groundwork for a wholesale reappraisal of human consciousness. The premodern notion that faith and God's grace are the windows to reality and the Enlightenment idea that reason is at the apex of modern consciousness are giving way to a more sophisticated approach to a theory of mind."

"In the empathic civilization, spirituality invariably replaces religiosity. Spirituality is a deeply personal journey of discovery in which empathic experience--as a general rule--becomes the guide to making connections, and becomes the means to foster transcendence."

"Reason too can be salvaged from its disembodied Enlightenment roots and be recast within an embodied empathic frame...Reason includes mindfulness, reflection, introspection, contemplation, musing, and pondering, as well as rhetorical and literary ways of thinking. Reason is all of this and more."