| Press Release "Many in the scholarly, religious, and political fields praise Jeremy Rifkin for a willingness to think big, raise controversial questions, and serve as a social and ethical prophet."
--The New York Times
Rifkin is “one of the leading big-picture thinkers of our day”
—Utne Reader
“Rifkin poses real questions that we’ve spent too little time thinking about.”
—The Washington Post
The Empathic Civilization
The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
In his new book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis , Jeremy Rifkin contends that we are at a seminal turning point in human history and that the coming decades could well determine our future survival on Earth.
In his role as an advisor to heads of state and companies around the world, Mr. Rifkin has come to believe that the global discussion around the unfolding economic crisis, energy security, and climate change must move beyond market incentives, new business solutions, and government sanctions, codes and standards.
If we are to avert a catastrophic destruction of the Earth’s ecosystems, the collapse of the global economy, and the possible extinction of the human race, we will need to change human consciousness itself—and in less than a generation. In short, we will need to rethink human nature and reconceptualize the very meaning of the human journey.
In The Empathic Civilization Mr. Rifkin presents a sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization. The best-selling author looks at the evolution of empathy and the profound ways it has shaped the human story. The dawning realization that we are a fundamentally empathic species has far-reaching consequences for society.
Building on these new understandings of human nature, Rifkin takes us on a never-before-told journey. He chronicles the dramatic story of the extension of human empathy from the rise of the first great theological civilizations, to the ideological age that dominated the 18th and 19th centuries, the psychological era that characterized much of the 20th century and the emerging dramaturgical period of the 21st century. 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 communication theory.
Rifkin notes that in our globally connected civilization, empathic consciousness is beginning to extend to all of life in the biosphere. Unfortunately, the same technological and economic forces that are bringing us closer together, are sucking up vast reserves of the Earth’s remaining energy and other resources to maintain a highly-complex and interdependent urban civilization, and are destroying the biosphere in the process. The irony is that just as we are beginning to glimpse the possibility of a global empathic embrace, we find ourselves close to our own extinction.
Rifkin describes the emergence of a new economic system—the Third Industrial Revolution—that is ushering in an era of “distributed capitalism” and the beginning of biosphere consciousness. We are on the cusp, says Rifkin, of an epic shift into a “climax” global economy and a fundamental repositioning of human life on the planet. The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy.
The author challenges us to think about what may be the most important question facing humanity: Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the devolution of civilization and save the Earth?
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