There is s scene in the absolutely horrible film 2012, where a crazy conspiracy nut doing a radio show from his trailer in Yellowstone Park (Woody Harrelson), tells a hiking writer dad (John Cusack) who stumbles upon him, that really deep scary concepts are easier to explain to the public if you use a cutesy internet video with graphics and humor.
It seems that writer Jeremy Rifkin of The Empathic Civilization (or perhaps one of his admirers), thought this was a good idea considering the depth of his topic. And I have to admit it is a very condensed and more amusing version of the book.
I just finished reading it last month, and I fully expected something titled “The Empathic Civilization” to be hippie drivel laid out in thick self-important academic prose. And it was. But I can’t deny he made some excellent points, some of which I’d never heard of before, and would be interested in hearing further debates on his topic. Anyway, here it is. The short and fast version… for the huddled masses.
PS: Why is the artist writing in British English, while the narrator speaks American English?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Empathetic Civilization = Utopia which means No Where.
That is totally fascinating! May I post a link to this on http://www.punkymoms.com? I think the people there would really like it.
Sure!
I agree with everything he said conceptually. It seems like it could work. It seems like it should work. But if you put two people in a room together one will immediately try and dominate the other (in a polite way of course). His Adm and Eve were also trying to drive their competitors into extinction and that hasn’t been devolved yet. Look at the examples he used. Neither global religions or nation states have anything close empathy. Katrina is a great example. Yes, many came running but it also showed just how course and vulgar some citizens could be to their countrymen. Many of the complaints being about tax money. So they were still trying to drive a neighboring tribe to extinction over resources, in this case, tax revenues.
I don’t see why human nature can’t be both empathetic *and* selfish. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. In fact, I think the balance is what makes us functional. Being ruthlessly competitive or totally altruistic is unhealthy for both the individual and the community.
Oh, I didn’t know that was an option.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/07/14/haiti.donations/index.html
empathy is no substitute for deliverables. less than 2% of pledges have been received. so much for the empathic response!
Yeah, apparently the empathic response has an expiration date. Cash in while you can!
There are lots of problems with this. First of all, empathy is relative and doesn’t really demand specific policies. One person might empathize with the plight of the poor and want to increase public assistance, whereas another might empathize with a hard-working person having their income taken away in taxes to fund public assistance. By itself, empathy doesn’t tell you how to resolve those kinds of issues.
Furthermore, empathy can be somewhat irrational. We might empathize more with individuals we see directly than we do with millions worldwide suffering from disease and famine (I think it was Stalin who said that one dead is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic). As numbers get larger and the people more removed, we empathize less. People tend to be provincial; they aren’t geared towards caring about everyone at once the world over.
Finally, I don’t think it’s really groundbreaking to say that human beings have the capacity for empathy, or that we’re wired towards empathy. Science really didn’t need to tell us
that. Likewise, as has been noted, human beings are self-interested as well. It doesn’t follow that because my brain feels empathy when I see a person hurt in a car accident, that I am “soft-wired” towards a mushy, lets-all-hold-hands, community-of-humankind conception of the world.