Yesterday I went to a book group gathering
to discuss Jeremy Rifkin’s monumental new book, The Empathetic Civilization. What follows are insights I developed in preparation for that gathering that I think will interest many
Pagans concerned with the deeper relationship of Pagan spirituality to the
modern world.

I had read Rifkin’s book
previously in preparation for his winter visit to Sonoma.  Then I had asked him a question regarding
his dismissive comments about the mental development of hunting and gathering
peoples, giving a number of reasons why I thought he was wrong.  He gave the nuanced reply: “We just
disagree.”

So yesterday I wanted to delve
more deeply into just what I regarded as faulty in a book with many good
qualities, and do so with caring and smart people who had also read it.  To do this I had to organize my
thoughts, which leads to this blog. 

Rifkin argues for a core tension
within civilization: as we master new forms of energy and communication, our links
with others grows and our capacity for empathy increases.  But at the same time we increase what
he calls “entropy” (which really means environmental degradation) to the point
that the culture either fails, sliding back to a less connected and less empathic
time, or breaks through into a new level of development and consciousness.

Rifkin reinforces this
provocative thesis with hundreds of pages of argument and interesting
examples.  Even so, I was not
convinced the first time I read the book, and was even less convinced with a second examination though if you have the time it is still worth reading for its
wealth of insights, especially in the first part).  But explaining why he went astray was a challenge. 

Rivkin’s dismissive attitude towards
hunter gatherers tipped me off to what I think is a pretty fundamental
problem.  Yesterday’s discussion, focusing on his
foundational arguments, gave me a chance to explore this flaw.

Rifkin sees significant human empathy
as a relatively new development in human awareness, the word not having even
existed a few hundred years ago. 
He cited David Hume and Adam Smith’s use of “sympathy” as a first, halting
step towards understanding the term. 
Significantly Rifkin was wrong here.  Before the word had been developed, “sympathy” often played
the role empathy does today, and Hume and Smith had defined it as such.  More importantly, they also argued it
was foundational to human awareness and moral development, beating an important
part of Rifkin’s argument by over 200 years.

Rifkin’s blindness on this issue
signaled a deeper problem. Every society has empathetc qualities and if modern
society has developed a different perspective towards empathy – and I agree
with Rifkin that it has – something other than a simple linear unfolding from
primitive to advanced is happening.

Multidimensional Empathy with
Multidimensional Selves

Empathy is multidimensional
because selves are multidimensional. 
There are at least four levels to empathetic identification,
corresponding to the breadth and depth of our connection with that with which
we identify. 

1. First is empathy as depth of
connection with another.  Love,
close friendship, and intimacy are all examples of this kind of empathy.  They could not exist without it.  It exists in every society.

2. Second is identification with
others as striving, caring beings. 
This seems to develop over time, extending from the first most accessible
example outwards to others who become increasingly different from us.  For example, for a white European
American such as myself, it might go

“Germans are just like us.”

“Blacks are just like us.” 

“Chinese are just like us.”

“Gays are just like us.” 

“Muslims are just like us.”

And so on.

This kind of empathy is
relatively impersonal, does not require in depth knowledge of others, and
enables us to care about and respect others, but not to really know them.  It is
why I could give money gladly to aid Haitian earthquake victims.  It also enables us to care about future
generations.  If I read Rifkin
correctly, this is the kind of empathy he sees as growing so hopefully in the
modern world of global connection. 
To the degree we have this kind of empathy we open ourselves to the
deeper kind as well, but it is impossible to have a deep connection with
enormous numbers of people.

3. Then there is empathy with
other species. We are able to empathize in the second way with many beings and
often we can empathize in the first way with some. Here it seems to me there is
a continuum from those beings most like us to those least like us. The
similarities with which we identify are farther removed from our concrete sense
of our selves as individuals. Perhaps even more interestingly, some animals can
do the same with us, as many people who have been close to a pet know.

Rifkin acknowledges this
possibility in mammals at least, which appear to have mirror neurons,  but appears to argue empathy only
really develops when technology arises. 
This is because in practice he only really focuses on the second kind in
his broader social analysis.

4. Finally there is what for lack
of a better term I call “energetic” empathy.  That is being sensitive and open to more subtle connections
with the land, with energy fields, with plants, and so on.  This is a blurring of boundaries, as is
all empathy, but in this case the boundaries blurred are as far removed from
our own selves as they can be in the material world.  It leads to identification with life, with the world, with
landscape and seascape.  It spills
into the spiritual perceptions of pantheism and panentheism.

All four exist in all societies,
but while the modern West has excelled in expanding the boundaries of the
second group, it has done so while limiting our openness to the third and
fourth to private and rarely talked about experiences.  So Rifkin, from this perspective, has adopted
a theoretical outlook that illuminates parts of the modern dilemma hile making
other parts invisible.

The Abrahamic Dimension

Modernity’s mixed outcome has
several causes.  The most
fundamental to my mind is our narrow Abrahamic cultural heritage, which in most
cases devalues the world into an artifact subject to our power if we are
powerful enough to dominate it. 
Having done so, it becomes vulnerable to being subordinated to
impersonal social processes that reinforce this narrowness of perception, such
as the market and science.  My
point is not simply to attack either (I admire central aspects of both), but to
point out that modernity has a seriously one-sided view of human capacities,
rooted in thousands of years of repressing and annihilating alternative views.  By viewing ourselves as surrounded by
things, we ultimately turn ourselves into things to be dominated by
corporations and other big organizations.

The problem increases when modern
processes such as the market and science enable huge organizations to arise
devoted to values far removed from a full human sensibility, and so
increasingly create a society dominated by sociopathy.  Modern America is a disturbing example
of such a sociopathic culture at its dominant levels.

But hunting and gathering
societies have much going on here that may make many of them more fundamentally
empathetic than the modern West. 
Their child rearing practices often give more weight to practices modern
research on child development is now highlighting, and Rifkin emphasizes,
than does the modern world.  Their
deeper development of empathetic capacities in the world within which they
actually live is as central to who they are as their tribalism, which often
inhibits their development of the second kind of empathy.  I suspect Rifkin would have written a
different book if he had read and understood Hugh Brody’s wonderful The
Other Side of Eden.    Hunting and gathering societies
have much to teach us, and the view that they are simply “primitive” or not as
“rational” as we blind us to what they have to offer.

And as modern “conservatism” is
daily demonstrating, modern tribalism leads to as vicious and degenerate
behavior as anything done by “primitive” tribes.  Modern tribes are bigger, but not necessarily any better in
their blindness to the humanity of those who are different.  The modern tribes are bigger not because
they embrace differences rejected by earlier smaller ones, but because they
have extirpated many smaller groups, incorporating them into larger ones by
destroying their distinctiveness. 
One could make a strong case that Indian tribes were often more
accepting of differences within the tribe
than modern “conservatives.”

From this perspective
spirituality of the genuine kind (not the faux spirituality of many
fundamentalisms) simply opens our hearts to ever larger contexts and ever
deeper dimensions.  Our capacity
for empathy is the seed which, when watered and nourished, opens and blossoms
into loving kindness and care.