I’m somewhat less ambitious than you (in regard to overthrowing capitalism)and far less optimistic than Rifkin. Frankly, I’m somewhat disappointed with this piece (probably need to read the book), especially in that Rifkin is something of a hero to me in regard to his hardcore and persistent challenge to biotech.

Basically, I don’t believe that this is the dawning of the age of aquarius or any other radical transformation in human consciousness. When you read the Bible, or Gilgamesh, or Euripides, or, centuries later, Shakespeare, what you find are human beings pretty much like you and I–and everyone else. Still struggling with the same questions, and with the same temptations. Those tales are filled with extraordinary examples of courage, magnanimity, compassion, and communitarianism–and with extraordinary savagery, brutality, greed, lust, and aggression. Pretty much what you find opening any newspaper today, and pretty much what I find walking through Boston on any given day.  

So I actually find this to be baloney: “Our core nature is shown not to be rational, detached, acquisitive, aggressive and narcissistic, as Enlightenment philosophers claimed, but affectionate, highly social, co-operative and interdependent. Homo sapiens is giving way to homo empathicus.”

I dunno about that. Nature’s still looking pretty red in tooth and claw to me, and if we aren’t engaged in the war of all against all, I suspect that has much to do with the presence of domestic security forces backing up the social contract than it does with our overwhelming sense of agape.

We’re neither one nor the other–in fact, looking over that list, I find that every one of those terms–both the “good” and the ostensibly “bad” can easily apply to me. Anyone who knows me well would admit, I think, that I’m capable of great generosity, selflessness, forgiveness, tenderness, and a whole lotta love. They’d also point out that I’m capable of really shameful selfishness, of carrying grudges for decades, of bar room brawling, and of, at times, genuine malevolence, though more often just being a thoroughgoing pain in the ass. I suspect most of you are pretty much the same. Meaning that I can’t even begin to classify my own “consciousness”–much less that of an entire culture.

(I do know that that I don’t even have the rudiments of a biospheric consciousness. Yeah, I’m intellectually attuned to ecological thinking, but behaving rightfully in that regard doesn’t come naturally–it’s a struggle, day-in, day-out. Pride, lust, and anger come much more naturally to me, followed by gluttony and sloth. And I don’t think I’m an outlier on the bell curve of biospheric whatever or at all unique in lacking that special empathic gene).

Whether we “need” the kind of “consciousness” Rifkin described or not, I think his examples are just wish fulfillment. Yes, lotsa educated people in their twenties share their knowledge of open-source software. He’s going to have to do a whole lot better than that–there are possibly more American kids on the ground in Afghanistan & Iraq  than there are developing LINUX apps. And I definitely do not see a burgeoning new consciousness among “millenials.” Not a bit. A campus movement here and there does not a new consciousness embody.

There’s a quasi-religious sensibility to this that I don’t think is susceptible to empirical analysis. I’m willing to accept that neurologists have identified altruistic elements in our brains, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything novel about them–we’ve been altruistic (and barbaric) since time immemorial. Catastrophes are a good example: when disasters strike, we sometimes see people banding together and acting with a kind of communal unity not previously seen. We also see them tearing their neighborhoods to shreds. (I’ve always found Rod Serlings “The Monsters of Maple Street,” along with Lord of the Flies, to be a useful correctives to utopian thinking).

I also question the idea of grand historical epochs and the idea that communications technologies change our inherent natures. The “enlightenment philosophers” Rifkin disparages did their best to combat the rigid orthodoxies of their day, but I actually don’t believe that we are any less “theological” today than we ever were. The susceptibility of the average American to the rampant charlatanism of New Age nonsense, to the misty mysticism of watered-down Buddhism, to the romantic appeal of a man who actually has the gall to parade around as the “Dalai Lama”–along with the endless jaw-dropping nonsense of the christian right–does not persuade me that we are any less superstitious than were the attendees of Ba’al or the deuteronomical Jehovah.  And I think that a great many progressive schemes are rooted in a kind of “theological” thinking, even if they’ve replaced “theos” with intenable beliefs in “progress.” Have a look sometime at Carl Sagan’s wonderful The Demon-Haunted World for a depressing account of, well, just how demon-haunted we are today. Then look closely at Sagan’s own blind faith in “science”… one theology replaces another.

And if we’re still theological, we’re as ideological as ever, bound fast to our own convictions. How many readers here, I wonder, can accept the fact that they might someday embrace the tenets of the Right? And vice versa? Rather than transcending our ideological differences, we glory in them–for most of us, they’re bound up in our self-identity.

I actually don’t think we need a “new consciousness,” or to speak in such spiritualized terms, to understand that our problems are global and that we gotta figure out SOME way to get along. We don’t have to like each other or empathize or really give a damn about one another–it’s enough to recognize that we’re mutually interdependent and that we’re pretty much fucked if we don’t learn to compromise, to stop sacrificing everyone’s future for our own short-term gratification. But that ain’t easy, as anyone who, like myself, occasionally gives in to the temptation to eat a burger at bar. For me, it’s enough to have the rational capacity to know I shouldn’t order it, and a strong enough sense of shame and guilt that I’ll sometimes forgo it.