© Bahá’í World Centre
As I have just published a post whose focus was on how to lift our awareness to a higher level that will benefit not just ourselves but all life on earth, it seems a good time to republish this sequence.
In the previous post we got as far as a general sense of Rifkin’s model of human progress towards what he hopefully terms our best destination of ‘biosphere consciousness.’ Now I want to turn to his examination of the possible costs of this – its dark side, if you like.
First of all, the progress he describes is unbalanced (page 452):
The evidence shows that we are witnessing the greatest surge in empathic extension in all human history. That surge, however, is largely confined to the well-heeled populations of the most highly developed nations and to middle-class enclaves in developing countries.
He repeats his description of the entropic cost (ibid):
… the leap in empathic consciousness is made possible by the expropriation of vast amounts of the planet’s energy and other resources to attain the level of economic security necessary to allow people to shift from survival values to materialist values and finally to quality-of-life values. . . . Unfortunately, the leap in empathic consciousness rides atop the growing entropic stream that’s turning much of the planet into a wasteland and further impoverishing a large proportion of the human race. . . .
Which leads him to a stark description of the challenge which he feels is facing us, and he’s not the only one (ibid.):
The question, then, is whether the minority of the human race that is undergoing an empathic surge, but at the expense of impoverishing the planet and a large portion of the human race, can translate their post-materialist values into a workable cultural, economic, and political game plan that can steer themselves and their communities to a more sustainable and equitable future in time to avoid the abyss.
I sense that we may be seeing here yet another variation of the ‘West is best’ myth, which implies that we are the only ones savvy enough to tackle this issue and come up with a solution. We may be the only ones with sufficient economic, technological, scientific (and their consequent military) power and knowhow, but I very much doubt that we are the only ones wise enough to work out what needs to be done by all of us in cooperation together.
Rifkin also makes essentially the same point as Ken Wilber makes but from a different perspective (page 487):
Weapons of mass destruction, once the preserve of elites, are becoming more democratised with each passing day. A growing number of security experts believe that it is no longer even possible to keep weapons of mass destruction locked up and out of the hands of rogue governments, terrorist groups, or just deranged individuals.
Future Blindness
In my study of psychology I came to understand all to clearly that we are creatures very much influenced by short-term costs and benefits and relatively blind to what will happen in the long-term. You have only to look at the habits we acquire as individuals such as smoking. The buzz is immediate and strong, with little in the way of a penalty. The painful costs are way in the future, virtually invisible and have little impact on our decision to have another fag. It’s a no brainer to realize that when it comes to complex issues that affect our collective destiny, you can multiply this problem by at least a million. Rifkin writes (page 493):
The problem is that while the complexity of the global economy is visible, knowable, and therefore vulnerable, the threats are largely invisible and as variable in their permutations as the imagination of their perpetrators. The only real solution is to radically redirect human consciousness over the course of the coming century so that the human species can begin to learn how to live on a shared planet. . . . .
We’re not quite at square one in terms of understanding the situation, but the problem is a long way from being solved (ibid.):
First the good news. There is no doubt that at least a sizeable portion of the human race is beginning to take on a global cosmopolitan consciousness, with the extension of empathy to more diverse human and animal domains. Now the bad news. The new global sensibility has been made possible by the creation of more complex, dense, and interdependent social structures, which, in turn, rely on more intensive use of fossil fuels and other resources to maintain their scaffolding, supply chains, logistics, and services.
He poses the ultimate question (page 495): ‘. . . . has the human race finished its pioneer stage of development now that it has invaded and colonised virtually every square foot of the biosphere and, if so, is it ready to settle into a near-climax stage of development vis-à-vis the biosphere?’
He has a fairly grim view of where our economic model of mankind has brought us, in some ways reminiscent of the dark picture Medina paints in his book Faith, Physics & Psychology (page 496):
By tying man’s happiness to the acquisition of private property and stitching private property into the sinew of man’s basic nature, utilitarian philosophers set the foundations for the idea that human beings are an acquisitive animal whose very nature predisposes them to acquire more and more wealth.
Rifkin is in tune with Medina in feeling that this utilitarian view is seriously deficient (page 497):
The interesting new twist is that . . . studies show that once people have reached a minimum level of economic well-being that allows them to adequately survive and prosper, additional accumulations of wealth do not increase their happiness but, rather, make them less happy, more prone to depression, anxiety, and other mental and physical illnesses, and less content with their lot.
Jeremy Rifkin seeks to modify the acquisitive view of humanity and expand our ideas of what is possible. He argues for what he calls ‘distributed capitalism’ in the context of ‘biosphere consciousness.’ In brief he feels that (page 544) ‘the simple reality is that distributed information technologies and a distributed communications and energy infrastructure are giving rise to distributed capitalism and necessitate a new type of management.’
© Bahá’í World Centre
Dramaturgical Consciousness
He acknowledges that there are dangers, though, in the emergence of what he terms Dramaturgical Consciousness (page 554):
A new dramaturgical consciousness is beginning to emerge among the millennial youth, the first generation to grow up on the Internet and live in the collaborative social spaces that exist all along the World Wide Web. The new consciousness goes hand-in-hand with the distributed communication and energy regime of the Third Industrial Revolution, just a psychological consciousness accompanied the Second Industrial Revolution and ideological consciousness attended the First Industrial Revolution. . . .
The problem is that the same communication technology revolution that is paving the way towards global consciousness has a dark side could derail the journey and sidetrack the Internet generation into a dead-end corridor of rampant narcissism, endless voyeurism, and overwhelming ennui.
He unpacks what he means by this kind of consciousness (page 557):
The Internet revolution transformed parasocial [ie one-sided and hierarchical] relationships to peer-to-peer relationships. The shift from centralized top-down, one-to-many connections to the flat, open source, many-to-many connections allowed a new generation to be the actors in their own scripts and to share a global stage with two billion other like-minded thespians – all performing for and with one another. Now the world truly is a stage and everyone is an actor.
There is not only the danger of narcissism to contend with here (page 564):
Dramaturgical consciousness raises the troublesome question of authenticity. Whenever the question of performance comes up, it inevitably leads to the related question of pretending versus believing.
He links this to his picture of succeeding levels of consciousness (ibid):
In the age of mythical consciousness, being heroic was the measure of a man, while in the age of theological consciousness, one was expected to be pious, and in the age of ideological consciousness, men of goodwill were expected to be sincere and of good character. In the age of psychological consciousness, being personable became an obsession. For the generation growing up in a dramaturgical consciousness, however, being authentic becomes the test of a man or woman.
I find Rifkin straining somewhat at this point to convince himself that this is not necessarily a torpedo to the ship of empathic consciousness (page 570):
Hochschild raises the legitimate concern that acting is increasingly being used as a training technique to prepare a service-oriented workforce on how to manage their feelings to optimize commercial relationships in an experiential economy. That’s true, but it is also true that deep acting provides the theory and technique to help train individuals to be more mindful of their own feelings, to keep a firm memory of them, and to improve their ability to conjure up those memories from their subconscious and harness and them to their imagination when the occasion arises, so that they might experience and another’s plight as if is it were their own. Deep acting, when used for the appropriate pro-social ends, is a powerful mental tool to stimulate empathic feelings.
To his credit he is aware that his argument here is not completely compelling (page 573):
Gergen raises an important qualification dramaturgical theorists often ignore or skirt. That is, that the dramaturgical way of thinking is unique to the modern age.
He notes that, the sense of “playing a role” depends for its palpability on the contrasting sense of a “real self.” If there is no consciousness of what it is to be “true to self,” there is no meaning to “playing a role.”
He adds (page 574):
Zurcher . . .warns that the mutable self can just as easily lead to a more pronounced narcissism, as individuals lose a sense of an authentic self to which they are beholden and accountable and become mired in deceit after deceit – a Machiavellian existence – where role-playing becomes instrumental to advancing endless self-gratification.
He feels that Kenneth Gergen nonetheless remains guardedly optimistic. Rifkin remains on the fence (page 575):
The evidence suggests that the new dramaturgical consciousness emerging in the very early stages of the shift into the Third Industrial Revolution and a new distributed capitalism is leading both to a greater sense of relatedness and empathic extension as well as a more fractured sense of self, and increased narcissism.
© Bahá’í World Centre
Biosphere Consciousness
Thankfully he avoids any simplistic sense of this progress moving forwards and leaving all trace of a more limited consciousness behind (page 593):
Most of us are a composite, in some measure, of our deep historical past, and keep alive bits and pieces of ancestral consciousness, in the form of mythological, theological, ideological, psychological, and dramaturgical frames of reference.
He is clear also about the exact nature of the challenge this creates (ibid.):
The challenge before us is how to bring forward all of these historical stages of consciousness that still exist across the human spectrum to a new level of biosphere consciousness in time to break the lock that shackles increasing empathy to increasing entropy. . . .
And here we come to a conclusion with which I will be taking issue in more detail at the end of this sequence of post (ibid.):
In a world characterised by increasing individuation and made up of human beings at different stages of consciousness, the biosphere itself maybe the only context encompassing enough to unite the human race as a species.
This position is perhaps an inevitable consequence of his unwillingness to admit the possibility of a theological inspiration. I am astonished even more by a subsequent claim, which is imbued with the same blinkering assumption that Western materialist models of the world have basically got it right. He blurts out, in surprise (page 593-4):
While the new distributed communications technologies – and, soon, distributed renewable energies – are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. . . .
Does he have no awareness of current trends in holistic thinking, which assert that we are already and have always been interconnected at the deepest possible levels, not simply in terms of these recently emerged material factors? Is he ignoring long-standing spiritual systems such as that of the Native Americans whose foundation stone is this concept of interconnectedness? Does he not know of the empirical evidence being generated by near-death experiences, many of which include reports of just such a sense of nonmaterial interconnectedness? Has he not heard even a whisper of the Bahá’í position, admittedly recently emerged but with a longer history than the roots of holism in physics, that humanity is one and needs to recognise its essential unity if we are to be able to act together to solve the global problems that confront us? The problem is not that no one is offering a reason ‘why we ought to be connected’: the problem is that too few people are accepting the idea, expressed by millions of our fellow human beings in many complementary models of the world, that we are already deeply connected at a spiritual level, not just with each other but with the earth that sustains our material existence.
He expands upon his ignorance (ibid.):
What’s sorely missing is an overarching reason why billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange, and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. . . . . Global connections without any real transcendent purpose risk a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness.
That last sentence is spot on. What is shocking as well as sad is that he seems not to have realized that millions of people world-wide – and I’m not just talking about Bahá’ís – already feel they have discovered a transcendent purpose which includes the plight of our planet but goes far beyond that and provides a far more secure foundation for sustainable empathy – we are all one family living in one homeland, we will sink if we fail to recognize that, and will swim to safety only if we act on that comprehensive understanding.
What he goes on to describe is fine as far as it goes (pages 598-99):
Our dawning awareness that the Earth functions like an indivisible organism requires us to rethink our notions of global risks, vulnerability, and security. If every human life, the species as a whole, and all other life-forms are intertwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are all dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism. Carrying out that responsibility means living out our individual lives in our neighbourhood communities in ways that promote the general well-being of the larger biosphere within which we dwell.
But the Bahá’í caveat is that it does not go far enough:
The earnest hope that this moral crisis can somehow be met by deifying nature itself is an evidence of the spiritual and intellectual desperation that the crisis has engendered. Recognition that creation is an organic whole and that humanity has the responsibility to care for this whole, welcome as it is, does not represent an influence which can by itself establish in the consciousness of people a new system of values. Only a breakthrough in understanding that is scientific and spiritual in the fullest sense of the terms will empower the human race to assume the trusteeship toward which history impels it.
(From The Prosperity of Humankind, a statement issued by the Bahá’í International Community March 1995)
Next time I will look at his model for raising our children and in the last posts focus on his major limitations, while recognising the immense value of what he has articulated.
Everybody Means Something 