By Jeremy Rifkin
by no means has the realm appeared so thoroughly united-in the shape of communique, trade, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the shape of battle, monetary meltdown, international warming, or even the migration of diseases.
regardless of how a lot we placed our minds to the duty of assembly the demanding situations of a speedily globalizing international, the human race turns out to repeatedly arise brief, not able to muster the collective psychological assets to really "think globally and act locally." In his such a lot formidable booklet so far, bestselling social critic Jeremy Rifkin exhibits that this disconnect among our imaginative and prescient for the realm and our skill to achieve that imaginative and prescient lies within the present country of human realization. The very method our brains are based disposes us to a fashion of feeling, pondering, and performing on the planet that's not completely correct to the recent environments we've created for ourselves.
The human-made setting is swiftly morphing right into a international house, but our latest modes of realization are dependent for past eras of background, that are simply as fast fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues, reveals itself at the cusp of its maximum test to this point: refashioning human cognizance in order that humans can at the same time dwell and flourish within the new globalizing society.
In essence, this shift in awareness is predicated upon attaining out to others. yet to withstand this alteration in human kinfolk and modes of considering, Rifkin contends, may spell ineptness and catastrophe in dealing with the hot demanding situations round us. because the forces of globalization speed up, deepen, and develop into ever extra advanced, the older faith-based and rational types of awareness tend to turn into under pressure, or even harmful, as they try to navigate a global more and more past their succeed in and keep watch over. certainly, the emergence of this empathetic attention has implications for the longer term that may most likely be as profound and far-reaching as whilst Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based awareness with the canon of reason.
Read or Download The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis PDF
Similar economic conditions books
The 2006 Human improvement file makes a speciality of water and human improvement. Water is important to the belief of human capability. it's a resource of existence for individuals and for the planet. fresh water and sanitation have a profound referring to wellbeing and fitness and human dignity. Inequalities in entry to wash water for ingesting and to water as a effective enter, strengthen wider inequalities in chance.
Demystifying the Chinese Miracle: The Rise and Future of Relational Capitalism
The final 3 a long time has witnessed superb monetary development of China. What has accounted for its miracle? what's the nature and way forward for the chinese language version? Is it special? This booklet provides an analytical framework to demystify China's financial progress miracle. The e-book means that interlinked and relational contracts among the brokers (in specific, among the country and the company) can compensate for flawed markets to in achieving excessive development.
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
Scanned from John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, manhattan: W. W. Norton & Co. , 1963, pp. 358-373.
Additional info for The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
Sample text
The empathic observer doesn’t lose his sense of self and fuse into the other’s experience, nor does he coolly and objectively read the experience of the other as a way of gathering information that could be used to foster his own self interest. Rather, as psychology professor Martin L. Hoffman suggests, empathy runs deeper. ” But they are more likely to perceive empathy as a total response to the plight of another person, sparked by a deep emotional sharing of that other person’s state, accompanied by a cognitive assessment of the others’ present condition and followed by an affective and engaged response to attend to their needs and help ameliorate their suffering.
When, for example, a red-hot poker is removed from the fire, it cools, because heat always flows from the hotter to the colder body. Eventually the poker is the same temperature as the surrounding air. This is the “equilibrium state,” in which there is no longer any difference in energy levels and therefore no more ability to perform work. The once-useful energy is no longer concentrated in the red-hot poker but is now randomly dispersed in the air and unavailable. But can’t we recycle energy and therefore reverse entropy?
The second law states that whenever energy is transformed, some amount of available energy is lost in the process: that is, it is no longer able to perform useful work. This loss of usable energy is called “entropy,” a term coined by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1868. Clausius observed that in order for energy to be converted into work, there must be a difference in energy concentration (namely a difference in temperature) in different parts of the system. Work occurs when energy moves from a high level of concentration to a lower level (or a higher temperature to a lower temperature).