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ALL hail to THE SOUL of Jeremy Rifkin

http://empathiccivilization.com/connect"; target="_blank">Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to ...</a></b>">The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic
embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of
humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal
empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the
form of climate change.


Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to ...
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Comment by Michael Grove on November 2, 2010 at 17:37
ALL hail to the SOULS of Great Barrington ...
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:16
ALL hail to THE SOUL of Jeremy Rifkin and ...
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:42

No leaps, no high kicks, no running. The feet always firmly on the ground ... movements intrinsically beautiful and at the same time charged with symbolic meaning. Thought taking shape in ritual and stylised gesture. The body transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, of attitudes modulating from significance to significance, like a poem or a piece of music. Movements of the muscles representing movements of the consciousness ... It's meditation in action; the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures.

                                                                                                        Aldous Huxley "Island"

NO man is an island and turning my own sense of self vision into a reality has always been dependent on a willingness to search for all the component parts, to communicate and collaborate with the multitude of people destined to provide the component parts and then to "glue" the whole together into a cohesive and meaningful solution.

What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in
less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the
biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic
sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history
?

Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:45
The pivotal turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes
converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras. The new
communications revolutions become the command and control mechanisms for structuring,
organizing and managing more complex civilizations that the new energy regimes make
possible. For example, in the early modern age, print communication became the means to
organize and manage the technologies, organizations, and infrastructure of the coal, steam,
and rail revolution. It would have been impossible to administer the first industrial revolution
using script and codex.

Communication revolutions not only manage new, more complex energy regimes, but also
change human consciousness in the process. Forager/hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great
hydraulic agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script
communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution of
the 19th century was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological
consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism
for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned
psychological consciousness.

Each more sophisticated communication revolution brings together more diverse people in
increasingly more expansive and varied social networks. Oral communication has only
limited temporal and spatial reach while script, print and electronic communications each
extend the range and depth of human social interaction.

By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole,
communication revolutions provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to
mature and consciousness to expand. For example, during the period of the great hydraulic
agricultural civilizations characterized by script and theological consciousness, empathic
sensitivity broadened from tribal blood ties to associational ties based on common religious
affiliation. Jews came to empathize with Jews, Christians with Christians, Muslims with
Muslims, etc. In the first industrial revolution characterized by print and ideological
consciousness, empathic sensibility extended to national borders, with Americans
empathizing with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese and so on.
In the second industrial revolution, characterized by electronic communication and
psychological consciousness, individuals began to identify with like-minded others.

Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication–a
third industrial revolution–that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and
all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with distributed
renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both
globally connected and locally managed.
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:46
In the 21st century, hundreds of millions–and eventually billions–of human beings will
transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store
those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local,
regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. The open
source sharing of energy, like open source sharing of information, will give rise to
collaborative energy spaces–not unlike the collaborative social spaces that currently exist on the Internet.
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:47
When every family and business comes to take responsibility for its own small swath of the
biosphere by harnessing renewable energy and sharing it with millions of others on smart
power grids that stretch across continents, we become intimately interconnected at the
most basic level of earthly existence by jointly stewarding the energy that bathes the planet
and sustains all of life.

The new distributed communication revolution not only organizes distributed renewable
energies, but also changes human consciousness. The information communication
technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of
human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to
flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history.
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 12:48
Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new
distributed communication medium. While 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. We talk
breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little
of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What’s
sorely missing is an overarching reason that 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. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall
unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global
connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an
expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication
networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the
common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 14:06
The European Union is the first continental governing institution of the Third Industrial
Revolution era. The EU is already beginning to put in place the infrastructure for a
European-wide energy regime, along with the codes, regulations, and standards to
effectively operate a seamless transport, communications, and energy grid that will stretch
from the Irish Sea to the doorsteps of Russia by midcentury. Asian, African, and Latin
American continental political unions are also in the making and will likely be the premier
governing institutions on their respective continents by 2050.

In this new era of distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings
of the ecosystems they manage. Just as habitats function within ecosystems, and
ecosystems within the biosphere in a web of interrelationships, governing institutions will
similarly function in a collaborative network of relationships with localities, regions, and
nations all embedded within the continent as a whole. This new complex political organism
operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally. This is biosphere
politics.

The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left distinctions so characteristic of
the geopolitics of the modern market economy and nation-state era. The new divide is
generational and contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life,
education, commerce, and governance with a younger generation whose thinking is more
relational and distributed, whose nature is more collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose
work and social spaces favor open-source commons. For the Internet generation, “quality of
life” becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st
century.
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 14:07
The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world, a younger
generation is beginning to realize that one’s daily consumption of energy and other
resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature
that inhabits the Earth.
Comment by Michael Grove on November 5, 2010 at 14:11
The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic
embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of
humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal
empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the
form of climate change.


Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to ...

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