Hearing the Call

SUBHEAD: The beauty of the Great Turning is that each of us takes part in distinctive ways.

By Joann Macy on 17 June 2013 in Resilience.org-
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-06-17/hearing-the-call)


Image above: Soul of the Whole by Pat Silbert Waverly Street Gallery, Bethesda MD, USA. From original article (www.patsilbertpaintings.com).

This article is an edited excerpt from the introduction to Stories of the Great Turning, edited by Peter Reason and Melanie Newman, published by Vala Publications. This article originally appeared in Resurgence magazine, and is republished with permission from the author.

When you know where to look, you begin to see an unprecedented phenomenon now happening in this world of ours. Be they teachers in favelas, forest defenders, urban farmers, occupiers of Wall Street, designers of windmills, military resisters (the list goes on…), the fact is people from all walks of life are coming alive and coming together, impelled to create a more just and sustainable society.

In his book Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken presents this – what he calls The Movement With No Name – as the largest social movement of human history. Estimating the number of grassroots groups and nongovernmental organisations for social justice, Indigenous rights and environmental sanity, he suggests a figure of 2 million of us (as of 2007), and counting.

Each of these groups and organisations represents a yet vaster number of individuals who, in some way or another (and each uniquely in their own fashion), are hearing the call to widen the notions of their self-interest and act for the sake of life on Earth. In this defining moment, countless choices are being made, habits relinquished, friendships forged, and gateways opened to unforeseen collaborations and capacities.

These shape the stories that deserve to be told – stories of ordinary men, women and youngsters who are making changes in their minds, their lives and their communities, in order to lay the groundwork for this more just and sustainable world. These are the tales that we need to hear, and those who come after us will want them as well. For when future generations look back at this historical moment, they will see, more clearly than we can right now, just how revolutionary it is. They may well call it the time of the Great Turning.

For those of us living now it is easy to be unaware of the immensity of this transition – from an entrenched, militarised industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilisation.

Mainstream education and mainstream media do not provide the tools for comprehending such a perspective. Yet social thinkers such as Lester Brown and Donella Meadows and others recognise this transition as the third major watershed in humanity’s journey, comparable in magnitude and scope to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This is the essential adventure of our time.

Like all true revolutions, it belongs to the people. Its inspiring stories do not star titans of industry or party politicians, military generals or media celebrities. The power of this revolution lies in the fact that it comes from people of all ages and backgrounds as they engage in actions on behalf of life itself. Their motivation represents a remarkable expansion of allegiance beyond personal or group advantage. This wider sense of identity is a moral capacity more often associated with heroes and saints; but it now manifests everywhere on a practical and workaday plane.

From children restoring streams for salmon spawning, to inner-city neighbours planting community gardens, from forest defenders perched high in trees marked for illegal logging, to countless climate actions to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, an undreamt-of wave of human endeavour is under way.

Each of these engagements has its own intrinsic rewards, whether its initial goal is achieved or not.

And even when failing to reach the desired outcome, the gains can be invaluable in terms of all that has been learnt in the process – not only about the issue, but also about courage and co-creativity.

Still, it is easy to turn away from playing a part in the Great Turning. All of us are prey to the fear that it may be too late, and thus any effort is essentially hopeless. Any strategy we can mount seems so puny in comparison with the mighty systemic forces embedded in the military-industrial complex.

The accelerating pace of destruction and contamination may already be taking us beyond those tipping points where ecological and social systems unravel irreparably. Along with the Great Turning, the Great Unravelling is happening too, and there is no way to tell how the larger story will end.

So we learn again that hardest and most rewarding of lessons: how to make friends with uncertainty; how to pour your whole passion into a project when you can’t be sure it’s going to work. How to free yourself from dependence on seeing the results of your actions. These learnings are crucial, for living systems are ever unfolding in new patterns and connections. There is no point from which to foresee with clarity the possibilities to emerge under future conditions.

Instead of any blueprint of the future, we have this moment. In lieu of a sure-fire strategy to pull off the Great Turning, we can only fashion guidelines to help us keep going as best we can, and to stay on track with a simple faith in the goodness of life. Here are five of those guidelines that have already served a number of us over the years. Try them out, and make up some of your own.

1. Come from gratitude
We have received an inestimable gift: to be alive in this wondrous, self-organising universe with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it. And how amazing it is to be accorded a human life with self-reflective consciousness that allows us to make choices, letting us opt to take part in the healing of our world.

The very scope of the Great Turning is cause for gratitude as well, for it embraces the full gamut of human experience. Its three main dimensions include actions to slow down the destruction wrought by our political economy and its wars against humanity and Nature; new structures and ways of doing things, from holding land to growing food to generating energy; and a shift in consciousness to new ways of knowing, a new paradigm of our relation to each other and to the sacred living body of Earth. These dimensions are equally essential and mutually reinforcing. There are thousands of ways to take part in the Great Turning.

2. Don’t be afraid of the dark
This is a dark time filled with suffering, as old systems and previous certainties come apart. Like living cells in a larger body, we feel the trauma of our world. It is natural and even healthy that we do, for it shows we are still vitally linked in the web of life. So don’t be afraid of the grief you may feel, or of the anger or fear: these responses arise, not from some private pathology, but from the depths of our mutual belonging. Bow to your pain for the world when it makes itself felt, and honour it as testimony to our interconnectedness.

When the Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh was asked: “What do we most need to do to save our world?” his questioners expected him to identify the best strategies to pursue for social and environmental causes. But Thich Nhat Hanh answered: “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying.” When we learn to hear that, we discover that our pain for the world and our love for the world are one. And we are made stronger.

3. Dare to vision
We will never bring forth what we haven’t dared to dream or learnt to imagine. For those of us dwelling in a high-tech consumer society, replete with ever proliferating electronic distractions, the imagination is the most underdeveloped, even atrophied, of our mental capacities. Yet never has its juicy, enlivening power been more desperately needed than now.

So, think of how many aspects of our current reality started out as someone’s dream. There was a time when much of America was a British colony, when women didn’t have the vote and when the slave trade was seen as essential to the economy. To change something, we need to hold the possibility that it could be different. Author and coach Stephen Covey reminds us: “All things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.”

4. Link arms with others
Whatever it is that you’re drawn to do in the Great Turning, don’t even think of doing it alone. The hyper-individualism of our competitive industrialised culture has isolated people from each other, breeding conformity, obedience and an epidemic of loneliness. The good news of the Great Turning is that it is a team undertaking. It evolves out of countless spontaneous and synergistic interactions as people discover their common goal and their different gifts. Paul Hawken sees this amazing emergence at the grassroots level as an immune response of the living Earth to the crises now confronting us.

Many models of affinity groups and study-action have emerged in recent decades, offering methods for learning, strategising and working together. They help us uncover confidence in ourselves as well as in each other.

5. Act your age
Now is the time to clothe ourselves in our true authority. Every particle in every atom of every cell in our body goes back to the primal flaring forth of space and time. In that sense you are as old as the universe, with an age of about 14 billion years. This current body of yours has been being prepared for this moment by Earth for some 4 billion years, so you have an absolute right to step forward and act on Earth’s behalf. When you are speaking up at a city council meeting, or protecting a forest from demolition, or testifying at a hearing on nuclear waste, you are doing that not out of some personal whim or virtue, but from the full authority of your 14 billion years.

The beauty of the Great Turning is that each of us takes part in distinctive ways. Given our different circumstances and with our different dispositions and capacities, our stories are all unique. All have something fresh to reveal. All can help inspire others. And that’s why we need these stories…

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The Empathic Civilization

SUBHEAD: For 200 years the "American Dream" served as our national goal. Is it time to replace it? Image above: The death of the American Dream crystallized in a foreclosure in Merced, California in 2008. Photo by Brian Smith (http://briansmith.com/blog/2009/05/wpa) By Jeremy Rifkin on 23 February 2010 in The Huffington Post - (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-rifkin/empathic-civilization-is_b_469546.html)

For two hundred years the American Dream has served as the bedrock foundation of the American way of life. The dream, reduced to its essence, is that in America, every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interest in the marketplace, and make something of their life, or at least sacrifice so the next generation might enjoy a better life.

The role of the government, in turn, is to guarantee individual freedom, assure the proper functioning of the market, protect property rights, and look out for national security. In all other matters, the government is expected to step aside so that a nation of free men and woman can pursue their individual ambitions.

Although American history is peppered with lamentations about the souring of the dream, the criticism never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that thwart its realization. To suggest that the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that.

The American Dream was spawned in the afterglow of the Enlightenment more than two centuries ago, at the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era. Enlightenment philosophers painted a new picture of human nature more in line with the new market forces that were promising a qualitative uplift in the standard of living of human beings.

For 1500 years, during the feudal and medieval periods, the Church's dark view of human nature prevailed. Christian theologians exclaimed that babies are born depraved and in sin, and that personal salvation must await them in the next world with Christ. The Enlightenment philosophers views were a breath of fresh air, promising that market forces, if left unhindered by government, would guarantee every person the opportunity to improve his or her station in life.

John Locke, Adam Smith, René Descartes, Marquis de Condorcet and other Enlightenment sages were of the belief that human beings were, by nature, materialistic, self-interested, and driven by the biological urge to be propertied, autonomous, independent and self-sufficient, and sovereign over their own domain.

Today, that dream is still fiercely championed by libertarian ideologues and tea party populists. Their increasingly shrill defense of the American Dream, however, seems almost panic stricken in tone, suggesting a desperate effort to hold on to a belief that may, in fact, be passing away.

How else do we account for the fact that the public discourse is becoming so ugly of late? The populist backlash against big government represents more than just a clash over legislative priorities. The opposition to a government stimulus to jumpstart an ailing economy, the reluctance to adopt universal health care, and the growing denial of human induced climate change speak to a deeper sense of apprehension and foreboding.

Granted, there are legitimate concerns one might raise to each of these public policy issues. My sense however, is that there is something more profound taking place under the surface, a feeling, particularly among an older generation of Americans, that the American Dream is in jeopardy and, with it, our way of life.

After all, if the American Dream were really working, each person would be able to fend for him or herself in a self-regulating market and be without need of an economic stimulus package or universal healthcare.

The reality, however, is that nearly one out of five Americans are either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work all together, and millions of families are facing foreclosures in a land where home ownership has been regarded as the epitome of the American Dream. Climate change is particularly upsetting; it implies that the invisible hand of the marketplace is both an enabler of global warming and incapable of addressing it without government intervention.

When we consider these big picture policy issues, what becomes clear, if we bother to read between the lines, is that our long held beliefs about human nature, and by extension, the institutions we have created to express those beliefs, played no small role in precipitating the very crisis that now faces the country.

In a nation that has come to think of human nature as competitive, even predatory, self serving, acquisitive and utilitarian, is it any wonder that those very values have led to a "winner take all" syndrome in the marketplace in which the rich get richer while everyone else becomes marginalized, and the well-being of the larger community, including the biosphere, becomes eroded?

The US ranks 27th among industrialized countries, in income disparity -- the gap between the very rich and the very poor. Only Mexico, Turkey and Portugal, of the OECD nations, have greater disparity of income. Moreover, the US enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the two leading contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Could it be that the American Dream is becoming the American nightmare?

Interestingly, a younger generation of Americans is growing up in a very different world than the one described by the Enlightenment thinkers. Their reality is being lived out on a digital commons and in social spaces on the World Wide Web. All across America, our nation's teens are performing hundreds of hours of community service as part of their formal educational requirements. In school, they are learning that every activity they engage in -- the food they eat, the car they drive, the clothes they wear -- comes with a carbon footprint and affects the well-being of every other human being and fellow creature on Earth.

Today's youth are globally connected. They are Skyping in real time with their cohorts and friends on the far corners of the Earth. They are sharing information, knowledge, and mutual aid in cyberspace chat rooms, apparently unaware of the so called "tragedy of the commons." They have little regard for traditional property rights -- especially copyrights, trademarks, and patents -- believing information should run free. They are far more concerned with sharing access than protecting ownership. They think of themselves less as autonomous agents -- an island to oneself -- and more as actors in an ever shifting set of roles and relationships. Personal wealth, while still important, is not considered an endgame, but only a baseline consideration for enjoying a more immaterial existence, including more meaningful experiences in diverse communities.

Surveys show that the Millennial Generation in the United States is much more likely than older generations to feel empathy for others. They are far more concerned with the planetary environment and climate change and more likely to favor sustainable economic growth. They are also more likely to believe that government has a responsibility to take care of people who can't care for themselves, and are more supportive of a bigger role of government in providing basic services. They are more supportive of globalization and immigration than older generations.

They are also more racially diverse and the most tolerant of any generation in history in support of gender equality and the willingness to champion the rights of the disabled, gays, other minorities, as well as our fellow creatures. In short, they favor a world of inclusivity over exclusivity, and are more comfortable in distributed networks than in old fashioned centralized hierarchies that establish boundaries and restrictions separating people from one another.

The new sensibilities of the younger generation are beginning to usher in a different idea about human nature and the dream that accompanies it. Today's youth find little value in the Enlightenment caricature of human nature as rational, calculating, detached, and utilitarian. They prefer to think of human nature as empathic, mindful, engaged, and driven by the intrinsic value and interconnectedness of life.

Homo sapien is being eclipsed by homo empathicus, as they shift their horizon from national markets and nation-state borders to a global economy and a planetary community. Even their preferred indicators of economic progress are shifting, from the crude calculation of gross domestic product and per-capita income to more sensitive social indicators -- like health and longevity, social equality, safe communities, clean environment, etc. -- that measure the well-being of the broader community.

If we listen very closely, we can hear the whisper of a new dream in the making, one based on what youth around the world are beginning to call "quality of life". In this new world, the American Dream seems almost provincial, even quaint, and entirely unsuited for a generation that is beginning to extend its empathic sensibility beyond national identities, to include the whole of humanity and the entirety of the planet as their extended community. If the American Dream served as the gold standard for the era of national markets and nation-state governments, the dream of "quality of life" becomes the standard for the emerging biosphere era.

In this new, more expansive human setting, libertarian cries and tea party bravado suddenly seem far less significant. The assumptions about human nature and the meaning of the human journey that are bound up with the conventional American Dream, which motivate much of the current political brouhaha, are more like a faint echo of the past than a clarion call for the future. The empathic civilization looms on the horizon.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: The Third Industrial Revolution 2/19/10 Island Breath: The American Dream Dies 8/30/07 Island Breath: The American Jet Ski Economy 10/21/07

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The third industrial revolution

SUBHEAD: To save ourselves from climate change we must embrace a new model of society based on scientists' new understanding of human nature.

Amanda Gefter interviews Jeremy Rifkin on 17 February 2010 in NewScientist - 
(http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/02/jeremy-rifkin-the-third-industrial-revolution.php)





Image above: General Electric illustration of their idea of a "Smart Grid". Note there is no nuclear plant getting cooled by the stream in the woods. From (http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/preview)  
 

What is the premise of your book The Empathic Civilization?

My sense is that we're nearing an endgame for the modern age. I think we had two singular events in the last 18 months that signaled the end. First, in July 2008 the price of oil hit $147/barrel. Food riots broke out in 30 countries, the price of basic items shot up and purchasing power plummeted. That was the earthquake; the market crash 60 days later was the aftershock. It signaled the beginning of the endgame of a great industrial era based on fossil fuels. The second event, in December 2009, was the breakdown in Copenhagen, when world leaders tried to deal with our entropy problem and failed. That's the context of the book. Why couldn't our world leaders anticipate or respond to the global meltdown of the industrial revolution? And why can't they deal with climate change when scientists have been telling us that it may be the greatest threat our species has ever faced?  

What do you think the problem is?

My sense is that the failure runs very deep. The problem is that those leaders are using 18th century Enlightenment ideas to address 20th century challenges. I advise a number of heads of state in Europe and over and over again I see how these old ideas about human nature and the meaning of life continue to cloak public policy. The Enlightenment view is that human beings are rational, detached agents that pursue our own self-interests and our nation states reflect that view. How are we going to address the needs of 7 billion people and heal the biosphere if we really are dispassionate, disinterested agents pursuing our own self-interest?

A lot of interesting new discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, child development, anthropology and more suggest that human nature might not be what Enlightenment philosophers suggested. For instance, the discovery of mirror neurons suggests that we are not wired for autonomy or utility but for empathic distress; we are a social species.

If we begin to change our ideas about human nature and, as you say in the book, view history through an empathic lens, what new things do we discover?

We can see how consciousness, which is wired for empathy and social engagement, changes over history. Obviously consciousness has changed over history. A Paleolithic hunter is wired differently than a medieval serf or a modern human. My belief is that when energy and communications revolutions converge it creates new economic eras and changes consciousness dramatically by shifting our temporal and spatial boundaries, causing empathy to expand. For instance, wherever there were hydraulic agricultural societies based on large-scale irrigation systems, humans independently created writing.

That's fascinating to me. Writing made it possible to manage a complex energy regime. It also changed consciousness--transforming the mythological consciousness of oral cultures into a theological one. In the process, empathy evolves. The range of oral communication is limited. You can't extend empathy beyond kin and blood ties. With script you could empathize further with associational ties, you broaden your frame of reference. In the 19th century the printing press communications revolution converged with new energies: coal and steam. This led to the introduction of public schools and mass literacy across Europe and America.

Theological consciousness became ideological consciousness. The same shift occurred in the 20th century with the Second Industrial Revolution, the electronics revolution, which gave rise to psychological consciousness. Each convergence of energy and communications technology changed our consciousness, extended our social networks and in turn expanded our empathy.

But all of that happens at the expense of the environment?

 It's the conundrum of history that these more complex civilizations that use greater energy flow-through allow us to bring more people together, but they create more entropy in the process. If we are going to ward off the extreme dangers posed by climate change we need to find a way to increase empathy while decreasing entropy. The question is, how do you do that? How do you break the paradox?

 In the book you argue that we can break the paradox by shifting from geopolitical consciousness to biosphere consciousness.

We need to implement reglobalization from the bottom-up in order to achieve a more sustainable global economy. Geopolitics is an extension of the Enlightenment view of human nature, the idea that we pursue our utilitarian pleasures and individual self-interests. In geopolitics, the nation-state becomes a macro view of that. Nations deal with nations by being rational, detached and calculating, pursuing self-interests, exercising power and acquiring more capital and wealth. That's why Copenhagen failed. The world leaders weren't thinking biosphere, they were thinking geopolitics.

Everyone was looking out for their nation's self-interest. What we need to do is attempt biosphere politics. Governing units are going to change--I think there's going to be a shift toward continentalization. The EU is a first attempt at organizing a new frame of reference across continents, but it's a transitional governing form. The Asian Union, African Union and South American Union are in their early stages.  

Why "re-globalization"?

The global economy didn't work in its first stage. And that's because the economics and the technology raced ahead of our changing consciousness. A global economy requires social trust; you need biosphere consciousness, not geopolitics. You're never going to get globalization until empathy extends to the whole species.

As I said in the book, I think we need to rethink economic policies and make thermodynamics the basis of economic theory. The price of energy is embedded in every product we make. At the same time, the effects of climate change are already eroding economies in many parts of the world as extreme weather events destroy ecosystems and agricultural infrastructure. The Third Industrial Revolution will be driven in part by the need to mitigate the entropic impact of the first two industrial revolutions.

A lot of business people would say that you can't be empathic in the market. But the market is a secondary institution--it's an extension of culture. The real invisible hand of the market is trust, which is the result of empathic engagement. The only way you can have a market is if you have a shared narrative. The market is not a utilitarian frame of reference, it only exists by the social trust that allows people to engage in anonymous settings and believe that their engagements will be honored. When that trust fails, markets collapse and that's what is happening now.  

What will the Third Industrial Revolution look like? When will it happen?

 I think we're on the verge. I had the privilege to help design the European Union's Third Industrial Revolution economic stability game plan, which was endorsed by the European Parliament in 2007. What we noticed is that in the last 10 or 15 years we've had a very powerful communication revolution with the internet, and the key word is that it's distributed.

What's beginning to happen now is that the distributed ICT [information and communication technologies] revolution is beginning to converge with a new energy regime: distributed renewable energy. When they do converge, it's likely to change consciousness once again. Distributed ICT will organize distributed energies. Renewables like wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are found in some proportion everywhere, in people's backyards. As people begin to harvest these renewable energies they can share electricity peer-to-peer across an internet-like smart energy grid that extends across nations and even continents. We see buildings as the new power plants. Buildings are the number one source of C02 emmissions, but they might also be the solution if they can harness renewables to produce their own energy on site. People will also need new energy storage technologies like hydrogen.

The EU has committed 8 billion Euros to hydrogen storage technologies. Those technologies will give us dependable distributed energy. I founded the Third Industrial Revolution Global CEO Business Roundtable, which is comprised of 100 leading companies from renewable energy to utilities to architectural firms. We're starting to lay out plans.  

How will the Third Industrial Revolution change our consciousness?

 It extends it in a distributed fashion, with everyone taking responsibility for their swath of the biosphere and then sharing their energy across continents. We have to take responsibility where we are but we have to share across the world for it to work. That would allow us to think biosphere politics not geopolitics and extend empathy in that regard. That gives us a possibility of breaking the empathy/entropy paradox. Will we actually do it? If I were a betting person...well, I wouldn't even want to make a bet.

But it's our best shot. It's a tough challenge. What I'm saying is so difficult. But what encourages me is the empathy we are already seeing resulting from technology. After the Iranian elections a young college student was gunned down in the street by an Iranian militiaman for protesting, and someone took a cell phone video. The world instantly empathized. Then there was the earthquake in Haiti. There was an immediate response.

That's new--we're thinking as a human race. We still have our xenophobia and our prejudices but I think we're catching a glimpse of something new, and we're going to have to if the possibility of our own extinction depends on it. I think the question hasn't been asked yet, what is the point of this exercise in connecting the human race in this way? Up to now, most people's reasons for supporting it is more information, quicker information, better entertainment, improved commerce and trade, etc. What I'm suggesting is that that is not enough. When Henry David Thoreau saw the telegraph, he said,

"Well, now Maine can talk to Texas, but does Maine really have anything to say to Texas?"

If we can't have a global discussion of the transcendent purpose of this connectivity, I don't think entertainment and information are going to be enough to justify the Third Industrial revolution. We have to think deeper, to think as a human family, to take responsibility for the biosphere and our fellow creatures. If human nature is Homo empathicus, as scientists are suggesting, if that's our true nature, then we can begin to create new institutions--parenting styles, education, business models--that reflect our core nature. Then I can see how this Third Industrial Revolution will happen.  

Perhaps we are too cynical for these ideas. Do some people see an empathic global society as an idealistic dream?

 If you know my past work you know I'm not utopian. But empathy isn't about utopia. It's about knowing how damn tough it is to be alive. We empathize with others because we smell the whiff of death in their vulnerabilities and so we celebrate their life. There's no such thing as empathy in heaven because there's no mortality, no suffering. Empathy is about encouraging another person's struggle to be. It's a tough feeling to have. In utopia there's no struggle, there's nothing to empathize with. Empathy is more than just, "I feel your pain". We root for each other's struggle to live out this mystery of life.  

I was struck by the vast number of fields you explore in your book. Do you think there's a need for more cross-disciplinary scholarship?

Absolutely. Education is a total mess. Our educational model is based on Enlightenment ideas and progressive ideas of the 20th century--if human nature is autonomous, calculating and self-interested and if the market is the way we fulfill those interests, our education reflects that. We are taught that knowledge is a personal asset to achieve one's aims in the world--knowledge is power. If you share your knowledge, that's cheating. It limits us to a more vocational idea of what life is about.

We all become little drones. And as we go through education it grows narrower and narrower. But what's happening with the internet is that young folks are growing up believing that information is something you share, not hoard. That thinking is a collaborative exercise, not an autonomous one, and that spaces ought to be commons. That's completely alien to the Enlightenment ideas I grew up on. I'm a big fan of interdisciplinary and collaborative teaching. If you're studying evolutionary biology, let a philosopher come in and talk about the way our concept of nature has changed over history. Allow young people to have so many frames of reference so they can be more open and more synthetic in their thinking. If we are a social animal and we live by our stories, then our stories are only made richer with more points of view.

Sharing knowledge is considered cheating, yet collaboration has been shown to improve critical thinking if it's done in a disciplined way. There was a doctor at UCL medical college in the 1950s who realized that if he brought all of his interns to a patient's bedside at the same time, the collaborative response got to a diagnosis quicker than if only one intern was there. Education has to be completely reformed to reflect the new era of distributed knowledge. I'm currently in deep private discussions with some major educational associations in the US who want to put together a team of people to begin rethinking this. We still don't know how to grade people in a collaborative model. But if we're moving from Homo sapien to Homo empathicus, we have to rethink all of this.  

You've also said we need to rethink the scientific method.

The scientific method reflects Enlightenment thinking. You have to be detached, rational and value-free; you can't be connected or use empathic imagination. But we're seeing that you need both. If the scientific method is the way kids learn, how do they grow up to form an empathic connection to the world? There are scientists who are practicing a different kind of science, a not-too-close, not-too-far empathic engagement. Jane Goodall is a great example. I told Jane, what you did was so amazing because it's a new approach to science, and she said she had never thought about it that way.

 She began to empathize with the chimpanzees she was studying, imagining their experience as if it were her own. What she learned about chimpanzee behaviour was massively more than what people had previously learned by studying them in a completely detached way. Goethe understood this a couple hundred years ago--he disagreed with Francis Bacon's approach. He argued that we understand nature by participating, not by standing back and observing with dispassionate neutrality.

 Especially in the ecological sciences and climate science, you need to be engaged, interactive and interdisciplinary, because you're dealing with systems thinking. Empathic science is a good balance between the traditional scientific method on the one hand and something that wouldn't be science at all on the other. Empathy requires that you not be too close or too far away. You have to be close enough to feel the experiences biologically as if they are your own but far enough to use your cognitive abilities to rationally respond. I hope scholars will take these ideas much further. I'm hoping a younger generation can do that.

 I found it interesting that you correlate the expansion of empathy throughout human history with a growing sense of self. I would naively think that they would have an inverse relationship.

  Empathy goes hand-in-hand with selfhood; if you know you're a self you can see yourself in relation to the other. People hear "empathy" and they think socialism or something--that's completely missing the point. Increasing individuation and selfhood is critical to increasing empathy. We are wired for empathic distress. If you put a bunch of babies in a nursery and one starts crying, the others start crying but they don't know why. Real empathy - empathic expression--doesn't occur until children develop a sense of self and recognize themselves as being separate from others; when they can recognize themselves in a mirror, for instance. When kids learn about birth and death they think, uh oh, now I know I have a history, I'm finite. Realizing their own vulnerability allows them to feel another's vulnerability. The more advanced your selfhood, the more you can feel another's fragility and empathize. Empathy is the invisible social glue that allows a complex individuated society to remain integrated.  

You said that people hear "empathy" and think "socialism". How does capitalism survive an empathic society?

Market capitalism will be transformed into "distributed capitalism". Just as the internet led to the democratization of information, the Third Industrial Revolution will lead to the democratization of energy. The required changes to infrastructure are going to create massive amounts of jobs and a whole new economy. But when you have peer-to-peer sharing of energy across an intelligent grid system, you no longer have the top-down, centralized economic system. Distributed energy requires distributed capitalism, and that relies on the opposite view of human nature than that of market capitalism. But the politics isn't right or left--its centralized, top-down versus collaborative commons. You don't hear people say, I'm going onto a social networking space because I'm a socialist--it's just a different frame of reference.  

At over 600 pages, The Empathic Civilization is a long book! How long did it take you to write it?

 I didn't mean for it to be a long book, but my wife says the older I get, the longer my books get. It took over five years. I got so deep into the research; I read about 400 books and maybe 3,000 articles. The actual writing took about a year and a half. My wife has made me promise no more books!
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