The story of civilization can be told in a number of ways. An economic history of mankind treats human interaction in terms of commercial transactions. A military history focuses on wars and battles won and lost, and their causes and consequences. One can undertake a history of culture, beginning perhaps with the earliest cave paintings. Political histories focus on aggregates ranging from city-states to nations.
We tend to use the word "empathy" to describe the capacity of an individual person so to identify with the situation of another as almost to share that person's feelings. We are less accustomed to use the word in a context beyond the individual and the personal.
Yet Jeremy Rifkin uses the word in a much broader perspective in The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2009, 674 pp.) You have probably never seen a history book like this. Rifkin traces the story from the dawn of civilization to the present, but from an unfamiliar point of view. The author writes, "Much of history that is written is about the pathology of power. The everyday world is quite different, lived out in hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity."
Rifkin's book covers familiar territory-the gathering of human beings into ever larger groups; the importance of agriculture; the Roman Empire; life in the Middle Ages; feudalism, humanism, the Enlightenment, and so forth. But in examining civilization, era by era, he calls attention to information we probably haven't encountered before. Around the fourth century, for example, the Roman Empire came to view the hitherto common practice of infanticide as murder, and outlawed it. The Renaissance invented the idea of companionate marriage, a relationship that we take for granted but which had not existed up to that point. Physical affection toward children became common only in the Enlightenment. The notion of self-fulfillment did not exist before the Romantic era. The nineteenth century saw the outlawing of the slave trade, which had been accepted practice in previous times.
Rifkin places into historical context a number of phenomena that have contributed to our greater connectivity as a species: global travel, the domination of the English language, the use of resources to materially improve quality of life, the trend toward gender equality, the new view of other species as having inherent worth beyond their utility for human beings.
The extension of empathy, however, has come at great cost. Every advance in transportation and communication tending to unify humanity has demanded every greater expenditures of natural resources. "We have now colonized virtually every square inch of the planet and established the scaffolding for a truly global civilization that is connecting the human race in a single embrace, but at the expense of an entropic bill that is threatening our extinction."
Whether the extension of empathy to include all peoples and all species arrives before a cataclysm produced by the reckless consumption of resources remains to be seen.
Arthur Wenk, a psychotherapist practicing in Oakville, Ontario, combines cognitive-behavioral therapy (discovering techniques for producing immediate changes) with a psychodynamic approach that helps make changes permanent by addressing the root causes of mental health problems. Art is certified by OACCPP (the Ontario organization for psychotherapists) and EMDRIA (the EMDR International Association). Art's website, http://www.arthurwenk.com/, contains one-page summaries of recommended books on personal growth, brief explanations of common mental health issues, and lectures on parenting, the psychology of families, and the functioning of the brain. You can read Dr. Wenk's lectures on western culture at http://arthurwenk.ca/speaker.html
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