Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank

Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization is a landmark book. The book’s theme is “…we are, at our core, deeply social animals whose primary drive is for companionship and belongings, affection, and nurturance within a community, the best way to address mental health issues not in isolation, on the couch, or in the laboratory, but rather in intimate group engagement – or group therapy.”

The book covers many themes including the development of theological consciousness. His approach is through Marshall McLuhan’s concept, the medium is the message. Changes in the economy and media influence our spiritual thoughts.
In the Neolithic era, humans looked to vegetation and animal gods. With the irrigation development in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Persia, humans turned to sky gods – the sun, moon and stars which seemed powerful and reliable. The discarded gods seemed to have been fragile and vulnerable.

Writing brought another change from the older participatory oral culture to the abstract contemplative private written culture. As music lovers can attest, hearing is the most engulfing and internalizing of all the senses. Vision is the least intimate and most abstract. For many centuries, people considered the manuscript less reliable than the spoken word.

Writing made the great introspective religions possible. Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have sacred texts.
With the Roman Empire’s cosmopolitan emphasis on introspection, tolerance, compassion, universal brotherhood and redemption, many citizens were ready to hear the Christian story.

The Roman message with a universal story conflicted with the city’s immigrants from many different cultures with their local gods. In the dense urban mix, these people had an identity crisis. Their local gods did not fit in with a cosmopolitan atmosphere. Many immigrants (foreigners) sought refuge in mystery cults that emphasized individual salvation. These cults could only serve as a halfway house because the members could not bring themselves to establish universal claims that would have opened themselves up to attracting outsiders.

Early Christians responded with a universal message that eventually brought mass membership. There was no overnight success. Archeological evidence shows that they were a heterogeneous group, upwardly mobile urban dwellers who had worked to acquire skill, education and some wealth. The traditional aristocracy met these upstarts with disdain and contempt. Noted widely by outsiders, the early groups were known for their emotional intensity, affection and goodwill.

Once established as the empire’s official religion, the church became increasing hostile to non believers. At the same time, the church was instrumental in passing legislation to prohibit child abuse, infanticide, selling babies, sexually abusing children and the gladiator sport. Nowadays, we may see this as setting low standards but in the fourth century, these practices had been prevalent for as long as anyone could remember. They were as revolutionary as environmental, war abolition and poverty abolition today.

In the 16th century, the printing press made the Protestant Reformation possible or even inevitable. “Books were read silently and alone, creating a new sense of personal privacy and, along with it, notions of self-reflection and introspection, eventually leading to the creation of a therapeutic way of thinking about oneself and the world.”

The Protestant route to salvation was tortuous. “Anxious to know whether they were among the saved or damned, Protestants spent endless hours searching their inner thoughts, moods and behavior for any sign of goodness or badness, faithfulness or impiety that might reveal their fate. While an earlier Christian in the feudal era would have little reason or inclination to entertain constant self-doubt and mull over every thought to assess its meaning relative to one’s salvation, the Protestant was embroiled in a constant state of self-analysis.”

The Enlightenment brought reforms to end judicial torture, cruelty to animals and slavery. “[T]he abuse and torture of animals was quite common. Cats were routinely set on fire, dogs, roosters, and other animals were made to fight to their deaths in sporting arenas, and horses were savagely beaten.” Until 1790, Great Britain burned women at the stake. Like lynching in the southern United States until the 1940s, this cruelty at one time was perfectly normal.

Not mentioned in his book are past efforts to diminish war’s cruelty and its abolition as called for in the Atlantic Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. General Douglas MacArthur, Franklin Roosevelt’s Department of War Secretary Henry Stimson and Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer have all said that humans must abolish war or war will abolish humankind. I hope Mr. Rifkin covers this in his next book.

I also hope that he and other great thinkers such as Karen Armstrong look at the Supreme Being in a pantheistic mode. Mystics and New Age adherents may come close but mainline and fundamentalist churches still project the sky god, which is easier to explain and understand. In a pantheistic model, destroying the earth and violence would be seen as suicide because we are not just connected but we are all one on Spaceship Earth. There are no lifeboats. We float or sink together.

I am aghast that more than two billion people live in poverty. Sometimes I wonder if Anne Frank and Jeremy Rifkin have it right after all. Maybe most people are sociopaths. However, for now, I am sticking with Anne Frank. If humankind still exists in 2050, it will only be because she is right and humans have the foresight to plan for the long haul.

Ed O’Rourke is a retired certified public accountant from Houston, Texas, now living in Medellin, Colombia.

Main source: Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, Jeremy T. Tarcher / Penguin, 2009, 675 pages.