THE UTOPIC IMPULSE

twice this weekend I have tuned into NPR to hear the voice of jeremy rifkin, someone I had never heard of before, but who took probably twenty seconds to get my attention. his surface topic is empathy, which he used for the title of his book, but he seems to have every iron in the fire at once, and moves fluidly through ideas about energy use, consciousness, systems theory, globalization, and neuroscience. every place he goes in his wide-ranging shpiels - which you can watch on youtube, or read about on huffpost, where they're featuring his book this month - makes total intuitive sense to me. essentially, he's making all the necessary links to see the big picture.

I really, really love big-picture thinking, and a lot of the work I've been doing this year in grad school is jostling between fields of research and trying to pin down some coherent framework. the problem is that knowledge in our era is so specialized - I can only hope to have basic knowledge in fields like physics, and I can forget understanding things like nanotechnology or quantum mechanics - and then there are the fields which are still fairly undefined, which I would consider empathy to belong to. empathy is an extremely potent, umbrella topic which requires basic knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and communication theory to make sense of, I would argue. in other words, it's not something you'll represented by a department in a university. I think there are some programs out there for "humanist studies," but I have yet to see one that's as serious as, say, a lit or psych department. supposedly all the liberal arts are "humanist studies," but this is sort of based on ideas from centuries ago, eighteenth- and even seventeenth-century ideas about what a human is. rifkin actually brings this up himself when he talks about the enlightenment, and how that idea of what a human is - a self-interested pleasure-seeking rational machine, basically - is severely outdated, if it was ever really accurate in the first place, which I would absolutely agree with. a lot of our ideas are in serious need of reinvention, and traditional academic fields are only barring progress.

hybridity is the buzzword among academia, it seems; and I have no idea what the academic reception of rifkin's book is or will be, but for me, it was just astounding to hear him make all the right connections between ideas, toward the idea of how we are going to save a fucked-up planet. it takes a lot of skill and most of all vast amounts of knowledge to weave together all these ideas, and I'm totally on board if someone else comes along and does it first. I think rifkin's got exactly the right approach here, one that doesn't seem entirely steeped in any one field, but evenly distributed through all the topics he's addressing. he's an economist, but his main focus isn't on profit or resource distribution; it seems to me that he's primarily concerned with consciousness. economists who are interested in human consciousness: holy fuck.

rifkin is not in the business of selling utopic ideas - as he says, in utopias there is no empathy - but it does have that flavor, at times; the visionary bent of it can't be totally suppressed. you can hear in the bookTV lecture that he is doing more than just gazing idly into the future, especially when he says things like "we have no plan B" and "we have no more than one generation to get it right." I feel the same way, which used to lead me into a kind of panic and subsequent depression, where everything man-made was a symbol of how permanently we're altering the planet. I don't think like that anymore, but I'm still extremely interested in whatever this new consciousness is. I'm firmly in the camp of those who are seeing signs of, and pushing for, a "biospheric consciousness," and on a level that's more than simply spiritual (i.e. the gaia hypothesis); one with practical applications (rifkin brings up the analogy of power networks on buildings that distribute energy like the internet distributes information) and one which incorporates ideas about human nature in the mix with ideas simply about nature.

A PARTIAL LIST

1. being open has a lot to do with it. this quality of 'openness' is a hard one to define, but entails taking a basic risk: namely, admitting that you, like anyone else alive, have weaknesses and flaws, are essentially incomplete. this can be done in a zillion different unnameable ways, which everyone performs pretty much every day. if you want to be really inclusive about it you could say that every phone call is a risk - will the other person answer? will there be a connection? implicitly, you are saying, I want a call back. need is scary. every interaction is a potential risk.

2. understanding, the next step of openness; 'understanding' being that fundamental shift in the brain which allows it to recognize an emotion or sensation felt previously by the self, now being felt by the other. in theories on autism the phrase 'theory of mind' comes up a lot (an understatement - autism is sort of incomprehensible without this concept). can you grasp that another human being might potentially feel the same things as you, as a result of having the same hardwiring? and then, if you take into consideration that they have had different life experience, can you extend your theory of mind to include this new thought they might have? and understand it? this step, of course, takes the most work - to construct another brain, on top of the one you already have, could be a process that takes up an entire lifetime (e.g., trying to understand a parent or child), and still be incomplete.

3. can you, then, forgive the differences? can you actively extend yourself by acting with this understanding? and how is this done, exactly, besides not killing/harming other people? do you have to, after finally achieving their perspective, inhibit your own? act like them?