The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin | Book review. Whoever hacked into the emails at the University of East Anglia fired the opening salvo in a new kind of dirty war. The Copenhagen conference met on the basis that dealing with global warming was in everyone's interest. The idea that nearly 200 countries could reach meaningful decisions was always unreal, but the meeting's collapse reflected a more fundamental reality.
Environmentalists have always assumed that the threat of disaster will bring about an era of global cooperation. In reality, climate change is triggering another round of geopolitical conflict. "Climategate" was an exercise in postmodern cyber-warfare – a move in a larger conflict that environmentalists show little sign of understanding. The catch-22 is that, as civilisation has extended the reach of empathy beyond the family and the tribe until it covers all of humankind, the expanding infrastructure of industry and transport has needed ever larger inputs of energy, increasing entropy and wrecking the planet.
| Vers une civilisation de l’empathie? The Empathic Civilization | Jeremy Rifkin. Jeremy Rifkin, philosophe : “Sans empathie, nous sommes foutus” - Idées. Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization".