Homo Empathicus: Jeremy Rifkin on the Science of Empathy
by: Dave Belden on September 9th, 2010 | 8 Comments »
A veteran of struggles for nonviolent social change was quoted to me this year to the effect that for all his long life “the science has been against us, but now suddenly it’s for us.” He was referring to the recent scientific work that has been done on empathy and cooperation. Edwin Rutsch has a very useful collection of this work at his empathy website. His list of experts, with links to articles, books and video, includes people I do know of, like Frans de Waal and Antonio Damasio, and many more I don’t. If I had a month off I would love to soak myself in these new understandings of our cooperative and empathic nature. And it’s not just humans: there is a potential revolution brewing in biology as a whole, as seen in the work of Joan Roughgarden at Stanford (who has written us a piece for our next issue of Tikkun, and whose book The Genial Gene I reviewed for Tikkun last year).
Tikkun Daily blogger Jan Garrett sent us this video that sums it up in a fairly entertaining manner.
I’m interested to know how well the cartooning works for people. I don’t think it does quite work because it goes at the speed of Rifkin’s speech, which is just too fast some of the time. If it had been planned as a cartoon first, rather than as a way to illustrate an existing speech, I think they would have slowed down the voice over so we could enjoy the cartooning more. But the content is amazing, revolutionary, inspiring, so far as I’m concerned!
Excellent video. Enjoyed it very much. Its a terrific learning/communicating tool. Unfortunately, there is far to much suppressing of the primary drive to associate allowing the secondary drive of individual autonomy/self-interest to flourish.
Mesmerizingly wonderful. For me, the cartooning assisted in my hearing the message in other than an intellectual way. I had to suspend judgment and analysis in order to get the message, that is that we are soft-wired to be empathetic and to love one another, both known others and unknown others. Great message, wonderful medium.
Identifying imitation with empathy is totally falacious. Is it “empathic” to respond to anger with anger? Neuron science is at such a primitive stage that it is reasonable to expect whatever is being taught today will be up for grabs as time passes. I admit, we are hard up for good news, but science ought be more than entertainment.
I love the cartoons… they keep me in the present following along, rather than spinning out while I think of responses. I ran this piece in a recent Tikkunista, and a similar RSA Animation by David Harvey on “The Crisis of Capitalism” about a month ago. Thanks for the reminder to go back and dig up some more
If you check the homepage of http://cultureofempathy.com/ you’ll see other videos and links related empathy.
There you can see another animation from RSA on empathy:
Empathy As the foundation of a New 21st Century Enlightenment from Matthew Taylor
Shows how a new Enlightenment is being developed and one of the foundations is the value of empathy. After an explanation of 18th Century Enlightenment, the empathy part starts about half way into the video.
the animated cartoons anchored the fast pace of the provocative thoughts and information being espoused. It kept my mind focused on the fast pace of the information being imparted, keeping me on track and letting me keep up with the speed instead of losing some of the message by dwelling on each of the thoughts being presented.
And I never buy what fast-talkers are selling. They never want you to read the fine print, or in this case, the disconnect between scientific claims and sentimental enthusiasm.
@Rex – The neural science is very clear that a section of the brain generates the same response to self-action as it does when the person (or ape) is observing the actions of others. And imitation is certainly related to empathy. Although a direct identification would be improper, the relation of the two is NOT “totally fallacious”. Finally, the fine print exists and is being elaborated in books like The Biology of Belief and Spontaneous Evolution (Bruce Lipton MD: 30 yrs research, 20 yrs med school instructor), as well as Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization and I’m sure many more to come.
The best argument I have for the primacy of cooperative drives is the simple presence of 6+ billion humans and almost nowhere does the violent death rate exceed the replacement birth rate. While I agree that selfish competitive motives exist humans are first and foremost social animals (great apes). The US armed forces must work hard at patterning the ability to kill reflexively into new recruits: please observe that the nationalist impulse warped into military action is still a group oriented activity in the minds of civilians and mitary alike. Even the obscene US expenditures on the war machine – greater than the rest of the world combined – are justified and framed as a group self-defense activity.
I think the transformation from an competitive/authoritarian/me/mine society to a cooperative/self-organizing/we/our society is underway in Latin America and in other places around the world. This real, basic evolutionary change in human organization needs to occur widely if our species is to survive under the coming stress of increasing population and CO2 on the closed surface of our ‘blue marble’ home.