Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization and P.W. Singer’s Wired for War: Review and Critique
by Gary Olson
Two recent books on the future, both seeking to interpret selected aspects of a rapidly moving, technologically complex world, are each deeply flawed but well worth examining for what’s missing. One author fears we are heading toward global entropic destruction of the earth’s biosphere unless we reinterpret history in light of new scientific evidence that proves humans are an empathic species. The other, more narrowly focused, explores the advent of military robotics, the revolutionary technology that promises to dominate future battlefields.
The first book, The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin, is the second major treatment of empathy to appear in recent months. It “outwords” Frans de Waal’s The Age of Empathy by a door-stopping 675 pages to a mere 304 [1]. The second book, Wired For War by P.W. Singer, is a disturbing but impressively detailed account of the American military’s current and anticipated use of robotic warfare.
Rifkin, a frequent advisor to CEOs, senior corporate management, and European Union officials, has authored 17 books on “big trend” topics, not infrequently self-proclaimed ones. His previous work has featured doom and Gloom warnings about imminent apocalyptic crises. Were Rifkin a meteorologist he¹d be drawing unemployment.
On occasion, an un-popped kernel of radical potential can be discovered. This was true about his early book on “pension fund socialism,” in The North Will Rise Again (with Randy Barber, 1978) and again in The End of Work (1995), both of which I assigned for my political economy courses. But his arguments are never carried to their logical anti-capitalist conclusion and that remains the case here. Thus he can accurately proclaim: “The ability to extend individual empathy across national cultures, continents, oceans, and other traditional divides is enormous, with profound implications for the humanization of the human race” (p. 427).
And further, although the social creation of surplus is a foreign concept to Rifkin, he does support ordinary citizens having access to a better quality of life and a more inclusive society. The problems arise when Rifkin attempts to operationalize his objectives.
» Read more: Review and Critique: Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization and P.W. Singer’s Wired for War
