Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of
communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the
form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration
of diseases.
No matter how much we put our minds to the task of meeting the
challenges of a rapidly globalizing world, the human race seems to
continually come up short, unable to muster the collective mental
resources to truly “think globally and act locally.” In his most
ambitious book to date, bestselling social critic Jeremy Rifkin
shows that this disconnect between our vision for the world and our
ability to realize that vision lies in the current state of human
consciousness. The very way our brains are structured disposes us to a
way of feeling, thinking, and acting in the world that is no longer
entirely relevant to the new environments we have created for ourselves.
The human-made environment is rapidly morphing into a global space,
yet our existing modes of consciousness are structured for earlier eras
of history, which are just as quickly fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues,
finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date:
refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live
and flourish in the new globalizing society…
As the forces of globalization accelerate, deepen, and become ever
more complex, the older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness
are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to
navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control. Indeed,
the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the
future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when
Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the
canon of reason.
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