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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
September 19, 2010
Reading: Worrying About Bob’s Wheat
One summer, we stayed three days at a farm in Pennsylvania where Bob
and Minnie opened their home to tourists. Each morning we gathered
for Minnie’s home-cooked breakfast and talked about whatever we
could think to say, such as the crops.
Bob was waiting for his wheat to be harvested. The crews were
scheduled to come, then they postponed, then they didn’t show up.
The wheat was ready, the weather was sunny and perfect, but rain was
forecast. “Maybe I should get somebody else,” Bob worried at
breakfast.
As we made our rounds of tourists steps, I found myself nagged by a
vague concern. Nothing crucial but something that made me uneasy
that I finally identified as Bob’s wheat. I was hoping the crew
would make it that day. I surveyed the sky anxiously for clouds.
Though I would have welcomed a cooling rain, I was willing to put up
with the heat for the sake of the harvest. When we returned to the
farm and found the wheat still standing, I was disappointed. Another
good day wasted. The nerve of that baling crew!
When I had packed the car before beginning this trip, Bob’s wheat
was nowhere among my concerns. It could have rotted, burned, been
engulfed by grasshoppers; I wouldn’t have known or cared. But now it
become important.
I argued with myself about the appropriateness of this worry. If I’m
going to fret, how about paying attention to something I have power
over or something that makes more of a difference to me? I thought,
how arbitrary: the things closest to us claim our attention and
distract us from worrying about the right things.
But we don’t have much choice over what claims our care (or, for
that matter, our love). The issue is not whether we care about the
“right” things, the issue is whether we care. My concern was not
with the wheat, but about these people whose lives were now part of
mine.
The day we left it hadn’t yet rained. Bob waved goodbye from his
tractor as we drove past his bounteous and uncut field.
I hope the baling crew finally got there. I hope there was time for
Bob’s wheat to be cut and baled before the rain. I hope he had a
good year. I hope Bob and Minnie are happy.
From Taking Pictures of God
By Bruce T. Marshall
Sermon:
Last week in our water communion service, Amy and I spoke of our
Labor Day weekend trip to Fredericksburg. I hadn’t known much about
Fredericksburg before going except that something about the Civil
War was there—but there’s something about the Civil War just about
everywhere in Virginia, it seems.
What we learned during our visit was that four battles were fought
in the Fredericksburg area—gruesome battles, particularly for those
on the Union side. In one of these, Union soldiers went against
Confederate troops who held a superior position behind a stone wall,
with an open field in front of the them. Union generals threw their
troops against the Confederate line over and over, only to have them
mown down each time a new division advanced. Soon the open field was
strewn with the dead and wounded.
During pauses in the fighting, the moans of those who had been
wounded could be plainly heard by both sides. This is the context
for the story I want to tell.
A young Confederate soldier named Richard Kirkland—19 years old—was
moved by the suffering of the Union soldiers just yards in front of
him. He asked permission to go to them, share water, ease their
suffering. The Confederate general said he could, but warned that he
would most likely be shot himself when he entered the battlefield.
Nevertheless, Richard Kirkland filled all the extra canteens he
could find with water and, laden down with them, scaled the wall
that divided the troops of both sides. He was immediately met with a
rain of bullets, but they all missed as Kirkland went to the wounded
soldier closest to him, propped him up, poured water into his mouth,
then—leaving the canteen—moved on to the next. As his mission became
apparent, the shooting stopped, and cheers erupted first from the
Union side and then from the Confederate side. For an hour and a
half, Richard Kirkland went back and forth from the field of wounded
soldiers to the Confederate lines where his comrades filled canteens
with fresh water for Kirkland to take back into the field.
Richard Kirkland survived this encounter but was later killed in the
battle of Chickamauga. Today, there is a statue on the
Fredericksburg battlefield, commemorating this act of empathy. He is
known as the Angel of Fredericksburg.
● ● ●
This morning I am considering the concept of empathy, which is
defined as “understanding and entering into another’s feelings.”
This is a sermon that was purchased last spring at the services
auction. I put the right to name the topic of a sermon up for bid,
and Dave and Ruth Phillips bought the right to name one of the two
sermons I sold. They gave me a book to work with. It’s called The
Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World
in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin who has a reputation as a “big picture”
thinker. That is, he looks at overall trends in history and
civilization. This is a big thick book—I must admit that my heart
sank when Dave gave it to me—partially because of the challenge of
reading it but mostly because of needing to make it fit into a
20-minute sermon. What I’m going to try to do is give a summary of
the book’s argument, then offer some comments of my own. Please bear
with me; we’re going on a ride together this morning.
I have entitled this sermon, Empathy and Global Consciousness which,
I admit, is kind of grandiose. It’s what came to me when the
deadline approached, but I think it is an accurate representation of
what this author is trying to do—his aim is also grandiose. He is
addressing some basic issues we face for the future of our planet
and taking the position that we need to change how we conceive of
these challenges, shifting our point of reference from power over
others to empathy.
Empathy, for Jeremy Rifkin, means more than what we find in the
dictionary definition, which is, “understanding and entering into
another’s feelings.” I’ll try to illustrate by drawing on my opening
reading and the story that began this sermon. Worrying About Bob’s
Wheat is an example of empathy. It gives an account of a time when I
found myself drawn into the lives of a Pennsylvania farming couple,
Bob and Minnie. They were farmers, and they also were Mennonites
with an everyday life quite different from my own. But we made a
connection, I began to understand their concerns, and I found myself
caring—even though what happened to them had no real impact upon my
life. That’s empathy.
But to understand Jeremy Rifkin’s concept of empathy, we need to go
to the second story: the Battle of Fredericksburg and the young
Confederate soldier who risked his life to give comfort to wounded
Union soldiers. His act of heroism involved “understanding and
entering into another’s feelings,” but he took it a step further: he
actually did something about what he was experiencing. I worried
about Bob’s wheat, but didn’t do anything about it. Richard Kirkland
felt the suffering of the Union soldiers, and he actually did
something. He brought them water and comfort.
That’s what Jeremy Rifkin is talking about when he refers to
empathy. Not just feeling another’s pain, but trying to address it.
● ● ●
The story of human history, Rifkin says, is usually told as an
account of conflicts, antagonism, battles and wars. It is a story of
power struggles, of one people conquering another whom they then
subjugate with their superior power. Which remains in place until
somebody else—stronger and more ruthless—comes along to topple
whoever has been in power up to then.
That’s how history is presented, and that’s also how we understand
the present: a world of conflict with people struggling with each
other to pull themselves up to the top.
But that’s not the only way to understand the story of humanity,
Rifkin says. There is another way: an alternative story. We can view
the same events and find something else going on that might not be
evident if we focus on wars and battles and struggles for power.
What Rifkin finds is a story of developing consciousness that
gradually widens an individual’s circle of concern beyond the
family, the tribe, the community, the nation: to humanity as a
whole. From “survival of the fittest” to a valuing of all members of
the human family.
“Is it possible,” he asks, “that human beings are not inherently
evil or intrinsically self-interested and materialistic, but are of
a very different nature—an empathic one—and that all of the other
drives that we have considered to be primary—aggression, violence,
selfish behavior, acquisitiveness—are in fact secondary drives that
flow from repression or denial of our most basic instinct?”
He poses that as a question, but it’s a rhetorical question for it
is his basic argument that the capacity for empathy is built into
us, but gets obscured when society does not give it an opportunity
to develop.
Rifkin offers this alternative view of history: For seventeen
hundred years—from the beginning of the Christian era until about
the 1700s—Christian society operated on the conviction that the
essential nature of human beings is that we are sinners. Our only
hope was in the salvation promised for the next life. If you have
traveled in Europe or read European history or seen the movies, you
know that people in that era viewed life in this world as
preparation for the next. making sure you were among the elect who
would be saved. If being among the elect meant going off on a
crusade to convert or kill heathens, well then, that’s what you did.
In the 1700s, at about the time of the founding of this nation,
there was a change in consciousness, anticipated by a school of
philosophical thought known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment
shifted the focus of meaning from the next world to this one. Faith
became less important than reason for with reason we have the power
to shape this world, while faith had been mostly about anticipating
salvation. As the emphasis shifted from faith to reason, the image
of God changed from being an all-powerful judge to an image you
might heard of: the clockmaker. In this view, God created the world
like a clock, run by laws that were accessible to human beings. We
were then left with the opportunity and the responsibility to tinker
with the clock that is this world. Our responsibility was to make it
run as efficiently as it could.
As this new consciousness permeated society, the goal of life
shifted. Salvation had been the most important capacity. Now it
became productivity. Productivity replaced salvation as the reason
for being. And so this worldview gave rise to the industrial
revolution, the age of inventors, the dramatic changes in everyday
life experienced in the 19th century, and the consumer society. The
founding documents of the United States reflect the values of the
Enlightenment as does the Unitarian side of our Unitarian
Universalist tradition. In its earliest years, Unitarianism was a
product of the thought and values of the Enlightenment and a protest
against earlier religious views.
Then in the early 19th century, there was another change of
consciousness. Not everybody was enamored of this new industrial
society. Henry David Thoreau, who spent his life on the outskirts of
New England Unitarianism grumbled about the invention of the
telegraph which let people in Maine talk to people in Texas. The
question, Thoreau said, was whether people in Maine have anything
important to say to people in Texas.
The philosophers and writers and artists who reacted against
Enlightenment thinking were called the Romantics. They believed that
life in a purely mechanistic world loses its depth and meaning. So
they appealed to the feelings, to artistic sensibilities, to a sense
of beauty as the guiding force to the developing human
consciousness.
From the view of life as concerned primarily with salvation, to the
reason of the Enlightenment, to the depth of feeling of the
Romantics, Jeremy Rifkin perceives a gradual strengthening of the
capacity for empathy. But, he says, it was not to come into its full
power until the later years of the 20th century. From then and into
the present, he states, we are witnessing and participating in
another dramatic shift in consciousness. This has been brought about
by the transportation and communications revolutions that have made
this world into a global village. No longer are we confined to the
region of our birth but now can move throughout the world. Even if
we do stay put, we have the world available to us via the Internet
in our own bedroom. As a result, we may meet and get to know and
care about people from all over the world.
To illustrate this change, Jeremy Rifkin cites an example from our
own area.
“In 1960, the Washington metropolitan area was a small southern
city, made up of a large black population and smaller white
community, with very little interaction. Today tens of thousands of
people from ethnic communities all over the world reside in the
region. They run businesses and are employed by local companies.
Their children attend public schools. Their native foods, fashions,
music, and other cultural fares have permeated the region, turning
much of the area into a multicultural sphere. It’s not unusual to
hear three or four languages spoken at the checkout counter at a
neighborhood supermarket...”
This is everyday life for those living in this region—as it is for
people in urban areas throughout this country and the world. Global
travel and tourism is now the largest single industry in the world
economy. English is becoming the global common language.
Manufacturing and commerce brings together participants from all
over the world. We have many occasions for coming into contact with
each other.
This new global consciousness brings many effects, but at the center
Rifkin finds a strengthening of empathy. One example to back up his
case: When Democratic voters in 2008 were poled as to their
preference in presidential candidates, they were asked which
qualities were most important to them. More people chose “empathy”
than chose “the best chance to win.” Rifkin concludes, “The evidence
shows that we are witnessing the greatest surge in empathic
extension in all of human history.”
● ● ●
This is a wonderful vision: a world whose peoples are drawn ever
closer to each other, a world in which the old antagonisms are
replaced by a sense of appreciation and understanding. It all sounds
lovely, doesn’t it?
But we know that it’s not all lovely. That’s not what we find when
we survey the news of world events. And Rifkin admits that the surge
in empathy is limited to the wealthy populations of the most highly
developed countries. Indeed, as the wealthy peoples of the earth
developed new levels of consciousness and understanding, the poorest
countries have retreated, sinking into a survival-values culture.
So we have a problem here. The problem is what Rifkin labels as
entropy. Entropy is the scientific law stating that in each
interchange, there is a loss of energy. The whole world is a system
subject to entropy which is to say that the energy available to us
is diminishing. This creates a situation of instability, with the
have-nots trying to get to what the haves have. For Rifkin’s vision
of a world united in cooperation and understanding, a lot of energy
is required because this Internet and global travel and moving to
new parts of the world and staying in touch with each other all
takes energy, lots of it, which we in the developed nations consume
in highly disproportionate amounts. He gave an example I hadn’t
heard before. The Sears Tower in Chicago—now called the Willis
Tower—is among the tallest buildings in the world. The energy
required for one day’s operations of that skyscraper is sufficient
to meet the needs of a city of 35,000 people. Think of the developed
world as the Sears Tower, usurping the energy needed for that city
of 35,000.
The situation becomes critical as our primary source of energy—that
is, fossil fuels, particularly oil—becomes depleted. Already we are
approaching what’s called “global peak oil.” Which is the point at
which half of oil reserves have been used. Optimists predict that we
will reach that point between 2030 and 2035. Pessimists say it’s
more likely to be 2010-2012. When we reach “global peak oil,” “the
oil age is effectively over because the price of energy becomes
virtually unaffordable.”
Empathic consciousness, then, is dependent upon a way of life fueled
by abundant energy. As the world’s stores of energy are depleted, we
will slip backwards. People will become more focused on keeping what
we’ve got. Empathy then becomes a quaint and outmoded value.
● ● ●
So what do we do? On the one hand, we have a growth in empathic
consciousness. On the other hand, we have a world increasingly
challenged to provide the energy necessary to maintain this vision.
As I read it, Rifkin’s response to this situation is to lay out what
amounts to a change in consciousness: abandoning old ways of
thinking and trying on new ones. These new ways of thinking and
being will be focused on preserving limited energy reserves and
finding how to share what we have with the rest of the world.
Maybe this seems really unlikely: surrendering personal and societal
wealth in order to save the world. But perhaps, Rifkin states,
perhaps this won’t be a difficult as it might seem. Because, he
says, it’s not like we’re all really happy with the way things are.
We assume that wealth brings happiness, so our solution to just
about every problem is: earn more, buy more. Except that there isn’t
much evidence to support that. What studies actually show is that
after reaching a basic level of material comfort, additional wealth
does not buy happiness. After that, accumulating more stuff assumes
the nature of an addiction, something we’re driven to do even though
the high wears off. People in the developed countries are no happier
today than they were 50 years ago, even though average
income—adjusted for inflation—has doubled.
So what does bring happiness? If our addiction to increasing wealth
doesn’t do it, what does? Well, says Rifkin, what really brings
happiness are relationships: closeness among people. What really
brings happiness is collaboration with others on something you all
care about. Working together toward a shared goal, trying to make a
difference. What really brings happiness is the opportunity to
pursue an interest, learn a skill, try out something new, follow a
dream.
Maybe, then, we should rethink how we live our lives, given the new
global reality in which we find ourselves, follow a different path
than the generations before.
He offers a few principles to guide our way. Such as, what he calls
the “democratization of energy,” learning how to share energy, share
power, encourage collaboration rather than saving and hoarding our
energy supplies. Another he calls “From belongings to belonging,”
committing ourselves to opportunities that create relationships
rather than accumulating things. Another principle: working together
to help create a new dream guided by quality of life, rather than
selling one’s soul to climb the ladder. Another he calls
“distributed capitalism,” a capitalism based on creating a
collaborative global economy where we work together for shared
benefit, rather than a competitive world economy.
Here’s an example of this last principle. The online encyclopedia,
Wikipedia, is a creation of the new global consciousness. The old
model is the Encylopaedia Britannica, created by experts at
considerable expense, which is then passed on to purchasers of the
encyclopedias. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has ten times more
information than Encyclopaedia Britannica, is free to use, can be
updated instantaneously, is run by a staff of five people, and has
an error rate just slightly higher than the Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
We live in a different kind of world, he says, in which global
consciousness is becoming the primary reality with which we are
faced. It offers different realities, different challenges,
different opportunities. Our success in dealing with these will
hinge upon adjusting our ways of thinking, the goals we pursue, the
kind of lives we try to lead.
● ● ●
Hence, the interpretation of world civilization offered by Jeremy
Rifkin as well as the beginnings of a prescription for addressing
the challenges of this new age. What’s left is for me to offer a few
brief reflections on the scenario he has presented to us.
First of all, I find myself cautious about these big picture
analyses of why everything is as it is and how we got there and what
we have to do next. Nobody is right all the time. My personal
preference is to start with small things and work from what we know,
rather than starting with the vast sweep of human history.
Nevertheless, there is much Rifkin says in this book that resonates
with me. We do live in a different world now than we did even 15 -20
years ago. Global consciousness is a reality. We are faced with
serious challenges on the question of energy: how to provide power
to keep human society on this planet running. I like his emphasis on
re-thinking our goals from accumulating quantity to living with
quality. And I appreciate his emphasis on empathy, the capacity that
we have to “understand and enter into another’s feelings” and then
draw upon that understanding to help each other, work together,
create collaborative relationships rather than entering win/lose
competitions.
I do feel like I’ve been down this road before, that is, the idea
that a revolution in consciousness will bring a comparable
revolution in our society. But it doesn’t quite work that way,
particularly among those who have no particular desire to have their
consciousness raised. I remember how the energy crisis of the late
1970s was going to change our relationship with oil—it didn’t. I
remember “small is beautiful,” which ultimately got overwhelmed by
our culture’s value of “bigger is better.” I remember “The Making of
a Counter Culture” in which the youth of 40 years ago were going to
bring dramatic change to our values and the way we led our lives—we
didn’t.
And yet perhaps there is a difference today. Young people coming of
age have grown up in a different society than did those who came
before. They have been raised with a global consciousness which has
radical implications for how they seek to live. I have seen it in
our own children as they make their way into the adult world. Their
experience of life is different, their goals are different. They are
part of a global society. They seem to want to make a contribution.
When Richard Kirkland risked his life on the Fredericksburg
battlefield almost 140 years ago, he offered an example of one
person risking his own being in response to the sufferings of
others. We live in a world of considerable suffering—in nations far
away, here at home, and among us. That’s what stays with me of
Jeremy Rifkin’s book: the power of empathy as a guide to taking
chances that might help address the very real challenges in this
newly evolving global society.
● ● ●
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