I’ve been tuning in to the conversation going on around Jeremy Rifkin‘s latest book, The Empathic Civilization. In it Rifkin argues that technology is ushering in a new, empathic, model of society. The modern age is coming to an end; the future belongs to the connected, empathic, global citizen.
In a recent interview with Moira Gunn, Rifkin says that for America to retain its global position in this fast-changing world, it must “rethink the narrative.” He goes on:
The real problem, and I’m going to step on some toes here, the real problem is the American dream. It really is. It’s an 18th–19th century dream based on the idea from the enlightenment that we’re all little autonomous agents, we each seek to pursue our own self-interest, and our utilitarian desires and that’s it. Now that may have worked in a colonizing period in the frontier era and I certainly grew up on that. But you can’t have 6.8 billion cowboys out there and think about bringing the species together in a global economy and a global biosphere.
This hardly captures all that Rifkin is saying, but the quote was too provocative for the blogger in me to pass up.