After watching
The Emphatic Civilisation, both the short animated version and the long one he gave as a discussion, I got the whole point that empathy is what we have to feel towards each other because as he states, we have to feel and touch and see what the other person is feeling. In both of the lectures, he starts off with his main point about the monkey experiment and the opening of the peanut and how the monkey's brain neurons activated the same way the human's did when the human opened the nut. He calls this being soft wired and brings up the theory of mirror neurons. That's pretty much how he explains the idea of Empathy and the Emphatic Civilisation. The only difference that he does in the long lecture/ discussion that he makes is that here he goes in depth and starts with an actual introduction that relates to what he is going to talk about. Here in the long version he describes the different eras of consciousness and how it changes according to what the person is living through. Also he describes how the feeling of being tied in to something has gone through changes like starting with religion, to state, to country, to nationality and such.After doing all the analysis he predicts that by the end of the century the human race will be extinct because of the lack of empathy.
One part that standed out in the long discussion is that he said that he can assure that there is no empathy in heaven and how he is giving some sort of apocalyptic imagery. In that part I do kind of agree with that because the whole point of heaven is that it for those who have already achieved it by doing what the Holy text says. And empathy to me is sounding like that, live with what surrounds us and be who you are to give the best for your community.Because part of being a good person is loving your neighbor.
This idea of empathy sound like the big message Father Gregory Boyle is trying to give in his book Tattoos in the Heart. Kingship and everything else falls into this and how we must live with the world in order to survive in the world. The sad part of all this is that we as Americans are so stuck with ourselves that we lack this idea because we are being sort of brainwashed to think a certain way with the media. Both Father G and Jeremy Rifkin are trying to emphasize this before it is too late to realize, just like it is said in both the lecture and the book. The main message overall is that we have to get free of that blinky consciousnesses that we have and start thing of the bigger picture that is happening in the community.
