Empathy - Entropy

Is society making progress?

The research project I carried out into ethical consumerism was in many ways pretty depressing. But a comment made in one of the groups stayed with me and painted a more positive picture.

The belief expressed by this guy - and shared by the rest of the group - was that if you look at history, then things are getting better. Compared to the olden days people treat each other with more respect, they empathise more with each others plights, they're more tolerant of differences. Technological progress has been accompanied by moral progress.

This seems largely true. And I think on some level most people believe in it. It's the 'arc of progress' that underlies much of the modern project. We are slowly but surely making things better.

In The Empathic Civilisation, Jeremy Rifkin takes a look at the history of (mainly Western) society through this len and finds that indeed, it seems we have become more empathic towards each other. Technology has actually allowed a reorganisation of our social lives, helping to enable a greater sense of ourselves as individuals and as a consequence better able to empathise with other similar individuals. He identifies several periods in the past where there have been 'empathic surges' based on technological innovation, from the Babylonian introduction of agriculture to the industrial revolution.

However, progress is not without a cost. Rifkin also shows how the progress that has been made has relied on using scarce resources. So that the same innovations that allowed more efficient farming eventually ruined the very land it was initially able to make more fertile by reducing its mineral content and flooding it with salt. The heavy reliance on wood during the late middle ages that allowed a flourishing of life - and of greater empathy - eventually led to a depletion of the resource on which so much life was based. The systems that we rely on for the energy that has allowed us to flourish are finite and tend towards entropy.

We are now of course facing the biggest entropy bill of all, having in the last 150 years used up so much of the energy stored in the earth over the course of millions of years, possibly seriously destabilising its climate in the process. As the earth's resources dwindle, we face a rapidly growing population, all wanting to achieve the living standards that they have seen people in the West enjoying for the last 50 years.

So whilst I sympathise with the idea that we're making progress - and even that I question because whilst empathy may be getting 'wider', it's also arguably getting 'thinner' - the bigger question is if we have much time left to make the progress that it seems we could be capable of?

Photo by Chris Berle - http://www.chriseberle.net/