People & Planet
To pause in our consideration of blocks to our noble vision, I would like to say a word about why the name “compassionate civilization.”
I was very pleased when Jeremy Rifkin published in 2009 his ground breaking book, The Empathic Civilization. Contrary to the belief that human beings are basically selfish, he clearly shows that human beings are fundamentally empathic. We are programmed to feel what others feel.
When I imagined a world of sustainable human development catalyzed by a movement of movements, I began to use the term, “an empathic civilization.” Over the past few years I wrote and spoke about this vision in UN global conferences and in my graduate classes at NYU Wagner:
“Ours is a critical decade and century of crisis and opportunity. We must angle toward utopia or face endless dystopia. We can create a new empathic civilization. We can and must mitigate climate chaos, protect the environment, achieve gender equality, promote social and economic justice, institutionalize participatory governance and realize cultural tolerance.”
After working with this for some time, I came to understand that we must move beyond empathy to build a compassionate civilization. What is the difference? With empathy we feel what others are feeling and identify with them. Compassion goes further by sharing in the suffering of others and vowing to relieve their suffering. We suffer together and we will relieve our suffering together. My own experience confirms what all of the world's wisdom traditions have articulated - that compassion and understanding are the deep structures of being human.
For me, combining compassion and civilization provides an inspiring vision of a macro historical-societal system infused with a powerful ethical stance based in human nature itself. My hope is that this concept may empower those of us working to create a better world, a world that works for everyone and protects the environment, one that is both pro-people and pro-planet.
May we relieve the suffering of all beings everywhere.