The Empathic Civilisation: our (collective) empathetic consciousness
"Never has the world seemed so completely united-in the form of communication, commerce, and culture-and so savagely torn apart-in the form of war, financial meltdown, global warming, and even the migration of diseases. ...
The human-made environment is rapidly morphing into a global space, yet our existing modes of consciousness are structured for earlier eras of history, which are just as quickly fading away. Humanity, Rifkin argues, finds itself on the cusp of its greatest experiment to date: refashioning human consciousness so that human beings can mutually live and flourish in the new globalizing society…
As the forces of globalization accelerate, deepen, and become ever more complex, the older faith-based and rational forms of consciousness are likely to become stressed, and even dangerous, as they attempt to navigate a world increasingly beyond their reach and control. Indeed, the emergence of this empathetic consciousness has implications for the future that will likely be as profound and far-reaching as when Enlightenment philosophers upended faith-based consciousness with the canon of reason."
(Jeremy Rifkin)
[A noble effort to explain the consequences of post-traditional society framed through a biological deterministic lens.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Phrenology: an early approach to anatomical science
"[Franz-Joseph Gall (1758-1828)], in his noted work, 'The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular', put forward the Gall, in his noted work, 'The Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular', put forward the principles on which he based his doctrine of phrenology,.
Firstly, he believed that man's moral and intellectual faculties are innate and that their manifestation depends on the organization of the brain, which he considered to be the organ responsible for all the propensities, sentiments and faculties.
Secondly, Gall proposed that the brain is composed of many particular 'organs', each one of them related or responsible for a given mental faculty. He proposed also that the relative development of mental faculties in an individual would lead to a growth or larger development in the sub-organs responsible for them.
Finally, Gall proposed that the external form of the cranium reflects the internal form of the brain, and that the relative development of its organs caused changes of form in the skull, which could be used to diagnose the particular mental faculties of a given individual, by doing a proper analysis."
(Renato M.E. Sabbatini)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics
The rules of social morality and etiquette in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. (pg.97)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Eugenics: Forced Sterilization
Kristi Coale
Already the laboratory had IQ test scores for Vivian's mother Carrie and her grandmother Emma which found the women to be "morons." Adding the "data" about Vivian's looks to the mix was enough to establish that three generations of the Buck family were of low intellect. These facts became the basis of a landmark 1927 [American] Supreme Court decision that allowed states to forcibly sterilize people who carried "hereditary defects." Carrie Buck was forcibly sterilized, and by the mid-1930s, about 20,000 people in the United States met the same fate under similar laws.Vivian Buck's story, along with various state sterilization laws, are among the artifacts that will soon be on the Web as part of a digital image archive chronicling a dark chapter in U.S. history -- the American Eugenics Movement. The movement, which began in 1904, was a government-sponsored social engineering project which sought to improve the human species by encouraging "fit" people to marry and procreate while sterilizing and prohibiting unions between the "unfit.
CONTRIBUTOR
The Constellations ProjectSHARE
