Munich The world is so much on the brink that on many days one does not know which crisis to assess first. Catastrophe as the “new normal”. Such a situation causes the number of apocalyptic descriptions of the future to skyrocket, as does the number of patent solution concepts that are supposed to protect us from the worst.
Which brings us to Jeremy Rifkin, 77, the American economist, consultant, activist and publicist, who entertains his loyal audience every few years with a book that picks up on trendy terms, delivers a grand design to explain the world and above all offers one thing: the scarcity factor hope.
At least all those who fight their way through a barrage of neologisms and bombast formulations to the back. The man has guru status and knows how to leave the impression that the EU Commission, China and Germany are implementing his innovative energy policy concept perfectly; he spoke to those responsible and gave them advice. The Joe Biden party of the Democrats in his home country USA has finally turned on the right path.’
A popular propagandist, then, who is also a prophet. In his new work, he deals with a phenomenon that has already led to a wealth of congresses, editorials, workshops and books in recent years: resilience, the ability to adapt to exogenous disturbances. Where the Princeton professor Markus Brunnermeier understands this in his book, which was published in 2021, to mean that a society “springs back” after a crisis like a reed in a storm (while an oak tree bursts), Jeremy Rifkin does not refer to a ” resilience revolution”.
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It will appear in his crystal ball in around 20 years. Nothing springs back here, everything jumps forward.
So, as always, Rifkin is about much more, about a new age that follows a turning point (yet another fashion item). Everyone is talking about resilience, but he is designing a new society. After all, according to his analysis, we live in a “global syndemic”, a simultaneity of crises, and for him this consists of obesity, malnutrition and climate change.
Jeremy Rifkin: The Age of Resilience
Campus Publisher
Frankfurt 2022
360 pages
32.00 euros
Translation: Jürgen Neubauer
For this total approach to work, the author must define and separate “evil” and “good.” An old-fashioned, dangerous “before” is criticized in order to then praise an ideal, salutary “after” all the more effectively.
“Before”, in Rifkin’s economic cultural history, which he calls “journey”, is the old-type industrial society, based on fossil fuels, on Vladimir Putin’s and Donald Trump’s triad of oil, gas and coal, but also on economics, which in their Little understanding and acceptance of market belief when everyone is chasing after the illusions of “productivity” and “gross domestic product”, in short, when they and the large corporations, including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, by the way, are completely subject to the dogma of “efficiency”.
Also, the rationalization of millions of jobs through computerization and artificial intelligence has fueled that efficiency while destroying jobs around the world, driving workers into poverty and precipitating the consumer crisis, according to Rifkin’s analysis. Just as we speak in retrospect today of “Stone Age people”, we will later be called “oil people” or “coal people”.
The Panopticon of Evil
From this point of view, the Christian belief that man subjugates the world to please God becomes a misguided expedition. Gradually, however, we realize “that the earth was never our dominion and that the agents of nature are far more powerful than we thought” – and would open our eyes to the “painful reality that we as a species are causing terrible carnage on our earth wreak havoc”—floods, droughts, forest fires, hurricanes. Rifkin’s conclusion: “The age of progress is dead and only awaiting its autopsy.”
Rifkin is an American economist, publicist, and founder and chair of the Foundation on Economic Trend.
(Photo: Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images)
The bustling professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania contrasts the panopticon of evil with the new “era of resilience”, its beautiful “after”, with the fair information society of a new type as “divided peerocracy”, as a bottom-up democracy of below, which gets its impetus from grassroots ideas, of course with renewable energies as a basis and with decentralized structures.
Here we use all of our self-generated solar energy, and instead of the old corporate conglomerates, “agile, high-tech, small and medium-sized cooperatives” are now setting the tone. Financial capital is being replaced by “ecological capital” in the new world order, and moreover, in view of the “bioregionalism” megatrend, people are increasingly moving from the metropolises to the countryside.
If mankind had previously regarded nature as property and greedily exploited it, according to Rifkin, in the future space will consist of the life spheres of the earth “which together form the patterns and currents of a dynamic earth”. We would then no longer be autonomous beings who determine everything, but just like animals and plants “only processes, patterns and flows” – the human being inhabited by viruses and bacteria as just a “semi-permeable membrane” in a new thermodynamics. But he acts empathetically and full of “biophilic awareness” out of “love of life” (Erich Fromm).
As sympathetic as many of the aspects described are, as rousing as Rifkin writes in many places, it is striking that his book occasionally has eschatological, even slightly esoteric traits, all intoxicated by a new “Garden of Eden” or, as one can also see from Mother Utopia. It remains a mystery whether resilience is efficient and how progress can be buried when it is still urgently needed for technological innovations.
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Rifkin’s audience will find some things familiar from previous books. He knows how to mix the elements of his lucid social and economic criticism again and again. The end of capitalism, which he prophesied many years ago, has not come, nor has an economy that produces at zero marginal costs. Individual trends are treated as absolutes, and empirical facts are mostly left out, including from resilience research. But Jeremy Rifkin thrives on going over the top to get a debate going.
It is also noteworthy that Rifkin enthusiastically calls for a departure from the traditional image of science, which goes back to the English philosopher Francis Bacon – who in turn was the first to coin the term “resilience” and thereby meant physical feedback of all kinds.
The fact that the turbulence on the energy markets caused by the Ukraine war that started in February does not appear in his opus about resilience may be due to the lead times of such a publication. But the current confusion in the markets shows how far away societies are from the desired decarbonization, which Rifkin already regards as a quasi-universal phenomenon. The green conversion, the “thermodynamics” of the natural, is becoming more complicated and lengthy than the Americans would have us believe in their announced revolution.
“The earth awaits us” is the last sentence of this description of an ambitious journey to the “ecological self”. Another question is whether the earth has also been waiting for this book.
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