呼唤人性的集体意识

Our new ideas about human nature throw into doubt many of the core assumptions of classical economic theory. Adam Smith argued that human nature inclines individuals to pursue self-interest in the market. Echoing Smith's contention, Garrett Hardin wrote a celebrated essay more than 40 years ago entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He suggested that co-operation in shared ventures inevitably fails because of the selfish human drives that invariably surface.

If this is universally true, how do we explain hundreds of millions of young people sharing creativity and knowledge in collaborative spaces such as Wikipedia and Linux? The millennial generation is celebrating the global commons every day, apparently unmindful of Hardin's warning. For millennials, the notion of collaborating to advance the collective interest in networks often trumps “going it alone” in markets.

This generation increasingly views happiness in terms of “quality of life”, forcing a fundamental reappraisal of property rights. We think of property as the right to exclude others from something. But property has also meant the right of access to goods held in common – the right to navigate waterways, enjoy public parks and beaches, and so on. This second definition is particularly important now because quality of life can only be realised collectively – for example, by living in unpolluted environments and safe communities. In the new era, the right to be included in “a full life” – the right to access – becomes the most important “property value.”

The shift from self-interest in national markets to shared interest on the biosphere commons, and the corresponding shift in property from the right to exclude others to the right to be included in global networks, is facilitating a vast extension in empathic consciousness.

In the earlier industrial revolution characterised by ideological consciousness and nation-state governance, Americans empathised with Americans, British with British, Chinese with Chinese and so on. What is required now, at the cusp of the third industrial revolution, is an empathic leap beyond national boundaries to biosphere boundaries. We need to empathise as a global family living in a shared biosphere if our species is to survive and flourish.

The writer's latest book is The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. This article has been adapted from an address prepared for the British Royal Society for the Arts