Question: What actions are needed to build a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable world?
By Riane Eisler
Today’s talk about changing consciousness reflects the understanding that a better world is not possible within the current paradigm.
The good news is that, in bits and pieces, movements are challenging many aspects of current economics, technologies, corporations, workplaces, governments, judiciaries, and how we treat our natural environment.
Yet, as vital as these disparate activities are, they are not enough. We urgently need long-term strategies addressing the foundations of the current paradigm. Otherwise, regressions to strong-man (authoritarian) rule, inequity, and violence will continue worldwide, ultimately leading to global disaster.
OUR BLIND SPOT
Like fish that see water as the only possible environment, we have all been conditioned not to see anything showing that there is an alternative to a “dog-eat-dog,” unjust, unequal, violent world.
Through our formal and informal education, we internalize normative stories such as “original sin” and “selfish genes.” While one is religious and the other secular, both have the same message: human nature is bad so we must be controlled.
Other normative stories blame “woman” for all of “man’s ills.” Whether it’s the story of Eve or Pandora, we’re taught that women are dangerous and must be controlled by men. Maxims such as “spare the rod and spoil the child” tell us that children must be controlled through violence – so globally more than 80 percent of parents believe spanking a child is good parenting.
These kinds of stories may seem disconnected. But once we take a whole-systems view of our past, present, and the possibilities for our future, we see that they’re interconnected. Like a spam blocker on our email, they work to create a blind spot in our consciousness.
A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE
Systems thinking is a popular phrase. But conventional studies of society still marginalize or ignore most of humanity: women and children.
While there is movement to change the ranking of men over women and the binary views of “masculinity” and “femininity,” it is slow and fiercely resisted. Even in the U.S., women only began to be admitted to universities and professions in the late 19th century and gender studies are just 60 years old. The “children’s rights” movement is even more recent, and the global pandemic of abuse and violence against children in families is only starting to be recognized.
None of this is coincidental. Nor is the fact that the social categories we inherited – religious/secular, Eastern/Western, capitalist/socialist, Northern/Southern – have little if anything to say about women and children, even though, and this bears repeating, they are most of humanity.
To see connections between components of social systems, we need a whole-systems approach. Also required are new categories that describe social configurations that can only be seen cross-culturally and trans-historically through a whole-systems analysis.
TWO INCLUSIVE SOCIAL CATEGORIES
A whole-systems perspective shows two underlying social configurations. One is the partnership system; the other is the dominator or domination system.
Since a society’s orientation to either configuration is always a matter of degree, there is also the partnership-domination social scale or continuum.
The evidence is clear that during the vast majority of human history – which includes the thousands of years of prehistory – the mainstream of our cultural evolution oriented more to the partnership side of the continuum. Only 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, during a period of great disequilibrium that included incursions from violent Indo-European nomads, did the shift toward domination begin.
Authoritarian and violent societies orient closely to the domination system. They can be:
Eastern and religious, like Afghanistan’s Taliban and fundamentalist Iran, which subordinate women and rigidly control children and their education.
Secular, Western, and rightist, like Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia, where strongman rule is the norm in both the family and state.
Leftist, like Stalin’s USSR, where a male-dominated punitive family persisted after the revolution, and millions of Kulaks and others were killed, or
Rightist like Nazi Germany, where subordinating women was a top priority and millions of people were murdered. This same configuration can be seen today in U.S. subcultures where rigid gender stereotypes and contempt for the “soft” or “feminine” goes along with support for strongman rule and anti-Black, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant fear and hate.
These cultures and subcultures all require children to conform to binary gender stereotypes, teach them in-group vs. out-group thinking and acting, and to subordinate both females and “feminine” traits such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence. Instead, they idealize a “masculinity” of domination, including domination of women, children, “inferior men,” and the “conquest of Nature.”
By contrast, partnership-oriented societies are more peaceful, gender-balanced, and egalitarian in both the family and tribe or state. They recognize that we must care for our life-supporting natural environment. Like domination-oriented societies, these societies do not fit into conventional categories.
They can be contemporary, technologically advanced societies such as Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which regularly top annual happiness reports, largely because they pioneered caring policies such as universal healthcare, high-quality well-paid childcare, and generous paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers.
They also can be millennia-old gathering-hunting societies, or prehistoric farming societies such as the Catal Huyuk, where there are no signs of destruction through warfare for over 1,000 years and the size of houses, grave goods, and other excavations reveal a generally egalitarian and gender-balanced culture.
FOUR CORNERSTONES
This leads directly to the urgent need for progressives to develop long-range strategies that focus on four foundations or cornerstones of all societies: childhood/family, gender, economics, and story/language.
The first cornerstone of childhood/family has consistently been a focus of domination and would-be domination regimes; for example, the so-called rightist/fundamentalist alliance in the United States has long considered the socialization of children a key “social issue.”
Today findings from psychology and neuroscience show that what children observe and experience impacts how our brains develop, and hence how we think, feel, and act – including how we vote. To build a more equitable, sustainable, and peaceful world, we must globally shift to what childcare experts advocate: caring for children, not through fear, but by modeling and acting with respect, and leaving behind domination traditions of spanking and other violence in families.
I again want to emphasize that those pushing us back to more rigid domination systems worldwide recognize the connection between violence and abuse in families and violence and abuse in a state or tribe.
For instance, in 2018, Putin substantially reduced the legal penalty for family violence in Russia. He recognized the connection between a punitive, authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated family and a punitive, authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated state.
The second cornerstone that must be changed from domination to partnership is how a society organizes the roles and relations of the two basic forms of humanity — male and female. We only have to look around us to see that gender is a major focus for those pushing us back to domination. We too must understand that this is not “just a women’s issue” as we are often told, but a key family, social, environmental, and economic issue.
The current controversy about abortion in the U.S., while framed in religious terms, is a sign of regression toward the domination side of the social scale. Since it is basically about controlling women, abortion is illegal or severely restricted in nations and U.S. states orienting to domination.
The reason is that ranking male/“masculine” over female/“feminine” and the accompanying rigid gender stereotypes are foundational to authoritarian, top-down, violent societies. These stereotypes and their ranking teach children – before their brains, and hence their critical faculties, are formed – to associate difference with superiority and inferiority, dominating or being dominated, being served or serving. This is a template for the in-group versus out-group thinking and acting characteristic of domination-oriented cultures or subcultures – rankings based on a different race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.
The third cornerstone is economics. The current argument between capitalism and socialism is a distraction; we need both (free) markets and (enlightened) government policies.
The real problem is that capitalism and socialism came out of more rigid domination times in the 1700s and 1800s. So, both perpetuate the domination system’s gendered values, where anything stereotypically coded “feminine” – such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence – is deemed inferior to anything coded “masculine” – such as domination and violence.
Consider how there is always money for prisons, weapons, and wars, but there isn’t money to care for people (starting at birth) and to care for our natural environment, our Mother Earth. Leaving behind these skewed valuations is essential to move to a caring economics of partnerism.
The fourth cornerstone consists of normative stories and language. We already looked at these stories earlier, and how some are slowly changing. There is also new language, with words such as “empowering” and “she or he” and “they” reflecting a shift toward partnership terms.
But these shifts must be more conscious and quicker, involving artists, musicians, writers, and education, AI, and media.
MOVING TOWARD PARTNERSHIP
The underlying struggle for our future is not between any of the social categories we inherited from more rigid domination times. It is between partnership – oriented and domination – oriented systems.
To effectively move toward partnership requires more than disconnected tactics, as important as these are. We urgently need a whole-systems consciousness, and with this, a united campaign focusing on the four foundational, interconnected, cornerstones of childhood/family, gender, economics, and story/language. This is essential to build solid foundations for a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable world.
For more information see www.centerforpartnership.org, www.rianeeisler.com, and httpspubs.lib.umn.edu/index.php/ijps
REFERENCES:
Eisler, Riane and Fry, Douglas. Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Eisler, Riane. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Kohler, 2007).
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. (Harper Collins, 1987, 2017).
Fry, Douglas, editor. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views. (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American, January 2004: pp. 77- 83.
Madhusree Mukerjee, “Interview with Riane Eisler,” 2023. Link to interview.
Riane Eisler, JD, Ph D (hon), is internationally known for her groundbreaking contributions as a systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and cultural historian. She is author of many books, including The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th US printing and 30 foreign editions and The Real Wealth of Nations, hailed by Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu as "a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking." Her recent work, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry (Oxford University Press, 2019), shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination. She has received many honors, including the Nuclear Peace Leadership award (earlier received by the Dalai Lama), the Women's Leadership Pioneer Award, and the Charter for Compassion Humanitarian Award, and has addressed the UN General Assembly, the US State Department, many corporations, and keynotes conferences nationally and internationally.
Eisler is President of the Center for Partnership Systems, which provides practical applications of her work, and Editor in Chief of the online Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies published at the University of Minnesota. She has taught at many universities, written hundreds of articles and contributions to both scholarly and popular books, pioneered the application of human rights standards to women and children, and consults to businesses and governments on the partnership model introduced by her work. For more information, see www.rianeeisler.com and www.centerforpartnership.org
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