Please go here for more from Riane Eisler:
This is a summary of Riane Eisler's
newest book, co-authored with Douglas Fry,
Nurturing Our Humanity, which is a book
that I highly recommend to everyone.
Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings — largely overlooked — from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed.
Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right versus left, religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale.
On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system.
Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction.
It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system
may lead us to an evolutionary dead end.
may lead us to an evolutionary dead end.
Nurturing Our Humanity —
- Provides a new analytical tool--the biocultural partnership-domination lens--that integrates knowledge to solve our personal, social, economic, and environmental problems
- Issues a new understanding of human possibilities, showing how we can structure our environments to support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity
- Distills and contextualizes findings from neurology, psychology, primatology, anthropology, economics, consciousness studies, chaos theory, and gender studies
A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.
Reviews
Eisler and Fry show how we lived without war thousands of years ago, and how we can do so again. This groundbreaking book should be required reading for all world leaders and decision makers. — Sarah Parcak, Author, Archaeology from Space
Nurturing Our Humanity explores the capacity for human happiness and its relationship to the development of sustainable cultures at a political and environmental point in history when we need it the most. — James McClintock, Author, Lost Antarctica
This path-breaking book goes beyond the conventional divides hurting today's civilizations. It is essential that the virtues of partnership get stronger and the vices of domination are controlled. — Ernst von Weizsacker, Honorary President, Club of Rome
This fearless, beautiful, and very timely book is a radical reminder that humanity's truest nature is oriented toward love, partnership, gender equality, and peace. It is essential and transformative reading for every policymaker, philanthropist, activist, and change-maker interested in a more just, balanced, and peaceful world. — Jennifer Buffett, Co-President, NoVo Foundation
This is the book for our time! Eisler and Fry have put their minds and hearts together to provide an integrative vision of how humanity's cooperative nature can be nurtured and supported... Everyone should read this book... so together we can re-envision our future! — Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology, University of Notre Dame
In a world that feels ever more dangerous, divided, and out of balance, Nurturing Our Humanity outlines the roadmap for how we raise a healthier generation of children and move away from a punitive and domination based society to a world that leads with partnership — where empathy, care, and community are valued above all, and each can fulfill our full human potential. — Jennifer Siebel Newsom, First Partner of California, Filmmaker, Miss Representation, The Mask you Live In, The Great American Lie
Nurturing our Humanity upends the very core of our notion that humanity is, at heart, violent and greedy. Human nature holds just as much potential for caring and partnership as war and domination. Knowing that changes everything. — Abigail Disney, President & CEO, Fork Films, director/creator of Pray the Devil Back to Hell and the PBS series Women, War, & Peace
Excerpts from the first Chapter, "Our Story"
For millennia, humans have imagined a just and peaceful world. Sometimes we only imagined this world in an afterlife. But over the last centuries, many of us have imagined it right here on Earth. Not a utopia, not a perfect world. But a world where peace is more than just an interval between wars, where dire poverty, brutal oppression, insensitivity, cruelty, and despair are no longer "just the way things are."
Now there is a new urgency to our wish for a more humane world. Every day we are bombarded by news of barbaric human rights abuses, terrorist attacks, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a drift back to strongman rule. The destruction of our natural environment continues at an accelerated pace, endangering our global life-support systems. New technologies, from artificial intelligence to biological engineering, could have catastrophic results if guided by cultural values of greed, megalomania, and disregard for human rights.
From all sectors — religious and secular, philosophical and scientific, and thousands of small groups worldwide — come calls for cultural transformation: for building a truly humane culture. The pivotal question is whether such a culture — one that supports rather than inhibits human well-being and our capacities to love, create, and prosper — is possible.
Nurturing Our Humanity offers extensive evidence that we can construct this humane culture. Based on findings from both biology and social science, we today know that the cultural environments we create affect nothing less than how our brains develop and hence how we think, feel, and act. But Nurturing Our Humanity takes bioculturism further. It examines our cultural environments through a powerful new analytical tool: the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens.
Rather than viewing societies through the lens of familiar social categories such a religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, rightist versus leftist, or capitalist versus socialist, which only describe a particular aspect of society, the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens uses two larger cultural configurations at opposite ends of a continuum: the partnership system and the domination system. This broader frame makes it possible to identify the conditions that support the expression of our human capacities for caring, creativity, and consciousness or, alternatively, for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness. It upends age-old assumptions about human nature and the supposed impossibility of improving the human condition, showing how we can bring about fundamental change. The new interdisciplinary perspective of the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens reveals how cultural beliefs and social institutions such a politics, economics, and education affect, and are in turn affected by, childhood and gender relations; highlights the impact of these early experiences and observations on how our brains develop; and shows how we can use our knowledge of human development to construct equitable and sustainable cultures that maximize human well-being.
Nurturing Our Humanity re-examines vital matters ranging from sex, love, intimacy, parenting, and romance to human rights, social justice, politics, economics, violence, and values from this integrative perspective. It sheds new light on critical current issues, all the way from climate change, scapegoating, authoritarianism, racism, and other forms of in-group versus out-group thinking to contemporary disputes about biological and cultural evolution, economics, national and international politics, religious fundamentalism, and the uses and potential abuses of technological breakthroughs.
We explore how our capacities for caring, creativity, and consciousness go way back in evolutionary time and are integral to human nature, and we show that there have been, and continue to be, cultures that orient to the partnership side of the continuum. We look at how dominations systems produce high levels of stress — from stressful early family experiences to the artificial creation of economic scarcity