I'm often moved to share this glimpse into the work of Riane Eisler and what is meant by domination ideology and partnership cultures: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/breaking-out-of-the-domination-trance-building-foundations-for-a-safe-equitable-caring-world/.
I'm also moved today to share this excerpt from the first chapter in Riane's latest book, Nurturing Our Humanity, which offers us a depth of wisdom and clarity on where we are, how we got here, and a path forward. It is my belief that among those experiences which are most helpful and needed in these times is to seek and connect with whatever it is that enables us to move beyond the problem and into the solution. I've found this to require also moving beyond the familiarity of the world as we know it and into new territory — territory which helps us to remember what we have forgotten and to embody more fully our human potential for wisdom, creativity, caring, courage, and love.
Riane has been among those who've supported me in my spiritual journey. And given how deeply we need a strong spiritual grounding in these turbulent times, I am drawn to share some of this larger wisdom today. We are all connected, all related, and all in this together. May we unite to bring about our individual and collective human evolution. We can build a truly humane culture. It is time. ❤ Molly
Our Story
For millennia, humans have imagined a peaceful and just 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, and 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 accelerating 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 scientists, 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 bioculturalism further. It examines our cultural environments through a powerful new analytical tool: the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens.
Rather than viewing societies through the lenses of familiar social categories such as 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, alternately, 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 as 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 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 domination systems produce high levels of stress — from stressful early family experiences to the artificial creation of economic scarcity — and how this plays out in the neurochemistry of the brain, tending to keep people at a less advanced level of overall human development that interferes with the full flourishing of those very qualities that make people happiest: security, empathy, consciousness, creativity, and love. On the other hand, partnership-oriented environments — as illustrated by conditions in contemporary societies ranging from the Minangkabau in Southeast Asia to European Nordic nations — enhance the expression of our human capacities for health, happiness, well-being, consciousness, and creativity.
We draw from recent studies showing that the difficulty some people have in dealing with change (with its implications for denial of climate change and other persistent threats) and the tendency of such people to support punitive political agendas (such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons and the military, and scapegoating of minorities, women, and gays) are associated with a particular kind of brain development in people who are taught early on that dominating or being dominated are our only alternatives. We explore how patterns of touch, intimacy, and sexuality differ at opposite ends of the domination-partnership continuum and how the confluence of caring with coercion and pain is one of the most effective mechanisms for socializing people to suppress empathy and submit to domination as adults. We examine how the erotization of domination and violence lies behind mass shootings of women in the United States and Canada by some men who call themselves incel (involuntarily celibate) and behind the enslavement of women by fundamentalist groups like ISIS (the Islamic Stare of Iraq and Syria). We then contrast these unhealthy interactions with healthy ones supported by partnership-oriented cultures and look at how we receive neurochemical rewards of pleasure when we give or receive empathic love.
Covering a wide swath of prehistory ad history, we take a fresh look at many conventional assumptions about religion and science. We see, for example, how Western science came out of a hierarchical, conformist, misogynist, all-male medieval clerical culture (a world without women and children) and how it took more than 700 years for women's, men's, and gender studies to emerge in universities; how Freud's secular theories replicated the earlier religious ideology of original sin and male supremacy; and how in all spheres (from the family, politics, and the academy to mainstream and popular culture worldwide), the underlying tension between movement towards partnership and the resistance to domination has played out over millennia.
But our focus is primarily on our present and future, on how we can draw on our enormous evolutionary gifts — our extraordinary capacities for empathy, creativity, caring, cooperation, and conscious choice — to build the missing cornerstones that support a more equitable, caring, and sustainable partnership future....
There is strong evidence that over the millennia of human biocultural evolution, most societies were constructed along partnership lines. Yet domination systems — with their inherent exploitation of people and nature, social and economic inequalities, and direct and structural violence — came to predominate on the global stage.
To borrow from the words of former head of Worldwatch Institute, Lester Brown, "this is no way to run a planet." As we will detail, the domination system has held humanity back — and through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, it may lead to our species' extinction.
There is, however, nothing inevitable about the Apocalypse. We can change our course. It is our hope that this book will help support this change, demonstrating that a more peaceful, equitable, and fulfilling way of life — a truly advanced humane society — is biologically possible and culturally attainable.
— Riane Eisler
Excerpted from Nurturing Our Humanity: How
Domination and Partnership Shape Our
Brains, Lives, and Futures
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