Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2006 

MAKING ROOM FOR SPIRIT

Is there room for Spirit in our families? 

By Riane Eisler

Our challenge is to create the social conditions that support the realization of our enormous human capacity for consciousness, creativity, empathy, and caring. This is the core of a progressive spiritual political agenda.

Most of us share the vision of a world where peace will no longer be an interval between wars. We are seeking a world of peace. A world where every child will be wanted and truly cared for. A world where abject poverty and hunger will be memories of a brutal past. A world where our natural life-support system, our mother Earth, will truly be honored. A world where governments will invest in really caring for people—in health, in education, in welfare—rather than in weapons and armaments. In short, a world where generations to come will be able not only to survive, but to thrive.

If we look around us at the world today, it's discouraging because we seem to be going backward rather than forward. But it is precisely in periods of regression that we have to be proactive. I know from my own personal life what can happen if people don't stand up to be counted. I was born during a time of massive regression: the rise to power of the Nazis in Europe, first in Germany, and then in my native Austria. I was a very small child when I saw the Gestapo come to our home and brutally push my father down the stairs and drag him away.

But I also saw something else: spiritual courage—courage out of love, to stand up against injustice. My mother displayed it. She stood up to the Nazis and demanded that my father be released. She could have been killed, but by a miracle she wasn't. By a miracle she obtained his release, and we escaped the fate of my grandparents, my cousins, and my aunts and uncles—to be exterminated in Nazi concentration camps.

Those experiences have profoundly affected my life, and they have also profoundly affected my research. They made it very important for me to ask questions about human possibilities, about whether or not all this cruelty is inevitable, about possible alternatives.

I tried figuring this out using conventional categories—capitalism versus communism, and Right versus Left, and religion versus secularism—and they were of no help, just as they are really not much use today. All such categories merely identify particular fragments of society; not one of them really describes the whole social system. They don't even take into account the most fundamental human relations, without which none of us would be here: the relations between women and men, and between parents and children.

If we don't look at the whole of a picture, we can't connect the dots. Thus, in the research that I and others have been carrying out, we look at a database that includes not only the public sphere of politics and economics as conventionally defined, but also the private sphere of families and other intimate relations which we inhabit.

We can then see patterns. I call one of them the "partnership" model and the other one the "domination" model. My research was intended to answer the question, what kind of system supports relations of mutual respect, mutual benefit, mutual accountability, and, yes, mutual caring? And that was how we came to the partnership model.

In order to really build a partnership-oriented institutional and belief structure, protest just isn't enough. We have protested, but the kind of change we need hasn't happened. We can't just be against; we have to offer better alternatives to assess what has been missing and to formulate long-term strategies.

If you look at modern history from this perspective, it can best be understood as the struggle between a powerful movement towards partnership that is met with resistance from the dominators every inch of the way. Every benefit we have was achieved by challenging entrenched traditions of domination that we were told were divinely ordained. The people pushing us back paid particular attention to primary human relations. Whether it was Hitler in Germany, Khomeni in Iran, or the rightist fundamentalist would-be regime in this nation, these issues have been primary.

The rightist-fundamentalist alliance first came together in this country around a "women's" issue: the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the 1970s. Ever since then, it has had a long-range strategy called "family values" and "morality." Of course it's been a very immoral agenda. Part of our job is to have the spiritual courage to point this out.

But in the intervening years, despite the success of the women's movement, conservatives have been so successful in advancing this regressive agenda, focusing on these primary human relations—and the cultural construction of these relations in terms of domination rather than partnership—that do you know what has happened? In 1992, a survey asked Americans how many of them agreed with the proposition that the father of the family is the master of the house. Forty-two percent answered yes. By 2004, the percentage of Americans agreeing with this proposal had risen to 52 percent.

We can't afford to cede this terrain to regressives any more. It is in our families and other intimate relations that people first learn what is normal and what is moral. It is in those relations that people first learn either to accept human rights violations as "just the way things are," or to respect human rights. They affect how people think, how people act, how they govern, and who they vote for—because people tend to replicate unconsciously their family structure in the kind of government and social structure they vote for.

Slogans like "traditional values" have often marketed the kind of family where fathers make the rules and harshly punish disobedience. And that is precisely the kind of family that prepares people to defer to "strong leaders" who brook no dissent and use force to impose their will.

Now, fortunately, not everybody in these families succumbs to believing in this kind of authoritarian model of relationships, but unconsciously a great many people do. And that kind of mentality particularly comes to the fore in periods of dislocation, when people are frightened, where they want the "protection" of that strong father, strong leader. That kind of family morality is the kind of "morality" suited to an undemocratic, rigidly male-dominated, chronically violent culture.

So, we have no choice. Spiritual Progressives must have an integrated family and political agenda.

This is a highly spiritual program, because it is based on the core principles of caring, nonviolence, and empathy, which are at the heart of both humanism and at the core of the world's great religious traditions. The people pushing us back are very selective in what they choose from the scriptures, and they select the dominator elements that we have inherited. When you look back at the historical moments they came from, you see brutal, tribal, biblical societies; where women were still stoned to death for any accusation of not being a man's possession; where children could be taken to the gates of the city and killed if they were disrespectful; where we're told that God commanded that whole cities be exterminated. That's not moral, that is immoral, and we have to make those distinctions. We need a morality, and, yes, a family values agenda that's appropriate for a world of partnership rather than domination.

I've outlined some of the steps that are needed in an article I wrote for TIKKUN (See volume 15, number 1). I begin with the rights of children to grow up healthy and thrive, including the right to shelter, nutrition, and healthcare; freedom from violence; and a clean environment.

The second component is to promote equality between women and men. I have written a great deal about this as well, but just think about it: this superior-inferior model of our species is a template for equating difference—beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species, that between female and male—with either superiority or inferiority, with either dominating or being dominated, with either being served or serving.

We certainly have to support all families—that's the third component—whether children are parented by a man and a woman, a single parent, or two parents of the same sex. We don't have a culture that supports families. We've got to bring that out, and we've got to change it.

Fourth, we must protect reproductive freedom and show that the only way to prevent abortions is to provide family planning and sex education, as do other nations with much lower abortion rates, such as Scandinavian countries.

We similarly have to take a strong stand against intimate violence, violence against women and children. The United Nations tells us that that violence against them is the most ubiquitous human rights violation in the world. But it is much more than that. It is a school for learning that it's legitimate to use violence to impose your will on others.

Most of the progressive movements throughout history have focused on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid, but have not paid enough attention to the foundations on which it rests. The pyramid will continue to stand unless we change those foundations. All it takes is spirituality, putting love into action.

Riane Eisler is the author of The Chalice and the Blade and president of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org). She has been a pioneer in bringing into public consciousness the notion of partnership relations rather than domination relations.

Source Citation

Eisler, Riane. 2006. Is there room for Spirit in our families?. Tikkun 21(1):44.