Come hear Riane Eisler if you can, Feb 15, or listen online now
by: Dave Belden on February 9th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
We are counting down to our conference this coming Monday in San Francisco. Any conference Michael Lerner puts on gets rave reviews from just about everyone who manages to get there, so if you are anywhere in the vicinity, come on down.
One of the presenters on Monday will be Riane 
Eisler, whose work we have featured in Tikkun many times. The latest was the cover article for our Nov/Dec 2009 issue, “Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism.”
Almost every Monday night we interview a Tikkun author and I talked with Riane last December. So you can listen to my 20 minute interview with her, and also to her Q and A with Tikkun readers (parts one and two), which she did beautifully, really engaging with the callers. I’m rarely happy with my own voice on these calls but hang in through my intro for Riane!
Riane Eisler is a systems scientist and cultural historian, president of the Center for Partnership Studies, and author of the international bestsellers The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations.
How should I sum up what I think is so critical about Riane’s approach? Here’s what I wrote at the start a review of her Real Wealth of Nations and a book by Frances Moore Lappe, and below it a longish quote from a 2006 Tikkun piece by Eisler:
Riane Eisler
“Today socialists and leftists do not dream of a future qualitatively different from the present,” wrote Russell Jacoby in 1999 in The End of Utopia. “To put it differently, radicalism no longer believes in itself…. Almost everywhere the left contracts, not simply politically but, perhaps more decisively, intellectually.”
Already that judgment sounds off. Radical hope is being reborn from unexpected sources, including ones the Left has often denied and rejected: the personal, the religious, and the spiritual. A new intellectual understanding of the primacy of caring relationships is emerging. With it comes a sense that all of us living beings, human or not, are deeply interdependent. We are beginning to understand that we can be oppressed by the lack of meaning in our lives, and, after a certain material level has been achieved, that may be the most alienating aspect of our lives. The creative vision we need to transform society and radically extend democracy will build from our deepest discoveries of meaning.
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.
100 percent agreement about the importance of Riane Eisler’s thinking! After reading her article in the Nov./Dec. 09 Tikkun and participating in the phone interview you mentioned, I read most of her books. My appreciation of the power of her perspective continues to grow with each book. She has the ability to synthesize insights from multiple disciplines and activist experience and put them all together in a systematic perspective (a method that others can master if we work at it and try to apply). Her distinction between Domination and Partnership relationships proves to be amazingly fruitful in area after area. Right now I am reading her 1995 book Sacred Pleasure, which I highly recommend to Tikkun/NSP people if they have not read it. Some of the truths it contains will be disturbing, but it is important that we confront them.
Great blog, lots of useful information. I should just give up and take lessons from you
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“When thinking of a new economics, let’s not think of stocks, bonds, derivatives, or other financial instruments. Let’s think of children.”
THAT, which is how she begins the Tikkun “Beyond Capitalism” piece is as good as anything gets: seminal, cutting through BS, re-ordering assumptions in both stealth and direct mode.
The religious beliefs, philosophies and economic theories of our times, and since the time of “civilization”, have been largely mythical moral justifications for greed on the part of those in control of the dominant power structures. An underlying assumption is that children have to be civilized through social controls, that reason is the basis for our humanity and that emotion and feeling are weaknesses to be overcome. Thus, obedience to external sources of power and knowing is cultivated, furthering the power of those in control. What children need to become authentic adults contributing to the ongoing welfare and development of life in our world is to have their childhood developmental needs adequately met by the right people, at the right time and in the right manner. What our most experienced and capable clinicians have discovered is that we humans, on the basis of our evolutionary biology, have in our genes the knowing of what constitutes just social systems. However this knowing is pushed into dormancy or corrupted by the experiences of children in our modern world and its approach to childhood development. As Master Therapist, and co-creator with his wife of the Pesso-Boyden System Psychomotor, Al Pesso so simple puts it “the roots of justice are in the body”. I refer you to the website http://www.pbsp.com for more information. Observing or experiencing his use of the concept of “holes in roles” in the therapeutic process fully demonstrates the truth of our innate humanity and compassion.