Use the "Back" button to return to the previous page

Toward a Partnership Society
An Interview with Riane Eisler
 Published in At Work,  January/February 1998

Partnership. Equity. These familiar terms are easier to talk about than put into practice, at work or anywhere else.

Riane Eisler, President of the Center for Partnership Studies and author of The Chalice and The Blade, Sacred Pleasure, and Women, Men and the Global Quality of Life, is engaged in exploring what is needed for the large-scale emergence of equity and partnership. As part of her work, she assists corporations in their efforts to apply principles of partnership in the workplace. We asked her to talk about her vision of what could be. Here is how she responded:

Riane Eisler: My vision is of a society that mirrors what I call the partnership model: a way of relating that is more equitable, more nonviolent, fulfilling, and sustainable in the long run. This is in contrast to the dominator model, in which rigid hierarchies, authoritarianism, and violence prevail. I'm not just talking about being nice to people. I'm talking about fundamental structures of society. For example, is a society male dominated? Is it de facto authoritarian? Never mind what the rhetoric is. Is there a lot of control of power in the hands of a small group? Is violence idealized? Or is there more economic and political democracy, more equal partnership between women and men, and an emphasis on preserving peace and our natural environment?

This is not about the old polarities of capitalism versus communism or right versus left or religious versus secular, or even industrial versus postindustrial. It's about the underlying tension between what I have identified as the partnership and dominator configurations.

At Work: How realistic is it to conceive of actually fulfilling this vision? The countervailing forces seem insurmountable.

RE: This is one of the supermyths-metamythologies-of dominator oriented societies. But, if we look back into our history, we see a long period of time in the mainstream of culture when we seem to have been oriented more to the partnership model. Minoan Crete, for example, might be considered an exemplar of a partnership-oriented society. Then, about 5,000 years ago, there was a period of disequilibrium and a shift toward a dominator model. Archeology and mythology provide evidence of this shift, not just in the West, but in China, and the Americas and Africa.

We are living now in another period of disequilibrium, due to rapid technological change. In fact, we have been for more than 300 years. During this period, one organized social movement after another has challenged entrenched traditions of domination. We began to shift from monarchies to republics; from a totally male-dominated family to somewhat more partnership in the family. The 19th century brought the abolitionist, peace, feminist, anticolonialist, and economic justice movements, followed in the 20th century by the civil rights, women's right, indigenous rights, and environmental movements. Even capitalism, with all of its present problems, represented a rebellion. Under feudalism, a more pure dominator model, the only honorable way to get land was to go next door and kill your neighbor. This was called heroic conquest; it was considered dishonorable for "noblemen" to buy land.

So capitalism was a step up; the notion of free enterprise, of not having everything controlled by the rulers was an advancement. But some other elements of capitalism, such as the notion that the common good is advanced by selfishness, are not. As we move into a partnership world, people will look back and say, "How silly. They thought the earth was flat, and they thought that if everybody acts selfishly everything will be fine!"

AW: You're talking about the grand sweep of history. How do you know that these movements are more than a perturbation in the continuing span of dominator culture?

RE: If you look at history as the tension between these two possible ways of structuring relations-of structuring institutions, family, education, politics, economics, religion, the media-then you see something very different. You see during the last 300 years very strong organized grassroots movements against entrenched traditions of domination. You also have backlash and regression-Nazi Germany, Khomeni's Iran, Idi Amin in Africa. If those of us working for a more equitable world get our act together and focus on the foundational issues instead of working only on the "top of the dominator pyramid," I think there's room for optimism.

AW: What's the top of the dominator pyramid?

RE: It's the so-called public sphere of politics and economics from which women and children were barred, except as workers. The private sphere of gender relations and of parent-child relations hasn't received as much attention. It needs to, because these are foundational relations where we first learn and continually practice how to relate to one another. For children, this is played out at a physiological level. The first three years of life are foundational in the kind of neural pathways that are laid. With dominator child rearing-a lot of violence, abuse, and stultifying or neglect of the child-you get gaps in the synapses. You get neural pathways that are hard to change, where people find it hard to do anything except either obey orders or rebel against obeying orders. They don't really know how to take initiative, how to be themselves. We'd better start paying attention to these things, not only if we are serious about creating a more democratic, equitable, caring, less violent world, but also if we're serious about having human capital for a postindustrial economy. We're told workers need to be more flexible, venturesome, creative; to know how to work in teams; to have relational skills. How are you going to get this without changing those early patterns from dominator to partnership child rearing?

AW: What needs to be done to change those early patterns?

RE: We need to teach children partnership processes - cooperative learning, and so on. They need to learn what, in my new book on education for the 21st century, I call partnership literacy and competency - emotional, parenting, and gender literacy, as well as multicultural, economic, and environmental literacy. We also need to give them the sense that there are possibilities. If they don't get a sense of what the structural underpinnings of society are - and that these have changed and can be changed - they're not going to work for change.

We cannot focus just on changing beliefs; we need to change the structures that influence beliefs and actions. A lot of the structures and rules of the game we have inherited from societies oriented more to the dominator model prevent partnership relations. Sometimes I say, "If you have a round room, you can't sit in a corner."

I look at child rearing. And I look at gender relations because those, too, are basic - there are two halves of humanity. They are women and men. If children early on get the notion that one-half of humanity is here to serve the other half, it becomes easy to see other "different" people in the same way.

People having rigid notions of gender stereotypes tend to fit what psychologists call the authoritarian personality. They see the world in terms of pecking orders, in terms of very rigid in-group versus out-group categories. So it isn't just about women and men; it's a mental map.

But that isn't even the worst of it, because in the dominator model, the governing system of valuations ranks the male half of humanity and anything associated with men above the female half of humanity and anything associated with women. The results of this you see brutally in poor regions - parents kill little girls, give them less to eat, give them less health care, give them less education. But we see this devaluation of the female half of humanity everywhere; for example, in lower pay for child care than plumbing services, although we would agree children are more important than plumbing, and that good child care requires more knowledge and skills.

AW: What does this mean for our economic system?

RE: I have begun to understand that the old rules of the economic game are based on the alienation of caring work. Basically, anything associated with women's work is devalued. This isn't good for women, of course.

But it's also a disaster for society.

It's not only that heavily female professions are the lowest paid, it's that work stereotypically considered feminine and assigned to women is the true foundational work of society. We're talking about caring for children, caring for a family's health, caring for the elderly, and maintaining a clean home environment. We are told there is no money for these in our public policies. Does that make sense?

But it's not just that. As we move to a postindustrial economy, we must confront two issues: One of them I've already touched on, the issue of human capital. We know that good quality human capital is not produced in universities, it's developed during the first years of life. So if we don't start giving real attention to child care-not only providing child care centers with qualified and well-paid people, but also training parents as caregivers, we're lost.

The second issue is the disappearance from industrialized societies of much that has been considered productive work. We're told that a lot of jobs are being created, but if you look at the statistics, you see that a lot of those are part-time jobs, jobs without benefits, low-income jobs. How many McDonald's workers can you have? Blue-collar workers are disappearing, as are receptionists and middle managers. What are we going to do with all of these people? We have an opportunity right now, a small window of opportunity, to redefine what productive work is.

Once we understand that everything around us-from banks to slavery to parental leave-is an economic invention, and we start using the partnership and dominator models to sort them out, we see that we need many more inventions that give value to caring work. Parental leave and on-site child care are such inventions. The movement to provide caretaking of the environment -because it's caring and caretaking work that has been devalued-that's also part of this movement toward what I call partnership economics.

That neither GDP nor GNP includes caring work as part of productive work is crazy. We have to get our accounting methods straight. At the same time, we have to explore new economic models and rules of the game. We can begin laying the groundwork by developing and testing economic inventions that give value to caring and caretaking labor in both market and nonmarket sectors.

We can share what we learn through a clearinghouse on economic inventions that give value to caring work. The Center for Partnership Studies and The Global Futures Foundation are partnering to launch such a clearinghouse: the Alliance for a Caring Economy. This Alliance will offer information, organize focus groups and conferences, conduct pilot projects, and provide a framework for testing and disseminating new ideas, programs, and policies. I invite readers to participate by visiting our web sites (www.partnershipway.org & www.globalff.org) or contacting Wendy Pratt at The Global Futures Foundation (916-486-5999 or wbpratt@aol.com).

The Center for Partnership Studies

P.O. Box 51936
Pacific Grove, CA 93950
USA
Phone 831-626-1004
Fax 831-626-3734
center@partnershipway.org