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Building
a Just and Caring World: Four Cornerstones
Throughout our history, human beings have experimented with almost every kind of society imaginable, from pacifist communities to totalitarian states, with a thousand variations in between. For all their unique peculiarities, though, most of our attempts at civilization have taken on one of two shapes. I call these configurations the “dominator model” and the “partnership model.” In societies ruled by the dominator model, we find top-down authoritarianism (strong-man rule), the subordination of a large portion of the population to another portion, and a high degree of institutionalized (or built-in) violence, whether in the form of wife and child beating or warfare and terrorism. At the partnership side of the spectrum - and it is always a matter of degree - societies are organized in a more democratic way, economically as well as politically, with every one equally valued. Stereotypically feminine values such as caring and nonviolence (considered "unmanly" in the dominator model) are highly regarded, whether they are embodied in women or men. And partnership-based societies are less violent. (For examples, see Sweden, Finland, and Norway). Given their markedly different qualities, can one model ever hope to become its opposite? you may wonder. If we find ourselves in a dominator-style society, how do we transform it into a culture that prioritizes partnership? We can begin to build this new structure by putting in place four cornerstones. The First Cornerstone: Childhood Relations We are learning that the physical structure of the brain - including the neural pathways that will determine not only intelligence, but creativity, predisposition to violent or nonviolent behaviors, empathy or insensitivity, venturesomeness or overconformity - is not set at birth but is largely determined while we’re young children. We are also learning that coercive, inequitable, and violent childrearing - what I call dominator childrearing - is fundamental to the imposition and maintenance of a coercive, inequitable, and chronically violent social and cultural organization. This knowledge has enormous implications for social policy. It is through our intimate relations that we learn how to think, feel, and behave in all human relations, be they personal or political. If these relations are violent, children learn early on that violence from those who are more powerful toward those who are less powerful is acceptable as a means of dealing with conflicts and problems. What’s needed is no less than a global campaign against intimate violence and the abuse of children. We must educate an international audience about the consequences of violence at an early age, and we must provide both women and men with the knowledge and skills necessary for empathic, nonviolent, and equitable childrearing. We must enact and enforce laws criminalizing child abuse, as well as legislation funding education for better childrearing. We must change the mass media, first by raising awareness about routine representations in movies and television shows. And we must persuade spiritual and religious leaders to take a moral stand on this pivotal issue of intimate violence – the violence that every year blights, and all too often takes, the lives of millions of children and women and perpetuates cycles of violence in all relations. This is the mission of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (www.saiv.net). The Second Cornerstone: Gender Relations How a society understands the roles and relations of women and men is central to the construction of every social institution, from the family to organized religions to the government. Not only do gender relations underlie a society’s fundamental value system, but they can also have a profound impact of the nation’s general quality of life. For example, Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life - a study by the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org), based on statistics from eighty-nine nations - found that the status of women can predict the general quality of life in any given state better than GDP or GNP, the conventional measures of economic health. When societies with institutionalized gender discrimination claim that they prioritize caring, compassion, and nonviolence, their pronouncements are often only rhetoric; in practice, these kinds of partnership values, which tend to be associated with women, remain subordinate as long as women themselves are excluded from governing. This is not to say that women possess fundamentally different qualities than men. Both women and men exhibit stereotypically feminine traits, such as caring and nonviolence, and both genders engage in so-called women's work, such as caring for a family's health and maintaining a clean environment. However, in societies adhering closely to the dominator model these activities are considered appropriate only for women and inappropriate for "real men." In recent decades, we have seen a strong movement towards real partnership between women and men in all spheres of life, along with a blurring of rigid gender distinctions. Men are nurturing babies, and women are entering positions of leadership. But this movement is still slow and localized; in some cultures and subcultures it’s fiercely, even violently, opposed (by certain fundamentalist leaders, for example). To continue to make change, the world's progressive leaders must prioritize a global campaign for equitable and nonviolent gender relations. Valuing so-called "women's issues" has enormous implications for the environment, the peace process, population, economic equity, and political democracy. As long as boys and men are socialized to equate "real masculinity" with violence and control - be it through "heroic" epics or war toys or violent and brutal television shows - how can we realistically expect to end the arms build-ups that are today bankrupting our world as well as the terrorism and aggressive warfare that threaten our species' survival? The Third Cornerstone: Economic Relations It makes no sense to talk of hunger and poverty in generalities when the mass of the world's poor and the poorest of the poor are women and children. Many studies show that in most regions of the developing world women allocate far more of their resources to their families than men do. Development policies must shift their focus to women, and we must include the work of caring and caregiving – still performed primarily by women worldwide in the "informal" economy – in national and international systems of economic measurement and accounting (since they are not included in either GDP or GNP). We should encourage and reward economic and social inventions that assign value to caring and caregiving work in both the market and non-market economic sectors. For example, we have national programs to train soldiers to kill people - and we offer these soldiers pensions. By contrast, we have no national programs to train women and men to effectively care for children - even though we have gained solid scientific knowledge about what is and is not effective and humane childcare. People need
meaningful work. Is there any more important or meaningful work
than caring for other humans, particularly our children, and for
our natural environment? In the dominator model, work is
motivated primarily by fear and the artificial creation of
scarcities through wars and misallocations and misdistributions
of resources. Redefining what productive work is allows us to
imbue work with what it lacks in a dominator system: a spiritual
dimension. The Fourth Cornerstone: Beliefs, Stories, and Spirituality As more and more of us come to realize that partnership is a viable possibility for human society, our understanding of spirituality may change radically: not merely an escape to otherworldly realms, spirituality offers us the opportunity for active engagement in creating a better world right here on Earth. But to spread this consciousness will require what I have called spiritual courage: the courage of political, religious, educational, and business leaders to actively oppose injustice and cruelty in all spheres of life. We must summon great bravery to end domination and violence not only in international relations but also in intimate relations, not only in the so-called public sphere of politics and business but in the so-called private sphere of parent-child, gender, and sexual relations. Domination and violence have been with many of us a long time – they may even be part of our most deeply ingrained traditions– and challenging this heritage will be unpopular at best, dangerous at worst. But it must be done. Only if we consciously and concertedly build these four foundations for a partnership way of living can we move from a violent dominator culture to a more equitable, peaceful, and sustainable future for ourselves, our children, and generations still to come.
“It is not enough to
talk about peace. One must believe in it. This essay was published in Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism, edited by Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, Maui, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2005. A different version first appeared in Tikkun May-June 1998. |
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