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Riane
Eisler, Creating Partnership Futures:
Some people think the vision of a more equitable, less violent future is merely a utopian dream. A goal of my work has been showing it can be a viable model for transformative change and that the key components of such a model can be identified through cross-cultural and historical research. INFLUENCES Another major influence was growing up feeling an outsider -- and only later becoming conscious that a major reason for this was not just that I was a foreigner and Jewish but, even more fundamentally, that I was female. Gradually I became aware that I was indeed an outsider in a world where just about everything I was taught as important "knowledge" was by and about those who happened to have been born male ... I was also profoundly influenced by my mother, who risked her life to save my father when the Nazis came to take him away during Crystal Night in Vienna. She modeled for me spiritual courage: not the courage to kill out of hate for an "enemy," but the courage to stand up against unjust authority out of love. Both my mother and father also provided during the years of immigration a model of perseverance in the face of adversity. There were other personal experiences that were also as important in developing my thinking as my academic education -- which (like my research) is multidisciplinary, ranging from formal training in sociology, anthropology, and law to an extensive, and continuing, self-education in fields ranging from history, archaeology, religion, myth, economics, and political science to feminist studies, chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and systems self-organization theory. One of these experiences was marrying and having children (two daughters from whom I continue to learn important lessons about life and love) and later remarrying an extraordinary man who, for almost twenty years, has given me enormous emotional support and intellectual nurturance: my partner in life and work, the social psychologist and futurist David Loye. There were many other influences: for example, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin (who proposed "action research" as a legitimate scientific pursuit) and women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in 1848 (the same year that Marx and Engels published their highly publicized communist manifesto) promulgated a feminist manifesto, and Tahirih, the 19th century Iranian woman who, at a time that the masses were in the grip of a fanatical Muslim clergy, courageously proclaimed before her execution, "You may kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women." I have also been influenced by men working for humanizing social change; for example, the futurist Robert Jungk, to whom I owe a particular debt, since it was he who during discussions of my cultural transformation theory insisted that the models I proposed needed accessible descriptive terms -- inspiring David and me to come up with the terms partnership and dominator models. FOCUS I have also during the past two decades worked on other projects. One was support for the formation in 1990 (after The Chalice and The Blade was published in Chinese) of the Chinese Partnership Research Group at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This group in 1995 published The Chalice and The Blade in Chinese Culture, tracing the same general developments in Chinese culture I studied in the West: an earlier more partnership-oriented cultural direction, a shift to a dominator model during a period of intense disequilibrium, and the struggle during our time of intense disequilibrium to shift from domination to partnership. TRENDS From this perspective, rhetoric about "strengthening the family" and "family values" can be refocused by asking what kind of family do we want to strengthen and value. Is it a family based on rankings of domination in which a male head of household "calls the shots"? Or is it a partnership-oriented family in which both halves of humanity are given equal value -- a family in which children learn early on to recognize human rights violations as not "just the way things are," and to instead expect human relations based on respect for everyone's human rights? Or, regarding the contemporary rhetoric about religious values, rather than seeing the struggle for our future as between religious and secular values, we look at what kind of religious values. For example, the so-called American Christian right reflects very few of the values taught by Jesus. These were stereotypically feminine values, such as caring, empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and love. By contrast, the leaders of the Christian right focus on hate-mongering, scapegoating, sexual control over women, violent discipline of children, and so forth -- all designed for dominator systems maintenance. But I want to emphasize that what we are here dealing with is not something inherent in women or men. Rather, it is a matter of the gender-specific socialization required to maintain a system in which -- beginning with the ranking of one half of humanity over the other -- the primary principle of social organization is one of rankings of domination ultimately backed up by fear of pain or force. VISION I believe this is realizable, but only if there is a new integrated partnership politics that factors in matters that have been largely ignored in most analyses of how to move to a humane future. First, this means paying attention to the hidden subtext of dominator gender stereotypes: to how "real" masculinity has been associated with domination and violence (including chronic warfare) and how, because of the higher valuation of men and "masculinity," stereotypical "women's work" (such as feeding children, caring for people's health, and maintaining a clean environment) could not be given social and economic priority. Second, it means recognizing that changes in intimate relations are equally, and in some respects more, important than changes in international relations -- that there is an interconnection between terror in the home (or domestic violence) and international terrorism and warfare. Third, it means showing that a partnership model of human relations is a viable alternative -- that it is not only emerging in bits and pieces today, but there is evidence indicating it represented the original direction of civilization. We humans are very creative. But as long as we believe that something is impossible, we are not likely to create it. This is why one of the most important tasks for futurists is to provide data showing that a better future is not a utopia (no place), but a pragmatopia (a possible place).
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