This is truly an exciting time in the history of human relations.
Many authors, apparently "on the same wavelength," are writing
about dramatic changes in how we view things in our culture. I'm
particularly impressed in Riane Eisler's tying together of myriad
issues (gender relations, race relations, class relations, peace
and war, child rearing, worker empowerment, environmental
protection, sexual and other freedoms, etc.) in a common thread:
moving from dominator to partnership models of running things.
Dig this:
excerpts from "Sacred Pleasure," 1995, by Riane Eisler
"Until recently, the general assumption has been that human
society never was, and by implication never can be, anything except
male dominated and warlike -- or that if there was anything
different in our prehistory, it was so primitive as to be unworthy
of much attention." [But] "new archeological discoveries, coupled
with reinterpretations of older excavations, support views that
there were in our prehistory more peaceful societies. In extensive
excavations of early European Neolithic settlements that had
regular trade and other contact with one another, there are few
signs of destruction through warfare or of fortifications.
Moreover, there is in the rich art of the Neolithic (to us)
remarkable lack of scenes of men killing each other in 'heroic'
battles" [or] "of men raping women.
"A second finding is that there were not in these societies the
massive inequities we have been taught are characteristic of all
ancient civilizations. The comparative size of houses, the nature
of their contents, and the funerary gifts in graves point to a more
egalitarian social structure."
"A third basic aspect of these first cradles of Western
civilization is that there is no evidence that women were
subordinate to men. There are indications that women specialized
in some of the more important crafts of their time: pottery,
weaving, and the creation of ritual artifacts and art.
Furthermore, from art, burial gifts, and temple models, there is
evidence that women were priestesses holding important religious
positions."
[But in artifacts from about 6000 years ago] "'...archeologists
perceive a structural reorganization of society across much of
southeastern Europe.' '...evidence for this comes from the
abandonment of the tell sites which had flourished for several
millennia; the displacement of previous cultures in almost every
direction except eastward; movement to marginal locations, such as
islands and caves or easily fortified hilltop sites such as
Cernavoda I; and a general reduction in the major Neolithic
technologies of both fine ceramic manufacture and copper
metallurgy.' '...this abandonment and movement, often propelling
neighboring cultures into one another, operated against a
background not only of somewhat elusive traces of hybridization
with the steppe cultures such as the Usatavo and Cernavoda I, but
also with continuous incursions of mobile pastoralists.'"
"There is...consensus among most Indo-Europeanists that...during
the period from approximately 4500 to 2500 B.C.E....
proto-Indo-Europeans left Eurasia in wave after wave of migration,
to bring both their alien languages and their alien ways of
structuring social and sexual relations into Europe." "...the
appearance of the Indo-European Kurgans in prehistoric Europe marks
the beginning of the end of a more partnership-oriented
civilization." "...gradually cultures where women (and 'feminine'
values) had not been subordinated or despised were either
destroyed, conquered, or themselves began to become societies where
'heroic' warfare and the rule by force and fear of a small male
elite (along with gods of war and thunder) became the norm."
"...harsh environmental changes were the switch that set off a
complex sequence of events -- famine, social chaos, land
abandonment, and mass migration..."
excerpts from "Sacred Pleasure" (Riane Eisler), continued
[James DeMeo has found] "a correlation in preindustrial tribal
societies between a harsh environment, the rigid social and sexual
subordination of women, the equation of masculinity with toughness
and warlikeness, and the repression and/or distortion of sexual
pleasure..." "...this kind of social organization itself seems to
have originated in times of harsh climatic changes." "...times
when droughts reduced areas that were once green semiforested
savannahs to arid steppes and/or deserts." "...it was from these
areas, which now could support only nomadic grazing rather than
farming (and during acute droughts, not even that), that wave after
wave of nomadic pastoral migrations and invasions ensued."
"DeMeo...proposes that rather than being merely random or
accidental, the making of patrist or dominator social institutions
was the outcome of traumatic experiences and practices that evolved
during severe climatic and environmental changes." "...and...once
established, these patterns of social and sexual organization were
exported into more fertile regions, where this type of social and
sexual organization was now perpetuated through the
institutionalization of trauma (for example, through traumatic
child-rearing practices that effectively inhibit respiration,
emotional expression, and pleasure-directed impulses)." "...these
repressive social institutions...to varying degrees still today
block not only full physiological and emotional expression but
sexual pleasure and full sexual satisfaction. And...the
institutionalized distortion of human sexuality -- particularly
severe and cruel controls over female sexuality -- have been
primary mechanisms for the maintenance of dominator (or...patrist)
societies."
"During the second half of the twentieth century, people began to
talk of a revolution in consciousness..." "...there was a
resurgence of feminism, as women all over the world challenged
stereotypical gender roles and relations, and with this, the
five-thousand-year entrenchment of male dominance." "Actually
these changes in consciousness...began in the West as far back as
the Renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages. But they were
vastly accelerated during the later stages of the Industrial
Revolution, which brought massive technological and economic
changes that in turn forced major changes not only in work habits
but in habits of thinking and living. Such fundamental changes in
turn required much social restructuring, as well as a reevaluation
of many long-established 'truths.' In the process, thanks in large
part to the much maligned Enlightenment, many things that had until
then been thought inevitable -- slavery, the divine right of kings
to rule, the idea that woman's sexuality poses a threat to man's
moral and spiritual well-being -- began to be reexamined and
rejected.
"In short, the major technological, economic, and social
upheavals that marked the onset of the modern era about three
hundred years ago opened the door for a ground swell of partnership
resurgence, more powerful than before. For if from the new
perspective of CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION THEORY we take a fresh look
at modern Western history, we see that underneath its complex
currents and crosscurrents lies the struggle between a mounting
partnership thrust and an equally fierce dominator resistance. And
we also see that this struggle is not just over political and
economic relations; it is, and all along has been, over sexual,
gender, and family relations -- with the common thread being the
challenge to a system based on rankings ultimately backed by force
and the fear of pain."
"...the real progress can only come as people begin to awaken
from the 'social trance'..."
