From Domination to Partnership with Riane Eisler

Welcome to Points of Departure, a podcast from the Arkansas Global Changemakers in Coordination with KUAF Public Radio, where we aim to place pressing social issues into global context and bring communities together to find local solutions to global challenges. My name is Lawrence Hare, Associate Professor of History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. And I am Rogelio Garcia Contreras, Dichina Assistant Faculty in the Walton College of Business. And I'm Daniel Garuth, a producer and reporter for KUAF Public Radio, and we're your host for Points of Departure. Coming up on today's episode of Points of Departure. If you look at these movements, they focus primarily on dismantling the top of the Domination Pyramid, politics and economics is conventionally defined. Interesting. And this left in place, the foundations on which regression after regression has rebuilt itself. Reframing how we see the past to better shape our future. Lawrence and Rogelio explore deep concepts with social scientists, author and celebrated political thinker, Rianne Eisler, and I'll talk about her 2019 book, "Nurturing Our Humanity." That conversation is coming up after the break. This is Points of Departure. You're listening to a podcast produced by KUAF, your public radio station for more than three decades. Hello, I'm Timothy Dennis. KUAF's on-air programming features the latest news from NPR, which shows like all things considered, one A, and here and now. Locally hosted music programs on the weekend that you won't find online, local newscasts every weekday morning at 530 and 730, updates on events happening throughout the KUAF listening area, and more. To listen, tune your radio to 91.3 FM, visit our website, KUAF.com, or tell your smart speaker to play KUAF. Welcome to another episode of Points of Departure. I'm joined as always by our KUAF producer, Daniel Karuth, and by my friend and colleague, Rogelio Garcia Contraris. Hello, Lawrence. So good to see you. I heard you were recently in Indonesia. Yes. We're trying to establish a network of social enterprises over there related to a course that is coming up with the MBA program. We go all over the world, and Rogelio, we may not say it explicitly, but many of our discussions on this podcast are all about the question of perspective. What is the proper perspective that we need in order to solve today's most pressing social and environmental challenges? Usually, we think of this in spatial terms, as in geography, how far must we zoom out on our mental map of the world to understand global problems? At what scale can we best envision solutions? Indeed, our discussions on Points of Departure intentionally juggle local and international perspectives. But sometimes, this question of perspective means looking within at the very structures that orient our social habits, our institutions, and our relationships with one another. And sometimes, it means looking across time horizons to the past or to the future. In this season of our podcast, we've been following a running theme that we call the future of, focusing on the trends that we can see for particular problems and for particular solutions. Today, I want to begin by stressing the fact that looking forward and that gaining perspective often involves a careful look backward. And for that, we have with us a very special guest today, Dr. Rian Eisler. Dr. Eisler is a noted public intellectual, professor, and the president of the Center for Partnership Systems. I first came to know her work at through my own role as a historian. She first rose to fame in the 1980s with her acclaimed book, The Chalice and the Blade, Our History, Our Future, which wholly reconceptualized the way we think about the ancient world at the transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age. It was a phenomenal piece of historical interpretation, but Eisler did not stop there. She went on to become a true academic polymath, a social theorist, and a futurist. That's a cool resume. In the last few decades, she has produced an accomplished, multidisciplinary repertoire. The Arkansas Global Changemakers Group at the University of Arkansas hosted Dr. Eisler not too long ago for a discussion of another of her titles, The Real Wealth of Nations, which critically examined many long-held assumptions about global economics and social systems. Her most recent book is called Nurturing Our Humanity, How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Despite the incredible breadth of her work, Eisler has been consistently examining a common theme, namely the ways in which societies, past, present, and future, contend with orientations that she describes as constituting partnership and domination. This is informed a great deal by gender theory and comprises a field that she has defined as "partnership studies." She argues that these concepts not only serve to describe historical and contemporary societies, but also can inform the ways that we act within them. As she explained in The Chalice and the Blade, her work is not merely about "what was, or is, or even of what can be, but also an exploration of how we may, or more effectively, intervene in our own cultural evolution." So who better to talk about the question of perspective than Dr. Rian Eisler? Dr. Eisler, welcome to Points of Departure. It's so great to have you here. It's a pleasure to be with you. Just for context, can I ask you to talk a little bit about how you understand broadly the field of partnership studies and how your work sort of connects to that? The partnership studies is really based on a new methodology for looking at our past, present, and the possibilities for our future called the study of relational dynamics. So the study of relational dynamics looks first of all at something that is fundamental to all of us, how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to our natural environment. What kinds of these relations does a particular society support or inhibit? And number two, what are the core components of a social system that have to be understood and how do they relate to one another in an interactive way to either maintain or change the social system? And this approach is very different from conventional studies of society or for that matter from conventional social categories, right left, religion, secular, Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, capitalist, socialist. If you, first of all, really think about it, none of these categories really look at the whole social systems. Our academies are very, very siloed, right? That's right. And our thinking is very, very fragmented. They either marginalize or just ignore nothing less than the majority of humanity, women, and children. And each of their own way, right? Yeah, and that is a fatal flaw in the analysis. There have been repressive, regressive violence societies in every one of these categories. So none of them tells us what we have to build in order to have a more equitable caring and sustainable way of living and making a living. So partnership studies looks at the result of the study of relational dynamics, which is the discovery of patterns of social configurations that really transcend these conventional categories. So your work has, I believe your early training was in sociology and then law, but you of course have grown just as you talk about the limits of particular ideologies. I think you have found limits within particular disciplines on how they, how they study social phenomena. And so you've grown, grown across disciplines and now in nurturing our humanity, you're looking at both a social science approach, but also a natural science approach. That is correct because the study of relational dynamics began by drawing from the social sciences. But then it expanded, as you said, as I wrote different books, and in nurturing our humanity, I draw very heavily from the biological sciences, especially neuroscience. And the fact that we know from neuroscience that, well, the subtitle of the book, nurturing our humanity is how domination and partnership shape our brains, lives, and future. And the fact is that we know from neuroscience that we are not born with fully developed brains, that our brains develop actually in interaction with our environments, which of course for humans are primarily our cultural environments. And that's where the partnership domination, social scale comes in and we're, and we call it a biocultural lens because it is really the interaction of its gene expression that counts, not genes, or I mean, this whole nature versus nurture argument is a distraction. These are so many of our social categories and our social studies because they really don't study the interactive dynamics. You seem to be, and tell me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be really consistently interested in the question of how domination patterns not only persist across societies, across time, but how they become normalized, about how we seem to be unable to think about any alternative. And now it seems that in nurturing our humanity, you're sort of looking at the impact of culture on brain development as a way of reproducing those sorts of systems. Well, very definitely, and the book ends with four practical areas. I mean, if you look at modern history through the lens of the partnership domination by the biocultural lens, okay, what you see is that, and as I mentioned earlier, my work draws very much from chaos theory, non-linear dynamics, et cetera, showing that living systems, complex living systems can radically change during times of great systems, disequilibrium, right? And so, in the chalice and the bzaid, I looked at one of these periods of great systems, disequilibrium in our prehistory, where we saw a shift from millennia, really, of more partnership oriented first gathering, hunting and then early farming societies to domination systems with the earlier systems, cultural systems, orienting farm or to the partnership side of a more democratic family and state or tribe. Agenda is very, very important because the ranking in domination systems of one human form over the other, there are really two basic human forms, male and female. I mean, there's lots as we are finding out, you know, in between, but if you have this model of our species that ranks one type of human over another, you are teaching children before their brains are fully formed to equate difference with either superiority or inferiority, emanating or being dominated, being served or serving, and they have a template for this in-group versus out-group thinking whether the difference is based on race or religion or ethnicity or sexual orientation, it really doesn't matter to get back to nurturing our humanity, we can really understand it now much, much better drawing from neuroscience, which shows that contrary to the story that we are told, you know, like the caveman cartoon holds a weapon, you know, a club in one hand, drags a woman by the hand, you know. We show that to children before their brains, much less their critical faculties are formed, and of course it's domination, injustice, violence, that's how, that's human nature, that is not true. Studies show that the so-called pleasure centers of our brains light up more when we share and care than when we win and dominate. Well, the conversation is also reminded me of this passage that is inserted in one of the books of Harari, you well Harari, establishing that even our biological evolution, the process through which the thumb, right, in the human hand, came to be, was also shaped by the environment and the tools that the first primates started using and how these tools actually shape the way in which our body adapted to this interaction. So, and it triggers a lot of thoughts about our interaction with the environment, co-dependency that we have with our environment, and that to me is fascinating. Well, as a sidebar Adrian Zeelman, who is a paleoanthropologist, has a different version of early tool development in which not only man the hunter, but woman is a gatherer, if you will, is the protagonist, and it is I think a very credible one. If you consider that hunting meat is only a very small part of the calories that were consumed in the gathering hunting, but what Zeelman has pointed out is that containers were probably first developed by our hominid female ancestors, because like the Bonobo, you know, which are along with the chimps, our closest genetic relatives, we share food. And so they would have to have some containers to carry that food. Moreover, the first bonds, probably were the bonding of mothers and children. Oh, that's so interesting because I was an anthropology major as an undergraduate, and I remember hearing the story about not containers specifically, but about surpluses, because oh, surpluses are about the root to political power, because gaining the surpluses, already you can see that the interpretation is leaning towards what you're defining as domination, but here you're presenting a completely different take, sort of on the origin of surpluses, right, and where it comes from, and that's so fascinating. Well, the thing is that I'll jump for a moment to my book on applying the partnership domination, social scale, to economics. My book, I call the real wealth of nationals, creating a caring economics, which you interviewed me about, but you know, among many other things, introducing what I call a caring economics of partnerism, which takes the partnership elements of both capitalism and socialism, that goes further to reward the work of caring for people, starting at birth, and caring for our natural life support systems, which are excluded, excluded from capitalist and socialist economic maps. I mean, it's really fascinating. I mean, capitalism and socialism came out of the 1700s and 1800s. We're now in the 21st century post-industrial age. So they'd be antiquated on that account alone, but they perpetuate what I call the gendered system of values, both for Marx and for Smith. Nature was there just to be exploited, you know, as for the work of caring for people, starting at birth, keeping a clean and healthy home environment, which translates into keeping our home, our planetary home. They saw that work as simply reproductive to be not productive, to be performed for three by a woman in a male controlled household. That is still what the conceptual map for GDP and GNP, that's right. It is crazy because you cannot, I mean, I spoke to the United Nations, General Assembly. You cannot simply add on harmony with nature to a completely imbalanced system. Exactly. It's really not sticking because the system is not really providing the fundamentals for that transformation to take place. Yes. Well, you know, the good news is that there has been movement towards partnership. I mean, if you look at the last 300 years, I started to talk about periods of disequilibrium. When the industrial revolution started to really go into high gear, about 300 years ago, there was a time of great disequilibrium, and one progressive social movement after another actually has been challenging the same thing, its tradition of domination. The so-called enlightenment, so-called right of men, movement challenged the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule over their code subjects. The abolitionists, then the civil rights, then the like-lives-matter movement challenged another so-called divinely ordained right of a code superior race to rule over a code inferior one. The feminist movement and the women's rights, the Mitu movement challenged another so-called divinely ordained right all the way to the environmental movement, challenging our ones hallowed conquest and domination of nature, but if you look at these movements, they focus primarily on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid, politics and economics as conventionally defined. And this left in place the foundations on which regression after regression has rebuilt itself, you know, whether it was Hitler in Germany, Stalin in the former USSR, whether it's the Taliban, or ISIS, or Homenis Iran, or the so-called rightist, fundamentalist alliance right now the would-be regime, theocratic here in the United States, they have focused on families, on childhood, on gender, on economics, you know, telling us this bizarre story that the people who control most of the resources are actually the people and whom we depend. No, we don't depend on these people, but the system just creates artificial scarcity by funneling resources to those on top and it's not capitalism, it's what I call domination economics, whether it's a Chinese emperor, or an Arab sheik, or an Indian pasha, or a feudal lord, or trickle down economics, it's like the feudal system right, those on the bottom are supposed to content themselves with the scraps. 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I am always intrigued about these conversations, because it always reminded me of wonderful books. And for sure, one of the most influential, comprehensive explanations that I have heard about the system in which we live today is definitely the real world of nations written by Doctor Aisler, which I recommend to everybody that is interested in these kind of topics. And the conversation, just what she was saying now, also reminded me of another very interesting book called Climate Change Is Racist by Jeremy Williams, which I found also incredibly fascinating the way he's connecting these thoughts. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that just to sort of put a finer point on sort of the alternative that you pose in a lot of your books, to the domination system is the partnership system. And in the real wealth of nations, you define it as, and let me quote here, is the partnership system supports mutually respective and caring relations. There are still hierarchies, as there must be, to get things done. But in these hierarchies, which I call hierarchies of actualization rather than hierarchies of domination, accountability, and respect flow both ways rather than just from the bottom up. And so one of the things I've always admired about your work, because I'm a historian. So I love the history, is that you see value in looking to the, to the distant past. You're very open on the, on very broad time horizons for understanding the world that we live in today. I contend with this all the time, where some of my colleagues call it short termism, where the value of thinking in the long term is sort of diminished over time, and it's better to look at things as they are now and worry less about over time. But you, you don't see it that way, you draw in these very deep lessons. And one of the lessons I think that you draw, is that the potential for partnership is never completely vanished in any given society. Even if domination systems consistently replicate themselves, or even if they are prevalent in society. Even if they impress themselves on the human brain, there is still the potential for an alternative, for a different approach. And that's where your interventions come in. And in your latest book, you talk about a new beginning. And I wonder if that's the looking forward part, because you're just as equally adapted at looking to the future as to the past. Can you talk a little bit about these interventions that you call for? Well, my work not only identifies the configurations that underlying all of these categories, which really fragment our consciousness, I mean, a colleague of mine, as I think, causes them quite rightly, weapons of mass distraction, because will they fragment our consciousness? But there are underlying configurations, and we can take our clue from those trying to push us back to more rigid domination times, whether they're religious or secular, whether they're Eastern or Western, whether they're capitalist or socialist, it really doesn't matter. These are the configurations. But if you look at the movement towards partnership, as I said, they've focused on dismantling the top of examination pyramid, politics and economics as conventionally defined. But they've left in place the foundations on which in regression after regression, domination systems, whether they're totalitarian or whether they're religious, fundamentalists or whether authoritarian, it doesn't really matter. They always pay a lot of attention to these four cornerstones. One of them is childhood. And this is where I had to write nurturing our humanity, and I had been writing, it takes me a long time to write these books, by the way, I had been working on it for seven years when I invited the anthropologist Douglas Frye to the icon also, because he is probably one of the world's authorities on how we lived from millennia. And I will talk for just one second about it, we don't want to move to any good old days in the past, but there was a certain configuration that includes childhood and gender, and story and language and a very different economics. And those are the four cornerstones that nurturing our humanity and with, I mean, they're all interconnected, for example, we hear today a lot about moving from authoritarian to authoritative parenting and non-violent, I mean, finally, a few years ago, the American Psychological Association finally said, gee, spanking, which is violence, okay? Yes. I mean, I taught graduate students, and they said, oh, spanking isn't violent. And I said, you've got to be kidding. Of course, spanking is violence. Well, you often hear parents say, I was spanked as a child, therefore, you know, and I turned down fine. I turned out fine. Well, how fine did you really turn out? It turned out rather brainwashed to deflect your pain. It's hard to get people to leave their comfort zones, you know? But if we, I mean Einstein said it, he said, you can't solve problems with the same consciousness that created sense. Do you think that there's a special urgency to this problem, this move to partnership systems at a time when we face, and here's the perspective issue, Rohelio. Here's where we're talking about, we often on this podcast talk about on the ground solutions to problems like individuals are doing, but here we're zooming way out. We're looking at systemic problems, but is there a special urgency at a time when we need to mobilize society to deal with certain very, very urgent global problems, for example, climate change that have an existential peril attached to them? Yes, but you know there is a more and more people, especially young people, but also old people like me, realize that we have to have systemic change, and you can't have whole systems changed unless you look at childhood, unless you look at this really hidden system of gendered values. I mean, think about it, I mean, it's just not realistic to really expect a social and or an economic system that rewards caring for our natural life support systems. I mean, right now, in GDP, it's crazy trees on which we depend, you know, for oxygen. Right, I mean, you know, we'd be dead, but they only show up in GDP when they're dead, when they're logs. I mean, think about that for a moment. And economists are taught in their schools still that all caring for people, caring for children in homes, that's just reproductive work. Well, in our post-industrial era, we know that whether we have that high quality human capital that economists keep telling us we need for the post-industrial knowledge service era, largely hinges on the quality of care and education children receive early on. These so-called women's work, but it's not women's work. The whole system deprives all of humanity of their full potential. The system came about, as you say, through what the word you use was disequilibrium, moments of intense instability, given the challenges that we're facing today, do you think that a similar moment of disequilibrium can play a role in pushing the needle in the other direction towards partnership? Yes, it can facilitate it, but only through human agency. And there is the whole thing. But we need a concerted partnerism, starting really with a caring economics of partnerism, because values are the key. We developed at the Center for Partnership Systems, a partnership technology toolkit and workbook. And I highly recommend that. And it can actually be adapted, because it's about what do we consciously or unconsciously what values, what beliefs, what assumptions do we consciously or unconsciously build into our technologies, but it can be built into our policies. It can be built into our education. Education, yes, exactly. And that is something that I think you are touching on this new project that you are launching with the Montessori Foundation, education for the 21st century, this partnership way in our children's future. Can you talk a little bit about this effort that you are developing with the Montessori Foundation? Well, I think that Montessori, in many ways, is the kind of education that most closely approximates what I call partnership education, which focuses on three areas, process, structure and content. We learn by stories, you know, and the stories that we are still taught is a fragment our consciousness, make it impossible to connect the dots, so to speak. And many of them are just false. I mean, you mentioned Ferrari. His assumptions are dominator assumptions. And that book sold millions because people like to have confirmation, but that's not it. It is that the system is geared towards stories that confirm the caveman cartoons. How do we fix that? Is the solution to proliferate more stories, more varied stories, shift to shift the focus? Particularly, I mean, I'm intrigued about your question because of the other premise that you establish on how our environment really shapes who we are, right, nurturing humanity. So how can we achieve effective change? Well, I think that we need to focus far, far more attention on these four cornerstones. Take a lesson from those pushing us back, reclaim family, reclaim morality. I mean, we've given it away. My wonderful husband who died, David Lloyd, wrote about moral sensitivity, partnership moral sensitivity, as contrasted to domination, moral insensitivity or moralism. I mean, right there, we have a starting point. I'm working on a project with some religiously oriented people to sort our scriptures, to sort the chaff and the grain because at the core of our religious scriptures are partnership teachings. We do want to others as you would have them do want to you, caring, nonviolence, more feminine, if you will. But then there is this overlay that happened during recorded history in the process of remissing. We can remiss again, but it takes a lot of money, a lot of rewards, changing the rewards. We're always talking about changing the rewards. What do we reward? We reward somebody like Elon Musk, who's really unstable mentally, but aside from that, whose instinct is a domination instinct, because that's what he knows. And there are laws, I mean, we are putting together an online course now through the Center for Partnership Systems, Systems, Uncaring, Economics and a new metric called the Social Wales Economic Index, to show the economic value of the work of caring for people starting at birth and caring for our natural life support systems. But as you said, it is a question of long-term thinking, rather than short-term thinking. Yes. And I want to come back to this sort of notion where I started about spatial perspective, right? Because in a lot of ways, changing this narrative, changing these systems has to happen at the local level, right? That the local level is where many of the parts of our human community that are overlooked have the most agency, where they have the most day-to-day role to play. And so I'm just wondering if you have thoughts on how to activate this sort of change at the base level, at the local level? Well, we're looking for a very massive funding for just that to establish more partnership nodes on the local level. And what we're talking about is, first of all, spreading the new conceptual frame. Because without that conceptual frame, we're working on the environment over here. We're working on gender equity over here, we're working on stopping violence against children over there. You have to connect the dots. That's right. These movements have often, as you said, they've been siloed, they've been fragmented, but they have common objectives at some level. And common roots in their properties. And common roots. And that is the, I mean, as I said, if you look at modern histories through the partnership domination, social scale, or through the partnership domination, biocultural lens, you see that they have all really challenged the tradition of domination, but you have to really look at the foundations. And if you don't change caregiving styles, if you equate our caring with coercion, then you're perpetuating the system. And if you then provide these balves for expressing that socialization through violence or hatred of the other, I mean, the whole thing is a mess. But we have to first of all understand it. Then we have to think of what are the interventions. I mean, we have to understand what keeps us back. We have to understand that there is an alternative and what it is, and it's not socialism or capitalism, it goes beyond that. And then we have to, I believe in human creativity, you know, we created this mess. We can create a better way of being. Those are beautiful words, and this podcast, in a way, was conceived to share different perspectives from around the world with our students, with a younger generation. And there is an explosion of information and some sort of an implosion of the meaning. There's so much out there to see, to absorb, to engage with that. And we get lost in this explosion. What you're saying is so important, and many philosophers and intellectuals that I follow kind of claim the same thing. We need to pause a little bit to try to understand, really, where the root of the problem is. But translating that into action, especially for a younger generation, where everything seems to be immediate gratification, and everything seems to require a decision that has to fulfill a need right away, it seems really difficult. What would be your advice to them and to people like Lawrence and I who interact with them almost on a daily basis, a little bit older, but with this constant interaction, with this constant interaction with this younger generation? What would you say to them? I would say, first of all, that without that clear understanding of what we're dealing with, which is traditions of domination. I mean, look at the old categories right left, religious, secular, Eastern, Western. We inherited them from more rigid domination-oriented times. They're outmoded, but they serve a purpose, which is to fragment our consciousness. So look at the partnership alternative, and yes, consider the things that you have not been taught are important. Look, gender is a primary social organizing mechanism. Globalization in domination systems is for quote, masculinity and for femininity, period. Not for being human. And I think young people can understand that. There are people in Iran, for example, today, who are finally recognizing the oppression of women, but the oppression of women also means the oppression of men, because of this system of gendered values for one thing, and because of the straight jackets of rigid gender stereotypes that are part of the domination system, I wish that I had a magic formula, but I think that the first step is really spreading the new understanding of our past, of what's possible for us, that gives more focus on the so-called, what in-domination systems we call the feminine, caring, caregiving, nonviolence. I mean, it's really not that complicated, is it? You wouldn't think so, and yet here we are. Talking to you today has been so important for us and for our listeners, and I just want to say thanks to you for taking the time to speak with us on points of departure. Well, it's been my pleasure to talk with you, and I look forward to moving forward. Outstanding. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Dr. Ather, we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lawrence. You've been listening to Points of Departure, your host, our Rojaleo Garcia Contreras and Lawrence Hare. I'm Daniel Caruth. Points of Departure is a podcast production of KUAF Public Radio and Arkansas Global Change Makers. For more information, you can visit KUAF.com.