Riane Eisler: Nurturing our Humanity
So, put all of that together. But I think that if we really were to look at these shootings, and at the shooters, there was a lot of pain in every one of their backgrounds. And it’s the deflection of that anger, which they can’t express against the adults who cause it, right? And that is characteristic of domination in a group versus other group-thinking. Whether it’s Sunni versus Shia, or Shia versus Sunni, in the Middle East, or white against dark skin, racist, in the United States, doesn’t matter. It’s part of the domination system, and it has its roots in the family, but the family does not arise in isolation. It’s interactive, with other social institutions, religion, politics, economics, education. So, you have to look at societies, not in terms of simple linear causes and effects. Still, in terms of interactions and if you leave out the foundational parent-child and gender relations as most studies and sociology courses still do, you can’t see the whole picture, can you? And you can’t see the connections. You cannot connect the dots.
Sandie Sedgbeer: A few years ago, when Isis was at its height and on the news all the time, I heard a story about a member of Isis who killed his mother. I don’t remember why he killed her, but I was shocked, and I could not believe how somebody could kill their mother. But after reading your book, I now under what a domination culture and environment do to a child’s brain and to its chemistry. Tell us about some of the science that backs up what you’re saying?
Riane Eisler: The science is very clear, and unfortunately, the way these studies are usually reported is just concerning a particular individual or family. But, looking at them from a larger social perspective is eye-opening. Because I’ll back up for a second. It’s really not coincidental that the subordination of women is key to all these repressive violence societies. Whether it’s religious fundamentalists like Isis or religious fundamentalists right here in the United States, whether it’s secular societies like Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s former Soviet Union, or Kim Jong-un from North Korea. They’re made of the same cloth. You know linguistic psychologists tell us that the categories provided by a culture really channel our thinking. And this is why I cannot emphasize enough the importance of looking at the whole picture and starting to use these new categories which identify configurations and connections. Still, to get to your question about the neuroscience, one thing that we are learning is that it’s not only our feelings and our beliefs but actually what children experience and observe early on, that leaves an imprint on the brain itself. And what we’re learning is domination systems.
I think of them as real trauma factories, stress factories; children learn to either fight or flight, or go into addiction, which is a form of flight. And the thing that really happens is denial – whether it’s a denial of climate change or denial of the parents, on whom you are dependent for life, that is causing you pain, and learning to deflect instead that pain and rage and anger to outgroups.
What we are learning from neuroscience is the importance of the environment, which for humans, of course, is our cultural environments. This whole notion of nature or nurture is a non-issue. The issue is gene expression. For example, one study showed that there’s a certain gene that some men have which predisposes them to be violent. However, only those men who in their childhood had what we call adverse childhood experiences turned out to be violent. So, there is no such thing really as genetic determinism. It’s always the interaction with the culture.
Sandie Sedgbeer: You are the president of the Center for Partnership Studies, and you’ve addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the US Department of State, and have conducted congressional briefings. You’ve authored over 500 articles, you grew up, as you mentioned earlier, in Nazi Europe, during the war. What was it like for you to escape the horrors and the humiliations of Nazi Europe only to find that the promised land of American Liberty and Equality had its own problems with prejudice and persecution?
Riane Eisler: I’m so glad you brought that up because for one thing, I have a great passion for this work, and I a great deal of that is, of course, rooted in my experience as a refugee child, as an immigrant with my parents from the Nazi era. I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana because, of course, the Nazis confiscated everything – that’s an official word for armed robbery. They took everything my parents had. So, until my parents got on their feet. I experienced poverty and other traumatic stuff, really unjust. I mean, in Cuba at that time under Batista, the gaps between the haves and have nots were simply enormous. But when we came to the United States, the promised land, one of the things we found, was, of course, racism. In Florida, at that time, there still was strict segregation. I don’t know whether my father was the first one to decide to do a sit-in or whether he just didn’t understand English well enough. Still, he sat in the colored section of a drugstore, and he was told to leave. And he said, ‘No, I’m sitting here, this is a good place to sit.’ But it was really rather horrifying to see extreme poverty, again, the gaps between the haves and have not, and this time based on race. Now I understand that this is part of what I call the domination system. And we had come by this because we inherited it. In The Chalice the Blade and again in Nurturing our Humanity, there is data – and by now it’s really such incredibly incontrovertible data – that for millennia we lived in societies that were more egalitarian, more gender-balanced.
Archaeologists, who excavated one of the largest early farming societies found no signs in the DNA of evidence that being born male or female made any difference in terms of status or life options. But then there was a shift. What I called in The Chalice and the Blade a 5,000-year domination detour. And we’ve inherited a lot of traditions of domination. In fact, if you look at the modern, progressive social movements, every last one of them, they’re not random and disconnected. They’ve all challenged traditions of domination, whether it was challenging the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule over their subjects, or the so-called divinely ordained right of men to rule over the women and children in their homes; or again, the so-called divinely ordained right of a “superior race” to rule over an “Inferior one,” all the way to the environmental movements. Nurturing our Humanity has all of the hard data to really document that most of these movements have only focused on dismantling of what I call the top of the domination pyramid.
Our politics and economics are conventionally defined, but it’s the foundational parent and child contender relations that these regressions keep rebuilding – the domination system. Why was it a top priority for Hitler to return to a “traditional family,” which is a code for an authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated, highly punitive family? Why is that a top priority for say, ISIS, or for the Taliban? Why historically, do we see this connection? Because we need to look at it. But our problem is this – out of 1600 years of so-called modern western science, only 50 years ago did women’s studies, men’s studies, gender studies, queer studies even enter the university, and it’s still marginalized, right? Our social categories leave this out. Most studies leave it out. Our educational and child development studies leave it out. It’s still taught, when it’s taught at all, as sort of siloed in with families or with child development rather than as part of sociology, political science, and economics. And that’s what this book does.
Sandie Sedgbeer: Yes, it does. It is such a thought-provoking book. I have lived in America for 20 years, just recently returned to live in England. And, over the last few years, since Trump was elected, I’ve watched people that I never thought would behave in an authoritarian manner, do exactly that. And I’ve been shocked and surprised by that. It always confuses me why people are so easily subjugated; why they conform so readily to authority. And as I was reading your book, I happened to receive something by an astrologer who was commenting on the same thing and referenced how, in his book The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich explained how authoritarian government structures take over, and how it usually starts with suppressing sexuality.
Riane Eisler: I think Wilhelm Reich was amazingly ahead of his time. My book, Sacred Pleasure, which re-examined sexuality and spirituality, explored how they were once really connected. But what Reich got wrong was that in men, sexuality is not suppressed. It is distorted. It is women’s sexuality that is suppressed. That’s a big difference. In Nurturing our Humanity, I go back to one of the points I made in Sacred Pleasure, which is that in domination systems, we have the eroticization of domination and violence. It is really like Pavlov’s dogs, it’s part of our socialization, and it’s very, very harmful. But, none of this is inevitable. Whether it’s “original sin” or “selfish genes,” religion and secular theories are at odds, but really, they’re telling the same story – We’re bad. We have to be controlled from the top, right?
One of the chapters in Nurturing our Humanity explains that it’s not between right and left, or between religious and secular, or between socialism and capitalism. I wrote a whole book about that, called The Real Wealth of Nations, where I again referred to the issue – it’s domination economics versus an economic system that gives visibility and value to the work of caring for people starting in early childhood and caring for our Mother Earth, which neither capitalism nor socialism does, by the way. It’s really within the struggle of all these types of societies as we think of them, between the domination elements, and the partnership elements. And once we understand that, we can be far, far more effective.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Riane Eisler
