From domination to partnership: reclaiming our future.

The humanist rejection of ancient stories about an innately evil humanity in need of saving from above--and what follows from that, the humanist commitment to the value and dignity of the individual, to civil rights, and to ethics--fits into a much larger conceptual framework that is every bit as revolutionary as the demonizers of humanism fear. In my work I have identified this wider context as the movement of society toward what I call a partnership rather than dominator model for structuring human relationships.

To give you a sense of what I mean by these terms, let's take a look at some societies which, on the surface, seem to have little or nothing in common: the Masai of Africa, Khomeini's Iran, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the Christian fundamentalist would-be state of today. Here we have a tribal society in Africa, a Middle Eastern theocracy, a highly technologically advanced fascist nation, a communist state, and a possible future United States. Yet if we look at three key, mutually supporting parts of their configuration, we can see important similarities.

First, we see strong-man rule. Whether it is in the family or the state, it is a normative ideal. It is not coincidental that, when both Hitler and Stalin came to power, the rallying cry was the same as the one we hear today: "Let's go back to the traditional family." We know now that traditional in this context is a code word for the male-dominated family in which one-half of humanity is modeled as being the half that gets served and has control. That is a centerpiece.

Second, we see rigid male dominance. There are certain gender stereotypes that are appropriate for a dominator society. As historian Claudia Kuntz observed, the ideal Nazi man was a warrior, and the ideal Nazi woman was his mother. Period. End of story. So it's easy to understand the coded meaning behind the effort to get women back into their "traditional" roles. The fundamentalist men's group, Promise Keepers, for example, gives men the false choice between either irresponsibly abandoning their families or responsibly regaining patriarchal control--never considering the possibility of a partnership family.

Third, we see a high level of institutionalized social violence. Although any society is going to have some violence--it's part of the human repertoire--in these societies domination, violence, and conquest are equated with "real masculinity." Remember, the ideal Nazi man is a warrior. The ideal Masai man was a warrior. Khomeini promised the young men he sent into battle that each would receive four female sex slaves in heaven as a reward for his "heroism." Thus the stereotype of women as merely there to serve men (sexually and otherwise) goes along with a high level of social violence--all the way from wife- and child-beating to rape and warfare. This is a built-in feature in dominator societies.

Now, by the measure of our own lives, social transformation away from this dominator model seems to have progressed slowly. Not only has it been retarded by constant resistance but it has been punctuated by periods of regression. I submit that we are living through just such a period now. Yet, depressing as much of today's culture and politics are, by taking a longer view we can see a larger picture. Societies are living systems that need to be looked at not in terms of simple linear cause and effect but in terms of interactive system dynamics. And from the standpoint of evolutionary time, changes involving disequilibrium and social transformation have taken place relatively rapidly, spanning mere hundreds or thousands of years.

A shift away from the dominator and toward the partnership model began in the Renaissance but surfaced about 300 years ago, early in the Enlightenment. Technological change was destabilizing entrenched structures, habits, and beliefs. With this came the questioning of much that had been taken for granted as "just the way things are." One social movement after another began to challenge entrenched patterns of domination, including the "divine right of kings" to rule over their subjects and the "divinely ordained" authority of men over women and children in the "castles of their homes." By the nineteenth century, there was also a growing questioning of the domination of one race over another, leading to the abolitionist and then the civil-rights movements. Social injustice was challenged. Economic injustice was challenged. Colonialism was challenged. Even today, in the environmental movement, what has really been called into question is the so-called conquest of nature which had earlier been idealized.

Humanism, very clearly, has been part of this movement for fundamental social change. It has philosophically challenged some of the underpinnings of domination--including the idea that the world was created by a male god giving orders. (Naturally, those who were in the thrall of a despotic society didn't find this story as incredible as do its critics, which is how some of these stories evolved--not from some human perversity but simply out of the circumstances of people's lives.)

Overall, modern history is the story of challenges to the dominator pyramid. But in the first few centuries, the challenge was primarily to patterns of domination in the so-called public sphere--that is, the top of the pyramid. These involved mostly relationships between men and men because women and children were barred from that sphere. At long last today, some of our major political issues are about relations in the so-called private sphere. They involve issues such as reproductive choice and issues about intimate gender relationships--the relationships between women and men, the two halves of humanity. This is extremely important, not only for the quality of our day-to-day personal relations but for all social relations, including those in the public sphere. These gender relationships are foundational and fundamental, as are relationships between parents and children.

Think about it. If you have a society in which one group of people--either as heads of religious and political institutions or as private individuals--controls what happens in the body of another type of individual, you have a basic model for domination and control. So women's struggle for reproductive choice is a fundamental struggle--and not only for women but for men and children. It is, of course, also essential for a planet that is dying from overpopulation.

Think about the old biblical injunction, "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Today we call it what it is: child abuse. Similarly, there is the old "joke" that "if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it." Today we recognize rape not as something that women "provoke" by being in the "wrong place" (the "wrong place" being outside of a male-controlled home, outdoors, anywhere) but as a crime of violence.

It is the social structure supported by slogans like these that we are trying to move away from. I develop this theme strongly in my new book, which I entitled, rather heretically, Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. I chose that title because one of the things that really struck me when I was engaged in the seven years of research that led up to it was how many of the religious images that we have inherited from the dominator system, which was still largely unquestioned in the "good old days" of the Age of Faith (when there were drawings and quarterings, public torture in the streets, the burning of women as witches, and so on) sacralize either the inflicting or the suffering of pain. In this dominator culture--which was one of the last phases of what we might call a 5,000-year dominator detour in our cultural evolution--we were brought up to be God-fearing, lest we burn in hell forever. And we have been told that our salvation is to be found through the terrible suffering of Christ.

In moving away from such images and ideas, we are moving toward a completely different way of structuring human relationships--what I call a partnership configuration. This has been emerging most clearly in the Scandinavian nations. But it is what many of us are, in bits and pieces, working to build. It is not new. We see it in some tribal societies, such as the Tiruray and the BaMbuti. And (as I will get to in a moment) we see it in prehistoric societies, such as the Minoan civilization which flourished on the Mediterranean island of Crete and profoundly influenced the ancient Greek civilization that came later.

Societies oriented primarily to the partnership model have a social structure of both political and economic democracy. Violence does not have to be institutionalized to maintain rigid rankings of domination--be it man over woman, race over race, or nation over nation. The third key feature is a much more equal partnership between the female and male halves of humanity. For example, in Scandinavian public life, this evidences itself in the fact that legislative bodies are as much as 40 percent female. One can talk about representative democracy there without it being a joke, as it is in much of the rest of the world today.

Integrally related to this is the presence of more stereotypically feminine social priorities. Now please understand that this has nothing to do with women and men. Despite the stories we are told, stereotypically feminine and masculine behaviors are not innate in the genders with which they have become associated. Today, we're seeing those gender stereotypes dissolve before our very eyes. I, a woman, am speaking and writing. I couldn't have done that as little as 150 years ago. It was almost totally out of the question. Women had to be silent. And men today are taking care of babies--something totally unheard of in terms of the rigid dominator gender stereotypes that once prevailed. So what we're seeing is a refashioning of that very fundamental relationship between the sexes.

Why does that translate into different social priorities? Well, let me contrast what's happening in Washington today with what the Scandinavian nations have pioneered. They have much greater economic democracy and, with this, a higher general quality of life for all. A major reason is because the Scandinavian governments provide funding for basic human needs--for the care of children, the aged, and people's health. But if we look closely, we see that this is stereotypical women's work, as is maintaining a clean environment. By contrast, in the United States today there is massive pressure both to avoid the Scandinavian practice as well as to defund those parts of that "women's work" of caring for children, the aged, people's health, and the environment already covered. But it's not correct to call this effort just a "Republican thing"; it is part of the overall regression to a dominator society trying to reassert itself.

Though the politicians tell us there isn't enough money for the United States to provide child care, health care, care for the aged, and care for the environment, those same politicians have no trouble finding enough money to give the Pentagon $7 billion more than it asked for to keep it supplied with obsolete warplanes--weapons that will likely be sold to some other nation which, like Iraq, will turn around and use them against us. So the issue isn't money; it's social and fiscal priorities.

We need to expose and examine the hidden subtext of gender stereotypes in these priorities. Then we can move beyond the rhetoric of right versus left or religious versus secular and look at issues in terms of domination and partnership.

It is then easier to interpret what is happening all around us today. Take, for example, the images idealizing violence and associating sex with domination and violence that bombard us in our mass media. Such images aren't part of the modern sexual revolution but, rather, of the dominator sexual counter-revolution. The real sexual revolution is the liberation of sex from its association with sin, fear, and violent punishments in this life or in a hell of terrible tortures. It is the liberation of women from rigid male sexual controls, including violent controls. It is part of the challenge to repression and domination.

By contrast, the images eroticizing violence and domination are hardly liberating. By constantly associating the act that gives us pleasure with domination, with control, with violence, we become conditioned to think of oppressive relationships, where one body controls another, as natural and normal. So this is just as regressive as the control over sexuality that the religious right wishes to impose. Both condition us to accept domination rather than partnership--not only sexually but in all aspects of our lives.

These connections between religions of domination, the institutions which maintain a patriarchal society, how we handle our priorities, and how we perceive the relations of women and men and view sexuality have not been lost on the right wing. The right is very aware that the way we structure the roles and relations of the two halves of humanity is basic. That's why this concern is one of its top priorities. The right is against the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive choice, and affirmative action. This is consistent. So the first thing we, as humanists, must do is make these our top priorities, too--but moving in the opposite direction, challenging entrenched patterns of domination and violence in our most foundational, intimate relationships.

The second thing we must do is to reject the argument from the right that the partnership model is not traditional. It is traditional. It just happens to relate to traditions that are much older than the ones to which they refer.

What is emerging in our time and has been for for the last 300 years has very ancient roots. The work of James Mellaart, Marija Gimbutas, Nicolas Platon, and other archaeologists at the forefront of a veritable revolution in archaeology has begun to show that there were partnership-oriented societies in our prehistory.

Actually, in the nineteenth century, when archaeology was in its infancy, scholars were already gathering data about these societies. These data showed that a great goddess was worshipped in these societies and that women held positions of religious leadership as priestesses; there was also an absence of images glorifying "heroic" male violence and brutality. But those early archaeologists and other scholars, stuck as they were in the dominator mind set, assumed that, if these societies weren't patriarchal, then they must have been matriarchal. That is a false conclusion; conceptually, matriarchy and patriarchy are two sides of the same dominator coin. The real alternative is a partnership society in which there is an equal valuing of the two halves of humanity--women and men. Difference and diversity do not need to be automatically equated with superiority and inferiority. And they weren't automatically so equated in those societies.

Still, there's a battle in the academy over this interpretation of the data. Scientists, like everybody else, have been brought up within a certain paradigm: the story of "man the hunter," "man the warrior," the story of the conquerors. When I was a kid, I really resented having to memorize the dates of all those battles, who killed whom and when. But now I understand why: those events are very important to a dominator account of history. They tell us what a dominator society considers important. Yet these events are really much less important than the social reform movements that we don't learn about in schools--or, at best, only hear of as peripheral or secondary, like during black history or women's history months.

We need to change the way history and prehistory are taught. And this includes the way we treat myths. As humanists, we have gotten used to dismissing a lot of myths. Yet many of these stories that we have inherited through folklore carry important information. They give very interesting clues to our cultural history. Let me illustrate this with two examples.

In China, in the Tao Te Ching, we read how there was a time when the yin or female principle was not yet subservient to the yang or male principle. We are also told it was a time that was more peaceful and when the wisdom of the mother was still honored. This backs up the archaeological evidence and the very different picture of cultural origins that Chinese scholars are beginning to reconstruct. It also backs up the attempts by women worldwide today to reclaim the archetype of the crone or old woman as positive, as wise and good rather than as in the children's cartoons where old women are depicted as witches.

Another myth with striking clues to a prehistoric shift from partnership to domination is the best-known story in Western civilization: the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It tells us that there was a time when woman and man lived in harmony with one another and with nature--in other words, in partnership. It also provides clear clues to the shift. We are told it is a sin to independently seek knowledge. We learn that the pair suddenly become ashamed of their bodies. And we learn that, henceforth, woman is to be subservient to man. Henceforth. When I was a kid, I always wanted to know what it had been like before the henceforth. But only now are we beginning to find out more about that.

Then the very next story is brother killing brother. This symbolizes war. First, the battle of the sexes, then warfare between men. Together these stories symbolize the shift from the earlier partnership society to the later dominator society.

But there's more. Returning to Eve in the garden, there's the question I asked as a child: "Why would a woman ask advice from a snake?" You know, we don't usually do that. But the serpent, which periodically sheds and renews its skin, was in the old iconography one of the epiphanies of a belief system of cycles of sex, death, birth, and regeneration. The worship of the goddess was associated with that kind of belief system, as opposed to belief in an ultimate cessation to life as we know it, followed by residence in heaven or hell. The serpent was also a symbol of oracular prophesy. Think of the Oracle of Delphi. It was the priestess--a pythonist working with snakes--who went into an oracular trance. Thus, under the old partnership reality, it was perfectly sensible for Eve to seek gnosis--direct access to knowledge--herself. But under the new dominator reality, it became perfectly logical for a punitive male deity to say, "No, knowledge is my monopoly. You may not think for yourself but only as I tell you to." And so we humanists are demonized because we advocate seeking knowledge independently.

Then you have Cain, the farmer, offering to the deity the fruits of the earth. Well, if you look at the Minoan frescos, as I have, you see the representative of the goddess, the high priestess, with her arms raised in the same gesture of benediction the pope still uses to this day. And people are bringing her the fruits of the earth. But Cain's god is a nomadic god; he is the god of the people who came in from the arid regions of the globe where, if you will, the earth was not a good mother. So this god demands that a sacrifice of an animal, a burnt offering, be made. And Cain is blamed for fratricide, for killing his brother.

Yet this is the total reverse of what actually happened historically. History tells us that it was the nomadic herding people who came in and destroyed the earlier civilizations. Yet in the Bible story, it is the farming people who are blamed. So there is a lot of rewriting of history to be done--a project already begun in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but still very incomplete. (For example, I think it is a very tenable theory that, during a period of great climatic change, waves of invaders came down upon the ancient, more partnership-oriented societies that originally developed in the more fertile regions of our globe, where farming was possible. These invasions, which built up over several thousand years, happen to coincide with periods of greater and greater aridity in the fringe areas of the globe.)

The shift from the earlier partnership society to the later dominator society, which I've been discussing here in the context of Western mythology, has now been recognized by Chinese scholars who applied my conceptual framework to Chinese history. They found evidence of prehistoric partnership societies there. My book on this subject, The Chalice and the Blade, was translated into Chinese, and a group of Chinese scholars--archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists--got together at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and tested my cultural transformation theory in Chinese culture. The book they published of their findings was released in time for the 1995 United Nations women's conference in Beijing and is aptly titled The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture. In it they report very much the same pattern as I found in looking at Western culture.

The method I use for my research is more in line with chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, systems self-organizing theory. It's also multidisciplinary. But there's another reason I think that my work has attracted as much attention as it has: I draw from a much larger body of data in my analyses of social systems; rather than just looking at one period or one society, I draw from a data base that includes the whole of our history, including our prehistory. And I also draw from a data base that includes the whole of humanity: both its female and male halves.

Now you may wonder how much this matters. Well, the old studies were quite aptly called the "study of man." We were told not to worry about that because man is a generic term that includes women. Yet if we look in the index of one of these older books, if there are even 20 pages on women it is a rarity, and we know that we've stumbled upon a book quite progressive for its time. Think about what that means. Ask yourself what happens when you study a picture and leave out a huge hunk of it. So, most critically, in terms of my interest in historical patterns, in the connections between the various elements of social systems--what I've referred to as the partnership and the dominator configurations--these patterns had been there all the time but simply hadn't been made visible. It wasn't until I got away from the "study of man" and studied both halves of humanity that I was able to see them.

Understanding these configurations has very practical and immediate implications. Politically, it takes us past the old-fashioned categories of capitalism versus communism, right versus left, or religious versus secular to basic issues of human relations. This makes it possible for us to reframe the political discourse in more meaningful and concrete terms.

For example, when people talk about strengthening the family, we can ask what kind of family they want to strengthen. If it's a dominator family, an authoritarian family, then we're in trouble. But if the desire is to strengthen a diversity of families--to value all families, including women-headed families and gay and lesbian families--that can truly be called the promotion of family life.

I think we need to apply this same healthy questioning to some of today's scientific theories. For example, the unfortunate way evolution has been taught emphasizes much more competition than what is really there and ignores the cooperation which is just as much a part of the process. The same is true of evolutionary theories that deny altruism, in which humans are depicted as basically selfish, mean people who only help those with related genes.

In fact, there is a lot of evidence of altruism that has nothing to do with anybody you're related to. One example of this is very dramatic for me, as a Jewish refugee. It is the story now recorded in numerous books about the thousands of people in Nazi Europe who not only risked their own lives but the lives of their families to help perfect strangers who happened to be Jews. They knew that not only would they be killed if caught but their whole family would be killed. Evolutionary hypotheses which argue that there is no altruism, that it is biologically impossible for us, can't make easy sense of this. And it is such scientific hypotheses that reinforce the dominator assumptions about a basically flawed humanity that must be strictly controlled just as much as religious dogmas about original sin do.

In reality, we humans have a very large repertoire of behavior. The real issue for us is how do we structure human relationships? Politics, economics, the family--they are human creations. If we remember this, we will realize that it is possible to change them.

But we have been told for so long that it is utopian, impossible, to create something better--and this even though we see people before our very eyes who have better relationships while others have horrible relationships. We see that there are partnership relations. I happen to be blessed to have one in my own life. We see that some countries--like those of Scandinavia--have evolved toward a more humane, humanistic partnership model.

But still we are told that it is impossible. Well, I submit to you that we've got to change. And this change needs to occur in our scientific myths as much as it does in our religious stories. This part of humanism is not only deconstruction but reconstruction. And that is what my work has been about.