PARTNERSHIP CULTURE IS PRACTICAL AND FEASIBLE

PARTNERSHIP CULTURE IS PRACTICAL AND FEASIBLE

1. EMPIRICS PROVE A NON-PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY CAN EXIST

Riane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, VOICES ON THE THRESHOLD OF TOMORROW, Edited by Georg and Linda Feurstein, 1993, page 126.

We have been taught that civilization has its civilization has its origins in brutally male-dominant and highly warlike societies. But more recent archaeological excavations indicate that stories of a more peaceful and harmonious time when women were not dominated by men are also based on earlier realities. For example, Mesopotamian and later Biblical stories about a garden where woman and nun lived in partnership most probably derive from folk memories of the more peaceful and egalitarian first agrarian (Neolithic) societies, which planted the first gardens on this Earth. Similarly, the legend of how the fabled civilization of Atlantis sank into the sea appears to be a garbled recollection of the ancient Minoan civilization, a remarkably peaceful and uniquely creative culture now believed to have ended when Crete and some surrounding islands were massively damaged by earthquakes and enormous tidal waves. Here, as in the earlier Neolithic, the subordination of women does not appear to have been the norm. Cretan art shows women as priestesses, as figures being paid homage, and even as captains of ships.

Riane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, VOICES ON THE THRESHOLD OF TOMORROW, Edited by Georg and Linda Feurstein, 1993, page 122.

This is why we urgently need both a new word and a new blueprint for the future. For a new word, I am proposing the word pragmatopia. Like utopia, this is also a term formed of Greek roots; it derives from the Greek term pragma (‘thing” or “reality,” as in “pragmatic”) and topos (“place”). And for a new, but at the same time very old, blueprint I am proposing what I have called a partnership rather than a dominator model of social organization: not an ideal society, but a society where neither women nor so-called feminine values like caring, compassion, and non-violence are any longer devalued. I chose the word partnership to describe this type of social organization because it is already in common usage as a term connoting mutuality of benefit. But I define it much more precisely, as a model of social organization where diversity is not equated with inferiority or superiority and where the primary principle of social organization is linking rather than ranking.
3. PAST SOCIETIES SHOW THE PRAGMATISM OF PARTNERSHIP

Lane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, 1995, page 73.

All this information about our lost past inevitably sets in motion conflict between the old and the new in our own minds. The old view was that the earliest human kinship (and later economic) relations developed from men hunting and killing. The new view is that the foundations for social organization came from mothers and children sharing. The old view was of prehistory as the story of “man the hunter-warrior.” The new view is of both women and men using our unique human faculties to support and enhance life. Just as some of the primitive existing societies, like those of the BaMbuti and the !Kung, are not characterized by warlike cavemen dragging women around the hair, it now appears that the Paleolithic was a remarkably peaceful time. And just as Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann defied the scholarly establishment of their time and proved the city of Troy was not Homeric fantasy but prehistoric fact, new archaeological findings verify legends about a time before a male god decreed woman be forever subservient to man, a time when humanity lived in peace and plenty. In sum, under the new view of cultural evolution, male dominance, male violence, and authoritarianism are not inevitable, eternal givens. And rather than being just a “utopian dream,” a more peaceful and egalitarian world is a real possibility for our future.

DOMINATOR SOCIETIES THREATEN SURVIVAL

1. DOMINATOR SOCIETIES THREATEN ALL LIFE FORMS ON THE PLANET

Lane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, THE PARTNERSHIP WAY, 1990, page 220.

The real issue, integrally related to the great contemporary debate of technology as savior or villain, is that in our high technology age, a dominator society is fundamentally maladaptive, threatening not only our species, but all life forms on this planet. For how long can the population explosion be arrested as long as women are denied access to birth control technologies, as long as they themselves continue to be viewed primarily as technologies for reproduction? How can environmental pollution and degradation be arrested as long as men continue to identify with the “manly” conquest of nature rather than the “women’s work” or environmental housekeeping? Most critically, how can we survive in a world still ruled by the Blade at a time when we have the ultimate technologies of destruction: the technologies for ending all life.

Riane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, 1995, page 172.

What was once merely a science fiction scenario is now a serious possibility. This is that after humanity has wiped itself out in a nuclear war our earth will be taken over by cockroaches, one of few life-forms immune to radiation. If that should happen it would be a fitting finale for androcracy--and a grim evolutionary joke on us. The system that has stunted out cultural evolution would finally have succeeded in producing the kind of creatures it is best suited for: insects rather than humans.
3. MOST CONTEMPORARY CRISES ARE AS A RESULT OF DOMINATION MINDSET

Lane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, THE PARTNERSHIP WAY, 1990, page 220.

Many of our contemporary global crises--such as environmental pollution and the threat of nuclear holocaust--are the result of the emphasis a dominator system places on so-called masculine values of conquest and domination. For example, in the United States almost 60 percent of every tax has gone to financing foreign intervention, nuclear weapons, and other military expenditures, with only a fraction of it left (after interest payments on the national debt) for human services. And in the poorest, most overpopulated, and most warlike and violently repressive developing regions of the globe such as parts of the Middle East and Latin America, women and so-called feminine values such as caring and nonviolence are most suppressed and despised.
4. MUST USE CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION THEORY TO CHALLENGE WAR IMAGES

Lane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, THE CHAUCE AND THE BLADE, 1995, page 159.

All is not hopeless if we recognize it is not human nature but a dominator model of society that in our age of high technology inexorably drives us toward nuclear war. All is not futile if we recognize that it is this system, not some inexorable divine or natural law, that demands the use of technological breakthroughs for better ways of dominating and destroying--even if this drives us to global bankruptcy and ultimately to nuclear war. In short, if we look at our present from the perspective of Cultural Transformation theory, it becomes evident that there are alternatives to a system founded on the force-based ranking of one half of humanity over the other.
5. NEARING A SOCIAL SHIFT THAT WILL LEAD EITHER TO PARTNERSHIP OR EXTINCTION Lane Eisler, J.D., former professor at UCLA and Immaculate Heart College, Cofounder of the Center for Partnership Studies, VOICES ON THE THRESHOLD OF TOMORROW, Edited by Georg and Linda Feurstein, 1993, page 126.

Today we stand at the threshold of another--and potentially decisive--social shift. For in our high technology age we either complete the shift to a different model of social organization or face the possibility of extinction.