Twenty-five years ago cultural historian Riane Eisler’s life was at a turning point. A practicing family attorney and single mother, she was working too hard on too little sleep and not enough good food. Divorced, she was also mourning the recent loss of her parents. But instead of slowing down or nurturing her emotional needs, she sought to push through her stress, until her lifestyle began to push back, and she became seriously ill.
It was one of those turning points in life. You might have had one yourself. I have, and more than once. You realize you just can’t go on the way you have, and so the light bulbs blink, the epiphanies come and either gradually or suddenly, painfully or enthusiastically, you begin to redirect your life.
For Riane Eisler, this turning point meant stopping the prescription drugs, giving up the apple strudel for more vegetables and fruits, and finding a therapist. There was also the small matter of re-evaluating what exactly she wanted to do with the rest of her life.
Many of us became familiar with Eisler’s ideas through her book, The Chalice and the Blade, which she published in 1987 to critical international acclaim. Chalice offered a sweeping re-evaluation of early human culture, to show that, "what we think of as natural and inevitable [including] destructive personal and social patterns such as domestic violence, chronic warfare, racial and religious prejudice, and the domination of women by men, are not natural or inevitable at all."
Eisler’s personal life crisis thus became a transforming moment for her, one in which she began to view personal issues within the larger scope of society and culture. Of course, her evolution took place against the backdrop of the emerging feminist consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s, when millions of women were engaged in a larger cultural epiphany, coming to understand in profound new ways the deleterious effects of a male-dominated culture upon their lives. As the feminist slogan of the time used to declare, "The personal is political."
Life...On Every Level
Today, the personal remains as political as ever, and since 9/11 it’s become increasingly difficult to pretend otherwise. Unfortunately, so much of our culture, writing, and activism ignore this. The political writers and intellectuals focus mostly on the big social issues like elections, the economy, or foreign policy. Meanwhile, the self-help promoters keep their lens generally within the scope of self-esteem, career, or personal relationship issues. In recent years, only a few contemporary writers like Paul Loeb, Susan Skog, or Marianne Williamson have even attempted to integrate a concern for psychological and spiritual matters into a broader social and political framework.
Now, in her latest work, The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life, Eisler has written her own version of the self-help book. Her concern here is to help readers more fully engage their personal power through a deepened understanding of their essential relationships in life on every level. Accordingly, if the usual self-help book is limited to our relationship with ourselves or to intimate relations with others, The Power of Partnership addresses these but goes further, focusing on not only, spiritual relationships, but also relationships in the workplace and community, the nation and international community, and with nature.
Eisler’s thesis is that the personal growth and transformation so many people seek in workshops, therapy, 12-step meetings, or myriad other ways, ultimately requires a more sweeping cultural transformation. But that cultural transformation is itself facilitated by the hard work of personal growth. So it’s not an either-or situation, rather one of dynamic and dialectical interaction between the two. Culture remains fluid and ever evolving, and progress is measured in both the small, incremental steps taken by individuals in their private lives and in the more sweeping, punctuated leaps offered by mass social movements.
The Virtues of Inner & Outer Work
Understandably, some people will say, "Well, there is just so much trouble in the world, it’s overwhelming. It’s all I can do to focus on my own small corner of things, do the best I can, and pray that the crazy world out there doesn’t intrude too much on my plans."
Unfortunately, there is not only irony to this way of thinking, but absurdity. As millions of people try living healthier lifestyles, Eisler reminds us, huge profits are being made from an economic system that exposes us to pesticides and petrochemicals, promotes junk food and cigarettes, and equates health care with overemphasis on high-profit prescription drugs. Also, our culture is cluttered with a backdrop of noise and insipid commercial entertainment, frenetic advertising, and the toxic notion that success and happiness equal the ability to buy, buy, and buy some more.
Meanwhile, "responsible" politicians (read: privileged, short-sighted people contentedly invested in the status quo) tell us not to worry about global warming, dismissing credible scientific reports that the phenomenon threatens future severe water shortages, famines, droughts and other consequences. They do tell us to worry about future terror attacks, as well they should, since their own long-standing foreign policies of support for corrupt, authoritarian (but pro U.S. oil policy!) governments are at the root of much historic "anti-Americanism."
I had the opportunity to participate in some conversations with Eisler while she was writing The Power of Partnership, and I recall our discussion of one publisher’s unfortunate advertisement for the spiritual program, "A Course In Miracles." "Seek not to change the world, but to change your mind about the world," the advertisement declared.
She reminded me that this was actually a very old spiritual notion found among many religious traditions. Yet she points out in her book that if we are to have a richer, more integrated spirituality in our day-to-day living, it’s vital that we do both the inner and outer work.
Eisler’s philosophy carries a dramatic impetus when she discusses her childhood. As a young girl, Eisler’s own family was targeted by Nazi thugs in her native Austria. I can only imagine what European anti-fascist resistance fighters would have thought about a spiritual teaching that counseled individuals to just change their minds about fascism, to make their mental peace with the, then unfolding, Holocaust.
Distorted Concepts of Power
Eisler’s conceptual framework views human relations through the prism of two co-existing and conflicting models of human relations, the "dominator" model and the "partnership" model. The former is based on a distorted concept of power, defined by political, social, or personal control over people’s lives based on the capacity to instill fear, pain, and the threat of violence or death.
She says we can do better, and I agree. The partnership model deals with the biology of love and human solidarity instinctive to our species. However, she says, it is too often driven underground by the relentless hammer of oppressive political and economic systems and their cultural reverberations.
But there is solid ground for optimism. The Power of Partnership reminds us that the stronger each of us is mentally, physically, and spiritually, then the better we know ourselves. Hence, the more we can contribute to a better world for everyone. I especially appreciate Eisler’s insight on matters of sexuality and rejection of gender stereotypes. In their innate humanity, men and women are more alike than they are different, she argues, although ingrained cultural scripts tell us otherwise, and are the genesis of much personal pain.
When a woman is assertive and logical, she is not, as some New Age Jungian thinking might suggest, accessing her "masculine" side. She is simply being herself. Likewise, a man who is gentle and caring is not more in touch with his "feminine" side; he’s just expressing one part of himself that the dominant culture happens to downplay. Here testosterone also gets a poor review as a cause of male violence.
What it’s all about is learning to be fully human, fully alive.
The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life, by Riane Eisler (New World Library, 2002). $14.95, 280 pages.
Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.