Eisler and hope for peace

I've been working on a post for days here, and I can't quite get what I want to say to untangle itself. It's been rolling around in my head for a while. It's become like a rock rolling down a perpetually steepening slope.

I've been reading as much as I can get my hands on by social scientist, author, and one of my new favorite scholars, Riane Eisler.

It's been good medicine after a lot of hard world news recently, and a lot of reading and thinking about violence, particularly about violence against the most vulnerable.

In Eisler's acceptance speech for the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award she talks of spiritual courage, "We've been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love." This is the kind of courage I am trying to have. To put it in the simplest of terms, it is hard.

We are all trying to do what's right. I believe that. It's what I see when I can step away from my ego, away from my fear, away from my anger. We are all trying. We are all doing our best.

But our best, right now, isn't working.

We live in a violent world. It's something I've been struggling to understand, something I've been struggling to see through to the heart of. We have a justice system that is brutal and deeply classist and racist, a social structure that allows for people to own mansions and jets and yachts while there are children and families starving and sleeping on the streets; we have a culture so permeated with violence, that we hardly notice our youth playing video games designed to numb soldiers to the brutalities of combat. We live in an ever-increasingly militarized world. We hear about child suicides in response to 'bullying' (though let's be honest and call it what it is, gay-bashing). The political climate and rhetoric in this country are getting more heated, more polarized, and increasingly more violent. Just last week, a 22-year-old young man, aiming for a congresswoman, shocked us all by shooting into a crowd, wounding 13 and killing 6.

It seems everywhere you look, someone is lashing out violently, lashing out in fear. Violence is a response to feeling threatened, a way to defend something or someone. Sometimes it is a belief, sometimes it is an idea or ideal, sometimes it is a person, sometimes—and I'm afraid more often than not—it is in defense of a hierarchical structure of dominance.

Back to Eisler, because she is giving me hope. She points to the connections that I have been seeing, and I feel such a huge relief wash over me when I read her words. Someone is doing this work. Someone else is talking about the intricate web of interconnection between social policy, international relations, domestic relationships, parenting, and economic and ecological health. The connection is in two underlying social categories: a domination system and a partnership system:

In the domination model, somebody has to be on the top and somebody has to be on the bottom. Those on top control those below them... Families and societies are based on control that is explicitly or implicitly backed up by guilt, fear, and force... In contrast, the partnership model supports mutually respectful and caring relations. Because there is no need to maintain rigid rankings of control, there is no built-in need for abuse or violence.

No built-in need for abuse or violence. Power, then, "is exercised in ways that empower rather than disempower others."

The current political climate is a clear indicator of a society built on the domination model—we must destroy our enemies, rise to the top, subjugate the 'other'—but the rhetoric of leadership that is slowly taking hold is one of the partnership model. The best leaders inspire not followers, but more leaders. When we empower others to act on their best selves, we can shift the thinking. When we stop the cycle of domination—in our families, in our relationships, and in our communities, we create the opportunity for a better way.