How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives and Future
This Global Read with author Riane Eisler was held October 21, 2020
Watch a recording of the program here
Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings--largely overlooked--from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system.
Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.
About the Author
Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, attorney, consultant, and speaker whose work has transformed organizations, policies, and people worldwide. Her book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future(co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press 2019) shows how to construct a more equitable, sustainable, and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination.
Dr. Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), dedicated to research and education, and Editor-in-Chief of theInterdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, an online peer-reviewed journal at the University of Minnesota that was inspired by her work. She keynotes conferences nationally and internationally, addressed the United Nations General Assembly, the U.S. Department of State, and Congressional briefings, and speaks at corporations and universities on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.
Eisler was a child refugee from Nazi Europe, and that experience eventually led to her multidisciplinary re-examination of human societies and human possibilities. She is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 27 foreign editions and 57 U.S. printings, the first book reporting her findings. Her book on economics, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, was hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking.” Other books drawing from Eisler’s research include her award-winning Tomorrow’s Children, Sacred Pleasure, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, statistically documenting the key role of women’s status in a nation’s quality of life. Her earlier Equal Rights Handbook was the only mass paperback on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.
She has taught at UCLA, CIIS, and the University of Alabama, and has written over 500 articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, The Christian Science Monitor, Challenge, and UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, Human Rights Quarterly, International Journal of Women's Studies, Business Insider, Quartz, and the World Encyclopedia of Peace, as well as chapters for books published by trade and university presses (e.g., Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford University).
Through the Center for Partnership Studies’ Caring Economy Campaign she developed new metrics demonstrating the economic value of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and of caring for nature, now being condensed and updated into a Social Wealth Index to provide a concise guide to business and government in our post-industrial era. She pioneered the expansion of human rights to include the majority of humanity: women and children. Her research provides a new perspective on our past, present, and possibilities for the future, including a new social and political agenda for building a more humane and environmentally sustainable world.
Eisler is the only woman among 20 major thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary PhDs, the Nuclear Age Peace Leadership Award, the Feminist Pioneer award, and inclusion in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of twenty leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
For more information, see www.rianeeisler.com & www.centerforpartnership.org
About the Host
Donna Mills lives in the aesthetically stunning Pacific Northwest, specifically in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. She is a woman committed to all things that elevate human consciousness. She is a practitioner of the healing arts, an advocate for civil conversations, and a community educator. She is the founder of HumanWell Integrative Healing and Wellness where she sees private clients healing through trauma and grief.
On the consulting side of HumanWell she designs integrative workplace wellness programs for large and small businesses. The name HumanWell was created out of her unwavering need to know “How do we human well? We can see where we are missing the mark in society, but where and how are we getting it right?”
Connect with Donna on social media Facebook - Instagram
← Go back Next page →
