Quincey Tickner

By Riane Eisler for World Futures: The Journal of Global Education Publication. Published online: 12 Jul 2013.

A basic principle of systems theory is that if we do not look at the whole of a system, we cannot see the connections between its various components. This article describes the author’s personal and research journey developing a new method of inquiry and a new theory of cultural evolution that takes into account the whole of our history (including prehistory), the whole of our species (both its male and female halves), and the whole of social relations (from politics and economics to family and other intimate relations). It reveals connections and patterns not visible using smaller data bases and casts a new, more hopeful, light on our past, present, and the possibilities for our future.

Notes

1. Eisler, R. Human possibilities (work in progress).

2. These interactions have been described by Maturana and Varela as autopoiesis, by Prigogine and Stengers as auto- and cross-catalysis, and by Csanyi and Kampis’s concept of autogenesis.

3. There are in cultural systems feedback and feedforward loops, continual auto-catalytic and cross-catalytic processes that maintain the system’s basic character. I use the term “feedforward” in the sense of “top-down feedforward” proposed by Karl Pribram, rather than in the sense of the older “bottom-up feedforward,” such as the passage of a visual image from the retina to the cortex.

4. The categories democratic/authoritarian come closest to partnership and domination, but they are generally used only to describe political arrangements (the presence or absence of “free elections”), and are only occasionally used to also denote family structures. Moreover, they do not describe other key components of social systems, such as economics, religion, and education.

5. In their analysis of capitalism and socialism, Marx, and particularly Engels, noted what they called the first class oppression: that of women by men. But, except in some passages in Engel’s Origin of the Family and an occasional paragraph in Marx’s writings, they viewed this issue as a peripheral “woman question” rather than a key social issue.

6. Private communication from Peggy Reeves Sanday, January 30, 2002.

7. Eisler, R. Human possibilities.

8. Eisler, Loye, and Norgaard (1995). The nine measures used to assess the degree of gender equity were: the number of literate females for every 100 literate males; female life expectancy as a percentage of male life expectancy; the number of women for every 100 men in parliaments and other governing bodies; the number of females in secondary education for every 100 males; maternal mortality; contraceptive prevalence; access to abortion; and based on measures used by the Population Crisis Committee (now Population Action International), social equality for women and economic equality for women. The thirteen measures used to assess quality of life, were: overall life expectancy; human rights ratings; access to healthcare; access to clean water; literacy; infant mortality; number of refugees fleeing the country; the percentage of daily caloric requirements consumed; Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of wealth; the percentage of GDP distributed to the poorest 40 percent of households; the ratio of GDP going to the wealthiest versus the poorest 20 percent of the population; and as measures of environmental sensitivity, the percentage of forest habitat remaining, and compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. In exploring the relation between the gender equity and quality of life variables with descriptive, correlational, factor, and multiple regression analyses, the authors found a strong systemic correlation between these two measures. These findings were consistent with their hypothesis that increased equity for women is central to a higher quality of life for a country as a whole, and that gender inequity contracts the opportunities and capabilities, not only of women, but of the entire population. The link between gender equity and quality of life was confirmed at a very high level of statistical significance for correlational analysis. 61 correlations at the .001 level with 18 additional correlations at the .05 level were found, for a total of 79 significant correlations in the predicted direction. This link was further confirmed by factor analysis. High factor loadings for gender equity and quality of life variables accounted for 87.8 percent of the variance. Regression analysis, also yielded significant results. An R-square of .84, with statistical significance at the .0001 level, provided support for the hypothesis that gender equity is a strong indicator of the quality of life.

By Riane Eisler for Kosmos Journal Spring/Summer 2014

Can we build a world where our great potentials for consciousness, caring and creativity are realized? What would this more equitable, less violent world look like? How can we build it?

These questions animated my research over the past four decades. They arose very early in my life, when my parents and I narrowly escaped from Nazi Europe. Had we not been able to flee my native Vienna and later find refuge in Cuba, we would almost certainly have been killed in the Holocaust, as happened to most of my extended family.

As I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, I didn’t realize that studying social systems would become my life’s work. By the time I did, it was clear that our present course is not sustainable. In our time of nuclear and biological weapons, violence to settle international disputes can be disastrous for us all—as can our once hallowed ‘conquest of nature’ when advanced technologies are already causing environmental damage of unprecedented magnitude.

I saw that a grim future awaits my children—and all of us—unless there is transformative cultural change. But the critical issue addressed by my multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, historical study of human societiesisthis question: Transformation from what to what?

Not so long ago, many people thought that shifting from capitalism to communism would bring a more just, less violent society. But the communist revolutions in Russia and China brought further violence and injustice.

Today, many people believe that capitalism and democratic elections are the solution. But capitalism has not brought peace or equity: Hitler was democratically elected, and elections following the Arab Spring led to repressive Islamist regimes.

Others argue that returning to pre-scientific Western times or replacing Western secularism, science and technology with Eastern religions will cure our world’s ills. They ignore that the religious Middle Ages were brutally violent and repressive, that Eastern religions have helped perpetuate inequality and oppression, and that today’s fundamentalist religious cultures, both Eastern and Western, are behind some of our planet’s most serious problems.

All these approaches are based on old thinking—and, as Einstein observed, the same thinking that created our problems cannot solve them. As long as we look at societies from the perspective of conventional categories such as capitalist vs. socialist, Eastern vs. Western, religious vs. secular, or technologically developed vs. undeveloped, we cannot effect real cultural transformation. Indeed, history amply shows that societies in every one of these categories can be, and have been, repressive, unjust and violent.

This is why my re-examination of social systems transcends old social categories. It uses a new method of analysis (the study of relational dynamics) that draws from a larger database than conventional studies. It looks at a much larger, holistic picture that includes the whole of humanity, both its female and male halves; the whole of our lives, not only the ‘public’ sphere of politics and economics but where we all live, in our families and other intimate relations; and the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.

Looking at this more complete picture makes it possible to see interactive relationships or configurations that are not visible through the lenses of old social categories. There were no names for these social configurations, so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system.

By Riane Eisler for World Pulse Magazine

The time has come for our religious, political and grassroots leaders to make ending violence against women and children a priority.

By Riane Eisler and Daniel S. Levine for Brain and Mind 3: 9–52, 2002.
© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Abstract

This article develops a theory for how caring behavior fits into the makeup of humans and other mammals. Biochemical evidence for three major patterns of response to stressful or otherwise complex situations is reviewed. There is the classic fight-or-flight response; the dissociative response, involving emotional withdrawal and disengagement; and the bonding response, a variant of which Taylor et al. (2000) called tend-and-befriend. All three of these responses can be explained as adaptations that have been selected for in evolution and are shared between humans and other mammals. Yet each of us contains varying tendencies toward all of these responses.

How does development interact with genes to influence these tendencies?

How do individuals, societies, and institutions make choices between these types of responses?

We review the evidence, based on behavioral, lesion, single-cell, and brain imaging studies, for cortical-subcortical interactions involved in all three of these response types, and propose partial neural network models for some of these interactions. We propose that the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex mediates this choice process. This area of prefrontal cortex performs this mediation through its connections with areas of sensory and association cortex that represent social contexts or stimuli, and with areas of the hypothalamus, limbic system, and autonomic nervous system that represent emotional states or classes of response patterns.

The article concludes with implications of our theory for social interactions and institutions. We argue that despite the wide prevalence of fight-or-flight responses, the bonding, caring responses remain available. We show with historical and contemporary examples how social settings – whether in education, work places, families, politics, and informal social customs – can be designed to support and enhance the natural caring responses of the brain.

This is an excerpt of an article written by Riane Eisler and published in Huffington Post in September, 2008.

Our economic system needs a major overhaul. What we’re seeing today is how inefficient unregulated markets really are, just as we’ve seen that, rather than raining prosperity down on us, “trickle down economics” were a disaster. On the other hand, what’s needed is not shifting to socialism. Ironically, the same administration that screamed about creeping socialism at the mere mention of business regulations took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac. These huge enterprises are now state owned. If that’s not socialism, what is?

This crisis could have been avoided if the rules of the economic game were not slanted to protect uncaring and irresponsible business practices. Beyond the necessary government regulations dismantled by Republicans, who stubbornly refused to apply virtually any controls to granting credit and allowing credit trading by banks, are the basic rules driving our economic system which continue to promote rather than prevent uncaring and irresponsible behaviors. This again is behind the Bush Administration’s proposed 700 billion dollar bailout – in still another nationalizing of failing enterprises with taxpayers’ funds that should go to promote human welfare and environmental sustainability instead.
Insanity has been defined as continuing to do things that don’t make sense, that don’t achieve their stated goals, that cause misery and unhappiness.

So where do we go from here? First, let’s not let the government use failed economic measures of corporate welfare to put its finger in the bursting economic dike. We must urge Congress to instead enact measures that offer better protection from loss to people’s bank accounts, from foreclosures, and shores up small investments.

We invite you to read the rest of Riane Eisler’s Huffington Post article here.