The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Security in the Service of Life

  The society that honors only the masculine principle traps itself in a destructive cycle of predatory competition and violence. The society that honors only the feminine principle invites predation by societies organized exclusively on the masculine principle. A viable society must have the capacity to defend its integrity against predators of both domestic and foreign origin.

  Societies that successfully balance the feminine and masculine principles to the end of nurturing life will be more prosperous and more productive of technological advances suited to improving human well-being than societies that suppress the feminine principle and give priority to the destruction and domination of life. To bring the feminine and masculine principles into balance is a defining challenge of the cultural turning.

  Spiritual Identity

  The gender perspective also offers important insights into human spiritual expression and highlights the centrality of spirit and gender to our identity and sense of meaning, our contemporary politics, and the choices we now confront as a species. We humans are born with a capacity distinctive among Earth’s species to reflect on our own mortality, ponder the meaning of Creation, and ask “Why?” By our answers, we define ourselves, our possibilities, and our place in the cosmos.

  In our efforts to comprehend and communicate about the incomprehensible, we necessarily resort to familiar metaphors to describe that which is beyond description. Whatever our choice of metaphor, the image of the sacred evoked can never reveal more than a small fragment of the infinite. The choice of metaphor speaks volumes, however, about our political orientation and spiritual maturity.

  When women held significant power, they chose female deities represented by life-giving and nurturing images associated with the feminine. When men subordinated women, they also subordinated the life-nurturing female deities to violent male deities. A rendering of the 106divine as exclusively masculine or feminine diminishes the reality of the Spirit, which transcends gender.

  Matriarchy and patriarchy are both within the range of human possibility; neither one is the natural condition of human society. The challenge for the future, as Eisler suggests, is to move ahead to a society of gender equality beyond matriarchy, patriarchy, monarchy, and their other dominator equivalents. This understanding is foundational to our effort to become whole human beings and to create whole and balanced human societies reflective of the possibilities of an integral Spiritual Consciousness.

  HIS-STORY

  We humans live by the stories that define our origins and our nature. History as written by male historians has been quite literally his-story —the heroic story of male warriors, male kings, male presidents, male religious leaders, male philosophers, and male artists. From time to time his-story may include mention of a queen, an empress, a Joan of Arc, a female writer, poet, or artist presented as aberrant deviations from the normal course of events. Raised on his-stories, we grow up taking for granted that it is the natural place of men to rule and women to submit.

  Similarly, most of his-story consists of stories of one imperial ruler conquering another or one elite faction prevailing over another in a competition for power. We come to understand that competition, greed, and violence are simply the natural order and that, no matter how destructive they may be, they are the necessary drivers of technological and social progress. The “masculine” power to dominate and destroy is good and just; the feminine power to create life is dangerous and deceitful, a pathway to sin and self-destruction. To worship a male god is “pious.” To worship a female god is “pagan.”

  Contemporary feminist scholars challenge us with some audacious questions. Why should the power to take life rank above the power to create it? Why do we assume that the worship of a male god is more advanced than the worship of a female god?

  Much of what we have come to take for granted about ourselves is choice, not destiny. Whether or not the gendered perspective of Eisler and others is correct in every detail or was true of all early societies is 107less relevant than the deeper understanding that the gendered analysis gives us of the variety and possibility of the human experience.

  The gendered perspective invites us to open our minds to the possibility that greater participation of women in leadership positions is not only just but may also be essential to the process of freeing ourselves as a species from the grim self-limiting organizational calculus of Empire. In any event, opening our minds to the truth that the era of Empire is no more than a five-thousand-year blip in the four- to five-million-year arc of human learning about ourselves and our possibilities is an essential first step in the great work of our time.

  The early human experience offers a powerful reminder that we humans are a complex species with an extraordinary range of possibilities. One of history’s best-kept secrets is the evidence that the most significant advances on the path to the actualization of our distinctive humanity came during a period when human relationships with one another and Earth were in relative balance and people worshipped the nurturant power of the Goddess. The turn to Empire was in part a practical response to the need to bring order to relationships among strangers in the face of population growth. This is the perspective of scale. The turn to Empire was, at a deeper level, a consequence of the suppression of the generative power of the feminine by the dominator power of the masculine. This is the perspective of gender.

  The scale perspective and the gender perspective each point to important lessons for our time. The scale perspective points to the truth that equity and consensual decision making come most naturally in self-reliant communities of place in which people have enduring personal relationships of mutual trust and caring, and in which they control the resource base on which their livelihoods depend. The misguided turn to the dominator relations of Empire as a solution to demands for order in the face of population growth undermined the relationships of trust and caring essential to the realization of the fullness of our humanity and transferred resource control to an elite ruling class.

  The gender perspective points to the truth that the healthful and dynamic functioning of human society depends on balancing the generative 108and nurturant power associated with the feminine and the more assertive dominance power associated with the masculine. The era of Empire not only upset this balance but actively deprecated and denied the feminine, resulting in a violent human assault against life itself.

  Empire is a social pathology of some five thousand years in the making. To replace the life-destroying cultures and institutions of Empire with the life-serving cultures and institutions of Earth Community, we must recognize the enduring presence of Empire beneath the veneer of contemporary democratic institutions, the costs of Empire, and the dynamics of domination by which Empire creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of diminished human possibility. We must know our history.

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  CHAPTER 6

  Ancient Empire

  Spiritual leaders throughout the world knew that this time was coming—a time when all things feminine would be exploited, smashed, and destroyed, including all Mother Earth–based cultures, feminine-based spirituality, and women.… It is said that only when humans are open enough in the heart will there be the deep reconnection that allows a true sharing of the sacred and secret teachings.1

  Ilarion Merculief

  The widely accepted myth that imperial hegemony brings peace, stability, and well-run public services is pretty much just that—a myth. It has happened: Rome had a succession of five relatively wise and benevolent emperors over a period of eighty-four years, but examples in history are so rare as to be considered mainly curious aberrations. Wise benevolence is rarely a quality of those who achieve and hold positions of absolute power. Empire creates its own violence in the suppression of dissent, its internal intrigues for power, and its incessant wars to extend its dominion.

  Even as Empire invented the technologies to construct great works, it also invented the technologies to destroy them more
quickly and completely. Even more troublesome is Empire’s propensity to impose a cultural context that suppresses the development to maturity of the human consciousness.

  The enduring positive contributions to human betterment of five thousand years of Empire pale in significance against the contributions of pre-imperial societies and the technological advances brought forth as the democratic reforms of the twentieth century unleashed the creative potential of a substantial portion of the human population. In short, the benefits of Empire have been as overstated as its costs have been understated. Beneath Empire’s carefully constructed myth of beneficent progress lies a dark truth of five thousand years of diminished human progress.

  110 Asia, Africa, and South and Central America all had their ancient empires. Each fell into ruin, leaving little trace. The focus of my concern is on the ancient empires of the Middle East and Mediterranean and the modern empires of western Europe and North America to which they gave way, for these are the empires that have shaped the modern human experience and brought the species to the brink of self-destruction.

  The brief historical review that follows draws mostly from standard history texts and reference sources to highlight the realities of Empire that are commonly overshadowed by history’s untiring accounts of glorious battles, great kings, brave warriors, and imperial accomplishment.2 It reviews the rise and fall of the first of the great ancient city-state empires in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as they offer iconic examples of the structure and dynamics of imperial culture, economies, and political institutions. It also briefly visits the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, which elitists of our time look to as a model for the United States. Finally, it turns to the subsequent descent into the feudalism and religious conflict of Europe’s Middle Ages, which our own future may repeat if we leave the choices at hand to those who look to the Roman Empire as their model of governance.

  MESOPOTAMIA

  In mid-fortieth century BCE the peoples of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys were organized into twelve walled city-states, each surrounded by the villages to which it offered protection and from which it extracted the food surpluses essential to its sustenance. Each city worshipped its own deity, whose temple was the city’s central structure.

  Historians believe that initially the citizens of each of the twelve cities shared power more or less equitably and that women may have had the key roles in the affairs of the temples, which were centers of administrative and economic as well as religious power. To survive during hard times, free farmers placed themselves in debt to the temple, leading to a gradual transfer of land to the temples and ultimately the city-states. Over time, the temples came to own vast tracts of the best agricultural land and played a major role in both local and foreign trade—an early manifestation of the principle that in hard times the moneylenders win.

  The region had fertile soil, and its rivers provided an abundant and reliable water supply. A lack of rainfall during the main growing season, 111however, made large-scale irrigation a necessity, which led to a further centralization of administration. A lack of basic natural resources, including stone, minerals, and even trees, made long-distance trade a necessity and created the need for an organized military to secure trade routes that linked rival cities competing for distant resources. The need to maintain both irrigation and an organized military created the need to increase tax collections from free farmers and local artisans while exposing them to competition from subsidized imports. These dynamics contributed to a gradual consolidation of power under powerful kings and a displacement of the feminine by the masculine.

  Commerce and administration required written records, leading to the invention of cuneiform writing and the first schools —located in the temple precincts—in which prospective scribes were taught to read and write. This served both to centralize power and to give special advantage to those trained in this powerful technology.

  A gradual evolution in religious beliefs regarding the nature and power of the gods mirrored changes in the defining relationships of the society itself. In the earlier period, when people lived in a more intimate relationship with nature, they worshipped goddesses that represented the natural forces of sun, rain, wind, and fertility. Ishtar, the goddess of nature, the elements, and sexual love, was chief among them. With the advance of urban civilization and the rule of male kings, male gods with more human qualities—including the capacity to do both good and evil—gained prominence. As earthly kings became more powerful, Mesopotamia’s gods took on political characteristics, and notions of an omnipotent god who ruled over all others came to the fore.3

  As they consolidated their power, the kings of the rival city-states began to compete for dominance. The region was unified under a single king around 2800 BCE, but the competition for power continued, leaving the region divided and vulnerable to external conquerors. Over the centuries, succeeding imperial dynasties rose and fell. Some were the creations of foreign invaders and others of local revolts. The greatest of the rulers of this period set new standards for both grandeur and ruthless brutality as successive waves of invasion, revolt, and conquest built great cities, destroyed them, and rebuilt them again at an enormous cost in lives and resources.

  The Assyrians, who had settled in the northernmost portion of Mesopotamia, consolidated their rule over the region in 1225 BCE with the defeat of Babylon. To prevent the emergence of a prosperous and 112educated class that might challenge the arbitrary power of the king, the Assyrians mandated that only foreigners could engage in commercial activity. They also imposed the complete subjugation of women. Wives were decreed the property of their husbands. Men were allowed to take several wives and given the sole power of divorce. Married women were permitted to appear in public only with their faces veiled.4 The suppression of the feminine was complete. We know little of the life of slaves in this period except that they existed, had no rights whatsoever, and were subject to cruel mutilation as punishment for minor offenses.5

  The mythos of imperial splendor and accomplishment has a factual foundation. The Assyrians are properly celebrated for their exceptional engineering, artistic, intellectual, and botanical capacities and achieved grand works that are impressive even by contemporary standards. During the reign of Sennacherib (705–681 BCE) they built the city of Nineveh on the banks of the upper Tigris. Its great wall had a circumference of seven and a half miles and enclosed magnificent temples and a royal palace of seventy-one chambers. The area outside the wall featured orchards with rare trees and zoos with exotic animals brought from far lands. A great aqueduct brought fresh mountain water to the city from a distance of fifty miles. The city’s library was a repository of all the region’s learning and literature.

  The legendary grandeur of these early imperial city-states was of brief duration and came at the price of an equally legendary brutality. What Empire built, Empire also destroyed. When in 689 BCE Sennacherib suppressed a revolt in rival Babylon, another city of fabled splendor, he boasted, “I made Babylon’s destruction more complete than that by a flood.”6

  The frightful brutality of Assyria’s military campaigns was intended to instill abject terror in the hearts of its enemies, an early version of the military tactic of “shock and awe” implemented with bombs and rockets by the U.S. military in its 2003 invasion of these same ancient lands. By their own surviving records, the Assyrians skinned their enemies alive; impaled them on stakes; cut off ears, noses, and sex organs; and exhibited mutilated victims in cities that had not yet surrendered. The Assyrians accomplished their goal of instilling terror, but at the price of instilling an unrelenting hatred that led to a sustained and ultimately successful resistance.7 The mutilation of the innocents caused by modern weaponry is no less brutal and, as the aftermath of the U.S. shock 113and awe assault on Baghdad demonstrates, provokes the same response. How slow we are to learn!

  For reasons of prestige, Sennacherib’s son rebuilt Babylon soon after his father had destroyed it. By 651 BCE Babylon had again become
a center of revolt. Sennacherib’s grandson forced its surrender in 648 BCE, again destroying the city and slaughtering its citizens. In an echo of his grandfather, the grandson boasted that he cut their corpses into small pieces and fed them to dogs, pigs, and vultures. Again, terror fed hatred and resistance.8

  Hated by all around them, the brutal Assyrian military rule lasted less than a century. The people of southern Mesopotamia formed an alliance with an Indo-European tribe that held power in Iran. In 612 BCE, the alliance captured and laid waste to Nineveh and slaughtered its inhabitants, ending the Assyrian Empire and giving rise to a new Babylonian Empire. This pattern of successive waves of creation and destruction of human and natural potential would define the era of Empire for thousands of years to come.

  The positive accomplishments of Mesopotamian civilization included the construction of major irrigation works, the invention of the earliest forms of writing, wheeled transport, and the calendar. In later periods, the region made major contributions to mathematics and astronomy—plotting and predicting the movement of the stars and the planets.

  However, the early imperial civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and the eastern Mediterranean failed to maintain their early advantage because, in the words of Jared Diamond,”they committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base” as they cleared their forests for timber and agriculture. A combination of overgrazing and loss of forest cover led to soil erosion and the silting up of river valleys. Dependence on irrigation to bring parched lands into production created a buildup of salts in the soil. Once its soil could no longer sustain large population concentrations, the region fell into a decline from which it has never recovered.9 It was an early local version of the ecological suicide the human species is now committing on a global scale for the same reason: failure to consider the long-term consequences of short-term gains.