DIANE: But I want to make a distinction here. Cultural transformation theory deals with cultural evolution. Also, we tend to think of evolution as a linear upward movement. But not even biological evolution is like that. And certainly not cultural evolution or technological evolution.
For example, if you look at technology, Minoan Crete (which was one of the last known prehistoric societies orienting largely to the partnership model) had very advanced technology, including indoor plumbing. This got lost until the Romans. Then it got lost again until very recent times. There may be a striving in our species towards ever higher cultural and technological development, but that striving will have to contend with the fact that there are other movements going on.
What cultural transformation theory posits, in a nutshell, is that the original thrust of our cultural evolution, the first civilizations, developed in areas where the earth was hospitable, fertile. As we began to develop agriculture, in the mainstream of our cultural evolution, we moved in a partnership direction.
But the evidence indicates that there was in our prehistory a period of tremendous system disequilibrium, when there was a fundamental shift in direction. We are now learning from non-linear and chaos theory that from the fringes of a system you can have a peripheral invader that comes in and changes the whole structure very quickly--what seems to be a small perturbation, in terms of Prigogine's language. These small perturbations become nucleations for a new system.
The same process seems to have occurred in our cultural evolution. There were peripheral invaders that during our prehistory came in from the barren steppes of the north and the arid deserts of the south and we saw a shift toward the dominator model of society. And for five thousand years we've been on this course. I think of it sometimes as a dominator detour. But the dominator model clearly is a choice for us as a species.
Now, as we approach the twenty-first century, we are in another period of tremendous systems disequilibrium. Nothing less than our survival as a species is now animating a very powerful partnership thrust.
Again it's from the fringes, from the periphery of the system, that so-called leading-edge thinkers, theorists, and researchers, the leaders in the so-called new consciousness, are emerging. But the dominator system is still very entrenched.
However, we wouldn't be talking here right now if there weren't already a lot of changed consciousness. We have an opportunity now, in this period of great system disequilibrium, for another shift. We're already on the road towards a partnership society. But the question is: can we complete that shift in time? One of my findings is that at a certain level of technological development the dominator system literally goes into self-destruct. The blade is the nuclear bomb. Even nature is rebelling against man's conquest of nature in acid rain, in air and water pollution. The message is clear: it is as if nature were saying to us, you either reconnect with your ancient partnership roots, or I'll find myself another species, perhaps another planet. Because we're doing so much intrinsic damage.
RMN: There's an ideology in current circulation that humanity is evolving toward a mutual expression of agape or fraternal, unconditional love, from eros, the kind of love associated with desire and sexuality, and that we are presently experiencing a transitional stage. What are your thoughts on this?
RIANE: Love has been one of the most abused and co-opted terms in dominator culture. It's interesting you use the word fraternal, as we are used to being so very male-centered. You know, fraternal is brotherhood. I think that even our language has conspired against us, because it's been a language that, to a very large extent, came out of a dominator or androcratic system. So I always make the point that what we're talking about is really sisterly and brotherly love.
RMN: I was thinking more in terms of like fraternal twins.
RIANE: It's very difficult. David and I deal with that in The Partnership Way, the new book we've written together in response to the many people who asked for tools to help accelerate the shift from a dominator to a partnership world. It's very hard, because we're all so used to dominator language. But part of our new consciousness for the twenty-first century is to free ourselves from the traps of that dominator language, so we don't, for example, continue to say "mankind" or "he," rather than "she or he." To get away from always the male in front, I have started to put "she" in front, rather than "he or she." Until we develop a gender inclusive pronoun.
DAVID L: Yes, that's a good example of what's going on in people's minds when they're captives of a dominator system. In other words, you have this false dichotomy between eros and agape. You have this idea that sex, eros, lust--all that is bad. And there is this more lofty, more saintly, more spiritual alternative, which is tied up with brotherhood and the love of humanity. This false dichotomy opens the way for pornography and many other bad things that keep us trapped. The hope for the twenty-first century is not to have a dichotomy between the two, but rather a good working relationship. In other words, an enjoyment of the fact that we have a body that has sexual identity, sexual capacities, a body and spirit that can relate to other people, either sexually, or in other forms of love, other forms of linking.
RMN: Right...well you've already anticipated the next question.
RIANE: I'd like to stay with that question a minute. When I was talking about the word fraternal, I was also going to make the point that when we think of brotherly love, fraternal love, which is the way agape has been conventionally defined, we say that's good. But that's love between men. That's the semantic implication of it. It implies that erotic love, the kind of love that is characteristic of the relationship between women and men, is inferior.
In line with what David is saying, I agree that that is a false dichotomy. If we go back and look at earlier partnership-oriented societies, we see that they do not make that spurious distinction that we have been taught to make between the spiritual and the natural, between spirit and nature.
In their iconography, nature is sacred. Now that's one of the biggest lessons for us, in terms of ecological consciousness. Because if we don't understand that the earth, the sky, the world, is sacred, that there is something askew about this myth of man and spirituality being above woman and nature, we're just going to keep destroying our planet. This is part of the dominator problem. I also believe that agape can in fact be a very important component in sexual love, in the sense of our bondedness, of our connectedness. So it isn't like here's one category, and there's another category.
I think some of the trends we're seeing today, where women and men are becoming loving friends to each other, as well as sexual partners, these are very important partnership trends. It used to be that, if you're a man, you have a wife who takes care of your household, you have a mistress with whom you have sex, and you have friends who are men. That whole schizophrenic thing is changing, so that there's truly friendship between women and men more as the norm. I see that as part of the movement toward integration, toward wholeness, towards healing and partnership.
RMN: Religion and sexuality have often been united in many pagan cultures-the Celts, Babylonians, the art of Tantra all combined religious and sexual ecstasy. Since then religions like Islam, Christianity, and Judaism have all attempted to separate the two-with often disastrous pathological effects. How do you see religion and sexuality co-evolving in the future?
RIANE: I believe that some of the things that you see in Tantra are rooted in this more partnership-oriented early spirituality, but they got very distorted. What I'm saying is that, again, I don't see a fundamental split between Eastern and Western. I see that most world religions today represent degrees of dominator overlay, covering and often distorting a partnership core. Of course, in the fundamentalist Christian and Moslem sects, it's horrendous. Whatever partnership core of spirituality was left is practically non-existent, because it's so encrusted, so crudded up by this dominator overlay.
Like the attitude that sex and woman are inherently evil and dangerous. That is a complete r
eversal of the earlier belief system, where woman and sexuality were central. What was celebrated in the earlier more partnership-oriented religion was the power to give life, to sustain life, to enhance life, to give pleasure, rather than pain. It was recognized that we all die, and the so-called "chtonic" or underground aspect of the Goddess was therefore also recognized, as these people believed that all of life came from the womb of the Goddess (the Earth), to then at death (like the cycles of vegetation) again return to her womb to be reborn. For example, in the Paleolithic, people worshipped in caves, which were symbols of the return to the womb, and there were I am sure important rites relating to this great mystery of birth, sex, death, and, in terms of their belief system, rebirth.
I should add that these people understood that it takes both the female and the male to give life--in other words that they understood and appreciated the role of sex as part of the life force. For example, in Catal Huyuk (the largest early agrarian or Neolithic site discovered to date) there is a sculpture of a woman and a man embracing, and right next to them, a woman with a child--the product of their union.
I mention this, because there are still people who believe that the moment that men discovered they also had life-giving powers, they were such brutes that they immediately enslaved women, and that this is how the shift to male dominant societies happened. (Of course that is really a dominator assumption about human nature, particularly male nature, that we are inherently evil.)
In relation to your question about religion and sexuality co-evolving in the future, I think that it is not coincidental that there is today so much interest in mystical religions. Because the way I look at mystical traditions is partly as remnants of the earlier more partnership-oriented religion, where sex and women were revered. But then a very sad thing happened. The original intent probably was forgotten, and, as in Tantric yoga (where female sexuality is still seen as the source of mystical illumination), these mystical religions also became very male centered--and thus distorted.
Now our job in developing a truly new consciousness, a new spirituality for the twenty-first century, is to clarify that, to understand that even the mystical traditions are out of balance, to restore that balance and get back to the hidden partnership core. And we now have the archeological data to help us do this, and that's tremendously exciting.
I think that it is a mistake to say, "The Eastern is terrific, and the Western is bad." If we are going to have a partnership consciousness in the twenty-first century, we have to unravel and reweave just about everything.
DAVID L: A new book I'm working on deals with a crucial aspect of this consciousness, moral sensitivity. I believe it sheds light on this basic question about the separation of religion and sex, spirit and nature. I'm taking a new look at the founders of the scientific study of moral sensitivity-Immanuel Kant, Marx, Engels, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, moving into current times, including the key work of Carol Gilligan, Marija Gimbutas, and Riane bearing on moral sensitivity.
Out of this is emerging a new theory of moral sensitivity as an organic process. In other words, moral sensitivity has mainly been seen in terms of socialization, or conditioning-something imposed upon this lower organism. We are seen as animals who have to be stuffed with this moral sensitivity which comes from some higher mysticism. What I'm showing is that moral sensitivity arises out of the organism, developing through evolution. What I'm convinced will be part of the consciousness of the twenty-first century is this understanding that morality, that moral sensitivity, is not an "add-on." It develops out of nature. It also has sexual roots. Freud actually had this insight, but typically, as a captive of the dominator system, he and his insight were completely screwed up and distorted--the whole Oedipus complex thing, the primal hoard, killing of the father, and so on.
RIANE: I think that if we talk about sexuality, the Oedipus complex, we see that Freud very accurately described the dominator psyche--or rather, the male dominator psyche. Unfortunately he went around saying it's the human psyche, and people believed him.
Now we're moving away from that. Maslow and a lot of feminist psychologists emphasize human growth needs, not so much what Maslow called defense needs. And believe me, in a dominator system defense needs are central. It's constructed so that there is constant war, even between the female and male halves of the human species. If you can't even trust the person you have the most intimate relationship with, how in the world are you ever going to have a harmonious relationship with people of a different color, or of a different belief system?
Sexuality has been distorted, beginning with this idea that woman is an object. Unfortunately, we see that in both Eastern and Western cultures. I can't stress this point enough in terms of twenty-first century spirituality, and it's hard for some people who have been very attracted by some of the Eastern disciplines, precisely because some of that old partnership core is, like a thread, still a little bit more visible. But look at Buddhism. Look at Hinduism. Look at how dominator-oriented those systems really are. Not all of the sects, of course, but, for example, this whole idea of the Zen master who beats his disciples to "enlighten" them-it really is a dominator approach. Not that there haven't been survivals of ancient partnership-oriented wisdoms in Eastern traditions. But superimposed on them are dominator religious teachings.
In Hinduism you have the caste system, and its justification of brutality by claiming that it's your karma to be of the lower despised caste and to suffer at the hands of the higher castes. If it's your karma, why change society? It's just a way of maintaining a dominator system. Like the Judeo-Christian idea that an inscrutable male God has decreed that we suffer in punishment for disobeying his orders and that all that matters is salvation in a far away heaven, rather than what happens here on earth. If you can't change misery, oppression, and exploitation because it's divinely ordained, why bother? That's how these religions have been used against us.
Getting back to sexuality, I think one of the great tasks for the twenty-first century is precisely the reclamation of our uniquely human sexuality, which is not only reproduction-oriented, it is also pleasure-oriented, ecstatically oriented, as in what we today call the pleasure bond.
It's very interesting that when you talk to women, they're often still hanging on to this earlier view of sexuality. It isn't this idea of conquest or scoring, as in the dominator male model of sex. It's the intimacy, the bonding, the sense of connectedness that they want. The ancients recognized that this intimacy, and this pleasure, were divine gifts, the gifts of the Goddess. To them sexuality was sacred.
Contrast that with the dominator view that equates sex with men's domination and humiliation and possession---and often brutalization and even killing-of women, with the dehumanized images of women and of women's bodies in pornography and advertising. Small wonder there is so much male violence against women! And this of course is not unrelated to the dominator religious teachings that women (and sex) are evil, that really "good" or saintly men do not have intimate sexual contact with women and the dominator ideal that "real" men only do so when they're clearly dominant, and thus won't be tainted by the inferior "feminine."
RMN: Do you feel that polytheism is more generally associated with the feminine principle, and monotheism with the masculine principle? How do you think this applies to the dominator/partnership model?
RIANE: I don't think that polytheism is necessarily more associated with the feminine principle. But let me try to untangle something about the feminine and the masculine principle first, may I? In my work I stress that the way we define masculinity and femininity is to a very large extent an artificial construct that has arisen primarily out of a dominator society.
We are just beginning to understand, for example, that this idea that the yin, the feminine, is passive and pallid is nonsense. One of the themes in earlier religion was the fire, the shamanistic fire of the priestesses, and the active creative sexuality of the Goddess. In fact some of the Hindu Tantric tradition
has that in it still.
The idea that there is no contemplative element in the masculine, no caring element; that to be masculine is to be assertive, aggressive, and conquering is also a distortion.
So talking of the feminine and masculine principle is useful at this point because people make certain associations of clusters of human qualities with them. But I'm hoping that--as a new consciousness for the twenty-first century really develops--we will find other names for these qualities that are essentially gender-neutral qualities, like being active or passive, or being caring and nonviolent or aggressive and violent.
Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… Page 7