NURTURING OUR HUMANITY

The central message of this hugely important and widely referenced book could not be more timely. It builds on Riane's earlier work on dominator and partnership societies going back over 30 years to the first publication of The Chalice and the Blade. The resurgence of authoritarian regimes is a regress to old dominator patterns at precisely the time when we need to be making a worldwide transition to humane partnership and repudiating the flawed ideology insisting that we are hardwired only for selfishness, violence and greed. The truth of the matter is that we are also hardwired for empathy, care and compassion and that our culture and upbringing fundamentally influence the relative predominance of one mode or the other. We can come to understand this more thoroughly through relational dynamics and by using what the book calls the Biocultural Partnership – Domination Lens as an analytical tool.

From an evolutionary point of view, books like The Selfish Gene support a deterministic view based on the dominator assumption and therefore have problems explaining altruism on the basis of their incomplete and one-sided approach. The evidence presented in this book demonstrates that we have 'also evolved powerful capacities, even proclivities, for empathy, equity, helping, caring, and various other prosocial acts.' (p. 28) Nor are these qualities extrinsic, but rather they are actually embedded in the brain's neurophysiology, as a chapter on this subject amply demonstrates. Young children who suffer from lack of love and abuse show that quality of nurturance directly affects the development of neural pathways in terms of feeling safe or threatened. This message is reinforced by recent findings in epigenetics and gene expression in relation to cultural and family conditions. As the authors point out, 'families in domination systems typically are authoritarian and male-dominated, with stressful and punitive childrearing', a state that can be tragically self-perpetuating. The fact that our brain is flexible means that there is a 'dynamic biocultural interaction between genes and experience in which culture, as well as our human capacity for creativity, must be taken into account' - as the work of the psychologist Paul Gilbert on compassion has also shown.

The chapter on the benefits of partnership and the costs of domination spells out the social consequences of both systems. Dominator systems are typified by top-down authoritarian rule in families and society more generally; subordination of women to men with corresponding valuing of stereotypically 'masculine' characteristics; a high degree of institutionalised violence maintained through fear and force; and a belief that domination rankings are natural and the use of violence to impose or maintain them is normal and moral (p. 282). In contrast, partnership societies are more democratic and egalitarian, they value men and women equally, embodying stereotypically 'feminine' characteristics of caring and nonviolence, promoting these in social life and relationships and maintaining that mutual respect and accountability are natural. The book gives a number of examples of societies on different parts of the dominator – partnership spectrum, with Nordic countries on the latter end and the Maasai warriors and the Taliban on the former. In this respect, it is interesting to reflect that the underlying problem in fundamentalism is in fact its dominator orientation, which one can also see reflected in conservative US politics. Dominator societies are also associated with the worst violence against children in terms of sexual abuse, child marriage, child sex trade and sexual slavery, female genital mutilation, forced child labour and violence against children in schools and homes.

After a chapter on the original partnership societies and a consideration that we can choose to contract or expand our social consciousness, there is a fascinating discussion of touch, intimacy and sexuality in partnership and domination environments. In dominator systems, coercive and hurtful touch is associated with upbringing and sexual relations, reinforced in Christian history by negative attitudes towards women and the body. All this underlines the importance of making fundamental changes to gender and parent-child relations. The authors also discuss the eroticisation of violence and the deadening of empathy, with a special note on the impact of digital media on touch, intimacy and sexuality. These models also have profound implications for socialisation and therefore emotional patterning; in particular, violence is integral to male socialisation in dominated societies where it is also considered necessary to maintain social order, a state of affairs that only serves to perpetuate warfare and terrorism.

Reading this book and adopting the Biocultural Domination – Partnership Lens makes one acutely aware of the fundamental significance of these patterns, and therefore how crucial and powerful our orientation and choices are. This also means realising the extent of our own cultural conditioning and assumptions about what is natural, as also reflected in our religious and scientific institutions. There is a strong cultural push towards partnership, but an equal reactionary resistance from the dominator institutions, reinforced by their outmoded conceptions of human nature. In the last chapter on a new beginning, the authors summarise their thesis and put forward four interrelated cornerstones: childhood and education, gender and equality, an economics of caring, and transformation of narratives and language, which also means a raising of awareness and a corresponding development of understanding. Adoption of a partnership orientation is also critical to the future of science and technology, which is currently dominated by a culturally inherited manipulator mentality, also present in our relationship with the natural world. I urge you to read this seminal cultural contribution for yourselves.