Eisler makes another very significant point -- one which has far-reaching implications: "One of the most important lessons to be learned from the rise of modern totalitarianism is that it can be a fatal error to underestimate the power of myth."
Here Eisler joins forces with many other social scientists who now acknowledge that human beings appear to have a built-in need for a system of "stories" and symbols. As Victor Frankl (1963), a psychiatrist who was imprisoned for three years in Auschwitz has said: we carry within us a hunger for meaning and purpose, and a yearning to satisfy it: "Man's search for meaning, stated Frankl , is a primary force in his life (and not a secondary drive)."
Unfortunately, this very drive - precisely because it is so fundamental to us - is vulnerable to manipulation. We will return later to briefly examine some of the ways in which public support for authoritarian political agendas can be generated. What is highlighted here is simply the strength of our inner "will to meaning," which, as Eisler has noted is, "seemingly beyond the power of any rationalistic or logical system to provide."
Eisler offers a precise assessment of humanity's actual situation at this time: the reality is, she forcefully asserts (and I am in wholehearted agreement with her on this point), that totalitarians and would-be totalitarians "still block our cultural evolution at every point today, aided by both old and new androcratic myths."
E isler presents a contemporary overview of archeological data gathered from excavations of Neolithic human communities (ca. 10,000 BC); in her reassessment Eisler argues that a substantial amount evidence now exists which suggests that in prior eras a "partnership" form of social organization was the norm.
The work of Maria Gimbutas, for example, has strongly indicated that southeastern Europe held a flourishing partnership civilization from 6500 to 3500 BC. Similar to the form of Neolithic groups found in Crete, it would seem that the people of Old Europe developed complex religious, governmental, and economic systems without rigid sexual or class hierarchies. Women held high positions in the social order; between the sexes a basically egalitarian relationship prevailed --one, which indicated a division of labor, but not the superiority of either sex. Parallel to evidence of such egalitarian cultures in Crete and Catal Huyuk (in what is now Turkey), there is much to suggest active trading, but little to be found which suggests military weaponry or fortifications.
In a sweeping turn of events (over several millennia), early partnership societies may have been overrun and conquered by nomadic bands, whose own mode of social organization was based on the dominator model. Raids grew into full-scale invasions"until, some four thousand years ago, the world historic defeat of partnership culture was complete.
Eisler stresses that a fundamental characteristic of the conquering civilization was that it valued the destructive power of the blade: "[The invaders] characteristically acquired wealth, not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction."
Bly (1996) and Slater (1991) have proposed a contrasting hypothesis for the origins of the authoritarian form of social organization, which emerged at this time. Both have looked to the transitional period some 5-6 thousand years ago when gathering and hunting gave way to agriculture and the domestication of animals - a time when humanity, in a wide variety of locations across the globe, glimpsed the possibility of controlling and manipulating nature. Bly provides this image: we began to realize that nature could be tamed"and soon, "the health of cities depended on training wheat or barley to grow in huge fields alone whether it wanted to or not." As the centuries progressed humanity witnessed the emergence of kings, nation-states, social classes, standing armies, and slavery. One can imagine the grand evolution of a form of "civilization;" a decisive historic leap from the Neolithic tribal community to a centralized state organization, which manifested in the birth of "cities" capable of dominating and ordering a whole river valley.
What was the purpose of these new forms of organization: fixed vertical hierarchies of status, and rigid systems of control, backed by coercive power? According to Slater, nothing less than the management of enslaved tribes who would not voluntarily participate in the society of their conquerors.
Slater argues that authoritarianism is a male creation, founded in war. Since women play such a small part in war, their position underwent a sharp decline. Soon they were at the "bottom" of society; as Slater notes, even the "lowest" male could be a dictator in his own home.
"Perhaps the males in some communities became intoxicated with the power potential of animal breeding" and took to a more bellicose life. Whatever the causes, authoritarianism began to appear as a dominant social form in many parts of the world 5 or 6,000 years ago - in the Far East, North Africa, India, and the Middle East - and has continued to be the prevailing mega-culture ever since, spreading to Europe, Africa, Meso-America and most of Asia. We begin to find kings, social classes, slaves, standing armies, weaponry, torture, and human sacrifice. Gods are put over goddesses, wives begin to pay deference to husbands and sons to their fathers.
In any case Eisler believes that the frank reality is this: androcacy, which she proposes as an alternative to the more dated term "patriarchy," (and defines as a social system ruled through force or threat of force by men) cannot meet today's central human tasks - the survival of our species and the development of our unique potentials. She argues that it cannot meet this requirement precisely because of its "inbuilt emphasis on the technologies of destruction [and] its dependence on violence for social control."
In this light the latest few U.S. presidential elections are exemplary indeed. The nation's "conservative" (or "regressive" -- a term I prefer) party managed to ascend to power through an intriguing series of calculated maneuvers by which they turned to their advantage more ambiguous events (including serious problems with voting machines in what came to be the result-determining states.
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