CHAPTER EXCERPT

A Complex Problematique and Its Silenced Root

{From Chapter 1}

                                     "Patriarchy and misogyny persist in every major contemporary society

                                     [as perusing the daily news confirms]. From the Taliban in Afghanistan

                                     to Japanese men's repression of women, from male pro-life fanatics in

                                     the United States to the practice of bride burning in India, evidence for

                                     these invidious twins abounds. Wide swaths of Africa and the Islamic world

                                     still practice female genital mutilation. Forced prostitution is rife among

                                     the former Soviet republics, and sex slavery is an ugly fact of life from

                                     Saudi Arabia to Thailand.

                                     "Humanity staggers on like a person who has suffered a stroke that left

                                     half the body paralyzed. The masculine half of the body politic resists

                                     acknowledging the obvious: Disdaining, ignoring and dismissing its distaff half

                                     is extremely counter-productive. Until individuals, couples, and cultures

                                     can facilitate and appreciate the contributions of both halves of the human psyche,

                                     the human species will continue to be hobbled by this serious handicap. (1)

                                                                                                                                          — Leonard Shlain

THE MALAISE OF A CIVILIZATION IN CRISIS

That civilization is in crisis has become obvious. And yet this is not a new situation. Less than a century ago, in Freud's final book, Civilization and Its Discontents, he proposed that civilization's malaise was the inevitable consequence of its incompatibility with human nature, and therefore with health and happiness.

Over many years, Freud's pessimism has come under criticism — not only regarding what is possible for the future, but also mainly regarding the natural goodness of human beings. Yet as we enter the third millennium, we cannot help but appreciate the truth that his great prophetic mind perceived with a lucidity unshadowed by the sentimentalism of the common man: that civilization as we know it is incompatible with health, and will continue to be so in its current form.

Yes: Human nature — which mythic language wisely declares to have been created in God's image and likeness — is incompatible with civilization, which is intrinsically anti-instinctive and pathogenic. But also, no: for humanity will not be incapable of transcending the form of collective living that was adopted at the turn of the Bronze Age — a form that even now is transmitted through the generations to its descendants. And we have reason to hope that the implicit goodness of human nature — once it has been at least partially liberated from the prison of its blindness and millennial evil, and can leave its obsolete institutions and modes of thinking behind — may finally evolve towards a beneficial coexistence and actually find that happiness prophesied by the great spiritual traditions of antiquity.

As a professional dedicated to assisting the therapeutic and spiritual evolution of individuals, I have witnessed countless examples of how people embark on a process of transformation by becoming aware of themselves, aided by appropriate intention and effort. This process, given sufficient time and application, progressively deactivates the conditioned, pathogenic childhood personality. Beyond even that, it may lead to the emergence of a deeper level of awareness than that of thinking, emotions, desires, or sensations: a more profound awareness, in which the experience of being and the felt meaning of life have their foundation. Although this constitutes our true nature, in our so-called civilized condition it ordinarily lies in a darkened, or veiled, condition — as if asleep.

My experience as a therapist working with groups over the last three decades has nurtured not only my trust in the intrinsic goodness of humans and in the individual's possibility of leaving destructiveness behind, but also my hope in collective transformation. And now that humanity is undergoing a planetary crisis, I must admit to being apocalyptic — if by this one means a person who hopes that, in spite of the life-or-death dimension of our crisis, we have what we need within us to ensure that it will not be a fatal one.

Many civilizations have risen and faded away, as Arnold J. Toynbee has well argued, and others (like our own) have been transformed through something akin to hybridization. But there is yet to be a civilization that undergoes the death-and-rebirth process that we have come to recognize as the essence of individual transformation, as manifest through the experience of those who have completed it: the prophets, enlightened individuals, and mythic heroes. In light of this vision, let us hope that the decaying structure of Western Christian civilization learns to die well, so that the regeneration of our social body may take place under the best of possible conditions.

How can we not hope for such a collective death-and-rebirth, when the commercial interests of the powerful devastate our environment, our values, our quality of life, our education, our culture, and even life itself?

And how can we not hope that the destruction of life and the human mind, to date, will at least stimulate awareness, and thus accelerate a regenerative process — in the same way that diseases indirectly cause their own cure by stimulating the organism's defenses. Funny as it may sound, the California author and spiritual teacher, E. J. Gold, did not find it at all absurd to write (in a 1980s humor magazine), “As Brother Rabbit said, maybe civilization is nature's way of telling us to slow down.”

Yes, the rhythm of life speeds up as civilization advances. And it would seem that we have no more time left for listening to the voices of the past. The very rhythm of civilization's growth seems to be gathering speed, and we feel it sweep us away in its impetuous current. Civilization even seems to feed on our energies like a cancer, without delivering the satisfactions that we expected from its progress.

It was during the mid-1960s — a cultural turning point — that I first wrote about the twilight of patriarchal civilization. The rise of a new consciousness was in the foreground, expressed through therapeutic revolution, feminism, ecology, the defense of civil rights and democratic values, and other libertarian initiatives. At the same time, however, a cultural death was also taking place: the essence of the counter-culture involved the desire to leave behind old forms of life and obsolete solutions.

Yet the new anti-authoritarianism of the sixties seemed only the most recent stage of a revolutionary process that first began in the Renaissance, continued during the Reformation, and blossomed during the Enlightenment (with the weakening of the Old Regime, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the independence of the American colonies). This progression was to culminate in Nietzsche, whose statement “God is dead” reflected the quest for a spiritual truth beyond the forms and language of traditional religion.

However, it has only been since the 1980s that the darker aspect of our collective death-and-rebirth has emerged into the foreground. Indeed, this cultural death is evident not only in our loss of values and in the degradation of wisdom into mere information, but also in the generalized devaluation of our earlier points of reference. Much of the Western world's population is now disenchanted with governments, authorities, experts, ideologies, and even science and philosophy, not to mention religions. The cynicism of the times is mirrored in a total relativism that finds voice in the writings of the post-modern thinkers, who not only observe the world's disenchantment but also share in it. Surely, such total relativism has been a response to violence, stupidity, and injustice, and reflects a greater understanding of history. Perhaps it may even be viewed as a good thing, in light of our need to free ourselves from the chains of a past that still conditions us, even as we boast that we have left all ideology behind.

For it is evident that during the last few decades, when our collective situation has grown more critical than ever, the ideological pendulum has swung towards a new conservatism, in which conformity again prevails over the ever-rising popular impulse towards change. And although the societal illness continues, the dissonance between facts and opinions has lent it a new flavor: it deals with a vague malaise — a vague suspicion that we are sinking and there is nothing we can do about it.

Our civilization is indeed dying, at the same time that millions are spent on the art of distraction. The communications media is used to deceive us into feeling that everything is okay, and that our problems will be resolved via technology.

Yet more than just our civilization is threatened. If we persist in our way of living, over the course of a limited number of generations our abused planet will barely allow a small fraction of our present human population to survive. Still, we hardly react. Individual interests in profit seem to prevail, far beyond people's interest in the common good. “Every man for himself” is today's prevailing stance, as before an impending shipwreck.

I believe that much of our collective impotence derives from hopelessness. And this hopelessness, itself, derives from a lack of true perception. We do not see what lies at the heart of our problems — and, correspondingly, what we can do to remedy our critical predicament.

It is the contention of this book that the root of our social problems has not been properly understood, and that therefore politics is much like the field of medicine, before scientific discoveries were made enabling physicians to properly diagnose infectious diseases and prescribe the corresponding cures. To better explain what this analogy means, I invite you to turn with me now to a consideration of our multi-faceted problematique.(2)  This will provide a springboard for my thesis concerning the diagnosis of humanity's fundamental, yet obscured, social problem.

IN MEDIAS RES

“It is unforgivable that so many problems from the past are still with us, absorbing vast energies and resources desperately needed for nobler purposes,” said U Thant (then-Secretary-General of the United Nations) as early as 1970, on the occasion of that organization's twenty-fifth anniversary. After reviewing some of these “problems from the past” — such as the armaments race, racism, violations of human rights, and “ dreams of power and domination instead of fraternal coexistence ,” he observed that:

                                    While these antiquated concepts and attitudes persist, the rapid pace of

                                    change around us breeds new problems which cry for the world's collective

                                    attention and care: the increasing discrepancy between rich and poor nations,

                                    the scientific and technological gap, the population explosion, the

                                    deterioration of the environment, the urban proliferation, the drug problem,

                                    the alienation of youth, the excessive consumption of resources by

                                    insatiable societies and institutions. The very survival of a civilized and

                                    humane society seems to be at stake. (3)

In addition to these problems, another (later emphasized by the pioneering Club of Rome) has emerged in the modern world: in our contemporary scenario, the multiplicity of worldwide problems have such complex interrelations that the very measures which could solve any one of these inevitably lead to the aggravation of another. Even simply attending to one issue may involve a selective inattention to the rest.

It has been recognized that the situation requires an interdisciplinary approach, which has come into vogue worldwide. Yet beyond this, I believe it is important to attend to the heart of the macro-problem: the fundamental ill from which the diverse aspects of our problematique derive, in much the same way that different bodily symptoms are, at base, manifestations of the same disease.

Of course, there are those who think that we need not overcomplicate something that is really much simpler. Particularly from 1980 onwards, what could be called a “global capitalist empire” has been established under the banner of neo-liberalism, the result of which has been the catastrophic destruction of the environment and the increasing poverty of people, in direct correlation with the progressive wealth of nations.

In our day and age, as discussions increasingly turn to the subject of crisis, it is clear that the forces of international business and the power of money (4) hold sway over the political world and the sovereign states. Decisions concerning the well being of society are no longer in the hands of its heads of state. Instead, they largely hinge on big trans-national businesses, which operate with the sole aim of optimizing their profits. It would therefore be very tempting to say that our current disease is simply what ancient translations of the Gospel used to call Mammon. (These days, we speak of money; but earlier it was personified, as in the saying, “No man can serve two masters, both God and Mammon.”)

Indeed, one cannot serve both the cause of love and the cause of profit at the same time. However, I think that emphasizing the economic issue distracts us from the fact that the commercialization of the world — and of life — is only one facet of a more complex problematique . The whole of our main ills — including such excesses as violence, injustice, corruption, authoritarianism, and others — has derived from a common root: a neglected root that has gone unattended until now, just as we have failed to look at our psychological ills.

It is my conviction that all such ills are manifestations of the patriarchal organization of both the human mind and of society.

Before we examine the consequences of this viewpoint, let us pause a moment to reflect on the meaning of the word patriarchal . It is a word that was first introduced by a Swiss historian, Johann Bachofen — a contemporary and colleague of Nietzsche at the University of Basel — who is remembered as the discoverer of our remote “matriarchal” past.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Bachofen discovered the existence of ancient cultures vastly different from ours in terms of aspects previously considered to be intrinsic to human nature (such as personal dominance). Today, archaeological excavations have proven the accuracy of his intuitive interpretation (5) of Herodotus' reports on some ancient peoples (such as the Lybians). Since then, many anthropologists — as farfetched as the hypothesis of a “matriarchy” first seemed to them — have examined living primitive cultures and found that matrism was indeed pervasive.

We need to recognize Bachofen had assumed that before the rise of male dominance there was a situation of female dominance, characterized by the explicit prominence of women leaders. When this was found to be a rare situation among primitive cultures, ethnologists felt that their search for matriarchy had been mistaken. In time, however, it came to be understood that feminine power generally is not expressed through dominance by women, but by the dominance of feminine values : community, cooperation, cultivation, and, more broadly, life. This is why the term matristic, introduced by Marija Gimbutas, has come into use today. Personal dominance being a male trait, the matristic spirit has been expressed through the power of the group, giving priority to relationships, and the ascendancy of the community spirit — the bonds of caring.

If the excess of patriarchy is individual tyranny, then we can say that the excess of matristic culture was group tyranny. Apart from the precarious struggle for survival that the great drought ensuing from the last glacial period represented (which could account for a culture of competition), we can imagine that male dominance — instilled some five or six thousand years ago, and bringing with it a predominance of warring values over loving values — entailed a rebellion against such community tyranny in the early Neolithic era.

Some academics seem to resist the notion that patriarchal aggression is cultural and historical, rather than genetic. Yet I find ample reason to think that the so-called fall of man was an historical event — a consequence of survival difficulties that forced the first sedentary communities to become depredatory, violent, and insensitive. Dr. James DeMeo has established a correlation between desertification, famine and starvation, and patristic attitudes, based on data from over 1,100 studies of different cultures in the area that he designates as “Saharasia.” He proposes that it is in “desertification,” the turning of fertile lands into deserts, that the traumatic origin of patriarchy lies:

                                  With very few exceptions, there is no clear or unambiguous evidence

                                  for warfare or social violence anywhere on planet Earth prior to around

                                 4,000 BC and the earliest evidence appears in specific locations, from which

                                  it firstly arose, and diffused outward over time to infect nearly every corner of the globe.

                                 A massive climate change shook the ancient world, when approximately 6,000 years ago

                                 vast areas of lush grassland and forest in the Old World began to quickly dry out

                                 and convert into harsh desert. The vast Sahara Desert, Arabian Desert, and the

                                 giant deserts of the Middle East and Central Asia simply did not exist prior to c. 4000 BC.

The need to survive by intensifying male aggression into violence and plunder is easy to explain, not only in terms of massive hunger but also in terms of the subordination of women (whom we may collectively view as the empathic voice of maternal tenderness); insensitivity to children; and even the ascetic characteristic of the civilized world — which, in turning against the Inner Child in each person, has turned against instinctual drives. For, as DeMeo observes:

                                 Famine and starvation is a severe trauma from which survivors rarely escape unscathed.

                                 A lot of people die, families are split apart, and babies and children are often abandoned,

                                 and suffer enormously. Starvation affects surviving children in an emotionally severe manner.

                                 They shrink from the exhausting heat and thirst, emotionally withdraw from the painful

                                 world, and simultaneously suffer a severe stunting of the entire brain and nervous system

                                 due to protein-calorie malnutrition. Even if such starved children later get all the food

                                 and water they want, they are deeply scarred in an emotional-neurological manner

                                 which forever changes their behavior — specifically, there is an implanted inhibition of

                                 any impulse of a pleasure-seeking, outward-reaching nature, and a discomfort with deeper

                                 forms of body-pleasure, in both maternal-infant or male-female expressions. Additionally,

                                 the child's view of the mother, who could not protect or feed the child during the famine

                                 period, is thereafter colored with suspicion and anger. These attitudes and behaviors

                                 are deeply protoplasmic in nature, and are passed on to ensuing generations no matter

                                 what the climate, by social institutions which reflect the character structure of the average

                                 individual at any given period of time. (6)

The observations of David W. Anthony complement those of DeMeo. In his recent book, (7) The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Anthony shows how the spread of Indo-European languages in Europe and Asia followed the pattern of a patriarchal form of social organization that came into being in the Russian steppes north of the Caucasus, with the domestication of animals and the rise of metallurgy. He also shows that, contrary to the earlier assumption that the initial spread of the Proto-Indo-European dialects was a reflection of violent invasions, patriarchy was established more gradually, at a time of food scarcity, through the use of technology and commercial treaties imposed through terror.

But I do not need to present my readers with an erudite review of what is known of the history of patriarchy to convey my essential premise that the great problem of civilization is none other than civilization itself . Let me, rather, proceed to the contention that civilization is not only the patriarchal organization of society, but also a patriarchal organization of the mind. As later chapters will reveal, my emphasis is on the notion that our present crisis is nothing other than an expression of the destructive, and increasingly unsustainable, obsolescence of the imbalance that patriarchy introduced among the father, the mother, and the child — in the family, in the realm of cultural values, and especially within the human mind.

I am convinced that many of the grave problems now threatening our very survival by rendering our present form of life unsustainable are like the many heads of the great patriarchal Beast, and that it is high time we attend to our fundamental problem, beyond merely addressing its symptoms.

This view implies that our understanding of the tyranny of the father over the mother and the children throughout history should not be viewed as just one more facet of civilized consciousness, among others. Rather, we need to regard it as the common root of servitude; the disruption of fraternal bonds; violence; greed; self-antagonism; and other characteristics of our collective neurosis.

It would seem that when men took control of collective affairs, our minds — the internal counterpart of society — became unbalanced. While cooperation and competitiveness are in our psyche like two hands meant to operate in balance, cooperation (the feminine mode) became eclipsed in our social life by the masculine emphasis on competition. Today, competition is the very motor of our inhuman and depredatory economy.

The same can be said regarding tenderness and aggression. In each of us there is a severe self and a compassionate self; and it is appropriate to be affectionate or bellicose, depending on the moment and the circumstances. But instead of being free to employ both of our psychological “arms” according to what may fit the circumstances, history clearly shows that we have become on the whole too prone to violence, and underdeveloped in our capacity for compassion. (This is why it is timely that the Dalai Lama travels worldwide giving talks about how important a good heart is for the future of humanity, and not only for our personal development.)

Just as, in the dawn of civilization, patriarchal aggression eclipsed our empathetic sensitivity, favoring competitiveness over cooperation, so something equivalent took place regarding the similar complementarity of cultivation and exploitation. And we may say that the subordination, or eclipse, of the intra-psychic femininity — our “Inner Mother” — which is part of our healthy and wholesome mind has led us (along with the imbalance between cultivation and exploitation) to an alarming and ever-increasing ecocide.

On a collective scale, male power has taken over the political decisions of the civilized world throughout history, turning history into the expression of a hegemonic, violent, conquering, and possessive spirit.

On a family scale, patriarchal society is characterized by the institution of the paterfamilias, who — through his authority — takes possession and dominates over both wife and children. And just as the oppression of women results in the eclipse of love, so the oppression of children (in the outer world, as in the inner) has resulted in the eclipse of eros. It is precisely this antagonism between civilization as we have known it, on the one hand, and instinct and “the pleasure principle,” on the other, that Freud emphasized in Civilization and Its Discontents.

Just as both the eclipse of love and the vilification of eros are intrinsic to the patriarchal mind, and thus lie at the heart of civilized life, so both the restoration of people's ability to love and the decriminalization of pleasure have been among the tasks of modern psychotherapy. It would be naive to expect psychotherapy alone to heal a sick society, and yet it cannot be denied that patriarchy has constituted an ever-present obstacle to mental health and inner balance. We may regard it as the basis of a universal neurosis that — contagiously propagating from generation to generation like a plague — carries it forward in time, like a plant propagating its genetic material.

In subtitling this chapter “Its Silenced Root,” I wanted not only to draw attention to how the acknowledgment of the patriarchal spirit at the center of our problematique has been rejected, silenced, and denied, but also to suggest that — just as individual neurosis entails a narrowing of understanding (sustained by the operation of different “defense mechanisms”) — so, on a collective level, the patriarchal spirit is defended by an active ignorance. For as Marcuse and Foucault have pointed out, it is not enough for something to be true in order for its truth to be recognized in academic circles or in the sphere of public opinion, where what is accepted as truth is also a function of vested interests, conformity, blindness, and the will of those in power. And without going into a detailed analysis of various resistances to the idea that the patriarchal mind is inherent in all known civilizations, I simply wish to note that social scientists have shared a common bias of looking down on matristic cultures (such as that of the Trobrianders, as well as the Iroquois and other American Indians) as “barbaric.” And they still look down disapprovingly upon those who are interested in the matristic past of our history.

Yet I hope that a day of “revelation” may not be far off, when the fact of the patriarchal despotism underlying our seemingly free modern world may become obvious, along with the beastly destructiveness hidden under its loudly proclaimed democratic values.

ENDNOTES

1 Leonard Shlain, Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (NY: Viking Penguin, 2003), p. 359.

2 I use the word problematique, a technical term introduced by the Club of Rome, for “the many-faceted world problem.” (The Club of Rome is an international global think tank whose mission is to act as a global catalyst for change.)

3 In Encyclopedia of Human Problems and Resources (Humanité, 2001).

4 From Quevedo's satirical poem, “Don Dinero” (Sir Money) , which begins, “Poderoso Caballero es Don Dinero” (“A Powerful Knight is Sir Money”).

5 Much of what we know about many of the ancient peoples comes to us from Herodotus.

6 James DeMeo, SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World ( Ashland , OR : Natural Energy Works: 2006).

7 David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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