In my last post, I described Riane Eisler’s partnership and dominator models of society and suggested that trauma is the reason we are stuck in the dominator part of the spectrum. In this entry, I will try to clarify what trauma is, and explain how it may lock us into a dominator way of being.

What is trauma?

What exactly is trauma? The following description is based on several sources including: wikipedia, MedicineNet and the Institute for the Study of Peak States.

Trauma is often used in medicine to refer to physical injuries, but this is not the sense in which it is most often used today. According to MedicineNet, psychiatric (or psychological) trauma, is “An experience that is emotionally painful, distressful, or shocking and which may result in lasting mental and physical effects.” A traumatic experience may be a single event or an on-going or repetitive situation. It usually involves a feeling of complete helplessness in the face of an actual or perceived threat to the life, body or sanity of the sufferer, their loved ones or community. The experience overwhelms the person’s ability to cope or to integrate the associated thoughts and emotions.

Trauma is a normal response to extreme experiences. It results in emotional memories stored deep in the brain and body which cause measurable physical and chemical changes to it. Individuals vary greatly, so that events that cause severe trauma in some will not significantly affect others.

Slightly different perspectives emerge from the work of The Institute for the Study of Peak States (ISPS). In his writings on peak states, Grant McFetridge describes how the way we respond to the original traumatic event becomes stored in the body, and this ‘memory’ is replayed like a tape whenever similar sensations are evoked in the present. In other words, we develop an unconscious, automatic survival response to any event that is identified as similar to the one which caused the original trauma.

From a rational perspective, such automatic responses may be quite inappropriate to the current situation, and may even lead to fresh trauma. A good illustration is claustrophobia in which an extreme fear of any enclosed space may originate, for example, from being locked in a cupboard as punishment as a child. Another is terror of all strangers, perhaps sparked by a frightening encounter with an unknown person in infancy.

Many traumas are individual, but others may be collective, arising from events in family or community history. These might include an unconscious memory of famine that creates a tendency for a community to overeat or hoard food. Or a ‘race memory’ of an atrocity that lingers as a fearful or angry reaction to anyone from a particular country or religion. Such memories often go back centuries, being kept alive by stories and rituals, and they fuel many modern conflicts such as Northern Ireland and Bosnia.

Healing trauma

Turning now to healing: What does it mean for a trauma to be healed? And how can this be achieved? A healed trauma loses its power to affect the present. Conscious memories of traumatic experiences may be recalled and thought about at will, but cease to be associated with any positive or negative emotional feelings or bodily sensations. In other words, the emotional ‘button’ that used to be triggered by a certain kind of event disappears. The person becomes free to respond rationally and appropriately to such events.

Most trauma therapies rely on remembering and re-experiencing the trauma in some way. Indeed, McFetridge claims that traumas are events that haven’t been fully experienced because we ‘leave’ our bodies and dissociate from the physical and/or emotional pain. Hence, healing requires that the event be lived through again in memory – a process that may be very painful. Unfortunately many therapies produce only partial healing – the symptoms may be reduced but not eliminated, or may return after a time.

ISPS researchers attribute partial healing to the presence of ‘trauma stacks’. Imagine that an early trauma causes a dysfunctional response to all similar events in future. Each time we respond in this way, we create a further trauma that is connected to the root trauma. Most trauma healing deals with traumatic events one by one. So if I have lots of events linked to a particular root trauma it may take many sessions before the healing is complete. However, according to McFetridge, if we can get back to the original trauma and heal that, the whole stack of subsequent traumas will also be healed at the same time.

Mainstream trauma research and treatment focus mostly on events in childhood or adulthood, such as abuse, rape, torture, wars, disasters and accidents. Alternative therapies often stimulate regression to unconscious memories, and are thus able to tackle birth traumas, which are often severe, and experiences in past lives. However, McFetridge believes that many of the traumas that create our deep emotional patterns and ‘buttons’ happen before birth, at key development stages such as conception and implantation in the womb.

Effective trauma therapy is difficult because we lock the memories away securely in the subconscious to protect ourselves from the pain they evoke. This applies particularly to in utero and birth traumas which predate the development of normal conscious memory. However, it is also true of many traumas that occur after infancy. A variety of new therapies are increasingly able to unlock the doors to these memories. This is not the place to go into details, but they include Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT) and Whole-Hearted Healing (WHH). Other approaches that ISPS recommend as effective include The 15-Minute Miracle, Psycho Energetic Auro Technology (PEAT) and biofeedback of brain waves.
        
Trauma and dominator societies

So what has all this stuff about trauma got to do with switching from a dominator to a partnership society? My answer is: Everything. I believe trauma is the reason why the dominator model took over from partnership, and why it has remained dominant for the last 6,000 years. And until we do something about trauma, we will remain stuck in a dominator civilization despite our best efforts to promote reform.

In The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler wrote (p.xvii): “the original direction ... of our cultural evolution was toward partnership but ... following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental social shift ... to a dominator model ... At this pivotal branching, the cultural evolution of societies that worshipped the life-generating and nurturing powers of the universe ... was interrupted. There now appeared on the prehistoric horizon invaders from the peripheral areas of our globe who ... worshipped ... the power to take rather than give life that is the ultimate power to establish and enforce domination.”

What Eisler describes as a period of chaos and total disruption was clearly a time of intense social and personal trauma. And this trauma resulted in the switch in cultural evolution towards a dominating power hierarchy that we are still experiencing today. Once that switch had occurred, the violent system persisted because it creates on-going trauma, generation after generation.

I believe it is impossible to live within a dominator society without suffering trauma at some level. The ISPS claims that most people suffer significant trauma. Much of this may well occur before birth due to the experiences of the mother, but I will focus here on the more obvious childhood and adult traumas. Imagine (or remember) growing up in a dominator society. From infancy, you learn submission to the authority of your parents, teachers and other adults. Perhaps you learn the hard way that disobedience or talking back will be punished. You observe how the male of the household is boss, that men hold most (if not all) positions of authority in your community, and that men are tough and often violent. You are taught beliefs, whether religious or secular, about the nature of reality and the way of the world that reinforce these experiences. In this way, you deeply imbibe the ideas that you are somehow bad or inferior, that children deserve to be punished; that men are superior to women; that violence is ok and the way to deal with conflict; and that a hierarchy of power is the natural order of things.

Even in the rich world, trauma is ever present - in domestic violence, crime, accidents, rape and illness; in fear of strangers, terrorists and the opinion of others; in workplace stress and money worries; in loneliness and homelessness. Even our modern materialistic, mechanistic worldview is a source of psychological trauma, leaving us without meaning or purpose for our lives. Now imagine how it is for many in the majority world, perhaps facing starvation and chronic thirst; or living in the midst of war, never knowing when their family, home and community will be shattered by violence; or being a survivor and refugee from terrorism, famine, flood, earthquake or tsunami.

Trauma begets trauma. We naturally tend to bring up our own children in much the same way that we were brought up, and to pass on the core beliefs in which we were raised. And our responses to the world are shaped by our traumas (see diagram). Trauma shatters trust in others and the universe. Out of fear, we may become timid and submissive, carefully planning our lives to avoid fear, and thus tacitly supporting the continuation of the dominator system. Similarly, we may take out our repressed anger at the way we have been treated on those who are weaker than us, particularly our partner and children. Another common response to fear is action, including aggression – getting in the first strike as a way to reduce risk, or pushing others out of the way to meet our own survival needs. Similarly, we may seek vengeance for the wrongs we have suffered, or simply become the tough, bullying male who physically or emotionally beats up anyone who opposes us. Hence, in one way or another, the violent system perpetuates itself.

 
If this emphasis on the prevalence of trauma in today’s world seems over the top, consider this. In a recent article in New Scientist magazine (16 June, p.24) psychologist Dorothy Rowe points out that the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder are essentially the same as those for fear. In other words, she argues, the many millions of children in the USA and elsewhere now being treated with powerful drugs for these ‘disorders’ are simply ‘very afraid.’ This is not recognized because psychiatrists don’t know enough about the lives of their young clients, and children are most afraid of adults!

Trauma theory and creating the future

This theory that trauma is a major cause of the patterns of relationship and forms of society that lie at the heart of the human condition raises as many questions as it answers. Amongst them are:

•    Is there direct evidence that trauma results in dominator relationships and societies?
•    Are there cases where the reverse has happened and cooperative partnership societies have emerged from traumatic circumstances?
•    How does the trauma model fit with other explanations of humanity’s predicament?
•    Is it human nature to form male dominated, hierarchical and violent societies, or can we be different?
•    Does the theory enable us to make any verifiable predictions that would validate it?
•    What are the implications of this theory for creating a sustainable future?
•    What can the theory tell us about key leverage points for achieving fundamental social and institutional change?
•    What evidence is there that humans can heal their traumas and live permanently in peak states of consciousness?

Many of these questions cannot be answered unequivocally. But I will devote several entries to gathering together some of the available evidence. It’s worth the effort for the insights and wisdom we may gain towards creating a better future.

In my next two entries, I will explore how this trauma theory can explain the transition from a peaceful partnership civilization to a violent dominator culture thousands of years ago.

In the last two entries, I introduced Riane Eisler’s partnership and dominator models of society, discussed the nature of trauma, and argued that it could explain the emergence and stability of dominator cultures. The origins of civilization are lost in the mists of time, but research over the last few decades has confirmed the importance of climate and other environmental factors.

In this entry, I outline the history of the earliest civilizations and the transition from the partnership to dominator model as described by Eisler. In the following entry, I will explore in greater depth the relationship between climate change and cultural evolution. I will argue that the trauma due to a drying of the climate may well have been an important factor in the switch to the dominator way of being. In this time of rapid global warming, the stress of climate change may once again emerge as a major determinant of our destiny.

The rise of partnership cultures

As the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated 10,000 years ago, settled agricultural societies began to emerge in Europe, the Middle East, Mesopotamia and as far east as India. Riane Eisler claimed in The Chalice and the Blade that these societies were peaceful and relatively egalitarian, worshipping the goddess and nature as the abundant source of all life. Their villages were located in fertile areas rather than defensive locations, and lacked fortifications or caches of weapons. There is no sign of war damage, their art is free of violent scenes, and their skill in metal work was directed towards tools, religious symbols and ornaments rather than weapons. As Eisler put it: “the many images of the Goddess in her dual aspect of life and death seem to express a view of the world in which the primary purpose of art, and of life, was not to conquer, pillage and loot but to cultivate the earth and provide the material and spiritual wherewithal for a satisfying life.”

As early as 7,000 BP (before present) these societies were irrigating their farms, and engaged in extensive trade. They developed a wide variety of arts and crafts, including weaving and sewing, rug and furniture making, copper and gold work. They invented plastered brick buildings and the wheel; domesticated horses, and practiced stock breeding. Despite this specialisation, the relatively uniform size of dwellings and absence of lavish burials suggests that they were non-hierarchical. There also appears to have been equality in gender roles.

This village-based culture spread from western Europe to India. A notable exception was the highly urbanised and sophisticated civilization of Minoan Crete. This was comparable to the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia except that it followed the partnership model, and they were dominator cultures, as discussed in the next section. The cities of Crete were large, perhaps as many as 100,000 living in Knossos. They are notable for their extensive public works including paved roads and viaducts, reservoirs and water pipes, fountains and gardens, with an emphasis on beauty and grace rather than monuments to power.

Minoan cities were ruled by a wealthy elite, but even the peasants enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. There was central administration but no evidence of autocratic rule. There are no statues or pictures of rulers, not even the names of authors and artists. This egalitarian atmosphere extended to gender relations, with young men and women both engaging in dangerous bull sports. Theirs was a happy religion with lots of public ceremonies including music, singing and dancing.

The Cretans had weapons, but did not idealize warfare. The separate city states on the island did not make war with each other but lived in harmony and peaceful coexistence. There are no battle or hunting scenes in their art. In contrast to dominator civilizations, power was not equated with dominance, destruction and oppression. In the words of historian Jacquetta Hawkes, “the idea of a warrior monarch triumphing in the humiliation and slaughter of the enemy” is absent.

The transition to dominator cultures

These peaceful and egalitarian partnership societies were not utopias, but nevertheless lasted for thousands of years. They demonstrate that humans are capable of creating and sustaining creative and technologically innovative partnership cultures. However, about 6-7,000 years ago, this culture began to disintegrate and had ceased to exist by 4,500 BP. There are signs of invasions and natural catastrophes that caused major destruction. Their crafts, such as pottery, regressed to more primitive forms, and defensive structures began to appear.

Riane Eisler claimed this disruption was due to invasion by aggressive nomadic peoples who brought with them their male gods of war and mountains, and were ruled by powerful priests and warriors. At first, these were “the activities of seemingly insignificant nomadic bands roaming the less desirable fringe areas of our globe seeking grass for their herds.” But “Bit by devastating bit, a period of cultural regression and stagnation sets in. Finally, during this time of mounting chaos the development of civilization comes to a standstill. ... it will be another two thousand years before the civilizations of Sumer and Egypt emerge.”

The civilization of Minoan Crete resisted the dominator take-over until after 3,500 BP. It may have lasted longer than other partnership cultures because its isolation on an island protected it from invasion, and may also have ameliorated the impact of a drying climate which is discussed in the next section.

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas identified three waves of destruction in Europe which she dated to 6,300-6,200 BP, 5400-5200 BP and 5000-4800 BP. The invaders swept down from the remote north-east of Europe and Asia, but Eisler points out that similar invasions of the Middle East came from the south, the best known of which were the Hebrews.

Very little is known about the origins or culture of the invaders from the north, but they may have been descended from the hunting and fishing peoples of the northern European forests and coasts. Sometimes called “Sons of the North Wind”, or Aryans, they left no archaeological remains, and yet they burst into history as aggressive warriors who imposed their male gods and dominator culture on a vast territory. We can only speculate about how this culture evolved. Fortunately, far more is known about the history of North Africa as we’ll see in my next entry.

In my last entry, I outlined the rise and fall of early partnership cultures as described by Riane Eisler. She made an implicit connection between the destruction of the partnership civilization and environmental conditions when she wrote about invaders coming from ‘the less desirable fringe areas,’ and ‘the arid lands of the north, as well as the deserts of the south.’ However, she did not investigate climatic conditions at the time of these invasions, and, indeed, the palaeo-climatic data required probably weren’t available then.

This entry focuses on more recent evidence for the interaction between climate and civilization, particularly in North Africa. From this analysis, it appears that a drying of the climate may have been a major factor driving the transition from partnership to dominator cultures.

The emergence of complex, dominator societies

Nick Brooks of the University of East Anglia, UK, has studied the relationship between the evolution of civilization and climate in the northern sub-tropics. These are the latitudes in which the first civilizations arose around the globe: North Africa, Mesopotamia, South Asia, China and northern South America.

Brooks was not concerned with the extensive agricultural, village-based partnership culture described by Riane Eisler. To him, complex societies, as he calls them, are the hallmark of civilization. These were relatively densely settled towns and cities, often fortified. They were highly organized with significant social stratification and specialization. They were ruled by powerful leaders, and built elaborate tombs, palaces, monuments and temples. They were early States, with centralized government power that extended over a substantial surrounding area. Usually based on irrigated agriculture, they traded widely, and were technologically innovative. Unlike the partnership cultures, their art included representations of violence and authority.

With the notable exception of Minoan Crete, described in my last entry, these complex civilizations were dominator cultures. Comparing them with the village-based partnership cultures described in my last entry, we can see that both were creative and technologically innovative. The key differences were that the later civilizations had larger and denser populations, hierarchies of power, and a culture of violence. Brooks argues forcefully that it was climate change that drove this transition.

The ability of any region to support humans depends on three broad factors. First is the natural endowment of climate, soils and other resources such as minerals and water for irrigation. Second is the density of the population and its level of material affluence. And third are the technologies available to exploit available resources. If the population is low and/or its demands are modest compared to the carrying capacity of the environment, the Earth will be experienced as abundant. But if the population is too large or has excessive ‘needs’ or lacks essential technologies, there will be scarcity no matter how fertile the land.

Not surprisingly, estimates of the human population at the dawn of civilization vary widely. But 10,000 years BP (before present), when agriculture and settlement began, there may have been as few as 5 million people on the planet. At this time, the Earth was emerging from the last Ice Age, with glaciers retreating. Thus more land was becoming available to support the population, and the latitudes of North Africa and the Middle East were entering a warm wet period. During the Ice Age, the Sahara was so dry that it was uninhabited. But by 10,000 BP it had numerous water bodies, abundant flora and fauna, and was being reoccupied. In other words, this was a time of low population pressure when the Earth would have seemed abundant and nurturing. It was in this context that the partnership cultures described by Riane Eisler emerged and spread. There was plenty for all, and therefore little reason for competition or conflict between social groups. Indeed, peaceful cooperation avoided the wastage of energy and resources due to conflict.

By 6,000 BP the population is estimated to have risen by only 50% to 7m, but it increased more rapidly thereafter, possibly quadrupling to 27m by 4,000 BP and doubling again to 50m by 3,000 BP (or 1,000 Before Common Era) – a 10-fold increase since the end of the Ice Age. Thus the population pressure grew very significantly over these three thousand years, and the demand for natural resources would have risen even faster with the emergence of more sophisticated societies.

Perhaps more significant than population growth, however, was the fact that the benign climate didn’t last. The generally warm, wet conditions following the last Ice Age were broken about 8,000 BP by a cold, dry period lasting a few centuries, after which the climate was less stable, and rainfall became seasonal. There was a similar, but less severe, episode around 6,000 BP. Then, between 5,000 and 4,000 BP, rainfall collapsed and the Sahara, Middle East and Mesopotamia became as arid as they are today.

According to Brooks, the challenge of this growing aridity was a major driver of cultural and technological innovation. In essence, there were two different responses. One was to adopt a nomadic way of life based on herds of cattle, or flocks of sheep and goats where conditions were even drier. Life was sustained by moving with the seasonal rains, and the availability of fodder and water. This way of life continues to this day in some regions, thus demonstrating its resilience compared to urbanisation.

The second response to the drying of North Africa was to retreat to rivers and oases as the desert advanced. There, the pressures created by high population densities led to the emergence of cities, complex societies and technological innovation. By contrast, in Mesopotamia drying of the climate about 5,000 BP freed more land from inundation, thus enabling a rapid expansion of population and the emergence of the Uruk civilization.

The example of modern land use in the Sahel indicates that there was also a third, intermediate response. In the semi-arid lands on the fringes of the desert, subsistence farming continued. I’ll return to this point later.

Nick Brooks hypothesized that as people retreated to the wetter areas, some groups would have been at an advantage due to their location and resources. Thus a natural process of social stratification would have begun. As the climate continued to dry and refugees arrived from the desert, there would have been further stratification – perhaps resulting in a pool of lowly labourers or slaves for undertaking construction of irrigation works, monuments and temples.

An alternative scenario is that at least some of the nomads would have begun to raid the towns. Such conflict would explain the increasing evidence of fortifications including town walls, and the depiction of violence in art. It is also consistent with the picture painted by Riane Eisler of invasion of the earlier partnership cultures by nomadic tribes.

An imaginative reconstruction

At this point I invite you to indulge in a little imaginative reconstruction. First, we can draw an analogy with the treatment of refugees and illegal migrants by rich countries today. Barriers are erected to keep out the hordes, and those who succeed in entering a country are relegated to menial, low paid work. Thus we can see the process of social stratification at work, and we can imagine the anger and frustration of those who are excluded, and consequent acts of violence and terrorism.

Now imagine yourself thousands of years ago. Many generations back, your tribe ceased farming and became nomadic herders as the climate dried. Today, it is one of many groups moving constantly across the landscape, following the rains in search of fodder and water. Survival is a perpetual dance with nature, and a constant struggle to defend your traditional rights from neighbouring clans. Nature no longer seems benign, and peaceful cooperation amongst clans has become the stuff of myth - a long-lost paradise or garden of Eden. In response, your people and your gods have become more violent, and you’re more willing to follow an aggressive leader, who in turn uses force to control his followers. Yours is a world in which hardship is common, and only the strong survive; a world of trauma.

The last decade has been particularly dry. Your remaining stock are emaciated, and your people are close to starving. The only way to survive is to find more fodder and water. So your clan moves out of its traditional territory, coming into conflict with your neighbours, or perhaps raiding the nearest oasis town. In this way, you bring the trauma of battle to hitherto peaceful settlements, which then begin to arm and defend themselves against future raids. If your tribe has tamed the horse, you will have the lightning, traumatic impact of an air raid today. You will be seen as ‘devils on horseback’ as the Janjaweed are called in Darfur.

As the climate continues to dry over the centuries, so this conflict intensifies. And so does the shift towards dominator societies. Perhaps your tribe goes beyond raiding, and takes over a peaceful agricultural town. Judging by Biblical and other historical sources, the men are most likely killed, and the women kept as slaves and concubines. The egalitarian community is replaced with a power hierarchy based on force, and warlike male gods displace the mother Goddess. And even towns that defend themselves successfully move inevitably towards the dominator end of the spectrum as the need grows for organized defences, military leadership and service, and the traumatic violence of war.

The Sahel today

Let’s now compare this scenario with the relationship between nomads and farmers in the Sahel over the last half-century. The Sahel is the semi-desert region just south of the Sahara, running east-west across Africa. It includes parts of many modern countries including Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Upper Volta, Ivory Coast, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and the Sudan (including Darfur). Its recent history is tragic, devastated by drought, desertification and war.

Traditionally, this semi-desert land supported nomadic pastoralists to the north, and settled farmers to the south, where rainfall was higher. Theirs was a mutually beneficial relationship. With the coming of the annual rains, the nomads moved north as fresh grass grew and water holes filled. They moved south again in the dry season, grazing the stubble of the farmer’s crops and receiving millet in exchange for manure. Both herders and farmers had a deep understanding of their environment and its sustainable use. For example, traditional rules governed the migration routes and how long the herders stayed at each waterhole along the way.

This sustainable system of land use broke down under a number of pressures including population growth. The region was unusually wet in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, encouraging northward expansion of agriculture and the growing of cash crops rather than traditional foods. Many deep water wells were drilled leading to an increase in cattle numbers and overgrazing. Then, starting in the early 1970’s, the region suffered two decades of severe drought with a 20% drop in rainfall. Crop yields were drastically reduced, many of the nomad’s cattle died and they were forced to sell others, thus becoming refugees. (Main source: Nicholas Wade (1974) Sahelian Drought: no victory for Western aid  Science, No.185, pp.234-237)

In the words of Nick Brooks: “The over-extension of agriculture, and consequently of pastoralism, into historically marginal areas as a result of a failure to appreciated the nature of long-term ... climatic variability in the Sahel, resulted in massive loss of life and livestock, the destruction of communities and livelihood systems, and massive societal disruption on a regional scale. In some areas drought also helped to trigger conflict, for example in the case of the “Second Tuareg Rebellion” in Mali ...”

More recently some commentators have described Darfur as the first climate change war due to decades of drought. This is undoubtedly an over-simplification, as New Internationalist magazine for June 2007 made clear. The north of Darfur is home to Arab pastoralists, and the south to African farmers. However, both groups are Muslim and intermarriage means that all Darfurians are of mixed ancestry. They coexisted peacefully for centuries “with inevitable disputes over resources between fixed and migratory communities resolved through the mediation of local leaders.”

However, after a long fight against European colonialism, the independent Sudan has been ruled by northern Arabs who have neglected the south and Darfur. This led to war from 1955 – 72, which erupted again in 1983 due to the imposition of radical Islam and the discovery of oil. “The people’s suffering was exacerbated by a devastating famine in the mid-1980’s, during which the Government abandoned Darfurians to their fate.” Thus the drought is but one factor in the emergence of violent Arab supremacism in the form of the Janjaweed. A recent report by the UN Environment Program similarly concluded that conflict over water and land helped spark the war. This was followed on 18 July by a report that a huge underground lake had been detected in Darfur, exploitation of which would help bring an end to the war which the article claimed was significantly due to conflict over water resources.

In a wider context, recent research has identified drought and other climatic stresses as contributory factors in many conflicts. Data show that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of low-level conflict escalating to full-scale civil war doubles in the following year. (Jim Giles  Rainfall records could warn of war  New Scientist, 2 June, 2007, p.12) Another New Scientist article (21 July 2007, p.19) reported the results of a study by David Zhang of 1000 years of Chinese archives which had revealed that 12 of the 15 major bouts of warfare in that period coincided with cold weather which would have led to food shortages. And a recent UN report claims that desertification could displace 50m people in the next decade – mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and central Asia. Such a dramatic increase in the number of environmental refugees seems likely to exacerbate ethnic and national tensions.

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The discussion in this entry illustrates how the trauma of climate change exemplified by drought may have led to the rise of dominator cultures, and the demise of the partnership way of life. If true, it reveals the fact that partnership only worked as a cultural form in a time of universal plenty. The advent of shortages due to population growth and climate change led ineluctably to competition and conflict. There are clear lessons in this history for us today which I will start to explore in my next entry.

Hi, friends and readers

Earon and Humanly Possible asked for a Pod to complement my blog. After some discussion we've just created On the Wisdom Trail.

This Pod is primarily for readers of my blog and my book, The Science of Oneness. It is a space for wider exploration and discussion of ideas sparked by my writings, including criticism and presentation of alternatives. And it will be the seedbed of new thoughts and ideas that will feed my writings in turn.

In my imagination this Pod is a space in which we share experiences, insights and wisdom. It is a meeting place of Elders – not necessarily in age but in wisdom. A place of attunement to Spirit and the wisdom of the ages, as well as of attunement to the spirit and knowledge of our times.

I dream that this Pod is a place in which we humbly seek wisdom to deal with the challenges of being human, and of the planetary crisis in all its dimensions. And a space in which we seek ways of creating a better future that go beyond ecological sustainability, to joy and abundance of life and spirit.

If your heart and mind resonate with this vision, please join us. And be welcome.

With love and blessings, Malcolm

I couldn't resist adding this link to my post earlier today on Civilization and Climate Change. The BBC News website reported this evening the discovery of a huge underground lake in Darfur.  This article claims that shortage of water is a major cause of the conflict, and that this discovery will make it far easier to bring about peace.

Just another bit of evidence about the significance of climate change.

I’ll start this entry with a brief recap of my last few posts.

For thousands of years after the last Ice Age, human society over a large part of the planet was peaceful, cooperative and egalitarian – what Riane Eisler called a partnership culture. Then, several thousand years ago, there was a switch to a violent, hierarchical, dominator model which is still by far the commonest cultural form today.

One compelling explanation for this switch is the dramatic drying of the climate and the associated trauma of famine, displacement of populations, and the need for radical change. This trauma led to the emergence of social stratification, and a rise in aggression and violence over dwindling food and water resources. Once in place, dominator societies have persisted because their violent institutions and relationships create fresh trauma in each generation – ably assisted from time to time by further climate change, environmental destruction, earthquakes and other natural phenomena.

If valid, this theory has important strategic implications for creating a peaceful, sustainable future. In essence, it means we need to focus on healing existing trauma – both collective and individual – and minimising the production of new trauma in order to promote a transition back to a partnership culture. But before enthusiastically embracing this approach, we need to step back and take a long hard look at the theory, and the many questions it raises. Does it really stack up when looked at from various perspectives?

The nature of human nature

To start the investigation, this entry focuses on the nature of human nature. Are we genetically programmed for hierarchy, domination and violence as many biologists and social scientists believe? Or is this just one possible outcome of a flexible, malleable development process that can also lead to peaceful, egalitarian relationships? Was the partnership civilization described by Riane Eisler no more than an evolutionary flash in the pan, or is it a humanly achievable model? More specifically in this post, I will be looking at the effects of child-rearing practices on the personalities of adults.

Arguments have raged for centuries over the relative influence of ‘nature’ or genes, versus ‘nurture’ or environment on human personality and behaviour. A few decades ago, tacit agreement seemed to emerge that both are important. However, the rise of biotechnology has seen a resurgence of claims that everything from consumerism and charitable giving, to addiction and aggression are genetically determined. Almost daily, it seems, a geneticist announces the discovery of a ‘gene for’ a particular trait, or a sociobiologist invents a new ‘Just So’ story to explain why evolution produced a specific social behaviour.

This is not the place to dive deeply into this debate. The most pertinent point, I think, is that human personality and social behaviour varies enormously between individuals, cultures and times. Hence, whether or not our genes predispose us to certain behaviours, the observation of eminent anthropologist, Margaret Mead, provides firm ground in this intellectual morass: “human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”

To illustrate her point, she gave the examples of two New Guinea tribes. The Arapesh cherish their children who grow into gentle, loving, cooperative, generous, unaggressive adults, responsive to the needs of others and unconcerned about personal property. By contrast, the Mundugumor use harsh child-rearing methods, and the adults are ruthless, aggressive, quarrelsome, undisciplined and lacking in gentleness and cooperation. These stories suggest that childhood trauma is linked with dominator behaviours in adulthood, whereas a nurturing upbringing fosters partnership.

These are not isolated examples. One study showed that only one third of 652 preliterate societies engaged in aggressive war. Similarly, social psychologist Erich Fromm pointed out that “the most primitive men are the least warlike and that warlikeness grows in proportion to civilization. If destructiveness were innate in man, the trend would have to be the opposite.” In other words, even if aggression and other dominator characteristics are innate, it is quite possible to inhibit them successfully.

Such peaceful cultures teach flight rather than fight, but do eventually learn to stand their ground and become aggressive if trapped. Similarly, they tend to become more aggressive when faced with outside pressures on their land and resources – an observation that supports the climate hypothesis discussed in the last entry. It also supports the idea that partnership cultures flourish only in the absence of serious resource limits.
(See A. Montagu (Ed) “Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Cultures” Oxford University Press, 1978)

Looking now at nation states rather than tribes, one study noted that half of 144 countries were not involved in any international war between 1816 and 1965. By comparison, the ‘peace-loving’ USA “is one of the most warlike societies on the face of the planet, having intervened militarily around the world more than 150 times since 1850” (A conservative estimate for the period to 1975). It is not that Americans as individuals are particularly warlike. The government regularly has to resort to the draft coupled with harsh penalties for refusing to serve. And training and indoctrination aim to dehumanize both the recruits and the enemy in order to over-ride the naturally intense inhibition against killing. Inhibition is also reduced by responsibility being taken from the individual soldier by higher authority, and turning killing into a routine, normal act. Even then, however, military research shows that the great majority of soldiers never fire their weapons in battle even though they face the prospect of dying themselves.
(See Falk R. A. and Kim S. S. (eds) “The War System: An Interdisciplinary Approach” Westview Press, 1980; Quote, Alfie Kohn “The Brighter Side of Human Nature”, 1990, pp. 45-58)

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The huge range of cultures from peaceful and cooperative to highly aggressive and violent lends credence to Riane Eisler’s contention that humanity is not inevitably condemned to live in dominator societies. We can create partnership relationships and cultures. The critical questions then become:
•    What causes these enormous differences between cultures? and
•    Can we identify ways to shift from domination to partnership?

In my next post, I’ll look at ways of raising children to be partners rather than dominators.


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