Patriarchy and Dualism: Anti-Liberty, Anti-Life

This is an excerpt from a presentation I made a few years ago at a national conference:

Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the fathers,” and its core concept is the idea that all men are born superior to all women. As Shulamith Firestone put it in her classic book, The Dialectic of Sex, this sexual class system, which in its purest form demands the literal enslavement of women and girls [see Nicholas Kristof's editorial in today's (11/30/08) New York Times on the prevalence of throwing acid in women's faces to punish them and keep them down in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., if you think female slavery is over], serves as the model for all other systems of oppression, such as racism and homophobia.

The key mode of patriarchy is domination. Scholar Riane Eisler has named patriarchy “dominator culture.” Dominator culture can conceive of power in only one form, as “Power Over” others. Every imaginable relationship, including that between parent and child, and that between lovers or spouses, is defined in terms of dominance and submission. Someone has to be “on top,” and someone else has to be “on the bottom.”

To make it easier to achieve this, dominator culture is saturated with dualism, a mode of thinking we are taught from the cradle. Dualism insists that everything boils down to an either/or choice – that you can never have your cake and eat it too. There are only two acceptable or possible answers to any given question, and these two answers are literally poles apart: polarized. They’re opposites. One answer is labeled entirely right and good, and the other is seen as entirely wrong and bad. Needless to say, dualism makes for gross over-simplifications and generalizations, and twists and distorts everything it touches. With a little bit of imagination, in most instances one can perceive a much broader spectrum of choices, and often more than a single option could be embraced. But that wouldn’t fit with the system of “tops” and “bottoms,” where one thing must always be “better” than another.

Patriarchal religions are used to justify and preach this system, and to legitimize the persecution and often extermination of those who resist it, both inside and outside a given culture. For the first two thousand years or so of patriarchy, these religions featured both Gods and Goddesses, but the “top god” in patriarchal religion was always male. The Goddesses were defined as wives, sisters, mothers, love interests or daughters of the male gods, to make sure that ordinary women didn’t get any ideas about freeing themselves from being defined as the possessions of men. For some patriarchs this didn’t go far enough, so about three thousand years ago they started to preach that there was only one god: male, of course. Eventually, several different religions of this type: male monotheism: developed. My friend the feminist art historian calls it “mono-male-theism.” However you prefer to arrange the syllables, the term proclaims: “Just For Men.”

Patriarchy has been with us in the West – Europe and North America – for only about 5,000 years, give or take half a millennium or so. Human beings have existed for much longer than that: hundreds of thousands of years. Patriarchy entered a Europe where many other cultures already existed, cultures that operated with a very different kind of mind-set. These were what Riane Eisler calls “partnership societies.” Partnership societies were quite cooperative and evolved, with high levels of creative sophistication. Their social structures were generally matrilineal – that is, children traced their descent through their mother back to her mother and so forth. These cultures were comparatively non-violent: they did not “focus on the power to inflict pain and kill, but the power to give life and pleasure.”[i] Their religions centered around a Goddess. The earliest European and Middle Eastern images of the Divine Female are up to 400,000 years old.

These partnership cultures were not in the dark about how babies are conceived: they were aware of both the male and the female role in reproduction. Partnership spirituality usually thought of “the divine in both female and male form,” but “the male deities were not associated with thunderbolts or weapons (like Jehovah or Zeus)” and they were, at most, equal to the Goddesses. In partnership cultures, “masculinity was not synonymous with domination and conquest.”[ii]

Patriarchy is a recent human invention. Despite what its religions preach, it is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it has never been “the only thing that’s out there.” There are alternatives to it, and all human-made systems can be changed. In the relatively brief span of its existence, patriarchy has already gone just about the whole way toward proving itself unviable. This comes easily to dominator culture because it is fundamentally “anti-life,” so anti-life that it has made uncounted life-forms extinct and now threatens even the survival of the human species.

Dominator religions preach the unlimited exploitation of our planet Earth, proclaiming that the world was created for “man” to use, and use up if he so chooses, since some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise is his “real home.” Their expectation is that “mankind” will end by causing global disaster, that human beings are incapable of self-control and common sense. In my local paper in May 2002, one Mike Hosey, a Christian, confidently stated:

“Christianity, in general, believes the world to be a lost and dying place in need of salvation; a place where people need to put their faith in God, and not in themselves.”[iii]

I totally disagree with this view of the world and of humanity, and I believe there is real reason for hope. As Riane Eisler points out, in the West, over the past 300 years and more, a historical continuum has developed that is moving us away from absolute dominator culture.[iv] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “divinely ordained” rule of kings and emperors over their “subjects” was challenged and largely overthrown. The early feminist movement in the 19th century chipped away at the control of men over women and children, while the abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged the entrenched traditions of the enslavement of one race by another, and the use of force by one nation to control another. In the past 100-plus years, civil rights, organized labor, anti-colonial, women’s liberation, indigenous people’s rights, and gay rights movements have arisen to oppose further aspects of domination. A relatively new and very important movement is now taking a stand against domination and violence in intimate relationships: rape, battering, child abuse and incest. Putting an end to intimate violence is central to moving toward a partnership society.

There is no mistaking that this “shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way.”[v] But if you look at the overall trend, we have moved a long distance away from all-out domination and toward partnership in a relatively short time. We are presently in a backlash phase, what Eisler calls a “periodic regression toward the dominator model.”[vi] Yet the irony of globalization is that the world has become so small that people cannot really avoid the knowledge of our mutual world-wide interdependence. We are being forced out of the denial that is typical of dominator culture by phenomena we cannot ignore, such as global warming. The world’s systems of domination are only able to escalate these problems, and as a result it is becoming inescapably obvious that these systems are counter-productive.

[i] Eisler, The Power of Partnership, p. 189
[ii] Eisler, p. 189
[iii] Mike Hosey, in an editorial on the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, The Gainesville Sun, May 20, 2002.
[iv] Eisler, pp. 94-95.
[v] Eisler, p. 95.
[vi] Eisler, p. 95.