Fresh Perspective
Partnership: An Interview with Riane Eisler
Russ Volckmann
Introduction:
You can read about Riane Eisler in the interview. However, before you do so you may find the following material to be interesting and in harmony with much of what Riane talked about in our conversation. I spoke with Michael McElhenie, one of the leaders of the “Leadership for Results” United Nations program that helps catalyze collaborative solutions to HIV/AIDS in Africa, SE Asia and the Caribbean. (See his article below.) This is something he had to say that is very relevant to the interview.
Mike: We started these programs in 2001; we saw results right off the bat.
What we were doing was trying to impact multiple levels of systems. We wanted
to impact individuals intrapsychically and behaviorally—to change how
they saw themselves, how they saw their worlds and how they took action in
them. We wanted to impact relationships throughout vast interconnected networks.
Most importantly, we wanted these leaders to develop and implement more collaborative,
more complete solutions to the complex issues surrounding HIV and AIDS. So
when we talk about results we are talking about results at many levels of systems.
Russ: I remember one story you told (Integral Leadership in Action conference,
Westminster, Colorado, April 2005) about bringing men and women into separate
and then mixed groups to talk about their gender and sexual relationships
and the impact that had. It brought tears to my eyes.
Mike: This work was tremendous! One of the things that is very clear in the
research cited by our friends at the United Nations Development Programme
is that when you increase women’s empowerment you decrease the incidence
of HIV and AIDS.
Russ: What you are saying is so in keeping with the message that Riane Eisler
is putting forth.
Mike: Yes, it is absolutely true and I see this reflected in Riane's writing.
We are seeing it on a small scale and a large scale. It has been particularly
true in Cambodia. Gretchen Schmelzer and Fran Johnston have been integral
in the work there. Along with efforts to increase the power and the visibility
of women, we have seen a significant decrease in the incidence of HIV and
AIDS and, in particular, the stigma related to HIV and AIDS. Increasing the
voice of women helps everyone, including men, bring their compassionate energy
into the various systems in which they are involved, whether it is at the
societal level or more local. This increases people’s awareness of
how their maltreatment of others, particularly those living with HIV/AIDS,
is not creating a better society. So women’s empowerment is an incredibly
important variable not only in addressing HIV and AIDS, but also in improving
the general health and wellbeing of society.
In the story you mentioned, men and women first met as gender groups in separate
rooms and talked about what it meant to be a man or a woman. What it meant
to be a good or bad man. What it meant to be a good or bad woman. They talked
about all of their experiences related to that. For the men I was with, they
slowly and quite cautiously began to admit to each other— after some
people in power spoke up first— that having a woman initiate sex feels
good. It does a lot for the ego and it does a lot for the relationship. That
was an acknowledgement by the men in this room, for the first time in their
collective history, that women actually enjoyed intimate relationships. Some
would say, “You’re kidding me! How could this possibly be so?” Yet,
the denial began to break down, led by the powerful men in the group, and
men began opening themselves up to another reality regarding this important
aspect of gender relationships.
What this opening up did at a psychological and a social level was to level
the playing field just a bit and men, and the women they shared this new
insight with, said, “Wow! We are in this together!” It is not
just men holding the power and being the authority over everything. It is
being partners and we are not that different and, at the same time, our differences
are subtler. People can embrace both sides of that reality and be able to
move forward in their relationships in a different way.
In one workshop, a very powerful policeman from Swaziland was brought to
tears at the realization that he had been ignoring the needs of his wife
for twenty some odd years. He decided to have a discussion with her about
this insight that very night. The next day he came and his wife was right
next to him. As I was to lead the group that day, she came up to me and said, “Michael,
I wanted to come in and see what had so powerfully moved my husband to want
to be my partner, not just my husband.”
I swear, you talked about stories bringing tears to your eyes, well that
was what was happening right there in front of 50 people. My partner doing
the workshop with me, Felice Tilin, saw me hugging this woman and her husband
and all of us letting loose these joyful tears. She came up with tears in
her own eyes and asked, “What’s going on?”
I said, “We are just having a wonderful moment.”
She said, “I felt it from across the room.”
And now, Riane Eisler:
Q: Maybe a way to begin this might be to help the readers have a sense of who you are and what you’ve been about in your career.
A: I sometimes have said that my life is like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together, because I have a varied background.
I have a background academically in both sociology and in law. I have used that background to embark on what my work has been: a systems study of our past, present and the possibilities for our future as a species. That is fairly big, right? My first job was as a systems scientist at the Systems Development Corporation, an offshoot of the Rand Corporation. Already in the 50’s, when nobody talked about systems, that was something that I was involved in.
Perhaps the most significant parts of my background are two-fold. One was what happened when I was a child and the Nazis took over my native Austria. That was cataclysmic for me, of course. We had to flee and it completely changed my life. It brought up the question that my work sought to answer: when we have such an enormous capacity for caring, for empathy, for creativity and yes, for love, why is it that there has been so much cruelty, so much violence, so much destructiveness? Is it inevitable—as we are often told—or do we have alternatives? That is a burning question for many of us. It certainly was for me starting very early in my life.
The second formative experience was not only the immigration process, the changing of so many cultures—first to Cuba, then later to the United States—but in the 60’s—like many women—I suddenly realized that as important as having been born Jewish had been in my life, having been born female probably affected my life even more. As happened with many women at that time—I realized that many problems that I had thought were personal were really cultural and social. That was very important because one of the things that distinguish my research methodology is that most studies of human society are quite aptly called the study of man. And then we are told, “Don’t worry, man includes woman.” Well actually, woman includes man…
(LAUGHTER)
A: …but the point of it is that these studies use a very, very incomplete database. Not only that, but when you focus on one half of humanity, you don’t take into full account the domain that is primarily associated with women, namely, family and other intimate relations. In other words, the private rather than the so-called public sphere is ignored. So in my research, I was able to see patterns and configurations that are not visible otherwise, because I drew from a much larger database.
There were no names for these configurations. Connecting the dots was what
was possible at that point, because if we only look at part of the picture,
we don’t see the configuration of the whole picture, right? So there
were no names and I had to name them. I named one configuration the dominator
or domination model and the other one, the partnership model. I also use the
term “gylanic,” because the cultural construction of the relationship
of the roles of the two halves of humanity is a key element of the social system.
Q: Your partnership model and dominator model concepts are very interesting,
because they aren’t just about interpersonal relationships or family
relationships, but they are also about social, economic and political relationships,
as well.
A: They are about everything, really. The whole picture includes women, children
and early childhood relations, which are so foundational to a society, and
affect everything. We’re socialized to just sort of immediately ghetto-ize
that and say, “Oh, this is about women and children,” whereas nothing
could be further from the truth. To understand human society we need an approach
that takes into account the whole of the population: men, women, and children.
Q: Please summarize the quality or characteristics of a dominator model.
A: We’re all very familiar with the characteristics. Basically we’re
talking about a system of beliefs and a way of structuring institutions—family,
education, religion, politics, and economics—in a way that imposes
and maintains top-down rankings of domination. I call this a “Hierarchy
of Domination,” be it in the family, the state or tribe. And of course,
we see it in economics, religion, and education. The partnership and dominator
models are just that, models, so we’re always talking about the degree
to which a particular culture, economic system, business or family orients
to one or the other. And these categories go beyond conventional ones such
as right vs. left, religious versus secular, or Eastern vs. Western. Examples
of rigid dominator cultures are Nazi Germany (a secular Western rightist
society, Khomeini’s Iran (a religious Eastern society), Stalin’s
Soviet Union (a leftist society)…
Q: So then most of us are very familiar with the dominator model. We’ve been living in it.
A: That is a good point because the mere fact that we are having this conversation, of course, shows that we’ve also begun to move away from it. Consider the European Middle Ages. They looked a lot like the Taliban, didn’t they? The Inquisition, the Crusades, the witch burnings, enormous abuse and violence, in child rearing and, of course, chronic, chronic wars, and very rigid male dominance.
Q: You have an alternative that you suggested as a result of your work and that is a partnership model.
A: It is a so very important that we know that there is an alternative. Just for starters, I would like to say that this alternative is about a configuration. When I use the term partnership, this is not about just strategic alliances or cooperation. People collaborate and cooperate in the domination model. The 9/11 terrorists did; invading armies and monopolies do, etc. So the difference between competition and cooperation isn’t the difference between these two models. The difference is that each has a very different cultural configuration.
We can see the partnership configuration in tribal societies such as the Teduray of the Philippines, the Minangkabau of Sumatra. We see it in very technologically developed cultures such as the Nordic cultures: Sweden, Finland, and Norway. There we see a much closer orientation to the partnership model than anywhere else in the world today, except for tribal islands of earlier cultures.
Q: Would you characterize the partnership model?
A: Well, let’s look at the Nordic Nations. First of all, rather than having hierarchies of domination—these rigid rankings—they do have hierarchies. They have more of what I call hierarchies of actualization. I’ll get back to that because it’s key to my model for business and economics. But the first thing that you see is that they have much greater political and economic democracy. They don’t have these huge gaps betweens haves and have-nots. They have a generally high standard of living for everyone.
Second, rather than ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, they have much more equal partnership between women and men. With this—and this is critical—you find that as the status of women rises, so does the status of those traits and activities stereotypically considered feminine: caring, care-giving, non-violence.
So what do you see? You see that the Nordic nations were pioneers in what my friend from Finland, Hilkka Pietila, calls a caring society. We call it a welfare state, but it’s very different from the U.S. welfare system. They have universal health care, childcare allowances, elder care and paid parental leave. In other words, in cultures that orient to the partnership model, the care giving that is stereotypically associated with women can become a fiscal priority of the nation.
This is very, very good for the economic health of the nation. Finland, for example, in both 2003 and 2004 ranked ahead of the much wealthier, much more powerful United States in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness ratings. And of course, these nations are always on the top in the U.N. Human Development Reports.
These nations also pioneered the first peace studies courses. They pioneered laws against physical punishment of children in families. They pioneered a strong men’s movement to disentangle male identity from violence. They also pioneered what we today call industrial democracy, teamwork in factories, rather than turning human beings into mere cogs in the industrial machine. Ecologically sound manufacturing, such as the Natural Step, was also pioneered by them.
Now, none of this is random or coincidental. It’s part of the cultural configuration characteristic of the partnership rather than domination model. It is a configuration that factors both what happens to the female half of humanity and also what happens in people’s day-to-day lives…
Q: Ultimately, I want to get to the question of leadership, but I think there is still more foundation to be laid. For example, you brought up the subject of economics. In a new book that’s coming out called Enlightened Power yours is the first chapter: The Economics of the Enlightened Use of Power. Can you lay out for us a little bit of the economic argument in support of a partnership approach?
A: It is something I’m very deeply involved in. I am actually working on a new book on partnership economics: a caring economy. We’ve been told for a long time, for example in terms of organizational structure, that hierarchies of domination are needed for success. In these hierarchies of rigid top down rankings, accountability, respect, and benefit flow mostly from the bottom up. Enron, for example, certainly didn’t have much accountability or respect from the top down. Most of the benefits accrued to the people on top. That’s the classic domination model. And Enron shows that in the long term it’s hardly successful.
I don’t mean to pick on Enron. But these hierarchies of domination, where there is so little accountability or respect by those on top, are rife with horrible corruption and cause great suffering and loss. These companies eventually went bankrupt or changed their names. These were disasters for many people: stockholders, employees and their pension plans. What we’re discovering today—and it’s all over the management literature—is that hierarchies of actualization are much more efficient, much more effective.
Now what is a hierarchy of actualization? Well, if we look at the way power is conceptualized, it isn’t conceptualized so much as power over, power to dominate or to destroy, but power to empower oneself and others to be the best we can be. It is also power with. So a term like teamwork is really part of the shift to partnership where there’s a different way of looking at power.
In a hierarchy of actualization, you have respect, benefit and accountability flowing both ways. But you also have something else that is very important: you have much better information flow. This is very important for companies to make effective business decisions. In partnership structures, not only do you have teamwork where people can really have input and use their brains and their creativity, but you also have the possibility for much more creativity.
When people are in a hierarchy of domination, they know very well that they better conform. It’s very dangerous to disobey orders or to question. Particularly in a post-industrial economy where we are told we need a flexible workforce, a creative workforce, a workforce that can solve problems, the hierarchy of domination just does not work. The structure inhibits creativity and flexibility.
There is something else really basic that takes us back to what I was talking about when I spoke of the Nordic Nations. There are many studies now showing that when people feel cared for—which is part of the hierarchy of actualization—people perform much better. There are empirical studies showing this. So all in all, what we’re finding out is that the partnership model is not only more conducive to higher stages of human development, but it actually is much move conducive to economic well-being.
Q: Have you actually been exploring studies to that effect?
A: Yes, all this will be in my book on caring economics. But I have an article that will be out in a book that is being published by Stanford University that was put together by the people in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University...
Q: Let’s see if we can talk a little bit about what are the implications of all this for leadership? Some of it may be fairly obvious. Dominator models of leadership are prevalent in most societies. For example, I was doing an interview with someone recently and asked about his definition of leadership and he said a leader is someone who has followers.
(Laughter)
A: You see, that is a dominator definition.
I do want to say something: we all need teachers, but we don’t need gurus. The guru is really a dominator phenomenon. We all need leaders, but we certainly don’t need to have leaders who consider it their function to make followers out of us.
Q: So if we don’t have followers in a partnership model, what is leadership?
A: Leadership is many things. First of all it is the capacity to inspire. Second, it is the capacity to have a vision of what one’s goals are and how to implement them.
Q: A course of action?
A: Yes. You see a lot of this in the corporate literature today where you read about the leader and the manager no longer being a cop or a controller, but rather being someone who facilitates. I think the good leader nurtures. That is a statement that takes us back to an important issue: the stereotypically feminine and the stereotypically masculine.
Q: Please tell us about that.
A: I think that if we really are serious about changing our economic system, about changing our world so that our children and generations still to come will survive and thrive, we need to pay attention to what I call the hidden system of gender values. The sociologist, Louis Wirth, once said that the most important things about a society are those that are seldom talked about. I paraphrase that into “the most important things about a society are those that people feel uncomfortable talking about.” …
Q: What is the role of leadership in our current circumstances?
A: I would like to see leaders world-wide stop thinking in terms of the conventional
categories of right versus left, religious versus secular, capitalist versus
communist, east versus west, north versus south, technologically developed
or underdeveloped. I would like them to think in holistic ways, which is
only possible once we transcend this hidden system of gendered valuation.
All these conventional social categories fail to take into account the social and cultural construction of the roles and relations of the two halves of humanity. Why? Because women are so devalued that anything concerning them is not considered important.
So, I would like to see leaders use the analytical lens of the partnership and domination models, because then they will really see the whole picture. They can make more sound policy decisions. That’s the first thing. There is an urgent need for partnership leaders, for leaders that can offer people—whether it’s in an organization or in a nation—a vision of a viable and positive alternative and how to get there.
Q: How do you think we need to go about trying to increase the kind of leadership you’re talking about in the world and in our organizations?
A: First of all, I think the challenge for leaders is enormous. For me a leader is somebody who has the spiritual courage to step out of the prevailing paradigm. We’re beginning to see partnership leaders all over the world. Wangari Mathaai with her greenbelt movement in Kenya is an example of leadership that empowers. In Brazil, Thais Corral has used radio as a tool to empower women. Now there is a network of 400 women’s radio programs that have developed.
Q: By implication, are the examples and the strategy for creating more of a partnership approach to leadership focused on women?
A: Raising the status of women is not going to solve all of our problems, but without it our problems cannot be solved. That is one of the core findings from my work. If you go back to what we were talking about—the shift to a more stereotypically feminine style of leadership that’s empowering rather than disempowering, nurturing rather than coercive—we’re talking about a hidden gendered system of values becoming embodied in leadership. I want to again emphasize this; this has nothing to do with anything inherent in women or men. Some women can be very cruel and some men can be very caring. And please, bring out that it has a lot to do with the way that the domination model is structured and the way the partnership model is structured.
We need to—as leaders—now I’m talking socially—observe what the people pushing us back focus on. Whether it was Hitler in Germany, Khomeini in Iran, the fundamentalist alliance in the United States or the so called Muslim Fundamentalists, one of their top priorities is always getting women back into their “traditional place.” This is code for subservient.
A “traditional family” is another code for an undemocratic, authoritarian, male-headed family, and a very punitive family in which children learn early on that it is very dangerous to question authority, no matter how brutal or unjust. That’s foundational to the domination model. We cannot dismantle the top of the domination pyramid and still leave it’s foundations of domination and violence in the primary human relations between women and men and between parents and children largely in place.
So it’s not only the status of women. For example, a very important leverage point is changing traditions of violence and abuse in family and other intimate relations. Where do people first learn that it’s okay or even “moral” to use violence to impose your will on others? It is in these early family relations. That is why I have co-founded The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV). This is a start up. We are just getting going and we do need support for it. I invite people to support us. The SAIV international council includes major world leaders: Queen Noor and Prince El Hassan of Jordan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. Harvey Cox, Professor of the Harvard Divinity School, etc. Men, not only women. The website is www.saiv.net.
We’re not talking about women now taking over from men. Matriarchy and patriarchy are just two sides of the domination coin, as I never tire of pointing out in my writing. The real alternative is the partnership society. We need to pay attention to the primary human relations if we are going to have the foundation for a partnership society.
It’s not coincidental that there has been the movement toward a more stereotypically feminine leadership and management style we read about in the corporate literature. Along with the entry of women, not only into worker positions, but also into leadership positions, has also come the change in how leadership is conceptualized and defined. These are not unrelated…
Q: Are you aware of anyone using the dominator/partnership model explicitly to look at leadership?
A: The fact that my article was chosen as the lead article for the enlightened leadership book will tell you that the editors of that book felt that it was a very important analytical tool and a very important way of looking at leadership.
Q: It seems to me that what you’re looking at, what you’ve described, is pervasive. There is virtually nothing in human relations that can’t be understood through that lens.
A: That’s the whole point. Our conventional cultural categories – capitalist vs. communist, right vs. left, religious vs. secular, East vs. West, and so on, they are all fragmented. They just look at economics or they just look at religion or they look at location. As I said, they don’t even take into account the primary human relations between women and men and parents and children.
Q: I asked you at one time whether you were familiar with the work of Ken Wilber. He is certainly familiar with your work. But I asked you about that, because it seems to me that you are taking a somewhat integral approach to this whole set of phenomena. You are looking at culture. You are looking at systems. You are looking at the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individuals. That is a central aspect of integral theory, along with the lines of development that we talked about earlier.
A: I think that both Ken Wilber’s Integral approach and Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics certainly have very much of the same goals as I do. Our approach is different in the sense that I pay much more attention to conditions that will help us move to these higher stages. I do think that there are higher stages that we are capable of. The other thing that is different is that I don’t think that they really take into full consideration the importance of the primary human relations: between the female and male halves of humanity and between them and their sons and daughter. They have good models, but they are incomplete.
Q: Okay. Well, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think I should have?
A: It’s been a fine interview. There is one thing I didn’t mention. A number of associates and I did a study for the Center for Partnership Studies called “Women, Men and the Global Quality of Life.” For anyone who doubts the centrality of gender relations to our social and economic systems and the existence of a hidden system of gendered evaluations, which so profoundly affects quality of life, they should read that study. We compared two bundles of statistics from 89 nations gathered by established international agencies. One was quality of life measures. The other was measures of the status of women. What we found, of course, is a strong correlation between the two. But we also found that in significant respects the status of women can be a better predictor of general quality of life than GDP. The study can be found at the Center for Partnership Studies website which is www.partnershipway.org.
Q: And if anyone should want to contact you, what route would you recommend?
A: I would suggest that they go to that website or that they email me at center@partnershipway.org. The other website that would be good is the website for The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence at www.saiv.net. I would like to invite people to support that.
Q: How can people get involved with your work?
A: They can get involved by volunteering to take a role in building SAIV right now. We are looking for somebody who can help us by being a part-time operations officer. We also need somebody who can help with fund raising. People can also help by simply making donations. They are tax deductible. SAIV is a project of the Center for Partnership Studies, which is nonprofit. The best way for becoming involved with my work is either to join in one of our projects—for example right now we are discussing with an award winning filmmaker, a documentary on my work—or simply by using it. The www.parternshipway.org website has a library with a lot of articles. It has a bookstore; it has a speaker’s bureau. It has all kinds of resources.
Q: Great. Thank you so much.
For the full interview go to http://www.leadcoach.com/archives/interviews/eisler