Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… (12 page)

RIANE: Let me put that into historical context, in the context of the tension between the partnership and the dominator models. The question of empathy is central here. Because one of the things that you have to do in the dominator system is to find some way to deaden empathy. For example, how in the world is a man supposed to do the kinds of things that he's supposed to do in war, and have empathy?

While we're on that subject, somebody was telling me of evidence suggesting that when we humans engage in helpful behavior, there is a release of a chemical bodily reward. We feel better for it. And yet in the dominator system that empathic impulse, that helpful impulse, is constantly being suppressed or distorted.

RMN: You have made use of Ralph Abraham's systems theory which explains the motions of cultural trends in terms of a response to chaotic or periodic attractors. What historical examples have you discovered which fit into this model of cultural evolution?

RIANE: Ralph speaks a great deal about attractors, and I have looked at the partnership and the dominator models as attractors. Using Ralph's terminology, if we look at prehistory as a basin, then the stable attractor there was the partnership model. I'm talking about the mainstream now, because obviously the attractor on the fringes was the dominator model.

Once we get into recorded history it becomes more complex. There are still elements of the partnership model, but they are co-opted and exploited by the dominator system, like women's nurturing work in the family, which is given no monetary reward and little status.

Still, what you also see is what Ralph calls periodicity, periods when the partnership model becomes a stronger attractor. But it never quite makes it. You never see the change, the system's transformation, where it becomes the primary attractor, and in
The Chalice and the Blade
, I describe some of these periods. Such as early Christianity. But then the Church allies itself (under the leadership of the so-called church fathers) with the Roman emperor, Constantine. And what happens is that you begin to see again a very hierarchic, completely male dominant structure--no women allowed in the priesthood--and a very violent structure, as manifested in the Crusades and the Inquisition. In other words you've got the dominator model again.

Let's now jump to modern times, to the sixties, when women and men were beginning to definitely reject the sexual stereotypes. Women were rejecting their exclusion from leadership and from the so-called public sphere. And men and women were rejecting the equation of masculinity with warfare. Is it really heroic to be a warrior? Wait a minute, they said, no it isn't. But again you had a regression, the "new conservatism," the rightist-fundamentalist resurgence.

And today what we are continuing to see in the world is a mounting partnership resurgence. But it is against tremendous dominator resistance, as we can see all around us in what's happening, from the U.S. Supreme Court to the spread of Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, the stronger the partnership thrust, the greater resistance. Until there is a systems shift--which is where the new consciousness has a major role to play.

DAVID L: This is another reason for the force of Riane's book, because it puts the challenge of social change within the most forceful context I know of. Those of us who have worked at various stages for civil rights and other causes have certainly had the experience of this massive wall of resistance, the inertia within the system. Much of the evil force of the dominator system is just this inertia. In any kind of system the resistance against change is phenomenal.

So we've had this idea--and Darwinian theory helped lock it in - that all change has to come slowly. We've had the idea that it's going to take many generations. But ever since 1945 when the bombs went off, people have begun to realize we don't have time for slow social change. So to the activist, the great excitement about chaos theory is that it shows you can have a system going along, and a little blip appears within it that doesn't seem to amount to a hill of beans. It may appear and then disappear--but it may also spread with astounding rapidity, and become more and more prevalent until the whole system has changed. This is why the strange attractor phenomena is fascinating, not only to mathematicians such as Ralph Abraham, but to social theorists. Because they see here a model for hope that we may survive, that there may be enough of us creating what, in Prigoginian terms, is called a nucleation, which in dynamic terms is a strange attractor. And chaos theory shows that if there are enough of us, and if luck is with us, we can, in a relatively short amount of time, which is all the time we've got, transform the whole system.

Ilya Prigogine can show this happening in chemical solutions. Ralph Abraham can show it happening with computer projections. What is exciting about Riane's book is that she shows this happening on a global scale in prehistory. For these were the dynamics of the Kurgan invasions. The Kurgan invaders acted in effect as a strange attractor. You see the strange attractor at work, coming, going, until within a relatively short period of time the whole system has been taken over by the dominator culture acting as a "peripheral invader," to use Eldridge and Gould's term.

Because we now at last have the pre-historical data that shows us how this shift happened in a negative and anti-human direction back there, we can now understand how the same kind of rapid shift can happen today--but this time in a pro-human direction. Another implication of chaos theory is extremely important. Just going by the mathematics, or chemistry of chaos theory, one might think that when we move over from natural to social science this remains a random process, and we have to just sit by and hope that we're part of a strange attractor. But other systems theorists--Ervin Laszlo, for example, who heads the General Evolution Research Group, which Riane and I helped form--are showing the effect of human change agents. We don't have to just sit back and wait for this mystic scientific process to maybe work in our advantage. We can show that human intervention, through change agents, can definitely make a difference.

DJB: Do you think that there is a relationship between the two types of human civilization that you define, and the over-specialization of specific hemispheres in the brain?

RIANE: I think that that's a very complex question, and David probably could answer it better. But I think that it's a fallacy that people seem to think that this earlier archaic prehistoric period was all right brain.

If you look at Crete, if you look at the technology, they obviously did some very logical, linear so-called left brain thinking. If you look at Stonehenge, at these massive ritual centers, they had to have had some left brain capacity to do this. And look at all the inventions that we owe to these people!

Clearly prehistory wasn't all right brain. I think it was more balanced, and I think in that sense you're right about an over-specialization of the left brain in dominator societies. But of course you know it's not that clear that they're that localized either, these faculties. And David can tell you more about that. I think that when we're talking about a partnership society, we are talking about an integration of what we now think of as right and left brain, about more of a system view, a holographic view.

DAVID L: Certainly, the earlier culture was more right brain oriented than our culture tends to be, but there is all this evidence indicating that it was a much more balanced holistic functioning, where you're able to draw upon both halves of the brain with some facility. As Riane pointed out in the example of Stonehenge, there are indications of a high mathematical capacity in early partnership-oriented cultures. But at the same time there is a correlation between left brain dominance and the dominator system. We speak of right brain dominance, left brain dominance, and the reason we do is that brain research shows that one or the other can dominate and suppress the other modes.

The prototypical situation for somebody today, particularly a male in the male dominant culture that has prevailed for five thousand years now, intensified by the so-called Age of Reason --is that you sop up a little bit of insight from the right brain half, but then you immediately suppress that original source of information. You shift wholly into the mathematics, or an elaborate left-brained rationality process. You develop the logic but suppress and shove under the whole feeling side of life, the whole realm of affectivity, which tends to be handled more by the right brain half. So there is a correspondence there, but it's not this simplistic notion the earlier culture was just blindly right brained. Julian Jaynes popularized the idea the earlier culture was right brained, and the later dominator culture was left brained, and this later culture not only represented true civilization but also the first appearance in human evolution of consciousness!

DJB: Could you make use of Rupert Sheldrake's recently refined theory of morphogenetic fields-- that is, non-material regions of organic influence---to shed any more light on the evolution of dominator and partnership societies?

DAVID L: I recently finished writing an introduction to a new book by Ervin Laszlo in which he provides substantiation for Sheldrake and other morphogenetic field theorists from many different scientific fields. I think the easiest way to see the possible relation between Sheldrake's theory and the shift to a dominator or a partnership system is what people have picked up on in the one hundredth monkey story.

In other words, Sheldrake's theory suggests that if you go back into the early partnership culture, there was a certain point at which the numbers of dominator-system-oriented nomads along the periphery, all carrying the same killer ethos, reached a critical point in imprinting this ethos on the morphogenetic field, or the "cosmic schmaz," or whatever you want to call it, and it began to crowd out the other. I think in our time the same process is going on, only in reverse. And so it's extremely important for those of us who have regained this partnership ethos to both increase in numbers and feel intensively about this to re-imprint this ethos with greater effect, greater force on the "cosmic schmaz." I think there's something there, and I think it relates to the dynamics, but of course we're still a long way off from fully understanding it.

RMN: The gylanic principle flourished during the sixteenth century Renaissance with a partial marriage of art and science. What other historical examples have you observed where the symbiotic union of the subjective and objective realms are indicative of a gylanic society, and do you see the current interest in fractals, brain machines, and the poetic musings of quantum physics as being examples of a reunion between these two areas of human experience?

RIANE: I think that these may be manifestations of emerging gylanic consciousness. But I also think that a lot of the so-called leading edge thinking today continues to be the male intellectual game.

Now certainly one of the very interesting things that's happening with fractals, for example, is that it's an image that's very much like a mandala. If you look at some of the art of the Neolithic, the meanders, the serpentine lines, you see a lot of mandala-like images. These were epiphanies of the divine, of the Goddess. So I see a relationship, but I also see that without the partnership mythos, we are always back to the same thing. Without the integrative story, and without the understanding that a truly new science requires not only integrating the "feminine," but real live people called women, we are just going to keep dancing around the problem and neither science nor art nor society is going to fundamentally change.

DAVID L: Yes. This is something about which I feel intensely as a male who has actively worked within male-dominated scientific contexts to try to inject the feminist perspective, to get more women involved. Take fractals, take chaos theory, this whole fascinating computer generated mathematical excitement without what Riane is talking about, without this larger balanced masculine/ feminine or feminine/masculine ethos, and all this "new science" will become merely another male head trip. That is, it will be reduced to merely another entertainment for primarily male academics who gather in symposia, which in one way or another are in the end sponsored by the military industrial complex, which all too often still pays the bulk of their salaries.

This is the horrible alternative we face with every one of these great discoveries reconnecting with the past. There is this danger they will be co-opted, degraded and defused by the present system, unless the people who are leading the revolution in "new science" understand this larger picture and ethos. The man who wrote the enormously popular book
Chaos
, James Gleick, for example, has no understanding of this larger context that I can see. He's done a beautiful job of providing information, but typically this can all go to simply serve the purposes of entertainment and the military industrial complex.

DJB: How do you envision civilization and human consciousness to be one hundred years from now?