Who Cares? - The Challenge for Creating a Compassionate Economy
By absolutely any measure, Dr. Riane Eisler is a phenomenal woman. A noted thinker, speaker and writer, Dr. Eisler is an attorney, social scientist, economist, historian, educator and internationally recognized peacemaker. Based on her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist, Dr. Eisler is the only woman noted among twenty great thinkers including Hegel, Marx and Toynbee. Included in the award- winning book, Great Peacemakers, she is listed among such luminaries as Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King. Her peacemaking is what her work is about. She seeks to understand to connect the dots of social and neurosciences to discover how the world works so that inequities might be balanced.
On a recent visit to Seattle was the keynote speaker for two very different events. As opening speaker for the Northwest Women’s Convocation, a biannual meeting of over 1000 Catholic women, Dr. Eisler’s topic was What is Good for Women is Good for the World. The following evening, as guest of the Compassionate Action Network (http://www.compassionateactionnetwork.com%29and/ the Social Justice Ministry of Mount Zion Baptist Church (mountzion.net; see Ministries), she spoke to a more intimate gathering on the topic, Cultivating Societies of Caring and Compassion. In both settings she willingly shared lessons learned from a remarkable life.
Dr. Eisler seeks, through her work, to create what she refers to as a caring revolution. She proposes that the greatest problems of history – poverty, family violence, inequalities of all kinds (racism, sexism, and ageism), environmental degradation, war, and terrorism - are directly related to our human inability to honor, cherish and support the most basic human work, loving and caring for each other. While it may sound, at first, like an alien concept to some, it is a concept that is at once beautifully simple and exceptionally politically radical. “Our challenge”, says Dr. Eisler “is to develop a caring economics where human needs and capacities are nurtured, out human habitat is conserved and our great potential for caring and creativity is supported.”
In The Chalice and the Blade (1987), her influential seminal book on gender relationships, Dr. Eisler explored early male- and female-headed societies as well as those based on Goddess worship. She drew upon the archaeological research of such well-respected scientists and cultural thinkers as Maria Gimbutas and Ashley Montagu. Her main hypothesis was that much of history has been a battle between Dominator and Partnership societies. The book references the destructive dominating blade versus the life-giving chalice.
Dr. Eisler believes that the Dominator model has also skewed our economic models. Her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations, takes its title from The Wealth of Nations,(1776) written by Scottish economist Adam Smith, one of the great thinkers to whom her societal impact has been compared. Adam Smith is most known for two concepts. The most famous idea, the invisible hand, states that people act in their own self-interest. In The Wealth of Nations he wrote that, “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good(page 456)." His second idea, meritocracy, is the notion that an elite group progresses in society based on ability and talent rather than on class privilege. For centuries, economists have ascribed to many of Smith’s theories. Eisler takes great exception to them, asking why we cannot rethink them, looking to what might really make our nations wealthy. Her view is that we must take care of each other and that we are all worthy. Compensation for caring, she states, must undergird a new economic structure.
Of her new book, The Real Wealth of Nations, Archbishop Desmond Tutu says (it): "gives us a template for the better world that we have been so urgently seeking. As practical as it is hopeful, this brilliant book shows how we can build economic systems that meet both our material and spiritual needs. It illuminates the way to a bold and exciting new future."
According to Dr. Eisler, the American economy is comprised of the following neglected sectors, all of which are in constant interaction with one another:
Household Economy – We think of home as the place where the heart is, but our economic models don’t. They view home as a unit of consumption rather than as place of “high-quality human capital,” specifically, compensated caring and caregiving.
Unpaid Community Economy – charitable and social justice groups like non-profit groups and non-governmental organizations (civil society), and barter structures are currencies that promote caring and caregiving.
Market Economy – this sector provides our traditional market analyses but discourages rather than promotes caring.
Illegal Economy – economic activities run by crime syndicates and gangs (sex trade, drug trade, some arms trade, and other illegal activities). These activities do not promote caring.
Government Economy – makes laws, policies, and rules impacting the market economy, public services, and contracts to private enterprises. Some entail caring components but government policies provide little support to the caring and caregiving activities of the household and unpaid community economies.
Natural Economy - Conventional economic models give little value to nature. Caring for the environment is viewed as a liability in conventional cost-benefit analyses. More recently caring has been a consideration in some economic theories.
Caring economics may not be a concept that makes immediate sense to some people. However, it makes perfect sense that Dr. Eisler sought to understand to make sense of a system that knit the world together in a way that differed considerably from her life’s experience. She is an Austrian-born Holocaust survivor, having, as a young girl lived through and her family lived through German Kristallnacht or the "night of the broken glass." On this night Nazis went through Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues smashing windows, religious symbols and crystal to show their power. Of those who entered her home was a boy soldier who had worked for her father. Bravely, her mother chastised him. Eisler's father was taken but through her mother’s ingenuity, was returned to the family. The family traveled for Cuba on the last ship to successfully leave the country. The fate of the ship that followed theirs was chronicled in the film, Voyage of the Damned. Raised in the industrial slums of Havana, Eisler had the choice to become bitter, angry and despondent. She chose, instead, to allow the extraordinary pain she had endured to challenge her to find a better way to understand her experiences.
She came to understand that social systems are typically designed as structures of domination and submission, proposing instead a partnership model. She made clear that partnership this is not the same as cooperation. Nazis cooperated with one another and with reasonable governments before their Final Plan became clear. The Taliban is cooperating as they terrorize the Swat region in Pakistan American soldiers cooperated with their superiors to create the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Instead partnership economics/politics/education/social justice efforts focus on four primary ideas:
Childhood Relations - New research on brain behavior and learning show that young brains are primed not just for cognitive learning but also for learning violent and maladaptive behaviors that are part of the dominant system.
Gender Relations - Women and men were created equal by God and, should be treated as such by all social systems. "We socialize our children to be terrorized by the domination system. Men are in charge and women must do as they say."
Economic Relations - the poor do not need to be with us always. "What sense does it make", said Dr. Eisler, "to have a trickle down system of economics. Why should anyone have to live on the droppings of the rich?"
Stories, Beliefs and Spirituality - The stories of domination must be changed. According to Dr. Eisler, our need for self-help books and programs is primarily because so many of us believe the negative stories that come from our dysfunctional dominating families within the larger dominating society.
We are stories, we are spirit, we are equal and we all have the potential for partnership if we also have a willingness to push outside our pain and to see, as has Dr. Eisler, that any personal pain has the potential for greatness and compassion on the other side. A caring economic system restructures how we are already living can gives it value. Most recently, the United States Congress included her language on Caring Education in their legislation. The same should occur for her Economic plan (http://www.rianeeisler.com/).
So the next time someone is flippant enough to respond to you with the statement, “Who cares?,” think of who takes care of your elderly parents and your children. Think of who you care for and the value of this caring to society. Remember that teaching is undervalued. That there are environmental disasters somewhere on a monthly basis that take human lives – those of people who live near the devastated sites and those of first responders.. That home health aides are underpaid. Remember that gangs are simply dysfunctional families and that prostitutes typically were abused at home or made vulnerable on the internet. Then kindly share with your friend what you have learned from Dr. Riane Eisler. Creating an economy based on caring is the basis of a new revolution. Or just a reasonable idea. It simply entirely much too costly not to care.