A New Beginning

This closing chapter opens with a brief summary of what came before. Across cultures and times, partnership systems and domination systems have affected our brains, actions, relationships, values, customs, and institutions. Over the last centuries, progressive social movements focused on dismantling economic and political domination, but gave scant attention to traditions of domination and violence in parent-child and gender relations, so domination systems keep rebuilding themselves. The rest of the chapter is a call to action. It details how to construct the missing four cornerstones required to support a more equitable, caring, and sustainable partnership future. The first cornerstone is childhood; concrete steps to reduce the staggering rates of abuse and violence against children worldwide are proposed. The second cornerstone is gender; as prerequisites for a better future, actions to change the devaluation of women and the “feminine” are described. The third cornerstone is economics, going beyond capitalism and socialism to meet our environmental, technological, and social challenges by recognizing the enormous value of the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and caring for nature. The fourth cornerstone consists of narratives and language; here, the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens is an essential tool in all areas of life, from education to guiding biotechnology and artificial intelligence in ways that support the expression of our evolutionary predispositions for caring, consciousness, and creativity.

The Real Culture Wars

We humans live, and all too often die, by stories, as one of the authors almost died as a child in the Holocaust. This chapter shows that the real culture wars are not between religion and secularism, East and West, or capitalism and socialism, but are within all societies, between orientation to either the partnership or domination side of the social scale. Starting with the two different biblical stories about the creation of humanity—the famous tale where Eve is an afterthought responsible for all our ills, and the earlier story where both men and women are created equal—is a contrast in normative narratives that support domination or partnership. Covering a wide swath of prehistory and history, this contrast offers fascinating new insights: for example, how Western science came out of a hierarchical, conformist, misogynist, all-male medieval clerical culture (a world without women and children) and how it took more than 700 years for women’s, men’s, and gender studies to emerge in universities; how Freud’s secular theories replicated the earlier religious ideology of original sin and male supremacy; and how in all spheres (from the family, politics, and the academy to mainstream and popular culture worldwide), the underlying tension between movement toward partnership and the resistance/regressions to domination is playing out.

The Original Partnership Societies

Mobile foragers—also called nomadic hunter-gatherers—constitute the oldest form of human social organization, predating by far the agricultural revolution of about 10,000 years ago as well as the rise of pastoralists, tribal horticulturalists, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and ancient states. In the debates about the nature of human nature—whether we are more inclined toward war or peace, selfishness or altruism—nomadic forager societies are regularly evoked to draw inferences about human existence “in a state of nature” before the development of civilization. Studies of nomadic forager band societies suggest that humanity’s ancient orientation actually was toward partnership and peace rather than domination and war over the many millennia of human evolution. The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies—re-enforced by archeological studies, the recent Nordic experience, and other evidence—is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither sex dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage. Since partnership behaviors have been essential to survival for the millions of years that humans and their ancestors foraged for a living, the study of archaeology and nomadic forager societies raises an intriguing possibility. Given the long-standing evolutionary legacy of partnership, human minds and dispositions may be especially inclined toward the empathic, caring, egalitarian, prosocial, cooperative behaviors.

The Benefits of Partnership and the Costs of Domination

This chapter focuses on the tension between domination systems and partnership systems as two ends of a continuum along which human societies can be organized, regardless of whether they are Eastern or Western, Northern or Southern, religious or secular, rightist or leftist, and so on. It describes the core components of each system, how these interact, and how growing up in societies that orient to one or the other differently affects neurological development and hence our perceptions, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors—which in turn affect human health, happiness, well-being, and the types of societies we create. The chapter provides examples of how domination systems produce high levels of stress—from the artificial creation of economic scarcity to stressful early family experiences—and how this plays out in the neurochemistry of the brain, tending to keep people at a less advanced level of overall human development that interferes with the full flourishing of those very qualities that make people happiest: security, empathy, consciousness, creativity, and love. On the other hand, partnership environments—as illustrated by descriptions of conditions in Nordic nations—enhance the expression of human capacities for health, happiness, well-being, consciousness, and creativity.

The Biology of Experience

Biology and experience are not generally seen as connected, yet experience is integral to gene expression, both individually and collectively. Dramatically illustrating how experience can influence whether genetic capacities are expressed or inhibited in humans and other species, this chapter looks at studies showing that our brain circuits, and therefore our abilities and behavior, are strongly shaped by the environment, which for humans is primarily our surrounding culture as mediated by families, education, religion, politics, and economics. Our large-brained species is flexible: we are equipped for destructiveness and creativity, rote conformity and independence, and cruelty and caring. There are many examples of how cultural environments affect the expression of genetic potentials, including fascinating findings from the emerging field of epigenetics showing that these effects can be transmitted from generation to generation; research showing that the brains of people with a background of abuse and violence tend to have lower levels of serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter, and higher levels of cortisol, the major stress hormone; and studies on how chronic or intense stress brings into play hormones such as cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine associated with fight-or-flight responses, including aggressive and other negative behaviors. While highly stressful traditions of domination and violence are still deeply entrenched in many cultures worldwide, there are interventions that can help us build a more secure, just, sustainable, and peaceful world for individuals, families, and communities.

Love, the Brain, and Becoming Human

This chapter introduces a new perspective on the role of love in human evolution and human development. The bonds of love, whether between parent and child, lovers, or close friends, may all have a common biological root, activating neurochemicals that make us feel good. Like other human capacities, such as consciousness, learning, and creativity, love has a long and fascinating evolutionary history. Indeed, the evolution of love appears to be integral to the development of our human brain and hence to much that distinguishes us from other species. Moreover, love plays a vital, though still largely unrecognized, role in human development, with evidence accumulating about the negative effects of love deprivation as well as the benefits of love. But whether or not our needs for meaning and love are met, and whether or not our capacities for creativity and love are expressed, are largely determined by the interaction of biology and culture—specifically, the degree to which a culture or subculture orients to the partnership or domination end of the continuum.

Love, Violence, and Socialization in Partnership and Domination Environments

We received neurochemical rewards of pleasure when we give or receive empathic love, and seem to have a predisposition against violence. This chapter explores the crucial question of what conditions support rather than inhibit the actualization of these human predispositions. It examines experimental evidence showing that, given a choice, people tend to choose mutual benefit over winning; looks at how socialization for traditional “hypermasculinity” promotes male aggression and the suppression of loving “soft” or “feminine” feelings; and gives examples of cultures with different socialization styles, and hence far less stress and violence. It shows how the socialization of men to equate “real masculinity” with domination and violence deprives both men and women of healthy loving relations based on mutuality and the sharing of pleasure, and is key to imposing and maintaining domination systems, with their chronic fear and violence. It looks at the modern movement away from traditions of domination and its liberating effects, for example, legislation pioneered in Nordic nations that prohibits physical discipline against children in families.

Contracting or Expanding Consciousness

This chapter looks at what gets in the way of our capacity for consciousness about ourselves, others, and nature—and the implications for our lives and the future of our planet. It draws from classic experiments on how perceptions are often suppressed, denied, and/or distorted in individuals who have been conditioned through their early experiences to believe that dominating and being dominated are our only alternatives, as well as how such individuals tend to have difficulty dealing with change. It presents recent studies using brain scans showing that this difficulty (with its implications for denial of climate change and other present threats) is associated with a particular kind of brain development. It also draws from new studies confirming that people from such backgrounds tend to vote for “strongman leaders”; support a punitive political agenda (such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons, use of military force in international affairs, and punishment of “immoral” women and gays); and deflect their suppressed fear and anger into prejudices against “inferior” or “dangerous” out-groups (all exploited by antidemocratic populists such as Trump in our world today). It examines how the cultural construction of gender roles and relations and the social categories provided by our languages affect what people perceive as moral, normal, and/or inevitable, revealing the psychosocial dynamics that habituate people to suppress their capacity for empathy, to accept authoritarian control, and to become unable to see more equitable, compassionate, less stressful life options.

Two Alternate Social Possibilities

This chapter explores a number of societies of very different geographic locations, social structures, economic systems, and religious orientations in depth, using the analytical lens of the partnership-domination continuum. It illustrates how the divergent patterns associated with each orientation play out in our day-to-day life; shows that partnership and domination orientations can be found across a variety of cultural settings, ancient and modern; and demonstrates why a whole-systems analysis that includes the cultural construction of the formative parent-child and gender relations is vital if we are to move forward. It details how and why partnership-oriented cultures, such as the Moso, Teduray, Minangkabau, and Nordic nations, support more egalitarian, peaceful, empathetic, and caring ways of living.

Touch, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Partnership and Domination Environments

How people are touched, especially as children and in sexual and other intimate relations, affects and is in turn affected by cultural factors. This chapter explores how patterns of touch, intimacy, and sexuality differ at opposite ends of the domination-partnership continuum and why understanding this is important for moving forward. Studies show that we read other’s intentions and emotions by how we are touched and that the confluence of caring with coercion and pain is one of the most effective mechanisms for socializing people to suppress empathy and submit to domination as adults—whether through the painful binding of girls’ feet once traditional in China, or so-called Christian parenting guides that today admonish parents not to “overindulge” children and instead follow “God’s way” by forcing eight-month-old babies to sit with their hands on their trays or laps through threats and violence. Sexuality, too, is distorted in domination systems through the erotization of domination and violence, for example, by inculcating the belief that males are entitled to sex; through the mass shootings of women in the United States and Canada by men who call themselves incel (involuntarily celibate); and by the enslavement of women by Muslim fundamentalist groups like ISIS. The chapter contrasts these unhealthy interactions with healthy ones supported by partnership-oriented cultures.