In this groundbreaking work, Eisler expands her influential cultural transformation theory by examining how social systems shape human development, behavior, and our collective future. The book presents a compelling framework analyzing societies through the lens of two fundamental models: domination systems versus partnership systems.

Domination systems are characterized by rigid hierarchies, authoritarian structures, and the normalization of violence. These societies emphasize control over others, whether through gender inequality, economic exploitation, or environmental destruction. In contrast, partnership systems prioritize mutual respect, gender equity, democratic processes, and sustainable practices. Eisler demonstrates how these contrasting models influence everything from child-rearing practices to economic policies.

A key contribution of the book is its interdisciplinary approach, combining neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology to show how early childhood experiences in different systems literally shape brain development. Harsh, punitive parenting in domination cultures creates neural pathways for aggression and fear, while nurturing care in partnership societies fosters empathy and cooperation. The authors present compelling evidence that our "human nature" is far more flexible than traditionally believed, shaped significantly by our cultural environment.

The work examines both historical examples (like egalitarian Neolithic societies) and contemporary case studies (such as Nordic nations with strong gender equality and social welfare systems). Eisler argues that transitioning to partnership systems is not just idealistic, but essential for addressing existential threats like climate change and nuclear war. The book concludes with practical pathways for change, emphasizing education reform, economic policies that value caregiving, and the transformation of gender narratives.

Nurturing Our Humanity ultimately presents an optimistic yet evidence-based vision for creating a more peaceful, sustainable future by consciously evolving our social systems toward the partnership model.

Nurturing Our Humanity

How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future

RIANE EISLER, JD, PHD (HON)
President, Center for Partnership Studies

DOUGLAS P. FRY, PHD
Professor & Chair
Department of Peace and Conflict Studies
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Acknowledgments

1. Our Story … 1
2. Evolution, Ideology, and Human Nature … 6
3. Love, the Brain, and Becoming Human … 14
4. The Biology of Experience … 23
5. The Benefits of Partnership and the Costs of Domination … 31
6. Two Alternate Social Possibilities … 37
7. The Original Partnership Societies … 41
8. Contracting or Expanding Consciousness … 50
9. Touch, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Partnership and Domination Environments … 55
10. Love, Violence, and Socialization in Partnership and Domination Environments … 63
11. The Real Culture Wars … 71
12. A New Beginning … 78

Bibliography

Many people have contributed to this book, which has gone through a number of iterations. Earlier manuscript drafts were strengthened through reviews by biologist Mary E. Clark and psychologist/primatologist Frans de Waal and by the dedicated editing of Helen Knode. Science writer Sharon Begley was also of help, as were psychologist Daniel S. Levine, primatologist Barbara Smuts, anthropologists Stuart Schlegel and Peggy Sanday, neuroscientist Lucy R. Brown, social psychologist David Loye, as well as Melissa Stone, Loren Alison, and Andrea Eisler. We express our gratitude to all of them.

We next want to give our thanks to the many contributions made to the final version of the book by neuroscientist C. Sue Carter, anthropologist Kirk Endicott, psychologist Sheina Lew-Levy, anthropologist Paul “Jim” Roscoe, primatologist/neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and peace and global ethics scholar Geneviève Souillac. We also want to thank Loren Alison, Julia Alison, Ann Amberg, Michelle Bird, Frances Collins, Leah Gowron, Carla Goldstein, Kacey Keith, Matt Lett, Brie Mathers, Sara and Manfred Melchior, Sara Saltee, and Claire Souillac.

Our editor at Oxford University Press, Joan Bossert, merits our special thanks, as do Phil Velinov, Jennifer Rod, and Ayshwarya Ramakrishnan.

We would like to acknowledge the collaboration and creative synergy between us as joint authors of this book. It has truly been a pleasure working together, and we have each learned a great deal in the process.

Last, but certainly not least, we want to thank our spouses for their wonderful support and great patience with us during the writing of this book. Riane’s partner David Loye has been an invaluable source of care, insight, and knowledge, and so also has Doug’s partner Geneviève Souillac. They continue to inspire us.

Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry April 2019

Oxford University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Eisler, Riane, author. | Fry, Douglas P., 1953– author.
Title: Nurturing our humanity : how domination and partnership shape our brains, lives, and future / Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018061070 | ISBN 9780190935726 | eISBN 9780190935740 Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations. | Dominance (Psychology) | Partnership—Psychological aspects. | Human evolution. Classification: LCC HM1111.E37 2019 | DDC 302—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061070

For millennia, humans have imagined a peaceful and just world. Sometimes we only imagined this world in an afterlife. But over the last centuries, many of us have imagined it right here on Earth. Not a utopia, not a perfect world. But a world where peace is more than just an interval between wars, where dire poverty, brutal oppression, insensitivity, cruelty, and despair are no longer “just the way things are.”

Now there is a new urgency to our wish for a more humane world. Every day we are bombarded by news of barbaric human rights abuses, terrorist attacks, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a drift back to strongman rule. The destruction of our natural environment continues at an accelerating pace, endangering our global life-support systems. New technologies, from artificial intelligence to biological engineering, could have catastrophic results if guided by cultural values of greed, megalomania, and disregard for human rights.

From all sectors—religious and secular, philosophical and scientific, and thousands of small groups worldwide—come calls for cultural transformation: for building a truly humane culture. The pivotal question is whether such a culture—one that supports rather than inhibits human well-being and our capacities to love, create, and prosper—is possible.

Nurturing Our Humanity offers extensive evidence that we can construct this humane culture. Based on findings from both biology and social sciences, we today know that the cultural environments we create affect nothing less than how our brains develop and hence how we think, feel, and act. But Nurturing Our Humanity takes bioculturalism further. It examines our cultural environments through a powerful new analytical tool: the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens.

Rather than viewing societies through the lenses of familiar social categories such as religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, rightist versus leftist, or capitalist versus socialist, which only describe a particular aspect of society, the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens uses two larger cultural configurations at opposite ends of a continuum: the partnership system and the domination system. This broader frame makes it possible to identify the conditions that support the expression of our human capacities for caring, creativity, and consciousness or, alternately, for insensitivity, cruelty, and destructiveness. It upends age-old assumptions about human nature and the supposed impossibility of improving the human condition, showing how we can bring about fundamental change. The new interdisciplinary perspective of the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens reveals how cultural beliefs and social institutions such as politics, economics, and education affect, and are in turn affected by, childhood and gender relations; highlights the impact of these early experiences and observations on how our brains develop; and shows how we can use our knowledge of human development to construct equitable and sustainable cultures that maximize human well-being.

Nurturing Our Humanity re-examines vital matters ranging from sex, love, intimacy, parenting, and romance to human rights, social justice, politics, economics, violence, and values from this integrative perspective. It sheds new light on critical current issues, all the way from climate change, scapegoating, authoritarianism, racism, and other forms of in-group versus out-group thinking to contemporary disputes about biological and cultural evolution, economics, national and international politics, religious fundamentalism, and the uses and potential abuses of technological breakthroughs.

We explore how our capacities for caring, creativity, and consciousness go way back in evolutionary time and are integral to human nature, and we show that there have been, and continue to be, cultures that orient to the partnership side of the continuum. We look at how domination systems produce high levels of stress—from stressful early family experiences to the artificial creation of economic scarcity—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-oriented environments—as illustrated by conditions in contemporary societies ranging from the Minangkabau in Southeast Asia to European Nordic nations—enhance the expression of our human capacities for health, happiness, well-being, consciousness, and creativity.

We draw from recent studies showing that the difficulty some people have in dealing with change (with its implications for denial of climate change and other present threats) and the tendency of such people to support punitive political agendas (such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons and the military, and scapegoating of minorities, women, and gays) are associated with a particular kind of brain development in people who are taught early on that dominating or being dominated are our only alternatives. We explore how patterns of touch, intimacy, and sexuality differ at opposite ends of the domination-partnership continuum and how 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. We examine how the erotization of domination and violence lies behind mass shootings of women in the United States and Canada by some men who call themselves incel (involuntarily celibate) and behind the enslavement of women by fundamentalist groups like ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). We then contrast these unhealthy interactions with healthy ones supported by partnership-oriented cultures and look at how we receive neurochemical rewards of pleasure when we give or receive empathic love.

Covering a wide swath of prehistory and history, we take a fresh look at many conventional assumptions about religion and science. We see, 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 has played out over millennia.

But our focus is primarily on our present and future, on how we can draw on our enormous evolutionary gifts—our extraordinary capacities for empathy, creativity, caring, cooperation, and conscious choice—to build the missing cornerstones that support a more equitable, caring, and sustainable partnership future.¹ In this introductory chapter, we share some aspects of our personal histories, orientations, and goals and also place the central message of this book within the context of our past work. Then we discuss the key concepts of partnership systems and domination systems and introduce the ways they are integral to the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens. We close the chapter by highlighting the need to exchange a domination-oriented narrative for a completely different story, one based on life-enhancing partnership principles such as equality, care, compassion, and sustainability.

When Riane was six, the German and Austrian Nazis took over her native Vienna. Riane’s father was dragged off by the Gestapo. Her mother miraculously obtained his release, and the family fled to Cuba. They were on one of the last ships before the MS St. Louis, carrying 930 Jewish refugees from Europe, was turned back by Cuban authorities. Because neither Cuba nor the United States nor any other country in the Western hemisphere let the St. Louis dock, it was forced to return to Europe, where many on board eventually died in Nazi death camps.

Riane remembers standing at the Havana waterfront watching how, after long days of waiting and hoping they would be permitted to disembark, the doomed families on the St. Louis disappeared over the horizon. As she looked out at sea and listened to her parents’ anguished conversation, she could not understand how people could be so cruel, so indifferent to the suffering of others.

There were other formative experiences for Riane: fleeing Vienna at night with only what they could carry, the plunge from affluence to dire poverty in cockroach-infested Havana tenements, radical changes in languages, equally radical changes in beliefs and customs.

That is how Riane learned that what people consider givens are not universal. It is also how she learned about the power of cultural narratives, including popular myths and scientific theories, to shape what people consider normal and right. The foundations of a small girl’s existence were demolished overnight by the resurgence of myths and theories about Jews as subhuman and dangerous. From one day to the next, Riane was transformed by the Nazi’s anti-Semitic cultural narratives from a cute little girl whom people smiled at into a hunted and despised “other.”

With her move to the United States in 1946 came further formative experiences. As she and her parents arrived at last to the promised land of American liberty and equality, they found in Miami, their port of entry, yet another disempowered out-group, or “other.” In the rigidly segregated US South of that time, they discovered one more variation of the all-too-familiar use of cultural narratives to justify the persecution and subordination of “inferior” beings.

The accumulation of these kinds of experiences brought recurrent questions: Are patterns of prejudice, cruelty, and violence inevitable? Are they human nature? Or is something else at work?

As time went on, these questions came up again and again. They came with shattering force after World War II when the world saw the newsreels of the Nazi death camps, the mountains of piled-up bodies, the hollow-eyed skeletal survivors. These questions became more insistent when Riane later read Treblinka, the harrowing account of life and death in one of the “better” Nazi camps. They erupted when she looked at the photo of a happy-looking crowd of men in Life magazine and discovered they were not at a football rally but at a lynching party, smiling into the camera after sadistically murdering a black man. When Riane studied sociology at the University of California, these questions were at the back of her mind. They were there as she became involved first in the civil rights movement and then in the feminist movement.

At that point, Riane became aware of yet another devalued “other.” This “other” had been there all the time, center stage. But because she had been taught to take it for granted, its inferior status had been invisible. Her awakened consciousness—that she was part of a female “other,” split off from and at the same time subsumed by the in-group of “mankind”—again shook the foundations of Riane’s existence. She realized that this prototypical in-group/out-group division had profoundly influenced her entire life. It had shaped her sense of self, relations, thoughts, feelings, everything.

This consciousness came to Riane relatively late, after much of her formal and informal education in history, archaeology, and the study of myth; after law school; after employment as a social scientist and attorney; after activism in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam war movements; after marriage, motherhood, and divorce. It came to Riane suddenly in the late 1960s when, like thousands of other women, she awoke as if from a lifelong trance.

It was only then that Riane fully understood that our consciousness, or lack thereof, is largely a function of our cultural contexts, and particularly of cultural myths and theories about “human nature.” What until then had been abstract— the influence of myths and theories on how we relate to ourselves and others— became of intense personal significance.

Riane then understood that theories are not abstract, academic playthings irrelevant to our day-to-day lives. On the contrary, theories have enormous power in shaping how we think, feel, and live—just ask any African American who came of age during an era when theory held that whites are innately superior intellectually, morally, and every other way. Riane also understood that the myths and theories about femininity and masculinity, which we all internalized without much consideration, shaped how she saw herself and how others saw her. Gradually she began to suspect that the widespread internalized sex roles and myths about femininity and masculinity were responsible for much that ails our lives and our world.

In the process of making all this conscious, Riane felt a need for new ways of thinking and feeling that could help her make better sense of, and find better guidance for, her own life and that of her two daughters. Riane was also impelled in her search by the urgency of humanity’s situation.

As an inhabitant of a planet whose life-support systems are being systematically undermined by human activities such as carbon emissions, excessive population growth, irresponsible resource exploitation, and other threats to our environment, Riane saw the critical need for new ways of thinking and living. And the magnitude and rapidity of cultural, social, and technological change made it clear that transformative shifts—such as what she herself had been experiencing—are realistic possibilities. In short, both Riane’s personal experiences and our common human experiences at this critical time in history led to the research that defined her work over decades.

Like Riane, Doug’s early life experiences shaped his perceptions and concerns as well as his choice to become an anthropologist focusing on peace and human nature. Although a boy at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, the near destruction of the world made a huge impression on his young mind. He recalls how his parents, like many people in the early 1960s, considered digging a fallout shelter. Their anxious discussions sparked Doug to contemplate what a world filled with poisonous radiation would be like, as his family huddled in a cement pit underground, eating canned tamales, sardines, and spam for months, maybe years. Doug questioned his parents about radiation and was not happy with the answers they gave about the poisonous, invisible fallout that would cause cancers, sickness, then death, not only of people but also of all the birds and animals. To a child’s mind, having a nuclear war was the scariest and stupidest idea imaginable.

About a decade later when Doug discovered anthropology at the university, he began looking at humanity from a macroscopic perspective that makes comparisons across cultures and millennia. He fell in love with anthropology and how it widens our view beyond our own culture and beyond current-day events. This broader perspective, Doug thought early on, could be useful for understanding warfare and also our human capacity for peace.

In fact, as key lessons, anthropology shows that while humans have the capacity to be violent, we also possess a powerful potential for peace.² In theory, any human might commit murder, but in reality, most of us never do. Anthropology holds some true treasures relevant to human survival, including documentation that nonwarring peace systems can be created, descriptions of how peaceful societies successfully keep the peace and promote cooperation and well-being, and the solid evidence from prehistory and the comparison of social systems showing that war is not inextricably bound up with human nature.³ Yet, beginning with debates with members of his own family, Doug realized that a substantial number of people assume war to be just part and parcel of human nature. This erroneous view in and of itself is an obstacle to achieving peace.⁴

Doug has lived in Mexico conducting anthropological fieldwork among Zapotec speakers of Oaxaca (1981–1983), has lived and taught in Finland (1995–2014), and has conducted cross-cultural research on numerous cultures. Living outside his native US culture has taught Doug firsthand lessons about cultural differences in values, beliefs, and institutions. His work also has taught him about the myriad ways that people keep the peace or, in those cases where the peace has been broken, about the paths that people take to mend damaged relationships and restore social harmony. For example, across diverse cultural settings, third parties intervene, sometimes in dramatic ways, to restore the peace. In their fields near the Nile, two Nubian brothers regularly argued about how to share the irrigation water.⁵ Their uncle overheard the shouting. He found a flat stone and placed it in the middle of the irrigation ditch, where offshoots of water went to each man’s land, thus dividing the irrigation flow equally. “Putting a stone in the middle” was a structural solution to this conflict, grasped by someone who was not involved in the dispute, and humans practice this type of conflict resolution all the time. It is so normal that it rarely makes the news.

In recent research, Doug has focused on archaeological and nomadic forager studies showing that war is a rather recent social invention, arising under particular circumstances that correspond with the rise of domination systems. Later in this book, we will examine the evidence in more detail. The archaeological sequences show transitions from originating nomadic foraging conditions of warlessness to war at different locations at different times, as well as how war became more common and destructive a mere 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.⁶ Furthermore, a careful examination of nomadic forager societies suggests the evolutionary deep roots of partnership systems, rife with sharing, caring, cooperation, reciprocity, and equity, suggesting that humans may be primed for developing social relationships of this nature.⁷

Doug’s motivations for teaming up with Riane in the writing of this book stem ultimately from a deep concern for the future of humanity, coupled with a great appreciation for Riane’s work.

Doug first heard of Riane in the late 1980s from his father, psychiatrist C. Brooks Fry, who praised Riane’s work. He had just attended one of her lectures and had exchanged a few words with her afterward. At the lecture, the elder Fry had purchased The Chalice and the Blade, which he later gifted to Doug.⁸ This particular copy has Riane’s telephone number written inside the front cover, along with Brooks’ pronunciation pneumonic for her name, and printed on the front cover is a laudatory quotation from luminary Ashley Montagu that reads, “The most important book since Darwin’s Origin of Species.” As Brooks realized decades ago, Doug would appreciate this innovative book. Perhaps he also realized that Riane and Doug were kindred spirits in key ways.

First, Riane and Doug both have a tendency to step back from an issue to gain a macroscopic view. Riane talks of systems and cultural configurations, and Doug writes about patterns and social models. Whereas both authors recognize the crucial importance of data and details, they share an aim of seeing the forest and the trees as they draw on research findings from multiple fields to paint their interpretations across a wide canvas.

Second, both Riane and Doug are motivated to do everything possible for the improvement of the human condition. We have already told how Riane’s early experiences shaped her work for peace, human rights, and social justice. When Doug was growing up, his grandmother, psychologist Ruth Thacker Fry, would sometimes remark that the family consists of caregivers and humanitarians. Doug took on the humanitarian charge, engaging in peace education and activism over the course of his life.

Third, Riane and Doug could be called realistic optimists in that they recognize the magnitude of the challenges faced by humanity and yet believe that even huge problems can be solved. As President Kennedy said in 1963, “Our problems are manmade. … No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”⁹

Riane’s research addresses the big picture questions. It uses a new method of analysis: the study of Relational Dynamics. These dynamics are, first, what kinds of relations—from intimate to international—a particular culture encourages or discourages; and, second, how key elements of a culture interactively relate to shape and maintaining its basic character.

Riane notes that this method owes a great deal to one of her early professional experiences. Although she holds a degree in sociology, she realized that her courses did not concern themselves with interactive dynamics. What opened her eyes was working at the Systems Development Corporation, an offshoot of the Rand Corporation, at a time when scientists were just beginning to talk about “systems analysis.” Riane did not like the work because her employers were only interested in military systems, but she learned a basic principle of systems thinking: that looking at how different parts of a system interact makes it possible to see more than just the sum of the system’s parts.

Systems thinking is at the core of this book. The study of Relational Dynamics draws from a much larger database than customary studies of how humans behave individually and in groups. Much of Doug’s research also focuses on systems. For instance, he studies peace systems, clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and sometimes not at all.¹⁰ The key questions are: How do people create peace systems? How are they maintained? Peace systems exist in various parts of the world from Malaysia and Australia to Brazil and Canada. The European Union also is a peace system because it was formed out of the ashes of war with the explicit goal of preventing future conflagration on the continent. A mere 70 years after the end of World War II, war within the EU system has become virtually unthinkable. This success story demonstrates that constructing other peace systems, including ultimately a Global Peace System, is conceivably possible.¹¹

Riane’s approach has always included the whole of humanity, both its female and male components. Her analytical lens also captures the whole of our lives, not only the so-called public sectors such as politics and economics but also the more intimate spheres of family and close relations. In addition, her perspective takes into account the whole of our history, including the thousands of years we call prehistory.

Sources for the multidisciplinary study of Relational Dynamics have included cross-cultural anthropological surveys¹²; anthropological and sociological studies of individual societies¹³; writings by historians, analyses of laws, moral codes, art, literature (including fiction, biographies, and autobiographies), scholarship from psychology, economics, education, political science, philosophy, religious studies (including the study of “mystery cults” around the Mediterranean from before the rise of Christianity), archeological studies (primarily of Western prehistory because of greater availability of materials, but also some of Indian, Latin American, and Chinese prehistory), and the study of both Western and Eastern myths and legends; and data from more recently developed fields, such as primatology, neuroscience, chaos theory, systems self-organizing theory, nonlinear dynamics, gender studies, women’s studies, and men’s studies.¹⁴

Looking at this larger picture made it possible to see patterns: interactions among key elements of social systems that keep repeating themselves cross-culturally and historically. Riane identified two contrasting configurations: the domination system and the partnership system.

In contrast to conventional social categories such as religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, rightist versus leftist, or industrial versus preindustrial or postindustrial, the categories of the partnership system and the domination system show that the social construction of the roles and relations of the two basic forms of humanity—males and females—is of central significance for a society’s beliefs and institutions, all the way from the family, education, and religion to politics and economics. These categories also show the crucial importance of the early years of life: that what people in a society consider normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, and even possible or impossible is profoundly affected by the kinds of relationships children experience and observe.

In other words, unlike most studies of human societies, as well as the social categories we have been taught, the social categories of domination and partnership systems do not split off matters relating to the majority of humanity as “just” women’s or children’s issues. They show interconnections between these critical matters and politics, economics, religion, and other areas that are the focus of conventional approaches.

We believe that within the next decades these interconnections will be generally recognized as key to understanding human societies. We also believe that at this point in human history, such an integrated analysis is essential.

Fortunately, we are now at the point where, for the first time, the data for such an integrated systemic approach are beginning to be available. If we, for example, view gender historically, we see that it only began to gain attention during the 1700s and 1800s, and then only in treatises dealing with feminism. It was not until the late 1960s that the subject of gender began to break into research and education, but again it was segregated into the academic ghetto of women’s studies. Even the more recent men’s studies, gender studies, and queer studies are marginalized in our siloed universities.

It was also not until recent times that gender entered popular discourse. So in the media we now find topics such as discrimination against girls and women, sexual assault and harassment, male anger against loss of what sociologist Michael Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement,” and so forth.¹⁵ And not until recently have the neurochemical effects of childhood experiences and observations received both scholarly and media attention.

Riane first presented the partnership-domination continuum in The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future.¹⁶ The title uses the symbols of the chalice and the blade as metaphors for power: one appropriate for partnership systems and the other for domination systems. This book introduced cultural transformation theory, a new reading of both history and prehistory. Cultural transformation theory takes into account matters omitted in earlier narratives. It probes otherwise invisible connections, for example, whether a society is more warlike or peaceful and whether or not violence is part of childrearing, whether the female and male forms of humanity are considered equal or unequal and whether a society is more generally equitable or inequitable. In subsequent books, Riane used the partnership-domination frame to examine different ways of structuring families and education, sexuality and spirituality, healthcare and environmental sustainability, technology and economics.

This book starts where these earlier volumes left off, by exploring fully a host of synergetic biocultural interactions among evolutionary-neuroscientific-developmental and social-cultural-institutional variables, always with an eye turned toward their application for human betterment and survival on our troubled planet.

For those readers unacquainted with the partnership-domination perspective, we want to quickly provide some familiar examples. We have seen the domination system historically in the rule by terror of Genghis Khan and the autocratic family patriarch of earlier times. Nowadays, we see it in despotic rulers, such as the religious heads of ISIS or a secular Kim Jong-un, and at the familial level in abusive parental behavior. Whether within a family or more generally within a society, social systems that orient closely to the domination side of the continuum are ultimately held together by fear and force, as illustrated by customs of child and wife beating, persecution of minorities, threats or displays of torture and death, and wars of conquest. In this system, beliefs and social structures support rigid top-down rankings, and the closer a culture or subculture orients to it, the more stressful it is. In contrast, the partnership configuration is more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and environmentally sustainable. As in the strivings of countless families, businesses, and communities today, the partnership system consists of beliefs and structures that support relations based on mutual benefit, respect, and accountability. Fear and force are not woven into the cultural tapestry of the partnership system because they are not needed to maintain rigid top-down rankings, whether it is man over man, man over woman, race over race, religion over religion, or nation over nation. Instead of hierarchies of domination, some partnership societies have what Riane calls hierarchies of actualization, where parents, teachers, and leaders use power to empower rather than disempower. So love, care, nurturance, and creativity can flourish.

As noted, we adopt a biocultural perspective to examine human possibilities, especially the enormous capacities made possible by our human brain. Biological and social sciences have now amply documented that the polarized nature versus nurture divide is a nonissue, an unrealistic model that befuddles rather than enlightens.¹⁷ As neuroscientist Cordelia Fine writes, “The new neuroconstructivist perspective on brain development emphasizes the sheer exhilarating tangle of a continuous interaction among genes, brain, and environment.”¹⁸

The Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens provides an integrative perspective that reveals critical connections between parts of social systems that have generally been studied in segregation from one another.¹⁹ While many studies show the enormous impact of what children experience and observe on the rest of their lives, the focus of these studies has been on the role of families, without taking into account that families do not spring up in isolation from the larger cultures in which they are embedded. Moreover, how a society constructs the roles and relations of the two basic forms of humanity is in most social analyses still only a sidebar.

By contrast, the social categories of the partnership system and the domination system show that the different ways human societies socialize the male and female halves of humanity for “masculine” and “feminine” roles is how people learn to view themselves and others. These new social categories also factor in extensive evidence from psychology and neuroscience that children’s early experiences and observations powerfully affect brain development—and with this, how people think, feel, and act, including the kinds of cultures they construct. They further take into account the impact of stories, especially stories about human possibilities.

Even now, there are many global good news stories that do not get as much attention as coverage of war and terrorism. For instance, nuclear testing has been halted by the holders of the major nuclear arsenals, Russia, the United States, Britain, France, and China; smallpox has been eliminated from the globe; after the nations of the world took action under the Montreal Protocol in 1987, the gaps in the Earth’s ozone layer have begun to recover; through concerted cooperative action among all the countries with Mediterranean shorelines, the Mediterranean Sea has not become a dead sea as was predicted in the 1970s; nonviolent “people power” has over the last decades ousted dictatorial regimes in Chile, Argentina, Poland, former Czechoslovakia, Tunisia, Serbia, and elsewhere; and following centuries of bloody strife, peace is now a reality within the European Union. As we will see in this book, these kinds of stories show that humanity can form a successful partnership for human well-being and survival.

Because stories are major transmitters of culture, fundamental change requires new narratives—especially about human nature. In poet Matthew Arnold’s depiction of a martial nightmare, the world:

. . . Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.²⁰

Indeed, wherever we turn, in magazines and newspapers, on television, or in bestselling books, the hackneyed message is the same: human nature is bad. Look at the evidence—greed, murder, rape, endless war. That is just how it is, always has been, and forever will be.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, these kinds of stories about an innately flawed human nature persist. A familiar brand of narrative describes our species as so defective as to require supernatural redemption; for instance, through the sacrificial death and resurrection of a god or through a series of earthly reincarnations. Another brand solves human defectiveness by imposing strict social controls, as illustrated in Plato’s philosopher kings or Freud’s superego.

In addition to these powerful normative narratives, other story-lines claim that we have only gradually, and at best partially, emerged from an original condition of savagery that still persists under a thin veneer of civilization. This evolutionary narrative holds that our savage natal condition still lurks just under the skin—and accounts for the chronic injustice and barbaric violence of recorded history. “Scratch an altruist, watch a hypocrite bleed” captures this idea that goodness is only skin-deep.²¹ And while most social scientists have rejected religious dogmas of original sin and simplistic notions of killer instincts, selfish genes, reptilian brains, Id monsters, or the shadow, this brotherhood of demonic constructs continues to present domination relations as inevitable.

Another regular feature of our normative narratives is that they generally ignore the majority of humanity: women and children. Even sociology, anthropology, and history have ignored the fundamental importance for human behavior of the formative childhood years—an omission that is astonishing. Similarly amazing is the omission of one half of our species from depictions of the human adventure, such as when museum dioramas present male apes gradually transforming into human males, while females are simply left out of the picture.

In these narratives, the female half of humanity appears in a footnote, if at all, in connection with the family, sex, love, or peripheral “women’s issues.” Even where women are included, they have rarely been protagonists. It has been like a play with a cast of gender stereotypes, where men are active superiors and women passive inferiors in what is often accurately termed “the story of man.”

For far too long, humanity has been mired in the “darkling plain” of such tales.”²² So strong is their grip that, like the internal censor Freud postulated, they have often blocked out everything that contradicts them, not only in popular but also in scientific thinking and writings.

It is encouraging that, despite all this, we are beginning to gain a deeper and more hopeful understanding of ourselves and our world. Especially encouraging are the insights emerging from paleoanthropology, primatology, forager research, and gender studies as well as chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and neuroscience.

In this book, we consider how evidence from these and other fields supports a new narrative about both biological and cultural evolution. Instead of a unilinear progression from savagery to civilization, this is a multilinear, open-ended narrative.²³ We look at evolution, not as the result of simple causes and effects, but in terms of interactive processes, taking into account that this is how complex living systems, including human beings and human societies, actually operate, and that living systems are capable of fundamental change or transformation.

There is strong evidence that over the millennia of human biocultural evolution, most societies were constructed along partnership lines. Yet domination systems—with their inherent exploitation of people and nature, social and economic inequities, and direct and structural violence—came to predominate on the global stage.

To borrow the words of the former head of the Worldwatch Institute, Lester Brown, “this is no way to run a planet.”²⁴ As we will detail, the domination system has held humanity back—and through today’s ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, it may lead to our species’ extinction.

There is, however, nothing inevitable about the Apocalypse. We can change our course. It is our hope that this book will help support this change, demonstrating that a more peaceful, equitable, and fulfilling way of life—a truly advanced humane society—is biologically possible and culturally attainable.

Brain scans. Functional MRIs. Neuroscience. Everywhere we turn these days, these words leap out at us. The information is potentially revolutionary. But for many of us it is just another stream of factoids coming at us in disconnected bits and pieces.

So we tend to miss the most important fact revealed by neuroscience: that the neural patterns for our minds are greatly influenced by our environment, particularly in our early years. In other words, who we are is shaped through the interaction of our genes with our environments over the course of early development and into adulthood.¹

But it is not only information overload that makes it hard for this key message from neuroscience to register. The cultural barriers are strong and deep and involve all-too-familiar tales of an unchangeable, innately selfish, violent “human nature.”

These narratives appear again and again in popular books and articles; in the movies, TV, and on the Internet; and in everyday conversations and political discourse: our genes are in a no-holds-barred battle for survival. Rape, warfare, murder, and other cruelties are what allowed our ancestors to triumph in the survival-of-the-fittest contest. These “evolutionary imperatives” shaped the genes we carry, which in turn direct our behavior.

While most scientists do not take such an extreme position, there are definite battle lines about whether or not our genes keep us trapped in destructive behaviors. And this is not only an academic debate. It pits those who believe we can change human behavior through personal and cultural choices against those who believe our brains are largely hardwired to obey millennia-old genetic programming. Deterministic thinking is reflected, for example, when Michael Ghiglieri asks, “Are men born to be lethally violent? The answer is yes. Aggression is programmed by our DNA.”²

If we believe we are governed by nasty evolutionary imperatives, we cannot solve problems such as violence and oppression. If our genes trap us in ruthlessly selfish and cruel behaviors, there is no point in trying to build more humane societies. By such reasoning, we are doomed from the moment sperm meets egg and mixes the age-old DNA into a new being, making each individual a prisoner of genes carried forward in time from the era of our ancient hominin ancestors. To counter these ideas, we have to understand the biases behind them and the scientific data that refute them.

Nurturing Our Humanity adopts a very different evolutionary perspective, a view that recognizes the human capacities for change and choice and emphasizes biocultural interaction over determinism. This emerging perspective on human origins and behavior hypothesizes, on the basis of much data, that the default tendencies in our very social species are toward prosocial helping and caring behaviors and concludes that, although we cannot create a world that is totally free of violence and cruelty, we can construct cultures with low levels of violence and oppression where our human capacities for creativity, caring, and consciousness are allowed to develop and flourish.

Most cultures have origin myths that explain how life and humans appeared on Earth. In an ancient Sumerian account, the Goddess Nammu births Heaven and Earth.³ According to a Hopi story, Hard Beings Woman breathes life into male and female effigies.⁴ According to a Chinese myth, a female deity called NuWa creates the world.⁵ In Japanese mythology, the creators are the goddess Izanami and the god Izanagi.⁶ In a Persian story, a male named Gayomart begets life by himself: when he dies, his semen falls on Earth, and the first human couple is born from two rhubarb shrubs.⁷ In the Judeo-Christian Bible, a powerful male deity called Yahweh is the creator of life: land, sea, sun, moon, animals, and humans spring into existence in response to his commands; later, when humans disobey his orders, Yahweh sentences them to eternal misery and condemns woman to be subordinate to man.⁸

All these very different accounts tell us that life and then humanity were created by powerful supernatural beings. These supernatural beings are projections of particular cultures and social structures, reinforcing prevailing ideas of what is normal, right, and inevitable.

Today, scenarios of supernatural creation coexist with scientific theories of evolution. While these evolutionary theories are in part based on deductions from observations and laboratory experiments, they, too, can reflect particular cultural assumptions.⁹

The landmark book for the Western scientific approach to evolution, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, was published in 1859 during a time of great cultural and intellectual ferment. Other naturalists had questioned the idea that all Earth’s creatures were created in one fell swoop by an all-powerful God. In 1794, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, and again, in 1809, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, proposed that the many life forms on our planet, including our own, gradually developed through natural processes. But Charles Darwin’s work provided the controversial breakthrough that triggered the research and theorizing that continues today.¹⁰

Darwin proposed that when environments change, species either adapt accordingly or die out. The key process of adaptation through natural selection entails three interrelated principles.¹¹ First, within a breeding population, variation exists. Second, some variants in the population are more successful at survival and reproduction than are others and hence contribute relatively more offspring to the next generation. That is, they have higher reproductive fitness. Third, this fitness is inheritable, at least to some extent. Darwin provided examples of protective coloration to illustrate the process of natural selection, explaining that:

It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers. … When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled-gray; the alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red-grouse the colour of heather, we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger.¹²

As Darwin’s theorizing predated an understanding of genetics, he necessarily left open questions about how characteristics are transmitted from earlier to later generations. Then, in 1937, Theodosius Dobzhansky, an experimental geneticist, published Genetics and the Origin of Species.¹³ He and a number of other scholars forged what is called the neo-Darwinian synthesis, or simply neo-Darwinism, combining genetics with the study of evolutionary processes.

During the last decades of the 20th century, a new field called sociobiology gained popularity, especially through the writings of Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins.¹⁴ Gradually, sociobiology morphed into evolutionary psychology, but despite this name change, like sociobiologists, most evolutionary psychologists argue that how we behave today is largely the result of hominin/human adaptations to ancestral environments. They further argue that, regardless of how maladaptive this may be under present circumstances, the behaviors of modern humans are still driven by this millennia-old evolutionary legacy.¹⁵

Many sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists are ingenious, even brilliant, theory builders. Some of their explanations for how selection operates in nonhuman species have inspired important research. When they insist that human behavior is not shaped solely by experience and learning, that we have to look at biological factors, they are, of course, right. When they point out that human biology developed over many millennia of evolution, they are correct. There is no question that genes must be considered in explaining human behavior, both individually and collectively.¹⁶ There is also no question that in the course of evolution, living organisms developed behavioral patterns for self-preservation that we still carry today, for example, preprogrammed reactions to danger triggered by the sight of a snake or an unanticipated loud noise.

One goal of this book is to balance evolutionary psychology that favors selfishness, competition, and self-interest with a consideration also of the prosociality, cooperation, and caring that generally has been overlooked, minimized, and denied despite its obvious importance during human evolution and in human societies around the world.¹⁷ We question the negative view of human nature that runs through some evolutionary psychological writings: a view that readily lends itself to justifying injustice and violence as “just the way things are.”¹⁸

We also question the linear deterministic thinking that runs through some of this literature. Although they may not intend to do so, some evolutionary psychologists give the impression that human behavior is the product of a one-way genetic process, rather than synergetic interaction of genes and experience.¹⁹

Even when they recognize that learning affects behavior, these theorists contend that influencing human behavior through education is an uphill struggle if it runs into what they claim are evolutionary imperatives embedded in human nature. And either explicitly or implicitly, according to many evolutionary psychologists, these evolutionary imperatives boil down to one implacable, overriding motivation: selfishness.

In explaining the thesis of his famous book The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins summed up this view vividly: “We, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world. This entitles us to expect certain qualities in our genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness.”²⁰

After The Selfish Gene came out in 1976, Dawkins was widely criticized for equating self-interest, which is certainly a major factor in human behavior, with ruthless selfishness. So in the 1989 edition of his book, Dawkins responded by adding a chapter on how, in his words, “even with selfish genes at the helm, nice guys can finish first.”²¹

In this later edition, Dawkins acknowledged that cooperation can be a good evolutionary strategy. But in his scheme of things, cooperation, love, kindness, and other “soft” behaviors are still only products of selfish genes striving to replicate themselves or related genes that carry the same pattern of information.

A number of evolutionary psychologists make still a further argument.²² They claim that because of biological imperatives that developed in the course of evolution, our behaviors are driven by specialized, inherited genetic responses to particular environmental stimuli. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby contend that we are like computers with complex software programs. “What is special about the human mind,” they assert, “is not that it gave up ‘instinct’ in order to become flexible, but that it proliferated ‘instincts’—that is, content-specific problem-solving specialization.” These writers maintain that to understand human behaviors, we have to look not at learning but at a “superstructure of evolved functional specializations.”²³ In other words, they propose that our minds do not grow through learning, but that our heads are like robots, filled with millions of cognitive cubbyholes programmed for reactions to the circumstances we happen to come across.

Other evolutionary psychologists even claim that “the increasingly sophisticated human capacity for deceiving one another is what eventually gave rise to that entirely new level of representational activity we call symbolic culture.”²⁴ In other words, language, art, music, and so much of what we enjoy as beautiful, meaningful, and humane are the result of nastiness and deceit.

Although in other respects evolutionary psychologists reject religious explanations, the notion of an innately flawed, ruthlessly selfish human nature is very similar to the religious dogma of original sin that for centuries justified strict top-down controls and punishments. It is also parallel to a strong strain in Western philosophical tradition. The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw the life of “man” (the life of women did not count) as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”²⁵ In his parable of the master and the slave, the influential German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel saw only the possibility of dominating or being dominated.²⁶ Another celebrated German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, denounced the Christian ideal of caring and compassion as slave morality.²⁷ Even the iconic Immanuel Kant could see nothing good in “man’s” nature, claiming that only the transcendent qualities of pure reason and practical reason account for morality.²⁸ The point is that sociobiology and its offspring, evolutionary psychology, have arisen within the larger frame of this cultural milieu and reflect a decidedly biased view of human nature.²⁹

Current theories focusing on selfishness and violence also follow the tradition of 19th-century social Darwinists. Herbert Spencer, from whom Darwin took the phrase “survival of the fittest,” was a great favorite of the robber barons of unregulated capitalism. This should not surprise us. If the “fittest” are the most brutal and callous, and this results from natural selection, one can easily argue that exploitive and unprincipled economic arrangements are inevitable results of the laws of nature. This view is reflected by scholars and lay people alike, as in a letter to the editor of Time, which reads: “Modern psychology tells us it is the genetically determined, typical male aggression, the ‘dark side of man,’ that helps men climb the corporate ladder.”³⁰

Most evolutionary psychologists try to distance themselves from social Darwinism. Like Dawkins, they make a point of distinguishing between selfish genes and selfish behaviors, arguing that selfish genes can lead to unselfish, even altruistic, behaviors if these help genes pass themselves on to the next generation. Usually, however, this important point is merely given lip service, whereas the bulk of what evolutionary psychologists write contradicts this distinction.

For instance, Dawkins writes that we must teach our children altruism because “we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.”³¹ He does not explain why, if altruism is not part of our biological nature, we are able to learn it.

Again and again, in these writings the emphasis is on the dark and dire side of human nature.³² Melvin Konner writes, for instance, “I will argue that there is in human nature a natural tendency to violence and, additionally to war.” David Livingstone Smith also assumes that humans have a warlike nature and then proceeds to construct an imagined evolutionary scenario to explain that which he assumes: “We inherited our warlike nature from prehistoric bands that were able to kill their neighbors and acquire their resources. These groups flourished while the pacifists withered on the evolutionary vine.”³³

These writers also claim that there are what they call evolutionary payoffs for cruel and violent behaviors.³⁴ Michael Ghiglieri opines, “because rape is so widespread and rampant around the planet, by males both human and nonhuman, it is clearly a male biological adaptation.”³⁵ In the same vein, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer argue that rape was specifically selected for, as in certain insects that have an appendage with no function other than restraining a female during forced copulation.³⁶

Thornhill and Palmer hasten to add that they deplore rape. But deplorable or not, according to them, rape is simply a successful evolutionary strategy that helps men pass on their genes—an argument that ignores, among other things, that rapists sometimes kill their victims or target women who are too old or too young to conceive, which are hardly ways to pass on genes. This argument also is contradicted by the existence of numerous societies where rape is either very rare or not known to exist—refuting the knighting of human rape as an evolved adaptation.³⁷

Numerous evolutionary psychologists maintain that, like rape, warfare is adaptive and originated because of evolutionary payoffs to fitness.³⁸ They, too, brush over the fact that caring, sharing, nurturing, and loving, as well as helping, forgiving, conflict-resolving, and acting nonviolently, predominate in the human repertory of behavior.³⁹

These writers do not say that caring and nonviolence are part of our biological human nature, or else we would not be capable of them. Instead, they give the impression that what is really natural, indeed inevitable, are violence and cruelty —as reflected in their book titles: The Murderer Next Door, Demonic Males, The Darker Side of Man, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, and A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion.⁴⁰

What these authors are actually expressing is an ideology that serves to justify the direct and structural violence of hierarchies of domination and the rigid ranking of some people over others. Theirs is an authoritarian worldview in which no real agency is given to the individual, where humans are controlled by powerful forces, be they genes or those at the top of a domination hierarchy.

The value of theories lies in their power to explain and predict. The theory of adaptation through natural selection explains and predicts how species evolve, survive, or die out. A huge amount of data support this powerful theory, which has helped us understand the history of life on the planet.

However, the argument that our cultures and behaviors can be explained by selfish genes ruthlessly seeking to replicate themselves and that rape, murder, and warfare are reflections of this goes way beyond the concept of natural selection and is infused with ideology.⁴¹ While writers taking this position may say that they are only using metaphors, their message is clear: we act, not out of our own will, but according to the will of invisible selfish replicators.

There is a difference between the description of what happens through natural selection and the attribution of will and motive to invisible forces. It is one thing to say that some genes get passed on and others do not because some women and men survive, reproduce, and leave more offspring compared with others. It is quite another to say that “the individual is a survival machine built by a short-lived confederation of long-lived genes,”⁴² that, driven by selfish genes “selfish greed seems to characterize much of child behavior,”⁴³ or to compare genes to Chicago gangsters.⁴⁴ Such phrasing suggests that genes want to be passed on and that they ensure this by getting people to do violent and ruthless things.⁴⁵

It is like saying that there are storms because gods of wind and water cause them. Just as people used to attribute nasty motives to spirits, deities, or demons —as in the old saying, “the devil made me do it”—such thinking attributes nasty motives to genes. Instead of being told we are possessed by devils, we are informed that we are puppets of our selfish genes.

Amazingly, Darwinism and neo-Darwinism are often invoked to support this position that genes drive us to cruelty and violence—when in reality neither Darwin nor the prime architects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis held this view. As David Loye documents, these interpretations completely ignore what Darwin actually asserted in The Descent of Man: that in human evolution natural selection declines in significance, with learning, mutual aid, love, and what he called the development of the moral sense becoming primary shapers of who we are and can become.⁴⁶

Likewise, Dobzhansky, Julian Huxley, and Ernst Mayr, three of the fathers of neo-Darwinian theory, emphasized that human evolution transcends prior evolutionary dynamics.⁴⁷ As John O’Manique writes in Origins of Justice, for Dobzhansky the human species is a transcendental product of evolution that has powers of creativity whereby it innovates within parameters which it itself constantly pushes outward.⁴⁸ Dobzhansky especially emphasized the importance of culture in human affairs. “The most significant product, and the paramount determining factor, of human evolution is culture,” he tells us, and “culture is not transmitted biologically through some special genes; it is acquired anew in every generation by learning and instruction, in large part through the medium of the symbolic language.”⁴⁹

By now we hope it is clear that we are not anti-evolutionary but rather anti-deterministic and that we are pointing out how ideology can masquerade as science. When comparing what Darwin and neo-Darwinists actually say with the selfish gene script, one has to be amazed at the disconnect. And the notion that ruthless genes drive our behavior seems all the more bizarre in light of many real-world observations to the contrary.

For instance, if humans were simply driven by selfish genes, how do we account for the people who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe? The Nazis made it clear that they would summarily execute not only the people who helped the Jewish population but also their entire families. So why would anyone endanger the lives and genes of their loved ones and themselves to protect nonrelatives? The eminent Harvard design artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Warsaw in 1943, once remarked, “It takes 47 people to save one Jewish family.”⁵⁰ When asked what he meant by 47, Wodiczko explained that everyone in a Warsaw building, all 47 neighbors, cooperated to hide and provide food for his family during the Nazi occupation. In Denmark, through a massive cooperative effort, more than 90 percent of Danish Jews were hidden and then smuggled out of the country to Sweden before Hitler’s Third Reich could round them up for deportation to concentration camps.⁵¹

Moreover, if humans were simply motivated by evolutionary imperatives that drive us to purely self-centered acts, why have millions of people throughout recorded history worked to change unjust and cruel customs and policies— sometimes at the cost of their lives? And if our cultures were just the product of ancient self-interested evolutionary imperatives, how could many cultures over the last centuries have succeeded in making fundamental cultural changes that we today take for granted—from abolishing slavery to ending witch-burning? If selfish genes hardwire our brains, how could people develop new ways of thinking and new social structures in so short a time?

The answer is that rather than being hardwired for ruthless selfishness and violence, a huge corpus of evidence, as we will explore in this book, indicates that humans have also evolved powerful capacities, indeed proclivities, for empathy, equity, helping, caring, and various other prosocial acts.⁵² Today, some evolutionary psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt acknowledge the importance of these human capacities. Others, such as Steven Pinker, are taking note of how behaviors and social institutions can and do change in just a few hundred years.⁵³

In his 2002 bestseller The Blank Slate, Pinker denied that the cultural environments we create make any difference, arguing that neither families nor peer groups count and that the only factor to consider, in addition to genes, is chance. He wrote that violence is “a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.”⁵⁴ But a decade later, in his The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker takes a very different stand. Arguing that violence has actually decreased over recent centuries, Pinker now asserts that these behavioral changes are far too recent to be attributable to genetic changes, and therefore we must look at factors such as better government, the Enlightenment, greater prosperity, health, education, trade, and improvements in the status of women to explain them. In this 2011 book, Pinker proposes that a civilizing process, a humanitarian revolution, and a rights revolution—in other words, changes in culture—are key to changes in behavior.⁵⁵

But lest we think that Pinker made a complete turnaround, it is by no means clear that he has changed his mind about the primacy of genes because he has not repudiated his earlier assertions. Nor has Pinker reversed his stance that prehistoric human societies were racked with violence “in a state of nature.”⁵⁶ So the path toward a more balanced perspective for explaining human behaviors and institutions will not be quick or easy.

Nonetheless, the evidence challenging deterministic assumptions of human selfishness and violence is accumulating at an ever-faster pace. This makes what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called a scientific paradigm shift an increasing possibility.⁵⁷

Study after study drawing from archaeology and observations of contemporary nomadic foraging societies—analogs for life among ancestral nomadic forager groups over the course of human evolution—are demolishing popular notions of our species as inherently warlike naked apes. As Doug has realized, “the often expressed idea that members of one nomadic band regularly raid other bands to steal women, gain territory, or simply to kill as many people as possible is for the most part a misconception not substantiated by a visit to the facts.”⁵⁸ Other scholars point to archaeological findings showing that warfare, male dominance, and rigid social stratification (the configuration of domination systems) only began to appear a few millennia ago.⁵⁹ As we will consider in more detail later, even the arrival of agriculture did not always bring warfare.

For instance, Brian Ferguson reports what appears to be a 10,000-year period of peace in the Southern Levant of the Near East.⁶⁰ From about 15,100 years ago until 5,200 years ago, there are only a handful of skeletons showing lethal violence over thousands of years, with no mass casualties, no sacked settlements, no fortifications, and no placement of settlements in naturally fortified locations —in short, none of the usual indicators of war. Ferguson opines, “The people of the Southern Levant domesticated nature. It is a pessimistic view indeed to presume they were not also capable of domesticating conflict.”⁶¹

Another example of enduring peace comes from an early agrarian settlement called Çatalhöyük in Anatolia. Here there are no convincing signs of destruction through warfare for 1,000 years.⁶² Houses and grave goods show no signs of large disparities between haves and have-nots. And verifying its more partnership-oriented social configuration, Ian Hodder, the archaeologist currently excavating Çatalhöyük, notes with some amazement, “even analyses of isotopes in bones give no indication of divergence in lifestyle translating into differences in status and power between women and men,” suggesting “a society in which sex is relatively unimportant in assigning social roles, with neither burials nor space in houses suggesting gender inequality.”⁶³

There are similar findings from the Minoan civilization that flourished on the Mediterranean island of Crete until about 3,500 years ago, contradicting the view that centralized, complex, technologically and artistically advanced cultures require massive inequalities and control through violence.⁶⁴ Findings such as these do not bear out the notion of evolutionary imperatives that drive us to inequity and violence.

There is now a plethora of evidence from many fields, ranging from ethnography, history, and psychology to genetics, neuroscience, and ethology, that provide a shock-and-awe set of counter-arguments to the assumption that selfishness and violence are central to what it means to be human. Certainly human beings are capable of engaging in atrocities, brutality, and mayhem. That is obvious. But, as we will explore in this book, our “better angel” capacities, to borrow Pinker’s phrase, for empathy, mutuality, caring, and restraint against violence, actually manifest themselves across cultures; occur far more frequently than physical violence in any society; are critical for the raising of the young; and have clear survival value.

Proposing that humans have a proclivity for prosocial behaviors such as caring for and connecting with others over raw violence and selfishness may seem like heresy in face of popular and scientific writings that focus on the darker sides of human nature. However, viewed from an evolutionary perspective, as biologist Frans de Waal documents in The Age of Empathy, helpfulness, mutuality, and empathy actually have a long and deep evolutionary history.⁶⁵

Caring, sharing, tending, and befriending may have originated in relations between kin and other group members—especially between mother and child. But in the course of evolution, these prosocial proclivities not only extended to others but also left a deep mark on the human brain.⁶⁶ To illustrate, experiments show that babies cry more when they hear the taped cries of other babies than when they hear recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding empathically to someone else’s distress, not just to a certain pitch of sound.⁶⁷ Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence, starting at about 1 year old, they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy.⁶⁸

Toddlers, too, have a basic impulse toward mutuality and helpfulness that has been experimentally verified. Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology did an experiment where 18-month-olds watched him “struggling” with ordinary tasks such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Over and over, as he “accidentally” dropped a clothespin or knocked over books, every one of the 24 toddlers participating in his experiment offered him help within seconds—but only if Warneken appeared to need help. When he threw a pin on the floor or deliberately knocked over a book, they did not respond. However, if it looked like he needed help, they quickly toddled over, grabbed the object, and eagerly handed it back to him.⁶⁹ To test the toddlers’ motivations, Warneken made a point of not thanking them, much less rewarding them. This indicates that their motives stemmed from empathy and altruism rather than an expectation of praise or a reward. They were simply responding to a stranger’s need by coming forward to help.

Theories that people are only helpful when they are related or expecting a payback ignore the evidence.⁷⁰ And this evidence not only is about human helpfulness but also is about that of other species.⁷¹ For example, dolphins and gorillas have rescued humans: creatures they are clearly not related to, and from whom, as Warneken found with the toddlers he studied, they are not expecting a reward.

This leads to a very important finding from neuroscience: our impulses toward empathy, helpfulness, and mutuality are linked not to extrinsic rewards but to rewards intrinsically embedded in our brain’s neuro-physiology.⁷² In later chapters, we will look at brain scans studies showing that when we engage in mutually beneficial behaviors, even with strangers, the “pleasure centers” of our brain light up.⁷³ Even more striking is that neural reward areas light up more when we care for others than when we only look out for ourselves.⁷⁴

What these kinds of findings indicate is that in the course of evolution humans developed a brain primed more for living in partnership-oriented societies. However, and this is a key point, these capacities are inhibited, or at best compartmentalized, in domination systems through socialization, values, social practices, and institutions.

As we will develop in this book, looking at our history from this perspective helps us solve the puzzle of why there has been so much cruelty and destructiveness when evolution equipped our species with such an enormous genetic capacity for empathy, working together, sharing, caring, and helping.

We today know from neuroscience that stress can inhibit our capacity for empathy, mutuality, and caring by changing our brain neuro-chemistry.⁷⁵ And, starting with the crucial early family relations, domination-oriented societies are extremely stressful.⁷⁶

This does not mean there is no stress in partnership-oriented cultures. There are always stresses in life. Stressful relations and conditions, however, are not inherent in the partnership system, as they are in the domination system.

When people grow up in domination cultures or subcultures, they tend to develop brains adjusted to these environments. Indeed, in settings based on strict rankings of domination and submission, this strategy may even be a survival requisite. In such environments, people do not usually survive long if they fail to obey orders. They are burned at the stake, stoned to death, shot, or imprisoned, as we see in much of Western history and still in far too many places today.

Under these conditions, harsh, stressful parenting would be a domination system’s maintenance requirement because it teaches people early on to either control others or submit to those in control. So also would constant early exposure to relations where difference—beginning with the basic difference between male and female—is equated with dominating or being dominated, since domination systems require acceptance of top-down rankings as normal and inevitable.

In addition, domination systems have other effective self-maintenance mechanisms. Economically, they create artificial scarcities of resources for those on bottom (slaves, serfs, “lower classes,” and out-groups) as well as insecurity for those on top. These scarcities and insecurities create enormous stress. So also does violence or the threat of violence—starting with the violence and abuse children experience or observe in their families, all the way to constant battles for control by those on top, which historically have often been violent.

Further stress, as we will also explore in later chapters, stems from the conflation of caring and coercion built into domination childrearing, leading to denial (including identification with the “strong”) and deflection of fear and rage to out-groups. The socialization of males to equate masculinity with domination and violence is still another source of stress, as is the attendant devaluation of anything stereotypically associated with “inferior” women (such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence). All this manifests itself in the development of neural structures primed for fight, flight, or freeze, which promote fear and denial, suppress empathy, and constrict consciousness of a partnership alternative.

This brings us to the need for a biocultural paradigm that combines recent and classic findings into a new framework for better understanding how our brains interact with our environments, especially with our cultural environments as mediated by families, education, politics, economics, and other social institutions. Different strands of such a framework are gradually beginning to emerge. For example, the term biocultural is increasingly used in a variety of disciplines such as anthropology and cultural psychology.⁷⁷

The Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens takes this emerging new framework further by adding to gene-environment interaction the partnership-domination social continuum. It proposes that the combination of the partnership-domination continuum with what we are learning about brain development and subsequent brain functioning can bring multiple avenues of scholarship together to reveal otherwise invisible patterns that can help us move to a more sustainable future.

While the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens is still under construction and awaits input and testing, by melding what we are learning from the biological sciences, especially from neuroscience, with findings from the social sciences, especially from the study of relational dynamics, anthropology, and psychology, it provides an integrative new perspective for addressing the following key questions:

1. What set of variables supports the development of a brain neurochemistry programmed for fight-or-flight, dissociation, insensitivity, and violence?
2. What set of variables supports the expression of our prosocial human capacities for empathy, nonviolence, creativity, caring, and conscious choice?
3. How do we decrease influences of the former set of variables as we simultaneously augment the effects of the latter set of variables?

As we will explore in depth, unlike other social-cultural categories, the partnership system and the domination system take our early experiences into full account. This difference in perspective is of crucial importance because we know today that we are not born with fully developed brains and that how our brains develop is largely a function of early life experiences.⁷⁸

In other words, unlike other social-cultural categories, the partnership system and the domination system take into consideration the enormous impact of our early environment on brain development, both during childhood and over the course of our lifetime. As neuroscientist Bruce Perry notes, “by birth the human brain has developed to the point where environmental cues mediated by the senses play a major role in determining how neurons will differentiate, sprout dendrites, form and maintain synaptic connections and create the final neural networks that convey functionality.” Moreover, he adds, by adolescence, the majority of the changes taking place in the brain are determined by experience, not genetics.⁷⁹

Using the analytical lens of the partnership-domination continuum, as reflecting two cultural configurations at opposite poles, makes it possible to see important connections that are otherwise invisible. We can then see the link between what happens in intimate relations and other relations—including national and international ones. In other words, because the partnership-domination continuum provides a lens for looking at an entire society—not only its political and economic relations but also its family and other intimate relations—it makes it possible to see larger patterns.

We see, for example, that cultures where families are generally more egalitarian and women have higher status, such as Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, are more democratic, equitable, and peaceful. We also begin to understand why authoritarian and violent cultures—whether secular like Germany under the Nazis or religious like the Taliban or ISIS—favor a highly punitive, rigidly male-dominated family.

Most studies of so-called religious fundamentalism, which we would call domination fundamentalism, have focused on how its leaders—be they Eastern or Western, Muslim or Christian—want to impose authoritarian theocratic control and intolerance of other faiths. Another frequently noted aspect of fundamentalism is its association with the violence of holy wars and terrorism.⁸⁰ Most observers, however, fail to note the connection between these characteristics and the fact that a top priority for fundamentalists of all stripes is pushing women back to their traditional or subservient place in a punitive, authoritarian “traditional” family.

Over the last centuries, as massive technological changes destabilized social structures, there has been movement toward partnership, at least in some world regions. While not so long ago it was believed that kings have a divinely ordained right to rule, and fealty and obedience were the cultural ideals, today most people hold democracy and freedom as coveted ideals.

But the movement to challenge top-down control has primarily focused on dismantling the top of the domination pyramid: what is conventionally defined as politics and economics. It has paid much less attention to gender and parent-child relations—the relationships that most profoundly affect the development of the brain—and with this, how we feel, think, and act.

Once we connect these dots, we see that in a domination system, familial, educational, religious, political, and economic structures—not an imagined human nature wired for oppression and violence—are what gets in the way of our human capacities, indeed, propensities, for empathy, caring, and mutuality. Identifying these dynamics, in turn, makes it possible to identify interventions that can more effectively bring about positive social change. The Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens treats biological and cultural evolution as a unified field reflecting gene-culture interactions. It reveals patterns in what otherwise seems random and disconnected, pointing to ways of achieving systemic and sustainable change.

Moreover—and this is a critical point—this lens not only examines how environments affect human behavior but also considers, in a process akin to the evolutionary concept of niche construction, how human behavior in turn affects our physical and cultural environments.⁸¹ It shows that because our brains have evolved the flexibility to adjust to different environments, they tend to develop differently in partnership- and domination-oriented systems, and that the effects of these different environments are particularly powerful over the course of child and adolescent neural development. However, we again want to emphasize that this is not a one-way process. What we think, feel, and do also affects which of our genetic possibilities are expressed. It affects the kinds of cultures we create.

In short, we propose that there are synergistic interactive relationships between biology, culture, and human agency. But before we explore these interactions further, we will in the next chapter look at another pivotal, still generally ignored, aspect of human evolution: the emergence of love.

Michelangelo’s magnificent Pieta is one of our most moving works of art because it so powerfully expresses the love of a mother for her child. We are deeply affected by love stories such as Romeo and Juliet and by great humanitarians who dedicate their lives to caring for others. All these expressions of love touch something inside us that developed in the course of evolution: our human need and capacity for love.

Spiritual seers have long said that love is the key to fulfillment, contentment, and joy. Most of us have experienced these feelings when we love and are loved.

So it is hardly news that love makes us feel good. What is news is that the feelings of well-being and pleasure we associate with love are part of human biology. Love triggers neurochemical messages of well-being and pleasure. Our bodies give us these rewards when we are loved and when we love others, whether it is a child, a lover, a parent, a friend, or even a pet.

As neuroscientists Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski note, brain studies support the proposition that 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.¹ Like other human capacities, such as consciousness, learning, and creativity, love has a long and fascinating evolutionary history. Indeed, as we will explore in this chapter, the evolution of love appears to be integral to the development of our human brain.

Many evolutionary developments seen in humans are, to varying degrees, found in other species. Traits such as behavioral plasticity, dependence on learning, and consequently significant cultural variation, as well as capacities for cooperation, prosociality, creativity, inventiveness, self-awareness, and consciousness, have precursors in mammals and nonhuman primates.² There is evidence of reasoning and problem-solving among chimpanzees, crows, and elephants. All three species can figure out complex ways of accessing food, and elephants are noted for their great memory.³ As for culture, monkeys and apes have rudimentary cultures that are shared by group members, learned, and transmitted across generations.⁴

These evolutionary trends toward behavioral flexibility, innovation, learning, and cultural transmission are dramatically illustrated by the classic story of Imo, a teenage Japanese macaque who, out of the blue, made innovative breakthroughs in her troop’s feeding practices. Japanese scientists provisioned the macaques with yams to lure them out of the dense forest on the island of Koshima and better observe their behavior. The monkeys would come to the beach where the yams were placed, brush off the sand, and eat. One day, Imo began dipping the yams in a tide-pool to wash off the sand. When scientists put out wheat grains on the beach, Imo was inventive again. She discovered that wheat grains float and sand grains sink, and began to separate wheat grains from sand by dropping them in the water.

So the capacity for behavioral flexibility and creative innovation clearly exists in Japanese macaques and other primate species. Moreover, within a few years almost every monkey in Imo’s troop had adopted the new techniques that she introduced, illustrating that behavior can be transmitted through learning. The case of Imo also demonstrates that primates can respond proactively, not merely reactively, to their environments.⁵

But the appearance of humans ushers in a new level of capacities, needs, and motivations. We create new environments, both physical and cultural. We create ideas, cultures, and technologies that to a significant extent feed back to mold human relations and human development.

These human activities constitute a form of niche construction, in the words of biologists F. John Odling-Smee and colleagues, “whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches.”⁶ Odling-Smee and his colleagues explain that an ecological niche is the position that a given species occupies in the environment, including all physical and biological interactions and factors. They further note that “by transforming natural selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution, on a scale hitherto underestimated, and in a manner that alters the evolutionary dynamic.”⁷

This is not to say that members of nonhuman species do not also modify their environments and have ideas, cultures, or technologies. But humans engage in niche construction more than any other species, as they interact with and alter the biotic and abiotic elements of the environments. And our technologies are enormously more complex and powerful than the simple tools used, for example, by crows, monkeys, and apes.⁸

In addition, there are significant features of human cultures that are absolutely unique. Mozart’s music, Shakespeare’s plays, Hildegard von Bingen’s mysticism, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s passion for women’s rights, and Gandhi’s crusade for freedom and peace are different from anything we see in other species. These differences do not fit into the propositions discussed in the previous chapter that emphasize evolutionary selfishness.

Of course, humans are not immune to the forces of natural selection. But there would not be an Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa devoting their lives to caring for total strangers if caring and love were just a tightly regulated outcome of purely selfish genes. Nor does a ruthless-gene view of the world explain Nelson Mandela’s reaching out in friendship and forgiveness to the people who oppressed black South Africans. These are famous persons, but their actions are not exceptional: from societies around the globe come daily examples of kindness and assistance given to strangers as well as acts of forgiveness and reconciliation.⁹ The nomadic pastoral Gabra people of East Africa have a saying, for instance, that “A poor man shames us all,” through which they express the moral responsibility in their society to help those in need.¹⁰

Or in the words of U2’s Bono, “When I came here [to Africa], and visited hospitals with thousands of people camping outside for treatment, for drugs that were not available, I wanted to do what I could to make the madness stop. Watching lives implode in front of your eyes for no reason. Children in their mother’s arms go into that awful silence. And looking to the side and seeing the health workers and seeing the rage inside of them. I just thought: I’ll do what I can.”¹¹

Reductionist propositions cannot explain why so many of us spontaneously feel concern for people living on the other side of the world. Nor do they explain why so many people display loving kindness to complete strangers. To understand these humane feelings and actions requires a fresh look at how they evolved.

The feelings, motivations, and behaviors we call love have deep evolutionary roots. Indeed, these roots go back millions of years before our species emerged. Most reptiles lay their eggs and leave the next generation to hatch on their own. Some reptiles, such as the rainbow lizard, have been observed to eat their offspring instead of caring for them, a fate that can befall any hatchling that doesn’t run off and hide.¹² But when it comes to mammals, the picture changes dramatically because immature mammals require care to survive.¹³

Mammalian mothers actively care for their offspring, sometimes risking their lives to protect them. Mother ground squirrels make alarm calls to warn their brood of an approaching hawk, and mother bears are renowned for protecting their cubs from danger.¹⁴ North American black bears, for instance, receive maternal care and protection for 18 months as they learn a plethora of skills necessary for their survival.¹⁵ A dramatic example of maternal protection involves an alley cat named Scarlett who suffered severe burns as she ran repeatedly into a burning building until she had retrieved her entire litter from the flames.

The evolution of mammalian nurturing represents a phylogenetic shift in the direction of care and empathy.¹⁶ In some species, such as owl monkeys, marmosets, and tamarins, fathers also engage in empathic caring.¹⁷ In other species, such as elephants, caring and empathy extend to other members of the herd. As Riane was privileged to observe in Africa, when danger threatens, adult elephants form a protective circle around the young.

Caring can even extend to other species, like when dogs or dolphins save human lives, occasionally at the cost of their own. A father swimming with three teenage girls encountered a great white shark. He told the press afterward that dolphins “  ‘started to herd us up, they pushed all four of us together by doing tight circles around us. . . . [The shark] was only about two metres away from me, the water was crystal clear, and it was as clear as the nose on my face,’ he said. At that point, he realised that the dolphins ‘had corralled us up to protect us.’  ”¹⁸ Another dramatic example of interspecies protective behavior comes from a female gorilla who in 1996 cradled an injured little boy who had fallen into the gorilla enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago and then brought him safely to the zookeepers.¹⁹

When it comes to humans, caring is integral to human survival. Human infants require much longer, sustained, and intense care than the young of other species. Consequently, the capacity for sustained nurturing evolved as a key part of the human behavioral repertoire.²⁰

The origins of our care-rewarding neurochemistry—and the importance of love in human relations—can thus be explained in terms of natural selection.²¹ Neuroscientist Lucy R. Brown, anthropologist Helen Fisher, and psychologist Arthur Aron have proposed that the neural circuitry supporting romantic love probably evolved to motivate couples to remain together and provide care for their young during their offspring’s most vulnerable years.²² But parental and romantic love are only two aspects of love. Once the capacity for loving appeared on the evolutionary scene, love became a feature in relationships beyond those directly connected with reproduction.²³

As Brown put it, love seems to be a motivational drive in itself, not unlike the drive for food, sleep, and sex.²⁴ Humans express love not only for their children but also for unrelated persons. People who adopt children, including those of another race or nationality, typically love, protect, and nurture them as devotedly as do biological parents. And thousands of organizations all over the globe extend humanitarian assistance to people in need, even to people traditionally considered enemies.

These caring emotions and behaviors once again contradict a strictly selfish gene view of the world. Since the beneficiaries of the care are not genetically related to those providing it or in a position to reciprocate, assistance to those in need, along with the associated compassionate feelings, can be explained instead as a function of motivational dynamics that arose because natural selection favored their development.²⁵

The striving for self-preservation and reproduction certainly plays an important part in human needs and motivations. However, a selfish gene perspective can explain neither humanitarian acts directed at strangers nor our powerful yearning for beauty, meaning, and love. Nor can it account for faith in a loving deity or in the belief that God is love.²⁶ Such spiritual extensions of love transcend reductionist genetic explanations.

The fact that humans love and care for their pets also contradicts a selfish gene view of the world.²⁷ Identification with and concern for wildlife and a belief that all life is interconnected—an idea at the core of some indigenous belief systems as well as the contemporary ecological movement—are further extensions of the human impulses toward empathy, love, and caring.

So while the original selective pressure for love likely came from the need to care for dependent young and to provide them with the protection and nurturance they need to survive, over the course of human evolution love became a motivation in its own right. It became a new dynamic that must be taken into account in the study of human possibilities. Indeed, we go further: love is a dynamic that helps explain the emergence of humanity in both meanings of the word.

Could the evolution of caring, culminating in the deep emotion we call love, have been a prerequisite for our species’ capacities for well-developed intelligence, symbolic thinking, learning, communication, consciousness, caring, planning, creativity, and choice? We hypothesize that this is the case and propose that once love arrived on the evolutionary stage, it developed its own dynamics, bringing new needs, capacities, and motivations.

The development of the capacities that make us uniquely human required a much larger, more complex brain.²⁸ This larger brain required a larger cranium, which in turn necessitated the evolution of a larger birth canal. But the human brain continues to develop after birth, particularly during the first years, and then extending into a person’s early 20s.²⁹ Especially during the earliest years of life, children require love, not just rote caring, if they are to adequately develop.³⁰ We agree with neuropsychologist Ruth Feldman, who places emphasis on “the primary role of love as a central motivating force of developmental progress as a critical ingredient in the survival, safety, and well-being of the young.” Adults must be motivated to respond to the needs of the young, and hence a neurochemical reward system evolved to provide pleasure for engaging in loving care.³¹

Thus, the emergence of our species would not have been possible without the emergence of caring and love.³² This does not mean that love was the cause of the appearance of humanity. But it was a critical feature in human evolution. As neuroscientist Sue Carter notes, “Even the resilient and highly flexible human infant needs some social predictability and support to prosper.”³³ They need love.

Moreover, love goes along with and reflects new human capacities, needs, motivations, and possibilities. One such development was greater intelligence, and with it, our species’ enormous capacity for learning. Still another was our capacity for language and other types of symbolic communication that play key roles in cooperation for mutual benefit. Also crucial were our capacities for consciousness, creativity, planning, and choice. All these developments relate to the evolution of our larger and more complex brain and were facilitated by the evolution of extended caring, and from there, love.³⁴

As neuroscientist Paul MacLean points out, the large and complex human brain developed over a long evolutionary process.³⁵ The most ancient parts of our central nervous system are the spinal cord, hindbrain, and midbrain and their surroundings. This ancient brain system is present in fish and amphibians and contains the basic mechanisms for physical survival and reproduction, including regulation of breathing and blood circulation. With the evolutionary appearance of reptiles, the forebrain and the lower layer of what is called the limbic system, the seat of emotions, evolved. With mammals, we find an expansion of the limbic system and a well-developed neocortex, the seat of more advanced cognition.³⁶

The neocortex, literally the “new bark” since it covers much of the brain, includes the occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. The neocortex began to emerge tens of millions of years ago. But its development accelerated only a few million years ago, when the human evolutionary lineage separated from other apes.³⁷

The prefrontal cortex, evolutionarily speaking, is the youngest brain structure. It sits directly behind the forehead and through its intricate network of connections to other parts of the brain and body is pivotal for planned action, moral reasoning, and social development.³⁸

Along with each of these evolutionary changes in the brain came a new range of capacities. In turn, selection pressures favoring capacities for learning, language and symbolic communication, social intelligence, creativity, and so forth may have spurred further changes in brain size and functioning.

Larger brains resulted in neotenous, dependent young in need of greater care. And in this process, love became a central feature in what it means to be human.

Since many of the qualities that distinguish us as humans were made possible by our larger, more complex brains, we are proposing that the evolution of this larger, more complex brain may not have been possible were it not for the evolutionary movement toward nurturing love in a synergetic evolutionary movement toward a brain capable of other well-developed human characteristics. Indeed, we know that the prefrontal cortex facilitates empathic caring because empathy and moral judgment are severely impaired when it is injured.³⁹

A related evolutionary development is that humans are readily able to reflect on their feelings, beliefs, motivations, and actions, aspects of what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls expanded consciousness.⁴⁰ Although expanded consciousness is found in some nonhuman primates and other mammals in rudimentary form, it is most developed in humans.

Expanded consciousness is a necessary precursor for language, art, and other forms of symbolic expression and communication.⁴¹ It makes possible a sense of past, present, and future, and thus the capacity to make long-range plans.⁴² It is fundamental to developing a sense of morality and internalizing right and wrong. And it can facilitate the expansion of love to people who are not close relatives.

Expanded consciousness is also a major factor in conscious choices. Humans, more than any other species, have the capacity for reflecting on options and deciding what course to take. And in humans, choices are largely a function of learning.

Certainly, many animals, from elephants and dolphins to monkeys and apes, are adept learners, as illustrated by Imo’s macaque troop emulating her food-cleaning discoveries. But in human evolution, learning became the primary mechanism both for acquiring novel behaviors and for changing existing ones. Humans learn across the life span, particularly when we are young, from parents, peers, and other people; at home, in school, within the community, and at ceremonial events; from oral tradition, the mass media, study, and imitation.

The complexity of the human brain also makes possible our great capacities for innovation and creativity, which in turn have led to an enormous range of material technologies and diverse cultural beliefs and practices. However, as the human urge to explore and create demonstrates, we do not just innovate and create in response to new environmental stimuli. We actively search for and initiate change. We do this almost from the moment we are born, as anyone who has watched a baby actively try to change its environment can attest.

Humans also imagine the future, make plans, and act on their plans. Neuroscientist Karl Pribram experimentally confirmed that this “future sense orientation” also can be found in monkeys, so it is probably connected to Imo having been able to imagine more effective ways of cleaning sand off her food. Pribram found that when monkeys were trained to press different bars depending on whether they saw circles or stripes, their brain waves indicated intention to act, not just action.⁴³

Pribram further found that our well-developed and complex human cortex connects to evolutionarily older neural structures to guide behavior through what he called feed-forward loops, affecting both cognition and emotion.⁴⁴ Other scientists have found that when this feed-forward connection is severed in lobotomized individuals, their capacity for self-regulation and long-range planning is impaired. Additionally, these individuals lose their capacity for empathy and caring.

Not only that—and this is extremely significant for how the cultural environments we create shape our brains—empathy, the capacity to care, self-regulation, and long-range planning can also be compromised in individuals who were abused in childhood. In other words, empathy, caring, self-regulation, and planning are dramatically affected by a lack of love.⁴⁵

Joan L. Luby and her colleagues showed that a child provided with good parental nurturing, even under otherwise stressful conditions, can develop a brain with a larger hippocampus—a key brain structure for learning, memory, and response to stress.⁴⁶ So the quality of nurturance directly affects the structure of the brain.⁴⁷

Rats also develop better if they are given loving care. Rat pups of attentive mothers, those who spent more time licking and grooming their offspring, performed much better on tests for spatial learning and memory and were less fearful than pups whose mothers were less attentive. The benefits, which not only were obvious at a young age but also endured throughout life, were clearly linked to attentive maternal care: when pups born to non-nurturing mothers were raised by highly attentive mothers, they were indistinguishable from offspring born to highly attentive mothers.⁴⁸

As Michael Meaney, founder of this McGill University rat research project, observed, that loving care sets off a chain of biochemical reactions that stimulate brain and memory development. A lot of early loving stimulates brain development. So also does high-quality rat daycare. Meany notes that these results for rats parallel findings that children from emotionally and intellectually deprived homes benefit greatly from high-quality infant care programs.⁴⁹

Like seedlings hungry for sunshine, children will reach out across amazing distances and barriers to bring love into their lives. They can be amazingly resilient in harsh environments as long as the hope and promise of love exists. But without this hope, children face an uphill struggle and all too often face lifelong cognitive and emotional problems. Even if they do not have difficulty in forming or maintaining relationships, their relationships often replicate the damaging patterns of their childhood: they tend to experience greater difficulties in expressing and addressing their emotional needs than people who had more opportunity in early life to learn productive emotional skills. They also often have great difficulty in impulse regulation, including regulation of violent impulses. In sum, lack of love in childhood tends to limit a person’s options for cognitive skill and emotional expression later in life.

The serious effects of lack of love in infancy and childhood have been extensively documented.⁵⁰ For instance, during the 1980s, the Romanian dictator Nicolas Ceausescu prohibited family planning. He actually required women to undergo monthly gynecological examinations to prove that they were not using birth control. Even under these circumstances, most parents took care of their children. But thousands of unwanted children were abandoned by parents who could not, or would not, raise them. Many of these children ended up in orphanages staffed by overworked, underpaid attendants who had little time or inclination to give them emotional comfort and caring.

Frequently these children died, but many of the survivors, including those later adopted by compassionate families, suffered lifelong developmental damage. Indeed, measures of frontal-occipital circumference, a reasonable estimate of brain size, were abnormally low in many of these orphans.⁵¹

There are also heartbreaking stories from Chinese orphanages, where girls abandoned by parents because males were considered more valuable withered away and died from a lack of caring attention. Again, even when these children were adopted by loving parents, they often suffered lasting developmental damage from their early lack of loving care.⁵²

As Bruce Perry writes, “when early life neglect is characterized by decreased sensory input (e.g., relative poverty of words, touch and social interactions) there will be a similar effect on human brain growth as in other mammalian species.”⁵³ Perry found that the regions of the cortex and limbic system responsible for emotions, including love, are 20 to 30 percent smaller in the brains of severely abused or neglected children.⁵⁴ In other words, brain sections responsible for emotions, including love, may be notably smaller in children who do not receive love and other stimuli needed for full human development.

There are hopeful indications that with intensive professional help, at least in some cases, part of this damage can be reversed. But it takes years of skilled intervention and care and massive investment of public resources, which are not often allocated to these ends. Significantly, as Dave Ziegler, a pioneering psychologist who developed such a residential care program, emphasizes, the key to these efforts is love.⁵⁵

In light of these kinds of findings, the evolutionary function of love assumes an even larger meaning that takes us beyond survival to the critical matter of human development. Children need loving environments in order to fully develop their human capacities for love, consciousness, creativity, planning, and choice.

We have been looking at severe cases of love deprivation. But to varying degrees, domination cultures and subcultures distort and inhibit our human capacity to express love in healthy and caring ways. Parents in such cultures or subcultures often learn to say, “I am hitting you because I love you,” and men socialized for a “masculinity” of domination are said to hit women “out of love.”

Women, too, are socialized to accept all this in domination systems. For instance, a South American Yanomamö woman, upon comparing with another wife the injuries inflicted on them by their husbands, concluded that her companion’s husband must truly care for her “since he has beaten her on the head so frequently!”⁵⁶

These distortions of our human need and capacity for love perpetuate cycles of brutality and violence that, as we have seen, are sometimes blamed on evolutionary imperatives or other supposedly inevitable aspects of human nature in keeping with the cultural belief that humans are innately flawed. Indeed, in contrast to the evolutionary view of love we have been proposing, a number of sociobiologists claim that the motivation for loving behaviors is actually selfishness.⁵⁷

Robert Trivers, who introduced the concept of reciprocal altruism, defines selfishness as “an act benefitting the actor at a cost to someone else,” and altruism as “an act that benefits another organism at a cost to the actor.”⁵⁸ This evolutionary perspective tars any behaviors truly motivated by empathy and concern for others as evolutionary losses. It makes genuine altruism appear unnatural at the same time that selfishness is crowned as the logical outcome of natural selection. While this may not be Trivers’ intent, as evolutionary theorist David Loye notes, this view conveys as the supposedly harsh reality that evolution justifies unscrupulous, even ruthless behavior.⁵⁹

The fact that the sociobiological and evolutionary psychological vocabulary borrows heavily from the language of neo-liberal or trickle-down capitalist economists also is revealing. Everything is just a matter of gains or losses. Catch phrases such as parental investment semantically convey that love is no more than a self-interested investment made for the evolutionary payoff of reproductive success.

The beliefs underlying these views of human nature and motivation also reflect the ranking of traditional masculine traits and behaviors over stereotypically feminine traits and behaviors. In these assertions, the love and empathy associated traditionally with women are of little intrinsic worth. What really matters is “masculine” strength and prowess. This gender-biased narrative is also reflected in heroic epics wherein a masculine protagonist trounces his opponents and thereby wins a mate.

The related claim that primate females prefer the most aggressive males is another sociobiological motif that deserves to be questioned. As primatologists such as Barbara Smuts have observed, females often chose to mate with males with whom they feel safe and who help them care for their offspring, not with the dominant male.⁶⁰

Turning to humans, here, too, the evidence is too contradictory to support the proposition that women prefer aggressive men. Anthropologist Patricia Draper, for example, explains how the Ju/’hoansi of the African Kalahari are uncomfortable around men with violent tempers, and the much reported assertion that Yanomamö killers have more wives and offspring than nonkillers has been thoroughly debunked and thus cannot lend support to the notion that women prefer killers.⁶¹

Nonetheless, the claim that male aggressiveness is natural for primates, and hence humans, is hard to dislodge—even though the degree of dominance reflected in nonhuman primate species ranges from nonexistent to unmistakable. On the low end of the aggressiveness scale, muriqui monkeys of South America are known for their “exceptionally low rates of agonistic interactions” and stumptail macaques are relatively good-natured.⁶² At the other extreme, chimpanzees sometimes gang up on lone individuals from other groups and viciously kill them.⁶³

Yet even here we must be cautious in our conclusions about chimpanzees. As Jane Goodall points out, “It is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent that aggressive ones; mild threatening gestures are more common than vigorous ones; threats per se occur much more often than fights; and serious wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones.”⁶⁴

This takes us to an important primate species that, unlike chimpanzees, rarely figures in the scientific literature: the bonobos. Indigenous to the tropical forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, bonobos are as closely related to humans as are chimpanzees. But unlike chimpanzees, bonobos do not have a male-dominated social structure and their social relations are much more geared toward sharing and caring. And while the chimpanzee is often invoked in explaining human behavior, including sexual behavior, actually bonobo sexuality is much closer to human sexuality than that of the chimpanzee.

Unlike other primates, female bonobos are sexually active most of the year. Their genitals, like those of human females, rotate forward, making it possible for them to copulate face-to-face. As primatologist Frans de Waal notes, penis lengths in bonobo males, in contrast to other apes, even “surpass those of the human male.” And, as is the case with humans, bonobo sexuality is often focused on pleasure, not just reproduction.

A notable feature of bonobos is that sharing sexual pleasure is, in the words of de Waal, often a bonding and even peacemaking ritual. As Takayoshi Kano, a primatologist who studied bonobos in the wild for decades, writes, “most other animals copulate only as an act of reproduction,” but for bonobos nonreproductive copulations “diminish hostility and help to establish and maintain intimacy between females and males.”⁶⁵

Bonobos are not an aggression-free species. But unlike chimpanzees, bonobos have never been observed engaging in lethal aggression. And whereas chimpanzee males sometimes kill infants, there are no reported instances of infanticide among the bonobos. Primatologist Suehisa Kuroda sums it up for bonobos: “their aggressive behavior is mild.”⁶⁶

Even violence between different bonobo groups is extremely rare. “Male bonobos do not form the tight bands that are associated with the male cooperative killing behavior of chimpanzees,” explain primatologists Frances White, Michel Waller, and Klaree Boose.⁶⁷ “Disputes and social tensions among bonobos are often diffused through sexual behavior.”⁶⁸ Kano reports observing how when two different bonobo groups met at a feeding site, the tension of the encounter was broken first by sex between a female and male from each group and then when a female engaged in genital rubbing with several females of the other group.⁶⁹

Use of nonreproductive sex by bonobos in what de Waal calls a “peacemaking ritual” raises interesting questions about primate—including hominin and human —evolution. It suggests an important evolutionary development: the use of sex as a means of reinforcing social relations based on the give-and-take of shared pleasure rather than on coercion and fear.

When it comes to caring, bonobos are also, as de Waal writes, “highly empathic.” For example, he notes that “As soon as one bonobo has even the smallest injury, he or she will be surrounded by others who come to inspect, lick, or groom.”⁷⁰

Moreover, de Waal and Frans Lanting note that there is no evidence that ensuring paternity is an issue for bonobo males.⁷¹ And, as Kano observes, among bonobos “elements of dominance do not enter into sexual activity.”⁷²

All this directly contradicts the dogma that a male-dominated, chronically violent social organization is inherent in primates as part of our evolutionary heritage. But despite this—or probably because of it—until recently bonobos have been generally ignored in the scientific literature.

Most revealing is that the evolutionary psychological literature generally fails to mention the absence of concern about paternity and the absence of male sexual coercion of females among bonobos because these observations contradict their assertions that as a cross-species principle, evolution favors violent competition, including rape, and that male dominance and violence against females are evolutionary adaptations.⁷³

Bonobo society is not male-dominated. Females, particularly mothers, play key social roles. Bonobo males do not use sexual coercion against females, and female bonobos form strong social bonds and effectively cooperate to keep male aggression down.

It is also worth pointing out, as primatologists de Waal, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and others who have worked closely with bonobos note, that bonobos are in significant respects smarter than chimpanzees, as demonstrated by their superior capacity to learn. The work of primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh teaching bonobos language skills is particularly fascinating. Bonobos such as Kanzi, Panbanisha, and her son Nyota have learned to use a keyboard with English words to communicate in ways that were once thought impossible for primates other than humans.⁷⁴

This leads to the important question of whether the greater mental capacity and greater empathy of bonobos compared to chimpanzees are related to the less stressful, less aggressive, and more partnership-oriented nature of bonobo groups wherein sharing and caring rather than controlling and hurting are socially supported.

Indeed, recent findings show that the brains of bonobos and chimpanzees have developed differently. James Rilling and his colleagues found that brain areas involved in the perception of another’s distress, such as the amygdala and anterior insula, are larger in bonobos than in chimpanzees.

Bonobo brains also contain better-developed pathways to control aggressive impulses. Rilling and his colleagues write that, “We suggest that this neural system not only supports increased empathic sensitivity in bonobos, but also behaviors like sex and play that serve to dissipate tension, thereby limiting distress and anxiety to levels conducive with prosocial behavior.”⁷⁵

The facts that bonobos in so many ways resemble humans more than chimpanzees and other primates and that their behaviors are based more on bonds of sharing care and pleasure than on domination and violence should be considered in evaluating other aspects of current evolutionary thinking, including prevailing ideas about early human social organization.

As de Waal reflects, “I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and cooperation.”⁷⁶

Gradually, an alternative evolutionary perspective has been emerging that provides building blocks for a new view of our species that takes into account the importance of motivations such as caring, curiosity, and creativity, rather than reducing us to puppets of selfish genes. Noting that earlier evolutionary narratives focused on the bonding of men to more effectively hunt and kill, Adrienne Zihlman, Nancy Tanner, and Sally Linton Slocum propose that the first social bonds were actually between mothers and infants and that they were based on sharing and caring, providing the foundation for social bonds later in life.⁷⁷ Zihlman, Tanner, and Slocum also shift the focus from strictly “man the hunter” to recognize the important role of “woman the gatherer” in human evolution, a view supported by studies of extant nomadic forager societies showing that most daily calories are derived from the gathering activities primarily performed by women, with protein being supplied largely by the hunting activities of men.⁷⁸

Further challenging the idea that not only bonding but also language first developed from men’s need to communicate during hunts, Zihlman, Tanner, and Slocum suggest that this human capacity, which makes possible our complex social networks, also arose out of the caring bonds between mothers and children.⁷⁹ Biologist Humberto Maturana also argues that the origins of language are rooted in loving behaviors and introduces the phrase “the biology of love.”⁸⁰ Similarly, MacLean proposes that language arose in the loving relationship between mother and child.⁸¹

De Waal identifies empathy, caring, and the drive for peaceful relations as important evolutionary developments that are observable in nonhuman species as well as humans. He locates the evolutionary roots of morality not only in other primates but also in social species more generally, such as elephants and dolphins. “If exploitation of others were all that matters,” de Waal observes, “evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.”⁸²

Darwin himself wrote of the softer, more stereotypically feminine aspects of evolution, suggesting that mutual aid and love are part of the biological basis for morality in our species. As Loye points out, Darwin referred to love 95 times, to moral sensitivity 92 times, and to selfishness only 12 times (and then in negative terms) in The Descent of Man.⁸³

John O’Manique also emphasizes that morality has evolutionary roots. He proposes that love and altruism are not dependent on selfish motivations and that the emergence of the human capacity for self-conscious reflection, which includes consciousness of others, is basic to empathy and cooperation.⁸⁴

Like Zihlman and her colleagues, O’Manique views the caring bonds between mothers and children as the evolutionary foundation for morality, and ultimately justice. He, too, recognizes the need for a more gender-balanced evolutionary narrative.

Evidence for this new, more balanced evolutionary story has been accumulating in recent years. For example, archeological finds point to the importance of women in the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. The majority of stone carvings of this era are of female figurines. And a recent analysis of the handprints sometimes found on the walls of famous cave sanctuaries shows that the majority were female hands.⁸⁵

Dean Snow, the archeologist who made this discovery using analyses of the differing finger formations on female and male hands, notes in an interview that Paleolithic artists may have “signed” their work using stenciled depictions of their own hands. Female and male hands differ, and a study of the handprints indicates that if they are in fact “signatures,” then contrary to sex-biased assumptions, most of the artists were women rather than men.⁸⁶

In the early Neolithic, too, female figurines are ubiquitous—until they rather abruptly disappear. Yet even after this cultural shift, female deities were still prominent. For example, the Egyptian Goddess Isis was revered as a dispenser of wisdom, counsel, and justice, and in ancient Sumer the most widely worshipped deity was Inanna, the Goddess of Love.⁸⁷

Going back even further, if we use the recurring patterns visible across ethnographies of nomadic foragers as a frame of reference for gender relations in most of prehistory, then the theme that emerges is one of egalitarianism. In assessing nomadic forager gender relations, Karen Endicott concludes that “rather than assigning all authority in economics, political, or religious matters to one gender or the other, hunter-gatherers tend to leave decision-making about men’s work and areas of expertise to men, and about women’s work and expertise to women, either as groups or individuals.”⁸⁸

The work of psychiatrists and psychologists such as Roberto Assagioli, Kasimierz Dabrowski, Abraham Maslow, and other humanist scholars adds another dimension to this expanded account of human evolution. They make a distinction between what Maslow calls defense or survival motivations and growth or self-actualizing motivations, such as the desire for fairness, the striving for a higher goal, and the need to be loved and to love. Dabrowski considers that the human drive to become attuned to our higher nature constitutes human authenticity. Assagioli focuses on what he calls the superconscious as the source of our higher aspirations and moral drives.⁸⁹

Indeed, a host of clinical psychologists have demonstrated that humans have a whole range of motivations beyond survival and reproductive fitness—from satisfying an intrinsic curiosity to the striving for excellence, and from searching for meaning to yearning for love.⁹⁰ Some of these motivations may be helpful for surviving and passing on genes, but with the evolution of a large neocortex and the corresponding expanded behavioral plasticity, the human possibilities multiply. The daring of explorers driven by curiosity, for example, has led both to new discoveries and to their untimely demise. The motivation to excel can be so stressful that it adversely affects health and survival. High achievers often have high blood pressure, heart attacks, and strokes.

Creativity, too, seems to be an intrinsic human motivation, closely tied to self-actualization.⁹¹ Many people report that in the throes of creativity—of writing, painting, composing music, or thinking in innovative ways—they experience a high, a feeling of excitement and well-being that spurs them on.⁹²

In addition, and this is one of the central messages of this chapter, love is an intrinsic motivation in its own right. While the origin of the human capacity and need for love can be explained in terms of the longer maturation period required for our survival and development, particularly the development of our brain, once this capacity and need appeared, love became a motivation in many relations beyond those connected with reproduction.⁹³

Without love—given and received—our lives would feel diminished in meaning. This deep human need for meaning is another motivation that cannot be explained in terms of the replication of genes, or even by our survival drive.

However, when it comes to the crucial question of whether our needs for meaning and love are met and whether our capacities for creativity and love are expressed or inhibited, as we will see in later chapters, we need to consider whether a society orients to the partnership or domination end of the continuum. But first, as a further backdrop to understanding what is possible for us as humans, the next chapter outlines additional evidence from neuroscience demonstrating the enormous role of experience in gene expression.

This may seem astonishing, but a 13th-century experiment already proved that, rather than following invariant genetic instructions, our brain circuitry is strongly shaped by experience. The experiment was ordered by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, who decided he would discover the natural language of God by having children brought up in total silence. So he decreed that a group of infants be taken from their mothers and raised by caretakers who provided them food and shelter in total silence.¹ But instead of revealing the language of God, the children spoke no language whatsoever.²

These unfortunates, all of whom died in childhood, had the genetic potential to speak a language. However, without the experience of hearing spoken words, they did not develop the neural circuitry to express this human potential.

This cruel experiment showed that our brain circuits, and therefore our abilities and behavior, are strongly shaped by our environment, which for humans is primarily our surrounding culture. Specifically, it showed that while humans have evolved a genetic predisposition for learning language, to realize this potential we have to be exposed to language. Frederick’s experiment also illustrates the role of culture in molding experience, since a ruler could only exercise such autocratic powers at a time when Western culture oriented far more closely to the domination system.

Examples of how cultural environments affect the expression of genetic potentials abound. For instance, a few centuries ago only a tiny percentage of the population of Western Europe could read. They had the genetic potential to do so, but for most people this capacity remained untapped. The potential to read became widely expressed in the population only with greater access to education, which in turn was brought forth by cultural movement in a partnership direction.³

In succeeding chapters, we will look in some detail at how human abilities, behaviors, and beliefs, including what is considered normal and abnormal, desirable or undesirable, and moral or immoral, are directly influenced by where a society is situated on the partnership-domination continuum—and how this plays out in the neural development of our brains. But to better understand how experience can influence whether genetic capacities are expressed or inhibited, we will first look at a number of fascinating studies, including findings from the emerging field of epigenetics.

Even highly heritable traits are affected by environmental conditions. Height, for example, has heritability of at least 90 percent, which means that 90 percent of the height difference between any two people is caused by their different DNA.⁴ As a result, you would expect very little effect from environmental factors. Nonetheless, Japanese children born and reared in the United States, on average, were considerably taller than their grandparents who grew up in Japan with very different diets and other life experiences. After World War II, as the Japanese became more prosperous and this prosperity was more widely shared, heights also increased in Japan, with the average height of Japanese 11-year-olds increasing by more than 5½ inches in just 50 years.⁵

This is just one example of experiential effects that span generations. For instance, studies show that what a woman experiences during pregnancy can affect her children and in some cases her grandchildren.⁶ One of the earliest, and probably most famous, studies that show these transgenerational environmental effects was based on birth records collected during the so-called Dutch Hunger Winter. This calamity was caused by a German-imposed food embargo in western Holland toward the end of World War II that led to death by starvation of some 30,000 people. As Tessa Roseboom and her colleagues report: “Throughout the winter of 1944–1945 the population had to live without light, without gas, without heat, laundries ceased operating, soap for personal use was unobtainable, and adequate clothing and shoes were lacking in most families. In hospitals, there was serious overcrowding as well as lack of medicines. Above all, hunger dominated all misery.”⁷ But the consequences of these experiences were much farther reaching. What scientists later found is that children who had been in gestation at any point during the famine had a markedly higher incidence of diabetes, and if their mothers had experienced the famine during the period of early gestation, they also had higher rates of obesity and coronary heart disease. Additionally, adult women who had been conceived right before, during, or after the famine had about five times the rate of breast cancer compared with nonexposed women.⁸

Developmental neuroscientist Eric B. Keverne points out the general implications of such findings. As he writes, the environment circumstances to which children are exposed “in the mother’s womb, and even in the grandmother’s womb, can change their metabolic profile, brain development profile, and a propensity for psychiatric dysfunctions.”⁹

Other studies confirm these long-term experiential effects. For example, a 2013 study shows that mouse pups—and even the offspring’s offspring—can inherit a fearful association of a certain smell with pain, even if they have not experienced the pain themselves, and without the need for genetic mutations.¹⁰ Kerry Ressler and Brian Dias designed a simple experiment in which laboratory mice were trained to associate the smell of acetophenone (a scent like that of cherries and almonds) with electric shocks. Not only did the animals shudder in the presence of acetophenone without a shock, but so also did their pups, even though they had never encountered acetophenone in their lives.¹¹

The most striking findings from this study were the accompanying changes to the brain structures that process odors. The mice sensitized to acetophenone, as well as their descendants, had changes in their brain, such as in those areas involved in processing fear, and produced more neurons to detect the odor compared with control mice and their progeny.¹²

Such changes in brain structures and behaviors that do not entail gene mutations are increasingly being confirmed. For example, mice fed a high-fat diet throughout their pregnancies and lactation periods produced offspring that were larger than normal—a trait that was also passed on to their offspring’s offspring.¹³ Other studies indicate that a father’s experiences and behaviors can also influence his offspring’s health. For example, a 2013 study in which male mice were fed a folate-deficient diet found that the offspring they sired had increased rates of birth defects.¹⁴

Another experiment exposed fruit flies to a drug called geldanamycin and found unusual growths on their eyes that lasted through 13 generations. Though in humans most epigenetic effects do not last so very long, still another study found that roundworms fed with a certain bacteria exhibit changes that are transmitted to at least 40 generations.¹⁵

These kinds of groundbreaking experiments showing that structural cell changes can occur without genetic changes led to the new field of epigenetics, and with it, a partial revival of Lamarck’s theories about the transmission of acquired traits from one generation to another. Biomedical researcher Yan Jiang and colleagues succinctly define epigenetics as “a type of molecular and cellular ‘memory’ that results in stable changes in the gene expression without alternations to the DNA sequence itself.”¹⁶

While epigenetics is today successfully demolishing dogmas of genetic determinism, it was actually prefigured by earlier studies of human and nonhuman species showing that both prenatal and postnatal experiences affect traits and behaviors. A notable example is an experiment performed in the 1960s by neuropsychologist Gilbert Gottlieb focusing on ducks. Ducks seem to be genetically preprogrammed to respond to species-specific maternal calls. However, Gottlieb found that when wood duck embryos were exposed to mallard duck maternal calls, once hatched the wood duck chicks showed a strong preference for the mallard call over the call of their own species.¹⁷ Gottlieb also found that when mallard ducks were raised in social groups rather than in isolation, they could be induced to prefer chicken calls to those of their own species. “Social rearing with peers establishes such a highly malleable state in the embryos and hatchlings,” Gottlieb wrote, “that a species-atypical preference could be induced, one that overrides the usual canalizing influence of exposure to their own contact calls.”¹⁸

That early experience influences which genetic possibilities are expressed or suppressed—even affecting so-called instincts—has also been documented by experiments with mammals. Among the most famous are Harry and Margaret Harlow’s pioneering studies on the early experiences of infant rhesus monkeys.¹⁹ Their experiments found that monkeys raised in isolation developed the extreme pathologies often seen in severely neglected and abused children. The monkeys would stare fixedly into space and hug or rock themselves interminably. They would react to the approach of people by biting or scratching bleeding holes in their own skin. When housed with other monkeys, they were not able to have sex.²⁰ Instead, they would indiscriminately hit and bite, in apparent terror. When females from this group were artificially inseminated, they were not able to give their offspring attention, much less affection. They carelessly stepped on their progeny, shoved them away, and sometimes deliberately injured them.²¹

It has now also been demonstrated that one mechanism through which parenting style in rhesus monkey mothers affects their offspring’s behaviors involves the serotonin system.²² A multidisciplinary research team made up of developmental psychologists, primatologists, and other scientists investigated the effects of variable parenting styles early in life on the monkeys’ neurochemical profiles in the second year of life. The researchers found that high rates of maternal rejection led to increased rates of anxiety and fearfulness, as mediated by serotonergic mechanisms. These findings suggest that different types of maternal care result in developmental differences in the brains, notably involving the serotonin system of the young monkeys. In short, at least if you are a rhesus monkey, rejection by mom affects both your brain development and your anxiety levels.²³

For one more example of the epigenetic effects of the environment on brain development, we turn to controlled studies on laboratory rats by William Greenough and his colleagues, who found that the growth of neural synapses is directly affected by experience in rats.²⁴ The typical lab rat, even if treated well, lives in a cage that lacks stimulation. Greenough and his collaborators instead put rats in a large wire-mesh cage filled with a daily-changing set of toys and other objects, and let them out once a day in an open field where there were other toys and objects. The rats reared in this enriched environment not only performed better than rats raised in less stimulating conditions but also developed more synapses in their brains.²⁵ Recall also the McGill University study by Meany and his colleagues, mentioned in Chapter 3, where rats whose mothers were more attentive—as well as rats born from less caring mothers who were placed in a caring rat “daycare” program—developed more brain neural connections than those who were short-changed on care and attention.²⁶

Even species with far less genetic flexibility than ours can radically change their behaviors—and their brain neurochemistry—when social circumstances change. For example, male savanna baboons are known to be rather aggressive primates. Males harass and attack females, who are only half their size and have much smaller canine teeth. They also can terrorize lower-ranking males with threats and physical attacks. But primatologists Robert Sapolsky and Lisa Share discovered that even baboons can shift to a much less violent, more affiliative way of life.²⁷

One troop that Sapolsky and Share studied, which they called the Garbage Dump Troop, slept near the trash heap at a tourist lodge in Kenya. Another troop, which they called the Forest Troop, slept in trees about one kilometer from the dump. They, too, wanted access to the dump goodies, but only the most bellicose Forest Troop males got dump food, since they had to compete with the Garbage Dump Troop for this resource. The less aggressive males in Forest Troop simply stayed away.

Then, the dump became contaminated with bovine tuberculosis (TB), and over the course of two years almost all the Garbage Dump Troop died out. However, among Forest Troop members, only the most aggressive males succumbed, since they had been the regular patrons of the contaminated site. This left alive the females, juveniles, and only the more socially affiliated and unaggressive males of Forest Troop, who had not eaten the TB-tainted food.

At this point, the Forest Troop’s culture underwent a radical shift, becoming a much more congenial community. There were still fights and struggles for dominance. As Sapolsky remarked, “We’re talking about baboons here.”²⁸ But both females and males of all ranks spent more time grooming, being groomed, and huddling close to troop mates than is typical of savanna baboons.

One of Sapolsky and Share’s most striking findings was that the neurochemistry of the Forest Troop monkeys changed when this cultural shift occurred. Hormone samples showed far less evidence of stress, as reflected in lower levels of cortisol and neurochemical markers of anxiety in even the lowest-ranking individuals, compared with baboons living in other troops.²⁹

Just as striking—and significant—is that, more than two decades later, the troop retained its more peaceful character. And this occurred despite the fact that all the original males had died off or left, and new ones had replaced them in accordance with the baboon pattern of submales migrating to another troop after puberty.

At first, the investigators had thought the reason that the troop’s relations became less tense and violent was the changed ratio of females to males, which was now two-to-one. But other troops with a similar preponderance of females were as truculent as ever. Clearly, what was happening was a cultural and, with it, a behavioral shift. Not only was the troop’s new culture being transmitted to the next generation, but it also was being adopted by new males coming into the troop.

Sapolsky and Share concluded that one reason might be the treatment of these new males by resident females. When they studied interactions between females and new transfer males, they found that females treated new transfer males in the same affiliative manner that they treated resident males. There were other factors, such as the lower rates of male aggression by resident males and the more relaxed social structure, as well as new males observing how resident males interacted with females and each other. Sapolsky calls this process a self-perpetuating cascade with “more affiliative males resulting in less-stressed females who are more likely to act prosocially toward new males, resulting in new males becoming more affiliative.”³⁰

Whatever the mechanism of cultural transmission, the persistence of a more peaceful mode of relations offers proof that new ways of relating can be socially transmitted to newcomers arriving from more aggressive baboon cultures. Moreover, the shift to a less violent culture also offers proof that the typical aggressiveness of savanna baboons is not decreed by their genes: baboon culture can shift in the space of a generation to become less aggressive and more affiliative, and these changes can become the new cultural norm that is adopted by arriving outsiders.

Commenting on the Forest Troop shift toward peace, Frans de Waal writes, “The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained. And if baboons can do it, why not us?”³¹ De Waal also notes that studies of other primates confirm the social impact of learning from others among nonhuman primates. For example, if normally combative rhesus monkeys are reared with more conciliatory stump-tailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys also learn tolerance, peacemaking, and hugging.³²

Unlike Sapolsky and Share, who examined the relationship between culture and neurochemistry, most neuroscientists studying humans have a much narrower focus. They, too, examine the connection between neurochemistry and environments. But the environmental contexts they look at are usually much smaller. They have focused on how the brain develops differently in different family circumstances, and especially on how people who grow up in harsh families seem to have disrupted patterns of both serotonin and dopamine activity, leading to depression, irritability, and other mood problems.³³

For example, studies show that the brains of people with a family background of abuse and violence tend to have lower levels of serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter, and higher levels of cortisol, the major stress hormone. One of the first studies to show this came in 1984, when researchers correlated lower levels of serotonin with lack of good caregiving.³⁴ Low levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with positive moods, also seem to be caused by the stress of being deprived of nurturing care early in life. Developmental neuroscientist Eric Keverne points out how “evidence is thus rapidly accumulating that demonstrates how adverse environments can bring about epigenetic changes to brain and other tissues. The human brain is especially vulnerable because of its long postnatal development, involving widespread frontal and temporal neocortical reorganization at puberty.”³⁵

Focusing even more narrowly are works proposing that the determining factor in how people feel and act, and thus in the development of their brain neurochemistry, is whether or not they had a secure bond with their mother. These works draw heavily from the attachment theory of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who proposed that babies have an innate need for attachment to their mothers, and that when this need is not satisfied the result will be long-term cognitive, social, and emotional difficulties. Bowlby further proposed that this is rooted in our ancient evolutionary heritage in nomadic foraging societies when presumably children who stayed closer to their mothers had a better chance of surviving—and thus that daycare and other modern ways of childcare go against our nature and are harmful to children.³⁶

However, many scholars have questioned Bowlby’s theories.³⁷ They point out that while mothers are certainly important, they are not the only adults with whom children bond, and that, despite Bowlby’s assertion that mother-child attachment was much stronger among our nomadic forager evolutionary ancestors than in modern times, in most of today’s nomadic forager societies, infants and toddlers are frequently held by relatives, including older siblings, as well as other group members.³⁸ They also cite studies showing that children today can fare better when their mothers have other interests or jobs.³⁹

The idea that mothering has severely deteriorated in modern Western times is also hard to support. Actually, a few centuries ago in most farming families, mothers spent a huge amount of time on various subsistence tasks as well as cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes, so that children, especially girls, took over much of the care of their younger siblings. Indeed, for much of human history a variety of people, not just mothers, have taken care of babies and infants.⁴⁰

This does not mean that secure attachments are not important. But whether a child bonds with a mother or other adults is only one factor in the kinds of people children become. The culture or subculture into which the child is born makes a huge difference.

What both sides of the argument about attachment theory fail to address is that families do not arise in isolation. Families are formed by people who have learned what kinds of relations are considered normal and moral in their particular culture or subculture. This does not mean that all families conform to a culture’s family ideal. For example, studies indicate that highly authoritarian and punitive families were the norm in Nazi Germany. Yet, as Pearl and Samuel Oliner found in their famous study of German helpers of Jews, the Germans who saved Jews from the Holocaust generally came from democratic and caring families—families that did not conform to what was then the German cultural norm.⁴¹

Families in domination systems typically are authoritarian and male-dominated, with stressful and punitive childrearing.⁴² Pediatricians and other child experts have begun to document that the “traditional” highly punitive and often violent childrearing typical of domination systems is damaging to people’s mental and even physical health.⁴³ But the damage done by this kind of childrearing goes further because children are taught that rankings of domination are normal and that they must submit to those in control. This stressful childrearing is a way that domination systems perpetuate themselves from generation to generation.

In studying the effects of stress, scientists have identified three basic responses: fight-or-flight; dissociation, sometimes called fight, flight, or freeze; and what neuropsychologist Shelley Taylor and her associates call “tend-and-befriend.”⁴⁴ Each of these responses activates different neurochemical patterns and behaviors.

Most studies of the effects of stress have focused on fight-or-flight or disassociation. But Taylor and her associates observed that women also frequently deal with stress by joining together to care for one another and for their own and others’ children.⁴⁵ So they began to study the neurochemistry of this previously ignored “feminine” response to stress. And what they found is that the tend-or-befriend response involves oxytocin, vasopressin, and other substances connected with bonding, caring, and caregiving.

Actually, oxytocin is not only present in women. It is present in both sexes and seems to provide the same anxiety-reducing benefits to both.⁴⁶ For instance, administering oxytocin to rats counteracts many of the typical physiological and behavioral effects of stress in both males and females, decreasing the amount of cortisol and reducing activity in the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, which is activated in the fight-or-flight response.⁴⁷ In addition, when scientists bred male mice that lack a gene for producing oxytocin, they found that this interfered with social memory and hence long-range social bonding. Unlike normal mice, these animals could not remember the smell of another mouse they had groomed or played with, even though their memory for other kinds of smells was intact.⁴⁸

Vasopressin is another substance that seems to promote caring and caregiving in males as well as females. Vasopressin has a molecular structure very similar to oxytocin, and both men and women release vasopressin in response to stress. But whereas oxytocin may be blocked by male hormones, the effect of vasopressin may be enhanced by them.⁴⁹ This is suggested by studies of the prairie vole, where males play an important parenting role and have high levels of vasopressin.⁵⁰ Since human males can also engage in caregiving, vasopressin may be particularly important for these behaviors in men, as well as in counteracting the negative effects of stress.⁵¹

However, persistent stress decreases the activity of these stress-reducing and bonding-inducing systems and therefore the ability to bond.⁵² As James Henry and Sheila Wang write, when stress is severe or chronic, these neurochemical processes become less active. Instead, “there is a long-lasting activation of the sympathetic system evidenced by sustained elevations in urinary norepinephrine and epinephrine. … The victims are vigilant, readily angered and display a dysphoria with a lack of interest in daily activities.”⁵³

In other words, persistent or traumatic stress decreases the amounts of oxytocin and vasopressin and the turnover of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which has a calming effect, and dopamine, which produces positive feelings.⁵⁴ Instead, chronic or intense stress brings into play hormones such as cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine that are often associated with fight-or-flight responses, including aggressive and other negative behaviors.⁵⁵

The fight-or-flight response to stress developed in the course of evolution as an adaptation to dangerous situations, such as when quick action to escape or defend against a predator was needed for survival. The adaptation of freezing so as not to attract attention when a predator approaches occurs in some species and possibly was a precursor to the dissociative response of withdrawing from painful experiences in humans, including through drugs.

Some of these responses can still have survival value today. We may not have to watch for a saber-toothed tiger jumping out from behind a rock, but we still have to respond fast if a truck jumps a highway divider and comes at us head-on.

The problem is that in rigid domination environments where stressful experiences are extreme and/or chronic, the neurochemical processes associated with fight-or-flight and dissociation become habitual. They can then become dangerous, both personally and socially.⁵⁶ For instance, the high cortisol levels in individuals suffering from extreme and/or chronic stress have been associated with impulsive violence, which poses a danger to both the individual and others.⁵⁷ Robert Sapolsky illustrates this phenomenon when he notes, “economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse.”⁵⁸ The neurochemical profiles associated with depression or the use of drugs or alcohol for psychological escape also aggravate rather than solve problems. And both these responses can be dangerous and ineffective for dealing with complex social challenges, such as conflict between groups and nations or environmental and economic problems.

There are of course genetic differences in individual predispositions to depression or aggression and violence, so none of this means that genes make no difference. However—and this is a critical point—whether these genetic predispositions are expressed, and how much this expression becomes habitual, heavily depend on how many positive or stressful life events an individual experiences.

This was dramatically demonstrated in a study of men with a low-activity version of a gene called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, which has been implicated in a higher propensity for violence. What the study showed is that this gene does not predict who will become violent: only those men who were mistreated as children, defined as having been rejected by their mothers, physically or sexually abused, or subjected to frequent changes in their primary caregivers, were more likely as adults to engage in antisocial behavior, including violent crime.⁵⁹ Men who carried the so-called violence gene but had loving, healthy childhoods did not grow up to become violent. Again, in this case we see that the biocultural interaction of genes and experience accounts for human behavior.

Studies of adopted children also show that even where there may be strong genetic predispositions, these are not necessarily expressed. In a study of Danish children of criminal and noncriminal parents who were adopted, Sarnoff Medick and Barry Hutchings found that although 24 percent of them exhibited criminal behavior when both the biological and the adopting parents were criminal, 20 percent did so when only the biological father was criminal, 15 percent did so when only the adopting parent was criminal, and 13 percent did so when neither set of parents was criminal.⁶⁰

Clearly, genes made a difference, but the fact that highest probability of criminality was when both biological and adopting parents were criminals illustrates the interaction between genes and environment. Even more important is that fully 80 percent of those with a criminal biological father did not exhibit criminal behaviors.

Nonetheless, adoption studies showing a correlation between genes and behavior are still frequently cited to support the position that what really matters are genes. This not only ignores studies showing the importance of experience in affecting the expression of genes but also ignores studies showing that the adoptive parents’ background is not the only, or even the most important, factor. Their behavior also matters.

A series of adoption studies by Remi Cadoret and colleagues from 1983 to 1995 point to the key role of modeling in shaping behavior. They found that antisocial behavior in children, adolescents, and adults is significantly higher in adoptees placed in home environments where the adopting parents display antisocial behavior or alcoholism. In addition, antisocial behaviors increase if the adopting parents have marital problems, legal problems, or suffer from depression or anxiety disorders.⁶¹

Socioeconomic factors also play a role. Adopted children whose biological parents are delinquent or criminal and who are placed in a home with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to develop problems with substance abuse than those placed in homes with a higher socioeconomic status. ⁶² In 1996, Michael Bohman reported similar findings from studies of adopted children whose biological parents had a history of petty crime. If adopted into well-functioning homes, 12 percent of these children committed petty crimes as adults. However, if adopted into environmentally risky homes, their rate of petty criminality in adulthood rose to 40 percent.⁶³

What we have been looking at comes down to an often ignored overriding fact: the human brain is enormously flexible. For a large-brained species like ours, there is a vast spectrum of behavioral capacities. We are genetically equipped for destructiveness and creativity, cruelty and caring, rote conformity and independence, and suppression of awareness as well as development of consciousness about ourselves, others, and nature.

As we have seen, our human brain continues to develop for a long time after we are born. In fact, the prefrontal cortex, which plays such a critical role in human behavior, does not fully develop until after puberty.⁶⁴ Electroencephalographic studies have even shown that the frontal lobes undergo a second growth spurt as the teens give way to young adulthood, between the ages of 19 and 21 or so. This helps explain why experiences during these years of college, work, or military life can powerfully affect both behavior and values.⁶⁵

Behavior and values can also change radically in adulthood. Even though the effects of emotional damage in childhood can usually not be completely erased, they can be reduced by therapeutic interventions. We are then able to reflect on our behavior and change it.

We can also modify destructive thought patterns and behaviors in supportive environments that show us that we have alternatives. Take the dramatic case of Larry Trapp, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska who became a speaker for religious and racial tolerance and respect for human rights. What radically changed him was experiencing a caring relationship. When Michael and Julie Weisser, a Jewish cantor and his wife, moved into Trapp’s neighborhood, they returned his hate phone calls with loving kindness and offers to help him get groceries, medicines, and other necessities he could not get himself because he was going blind. In response, Trapp not only renounced this racism and anti-Semitism but also strongly denounced these and eventually even converted to Judaism.⁶⁶

This great flexibility of the human brain means that positive experiences should also selectively strengthen neural circuits that represent positive emotions and caring social bonding in adults as well as children. A striking example is that when fathers spend time with their children, their levels of testosterone drop. This effect of behavior on neurochemical states has been shown repeatedly, including by a large study that found that those fathers who reported three hours or more of daily childcare had lower testosterone compared with fathers not involved in care.⁶⁷ Cross-culturally, another study found that fathers in a Tanzanian group where fathers are involved in parenting had low testosterone, while those from a neighboring culture without active fathering did not—a subject we will return to when we look at the lack of a clear relationship between testosterone and violence.⁶⁸

Evidence that experience affects the strength of brain synapses accounts in some measure for the capacity of adults to change behavior through learning. But there is much more: over the past decades scientists have found evidence of new neural development in our brains as adults. While it was long thought that only synaptic connections change in the course of life, now studies dramatically show neural development as well.

For instance, an experiment by neuroscientist Fred Gage and his colleagues found not only that new neurons are born in adult brains but also that the survival of these neurons is affected by environmental factors.⁶⁹ Brain cells are so flexible that they can even change functions. In blind people who have become Braille readers, for instance, the region of the brain that usually processes vision —and which is not being used in non-Braille-reading blind people—changes function. Norihiro Sadato and his colleagues discovered through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that the “visual” region was instead processing tactile sensations, receiving signals from the fingers rather than the eyes.⁷⁰

Many other studies show that behavior affects neurons. For example, a study by scientists at Wayne State University showed that behaviors can change the shape of neurons in ways that affect susceptibility to heart attacks. While a number of earlier studies already showed that exercise can remodel the brain by prompting the creation of new brain cells and inducing other changes, this study found that inactivity, too, can remodel the brain. Being sedentary changes the shape of certain neurons in ways that significantly affect not just the brain but also the heart—helping explain, in part, why a sedentary lifestyle is so bad for us.⁷¹

Based on such findings, neuroscientists now recognize that profound neural changes can, and do, take place throughout life. This is the crux of constructive learning theory developed by Quartz and Sejnowski, which proposes that brain development is not merely the pruning of neural connections but a progressive increase in representational complexity. This increase in complexity culminates in the cortex, which is key to constructive learning.⁷² That is, learning does not merely fill our heads with information. Learning affects nothing less than the construction of our brains.

Quartz and Sejnowski emphasize that the theory of constructive learning is not a return to the tabula rasa or blank slate theory of the brain. Rather, our genes give us a unique capacity to learn and change behavior as needed in different circumstances, including, as they note, through both cultural and technological innovations.⁷³ They observe that learning is a dynamic biocultural interaction between genes and experience in which culture, as well as our human capacity for creativity, must be taken into account.

In short, we humans are neurologically flexible not despite of our genes but because of them.⁷⁴ And this flexibility makes it possible for us to change not only our behaviors but also our cultures.

Just as we can develop new ways of thinking and change our emotional reactions, we can change the systems of beliefs and social institutions that compose cultures. The malleable nature of cultural beliefs and institutions is mirrored in the great variation that exists among human societies.

For instance, in Victorian England, the mark of a truly feminine woman was pallid weakness. Among some tribes in Kenya, by contrast, women were perceived as strong enough to carry enormous loads of wood and water over long distances. The Samurai of medieval Japan, like many societies today, equated masculinity with being a fierce warrior. But among the Hopi Indians of North America, a man was supposed to be peaceful and nonaggressive, an ideal regaining currency as we move more in a partnership direction and men embrace “feminine” parenting at the same time that women move into management and other so-called “masculine” roles.⁷⁵

Similarly, the games children play differ from culture to culture. Children of the cattle-herding Banyoro of the East Africa culture “played at going out to war, fighting battles and capturing prisoners and cattle and bringing the spoils to the king; they married and built their kraals, observing taboos as their elders did; they bought, sold, and exchanged cattle and tended them, healing them of various diseases.”⁷⁶ By contrast, Batek children of Malaysia, who come from a nomadic foraging society that neither herds cattle nor engages in war, play at hunting or moving camp. “They chopped down trees. They built fires and cooked food. They pretended to smoke porcupines out of holes. . . . When one child held his hands up like claws, growled, and ran after the others, everyone begin playing the game of tiger, with much spontaneous role switching between tigers and people—and who was chasing whom.”⁷⁷

Childcare, too, is greatly influenced by culture, varying enormously, from habitual violence and strict controls, such as the swaddling that immobilizes infants found in a number of cultures, which was still practiced in Prussia as late as the 19th century, to the free, gentle, and responsive methods recommended by child development studies as Western culture has moved more to the partnership side of the continuum. Yet traditions of domination in childcare are still very much with us. Hitting children to discipline them is widely accepted, even though such assaults on adults are considered crimes. The sexual mutilation of girls practiced in large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East is only now being recognized as a brutal human rights violation. Female infanticide and giving girls less food and healthcare than boys is still practiced in parts of Asia— a cruel discrimination often perpetrated by mothers on their own daughters in accord with cultural beliefs that sons are more valuable. Similarly, so-called honor murders of girls by their own families in many parts of the Middle East and South Asia are still generally culturally accepted and thus rarely punished.

It is difficult to fathom how parents could be so cruel to their own children. Yet these traditional practices—stemming from cultures where control by men over women, parents over children, and rulers over subjects was the unquestioned moral norm—continue to be transmitted from generation to generation. Even in cultures where these top-down rankings are no longer so rigid, parental love is often expressed in coercive and punitive ways because this mind-binding tangle of caring and coercion has been transmitted from generation to generation in domination systems.

Of course, children must also listen to parents in partnership-oriented cultures so that they do not run into traffic, play with poisonous snakes, or otherwise hurt themselves. But the object of these constraints in partnership cultures is not to teach children that the will of their parents is the law, as it is in strict domination cultures where children must be reared in ways that ensure they will accept rigid top-down social and economic controls.

These more partnership-oriented norms were thought up by people who did not operate under rigid rankings of domination or else who saw the possibilities of other childrearing methods even when rigid control was still promoted on traditional or religious grounds. This was possible because of the human capacity to be proactive rather than merely reactive: to learn, to create, and to choose.

This ability to choose also applies to changing our cultures. For instance, the Waorani of Ecuador reduced a very high rate of killings by more than 90 percent in just a few years by adopting new, less violent ways of dealing with conflict. As anthropologists Clay and Carole Robarchek observed, “the killing stopped because the Waorani themselves made a conscious decision to end it.”⁷⁸ Anthropologist Kirk Endicott provides another case from the Chatham Islands in the Pacific involving the Moriori people.⁷⁹ They shifted from cycles of blood feuding to dealing with their grievances in nonlethal ways, for instance, fighting with sticks no thicker than a thumb and stopping immediately at the first sight of blood. These new rules prevented bloodshed and halted interpersonal conflicts before they could escalate to the group level. In rural Mexico, a village plagued by violence redistributed land and implemented a total ban on alcohol consumption and the carrying of weapons, with a resulting marked reduction in violence.⁸⁰ The members of all these cultures chose to move from the violence inherent in domination systems, in which dominating or being dominated is the only perceived choice, to less violent, more partnership-oriented cultural norms.

But, unfortunately, traditions of domination and violence are still deeply entrenched in many cultures worldwide. Indeed, for much of history, human choices have been severely limited by cultural constraints. Kings and nobles were ranked over craftspeople and merchants, feudal lords were ranked over peasants, men were ranked over women. Not only were these rankings maintained through force or its threat, but people were also taught that no one should try to change his or her station because an individual’s place in society was considered part of a fixed, divinely ordained order that must never be questioned. The few who challenged this order faced torture and often death.

Still today, for many people, inequitable economic arrangements, despotic regimes, authoritarian families, rigid male dominance, violence, hunger, disease, malnutrition, poverty, lack of education, and the persistence of religious and secular teachings about the inevitability of all this prevent meaningful choices. But over the last centuries, a growing fraction of humanity has realized that the circumstances of our lives are not inevitable, that there are alternatives, and that we can make choices.

The growing consciousness that we have choices has been largely about individual choices. This has been very important. But perhaps even more important is that progressive social and political movements over the last 300 years have also been animated by the consciousness that we have cultural choices—which directly affect our individual choices, with the two obviously intertwined.

The rest of this book looks at our cultural choices from the integrated perspective of the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. It exposes harmful domination cultural patterns that continue to influence our beliefs, behaviors, and brains, even threatening our survival. It describes partnership cultural alternatives. And it proposes key interventions that can help us build a more secure, just, equitable, and peaceful world for individuals, families, communities, and all humanity.

Not long ago, many people thought communism would cure the world’s ills. But the communist revolutions in Russia and China brought further violence and repression. Today, many people think capitalism and democratic elections are the answer. They forget that Adolf Hitler was elected in Germany, Donald Trump was elected in the United States, Egyptians elected an authoritarian fundamentalist regime after the Arab Spring, and capitalism brought neither peace nor equity. Others believe that returning to prescientific Western times or replacing Western secularism, science, and technology with Eastern religions will cure our world’s ills. They ignore that the religious Middle Ages were brutal and repressive, that Eastern religions have helped perpetuate inequality and oppression, and that today’s fundamentalist religious cultures, both Eastern and Western, are creating, rather than solving, some of our planet’s most serious problems.

If capitalist, communist, rightist, leftist, religious, secular, Eastern, and Western cultures all had patterns of violence and inequity, it should not surprise us that many people think the trouble must lie in human nature. But this view stems from the fragmented perspective of old social categories, which only describe particular aspects of cultures. A systems approach opens up wider vistas, revealing relational dynamics: interactive patterns or connections that are otherwise invisible.

Just as we need a systemic framework that describes the interaction of biology and culture in affecting behavior, we need a systemic framework that describes the mutually supporting interaction of the major components of cultures— including what is considered normal or abnormal in our foundational parent-child and gender relations.

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. We look at the core components of each system, how these interact, and how growing up in societies that orient to one or the other differentially 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.

Domination systems have four mutually supporting core components.¹

First, rigid top-down rankings, hierarchies of domination, are maintained through physical, psychological, and economic control in familial, religious, political, economic, and other social institutions.

The second component of domination systems is the ranking of one form of humanity over the other. Theoretically, this could be the female half over the male half, but historically it has been the ranking of males over females, and with this, the idealization of traits that are in domination systems equated with masculinity, such as “manly” conquest and “heroic” violence.

The cultural acceptance of abuse and violence, from child-and-wife-beating to slavery and warfare, constitutes the third component of domination systems. Violence can be direct, as in flogging, torture, and genocide, as well as structural, as noted by Johan Galtung, playing out as exploitation, repression, injustice, and social inequities enshrined within the society’s norms, values, practices, and institutions.² Abuse and violence are built into domination systems to maintain rankings of domination.

The fourth core component consists of beliefs that rankings of domination are inevitable, even moral. In cultures and subcultures that orient closely to the domination system, we find teachings and stories telling that it is honorable to kill and enslave members of other societies, stone women to death or maim them with acid, stand by while supposedly “inferior” people are put in ovens and gassed, or beat children to impose adult control through physical force.

By stark contrast, the four interconnected core components of partnership systems support equity, caring, and well-being not only for some individuals but also for all members of the society.³

The first component is a democratic and egalitarian structure manifested in social practices, values, and institutions. This democratic and egalitarian focus provides the template for all social institutions, from the family to the society or state.

The second component is equal partnership between women and men. With this equality comes the high valuing, in both women and men, of qualities and behaviors such as nonviolence and caregiving that are denigrated as “feminine” in domination systems.

The third core component of partnership systems is the cultural rejection of abuse and violence. This does not mean that partnership systems are totally free of violence, but rather that abuse and violence are not systemically built into a society’s values, traditions, and social institutions.

The fourth component consists of beliefs about human nature that support empathic and mutually respectful relations. Although cruelty and violence are recognized as human possibilities, they are not considered inevitable, let alone moral. Instead, typical human relations are seen as based on precepts of equality, mutual respect, compassion, caring, and cooperation geared toward the social good.

We want to again emphasize that the partnership-domination distinction transcends conventional categories such as ancient-modern, religious-secular, Eastern-Western, or preindustrial-industrial-postindustrial. For example, as we will see in later chapters, societies that orient closely to the domination end of the continuum can be Western, such as secular Nazi Germany, or Eastern, such as religious Iran and the so-called Islamic Caliphate of ISIS. Examples of partnership systems, as we will also see, include cultures from various quarters of the world, indigenous societies as well as technologically advanced nations.

We also want to quickly note two major historical shifts in the domination-partnership continuum. As we will detail in later chapters, on the grand scale that stretches back across the Pleistocene since the origin of genus Homo, archeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that a durable legacy of cultural orientation to partnership lasted for at least two million years.⁴ Then, a domination social organization began to enter the social mainstream approximately 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, punctuated by intermittent attempts to move again toward partnership.⁵ The second shift is much more recent and is ongoing: over the last several centuries, we have seen strong movement toward the partnership side of the continuum.

One progressive social movement after another has challenged entrenched traditions of domination—from the “divinely ordained” right of kings to rule to the “divinely ordained” right of men to rule over the women and children in their families and of some races or religions to dominate others. Recent history has seen the formal abolition of slavery and the outlawing of torture.⁶ The Geneva Conventions have sought to reduce atrocities of war.⁷ We have seen the birth of human rights and important strides for women’s rights.⁸ Colonialism has dwindled, and nonviolent regime changes now outnumber violent revolutions by a ratio of two-to-one.⁹

However, these challenges to top-down control have focused primarily on domination in politics and economics. The majority of progressive social movements have paid scant attention to the relations that most profoundly affect brain development: parent-child and gender relations. As a result, the domination pyramid has continued to rebuild itself on the same foundations—whether through totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism, or other domination isms.

This new understanding of what has been missing for sustainable change offers grounded hope for our future. We see that the movement toward a more partnership-oriented world has not failed—rather, it is incomplete.

No society orients completely toward either the domination or partnership configuration. But the degree to which a society orients to either end of the partnership-domination continuum profoundly affects which beliefs, institutions, and practices are culturally reinforced.

To illustrate, during the European Middle Ages the idea of human rights would have been beyond the pale. This does not mean there were no partnership elements in medieval culture. There was a period when the veneration of Mary as the compassionate mother of God became prominent, elevating the stereotypically “feminine” in a culture that otherwise held women in such contempt that theologians actually debated whether women, like men, have souls. For a while, communities inspired by St. Francis and St. Claire tried to practice partnership with both humans and other species, and there were even the self-supporting, self-governing, service-oriented Beguine communities, who believed women were directly empowered by God.¹⁰ But with its Inquisition, Crusades, chronic wars, witch-burnings, and strict male control of women and children, the European Middle Ages leaned closely to the authoritarian, male-dominated, violent domination system.

These were extremely stressful times. In addition to regular exhibitions of public torture for any questioning of the divinely ordained top-down social order or for doubting that the Church taught the word of God, constant battles between nobles whose favorite sport it seemed was sacking each other’s castles and decimating the surrounding farmlands, religious dogmas that condoned the abuse of women and children, and the chronic fear and suffering that all this engendered, there was also the stress and pain of poverty for the vast majority of people.

The medieval Church taught that women must obey their husbands just as common men must obey nobles, kings, popes, and bishops. Any attempt to throw off such “divinely ordained” authority was a sin against the authority of the supreme male ruler: God. A husband’s use of violence against a wife who disobeyed orders or was suspected of sexual independence was considered natural and right.¹¹

Parenting was, as it still is today in domination-oriented cultures and subcultures, based on harsh punishments for disobedience, which teach children to equate respect with fear, shame, and blame. As reams of psychological writings document, this harsh kind of upbringing is extremely stressful. But fear of pain is a basic motivator in domination systems.¹²

By contrast, partnership parenting is based more on praise, caring touch, modeling mutual respect, and helping children learn to care for themselves and others.¹³ This is not laissez-faire parenting where anything goes. There are expectations, rules, and consequences for destructive behavior, whether to others or oneself. But parenting is authoritative rather than authoritarian and responsive rather than repressive. Family relations, including those between parents, are far less stressful and model a morality of caring rather than coercion.¹⁴

In these and a myriad other ways, partnership- and domination-oriented societies are fundamentally different. However, before going further, we want to clear up some possible misperceptions about these differences.

First, what distinguishes partnership systems from domination systems is not cooperation per se, but the ends to which it is applied. Cooperation in partnership systems is not aimed at having harmful effects on anyone; it is a prosocial endeavor. By contrast, while people also cooperate in domination systems, much of the time toward positive ends, all too often cooperation is co-opted to serve the needs of a few, exploit the many, and inflict harm. Terrorists work together to maim and kill; businesses collaborate to build monopolies that fix prices and crush competitors; secret police cooperate to execute citizens; invading armies cooperate to annihilate and destroy. Thus, a critical difference in partnership cooperation and domination cooperation is the purpose to which the teamwork is applied. In partnership systems the outcome tends to promote human well-being and can be seen as reciprocally positive or generally prosocial, whereas in domination systems cooperation can also be harnessed to exploit, subjugate, and abuse—or in other words, to dominate—other human beings.

Second, the difference between these two systems is not that the domination system is hierarchical and the partnership system is hierarchy-free. Some partnership-oriented systems do not have completely flat structures: parents are still responsible for children, teachers for students, and managers for workers, and there may be leaders and followers in partnership systems.¹⁵ But the ideal norm for parents, teachers, managers, and leaders, as in some Western partnership structures, is to empower rather than disempower through what Riane calls hierarchies of actualization.¹⁶ By contrast, hierarchies of domination are imposed and maintained by fear and force. They are held in place by the power that is idealized, even sanctified, in cultures that orient primarily to the domination system: the power to control others, inflict pain, destroy, and kill.¹⁷ Of course, we are talking about conceptual differences; in real life there will necessarily be shades of gray, which is why we speak in terms of a partnership-domination continuum.

Third, the difference between domination and partnership systems is not that there is competition in the former but not in the latter, but rather that domination systems promote cut-throat, “dog-eat-dog” competition, whereas competition in partnership systems tends to be less overt and may be directed more to excellence: the achievements of others are a spur to greater accomplishments.¹⁸ Many partnership-oriented societies across the ethnographic spectrum actively socialize children to avoid overt competition as socially undesirable, as among the Paliyan of India, the Semai and the Batek of Malaysia, and the Hopi of North America. Moreover, the competition that does exist in such cultures often takes very formalized and limited routes of expression, for instance, through contests or rituals.¹⁹

In domination systems, whether Western or non-Western, competition can rage out of control as individuals seek to satisfy their affect hunger by besting others rather than forming bonds with them. So it is not that partnership systems lack all competition or that domination systems are only competitive, but as the flip side of cooperation, competition in domination-oriented societies is more common, more severe, and often harmful.

Fourth, there is conflict in both systems because there will always be disagreements among people. But in partnership systems, conflict can be used to facilitate creative solutions through mediation and other techniques for finding nonviolent ways of resolving conflicts. In domination systems, conflict either is suppressed by those in power or explodes into violence—which is one of the reasons domination systems are so dangerous in this time of nuclear and biological weaponry.

Finally, biological differences between males and females are recognized in both systems. But in domination-oriented cultures, boys are socialized to be “less emotional”—which actually means they are taught that anger and contempt are permissible “masculine” emotions, but that they must repress feelings considered feminine such as caring and empathy, lest they be despised as sissies or weak sisters. Women, too, are taught to repress part of their human repertoire. They are taught that anger and other supposedly masculine emotions are reserved for those who dominate, in other words, for men.

With movement toward the partnership side of the continuum, rigid gender stereotypes have begun to melt away—as shown by the many men today adopting “feminine” roles, such as feeding, diapering, and tending to their children’s needs, and the many women entering professions once considered strictly male preserves. Exemplifying this trend, former Prime Minister of Finland, Paavo Lipponen, took paternity leave upon the birth of his daughter in 1998, and in so doing sent a subtle message to Finnish men across all professions that no job is so important that it should take precedence over family life and the joys and duties of fatherhood. Somehow the government continued to function in the Prime Minister’s absence.

So in more partnership-oriented cultures such as Finland, gender roles are flexible. By contrast, in domination systems they are rigid, with the devaluation of women and the “feminine.”

Differences between partnership and domination systems play out in the neurochemistry of our brains. As we saw earlier, the human brain is remarkably flexible—so much so that it can be called a work in progress. This great brain flexibility has enormous benefits. It enables us to learn, be innovative, and survive in many kinds of environments, both natural and human-made. But as we already glimpsed, this brain plasticity has drawbacks as well as benefits.

Since our brain’s biological design gives it an exceptional capacity to adapt to different environments, humans are especially open to environmental influences. So if people grow up in domination cultures or subcultures, they tend to develop a certain kind of brain neurochemistry in response to these highly stressful environments.

As detailed in Chapter 4, neuroscience shows that traumatic or chronic stress leads to high levels of the hormone cortisol and the neurotransmitter norepinephrine—chemicals associated with problems of impulse regulation and propensity to violence. Conversely, free circulation of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, as well as the neuropeptide hormones oxytocin and vasopressin and other substances involved in bonding and empathy, is associated with the less violent, more caring behaviors characteristic of the partnership system.²⁰

How people respond to stress is modulated through an interaction of genetic factors, environmental conditions over the course of development, and behavioral choices, so there are individual variations in the resulting patterns of brain neurochemistry. But the point is that there are central tendencies in different social environments.

This is why, again and again, people growing up with the stress of relations of domination and submission tend to develop neural and biochemical patterns that trigger fight, flight, or freeze responses. Rather than facing and dealing with a situation effectively, such individuals may blank out, automatically want to flee, or go into a physical or psychological attack mode. Some people who have experienced horrendous traumas do not seem to exhibit such responses. However, when these patterns develop, they constrict an individual’s capacity for independent thought and action and lead to more abuse and suffering—which in turn maintain family, economic, social, and political institutions that chronically inhibit the expression of the human capacity for consciousness and caring.²¹

For instance, domination cultures create self-perpetuating patterns of economic scarcity due to misdistribution of resources to those on top, lack of funding for healthcare and education, diversion of resources into weaponry, and destruction of resources through war and other forms of violence.²² These features of domination systems create stress, and with this, a general sense of anxiety, insecurity, and fear, which affects brain function.

Domination systems also fail to invest in the work of caregiving, which is still primarily performed by women, creating even further stress. This fact, in and of itself, perpetuates cycles of poverty, as evidenced by global statistics showing that the majority of the world’s poor are female and that a major reason for this is that, in domination systems, women are supposed to do this caregiving work either for very low wages in the market economy or for free within households, with no pensions or social security benefits.²³ This pattern of gender inequality can occur even in wealthy nations such as the United States, where US Census Bureau statistics show that women older than 65 years are almost twice as likely to live in poverty as men of the same age.²⁴

Children also suffer from such gender disparities. In the many regions of our world where cultures or subcultures are still more male-dominated, mothers, compared with fathers, tend to invest a much larger proportion of their more limited resources in feeding, clothing, and educating children.²⁵

These are some of the economic reasons that domination-oriented cultures are so stressful. Of course, for those at the bottom of domination hierarchies, there is even further stress, starting in childhood. Children living in extreme poverty are often hungry, even in rich nations. Poor children often live in unsafe, vermin-infected housing or are homeless and face many dangers on the streets. Children living in less extreme poverty also tend to live in dangerous neighborhoods, with poor schools and parents stressed by economic hardships.²⁶

Such stressors and hardship affect the brain. As we saw in Chapter 3, children raised in extremely deprived environments, such as Romanian orphanages, failed to develop normal neuronal connectivity, were cognitively impaired, and lacked normal motor control and language development.²⁷ Negative experiences in childhood, such as physical and verbal abuse, witnessing violence in the home, sexual abuse, and severe corporal punishment, are linked to health problems and early death.²⁸ The earlier the exposure to child maltreatment, the greater the likelihood of depression and anxiety in adulthood.²⁹ Stress and maltreatment affect brain development. Psychologist Darcia Narvaez reports that, among other problems, “infant maltreatment (abuse, neglect, and trauma) leads to massive physiological deficits: an overactive stress response, compromised immunity, a misdeveloped endocrine system, underdeveloped neurotransmitters (in terms of numbers and function), mistuned emotions and emotion systems, and poor integration of emotions with prefrontal controls.”³⁰

As K. Luan Phan, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, notes, the stress-burden of growing up poor may help account for the relationship between poverty as a child and emotional and cognitive problems in adults. Phan and his colleagues found that children who had lower family incomes at age nine exhibited, as adults, greater activity in the amygdala, an area in the brain known for its role in emotions, including fear. They also showed less activity in areas of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain related to regulating negative emotion.³¹

Poverty is particularly stressful for many parents because in domination systems caregiving is not socially supported. To this day, despite rhetoric about the importance of mothering, in most world regions caregiving is not given government-supported training or financial assistance.³² All this adds to children’s stress.

A study conducted in Brazil suggests that living in the proximity of homicides during pregnancy stresses expectant mothers and accounts for lower birthweights of their children compared with mothers unstressed by the proximate occurrence of homicides.³³ In addition, studies show that mothers who are stressed, whether from their own early experiences or from unsafe relations with a husband or live-in male, are more likely to be abusive and/or neglectful of their children.³⁴ Where domination norms prevail, mothers also get little help from males because caregiving is not considered appropriate for “real men,” further contributing to maternal stress.³⁵

As noted earlier, neuroscientists have found a strong relationship between nurturing and the size of children’s hippocampus, a brain region important to learning, memory, and response to stress. Brain scans show that children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus and were less stressed—a finding congruent with the studies we looked at showing that rat pups whose caregivers were more nurturing by frequently licking them were also less prone to stress.³⁶ A parallel in humans has been reported by Ruth Feldman and her colleagues for children growing up in a war zone; the youngsters had an increased risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but maternal sensitive support reduced the chance of war-exposed children developing PTSD-related symptoms.³⁷

Furthermore, where domination norms prevail, parents tend to teach children to conform to top-down control through stressful childrearing that heavily relies on fear or force. So, as we will later examine in more detail, empathic love is distorted and even suppressed, which directly affects how the brain develops.

The level of stress in schools is also different depending on the degree to which a culture or subculture orients to the domination or partnership side of the continuum. For example, not so long ago in the West, physical punishment was routine in schools, as is still the case today in many world regions. Fear was a major motivator routinely used by teachers, causing children enormous stress. Sadly, this is still the practice in many regions, as Riane found when researching “traditional” practices that violate the human rights of children.³⁸

Working conditions also tend to be stressful in cultures and subcultures orienting closely to the domination system. Workplaces are frequently unsanitary and unsafe, as in the sweatshops still commonplace in some world regions, exemplified in news stories about the collapse of buildings in Pakistan and Bangladesh causing the death of thousands of workers.³⁹

Even when conditions are better, hierarchies of domination in themselves generate stress. This was first shown by studies in the 1970s by the British physician Sir Michael Marmot and his colleagues.⁴⁰ Named the Whitehall studies for the street where much of the British civil service is housed, they showed that physical health, mental health, and even life spans correlated significantly with an individual’s position in the civil service hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy were healthier and lived longer than those further down.

These civil servants were not poor. Yet these relatively well-off people suffered disproportionately from stress-related problems—problems that the Whitehall study found derived from the domination hierarchy itself. Like many other bureaucracies, whether governmental or corporate, the structure of the British civil service was one of top-down commands. There was little if any discretion for variance for those on the lower rungs, as evidenced by the familiar bureaucratic refrain, “I wish I could help, but these are the rules.” In such situations, violating rules is grounds for dismissal. So the further down people are in these hierarchies of domination, whether in government agencies or businesses, the more they must suppress initiative, creativity, caring, and even consciousness—otherwise, it would be too painful to enforce rules that are often very uncaring.

This suppression also is stressful. So is the fear that maintains hierarchies of domination—whether in families, workplaces, or society at large. And, as the Whitehall studies show, along with its correlates in brain neurochemistry, this stress can lead to heart attacks, diabetes, depression, alcoholism, respiratory illness, or cancer.

By contrast, workers in companies where they have some autonomy and power to make decisions report less stress and more job satisfaction.⁴¹ Overall, these companies have a more caring ethos, which manifests itself in supportive employee benefits—from good healthcare plans and parental leave to profit-sharing and time off to engage in community service. These improvements in quality of life for workers, their families, and other members of the community contribute to good health and longevity—and more highly motivated workers.⁴²

The neurochemical patterns supported by these settings facilitate greater flexibility, creativity, ability to work in teams, and other capacities that make for greater productivity. This offers advantages for both employees and employers, particularly in the postindustrial service-knowledge workplace—a subject Riane addresses in detail in The Real Wealth of Nations.

The large gap between haves and have-nots that characterizes domination systems is itself highly stressful. While one might think this gap only adversely affects the people on the bottom economic rungs, studies show that it adversely affects those on top as well. Until recently, researchers on inequality have focused on the plight of the poor and the shrinking middle class, documenting how inequality hurts their mental and physical health. But new studies show that status and wealth gaps make everyone—including the rich and powerful—more anxious and insecure.

Richard Wilkinson, a British epidemiologist, spent years researching these effects, which he documents in his book, coauthored with Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone. Wilkinson and Pickett write: “There are powerful psycho-social effects of inequality. As status differences grow, we worry more about status insecurity, we get widespread anxiety about self-esteem, and that brings rising rates of mental illness and depression.”⁴³

Still another adverse effect of hierarchies of domination seems to be that the people on top tend to be psychologically disconnected from those around them— not only from those below them, but from others like them. For instance, a 2010 study published in Psychological Science found that people of higher socioeconomic status were worse at reading other peoples’ emotions, were more self-absorbed, and exhibited less empathy for others.⁴⁴ In this study, psychologists Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote, and Dacher Keltner found that rich college students not only reported feeling less compassion than nonrich students when they watched a video about children suffering from cancer, but also that these feelings were reflected in their heart rates. The heart rate of students who were not rich slowed down as they watched the video—a physiological sign of compassion—whereas on average the rich students’ hearts did not.⁴⁵

The foregoing research shows that the effects of economic hierarchies of domination are not just bad news for people who encounter indifference and apathy from the rich. They are bad news for everyone—including the rich themselves. As the Beatles famously sang, “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

Empathy and caring are strongly linked to long-term happiness. Psychologist Paul Piff explains that, “Being compassionate, having empathic accuracy, being trusting and cooperative—these are keys to social connection and, in turn, happiness.”⁴⁶ So the stories of unhappy rich people have a basis in psychological dynamics, in their tendency found by research to exhibit less empathy for others, not only for those who are poorer, but also for everyone. Charles Dickens drove home this point in his classic, A Christmas Carol, about the personal transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge from a miserably unhappy miser to a joyful benefactor.

That being on the top of domination hierarchies can lead to disconnection from others also helps explain why, once a certain level of economic security is reached, more money and status do not translate into more happiness—and can actually lead to less. However, as researchers such as Piff note, the problem is not wealth but inequality.⁴⁷

International surveys further reflect the link between social equality and satisfaction with life: among the happiest nations are those with the least inequality, such as Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark.⁴⁸ Not surprisingly, these nations orient more closely to the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum.

While even these more partnership-oriented nations have statistical differences in health between higher and lower socioeconomic levels, their populations’ average life span is 80 years. One could argue that there may be genetic factors involved. But this is not the case. The fact is that in the mid-19th century, both adult and child death rates in nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland were extremely high—which changed as these nations moved more to the partnership side of the continuum. These nations’ long life spans are all the more remarkable because of their location in cold northern areas where winter days have long hours of darkness, known to lead to depression, health problems, and suicide.

The story of Finland is particularly striking. This country that straddles the Arctic Circle suffered from famines and had huge infant and adult mortality rates in the 19th century. As late as the 1940s, only 10 percent of Finns had a secondary education. But because of a determined nationwide effort that began with universal education for girls and boys and a strong women’s movement, Finland gradually instituted high-quality healthcare, universal childbirth preparation for mothers and fathers, and public support for families with children in the form of child daycare and home help services. Finland has the sixth lowest infant mortality rate in the world—by comparison, the United States ranks 55th —and a premier healthcare system available to all citizens.⁴⁹ Finland makes the top ranks of United Nations measures of quality of life, including longevity, as well as the World Economic Forum’s measures of global competitiveness.⁵⁰ In fact, in 2006, Finland was in first place of the World Competitiveness index, ahead of the much wealthier United States.⁵¹

As an anthropologist from the United States, Doug experienced a series of minor culture shocks when he lived in partnership-oriented Finland. Upon his arrival in 1995, Doug asked a Finnish immigration official about how and where he should purchase health insurance. At first, she did not even understand this US-type question. “Of course all your medical care is provided to you. It would be inhumane not to do so.” Some years later, Doug needed emergency surgery and spent four days in the hospital. Doug’s hospital bill totaled about $150 US dollars. When it comes to Finnish jail cells, again the idea is to be humane; they are warm and clean and have televisions and sometimes windows, although in this case Doug did not have the opportunity to try one out personally.

The Finns have a very strong sense of equality, as reflected institutionally in universal healthcare coverage. Finnish sociologist Risto Heiskala illustrates equality as a Finnish value when he writes, “all persons are seen to be equal.”⁵²

Finland has a government bureau of gender equality. When Doug used the phrase “the battle of the sexes,” Finns said they did not understand what he meant. Doug was repeatedly told that the sexes respect each other. A sociologist friend said that the ideal was for a wife and husband, or girlfriend and boyfriend, to be “best friends.” There are conflicts within relationships, of course, but there also is a feeling of partnership and mutual respect in many relationships. The members of both sexes are independent, and perhaps the women even more so than the men. There is a cultural stereotype of the “strong Finnish woman” who is self-reliant and independent, will stand up for her rights, but is not cruel or uncaring. As in any culture, most—but not all—people fulfill the expected gender roles and cultural ideals.

Finland was the first country in Europe, and the second in the world, to pass universal suffrage laws back in 1906. Women gained not only the right to vote but also the right to run for political office. Finnish women are active in Parliament and regularly serve as cabinet Ministers, and Tarja Halonen, Finland’s first woman President, was elected for two six-year terms with a substantial number of men voting for her.

Doug was told that decades of Finnish women working with their male counterparts in Parliament has assured that resources were spent for education, eldercare, paid maternity and paternity leaves, daycare facilities, free school lunches for all school children in the country (here we see the ethos of equality put into practice once again), innovation in science and medicine, and the arts and culture—in other words, in ways that provide care, assistance, security, services, and happiness for the people. When Finns see a social problem, they try to fix it, often successfully. A partnership focus on human needs, the core value of equality, parity between the sexes, and prevention of abuse and violence are characteristics of Finnish society.

All this shows—on the kind of scale that should make even the most skeptical take notice—that orientation to the partnership system leads to more happiness and a better life for all. The countries with the highest happiness ratings, including Finland, have low levels of poverty and crime. They rate better than richer nations with greater inequality, such as the United States, in student achievement test scores. In these countries, there is greater gender equality, and with this, a higher valuing of stereotypically feminine values and activities such as nonviolence and caregiving by both women and men—leading to more caring policies that make life better for families and children. Not only these nations’ international happiness ratings but also their compassion ratings are higher—as illustrated by the fact that they invest a larger percentage of their GDP in altruistic aid to people in the developing world.

Of course, these nations are not flawless utopias. We are simply looking at empirical evidence showing that our human capacities for empathy, compassion, and caring are more likely to be expressed in more partnership-oriented environments—and, as the studies we just considered show, that this positively correlates with higher levels of happiness. These examples also show that it is possible to create humane social practices and institutions that adequately and equitably address the needs of the citizens of a country—and that such countries exist, so we are not just talking about pie-in-the-sky fantasies. By adopting a partnership orientation, social change that shifts society away from domination hierarchies, violence, and structural violence toward greater social and gender equality, the satisfaction of needs, and the expression of human potential is possible.

Having lived in Finland and experienced a country that provides caring services to its citizens, Doug would sometimes talk, while visiting the United States, with people about the inexpensive access to high-quality healthcare available to all citizens of Finland. He found that a rote response from US citizens was, “but they have high taxes.” Actually, income tax in Finland is on a graduated scale just like in the United States, and not much higher, with one difference being that extremely wealthy Finns are heavily taxed, while the average Finn is not. This taxation system again promotes equality.

The big difference between Finland and the United States is how the income tax is spent. In Finland, services for citizens are funded—universal healthcare, education, parks and recreation, childcare, assistance to the elderly, viable public transportation, and so forth—with only about three percent of the budget going to the Finnish Defense Forces. In the United States, nearly half of the income tax revenue each year—close to 50 percent—is spent on defense contractors, weapons development, the armed forces, and other military uses—or feeding the goliath that President Eisenhower dubbed “the military industrial complex.” Were the United States to spend only 10 percent of each tax dollar on military pursuits instead of nearly 50 percent, this would almost double the financial resources available for everything else that currently goes underfunded.

Nordic nations provide support for the expression of our human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity, not because they are small and relatively homogeneous (other such nations still orient closely to the domination side of the continuum), but because they chose to shift toward the partnership side of the social continuum.

This shift in large part accounts for their higher health and longevity rates not only because of their good healthcare system but also because in societies on the partnership side of the continuum, there is far less stress, starting in early childhood. As we have seen, childrearing in domination systems relies heavily on fear, abuse, and violence. A growing number of studies show that abusive childhood experiences lie behind many public health problems.

In the United States, the relationship between negative childhood experiences and severe health problems in adulthood has been extensively documented through the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. Conducted by pediatricians and experts on childhood development and public health, the ACE research is ongoing, but it has already yielded a consensus that health and longevity are directly affected by what children experience and observe. It also has found that the frequency of adverse childhood experiences is much greater than previously thought.⁵³

The ACE findings are based on long-term, in-depth analyses of more than 17,000 adults in the United States to date. Various categories of adverse childhood experiences were studied, including psychological, physical, or sexual abuse; violence against mother; and living with household members who were substance abusers, mentally ill or suicidal, or at some point imprisoned. The number of categories of these adverse childhood experiences was then compared to measures of adult risk behavior, health status, and disease, revealing how these experiences led to many illnesses as well as high mortality in adult life, with a graded relationship between the number of categories of childhood exposure and each of the adult health risk behaviors and diseases that were studied. Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared with those who had experienced none, had four to 12 times greater risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt; two to four times greater chances of smoking, poor self-rated health, and sexually transmitted disease; and higher rates of physical inactivity and severe obesity.⁵⁴

Dr. Vincent Felitti concludes:

Adverse childhood experiences are surprisingly common even in the earliest years, are generally unrecognized, can be identified during childhood by history from children and caretakers, and can start to manifest their damage as ill health and somatization during childhood itself. As was demonstrated in the ACE Study, what happens in childhood—like a child’s footprints in wet cement—commonly lasts throughout life. Time does not heal; time conceals. Many of our most intractable public health problems are the result of compensatory behaviors like smoking, overeating, and alcohol and drug use, which provide immediate partial relief from the emotional problems caused by traumatic childhood experiences. Those experiences are generally unrecognized and become lost in time, where they are protected by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboos against exploring certain areas of human experience.⁵⁵

These findings indicate that the childhood experiences characteristic of our domination heritage not only lead to behaviors that cause illness and premature death but also lead to traumas and chronic unhappiness that people suffer from all their lives.⁵⁶ And the extent of child maltreatment worldwide, including severe forms of violence, is staggering, as illustrated in Box 5.1. It is also staggering how little attention is given to this pandemic of violence against children, or its social and economic costs, and the horrendous suffering and unhappiness it causes to those who survive it.

By contrast, in partnership-oriented cultures, greater happiness prevails. This is illustrated by the Nordic nations. There are many reasons for these nations’ high happiness ratings. One factor, as we have already glimpsed, is a partnership orientation that promotes helpfulness, well-being, and care.

Indeed, recent studies show that, contrary to popular belief, people are happier when they help others rather than when they just look out for themselves. For example, psychologists Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn showed that spending money on others makes a person happier than spending on one’s self.⁵⁷ And research headed by George Moll of the National Institutes of Health has demonstrated that when altruistic choices prevail over selfish material interests, brain regions associated with psychological rewards of pleasure are activated.⁵⁸

When in earlier chapters we looked at studies of the brains of the more partnership-oriented bonobos and the dramatic changes in brain neurochemistry of baboons when their culture shifted away from rigid rankings of domination, we saw how partnership and domination-oriented cultural environments support very different neurochemical profiles in other primates, not only humans. In addition, we saw that family and socioeconomic environments characteristic of the domination system perpetuate the highly stress-and-fear-driven neurochemistry that helps perpetuate this system.

It bears repeating that partnership-oriented cultures are not stress-free. But these cultures do not cause the unnecessary stress and suffering that so devastatingly afflict people in domination environments.

Thankfully, our built-in human yearning for caring connections protects us to some degree from the effects of these environments. Even in the strictest domination cultural environments, some people will relate in partnership ways. But to the extent that a significant part of the population is affected by life experiences characteristic of domination cultures or subcultures, negative patterns will be perpetuated from generation to generation.

This does not mean that experience is the only thing that counts. Genes matter. For instance, animal experiments and observations of humans show that genetic factors can mitigate the neurochemical effects of stress. Some people can develop a brain neurochemistry not so prone to fight, flight, or freeze responses even in the most brutal environments. So even in harsh environments, some people will be compassionate and caring, which probably reflects an evolved human propensity to be humane.⁵⁹

Indeed, it is a testimony to the powerful human need and capacity for caring that even in rigid domination systems, there are always people who do not treat children in abusive and violent ways, and that even among children who are so treated, there are those who grow up to reject cruelty and injustice. However, based on what we are learning from neuroscience, we can predict that many people living in domination environments will develop habitual neurochemical patterns of fight, flight, or freeze to adapt to the stress inherent in rigid rankings backed up by fear and force.

We can also predict that most people who become accustomed to human rights violations in their day-to-day relations, including abuse in their families, are unlikely to champion human rights more generally. Nor, we predict, are they likely to actively promote a “culture of peace” envisioned by the United Nations, where children will be safe, loved, and supported in the full development of their human potentials.⁶⁰ This is because domination cultural environments not only harm health but also tend to keep people in an arrested state of development focused on what psychologists call “defense” or survival needs rather than “growth” or actualization needs.

In this sense, domination environments keep humanity at a less advanced level of overall human development. They interfere with the full flourishing of those very qualities that make us happiest: empathy, consciousness, creativity, and love. But it does not have to be this way. We have choices.

Every society has biocultural constraints.¹ Children require care until they are old enough to fend for themselves. People are socialized to think and act in ways congruent with the beliefs and institutions of the culture. Commonly agreed-on symbols, in language and art, are created and replicated. The culture’s accumulated knowledge and technologies are passed on from generation to generation.

However, the ways these requirements are met differ depending on the degree to which a society orients toward partnership or domination. This orientation affects the nature of childcare and socialization, gender roles and marital relations, sexuality, personal autonomy, attitudes and beliefs, egalitarian or top-down social structures, and the types of institutions that are created. These, in turn, affect life experiences, which then influence whether people are generally fearful or trusting, cruel or caring, and violent or peaceful.

Partnership and domination orientations can be found across various cultural settings, ancient and modern. For instance, neither secular totalitarianism nor religious fundamentalism is new. Both are simply recent iterations of rigid domination systems.

In this chapter, we will look at diverse societies through the analytical lens of the partnership-domination continuum and how the divergent patterns associated with orientation to the either side of their continuum play out in real life.

In 1987, shortly after The Chalice and the Blade was published, Riane received a phone call from a retired University of California anthropology professor, Stuart Schlegel. He explained that he had done fieldwork with a tribal society in the Philippines. “I did not know what to call them,” he said. “I used to call them ‘radically egalitarian.’ But when I read your book I realized that they are a partnership society. They have the configuration you describe: they are generally egalitarian, women and men have equal status, and they are peaceful.”²

The people Schlegel described represent the kind of culture that was widespread in the Philippines before the arrival of strong Islamic and later also Spanish influences. In the 1960s, when Schlegel lived with the Tiruray (or as they call themselves, Teduray), they were already under strong pressure from encroaching Muslim neighbors. But they still lived in relative isolation in the dense tropical forest of the mountains of southwestern Mindanao, with an economy based on gathering wild foods, fishing, hunting, and subsistence farming.

The greatest part of Schlegel’s study of traditional Tiruray life was done in Figel, a neighborhood of families who assisted one another in their horticultural and ritual activities. What first struck Schlegel is that the fundamental moral obligation for the Tiruray is respect for other persons, and respect is “the essence of tribal custom and the guiding intention of behavior felt to be most distinctively Tiruray.”³

This culture’s egalitarianism also impressed Schlegel: “all human beings, whether men or women, whether adults or children, whether the finest shaman or the most ordinary basket weaver, were considered of equal worth and of equal standing in society.”⁴ Not only were men not ranked over women, but even the spirits were not ranked over one another.

“Women and men were clearly different—and the Teduray delighted in the difference,” Schlegel writes. “But they were not ranked . . . among forest Teduray neither gender was thought superior to the other in any way. Men and women related with empathy and an ethos of interdependence, with a mutual sharing of life’s problems and joys.”⁵

Among the Teduray, there was no battle of the sexes. To the contrary, Schlegel explains that “an abiding spirit of harmony existed between the sexes, and both men and women saw each other as equal participants in the great dance of life.”⁶ Men and women cooperated to nurture and raise children. Gender egalitarianism was obvious in working life, although the genders engaged in different tasks. Women’s work tended to be less strenuous than men’s chores: for instance, weeding the gardens as opposed to chopping down trees or weaving baskets compared to hunting wild pigs. However, greater male strength provided no rationale for oppression or exploitation of females by males. “All were really just different but equal specialties,” explains Schlegel.⁷

Their language had no gendered pronoun system—no “he, his, him,” no “she, hers, her.” There were no different words for “husband” and “wife” (just spouse) and no separate words for “sister” or “brother” (just sibling). Nor did they view gender as affecting a person’s disposition, potential, or personality, as is common in more male-dominated societies. As Schlegel notes, “when it came to positive and negative values of human behavior, the same criteria applied to men and women alike.”⁸

The Teduray did not always behave in positive, caring ways. As Schlegel writes, “they occasionally turned to violence to settle their problems, even though their beliefs and institutions all said that violence was never right. … They ran off with each other’s spouses, even though doing so violated their most fundamental moral norm, and they knew it. … They were certainly not goody-goody moral automatons in a never-never land of perfect harmony.”⁹

When violence erupted, however, they had elaborate mechanisms to prevent feuding between different kinship groups seeking vengeance. To avoid cycles of violence, “legal sages” from both sides focused on working out a settlement, and both men and women played this role. In fact, one of the most respected of these legal sages was a woman called Ideng-Amig, who could be trusted to remain calm and to listen, and who, as Schlegel observed, knew how to speak with grace in the roundabout rhetoric of sessions. The dispute settlement proceedings described by Schlegel were cooperative, as the legal specialists involved strove to find just outcomes.¹⁰ These elders sometimes lectured the disputants that self-redress was not the right way to deal with a conflict: “You must be patient and hold anger in your gall bladder.”¹¹

In his 1998 book, Schlegel sums up as follows: “The forest Teduray were a ‘partnership society’  ” where “softer, stereotypically ‘feminine’ virtues were valued,” where “community well-being was the principal motivation for work and other activities,” and where “the emphasis on technology was on enhancing and sustaining life.”¹²

Another indigenous society that orients to partnership is the Moso (also spelled Muoso) culture in China. These people are a subgroup of the Naxi in northwest Yunnan province about 100 miles east of the Myanmar border, speak a Tibeto-Burman language, and have drawn international interest as a growing number of cultural and ecological tourists feed the local hosting business.

Moso households operate as one big economic unit like many Chinese families. However, the traditional Moso family unit is headed by an elder woman, and she and her brothers, her daughters, and their children, with the intermittent help of the women’s lovers or husbands, work together to till the land and carry on other economic activities. In the Moso matrilineal family system, the lands and assets of a family are not subdivided on marriages and deaths. They pass through the mother’s line to a new female family elder. There are no orphans or abandoned seniors, and (at least until recent decades) no illegitimate children.¹³

Women and men are equal among the Moso, so this society is not a matriarchy, although it is often referred to as one, the term defined as not being the mirror image of patriarchy but rather a society where the guiding values are nurturance and caring.¹⁴ In his analysis, Professor Junsheng Cai describes the Moso as a society based primarily on linking rather than ranking. He writes that relations, whether inside the families or among them, are “practical lively partnerships.”¹⁵

Since the Moso have a love marriage system, there is no fighting over sexual honor, as can occur in in societies where female sexuality is controlled by men. After their initiation to womanhood at about age 13, girls have their own rooms. Their lovers, glossed as “special friends,” may visit them between midnight and dawn. A girl may invite a boy for a nocturnal visit and tell him a password. Upon arrival, he knocks on her door and says the secret word. The girl then decides whether or not to let him in. The whole matter remains a secret between them. Consequently, there is no economic or social pressure on the lovers, and no public shame over possible rejection.

A minority of Moso villages now have male-headed families. This minority is descended from later immigrant groups, the Pumi, or Xifan, who allied themselves with the conquering imperial armies of Mongol and Manchu times and were appointed headmen over the district. The Manchu (or Qing) imperial court required that chieftainship pass to the eldest son of each appointee’s legitimate wife, so patriarchal marriage became a state-imposed requirement for holding power.

During the “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s, the Communist cadres split the matrilineal, matrilocal households into production brigades with communal kitchens. As in much of China, the result was famine within two years. But the Moso had a higher than average death rate because of the extra trauma of losing their whole family system. After that period, the vast majority of ethnic Moso returned to the traditional form of “non-contractual, non-obligatory, and non-exclusive” marriage.¹⁶

Interestingly, there has been no overpopulation problem among the Moso. Since in their system there is sexual freedom for young people from age 13, it is surprising that the average age of a woman at first childbirth is 23 years.¹⁷ This is partly due to the absence of pressure. There is no duty to prove marriageability or fertility. And “masculinity” is not equated with control over female sexuality or maternity.¹⁸

All this is radically different in another indigenous society: the Maasai. Although some members of this semi-settled East African herding society are today moving away from a domination heritage, and there are now concerted efforts to empower women, traditional Maasai culture has held women and “feminine” traits and activities such as nonviolence and caregiving in low regard.¹⁹ Men rule, and in accordance with tradition, young Maasai men identify themselves as warriors and protectors. Anthropologist Aud Talle explains that “from an early age boys are taught to be courageous and fear nothing in order to defend property and people.”²⁰

In precolonial times, the Maasai and other neighboring pastoralists raided for cattle and sometimes killed people from other tribes.²¹ The 19th-century colonial “pax Britannica” was imposed on the Maasai and their neighbors to stop intertribal raids. However, as late as the 1970s, when the anthropologist Melissa Llewelyn-Davies made a documentary called “Masai Women,” Maasai male initiations still prepared men for the role of warriors.²²

The traditional source of wealth and status among the Maasai was cattle. Male duties involved herding and the protection of the cattle. The men grazed and watered the herds, castrated bulls, butchered animals, dug wells, and constructed cattle enclosures.²³ The women tended to the herd animals when corralled, milked the cows, prepared and served the food, cared for the children and the sick, and built houses to shelter themselves and their children.²⁴

But although Maasai women participated in caring for cattle and worked from dawn to dusk, traditionally they were not allowed to own anything except the beads around their necks. In this polygamous society, women were essentially male property, first of their fathers and then of their husbands. Talle explains that “With the control of livestock [vested in the elder male Maasai] goes the control of women and children. . . . This does not mean that women are totally subdued to men, but they have few means of overruling the latter’s authority. This applies to daughters toward their fathers as well as wives toward their husbands.”²⁵ “If he so wishes, a husband may beat an obstinate wife into submission,” Talle notes.²⁶

Maasai rituals make the different roles, and status, of women and men clear, starting in childhood. After the imposition of the Pax Brittanica, Maasai males were forced to fulfill their warrior roles through symbolic rituals rather than warfare. The 1970 Llewelyn-Davies’s film shows Maasai boys leaving their village homes to play at war. When they returned a few years later, it was after having proven themselves “real men.” At that point, even though they were still young, they were ritually welcomed back, took over their inherited portion of the herds, married their first wife, and began to administer their property.²⁷ Girls, on the other hand, underwent very different rituals.

At puberty, Maasai girls traditionally were subjected to the brutal cutting anthropologists call female circumcision that, in a variety of forms, is still performed on millions of girls in much of Africa and the Muslim world. What this cutting actually entails is very different from the circumcision of boys, which does not maim male sexuality. Female circumcision means that young girls are de-sexed: the clitoris is mutilated or cut off, and the vagina sometimes is sewn almost completely shut. This is designed to ensure, first, their sexual abstinence and, second, their sexual docility and fidelity to their husbands.

Among Maasai, this ritual cutting in which the clitoris and labia minora are removed has to be endured by girls without anesthetic or antiseptic. The operation is usually performed by an elderly woman in the community. Twigs are used to secure the vaginal closure and cow dung applied to “help healing,” with the consequence that serious infections are routine. Female circumcision initiates a new role for the 13- to 14-year-old girl, marking her formal entry into the marriage market.²⁸ Nowadays some Maasai are opposing the practice, although a traditional Maasai belief is that an uncircumcised woman will not be able to conceive or else will give birth to deformed children.²⁹

After she is given in marriage to a man by her relatives, still little more than a child, a Maasai girl must endure another traditional “celebration.” She is sent off on foot alone to her husband’s village, and in this place, where she knows she will have to remain for the rest of her life since the Maasai practice patrilocality, she is received by her husband’s other wives and the rest of the women of the village with threats and insults—a re-enactment of a ceremony of intimidation and degradation each woman was, in her own turn, forced to experience.³⁰

As is often the case among the oppressed, in these first two rituals the immediate agents of traumatization are the girl’s own kind: women. The third female Maasai ritual is administered by the men—more precisely, by the women’s sons. But like the first two, it reinforces women’s inferiority and subordination.

This ritual is held when the young men return to the community. For the men, it is a ceremony of coming of age and empowerment. For the women it is more degradation, humiliation, and disempowerment. On this ceremonial occasion, the sons insult and mock their mothers. The mothers then join in with their own self-deprecatory remarks. On top of this, they are by custom forced to swallow drinks containing urine.³¹

Some women undoubtedly continue to influence their sons, and in “Masai Women” we see women who seem to take pride in their sons.³² But this rite ceremonially strips women of all authority over their own sons—who, as befits “real” men, are instead to have authority over their mothers.

Traditional Maasai culture dramatically illustrates the connection between the subjugation and exploitation of women, the maltreatment of children, and a traditionally warlike way of life.³³ We see how the suppression of authentic human perceptions and experiences leads to acceptance, even idealization, of abusive and violent relations by both those who are dominated and those who dominate.

The comparisons between the partnership-oriented Moso and Teduray and the domination-oriented Maasai also illustrate how in the former cases empathy can be supported by a culture’s beliefs and institutions or how, like in the Maasai case, both women and men can be systematically taught to suppress empathy, even empathy for themselves. These contrasting cases further show the connection between how gender and childhood relations are culturally constructed and whether a culture is warlike or peaceful and ranked or egalitarian.

In short, if we compare the Moso and the Teduray with the Maasai, we see marked differences between these indigenous societies regarding war and peace, caring and cruelty, and equality and oppression. We also see how the extremely different beliefs and behaviors in these two tribal societies reflect the Moso’s and the Teduray’s close orientation to the partnership system and the Maasai’s to the domination system.

Applying what we have learned from neuroscience, we can infer that such differences between domination and partnership systems are manifested not only on a social cultural level but also on a neural-psychological level within individuals.

The Taliban are a rigidly male-dominated, violent group. Violence is idealized, and male sexual, economic, and religious control of women is a cornerstone of a top-down social and political structure. Though the Taliban do not practice female sexual mutilation, men’s honor depends on absolute control over women’s sexuality.

This control of one half of the population over the other is a core element of a system based on rigid rankings—not only men over women but also “superior” groups of men over “inferior” ones. There are constant tribal feuds, “holy wars,” and brutal public killings of “criminals” such as women accused of sexual transgression. For the Taliban and other Muslim fundamentalist cultures, as for the Maasai, male control over women is key to a construction of masculinity equated with domination and violence.³⁴

As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod reports about another Muslim fundamentalist culture—a Bedouin tribe in the western desert of Egypt among whom she lived for two years—free expression of female sexuality is seen as a threat to the whole hierarchic male system. It is, in her words, an “act of insubordination and insolence.”³⁵ She writes: “In the eyes of others, a dependent’s rebellion dishonors the superior by throwing into question his moral worth, the very basis of his authority. … To reclaim it, he must reassert his moral superiority by declaring her actions immoral and must show his capacity to control her, best expressed in the ultimate form of violence.”³⁶

This “ultimate violence” is not only a man’s right but also his responsibility. Murdering one’s own kin—daughters, sisters, even mothers—is called an “honor killing” because “superiors” must always dominate “inferiors” such as women.³⁷ Terms such as honor and dishonor, moral superiority and inferiority, and responsibility and dependence are cultural justifications—and disguises—for the brutality and violence required to maintain rigid rankings of domination.

The gender apartheid that segregates women from men in most areas of life is one way of maintaining the detachment required for this brutality. Since sexual love would interfere with rigid and, if “necessary,” violent male control, as Abu-Lughod documents, sexual love was a threat to the social order in this rigidly male-dominated society.

“Love matches are actively discouraged, and thwarted when discovered,” Abu-Lughod writes.³⁸ Every attempt is made to “minimize the significance of the marital relationship and to mask its nature as a sexual bond between man and woman.”³⁹ In other words, an important aspect of these strict domination cultures is an ideology in which love and intimacy are actively discouraged.

Men are looked down on by both men and women for succumbing to romantic love because it is equated with dependency, which for men is “inimical to the highest honor-linked value, independence.”⁴⁰ Abu-Lughod reports that for men, any witnessed affection for or attachment to a woman, even if only in front of family members, compromises a man’s right to control and receive the respect of his dependents.⁴¹

So the contempt for women that is part of top-down violent cultures extends to contempt for traits considered feminine and values such as empathy, nonviolence, and love, which are considered unsuitable for men. Empathy would interfere with the maintenance of rankings of domination. Nonviolence would interfere with the use of violence to maintain these rankings. Love has to be equated with possession and control. And the intimacy of love has to be prevented lest it interfere with unequal gender and family relations.

What we are examining is not a matter of being Muslim. There are Muslims who abhor violence and non-Muslims who commit atrocities. Moreover, we can find this same domination configuration in Christian cultures. Not so long ago, when Western culture still oriented more closely to the domination system than today, marriage and family relations were typically also characterized by distance, deference, and male control. In the Christian Middle Ages, violence against children and women was customary. So was brutal violence against any form of religious or political dissent, along with violent scapegoating, such as the persecution of Jews. There were incessant feuds and wars, including the medieval Church’s Crusades, as well as its Inquisition and witch burnings.⁴² In these Western historical examples, we also find a social organization of strict top-down physical, emotional, and economic control in both the family and the state, rigid male dominance, and socially condoned, even idealized, violence.

Whereas social stratification and violence are sometimes justified by passages from sacred scriptures, as noted earlier, domination systems are found in secular societies, too. Moreover, a partnership orientation can also be found in religious cultures.

This brings us to the Minangkabau, the fourth largest ethnic group in the West Sumatran archipelago, numbering about four million people. Like the Taliban and the Bedouin, the Minangkabau are a Muslim culture, although with strong earlier animistic and matrifocal spiritual traditions. Yet, as anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday writes, the Minangkabau are “the largest and most stable matrilineal society in the world today … well known in Indonesia for their literary flair, democratic leanings, business acumen, and ‘matriarchal’ ways.”⁴³

Because “matriarchal” is what Minangkabau people call themselves, Sanday also uses this term to describe this egalitarian and peaceful culture where women are not dominated by men. She explains, “I prefer to retain the term matriarchy out of courtesy and respect for Minangkabau usage.”⁴⁴ Sanday continues: “the concept of matriarchy is relevant in societies where maternal symbols are linked to social practices influencing the lives of both sexes and where women play a central role in these practices.”⁴⁵

Nonetheless, the Minangkabau are not matriarchies because they are not ruled by women rather than men. What Sanday describes, based on her observations living in the Minangkabau village of Belubus on and off for 20 years, is a society that orients to the partnership system.

As among the Teduray, violence is not part of Minangkabau norms. Sanday explains that childcare is neither authoritarian nor punitive and that she never observed a child being slapped or hit. She writes, “The socialization techniques fit what one would expect from the peacefulness of Minangkabau interpersonal relations: Children aren’t hit, I never heard mothers screaming at their children, children get their way frequently and no one seems to mind much.”⁴⁶ The Minangkabau believe that sooner or later children will learn proper behavior. Like the Teduray, the Minangkabau also use mediation for violence prevention and nonescalation. This encourages a more peaceable way of life.

In contrast to domination-oriented ideologies, the Minangkabau view nurture as a core principle of nature. Based on her conversations with Minangkabau elders, Sanday reports:

The Minangkabau weave order out of their version of wild nature by appeal to maternal archetypes. Unlike Darwin in the 19th century, the Minangkabau subordinate male dominion and competition, which we consider basic to human social ordering and evolution, to the work of maternal nurture, which they hold to be necessary for the common good and the healthy society. … Social well-being is found in natural growth and fertility according to the dictum that the unfurling, blooming, and growth in nature is our teacher. … Like the seedlings of nature, infants must be nurtured so that they will flower and grow to their fullness and strength as adults. Generalizing this principle, nurture is the natural law that humans should follow in devising social rules. This means that culture must focus on nurturing the weak and renounce brute strength.⁴⁷

Both men and women are expected to be nurturing in this culture, which does not regard roles we have been taught to associate only with femininity as unsuitable for men. The Minangkabau include nurturing in the male role, but they figure descent through the maternal line. As Sanday observes, “the matrilineal system was originally devised so that children would always have a family, food, and ancestral land.”⁴⁸ She notes that although the Minangkabau certainly understand the male role in paternity, they view the father-child link as less reliable than the mother-child bond for fulfilling the central cultural purpose of providing care and security to the young.⁴⁹

Significantly, the Minangkabau do not make an issue of paternity in the treatment of children or in relation to passing on male property. A Minangkabau elder, Nago Besar, put it this way:

Concerns about biological fatherhood deflect attention from the more important emphasis on the child’s well-being. This is not to say that Minangkabau fathers don’t play an important role in the lives of their children. They do, but the connection of father to child is not tied to the transmission of land and houses.⁵⁰

Sanday compares Minangkabau thinking with the ideas of Hobbes and other philosophers who viewed social relations based on rankings of domination as the only alternative for maintaining social order. She observes, “since nurture (not dominion) is the primary social lesson that the Minangkabau take from nature, their construction of the social contract is geared toward institutions protecting the weak.”⁵¹ This is reflected in the observation that Minangkabau women hold rights to land and its products, while men have rights and access in this matrilineal system through their relationships with their sisters.

Another feature of Minangkabau society is that what helps foster social bonds is the exchange of men, or rather the giving in marriage of sons by mothers to other clans. But again, significantly, these bonds are not a matter of unilateral material exchanges such as bride-price or dowry. In line with the culture’s partnership orientation, they are reciprocal exchanges where both the bride’s and bridegroom’s families contribute to the wedding feast. While maternal and paternal relatives play important roles in the wedding ceremony, there is special focus on the husband’s mother. The special honoring of the paternal side is also important in ceremonies welcoming a newborn child. Sanday explains:

The ceremony gives public recognition to the lifelong commitment of the paternal side to the child’s interest. … A good connection between the clans is also considered necessary for the child’s welfare. As a male adat expert told me, “Ceremonies maintain a good connection between families connected by marriage; if something happens to the father or the mother, the child is never forgotten.”⁵²

On the surface, Nazi Germany bears no resemblance to the Maasai and Taliban. But it has the same configuration of top-down control, an ideology of male supremacy, and institutionalized, socially idealized violence.

Reams have been published speculating about how a people who boasted great contributions to literature, music, philosophy, science, and other aspects of modern civilization could commit, support, or condone the atrocities of the Third Reich.⁵³ But little has been published about the underlying conditions that supported the German regression to authoritarianism and brutal violence.

The rise of Hitler has often been blamed on the punitive measures imposed on Germany after its defeat in World War I and the economic crisis in the short-lived Weimar Republic.⁵⁴ These were undoubtedly factors. But other nations have had severe economic problems and did not turn fascist. A key factor in this turn to fascism is a nation where male dominance and authoritarian parent-child relations were still normative ideals.

When the Nazis were elected to rule Germany, they brought with them a revival of pagan myths about Aryan supermen who, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued, were entitled to rule over all women and most men.⁵⁵ The absolute authoritarianism celebrated in Nietzsche’s prose went hand in hand with the “masculine” violence celebrated in Wagner’s music.

Nazi propaganda asked men to become “real” men: truly “masculine” men who conquer and who rid the world of “inferiors.” So the Nazi Wehrmacht went forth to conquer Europe, and from there the world, following their leaders’ commands to commit the most meticulously organized and technologically efficient atrocities in recorded history.

At the same time that German men were instructed to reclaim their “masculinity,” women were told that they were put on Earth to care for men—mind, body, and soul. Birth control clinics were closed, dissemination of birth control information was forbidden, and penalties for abortion were greatly stiffened. Women employed outside the home were blamed for male unemployment, inflation, and other economic ills and were exhorted to give up their jobs. Quotas of 10 percent limited women’s access to higher education. Women lawyers were removed from judgeships and high state offices. Women doctors were allowed to practice medicine only if they merged their practice with that of their husband. Laws denied women tenure in jobs.⁵⁶

As Joseph K. Folsom notes, the purpose of Nazi policy was not only to return women to their “traditional” place as wives and mothers economically dependent on the male head of household. It was also to take women out of professions and put them in low-paid occupations, thus promoting male supremacy in all relations.⁵⁷ After the war started, and women were needed in jobs men vacated to fight, as historian Claudia Koonz writes, “women were urged to be ‘traditional’ by reclaiming their economic importance.” But in line with the Nazi’s policy of male supremacy, their wages were officially kept lower than men’s.⁵⁸

Hitler declared as early as 1934 that “the message of woman’s emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped with the same spirit.”⁵⁹ Or as a young Nazi leader put it, “the Jew has stolen women from us through the forms of sex democracy. We, the youth, must march out to kill the dragon so that we may again attain the most holy thing in the world, the woman as maid and servant.”⁶⁰

In Nazi Germany, as in Maasai and other cultures that orient closely to the domination system, “the ideal Nazi man was a fighter; the ideal Nazi woman, his mother.”⁶¹ “Soft” traits such as nonviolence and caregiving were appropriate only for “inferior” women and “effeminate” men.

A stark contrast to domination-oriented Nazi Germany is provided by a very different group of Western countries: the Nordic nations. While the Teduray and Minangkabau are Eastern and indigenous, the same partnership-oriented template can be seen in Western technologically developed, industrialized nations such as Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

Nordic nations have created societies with a high degree of political and economic equality in both the family and the state. They have a mix of free enterprise and central planning and were the first nations to move toward more industrial democracy, pioneering teamwork by self-directed groups to replace assembly lines where workers are mere cogs in the industrial machine.

As noted earlier, Nordic nations have succeeded in creating a generally good living standard for all, without the huge gaps between haves and have-nots characteristic of domination-oriented nations. According to the Gini coefficient, a widely used measure of social equality-inequality, all the Nordic countries are among the top 13 percent when it comes to social equality worldwide.⁶² Finland is in first place globally in terms of equality. In Sweden, the average CEO of a company earns 89 times the average worker’s pay, and in Norway and Denmark, respectively, CEOs take home 58 times and 48 times the amount of workers—which is a large difference, but dwarfs in comparison to the United States, where the average CEO earns 354 times more than workers.⁶³ Overall, on the United Nations’ Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) for 2015, which reflects a country’s actual level of human development (with the amount of inequality within the country being taken into account), Finland ranks at 14 with a score of 0.843, while the United States lags behind, ranking at 20 with a score of 0.796. The other Nordic nations have IHDI rankings even lower than Finland, with Norway, Iceland, Sweden, and Denmark all ranking within the top 11 countries of the world for human development adjusted for inequality.⁶⁴

This greater equality has sometimes been attributed to the relatively small and homogeneous populations of the Nordic nations. But smaller and even more homogeneous societies, such as certain oil-rich nations of the Middle East, orient closely to the domination system, with authoritarian regimes, large gaps between haves and have-nots, rigid male dominance, and rule through force or threat of force.

To understand why Nordic nations developed a more caring and equitable economy, we have to look beyond homogeneity and size to consider other factors. And one important factor is that in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden there is much greater partnership between women and men. Women have held the highest political offices, and the percentages of Nordic women in parliament in recent years approaches parity with men, being generally around 40 percent, or about double the percentage in the United States.⁶⁵

The former Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland born in 1939, reflects on the early influences of her life and the egalitarian and caring values that motivated her work, nationally and globally, to promote access to healthcare, better lives for all citizens, and sustainable development internationally. She explains,

Gender equality was simply the norm in many areas of my young life. My mom participated in heated political discussions, taught herself to drive the car, and thought it the most natural thing in the world to carry a yoke with a three-gallon bucket of water hanging off each end. I was taught that women can achieve the same things in the world as men. These early years influenced me and created in me a fierce passion for justice, equity, health, and the greater world.⁶⁶

As we will examine further in subsequent chapters, there is a strong connection between the status of women in a nation and both its general quality of life and economic success.⁶⁷ This is not only because women are half of humanity; it is also because as the status of women rises, so also does the value a society gives to stereotypically “feminine” traits and behaviors such as caring and caregiving—in women, men, and economic policy.

As the status of women rises, so does the status of traits and activities deemed unacceptable in men in domination-oriented cultures because they are associated with “inferior” femininity. This is a critical point: men in more partnership-oriented cultures no longer find it such a threat to their status—to their “masculinity”—to adopt more “soft” feminine traits and behaviors.

Along with the higher status of Nordic women came fiscal priorities that support “feminine” values and activities. So these more partnership-oriented nations pioneered caring policies, such as government-supported childcare, universal healthcare, and paid parental leave.

As Hilkka Pietila documents, largely as a result of these caring policies, countries that suffered from extreme poverty—including severe famines that led to waves of immigration to the United States—became prosperous. ⁶⁸ This contradicts still another erroneous assumption about progressive Nordic social policies: that these policies were due to greater prosperity. In reality, as Pietila emphasizes, these policies were the cause, not the effect, of greater prosperity.⁶⁹

While Nordic nations are sometimes called socialist, they actually have a thriving market economy as well as private property. Labeling them socialist because they have government policies that provide universal healthcare, childcare, and eldercare is a misnomer. What distinguishes these nations is not that the government is involved in the economy, which fascist governments such as Nazi Germany also were, but that these countries have many caring policies. Indeed, these more partnership-oriented nations often call them themselves “caring societies.”⁷⁰

Another important partnership feature of Nordic nations is that they pioneered legal measures and attitude change against the physical punishment and abuse of children. Sweden, Finland, and Norway in 1979, 1983, and 1987, respectively, were the first countries in the world to pass laws making corporal punishment of children illegal, and since that time, more than 30 other nations have followed suit, including Denmark in 1998 and Iceland in 2004.⁷¹ In Finland, for example, the law states: “A child shall be brought up in the spirit of understanding, security and love. … [The child] shall not be subdued, corporally punished or otherwise humiliated … [and] growth towards independence, responsibility and adulthood shall be encouraged, supported and assisted.”⁷²

Passing of the law was accompanied by public awareness campaigns geared at changing attitudes and providing parents with nonviolent alternatives to engaging in physical punishment of children. Doug lived in Finland for almost 20 years and kept his eyes open for any acts of physical punishment of children, in homes and in public, and only once observed an adult strike a child. However, on closer investigation, it turned out that the parent and child were not ethnically Finnish. Psychologists Karin Österman and her colleagues surveyed Finns between the ages of 15 and 80 and found significantly lower rates of being beaten with an object or slapped among the respondents born after the passage of the law and the accompanying attitude change campaigns.⁷³

Overall, the Nordic nations also have low homicide rates.⁷⁴ Some Nordic countries have well-supported men’s movements against male violence toward women.⁷⁵ In discussing rape with Finnish men and women, Doug found that both sexes agreed that rape was a truly reprehensible crime and in fact was uncommon. One man said that if the woman says “no,” Finnish men respect this. Another man said, “most men know how to get sex in the normal way”—by which he meant without coercion, threat, or violence. Finnish geographer Hille Koskela explains that, generally speaking, women feel safe at night: “It is quite common for women to go out without male company, and to stay out until the latest restaurants close at 4 a.m. and, as a consequence, the landscape of Finnish cities at night is not obviously gendered.”⁷⁶ Doug teamed-up with Finnish sociologist Jukka-Pekka Takala to investigate how many lone women were out and about on the Helsinki streets at night. Forty-two percent of the people on the streets were women, and of the lone individuals, women constituted one third.⁷⁷ The various lines of data show the risks of rape and fear of rape are low in Finland.⁷⁸

Nordic countries also have pioneered nonviolent conflict resolution, establishing peace studies programs and institutes early on, when most countries only had war academies. Denmark set up the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, which is now part of the Danish Institute for International Studies, where researchers focus on such topics as nuclear weapons, climate change, and the challenge of the human impacts on the Earth in the Anthropocene.⁷⁹ Established in 1959, Norway hosts the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, which among other activities provides regular updates on peace and security issues as they affect women, as laid out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on women and security.⁸⁰

Finland established the Tampere Peace Research Institute and, recently, a Master’s program in Peace, Mediation, and Conflict Research. Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful track record in mediating international conflicts in various parts of the globe. He set up the Crisis Management Initiative “that works to prevent and resolve violent conflicts through informal dialogue and mediation.”⁸¹ Sweden houses three peace studies programs, including the world famous Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.⁸²

In addition, Nordic nations pioneered environmentally sound manufacturing approaches. In the Swedish “Natural Step,” materials are recycled even after they reach the consumer to avoid pollution and waste.

Moreover, these nations contribute a larger percentage of their annual gross domestic product to international programs working for economic development, environmental protection, and human rights than other developed nations. This is another manifestation of greater empathy and care as the norm in these cultures—including empathy and care for people in far-away and very different places.

These Nordic practices and policies are not coincidental developments. They stem from the fact that the Nordic world orients more to the partnership than the domination configuration.

As the examples of the Moso, Teduray, Minangkabau, and Nordic nations show, partnership systems can be found in societies with very different subsistence modes, social structures, and religions orientations. And partnership-oriented structures, beliefs, policies, and relations support more egalitarian, gender-balanced, peaceful, empathetic, and caring ways of living than do domination-oriented systems.

As we will further detail in the next chapter, studies of nomadic forager band societies suggest that humanity’s ancient orientation actually was toward partnership rather than domination over the many millennia of human evolution. This indicates that, whereas our flexible human species can accommodate to life in domination systems, our primal inclination bends toward partnership.

The domination system and the partnership system are social configurations that transcend conventional classifications such as religious versus secular, Eastern versus Western, or right versus left. Cross-culturally and throughout history, brutally repressive and violent societies exemplify the core configuration of the domination system, whether secular, like rightist-capitalist Nazi Germany in the West and Kim Jong-un’s leftist-communist North Korea in the East, or religious, like the European Middle Ages or ISIS in the Middle East and Boko Haram in Africa (Table 6.1). More equitable and peaceful societies adhere more closely to the partnership system core configuration, whether ancient, such as during much of the deep nomadic forager past and prehistoric Çatalhöyük, or modern, such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland. No society is a pure partnership or domination system, but the degree to which a culture orients to one or the other shapes beliefs, social structures, and how the human brain develops.

Before about 12,500 years ago, the nomadic forager lifeway was ubiquitous. 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.¹

Nomadic 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. For most of humanity’s existence, these ancestral foraging partnership societies lacked large population concentrations, permanently settled communities, stored plunderable resources, top-down leadership, distinct social rankings, and warfare.² These small, unwarlike, and egalitarian bands shifted camps regularly as they moved across the landscape in quest for food.

By contrast, another type of hunter-gatherers, usually called complex foragers, are generally hierarchical, settled, and have higher population densities than do nomadic foragers. Complex foragers tend to be found in areas of bountiful, consistent resources such as rich aquatic environments. Complex foragers of the northwest coast of North America, for example, shared certain features. They subsisted largely on marine resources such as highly productive salmon runs; had hierarchical class strata with chiefs, commoners, and sometimes slaves; had highly developed arts, rituals, and economies based on the redistribution of goods; and, last but not least, engaged in warfare.³ Complex foragers are relatively rare in the worldwide ethnographic and archaeological records.⁴

Complex forager societies constituted the very first domination systems, and they arose relatively recently, being “most common after 12,500 BP, usually transitional between simple [nomadic/egalitarian] hunter-gathering and agricultural systems.”⁵ Not all transitional societies were domination systems. As noted earlier, the large Anatolian town of Çatalhöyük was partnership-oriented, with no signs of warfare for more than 1,000 years, no signs of major differences in status or wealth in both houses and burials, and gender equality as the norm.⁶ But from diverse parts of the planet, archaeological sequences tell similar stories about the origin of domination systems from prior conditions of ubiquitous partnership. With development of greater social complexity, some societies, but certainly not all, embarked on a set of monumental changes in a domination direction.⁷ These initial preagricultural changes toward social complexity provided the foundations for new social institutions and practices of domination, such as social classes, control of women by men, and slavery, features that are often assumed to be as old as humanity itself—but in fact constitute rather recent inventions.

There are a number of theories about how and why domination systems originated. One theory, which recently seems to have received some support from DNA studies of prehistoric European populations,⁸ is based on the proposal by archeologist Marija Gimbutas that in Europe the shift was due to incursions of Indo-European pastoralists originating in the Eurasian steppes who brought with them strongman rule, male dominance, and warfare.⁹ A more generally accepted theory is that this shift was due to the complexity complex. That is, settling down in one place, intensive resource use (often due to agriculture), accumulation of surpluses, population expansion, social hierarchies, definitive leadership, warfare, and sometimes slavery constituted a tremendous shift from the age-old human conditions of low population density, small-band life, nomadism, day-to-day foraging, egalitarianism in ethos and practice, and non-surplus-accumulating social life.¹⁰

The worldwide archaeological record offers a view into the evolutionary timeframe of partnership and domination. It shows that transitions from partnership to domination occurred at different locations at different times, and certainly did not take place everywhere.¹¹ As we have seen, a diversity of partnership-oriented societies have been documented across space and time, ranging from Minoan Crete that flourished from about 2000 bce to 1500 bce to the Teduray, Moso, and Minangkabau cultures considered in the Chapter 6, the Hopi of North America, and the contemporary Nordic countries of Europe. However, beginning as early as 12,500 years ago in parts of the Near East, and much later on the northwest coast of North America, the Valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, and elsewhere, similar sequences of culture change accompanied transitions from partnership to domination.¹²

When it took place, the transition away from a nomadic forager lifestyle to a settled existence entailed many changes that are archaeologically apparent. For example, variability both in house size and burial features indicates that a social hierarchy existed, with high-status people living in larger homes and being interred more elaborately than those of lower social ranks. In other words, inequality leaves its marks in the archaeological record.

Various archaeological examples also show the birth of war in association with hierarchical systems. For instance, in the Near East between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, nomadic foraging gave way to plant and animal domestication. In this region, there is no evidence of war or hierarchical social organization in the archaeological record at 12,000 years before the present, sparse evidence for war by about 9,500 years ago, and then clear evidence of spreading and intensifying warfare after that. Multiple kinds of data validate the fact that war in the Near East emerged from a condition of prior warlessness: the growing defensibility of settlement sites, increase of violence apparent in human skeletal remains, and rapid introduction of new artistic styles suggesting the imposition of a conquering group’s cultural tradition in a new location.

Another archaeological case illustrates a similar sequence. Archaeologist Herbert Maschner chronicles changes in type and severity of violence and the rise of social complexity in an area of the northwest coast of North America.¹³ Beginning at about 5,500 years ago and persisting over at least a couple millennia, skeletal trauma almost exclusively involved nonlethal injuries—and not many of these. This was a period of nomadic foraging. The rarity and nonlethality of the injuries, in conjunction with absolutely no other indicators of warfare, strongly imply the presence of incidents of interpersonal aggression rather than war. Later in this prehistoric sequence, evidence of war appears in correspondence with other domination elements such as social hierarchy and inequality. Maschner summarizes: “The first large villages appear, status differences become apparent, a heavy emphasis on marine subsistence develops, and warfare becomes visible in the archaeological record.”¹⁴

Yet another example of the birth of a domination system comes from southern Mexico. Archaeologists Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus find no evidence of group conflict or markers of social hierarchy among the egalitarian nomadic band societies that foraged in the Valley of Oaxaca for six millennia between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago.¹⁵ This was a time of partnership. Toward the end of this period, the transition from nomadic foraging to hierarchical sedentary village life reliant on farming was underway. By 2,800 years before the present, three rival chiefdoms had developed, buffered from each other by unoccupied zones.

Archaeology shows that one chiefdom, San José Mogote, was then attacked and sacked. The survivors withdrew to a mountaintop called Monte Albán and constructed defensive walls that encircled the settlement. Eventually, Monte Albán emerged as the capital of the prehistoric Zapotec state. Hallmarks of such states, whether ancient or modern, are permanent armies with hierarchical command structures led by military specialists, which make military campaigns and protracted wars possible.¹⁶ By about 2,300 years ago, the Zapotec state had obtained empire status by conquering and exacting tribute from neighboring peoples up to 150 km away. In summary, the archaeological time sequence for the Valley of Oaxaca again shows a long partnership period of egalitarian and peaceful nomadic forager lifestyle before the entrance of complexity with its settled, hierarchical social organization that eventually, in this case, developed state-level civilization with distinct social classes, a professional army, exploitation of labor, and torture and mutilation of war captives, along with hieroglyphic writing, massive temples, exquisite goldsmithery, and extensive astronomical knowledge.¹⁷

In light of these kinds of findings, whereas the development of agriculture is correctly heralded as a landmark event in world prehistory, bringing innumerable changes to the human species, the preagricultural revolution or, in other words, the emergence of social complexity in some places also can be viewed as a monumental transformation in human existence.¹⁸ Prehistorian Donald Henry emphasizes the magnitude of the changes that often take place when nomadic partnership societies shift to settled, domination-based complex foraging, explaining that, “The replacement of … [nomadic forager] societies composed of small, highly mobile, materially impoverished, egalitarian groups by a society that was characterized by large, sedentary, materially rich and socially stratified communities represented a dramatic shift from an adaptive system that had enjoyed several million years of success.”¹⁹

We want to highlight that this shift toward domination-oriented societies during the preagricultural and agricultural revolutions did not occur everywhere on the planet. But when the transition to domination did take place, it ushered in massive changes in relations between men and women, the way people lived, how they made a living, and their modes of interaction with one another.

Worldwide archaeology suggests that homicide has been around for a very long time but that warfare has not. Archaeologist Marilyn Roper reviews the skeletal finds for early humans—or hominins—over the last three million years, and she reaches the conclusion that sporadic homicides occurred in the deep past but not warfare.²⁰ In the absence of any corroborating evidence of warfare such as defensive sites, fortifications, mass graves showing trauma, or specialized weapons, the discovery of a single victim of lethal aggression does not justify a claim that war existed.²¹ In the absence of other war indicators, skeletal trauma may likely represent a murder, a group-sanctioned execution, or a hunting or other accident, rather than war.²²

Hisashi Nakao and his colleagues looked at all cases of skeletal violence in Japan across the mostly forager period beginning 13,000 years ago and extending into historical times less than 1,000 years ago.²³ Whereas Steven Pinker has assumed that high rates of warfare characterized nomadic forager prehistory, the data from Japan question this presumption because violent death averaged less than two percent over the entire period.²⁴ Absolutely no cases of lethal violence were discovered among the skeletons for the earliest 5,000-year period. Nakao and his colleagues point out that some, if not all, of the lethal trauma would have resulted from homicides and accidents rather than war. The authors conclude that their results are “inconsistent with arguments that warfare is inherent in human nature and was an important selection pressure.”²⁵

Worldwide, the archaeological site that possibly shows the earliest indications of war is a cemetery called Jebel Sahaba, dated between 11,600 and 14,300 years old.²⁶ Excavations of this ancient burial site in Sudanese Nubia near the Nile were originally reported to reflect a very high percentage of violent deaths in the skeletal population, and some scholars have attributed this violence to warfare or feuding. Other researchers have cautioned that homicides and executions cannot be ruled out. Additionally, the number of victims of violence almost certainly was overestimated in the original report because any association of a buried skeleton with stone flakes, chips, or scrapers in the nearby soil was seen as evidence of violent death, even in the absence of any skeletal trauma.²⁷

Unambiguous indications of warfare only begin about 10,000 years ago, that is, after the preagricultural and agricultural revolutions were underway in some locations. A recently reported massacre on the ancient shores of Lake Turkana in Africa, dated to about 10,000 years ago, is a case in point.²⁸ Archaeologist Marta Mirazon Lahr and her colleagues note the presence of pottery, which is not typical of nomadic foragers, and they suggest that some degree of sedentism and food storage may be indicated. The location of this Lake Turkana violence is significant because social complexification tends to take place when a localized, consistent aquatic food supply allows population concentration in settlements, intensification of resource utilization, food storage, and increases in population density as preconditions for the development of warfare. This is documented in such places as the northwest coast of North America, the Kodak Archipelago in Alaska, and coastal Florida, as with the prehistoric Calusa, and possibly on the island of Isla Cedros off the coast of Baja California.²⁹ The Washington Post reports that, according to Robert Foley who coauthored the Lake Turkana massacre report, “the skeletons appear to have belonged to a group of hunter-gatherers living at the time on the lush, marshy edge of a lagoon where they used bone harpoons to fish and hunt. They were probably more sedentary than most foraging communities, as there are indications that the environment was quite rich.”³⁰ Moreover, the abundant aquatic resources available at this relatively flat marshy area stood in contrast to most other parts of the steeply sloping lakeshore, making it a limited and valuable location for fishing in the shallow waters.³¹

Mark Allen and Terry Jones, in framing the chapters in a recent book that they co-edit, assert that war goes way back in prehistory to the earliest hominins— about five million years in other words.³² However, Allen and Jones turn a blind eye to the fact that nearly all the archaeological chapters in their own book deal with violence or warfare within the last 10,000 years, that is, since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. And even the chapter by paleoanthropologist James Chatters that does consider data from more than 10,000 years ago contradicts the long-chronology view of warfare advocated by the book’s editors.³³ Thus, Allen and Jones’ assertion that the chapters in their book “support a long chronology for war and violence” is not supported by the evidence they themselves offer.³⁴

As archaeologist Jonathan Haas writes, “there is negligible evidence for any kind of warfare anywhere in the world before about 10,000 years ago.”³⁵ A recurring pattern can be seen across archaeological sequences from diverse geographical locations indicating that warfare as an element of domination systems lacks ancient roots. It originated various times in different locations as some, but by no means all, forager societies underwent shifts toward intensification of resource extraction and greater social complexity. Before this, for most of human evolutionary history, domination systems simply did not exist. A very significant conclusion emerges: human nature evolved under the long-standing era of partnership social organization; the human mind evolved in partnership contexts.

For the overwhelming majority of the period that the genus Homo has existed, nomadic foraging constituted the ubiquitous human lifestyle. Consequently, to gain insights about the human past and human nature, a careful consideration of nomadic forager partnership societies is crucial.³⁶ As Bicchieri writes:

For more than 99 percent of the approximately two million years since the emergence of a recognizable human animal, man has been a hunter and gatherer. … Questions concerning territorialism, the handling of aggression, social control, property, leadership, the use of space, and many other dimensions are particularly significant in these contexts. To evaluate any of these focal aspects of human behavior without taking into consideration the socioeconomic adaptation that has characterized most of the span of human life on this planet will eventually bias conclusions and generalizations. ³⁷

As discussed previously, the central features of partnership systems include (1) overall egalitarianism; (2) equality, respect, and partnership between women and men; (3) a nonacceptance of violence, war, abuse, cruelty, and exploitation; and (4) ethics that support human caring, prosocial cooperation, and flourishing.³⁸ We will now illustrate how the key features of partnership typify nomadic forager social life.

Overall Egalitarianism

Nomadic foragers are characterized as having egalitarian values, nonranked social structures, and high degrees of personal autonomy.³⁹ Forager specialist James Woodburn summarizes that “there are either no leaders at all or leaders who are very elaborately constrained to prevent them from exercising authority or using their influence to acquire wealth or prestige.”⁴⁰ Anthropologist Eleanor Leacock concurs: “What is hard to grasp about the structure of the egalitarian band is that leadership as we conceive it is not merely ‘weak’ or ‘incipient,’ as is commonly stated, but irrelevant.”⁴¹

When the social order is egalitarian and thus a hierarchy of command is lacking, no one has the authority to order others to fight.⁴² For example, anthropologist Mervin Meggitt explains that among the Walbiri of Australia there were neither military hierarchies nor “military leaders, elected or hereditary, to plan tactics and ensure that others adopted the plans.” ⁴³ Ethnographer John Cooper succinctly states of the Ona of South America that, “No man recognized authoritative headship of or accepted orders from any other.”⁴⁴ Anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes nomadic foragers as “fiercely egalitarian.”⁴⁵ In short, this lack of top-down leadership and the strong ethic of egalitarianism are recurring cultural features that have been documented ethnographically time and again for nomadic forager societies.⁴⁶

Nomadic forager societies also tend to have high levels of gender egalitarianism compared with most other types of societies.⁴⁷ For example, among the Polar Eskimo, “men and women had more or less equal status.”⁴⁸ Among the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, “the woman was largely her own mistress, particularly in such provinces of her own as child rearing, food gathering, and canoe managing. Some men domineered over their wives, but not a few husbands were under the thumbs of their spouses.”⁴⁹ Leacock observes, “those who came to know the Montagnais more intimately saw women as holding ‘great power.’   ”⁵⁰ Anthropologist Peter Gardner writes of the Paliyan of India, “Neither spouse can order the other and neither, by virtue of sex or age, is entitled to a greater voice in matters of mutual concern.”⁵¹ Anthropologists Kirk and Karen Endicott report that the Batek of Malaysia viewed “men and women as being different in various ways, but did not regard these differences as making either sex superior to the other.”⁵² Forager specialist Richard Lee writes, “women are a force to be reckoned with in Ju/’hoan society.”⁵³

Overall, women in nomadic forager societies can freely divorce and remarry.⁵⁴ For instance, anthropologist Gardner observed that Paliyan “spouses separate at the first quarrel, which results in the serial marriages. … One girl of fifteen rotated between three men, moving after each quarrel; she had experienced eight unions, each of which was referred to as a marriage.”⁵⁵ In Montagnais bands, “divorce was easy and at the desire of either partner.”⁵⁶

Another reflection of the high level of gender egalitarianism and female autonomy that is typical of nomadic bands involves sexual relations. In many nomadic forager societies, women exercise considerable sexual independence.⁵⁷ Among the Batek, “people joked that affairs were fine unless the couple had their tryst on a major path. … Their attitude was that no one could control the sexuality of anyone else in premarital, marital, or extramarital contexts.”⁵⁸ Anthropologist Allan Holmberg explains that Siriono “women enjoy about the same privileges as men. They get as much or more food to eat, and they enjoy the same sexual freedom.”⁵⁹ Adultery is common among the Siriono and many other forager groups, yet it tends to be ignored if engaged in discreetly. Holmberg comments on the equality of the sexes in this regard:

Generally speaking, great freedom is allowed in matters of sex. A man is permitted to have intercourse not only with his own wife or wives but also with her (their) sisters, real or classificatory. Conversely, a woman is allowed to have intercourse not only with her husband but also with his brothers, real and classificatory, and with the husbands and potential husbands of her own and classificatory sisters. Thus, apart from one’s real spouse, there may be as many as eight or ten potential spouses with who one may have sex relations. There is, moreover, no taboo on sex relations between unmarried potential spouses, provided the women have undergone the rites of maturity. Virginity is not a virtue. Consequently unmarried adults rarely, if ever, lack for sexual partners and frequently indulge in sex.⁶⁰

Endicott and Endicott point out that another reflection of gender equality is when a society values both maternal and paternal descent.⁶¹ Indeed, nomadic foragers usually figure descent bilaterally, that is, through both parental lines.⁶² Knauft reports for a sample of 39 nomadic forager societies that 59 percent of them figure descent through both maternal and paternal lines.⁶³ Similarly, Doug discovered that 71 percent of a sample of nomadic forager societies had bilateral descent.⁶⁴

Gender egalitarianism is also reflected in residence patterns. Drawing on the cultural codes of George Murdock, Knauft reports that only 26 percent of the nomadic foragers in his sample of 39 are classified as patrilocal—living with father’s kin.⁶⁵ Among the Paliyan, at any given time, roughly equal numbers of persons shared camps with paternal and maternal relatives.⁶⁶ Marlowe refers to the typical forager residence pattern as multifocal, reflecting the fact that movement is the norm and nuclear families are to be found living with a variety of different relatives and nonrelatives over time.⁶⁷ The take-home point is that residence is flexible, does not significantly favor one gender’s relatives over the other, but might slightly favor maternal kin over paternal relatives.⁶⁸ Thus, the gender equality criterion of partnership systems is solidly present across nomadic forager societies.⁶⁹

The cherished virtues among nomadic foragers are nonmartial and include generosity, humility, and nonaggressiveness.⁷⁰ Doug and his colleague Patrik Söderberg examined the details of all incidences of lethal aggression ethnographically reported in a sample of 21 nomadic forager societies.⁷¹ The ethnographic cases were derived from an existing cross-cultural sample to minimize the possibility of sampling bias, which can occur if ethnographic cases are simply self-selected.⁷² Additionally, only the recommended ethnographic bibliography for this sample was used to obtain the highest-quality data on each society.⁷³ In this study, we did not classify lethal events as manslaughter, homicide, feud, or war beforehand, but rather examined the fundamental characteristics of the events such as the relationships of killers to victims, reasons for the killings, whether lethal events occurred within or between groups, and so on.⁷⁴ In this way, we let the specifics of the lethal aggression cases speak for themselves.

The core results are as follows.⁷⁵ Three societies had no reported lethal events at all. For the remaining 18 societies, there were a grand total of 148 lethal aggression events, with some societies having more than others. Men were almost always the perpetrators or co-perpetrators of lethal violence. One society, the Tiwi of Australia, was exceptionally violent, accounting for 47 percent (69/148), or nearly half, of all lethal events.⁷⁶ A majority of the 148 events, 55 percent, involved one perpetrator killing one victim. A one-killer, one-victim situation does not suggest war. Correspondingly, almost half of the societies, 10/21, had absolutely no lethal events perpetrated by more than one killer. After also considering the motives and circumstances of killing, which are interpersonal much of the time, we conclude overall that among nomadic forager societies, most incidents resulting in lethal aggression “may be classified as homicides, a few others as feuds, and a minority as war.”⁷⁷

Since nomadic foragers are so often assumed to fight over territory, it is noteworthy that boundaries are more typically controlled through permission-granting of resource use, rather than though outright fighting.⁷⁸ Kelly observes of nomadic forager societies that “a strong tendency toward permission-granting rather than active perimeter defense gives human land tenure its own particular character.”⁷⁹ Anthropologist Eric Wolf points out that “to survive, a person periodically needs to gain access to resources in other locations, and he gains such access through ties of kinship, marriage, friendship, and exchange.”⁸⁰ In agreement, forager specialists Lee and DeVore point out that local bands tend not to maintain exclusive rights to resources.⁸¹ For example, Canadian Inuit men hunt where they choose without attempting to exclude other hunters.⁸²

Moreover, the ethnographic descriptions suggest that the overwhelming majority of conflicts, disputes, and grievances in nomadic forager contexts do not lead to killings.⁸³ A common response to conflict in the nomadic forager world is for one or both parties to simply walk away, sometimes called “voting with one’s feet” in the ethnographic literature, an easy option given the constantly changing membership of the bands.⁸⁴ Another typical nonviolent approach to conflict is discussion. Among the Ju/’hoansi, for example, “Differences are resolved by talk. Relatives and friends may intervene in quarrels between the husbands and wives and help them to stop the quarrel.”⁸⁵ In nomadic forager society, an entire camp may act as mediators.⁸⁶ Alternatively, disgruntled persons may vent their feelings at night as the band clusters around campfires.⁸⁷ In conclusion, while some nomadic forager societies are remarkably peaceful and others less so in terms of interpersonal aggression, the cross-cultural evidence does not support an assumption that nomadic foragers are warlike.⁸⁸

The overwhelming majority of nomadic forager social interaction involves prosocial behavior—initiating and reciprocating good deeds. An extensive survey of the ethnographic literature led Boehm to the conclusion that nomadic foragers value behaviors that are generous, cooperative, unbossy, and unarrogant.⁸⁹ The salient cultural values among Mardu Australian Aborigines, for instance, include unselfishness, kinship solidarity, sharing, amicability, and peace.⁹⁰

Caring can be linked evolutionarily back to the basic mammalian pattern of nurturing dependent young, a tendency that is clearly evident in the order Primates and particularly in humans over the lengthy period of child dependency. Caring for offspring and other relatives is ubiquitous in human societies, but humans also regularly extend kindness and assistance to nonrelatives. De Waal points out, for example, the tremendous empathic potential not merely in humans but also in some primates and other species.⁹¹

As we saw in Chapter 3, the origin of human caring has long and strong evolutionary roots. It therefore should come as no surprise that caring is well represented among nomadic foragers. Anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy documents how childcare extends well beyond parents in nomadic forager society.⁹² “The fact that children depend so much on food acquired by others is one reason why those seeking human universals would do well to begin with sharing.”⁹³

Indeed, a prominent feature of the nomadic forager group is “an ethic of sharing that selectively extends to the entire group the cooperation and altruism found within the family.”⁹⁴ A key example is that nomadic foragers share meat. Social life involves a network of obligations to cooperate, share, and participate in exchanges. The ubiquity of meat-sharing in nomadic forager society is unambiguous.⁹⁵ The Guayaki of South America, for example, have a practice that promotes sharing: a man cannot eat the flesh of an animal he has killed. This taboo makes each hunter mutually dependent within a camp and underscores the absolute necessity of sharing meat with others.⁹⁶

The desert-dwelling African Ju/’hoansi, North American Shoshone, and Australian Walbiri survive by sharing. Wolf describes the pattern as follows:

All three populations—[Ju/’hoansi or formerly the !Kung] San, Shoshoneans, Walbiri—live in environments where strategic resources are widely scattered and seasonably variable. To survive, a person periodically needs to gain access to resources in other locations, and he gains such access through ties of kinship, marriage, friendship, and exchange.⁹⁷

Lee writes of the Ju/’hoansi: “If one has good relations with in-laws at different waterholes, one will never go hungry.”⁹⁸ Leacock describes how among nomadic Montagnais foragers of Canada, sharing is the path to food security: “Owing to the uncertainty of the hunt, several families were necessarily dependent upon each other, thus providing [in Steward’s words], ‘a kind of subsistence insurance or greater security than individual families could achieve.’  ”⁹⁹ Anthropologist Gerald Wheeler notes a pattern among Australian Aborigines of sharing occasional windfalls, such as abundant harvests of nuts or berries. When a coastal group discovered a beached whale with enough meat to feed many people, the Aborigines lit signal fires and neighboring groups flocked to the beach to share in the leviathan-sized bounty.¹⁰⁰ The reciprocal sharing of periodic food abundances means that over time everyone gains more than had each group simply hoarded more than they could consume.

In previous work, Doug has suggested that sharing across different bands is promoted by at least three factors.¹⁰¹ First, nomadic foragers are already accustomed to the norms for sharing within their own social circles, so it is psychologically and normatively congruent to extend sharing more generally. Second, nomadic foragers understand, and by example teach their children, the importance of reciprocal sharing: By sharing now, one will receive aid in the future.¹⁰² Third, sharing among groups is promoted through kinship and friendship.¹⁰³ The typical pattern is for members of one group at any given point in time to have relatives and friends living in neighboring groups, which creates an overlapping network that promotes intergroup sharing and cooperation.¹⁰⁴ Thus, networks of relationships cut across bands, including at times bands from different language groups.¹⁰⁵ Shifting band composition also tilts decisions toward reciprocal sharing and away from hostile competition for scarce resources.¹⁰⁶ It is a culturally biased mistake to assume that human groups everywhere will favor a dog-eat-dog type of competition over cooperation and sharing.

More often than not, children are not explicitly taught moral values in nomadic band society, but instead simply learn prosocial sharing, helping, cooperating though observation, and imitation of their elders.¹⁰⁷ The Yahgan of Tierra del Fuego raise their children to be “good and useful human beings,” and a similar sentiment can be inferred to exist in many other nomadic societies that emphasize caring and fairness orientations.¹⁰⁸

Writing together, Geneviève Souillac and Doug have proposed that it may be particularly easy and rewarding for children to learn empathy, cooperation, helping, and sharing—in a word, prosocial behaviors.¹⁰⁹ As we have considered, engaging in cooperative activity can activate a neurochemical reward. “The strength of the neural response increases with the persistence of mutual cooperation over successive trials; it is cumulative and self-reinforcing” writes biological anthropologist Robert Sussman.¹¹⁰ Such evolved neurophysiological responses may make it relatively easy for the developing individual to learn how to become “a good and useful human being.”

Nonetheless, from time to time, people need to be reminded of group norms, values, and ethical behavior. Members of nomadic bands, with remarkable consistency, cooperate to sanction deviants and ideally lead them to correct their misbehavior. Rarely do cheaters prosper in small-scale interdependent societies because they get their comeuppance through criticism, ridicule, withdrawal of support, physical punishment, ostracism, and even execution if the crimes are serious.¹¹¹

Since formal courts, police, and top-down leaders are nonexistent, nomadic foragers cooperate when faced with bullies or deviants. Boehm calls the phenomenon of the group collectively exercising social control against deviants a “reverse dominance hierarchy.”¹¹² There may be an occasional upstart, but the nomadic forager group takes action to prevent domination by such deviants. Many different types of social control are exercised in nomadic forager society. For instance, Doug conducted an analysis of the 21 mobile forager societies and discovered that ridicule was mentioned for 13 societies; criticizing, scolding, or reprimanding for 12; delivering harangues, inflicting physical punishment, or instilling fear of sorcery in 11; ostracism, gossip, or supernatural threats in 10; execution in nine; shaming of deviants in eight; withdrawal of social support in five; and various other infrequent options (such as fear of illness, appeal to conscience, destroying property, or disapproving stares) in less than five societies.¹¹³ To balance these largely negative methods of social control, it must be remembered that children are socialized to behave according to the prosocial norms and values of their society and usually do so into adulthood.

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, physician and anthropologist Melvin Konner echoes writers such as Pinker or Allen and Jones in listing relatively recent (archaeologically) cases of mayhem to argue once again that war is as old as dirt, thus missing the “big picture” that the archaeologically recent birth of domination systems changed everything.¹¹⁴ As documented previously, the warfare and inequalities that we see today, historically, and in recent prehistory are not representative of the deep past of nomadic partnerships on earth. The archaeological evidence demonstrates the prevalence of partnership systems over the evolutionary long haul. Of course, horrendous massacres; bloody feuds; acts of torture, mutilation, and abuse; the inhumanities and indignities of slavery; the appalling horrors of terrorism; and war of all shades are scattered across recent prehistory, chronicled in written history, and reported by the news media today. There is no denying this and no reason to deny the human capacity for violence. But we can go well beyond the easy narrative told by Konner, Pinker, Allen and Jones, and others that by compiling a litany of human barbarity they can “prove” war to be staunchly embedded in human nature.¹¹⁵ This explanation for warfare is as fallacious as it is facile. The worldwide archaeological record and comparative nomadic forager studies combine to reveal how domination arose from an earlier condition of universal partnership. As forager specialists Richard Lee and Richard Daly express:

[Nomadic foragers] lived in relatively small groups, without centralized authority, standing armies, or bureaucratic systems. Yet the evidence indicates that they have lived together surprisingly well, solving their problems among themselves largely without recourse to authority figures and without a particular propensity for violence. It was not the situation that Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century philosopher, described in a famous phrase as “the war of all against all.”¹¹⁶

In summary, the recurring patterns across nomadic forager ethnographies from around the world suggest that many elements of partnership systems—social equality, gender egalitarianism, personal autonomy, sharing, caring, and an absence of war—were typical of the evolutionary past when humanity lived as mobile foragers, whereas pervasive intergroup violence, clear-cut social ranks, despotic rulers, sexism, and slavery were not. As the words of economist John Gowdy remind us, partnership predates domination: “Judging from historical accounts of hunter-gatherers, for most of the time humans have been on the planet we have lived in relative harmony with the natural world and with each other. Our minds and cultures evolved under these conditions.”¹¹⁷ In addition, as we have seen, findings from both the social and neurological sciences are amassing more and more evidence that humans are happier, healthier, and more fulfilled in partnership social systems than in domination systems.

Lest this sound overly idyllic, of course, there are disputes and conflicts, dislikes, and feelings of resentment, and when problems arise, the group usually attempts to deal with them nonviolently, though occasionally these interpersonal disputes lead to fights and even killings.¹¹⁸ But at the primary level, nomadic foragers socialize children to be, in the words of the Yahgan, “good and useful human beings.” And across nomadic forager ethnography, central values instilled in the young are equality, humility, generosity, and cooperation, so that the overwhelming majority of social interactions are prosocial, cooperative, and caring.

We do not need to return to a nomadic foraging lifestyle to create a partnership world. Not only are many indigenous societies around the world oriented toward partnership, as we have seen in cases such as the Moso, Tiruray, and Minangkabau, but the socially and technologically complex Nordic countries also are well on the way to creating partnership societies within modern nations.

The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies, re-enforced by the recent Nordic experience, 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.

Humans are capable of cooperation as well as competition, sharing as well as selfishness, empathy as well as envy, and beneficence and well as bellicosity. Recognizing all these potentials has implications for security and survival in today’s interdependent world. A partnership perspective highlights the evolved capacities of humans to get along with each other, to work together prosocially, and to resolve their disputes and differences without bloodshed.

Such partnership capacities, we suggest, have been critically important over the course of human evolution and are absolutely needed today. Competition does play a central role in Darwinian evolutionary thinking, and rightly so. But as the sharing of meat and the open access to resources across nomadic forager bands demonstrate, sometimes the best competitive strategy in a fitness-enhancing sense may be to cooperate in a behavioral sense.

Indeed, findings of numerous disciplines show that most human behavior actually is oriented toward getting along with others without violence, showing restraint against lethal aggression, cooperating toward shared goals, feeling empathy toward others, and resolving disputes peaceably, often with reconciliation and forgiveness as part of the process.¹¹⁹ Moreover, studies from many quarters on health, happiness, and well-being substantiate that partnership systems are better for individuals, families, communities, and nations than domination systems, replete with their dehumanizing and destructive features. And given the serious challenges facing humanity in 21st century, working together for human survival is today urgent and mandatory.

On an interdependent planet facing major challenges, understanding the origins, natures, and impacts of partnership and domination systems on human lives and societies is crucial to human well-being and survival. Beliefs that humans are naturally competitive and aggressive can facilitate fear of others, distrust, and reluctance to work together. These assumptions can lead also to pessimism about creating more caring social institutions, achieving gender equality, eliminating gross inequities within nations and around the world, and maturing beyond the bullet and the bomb. By contrast, understanding the strong partnership underpinnings of human behavior offers a prescription for human survival and well-being. When the evolved prosocial and peaceable tendencies of humans are recognized along with the long-standing legacy of partnership systems, then the possibilities of creating, in the 21st century, true gender equality, rights, and opportunities, and of satisfying human needs, abolishing war, and handling disputes justly and without violence, all become viable.

In the chapters that follow we will look at progress in this direction, including actions we can jointly take. At the same time, we will examine obstacles in our way, starting with how people’s early experiences can skew what they perceive as reality.

What we see and reality are not necessarily the same. Even the two physical qualities we take for granted as objective reality—space and time—are not absolute. Relative to the observer, as Einstein showed, both change significantly near the speed of light.¹

As for the effect of culture on how we perceive reality, in some societies people blame illness on germs, while in others they believe illness is caused by a deity, witchcraft, or even a sudden fright. For instance, the Batek of Malaysia believe that the creator being, Tohan, would bring a fatal disease to someone who committed a serious offense, such as physically harming another person, and the Zapotec of Mexico believe that experiencing an unexpected fright, such as a snake dropping out of the house rafters, can cause a debilitating sickness called susto, requiring treatment by a curer.²

The recognition that what we consider reality is largely filtered through the lens of culture informs much of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology. However, this is only part of the story.

As we glimpsed in Chapter 3, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio distinguishes between core consciousness, which we share with other species, and the expanded consciousness made possible by our human brain.³ Expanded consciousness requires a large stored memory, the ability to reason, and the capacity to reflect on ourselves and our relationship with the environment. This in turn is connected with what Damasio calls the autobiographical self, which he notes “is not just dependent on, but is even regulated by, the environment.”⁴

In other words, the extent to which expanded consciousness develops, or fails to develop, is not something we are born with. It is regulated by environmental influences, and hence by culture.

Psychologists have studied what they call “selective perception” through clinical experiments going back several decades. In one of these experiments, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman asked subjects to distinguish between normal and trick playing cards—and found that people tended to describe the trick cards in terms of categories familiar to them. For instance, when shown a black three of hearts, they generally perceived it as either a normal three of spades or a normal three of hearts.

Since subjects had been told some of the cards would fall into the category of trick cards, most eventually saw what was actually there. But it took them four times as long on average to identify a trick card than a normal card.⁵

In another experiment at a military post, a man was dressed in the blue Air Force uniform, but instead of the required—and familiar—blue nametag, his tag was green. After a five-minute interaction, the tag was covered up and subjects were asked what color it was. Eighty-seven percent responded it was blue—the expected color. These responses—based on familiar categories instead of what people actually saw—were also given in settings where people tended to look at the experimenter’s nametag for identification.⁶

But familiarity is only one factor in selective perception. An even more powerful factor is the pressure to conform. This was shown some decades ago by psychologist Solomon Asch, who devised a series of experiments on social conformity wherein, unbeknown to an actual experimental subject within a group of confederates, all the other group members were following Asch’s instructions to maintain falsely that the lengths of lines shown to the group were equal, even though the lines were clearly of different lengths. Having listened to the other group members express their erroneous conclusions, a majority of the experimental subjects agreed with them, even though this required them to deny what their own eyes told them.⁷

Other experiments have shown the power of pressure to obey authority. This was demonstrated in the experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram. Having been told that they were participants in a teaching experiment, subjects were asked by a man in a white lab coat to administer powerful electric shocks to Milgram’s confederates every time they made a “mistake.” A majority obeyed the man’s orders—even when Milgram’s confederates screamed and said they were in terrible pain (though in actuality they were not receiving any shocks). So strong was the participants’ inner pressure to obey the authority figure that, although many protested and were evidently disturbed by the pain they believed they were causing, they continued to deliver “shocks” to the end.⁸

The good news is that not everyone has the same need to conform or obey orders. In both Asch’s and Milgram’s experiments, a substantial minority did not conform or obey. Moreover, even one dissenter had a powerful effect on others.

Undoubtedly, a combination of factors account for the differences in how people behaved in these experiment. But one factor is the degree to which people are acculturated to subordinate their own perceptions and feelings to social pressures—particularly the pressure of external and internal figures of authority, as was shown in a later, but strangely ignored, study of participants in Milgram’s experiments.⁹

Several months after his original experiments, Milgram and psychologist Alan C. Elms invited 40 of Milgram’s experimental subjects to return to the Yale campus: 20 who had been fully obedient even with maximal cues for disobedience and 20 who had disobeyed even with maximal cues promoting obedience.¹⁰ Elms interviewed and gave various personality tests to each participant. What he found, as he wrote in a 2009 article discussing experiments that replicated some of Milgram’s findings, is that “fully obedient participants appeared rather consistently more authoritarian than disobedient participants on the original California F scale as well as on several biographical indices.”¹¹

The F scale consists of a set of tests measuring how compatible an individual is with fascist rule. It was developed after World War II by a group of scholars, most of them refugees from the Nazis, trying to understand how so many people could accept, and even participate in, the Holocaust, and why Hitler was followed, even loved, by so many Germans.

This takes us to the pioneering experiments of psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswick, one of the developers of the F scale, and her findings that people who scored high on this scale generally came from families where deviation from norms was severely punished. Specifically, what Frenkel-Brunswick’s research shows is that the people who scored high on this F scale had typically grown up with a great fear of punishment in families with powerful authority figures. She also found that people from these kinds of backgrounds—in her words, people from families where roles were “clearly defined in terms of dominance and submission”—tended to develop an “us versus them” mentality and to support strongman leaders.¹² In short, her findings not only foreshadowed Milgram’s and Earl’s later findings that people from authoritarian backgrounds tended to follow orders regardless of how much they hurt others, they also showed that these people were prone to vote for and support authoritarian leaders.

In a related set of studies, Frenkel-Brunswick further found that, in addition to their tendency to conform to authority, people from authoritarian families also tended to lack tolerance of ambiguity and have a strong aversion to complexity. In these highly stressful families, she writes, “certain aspects of experience have to be kept out of awareness … to reduce conflict and anxiety and to maintain stereotyped patterns.”¹³

In one of her experiments, Frenkel-Brunswick showed her subjects the picture of a dog, followed by pictures of transitional stages as the dog transformed into a cat. In each case, the subject was asked to identify the image on the given card. Prejudiced people would continue to identify the picture as a dog, even when the characteristics of a cat became more and more apparent. As Frenkel-Brunswick put it, “There was a greater reluctance to give up the original object about which one had felt relatively certain and a tendency not to see what did not harmonize with the first [picture].”¹⁴

And that is not all. Recent brain experiments indicate that the experiences that lead to this mental rigidity actually leave their mark on the brain—and that these brain patterns appear to affect people’s political orientations.

In ongoing research, psychologists David Amodio, John Jost, and their colleagues study the perceptions and accompanying brain activities of people who identify themselves as either liberal or conservative.¹⁵ In one experiment, the researchers instructed college students to tap a keyboard when they saw a letter “M” appear on a computer monitor, and to refrain from tapping when they saw a letter “W” appear. While they did this, encephalograph equipment recorded the activity in each participant’s anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that helps people shift gears when their habitual responses are inappropriate to a new situation.¹⁶

Because the letter “M” appeared four times more frequently than “W,” participants became conditioned to tap the “M” key in a knee-jerk fashion. However, the people who self-described themselves as conservatives erroneously tapped the “M” key when the “W” appeared more often than did self-identified liberals. And this behavioral difference was reflected in differences in anterior cingulate cortex activity patterns: the self-identified liberal subjects demonstrated significantly more activity than did the self-rated conservatives in this critical habit-changing region of the brain.

In other words, the brains of people who described themselves as liberals— people who have historically challenged traditional beliefs about what is or is not desirable and moral—were more flexible than were their more conservative counterparts. And those who described themselves as very conservative were even slower to shift away from preconceived or habitual ideas.

The Amodio and Jost research team did not ask subjects about their family backgrounds. But as Frenkel-Brunswick and others have shown, people who grow up in domination families are more likely to be conservative—in the sense of identifying with strong authority figures and supporting policies that are more punitive than caring. And, as experiments also show, such people have difficulty in letting go of preconceived assumptions.

The work of Frenkel-Brunswick, Amodio and Jost, and other psychologists leaves no doubt that there is a strong experiential component to how brain rigidities and flexibilities come about. Particularly relevant to how dominance-submission environments distort perceptions is this observation by Frenkel-Brunswick: “It is as if any stimulus [plays] the role of an authority to which the subject feels compelled to submit.”¹⁷

Frenkel-Brunswick lists “an expectancy of self-negating submission and the inducement to repress non-acceptable tendencies” among factors contributing to this “rigidification.” As a result, she notes, “we find a break and conflict between the different layers of personality. … Assumptions once made, no matter how faulty and out of keeping with reality because of a neglect of relevant aspects, are repeated over and over again and not corrected in the face of new evidence”¹⁸ Or, in terms of our argument, the socialization to conform can be so severe that it stunts the capacity for expanded consciousness that makes it possible for us to accurately perceive and reflect upon ourselves in relation to changing environments.

Frenkel-Brunswick also repeatedly observed that this inability to recognize the need for changing one’s perceptions, and the accompanying denial of reality, is part of a pattern of psychological dynamics. One of these dynamics is denial about childhood experiences and the displacement of fear and pain to culturally marginalized groups.

For children in abusive domination families, it is far too dangerous to disagree with their parents, let alone blame them for the pain they inflict. To do so would only add to the children’s stress and pain because they are helpless to change their circumstances. So it is easier for such children to believe that they deserve this treatment than to accept that their pain is undeserved and unfair. Hence the frequent idealization of punitive parents by their adult children, as well as the tendency of people brought up this way to idealize “strong” leaders and to scapegoat “weak” out-groups.

Children in these highly stressful environments grow up with a great deal of fear and suppressed anger, which is then often converted into prejudice against out-groups. This was shown in other experiments by Frenkel-Brunswick, such as when she asked children to read a story in which one out of 11 featured children was African American (in the language of that time, Negro). When Frenkel-Brunswick asked questions about the story, she found that “children who scored high on prejudice mentioned the Negro boy significantly more often in an unfavorable context, even though the story said no more about him than that his father was a Negro and worked in a hotel.”¹⁹

She also reported that the prejudiced children tended to recall a higher ratio of undesirable over desirable characteristics. “This result,” she observed, “is in line with the general overemphasis on negative, hostile, and catastrophic features found in the clinical data, the interviews, and the Thematic Apperception Test scores of the highly ethnocentric subjects.”²⁰ In other words, the overemphasis on hostility and danger conformed to the children’s stressful experiences in the domination-oriented environments in which they were raised.

Brain science helps us understand these dynamics, showing that traumatic or chronic stress alters the neurochemistry of the brain. As Robert Post, chief of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Biological Psychiatry, writes, the impact of stress occurs on the cellular level in ways that reconstruct the brain, with long-lasting consequences for neural function and behavior.²¹

Stress tends to limit perceptual and behavioral options. This happens in part because stress often affects emotional memory in negative and limiting ways, as illustrated by the children Frenkel-Brunswick studied, whose overemphasis on hostility and danger resulted from their stressful experiences. As neuroscientist Debra Niehoff writes, “By progressively remodeling brain areas that participate in emotional memory, stress may slowly obliterate positive memories, leaving behind only the painful ones.”²²

Another frequent consequence of chronic stress is the development of a brain neurochemistry primed for violence or depression. In Niehoff’s words, “More constructive coping responses are lost, and the brain fixates on an increasingly smaller portfolio of counterproductive reactions. With fewer and fewer alternatives, violence, depression, and fear stop being options and become a way of life.”²³

Laboratory studies of hamsters reveal what researchers call “subordinate stress” wherein young animals that were repeatedly attacked by adults developed an increased density of serotonin-containing fibers in the hypothalamus, a brain structure and chemical pathway involved in generating aggressive behavior. As adults, these animals were more submissive toward peers, but more aggressive toward younger or weaker animals.²⁴

Studies show that continuous stress also can negatively affect those at the top of domination hierarchies. Baboons at the top of the domination hierarchy, for example, sometimes had elevated cortisol levels and nervously saw a threat behind every bush, in contrast to others who were calmer and less aggressive and hostile.²⁵

Niehoff found that in humans stress has similar effects. “As stress wears away at the nervous system, risk assessment grows less and less accurate,” she writes. “Minor insults are seen as major threats. Benign details take on a new emotional urgency. … Surrounded on all sides by real and imagined threats, the individual resorts to the time-honored survival strategies: fight, flight, or freeze.”²⁶ Or as stress expert Bruce McEwen put it, “People say ‘stress makes you stupid.’ But what it really does is limit your options.”²⁷

Another effect of stress is the suppression of empathy. Stress can make it harder to be conscious of others, or even fully conscious of oneself, as energy goes into ways of escaping from pain or at least becoming less aware of it. As Niehoff writes, “Empathy takes a back seat to relief from the numbing discomfort of a stress-deadened nervous system.”²⁸

This stress-related suppression of empathy helps explain how, generation after generation, parents can treat their children in cruel and abusive ways. When parents profess love for their children at the same time that they mistreat them, the protestations of love could be seen as hypocritical. However, Frenkel-Brunswick found a fragmentation of consciousness in people who as children were subjected to a great deal of fear and punishment.²⁹ Parents who love their children, having learned to fragment their consciousness, can treat their offspring in unempathic, stress- and pain-producing ways through denial. In denying their own harshness, parents also deny the maltreatment they themselves suffered as children. And all this denial has been, and continues to be, a key psychological mechanism for domination systems maintenance.

At the time Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac to God, his culture gave fathers the right to kill their children. When Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigeneia so that the gods would grant him wind for his warships to sail, the same cultural rules were in place. Later, in the fabled Athenian civilization, fathers were legally entitled to decide whether a baby, usually a girl, should be abandoned on the town dung heap to starve to death or be torn apart by predators.

Although such practices are no longer culturally accepted, feeding girls less than boys and giving them less healthcare is still practiced in some parts of the world—often by the girls’ mothers as well as fathers.³⁰ Even in cultures where we today find an uneasy mix of partnership and domination elements, we still often see parenting characterized by a mind-scrambling mix of caring and coercion. And the effects of this parenting are later expressed in society at large, including in how people vote and the policies they support.

In The Politics of Denial, social psychologists Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad document how people who were abused as children are often drawn to political leaders who advocate a punitive social agenda. This, they note, serves as a means of deflecting repressed pain and anger against those perceived as weak and evil—exactly how they were taught to perceive themselves as children when their parents punished them.³¹

Milburn and Conrad point out that the conservative political agenda tends to focus on issues in which the common theme is punishment or retribution, such as capital punishment, heavy investment in prisons, use of military force in international affairs, and punishment of “immoral” women and gays. These issues, they write, often “serve as an arena for displaced childhood rage, fear, or helplessness, and an excuse for rationalizing the long-suppressed desire for retribution.”³²

As Milburn put it in a Newsweek interview after the photos of US torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were published, “a major component in this politics of punishment is denial.” Commenting on how Rush Limbaugh could dismiss these barbarities as no more “than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation,” and Senator James Inhofe could express outrage, not about the torture, but about the condemnation of it, Milburn pointed out that these reactions can be traced to harsh childhood punishments. These, he noted, often lead to identification with the “strong” and, along with this, to denial that there is anything wrong with those in control using force against those “who deserve it.”³³

Milburn and Conrad point out that this punitive politics of domination is especially pronounced in men. They attribute this to socialization processes that teach males to deny fear, pain, and empathy, focusing instead on anger and contempt as culturally proper masculine emotions.

The emotional and cognitive patterns stemming from the psychological mechanisms of denial and transference in both men and women help explain why throughout history, including in our own time, autocratic rulers have enjoyed the loyalty of so many people, even obtaining their love. In their 2018 book, Raised to Rage: The Politics of Anger and the Roots of Authoritarianism, Milburn and Conrad propose that these dynamics ultimately lie behind the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016 and help explain the indifference of his constituents to the pain caused by many of his policies.³⁴

Since children are helpless in the face of adults who ostensibly love them but treat them harshly, many children rely on denial and identify with the powerful and supposedly “good” adult rather than the weak, powerless, and allegedly “bad” child. As adults, children raised in such punitive contexts not only may fail to empathize with the pain caused by policies that harm people or neglect their basic needs but also identify with and support leaders who decree such policies.

A 2018 study from the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics sheds further light on the voters who brought Donald Trump to power. Based on an analysis of survey data from 1,200 representative voters, this study contradicts the common opinion that the people who voted for Trump were animated by economic hardship, as in the often-quoted assessment that they were the “forgotten” American white lower middle class. It seems that the primary motivation for many of these voters was not economic hardship, especially not individual financial hardship, but rather the threat of loss of status or dominance. As the Director of the Institute, political scientist Diana C. Mutz, put it in her interview with the New York Times, “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”³⁵

Significantly, Dr. Mutz and her colleagues assessed what she termed a “social dominance orientation,” a psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society. They found that people who exhibit this orientation were more likely to move toward Mr. Trump, reflecting their hope that the status quo be protected. Specifically, voters who switched to Trump, the study found, were largely motivated by what they perceived as the threat to white, Christian, male dominance by a growing “brown” US population, foreigners, and women who they saw as grabbing power away from white men.³⁶

So even though many Trump supporters were Evangelical Christians, they voted for a self-described sexual predator who, like many of them, loved cheeseburgers and fries; felt superior to women, immigrants, and foreigners (especially Muslims and the “unfair” Chinese); and promised to put “America First”—a code phrase for restoring white male dominance. Moreover, Trump’s “strong-man” stance, self-proclaimed success through bullying (as in his reality TV show “The Apprentice”), and promises to cut aid to the “undeserving” and punish those who opposed him (as in “lock her up”) would also have served to deflect repressed pain and anger from abusive childhoods into harsh policies against the immigrants, women, and people of color whom Trump blamed for our ills.³⁷

Fortunately, there are, and have always been, those who consciously reject authoritarian and uncaring policies and relations. This is a testimony to the powerful human yearning for caring, freedom, and equality—human inclinations that, given half a chance, can overcome dysfunctional cultural constructions.

But the psychosocial dynamics we have been examining also demonstrate that the flexibility of the human brain can be a two-edged sword. Adjusting to domination cultures and subcultures, particularly to fear- and force-based childhood experiences or the control of men over women, tends to habituate people to accept, and even idealize, authoritarian control. And when people experience life in a domination system, they tend not to see that there exist more equitable and compassionate, and less stressful and damaging, life options.

Even in cultures and subcultures where there has been movement toward the partnership side of the continuum, our cultural heritage from more domination-oriented times continues to communicate the message that hierarchies of domination are normal, desirable, and inevitable. And this normalization of domination starts very early in life.

During the early years, when children’s brains are literally being shaped by both experience and instruction, cherished fairy tales, myths, and cultural motifs idealize the dominators over the dominated, such as royalty over commoners, instilling in developing minds that the world is rightly divided into those on top and those on the bottom. These narratives, which are imbibed along with mothers’ milk, almost invariably also present the control of females by males as normal, desirable, and even romantic.

In the West to this day, for example, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and other tales told little children depict males as powerful and females as powerless. These stories, passed on from generation to generation, portray women not only as incapable of determining their own destinies but also as decorative possessions to be acquired by men. The hero is a prince or ruler who gets to possess a beautiful young girl as his wife (a model still replicated in popular culture today, as in the term “trophy wife”).

When women in children’s tales have some power, they are generally evil stepmothers or witches. So long before their critical faculties are in place, children learn the insidious lesson in folktales, books, and media that women should not be entrusted with power.

Even more perversely misogynous is the fabled Persian story of Sheherazade and her 1,000 Arabian tales. In this story, still included in many anthologies as romantic, a courageous and creative young woman, Sheherazade, saves her own life and that of countless other girls with inventive tales that distract a Persian king who for years raped a young girl every night and had her killed the next morning. As a reward for this accomplishment, in a bizarre “happy ending,” Sheherazade gets to spend the rest of her life in the harem of this serial killer. There is not even a hint in the story that this royal monster should be punished for his crimes. On the contrary, he is rewarded with an entertaining and lovely new wife.

In other classic tales, such as The Odyssey, the hero’s violence is idealized—as it still is in much of today’s action entertainment. We learn how, wielding his lethal blade, Odysseus fights evil, which in the Odyssey is often embodied by sorceresses and female monsters. This theme of the female as villain also still lingers, as in the plot formula for the iconic James Bond films from Diamonds Are Forever to Ocotpussy. In all this normative literature, there are only the possibilities to dominate or be dominated. There is no partnership alternative.

Even the language we inherited from more rigid domination times constricts our ability to see partnership relations as a possibility. As Robert Ornstein writes in The Psychology of Consciousness, “Within a linguistic community, the common language provides an almost unconsciously agreed on set of categories for experience, and allows the speakers of that language to ignore experiences excluded by the common category system.”³⁸

This is a vital point. Language can be an instrument for excluding from consciousness even what we ourselves observe and experience. This is dramatically illustrated by the terms matriarchy (rule by mothers) and patriarchy (rule by fathers)—the only conventional categories that take into account how gender relations are constructed.

While at first glance matriarchy and patriarchy may seem like two contrasting categories, they actually describe the same way of structuring relations: both present rankings of domination—beginning with the ranking of half of our species over the other half—as the only possibility. Rather than expanding consciousness, these terms constrict consciousness, making it hard to imagine gender relations that are not based on dominating or being dominated.

Because there was no term for a relationship where women and men are equals, Riane coined the neologism gylany. It derives from the Greek gyne (woman) and andros (man) linked by the letter l for the Greek verb lyo (to set free) and lyen (to resolve). The letter l also indicates that the female and male parts of humanity are linked rather than ranked.³⁹ This new term provides a word for ideas and experiences that fall outside both matriarchy and patriarchy. Having this term can help us expand our consciousness.

Of course, much more than new terminology is needed to change old ways of perceiving and structuring “reality.” For transformative change, we have to address the underlying dynamics of social systems—starting with the interconnections between the formative gender and parent-child relations and relations in society at large.

What happens in families and in the larger society is not a one-way process. Maintaining systems of domination entails interactive psychosocial dynamics that involve politics, economics, religion, and other institutions that severely limit partnership alternatives all through life. In other words, childhood experiences are not the simple cause of what later goes on in families and other institutions. Peer groups, education, religion, and other institutions interact with what children experience and observe in families, reinforcing one another.

Nonetheless, family socialization for relations of domination and submission is particularly effective. This is not only because early family experiences are so important. It is also, as we will see next, because these relations involve touch to the body—and it is through intimate touch that socialization is most powerful and enduring.

The idea that touch and sexuality have anything to do with partnership and domination systems may seem strange. But as physical anthropologist Ashley Montagu showed in his groundbreaking book Touching, how we are touched can powerfully affect how we feel, think, and act.¹

The effects of touch are especially powerful in childhood. But touch is important throughout life. This is because, in the words of psychologist Dacher Keltner, “human skin has special receptors that transform patterns of tactile stimulation—a mother’s caress or a friend’s pat on the back—into indelible sensations as lasting as childhood smells.”²

We communicate with one another through touch, starting from birth. As Keltner and others have found, we actually read other’s intentions and emotions by how we are touched. In one of these experiment, scientists put strangers on two sides of a barrier so that they could not see each other but could touch each other through a hole. One person was asked to touch the other on the forearm several times, each time trying to convey one of 12 emotions—from anger, fear, and disgust to love, gratitude, and sympathy. When people were asked to describe the emotion they thought the person touching them was communicating, they successfully identified it to an amazing degree.³

Of course, our skin is not the only part of our body that registers what others are communicating. Many parts of our bodies are involved in receiving and transmitting sensory information. For instance, if someone threatens us, our heart and breathing rates increase, sending signals to our brain to confront or to flee. Studies also show that the heart often reacts to signals before our brains do.⁴ Our glands, organs, and other bodily systems, too, respond to environmental stimuli and transmit messages to our brains. All this is part of interactive feedback loops. Neurons communicate with one another and consolidate information.

Ultimately, the ways that people relate to others are processed through our bodies. And especially in parent-child relations and also later in sexual contexts, touching plays an important role in how feelings, thoughts, and even brains are shaped. Babies have to be touched to be fed, and even when they are not breastfed, they have to be cleaned, wiped, and carried. As Kenneth A. Wesson notes, at “nearly all early phases of one’s development, a great deal is learned about the environment by the act of touching.”⁵

Indeed, the skin can be seen as an extension of the brain itself. While the exact neurology of touch, and how it affects emotions and behavior, remains to be fully understood, we know that caring touch can trigger the release of oxytocin, bringing feelings of warmth and pleasure.⁶ By contrast, uncaring and hurtful touch triggers the release of different neurochemicals, bringing feelings of pain, fear, and anger.⁷

The effect of touch on our nervous systems, as well as on our feelings and behaviors, is not just a temporary matter. As Montagu observed, the effects of touch start at birth and continue throughout life. How we are touched affects everything, including whether empathy and caring or fight/flight and dissociation patterns become habitual, and whether a morality of caring or coercion is considered normal.⁸

This is why, in order to maintain domination systems, coercive and hurtful touch is a powerful way of socializing people, whether they are those who dominate or those who are dominated. In this chapter, we explore how the patterns of touch, intimacy, and sexuality differ at the opposite ends of the domination-partnership continuum, and why understanding the societal variations in coercive and caring touch is important.

The practice of foot-binding was prevalent in prerevolutionary China, not only in the ruling classes but also in large sections of the population. From the age of around five to 13 or 14 years, little girls’ feet were tightly bound until they were deformed into little stumps, making walking difficult and running impossible. This years-long ordeal not only impeded girls’ natural growth; it also caused them excruciating pain. But it continued because men—those who held power—found these crippled feet sexually arousing and demanded it in their brides.

Foot-binding was a way of incapacitating women so that they could not escape their subordinate positions. But, as anthropologist C. Fred Blake writes in his study of this brutal practice, it did much more than that: foot-binding taught women to accept submission and self-sacrifice as the essence of their sense of self.⁹

On the fundamental level of neural pathways, foot-binding trained women from early childhood to mold their minds and bodies—and with this, what they imaged as their core identity or self—to the requirements of those in power. As is often the case with domination socialization, the main enforcer of this mutilation was the girl’s own mother. Having herself had to mold her body, and her sense of self, to conform to these cruel requirements, a mother demanded from her daughters the sacrifice of their natural capacity to run, dance, and even walk without difficulty—as well as the terrible pain of years of oozing sores, bandages stiff with dried pus and blood, and sloughed-off gobs of flesh. It was a girl’s mother who punished her for removing her bandages, and who insisted that men required this.