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Books by Carol Lee Flinders
"Nobody navigates the intersection of the spiritual and political like Carol Lee Flinders."
– Sue Monk Kidd
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Sidebar
Rebalancing the World -
Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World
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New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003
Paperback: 256 pages
ISBN: 9780062517371
The “gender wars” of the past thirty years, Carol Flinders argues in Rebalancing the World, have not really been about gender after all, but values: two sets of values, so radically different from one another that they would seem to be mutually exclusive.
Before we can get to the bottom of this conflict, she believes, we must re-visit and question the “master narrative” of human history that most of us absorbed in school. The full meaning of our pre-agricultural past, for example, has never been given the weight it deserves. It is time we picked up the marker that conventionally separates history from prehistory and moved it way, way back.
Throughout the eons that preceded the agricultural revolution, Flinders notes, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Certain values are intrinsic to that way of life wherever it is lived. Self-restraint, generosity, mutuality, balance, and a warmly reverent connection to the earth and other creatures are all adaptive to a nomadic, foraging existence. They are the values of Belonging, and they defined the human condition for so long they exist still – in longing, in faint memory -- as an indestructible stratum in consciousness itself.
With the rise of agriculture and city-states, beginning just ten thousand years ago, a new set of values became adaptive: irreverence, willingness to exploit the natural world for profit; acquisitiveness, aggression, and competitiveness. The values of Enterprise .
Given world enough and time, our ancestors might have managed to integrate those two sets of values, and build institutions that reflected that integration. But things were moving swiftly, and they did not, and the full cost of that failure is upon us today.
The values of Belonging are no more inherently feminine than the values of Enterprise are innately masculine, but for a variety of reasons, things played out as if they were. Women were by some wordless arrangement assigned to sustain the values of Belonging. Men would live out the values of Enterprise and build a civilization that was pre-eminently a culture of Enterprise : Separate gender spheres, and a horror of contact.
The Agricultural Revolution turned women into a permanent underclass. But women were not the only casualty. In cultures of Belonging, there is typically no word for “religion,” and yet the whole of life is imbued with religious significance. God is immanent, fluid, and everywhere, within reach of every human being. In Enterprise cultures, on the other hand, God is transcendent, singular, and distant, accessible only through priestly intervention. The same massive cultural shift that silenced women, that is, and enclosed them, redefined the human being’s relationship with the sacred as well.
But women are phenomenally resilient, and so is the understanding that God is, as a Sufi poet said, “nearer to me than my jugular vein.” Today, even as women reclaim their rightful place in the scheme of all things, the idea of God as celestial autocrat is losing favor. The values of Belonging, meanwhile, are reasserting themselves in every area of life.
At the heart of the crises we face – ecological, economic, political, religious – there is, indeed, Flinders concedes, a gender knot. But it is more accurately seen as a spiritual knot -- one that can only be untied by women and men committed to reclaiming balance, mutuality, intuition, and wholeness together.
With indelible portraits of visionaries, artists, and mystics like Gautama Buddha, Saint Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Muir, and Martin Luther King Jr., Flinders offers models for a new kind of balance. Rebalancing the World urges us to incorporate the values we are missing in our lives for the sense of wholeness we all seek.
"An important and captivating book. Flinders writes so exquisitely that you want to go with her into every note and cranny she explores. And what she explores here is brilliant."
- Vicki Robin, co-author,Your Money or Your Life
"A hard-nosed attempt at understanding how on earth we got ourselves into our present cultural trouble, and how on earth we might think and feel ourselves into something happier."
- Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature
"Carol Flinders takes us beyond simple notions of matriarchy and patriarchy, male and female."
- Dr. Elizabeth DeBold, author, Mother-daughter Revolution.
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