Rebalancing
the World
"Nobody navigates the intersection of
the spiritual and political like Carol Lee Flinders. In Rebalancing
the World, she offers an inspired vision for individual and global
wholeness. There is an irresistible boldness and wisdom in these
pages."
– Sue
Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
The “gender wars” of the
past thirty years, Carol Lee Flinders argues, 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.
