Media Review: 'Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives and Future,' by Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry

Abstract

In Nurturing Our Humanity, Eisler and Fry address the neuroscientific-biological and social-relational aspects of brain development in human children, as well as the ways brain growth in children is either promoted or inhibited, depending upon the relative degrees of domination or partnership systems existing within the social structures of families and cultures. Fry brings an anthropological perspective covering human prehistory, history and present-day humans, while Eisler brings a dynamic social-relational and systems science perspective. The effect of joining these perspectives is the dawning of a deeper understanding from which a plan can be made and carried out to raise new and successive generations of kinder, more peaceful, creative and intelligent humans. Nurturing Our Humanity winds up with Eisler’s plan, developed out of her own Cultural Transformation Theory. The plan calls for instilling partnership system values and practices into family cultures during earliest childhood, so that partnership values and practices can grow, endure, and replace domination values and practices in the family. As the family goes, so follows all the rest: schools, towns, cities, states, and nations.