Shifting the Paradigm: A Conversation with Riane Eisler, JD

Abstract

Teddie Potter: Today I am privileged to interview Riane Eisler, social theorist, macrohistorian, celebrated author, and president of the Center for Partnership Studies. Riane, we at Creative Nursing are excited to have you join us for this interview. Our previous issue (Creative Nursing, Volume 18, Issue No. 2) has a review of your book, The Chalice and the Blade, as well as a discussion of your work related to the field of nursing. So we're very interested in what you have to say. Riane Eisler: And I'm very interested in Creative Nursing because the nursing community embodies in so many ways the principles of what I call the caring economy. As you know well, Teddie, because you wrote your dissertation on that as well as on what I call the partnership model. Potter: Yes. You have been analyzing social organization structure for your entire career. Would you help our audience understand a bit about your personal history and how it fueled your passion for partnership? Eisler: You're right. I have a great deal of passion for this work, not only as a researcher and a social scientist and of course as a writer and organizer and speaker, but also as a mother and grandmother. I'm deeply concerned, as so many of us are, about what kind of world our children will inherit. The issue is human agency. We must understand where we are and what we can do to move in a more positive direction. My research came out of questions that arose very early in my life. When I was a little girl in Vienna, after the takeover by the Nazis, suddenly my parents and I became hunted. The Nazis had a license to kill, and we escaped by a hair's breadth. I was very young on Kristallnacht, when a gang of Gestapo men barged into our home and dragged my father away. So very early, I saw that we humans are capable of great cruelty, violence, insensitivity. But I also saw something else that night that profoundly affected me: it's what I call spiritual courage. We've been taught to think of courage as slaying the dragon, killing the enemy, but spiritual courage is the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. And my mother displayed that courage. She recognized one of the Gestapo men as a young man who had once been an errand boy for the family business, and she got furious. She said, "How dare you treat this man, who was so good to you, this way! I want him back!" Now, my mother could have been killed because many Jewish people were killed that night. But by a miracle she wasn't-by a miracle, we escaped Vienna. My mother managed to get my father's release; we fled in the middle of the night and I grew up in Cuba, in the industrial slums of Havana, and eventually came to the United States. All that led to the question that many of us have asked: Does it have to be this way? When we humans have such an enormous capacity for caring, for sensitivity, for creativity; why has there been so much destructiveness, so much cruelty, and so much insensitivity? Eventually, those questions led to my multidisciplinary cross-cultural research, looking for answers. Potter: You did a wonderful job describing those answers in your book, The Chalice and the Blade. Can you talk about the cultural transformation theory that came out of your work? Eisler: I want to start by saying that I didn't really embark on this research until another pivotal experience in my life-in the late 1960s-when, along with thousands of other women, I suddenly woke up as if from a long drugged sleep. I realized, through consciousness-raising groups, that so many of the problems that I thought were just me (You know, something's wrong with me! We're always told something's wrong with us, right?) . . . Potter: Right! Eisler: They weren't really personal problems, because I shared them with so many other women. They were social problems. So when I embarked on this cross- cultural historical multidisciplinary research, I drew from a much larger database than most studies of society. …