About the Book
Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings--largely overlooked--from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course.
About the Author :
Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (hon) is Adjunct Professor at California Institute for Integral Studies Transformative Leadership Graduate Program, San Francisco and a Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is also President of the Center for Partnership Studies, Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, internationally known as a systems scientist, cultural historian, pioneering attorney working for women's and children's human rights, and recipient of many awards. Her groundbreaking books include The Chalice and the Blade, Tomorrow's Children, and The Real Wealth of Nations. She lectures worldwide, keynoting conferences, addressing the U.N. General Assembly, U.S. State Department, corporations, and universities. Her website is https: //rianeeisler.com/. Douglas P. Fry, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is internationally renowned as a peace anthropologist. His previous books include Beyond War, Keeping the Peace, The Human Potential for Peace, Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution, and War, Peace and Human Nature. His current project, with colleague Genevi�ve Souillac, entails an in depth exploration of human capacities for survival in the Anthropocene.
Review :
"Nurturing our Humanity upends the very core of our notion that humanity is, at heart, violent and greedy. Human nature holds just as much potential for caring and partnership as war and domination. Knowing that changes everything." -- Abigail Disney, President & CEO, Fork Films, director/creator of Pray the Devil Back to Hell and the PBS series Women, War, & Peace
"In a world that feels ever more dangerous, divided, and out of balance, Nurturing Our Humanity outlines the roadmap for how we raise a healthier generation of children and move away from a punitive and domination based society to a world that leads with partnership-where empathy, care, and community are valued above all, and each can fulfill our full human potential." -- Jennifer Siebel Newsom, First Partner of California, Filmmaker, Miss Representation, The Mask you Live In, The Great American Lie
"This is the book for our time! Eisler and Fry have put their minds and hearts together to provide an integrative vision of how humanity's cooperative nature can be nurtured and supported... Everyone should read this book... so together we can re-envision our future!" -- Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology, University of Notre Dame
"This fearless, beautiful, and very timely book is a radical reminder that humanity's truest nature is oriented toward love, partnership, gender equality, and peace. It is essential and transformative reading for every policymaker, philanthropist, activist, and change-maker interested in a more just, balanced, and peaceful world." -- Jennifer Buffett, Co-President, NoVo Foundation
"This path-breaking book goes beyond the conventional divides hurting today's civilizations... It is essential that the virtues of partnership get stronger and the vices of domination are controlled." -- Ernst von Weizs�cker, Honorary President, Club of Rome
"Nurturing Our Humanity explores the capacity for human happiness and its relationship to the development of sustainable cultures at a political and environmental point in history when we need it the most." -- James McClintock, Author, Lost Antarctica
"Eisler and Fry show how we lived without war thousands of years ago, and how we can do so again. This groundbreaking book should be required reading for all world leaders and decision makers." -- Sarah Parcak, Author, Archaeology from Space
"The central message of this hugely important and widely referenced book could not be more timely...I urge you to read this seminal cultural contribution for yourselves." -- David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer
"What does it mean to be human? And how can we construct a sustainable world where we might all flourish? This book addresses these universal questions at our particular historical moment of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, offering a counter-narrative to the outburst of dystopias over the past few decades...it makes a persuasive case for adopting a new narrative about human beings and human possibilities. It contains a message of hope for the future, a future which is dependent on the choices we make now." -- Coral Ann Howells, Professor Emerita of English and Canadian Literature, University of Reading, Le Simplegadi
