The Glacier & the Flame Book II REDEFINING EVIL DAVID LOYE

Transcription

1 The Glacier & the Flame Book II REDEFINING EVIL DAVID LOYE

2 The Glacier and the Flame II REDEFINING EVIL DAVID LOYE Osanto University Press copyright 2013

3 FREE AND EASY READER S GUIDE. 1. Read on SCREEN or quick pdf DOWNLOAD to easy E- reader phone, book, or computer. 2. This Free First Reader s Copy is not excerpts. It s everything from beginning to end only notes, references, and index are missing. 3. In lieu of notes and references, Google or other search engine will take you quickly online to practically everything you may want to know. 4. In lieu of an index, with this PDF on screen or download, your computer s Find or Search feature will quickly take you to all names, places, or concepts of interest. 5. I m still working on notes and references before locking this book fully into place. So please write if you catch needed corrections or have questions (davidloye@gmail.com). 6. To browse for a quick sense of what this book covers, first scan Table of Contents, then read brief Prologue. 7. This book is copyrighted. This means you can t republish it for sale or claim any part of it for your own. But you can quote from it and make copies free of charge. For all uses you must credit book, author, and online publisher (Osanto University, 2013) as the source. 8. Sign up with Osanto University ( to get free online updates on more books and features as we develop this new meeting place for better world builders over the months ahead. May the Force be with you!

4 Worldwide you work for human rights, the women s movement, the environment, peace, an end to poverty or homelessness on and on the causes rise... Then it happens. Isn t it as though something like the chill wind blown off an immense glacier sweeps into our lives to try to snuff out the flame of the drive of the good within us? Oh how well you and I know this feeling! Again and again all that was moving forward in our evolution is suddenly politically, economically, spiritually, and morally driven radically backward and downward. What is this chill that with astonishing speed, defying everything we have come to think of as intelligence, purpose, values, and sanity, can move into our nations, hearts, and minds to seize and numb us? What is the Glacier? But of equal concern, what, by contrast, is the Flame? The Glacier and the Flame I: Rediscovering Goodness, page 1

5 CONTENTS PROLOGUE MAPPING AND MELTING THE 1 GLACIER PART I MORE PARABLES OF SCIENCE 5 ONE THE LOSS OF GOODNESS 6 TWO THE APOSTASY OF MARIJA 12 GIMBUTAS THREE THE APOSTASY WIDENS AND 21 THE OPPOSITION DEEPENS FOUR THE DISAPPEARED APOSTASY 29 OF 100 YEARS OF FAMOUS MALE SCHOLARS FIVE MAINSTREAMING THE APOSTASY: 39 THE SYSTEMS SCIENCE OF RIANE EISLER iv

6 SIX FURTHER MAINSTREAMING THE 45 APOSTASY SEVEN REINFORCING THE APOSTASY: 55 THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RUTH BENEDICT PART II WHAT IS VERSUS WHAT 62 SHOULD BE EIGHT PARTNERSHIP AND 63 DOMINATOR MORALITY NINE THE TWO WORLDS AND THE 76 FOUNDING OF SOCIAL SCIENCE TEN THE RESURGENCE OF THE 82 GODDESS ELEVEN THE MANGLING AND POISONING 93 OF RELIGION EPILOGUE REDEFINING EVIL 112 v

7 REFLECTIONS AND RESOURCES 116 FOUNDATIONS AND A STATEMENT OF 117 MORAL TRANSFORMATION THEORY THE CODE OF OSANTO AND THE 131 CODE OF SNARLSGRRRRRR THE GLACIER AND THE FLAME: 136 BRIEF BOOK DESCRIPTIONS OSANTO UNIVERSITY 147 TABLE X: PARTNERSHIP AND DOMINATOR 150 MORALITY: CONCEPTS BEARING ON THE DIFFERENCE FROM MANY FIELDS ABOUT THE AUTHOR 157 1

8 PROLOGUE MAPPING AND MELTING THE GLACIER We live by story, it is said. If so, this must be said. In its acceptance and even blind celebration of evil, from all sides we re being told that the story we live by is killing us. Is the wholesale slaughter of war after war to be our highest calling? Or are we meant by evolution to find more glory in sustaining peace? Is this lone planet out of which the miracle of life emerged something to be trashed and consumed down to the last apple or last drop of oil? Or is it a garden to be cherished and cared for with love and respect? Is one gender, one race, one class, or one creed so superior that by the sacred nature of what exists it has been granted the right to lord it over all others? Or is ours a species rich in its diversity and what these differences contribute to our delight and well-being during our time here on earth? Is it decreed beyond change that the rich are to automatically get richer and the poor to automatically get 1

9 poorer? David Loye Or is the message of earth that there can be enough here for all of us if we will just arrange things in better ways? Are we by nature meant to lie, cheat, thieve, defraud, exploit, enslave, harass, molest, beat, rape, terrorize, shoot, stab, poison, or bomb one another? Or does our species have a higher calling? In this book we ll look at the incredible story of what happened to us on the way to a better world. We ll look at how by nature we were meant to live. We ll uncover the dark tale of how, when, what, and by whom we were shoved off track for over 5,000 years. We ll see how with even by now the best of intentions the significance for us of what happened back then was concealed by the most skillful cover-up of all time. In short, we ll see what both progressive science and progressive spirituality tell us of how we ve been checked in place and even driven backward in evolution by suppression of the evidence of what happened to us that is, of who we really were, and are, and could have been, and still can be. We ll see how even now in what feels like the end game, with the game going against us we can get back on track. Of Evolution and Revolution This is the second of the books of The Glacier and the Flame. 2

10 Redefining Evil The title signals my purpose. It is to bring to life the immense body of science and spirituality that reveals the power of the Flame within us to speed up evolution of the best in us before the worst in us destroys us. It is to uncover what primarily drives human evolution... what opposes it... and how we can update it, fight for it, and gain the better future before our time runs out. Rediscovering Goodness, first for The Glacier and the Flame, focused on the revolutionary power of the Flame as a metaphor for the drive to be and do good in the world. Of goodness, in that book we learn of where it comes from... of how we nurture and develop it within ourselves... of how we now seek to find ways to speed its development within our deeply troubled world. In this book we turn to the other side. Of now pivotal concern, we turn to the woefully confused, and all too widely glossed over or otherwise evaded, but crucial, question of what is evil. To grasp the magnitude and dark vector of this factor in evolution, the Glacier is my metaphor for all that sets out to snuff out, and in effect even strangle in the cradle, the Flame first revealed in the bright eye of the new born child. In Part I: More Parables of Science, and in Part II: What Is Versus What Should Be, we will take a deep new look at the Glacier and the Flame in terms of two radically different stories that science and religion tell of who we are and what has brought us to where we are today. Most widely entrenched, by now the traditional view, is 3

11 David Loye the story of ours as a heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance, suffering and limitation to the technological wonder that s created the high level of civilization we enjoy today. Linked to this story for religion has been the view of our rise from the dark clasp of original sin. From this dismal mindset we ve ostensibly graduated to a science empowering the belief in survival of the fittest and selfish genes as prime drivers for human evolution. The other story has had a difficult time gaining comprehension and firm support. In the words of noted systems philosopher Ervin Laszlo, it is the story of humanity s fall and separation from the original state of oneness with nature and cosmos a story that over time has led in our time to the current ecological disaster, moral disorientation, and spiritual emptiness. This is the story that in this book we will uncover in its urgency, and revolutionary significance, through the lives and works of an embattled band of scientists who refused to give in, give up, and go along with their peers. Indeed, depending on which of the paths for us into the future we wind up taking, within our bloody history it may come to be seen as the most important case of going up against the prevailing paradigm. 4

12 PART ONE MORE PARABLES OF SCIENCE 5

13 ONE THE LOSS OF GOODNESS After at least 10,000 years of religion, at least 4,000 years of philosophy, at least 400 years of science, and a still longer overall span for education all supposedly directed to bettering life on this planet how and why can such monsters as Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin still rise among us? The question widens with the horror of the Holocaust and the destruction of European Jews, the Russian massacres of the Kulaks, Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the Chinese destruction of Tibet, two World Wars and the 227 other smaller wars that blackened the 20 th century. For a brief time in 1989 and 1990, with the ascendency of Gorbachev in Russia, the destruction of the Berlin wall, and the end of the Cold War, there was as many of us still hauntingly recall the lift of hope for a radical change in the rules of the game. But overnight, it seems now in retrospective, the Glacier snuffed out the Flame. Over and over it s been the same story. With now the specter of nuclear and biological terrorism, the spread of environmental collapse, and time running out

14 Redefining Evil upon us, is our story to be only more of the same? Where and how did we go off track? Most urgent: how do we get back on track? To find answers to these pivotal questions for the 21 st century we must go back in time. We must do this to see how we became who we are today in terms of a knowledge and a heritage that again and again has been lost to us as the chill wind off the Glacier has snuffed out the Flame. So where do we begin? My search began with the fact of my basic training as a psychologist, then deepened with the excitement of my years becoming an evolutionary systems scientist. Just as effective therapy for us as individuals involves going back to look for the roots of what ails us, so must therapy for our species at this critical juncture in evolution involve going back to look for where and how we went off track. We must go back to the beginning as we know it today through the picture we have of the development of our particular life form on this planet. First came the rise over 70 million years of the primates the lemur, the ape, then our own closest predecessors, the hominids Australopithecus afarensis, 7

15 David Loye africanus, robustus, and boisei. Then came the first true human, homo habilis, then homo erectus, then homo sapiens including the famous Neanderthals of the mighty rear brain. Then at last, around 200,000 years ago, emerges homo sapiens sapiens Cro Magnon and our other less-wellknown African variations with the expanded frontal brain thence to ourselves! Now to the established story we must add the jolt of what Charles Darwin first articulated at age 28 the insight that the power of the Glacier to suppress the Flame almost obliterated. Incredibly bold for his time, and it seems now even our time, was Darwin s perception that the originating impulse for the moral sensitivity that most notably comes into play with the emergence of our species was sex. The primacy for sex in evolution is obvious. However could we have evolved into who we are today without the coupling of billions of generations of males and females over millions of years? The fact was well-established by the time the mammals, and then out of the mammals the primates arrive on the scene. But with the mammals and the primates as Darwin saw and modern brain research confirms there comes the marked expansion in the brain substrata for the next step 8

16 Redefining Evil upward for the development of moral sensitivity. There arrived the grounding for the social, intellectual, and creative capabilities that open to us the high places and the grandeur for the rise of humanity. At the center of it all was and is the human brain and centered within the brain is what is known as the limbic system. So far I ve summarized the astounding story of the revolutionary insight of young Darwin that thirty years later he went on in The Descent of Man to develop into the moralaction completion of his theory of evolution, which I covered in Rediscovering Goodness, which modern brain research confirms. But now his thinking becomes quite specific. First, said Darwin, came the sex instinct which out of the split into male and female would have driven our earliest predecessor not only to mate but also begin to care for one another. Then after millions of years came the step up Darwin s ladder for emergence of the parental instinct. Now we were driven to cherish, care for, and fight for, rather than, as did happen before then, eat our offspring. Then over thousands of years, with Darwin s perception of the emergence of the social instinct, came the limbic expansion of the capacity for sociability, or the enjoyment as well as the need for friends and community. 9

17 David Loye Now we could care and fight for others as well as ourselves and own family. Next the limbic system flowered into Darwin s vision of the great emotional repertoire for our species. Now in a new wide range of dimensions we could love as well as hate. Then came the eruption of his perception of the advanced capacity for reasoning made possible, we know today, by frontal brain expansion. Now wedded to feeling we could think. We could see beyond what is into the future of what can be and what should be and lay plans for how to get there. Thus, out of a vast grounding in brain science and other fields, we can now see how the capacity for moral sensitivity expanded with the emergence of each new species on up the ladder of evolution to ourselves. For likely the first time in the history of our species we can at last clearly see how we arrived on this planet either as a species in the past or as a new born today with an evolutionary inbuilt capacity for moral sensitivity. But why now should this massive upward trend for goodness have been checked? This is the critical question for our time and for the human future. 10

18 Redefining Evil The last Ice Age, which in effect covered much of the earth with a sheet of ice, ended approximately 12,500 years ago. Why then, within what comparatively seems to have been only a few thousand years of a more general warmth for both the bodies and minds of our species, do we find the winds of a new kind of chill blowing off a new kind of glacier that no longer can be seen? Why, indeed, does this change so soon become a cultural and psychological glacier chilling heart, and mind, and soul? How, we must ask, how could a drive established over aeons of our biological evolution from the first appearance of sex among life forms 1200 million years ago to the ascendency of the frontal lobes in homo sapiens sapiens be so easily blunted, degraded, and suppressed by cultural evolution? After much nibbling toward an answer by other scientists came another big jolt to the story of who we are and all we can be. For out of a cumulation of work pointing in this direction, the fall of the culture of the Flame, the rise of the culture of the Glacier, and the subsequent iron clasp of the Moral Gap we shall from here on investigate, was dramatically revealed by the archeology of Marija Gimbutas. 11

19 TWO THE APOSTASY OF MARIJA GIMBUTAS The standard story, which still prevails in the mass mind as well as in popular movies, books, and many scholarly works, is that the basic problem is that our early ancestors were brutal, ignorant, and blood-thirsty savages. The story is that this savage heritage persists in us as a matter of a killer instinct, selfish genes, reptilian brain, Id monsters, the Shadow, or original sin for regressive religion. The story is that from this degraded state we were originally rescued by a civilizing process set in motion by the virile creativity and racial superiority of the ancient Indo- Europeans, or Aryans, as they were also known. For proof the weight of popular scholarship has long pointed to the incontrovertible fact that other than in Africa and Asia the world's present languages are mainly Indo- European in origin. Marija Gimbutas did not set out to rock the tidy world of archeology, or the culture that over so many long years has made of this story another comfortable assumption 12

20 Redefining Evil supporting its ethos. Born in Lithuania, for some time all Gimbutas tried to do was to survive the Nazi and then the Russian take-over of her homeland and then most of Europe during and after World War II. At times hiding in forests and small villages, she fled with her husband and child to Vienna, then to Innsbruck and southern Germany. Somehow during this time she also managed to continue her schooling and gain her doctorate in archeology. Coming to the U.S. after the war, she persuaded Harvard University to give her a cubby hole of an office. Thereafter supporting herself and her family in the beginning by working in an orange juice factory and as a door to door book salesperson she gradually became celebrated throughout the field of Indo-European studies for her encyclopedic knowledge of a mysterious and intriguing early people one might glimpse in legends and artifacts. She gained the status of being the excavator of important archeological sites. She became the recipient of important grants and gained the prestige of a faculty position at UCLA. She also gained the triple strengths of authority in the fields of mythology and linguistics as well as archeology. This made it possible for her to triangulate on her findings with a power of systems analysis that was not only alien to but even still is suspect among many traditional 13

21 David Loye archeologists, who pride themselves on the "purity" of a far narrower view. Everything was going wonderfully well for Gimbutas in academia. But then came the apostasy. For across the span of old Europe, in a period roughly 6500 to 3500 B.C.E. which lasted in Crete until around 1450 B.C.E. she uncovered the detour that set us off in the wrong direction. By integrating the diggings of hundreds of other archeologists as well as her own numerous excavations, she uncovered the long obscured truth about our ostensibly savage ancestors and the ostensibly noble people who brought us civilization. The pre-indo-european world that Gimbutas reveals in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, The Civilization of the Goddess, The Language of the Goddess, and other works is haunting beyond measure. Rather than ignorance, brutality, or the bloody violence of savagery, in a tour de force of science, art and words, she documents the reality of what was long thought to be just naive legend. Shard by shard and site by site, she uncovered the existence of a highly creative people displaying a high degree of intelligence, technological advancement, and even scientific competence a people who, for from three to five 14

22 Redefining Evil thousand years, lived together throughout Old Europe in what seems to have generally been a state of peace such as has never been seen since then. The names given by the scores of archeologists who, besides Gimbutas, studied the cultures of these forgotten peoples suggests their exotic diversity. We read of the Danilo, Butmir, Vinca, Tisza, Lengyel, Karanovo, Petresti, Hamangia, and Cucuteni cultures. Out of the pages of Gimbutas' books erupt hundreds of pictures of a remarkable range of tools, gracious and bold pottery styles, fine gold jewelry designs. A lively range in clothes, hairstyles and hats already includes a good portion of the forms we know today. The models of their temples further reveal a free and playful artistry that seems to prefigure the architecture of Antonio Gaudi or Aero Sarinen in modern times. This was happening in no tiny pocket of land, nor was it revealed by only a few out of the way places. Thousands of sites uncovered by hundreds of archeologists are involved. In southern Europe the sites include the giant hypogeia on the island of Malta, where into a hill encompassing 480 square miles a temple complex was dug, of which until recently only three levels with 28 rooms had been excavated so far. 15

23 David Loye There is the 8,000-year-old town of Sesklo in Northern Greece, one of the earliest settlements to rise out of our species' first great agricultural culture, which along with other important sites Gimbutas took my wife and I to see for ourselves. The full impact of practically all this evidence depends on what often seems to be a lost belief in the power of our own eyes i.e., what can be plainly seen rather than on what we have been told by the favored scholars over the years. Hence it s been easy for those so minded to ignore. In Eastern Europe, in the rich early culture of the Balkans and elsewhere, however, was unearthed what surely cannot go on being ignored much longer. For here were uncovered what the simple power of our eyes makes obvious. There, plain as the nose on your face, one might say, were the world's first written scripts. In practically every scholarly tome and textbook today, clear around the world, we re told that the first written scripts appeared much later in the radically different culture of ancient Sumer. We re told the cuneiform marks of a first discernible alphabet emerged as a means of conducting business. The further implication is that this first big bump up the scale for civilization is evidence of the great advance that came with the shift from the purported savagery and pagan 16

24 Redefining Evil ignorance of earlier eras to the expanding glory of the Indo- European conquest, which gave us the glory of what we have today. Clearly sacred in origin, however, an earlier script originally developed for communication "between individuals and deities," as Gimbutas put it appears between 5500 and 5000 BCE. This was 2000 years before the Sumerian script still almost universally credited by scholars and widely celebrated as the world's first written language. In further evidence of the power of the Glacier of exclusion, calibrated radiocarbon chronology shows the earlier script Gimbutas found was used for 2000 years. Indeed, some of the basic signs or symbols for this script appear continuously over 15,000 years. Nearly 100 prehistoric sites have yielded objects inscribed with it. On the next page, in Figure 2.1, in two columns, you can see for yourself a comparison between the early Old European script (left column) and, some thousands of years later, (right column) the Linear A script for Minoan Crete. 17

25 David Loye Figure 2.1 Old European compared with Linear A script from Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess 18

26 Redefining Evil Here s another view further demonstrating the continuity over thousands of years for this ancient script. In three columns, this shows the continuity between the symbols for the Old European script (to the right) and the classical Cypriot script (to the left) used from the 7th to the 2nd century B.C. Figure 2.2 Classical Cypriot compared with Old European script from Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess 19

27 David Loye Let s move on to the north of the region for discovery of this ancient pre-sumerian script. And what do we find? Hammered out of lasting rock, both the immense remains and significance of this early civilization can no longer be so easily denied. In Ireland one finds the giant chambered tombs of Newgrange. In the Orkney Islands of Scotland one finds Isbister one of 76 megalithic tombs found so far. And in Stonehenge, Avebury, and Woodhenge in southern England one finds the awesome monuments constructed in such perfect circles that scholars think the people who laid them out must have understood the principle of the Pythagorean theorem two thousand years before Pythagoras. 20

28 THREE THE APOSTASY WIDENS AND THE OPPOSITION DEEPENS In addition to this powerful evidence of the continuity for an earlier written language and a sophistication in mathematics and technology over thousands of years, five other things about this widespread early culture are even more striking: 1. A general lack of fortifications, lack of evidence of destruction through war, and lack of depictions in art of cruelty, violence, or warfare. It soon became a popular academic pastime to try to punch holes in the exciting cumulation of studies integrated by Gimbutas by finding exceptions. But the evidence of the general prevalence of peace and nonviolence available to anyone who will take the time to 21

29 David Loye read about or visit the sites and to think for themselves is overwhelming. 2. An economy of abundance widely shared. The creative explosion of technologies for farming and domestication of animals, expansion of trade and barter, discovery of metallurgy, and the proliferation of crafts during the earlier time span is little short of mind-boggling. In contrast to the drastically widening gap between rich and poor which begins to appear after the Indo-European invasions the sharing of the abundance of the pre-indo- European economy is indicated by a comparable size of houses and burial gifts during the earlier period. 3. Creation or refinement of practically everything that makes up civilization. Music, art, religion, business, government, medicine, technology, metalurgy, manufacturing, architecture, urban planning, the invention and manufacture of fine clothes, homes, even comparatively modern plumbing and quite possibly the wheel it all came from these early Neolithic and Minoan people or their Paleolithic ancestors, not from the 22

30 invading Indo-Europeans. Redefining Evil 4. An equality of women and men As Gimbutas notes, although female figurines and images predominate in these regions, the evidence indicates a comparative equality of women and men rather than a matriarchy of absolute rule by women. This situation of comparative gender equality, as we are to see, is the aspect of this earlier culture that has been the hardest for people in all fields of scholarship, on all sides of the ideological spectrum, and of all shades of sexual orientation, to comprehend in terms of its implications for the moral and more general difference between then and now. Thus, point for point, we can now see the searing and I believe incontrovertible evidence of what happened to us. In the burial of the fact of an earlier written language, of an advanced architecture, of lack of fortifications, evidence of destruction through war, depictions in art of cruelty, violence, or warfare., an economy of abundance, creation of practically everything that makes up civilization, an equality of women and men we see how the paradigm of the Glacier swiftly succeeded in the chilling and freezing of our species' mind. 23

31 David Loye We can now see how, clasped by the Glacier, science and scholarship more generally suppressed and continue to try to suppress anything that threatens the standard story of our cultural origins and the power of the Glacier Most of all, what emerges out of Gimbutas' evocative pages is the all-embracing, mothering, endlessly generative, creative, and re-enfolding presence of the Goddess. 18 Along with the centrality of gender equality, the symbolism of this centering figure is pivotal in understanding the moral perspective of this early culture. So we have this generally peaceful, gender-equalitarian earlier culture of great creativity pointing toward the future of expanding fulfillment for humanity that has haunted the minds of our species' visionaries for thousands of years. Without knowing for sure that it had ever existed, to the legend of an earlier, better time, generation after generation gave the name of The Golden Age, Atlantis, Paradise, and all the other names out of a longing for something like this to be true. It was Gimbutas historic accomplishment to pull together the work of herself and hundreds of other scholars over at least 100 years to prove that it had been true that the better earlier time had existed. For this she might have been forgiven, but never for what she went on to do. 24

32 Redefining Evil For with the scholarly equivalent of thumbing her nose at the pack of them, she brushed past the taboos that had warned off thousands of male scholars before her to reveal what was ultimately forbidden the actuality of the plunge off track that was to drive us off course in evolution for 5,000 years. The Slaughter and Burial of the Golden Age We now know that the radical change, indeed the most powerful of all counter-revolutions, came about in somewhat different ways in different regions. But most often the pattern was of the invasions that Gimbutas records. In three great waves "the warlike Kurgan horsemen...swarmed down upon" these "gentle agriculturalists...armed with thrusting and cutting weapons: long dagger-knives, spears, halberds, and bows and arrows." Soon "towns and villages disintegrated, magnificent painted pottery vanished; as did shrines, frescoes, sculptures, symbols, and script." Soon everywhere in Old Europe there prevailed the "warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical culture" of the Kurgans, "who like all historically known Indo-Europeans, glorified the lethal power of the sharp blade." 25

33 David Loye These bloody, bashing Indo-Europeans were as the work of many other Indo-European scholars also attests the ostensibly noble people, who for thousands of years we ve been told rescued us from savagery. These were our saviors according to the new legends that as the work of cultural evolution theorist Riane Eisler so powerfully reveals their successors manufactured and passed on, for scholars to certify, and teachers and writers to stamp into our minds generation after generation. A people themselves in fact truly savage, these were the new conquerors and masters of all whose main claim to civilization was what they stole from the Old Europeans and other prehistoric cultures and later claimed exclusively for themselves. This account must of course sound exaggerated to anyone who has not spent time with the research, in personally visiting the sites, or in knowing the archeologists and others involved, as I and by now hundreds of others have. There are the modifications and exceptions to this tale that one always finds within both our personal and our species histories. But shorn of the illusions and the protective screen of centuries, this is what is there. On horseback, driven by drought out of what is today central Eurasia, these nomadic invaders were a people whose 26

34 Redefining Evil main creative contributions to humanity were the taming of horses for herding and warfare and the development of advanced weapons (for example, swords, shields, helmets, armor, and wheeled war chariots) for the killing of humans. These were also the people whose famed Indo-European language, while imposing enough of their own terms to assert their domination, also seems to have involved a borrowing of many words from the earlier culture they engulfed and robbed. For the immensity of what happened there is really no adequate expression. For here, out of a time of a peak in evolution of peace and plenty for humanity, we are looking at the rise and spread of the great chunk of psychic ice which we shall, through the chapters of this book, define as the Glacier. Here we are looking at the birth of the force that in our time could still be so powerful as to freeze and bury the second half of the theory of evolution upon which much of our science has been based the Darwinian second half, which today constitutes what is becoming a second Darwinian revolution in science. We are looking at what, had it been uncovered and known to us earlier, could have liberated us from the radically diminished and diminishing story of who we are and all we can be that became what we ve been raised on, which 27

35 David Loye worldwide still shapes the minds of our children today. Only here is something even more immense. For in this snuffing out of the Flame of a better past by the Glacier of a dark future we are looking at the birth of the iron clad clasp of the Moral Gap, and the freezing and denial of all to which we have given the name of humanity. 28

36 FOUR THE DISAPPEARED APOSTASY OF 100 YEARS OF MALE SCHOLARS As the 21 st century opened its dread prospects for better or worse, it became fashionable among some scholars, women as well as men, to try to write off the work of Gimbutas and other women researching and writing of this earlier period as just the fantasy of the "feminists." It was just the "Goddess bunch," or the "eco-feminists," as until he became wiser one popular theorist labeled them. The impression given was that nothing lay behind all this but the propagandistic needs of the women's movement. It also became fashionable in some quarters to downplay and downgrade something else that in a striking way emerges in Gimbutas recovery of our ancient roots the prevalence of gender-equality as of fundamental importance for the beliefs and goals of the Good Person and Good Society of the founder of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow s, vision. All in all, all the ballyhoo on the need for gender equality was pooh-poohed as just another women s issue. 29

37 David Loye In fact, what lies behind the revelations of the considerably different nature and arresting implications of Gimbutas earlier culture is not just the huge body of research in the fields of archeology, mythology, and linguistics that will be in the notes and references for these chapters. There is also behind it still another monumental example of the aspect of the dynamics of the Glacier that in another aspect of my work I ve labeled paradigm exclusion or the move by the guardians of the prevailing mindset to exclude whatever may challenge it. Here the mind-boggling irony is that this apostasy which scholars still enthralled by the glacial mindset seek to exclude as nothing more than a feminist fantasy had in fact, over nearly 150 years, been held by scores of male scholars. This includes some of the most famous of social scientists and others in their time, which those blinded by paradigm themselves look up to and cite in their own references as giants in their fields! Of many beginning points for the story of the "disappeared" apostasy of male scholars, particularly meaningful is what one never finds reported in the usual account of the life of revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Shortly before Marx's death, Engels was electrified by discovering the work of the Swiss jurist Johann Jacob 30

38 Redefining Evil Bachofen and the amazing first American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Based on 19th century archeological and ethnographic findings, Bachofen and Morgan had written of the existence of goddess-worshipping "matriarchies" that preceded the rise of god-worshipping "patriarchies." This earlier time, Bachofen concluded, was a time of an "absence of inner disharmony, a longing for peace," and "a tender humaneness." In that earlier time could be found "the beginning of the development of every virtue and of the formation of the nobler aspects of human existence." Of relevance to the third foundation for moral transformation theory (see Resources and Reflections, and Transformation, book four for The Glacier and the Flame) is also Bachofen's observation that the earlier culture was "the basis of the principle of universal freedom and equality." What excited Engels, and then after initial reluctance Marx, was that the earlier culture seemed to have embodied the equalitarian sharing of wealth and power that they envisioned for communism. This, in turn, seems to have re-awakened the memory of their own first step toward what few today realize was, for a time, a pivotal perception for them. This was their belief in the equality of women and men as 31

39 David Loye a basic system's necessity for perfected and optimally functioning social, economic, and political systems. "In the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid...is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself," they had written as young men in their twenties in Paris. "From this relationship man's whole level of development can be assessed." Following Marx's death, Engels expanded this earlier insight in The Origin of the Family into his contention that in history "the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male." The family thereafter was "founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife." Of male and female within the family Engels said the long-established relation was that of the exploiter to the exploited. The husband, he said, was "the bourgeois," the wife "the proletariat." This conviction of Marx and Engels gave rise to an amazing lost body of work by male scholars awakened to this arresting new possibility for explaining the pathological imbalance of the prevailing social and economic systems. Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, and August Bebel, the writer of the turn-of-the-century best-seller Woman and 32

40 Redefining Evil Socialism, both drew on the Bachofen-Morgan-Marx-Engels gender-sensitized view of prehistory and history for their writings. Soon thereafter came the early 20th century research and writings of the scholars of the Vienna School of Ethnography. Seemingly another casualty to paradigm exclusion, gone from even the footnotes by now, this group included the famous sociologist Max Weber's younger brother, the pioneering ethnologist Albert Weber. Following World War II, the Vienna School's studies of prehistory re-surfaced for one last gasp in Freedom and Domination by Alexander Rustow. Still another fascinating and of course conveniently forgotten figure, Rustow was the economist credited with the thinking behind the "economic miracle" of German recovery following World War II. In his other role as a leading German historian, in Freedom and Domination Rustow tracks the interplay of these two forces in our cultural evolution from the earliest prehistorical times into the present. "I have resolved to leave no doubt of any kind about what I affirm and reject in the past, present, or future," Rustow wrote in explaining both the purpose and the conclusion of this three volume set of books. "I affirm freedom and reject domination. I affirm 33

41 humaneness and reject barbarism. I affirm peace and reject violence." "These pairs of opposites are the great poles between which the drama of universal history is enacted, Rustow wrote in this work widely acclaimed at the time for its scholarship as well as for Rustow's determined attempt to shape the "moral regeneration and reorientation" as well as the economy of post-hitler Germany. Our present stands in the middle of a crucial, worldwide, battle between freedom and an extreme form of barbarism and violent domination," Rustow concluded in words now becoming dreadfully meaningful in terms of the global control of media in our time. "Our future will depend on the outcome of this battle." And what did the triumph of freedom over domination depend on? Rustow had many suggestions, but one in particular is of interest here. Of the late Neolithic culture that Gimbutas brought to life, Rustow wrote, "Here was fully achieved for the first time that equilibrium between the two sexes" that "united the good features of all hitherto existing cultures, but without their drawbacks." Regaining this gender equilibrium, he concluded, "still lies before us as by far the most important and by far the most difficult of all tasks." 34

42 Redefining Evil Additionally, there were dozens of works dealing with the influence of the goddess and "matristic" strains in our cultural evolution book after book by Jungian analyst Erich Neumann, ethnologist Robert Briffault, and religious historian and philosopher E.O.James on the earlier culture of the Goddess. Cutting further to the historical core were the insights and sustained writings of the psychoanalytic rebels Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and Erich Fromm, which briefly managed to burst out of antiquarian obscurity to seize a wide world readership. Adler wrote that the "fallacy of the inferiority of woman...and the superiority of man" poisoned "our whole love life" as well as the prospects for "the happiness of the whole of humanity." Pinpointing the relation to the earlier culture and the shift to male dominance, Reich attributed to a "patriarchalauthoritarian civilization" over a "span of years" our inability to achieve the freedom and equality of what he called "work democracy." And in parts of two books and other writings also linking his observations to suppression of the knowledge of the reality of the earlier Goddess culture Eric Fromm wrote extensively of the psychological, sociological, economic, and political devastation of the "patriarchal" in contrast to the positive influence of the "matriarchal" model for society. 35

43 David Loye Particularly notable is the perception roughly held in common by Fromm, Reich, and Briffault, of "love and compassion" as dominant values for the earlier culture and "fear and subordination" for its patriarchal cultural replacement still prevailing today. And to Fromm came this central liberating insight. In their time hard data on what had happened in prehistory was still so difficult to come by that he felt the truth of the existence of the earlier culture and the shift to "patriarchy" might never be determined. More important, however, he felt was this: that what was known even in the bits and scraps of legend and artifact in his time gave to an enslaved humanity "the vision of an alternative reality." Nor do the conclusions of hordes of male scholars stop there. For further wholly demolishing the charge that all this was nothing but the work of feminists, nothing but women s movement propaganda, were the scores of male archeologists, extensively credited by Gimbutas, who uncovered and extensively wrote of key parts of this astounding story. There were the discoveries by Sir John Hubert Marshall, Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Madko Sarup Vats of the majestic, peaceful, and basically gender-equalitarian Indus Valley 36

44 Redefining Evil culture of Harrapa, Mohenjendaro and many other sites along the border between present day India and Pakistan. James Mellaart's excavations of the comparably ancient (circa 6,000 BCE) culture of Catal Huyuk in what is now Turkey. Sir Arthur Evans and Nicholas Platon's discoveries of the inspiring high point for the earlier Goddess culture in Minoan Crete. And comparatively recently brought to the attention of Westerners, the excavations of Yan Wenming and Wang Ning Sheng in Neolithic era China. Moreover, to in a sense cap it all by providing a beginning for the story, were the findings of embattled geographer and Reichian scientist James DeMeo. Haunting in its implications for our time of cataclysmic climate change, out of a huge data base mapping the relation between climate change and human behavior over thousands of years, DeMeo was able to pinpoint a massive drought in Central Asia as a primary trigger for the cataclysmic cultural shift detailed in the works of Gimbutas, Eisler, in DeMeo s Saharasia, and by now hundreds of other scholars. All this too, from Bachofen and Engels to Fromm, Platon, and all the rest, was apostasy. All this was on the disks of mind set aside by the guardians of the prevailing paradigm for erasure. 37

45 David Loye For what I write of here has not only been excluded from Marxism by Marxist scholars but also from their respective fields by most ethnologists, historians, economists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists, and classical and religious scholars! As for the case of the thousands of bits of evidence found in hundreds of digs that substantiate this catastrophic change in the story of our cultural origins, what do you supposes has happened? Yes, all these shards, pots, figurines, scripts and murals generally have been treated by old school archeologists and other relevant scholars merely as curios, as novelties rather than as in any way revolutionary, as basically, forcefully, or systems structurally meaningful in terms basic to our evolution. With all this working for the Glacier, it s a wonder the Flame endures. But let s turn to the wonderment of how the Flame is being relighted as in the extension from the coals of the past to the hopeful glow of a new dawn we ll next examine. 38

46 FIVE MAINSTREAMING THE APOSTASY: THE SYSTEMS SCIENCE OF RIANE EISLER It is interesting and indeed, rather horribly meaningful to note how often the social scientists and other scholars who emerge or re-emerge through this rediscovery and redefining process were spurred to go beyond the old paradigm by the Nazi impact on Europe. In Rediscovering Goodness, for example, we saw this in the case of the psychiatrists Kazimierz Dabrowski and Roberto Assagioli, and then psychologist Eva Fogelman in her study of the rescuers of Jews. We ll now see it in the global impact of the cultural evolution theorist whose work was destined to most explosively punch across what happened after we got shoved off track, and how to get back on track. On the infamous Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night as it is known in English, Nazi thugs in Germany and Austria burned 215 synagogues, destroyed or looted more than 7,500 Jewish shops, killed many Jews and hauled more than 20,000 men 39

47 David Loye and young boys off to the concentration camps of Dachau, Ovanienburg-Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald. That night November 10, 1938 seven-year-old Riane Tennenhaus saw her father kicked downstairs and dragged away by a gang of Gestapo men. But she also saw something else that burned into memory and influenced the rest of her life She saw her mother stand up to and, through the passion of her outrage, convince the thugs to agree to let her have her husband back if she would bring a bribe to local Nazi headquarters. She obtained his release and the family fled from Vienna to Italy and then to Cuba arriving on one of the last ships of Jewish refugees allowed to land before the ill-fated St.Louis was turned back to Europe, with many of its passengers thus fated to die in the Nazi death camps. In Havana Riane grew up gyrating between the worlds of the very poor and the very rich. She lived in the slums, where after a time of dire poverty her parents started a small factory with next door an apartment upstairs for the family. But daily she set out for an expensive private school to learn English and Spanish and the wonders of civilization with all the fear and grime removed. She also prayed that her relatives who were left behind in Europe might be saved. 40

48 Redefining Evil When the war ended, and the newsreels of the death camps revealed the horror of what had happened, she learned that out of her large family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered all over Europe out of her memories of faces, visits, gifts, and all else that goes to build within us that sense of the welcoming oasis that gives meaning to the word family only less than a dozen had survived. She was fourteen then; the blow ignited questions smoldering within her that were to burn into the future. "Why do we hunt and persecute each other?" she later wrote in opening her book The Chalice and the Blade. "Why is our world so full of man's infamous inhumanity to man and to woman? How can human beings be so brutal to their own kind? What is it that chronically tilts us toward cruelty rather than kindness, toward war rather than peace, toward destruction rather than actualization?" Some decades later, after marriage, motherhood, divorce, and professional careers as a social worker, systems scientist, attorney, teacher, and pioneering feminist, after writing two prior books on the relationship between law and society, Riane Eisler buried herself in a decade of research to write what became The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. For the 20 th century this became the pivotal book to break through the walls of exclusion to mainstream the apostasy. 41

49 David Loye It became a best-seller, with over 25 foreign editions and referenced in scores of other scholarly and popular works on society. And in the widening scope of more pioneering books on sex, spirituality, politics, education, self-development and economics, Eisler introduced the conceptual framework of her cultural transformation theory. This theory identifies the forces that shape cultural evolution as deriving from "dominator" and "partnership" models of social organization. Rather than looking at societies historically and crossculturally through the lenses of prevailing categories, such as ancient vs. modern, religious vs. secular, rightist vs. leftist, Eastern vs. Western, Eisler identified these two underlying social configurations in each of which the social construction of gender roles and relations plays a central part. A particularly powerful factor for Eisler's work, giving it new scope and cutting edge, was how it drew on an archeological, anthropological, and sociological data base greatly extended beyond what was available earlier, as well as the findings of a wide range of other fields. Biology, chaos and new evolutionary theory, chemistry, economics, ethnology, feminist scholarship, gender studies, history, political science, primatology, psychology, and religious studies all are melded within the overall perspective of a new humanistic and evolutionary systems 42

50 Redefining Evil science. Yet despite this weight of scholarship, the story Eisler tells is easy to follow. Along one track, Eisler takes a fresh look at biological evolution. As with Darwin and Freud, she pays special attention to sex, finding in its emergence a key evolutionary turning point that becomes especially significant with our species. Our unique human sexuality particularly our human capacity for prolonged sexual pleasure and for pleasure bonding becomes of central importance in her analysis of the role of pain and pleasure, first in biological evolution, and then in cultural evolution. The critical factor at our level of evolution, Eisler observes, is not the capacity to inflict pain as is stressed in Darwinian first half or "survival of the fittest" evolution theory, and as became central to the violent and feardriven dominator model of social organization. What most distinguishes our species is the enormous expansion of the need for and capacity to experience, give, and share pleasure that lies at the core of the partnership model of social organization. Out of this need rises our great human yearning for caring connection, for love, for our drive to communicate through all the ways made possible by language; our capacity for creativity, our imaging of new possibilities and their realization through human technologies. 43