Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others… by David Jay Brown, Rebecca McClen Novick Page B
Authors: David Jay Brown, Rebecca McClen Novick
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teaching, where it's a transmission of ideas from the printed page tothe eyes, to the mind. They look at the evidence and think there's more going on there. Jung, for example, came up with the idea of the collective unconscious, that there is transmission through archetypes.
Sheldrake's idea of a giant invisible memory bank is that there is so much evidence of other forms of transmission. A huge amount of so-called psychic research into telepathy, clairvoyance, and that whole realm indicates there are other forms of transmission that enter the replication process which Vilmos Csanyi and Maturana articulate beautifully. I've also noticed that the gene-theorists tend to be more basically conservative and traditionalist. Here it may also be interesting to note that, in political psychology studies show a strong positive correlation between liberalism and empathy, and a negative correlation between empathy and conservatism.
RIANE: Let me put that into historical context, in the context of the tension between the partnership and the dominator models. The question of empathy is central here. Because one of the things that you have to do in the dominator system is to find some way to deaden empathy. For example, how in the world is a man supposed to do the kinds of things that he's supposed to do in war, and have empathy?
While we're on that subject, somebody was telling me of evidence suggesting that when we humans engage in helpful behavior, there is a release of a chemical bodily reward. We feel better for it. And yet in the dominator system that empathic impulse, that helpful impulse, is constantly being suppressed or distorted.
RMN: You have made use of Ralph Abraham's systems theory which explains the motions of cultural trends in terms of a response to chaotic or periodic attractors. What historical examples have you discovered which fit into this model of cultural evolution?
RIANE: Ralph speaks a great deal about attractors, and I have looked at the partnership and the dominator models as attractors. Using Ralph's terminology, if we look at prehistory as a basin, then the stable attractor there was the partnership model. I'm talking about the mainstream now, because obviously the attractor on the fringes was the dominator model.
Once we get into recorded history it becomes more complex. There are still elements of the partnership model, but they are co-opted and exploited by the dominator system, like women's nurturing work in the family, which is given no monetary reward and little status.
Still, what you also see is what Ralph calls periodicity, periods when the partnership model becomes a stronger attractor. But it never quite makes it. You never see the change, the system's transformation, where it becomes the primary attractor, and in The Chalice and the Blade , I describe some of these periods. Such as early Christianity. But then the Church allies itself (under the leadership of the so-called church fathers) with the Roman emperor, Constantine. And what happens is that you begin to see again a very hierarchic, completely male dominant structure--no women allowed in the priesthood--and a very violent structure, as manifested in the Crusades and the Inquisition. In other words you've got the dominator model again.
Let's now jump to modern times, to the sixties, when women and men were beginning to definitely reject the sexual stereotypes. Women were rejecting their exclusion from leadership and from the so-called public sphere. And men and women were rejecting the equation of masculinity with warfare. Is it really heroic to be a warrior? Wait a minute, they said, no it isn't. But again you had a regression, the "new conservatism," the rightist-fundamentalist resurgence.
And today what we are continuing to see in the world is a mounting partnership resurgence. But it is against tremendous dominator resistance, as we can see all around us in what's happening, from the U.S. Supreme
Sheldrake's idea of a giant invisible memory bank is that there is so much evidence of other forms of transmission. A huge amount of so-called psychic research into telepathy, clairvoyance, and that whole realm indicates there are other forms of transmission that enter the replication process which Vilmos Csanyi and Maturana articulate beautifully. I've also noticed that the gene-theorists tend to be more basically conservative and traditionalist. Here it may also be interesting to note that, in political psychology studies show a strong positive correlation between liberalism and empathy, and a negative correlation between empathy and conservatism.
RIANE: Let me put that into historical context, in the context of the tension between the partnership and the dominator models. The question of empathy is central here. Because one of the things that you have to do in the dominator system is to find some way to deaden empathy. For example, how in the world is a man supposed to do the kinds of things that he's supposed to do in war, and have empathy?
While we're on that subject, somebody was telling me of evidence suggesting that when we humans engage in helpful behavior, there is a release of a chemical bodily reward. We feel better for it. And yet in the dominator system that empathic impulse, that helpful impulse, is constantly being suppressed or distorted.
RMN: You have made use of Ralph Abraham's systems theory which explains the motions of cultural trends in terms of a response to chaotic or periodic attractors. What historical examples have you discovered which fit into this model of cultural evolution?
RIANE: Ralph speaks a great deal about attractors, and I have looked at the partnership and the dominator models as attractors. Using Ralph's terminology, if we look at prehistory as a basin, then the stable attractor there was the partnership model. I'm talking about the mainstream now, because obviously the attractor on the fringes was the dominator model.
Once we get into recorded history it becomes more complex. There are still elements of the partnership model, but they are co-opted and exploited by the dominator system, like women's nurturing work in the family, which is given no monetary reward and little status.
Still, what you also see is what Ralph calls periodicity, periods when the partnership model becomes a stronger attractor. But it never quite makes it. You never see the change, the system's transformation, where it becomes the primary attractor, and in The Chalice and the Blade , I describe some of these periods. Such as early Christianity. But then the Church allies itself (under the leadership of the so-called church fathers) with the Roman emperor, Constantine. And what happens is that you begin to see again a very hierarchic, completely male dominant structure--no women allowed in the priesthood--and a very violent structure, as manifested in the Crusades and the Inquisition. In other words you've got the dominator model again.
Let's now jump to modern times, to the sixties, when women and men were beginning to definitely reject the sexual stereotypes. Women were rejecting their exclusion from leadership and from the so-called public sphere. And men and women were rejecting the equation of masculinity with warfare. Is it really heroic to be a warrior? Wait a minute, they said, no it isn't. But again you had a regression, the "new conservatism," the rightist-fundamentalist resurgence.
And today what we are continuing to see in the world is a mounting partnership resurgence. But it is against tremendous dominator resistance, as we can see all around us in what's happening, from the U.S. Supreme
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