The importance of envisioning “community” (part 3)
by Gary Clausheide

Rianne Eisler has a different theory that she has written about in The Chalice and the Blade. She says that early societies developed in two different directions. One type became pastoral “dominator” societies, nomadic, patriarchal, and violent. The other type were agrarian, peaceful, sedentary, egalitarian, and goddess worshippers. She calls them “partnership” societies, and they began in middle Europe around 6,000 B.C. At some point the dominator societies began to invade them, supposedly for food, and later taking over their towns and enslaving them. The last partnership society was on the island of Crete and was destroyed around 1500 B.C. The point is that as partnership societies were overtaken by dominator societies, their patterns of equality and peaceful cooperation were overtaken by patterns of aggressive competition and hierarchy. That is what we have inherited today. (Note that once societies become hierarchical, I no longer call them communities. I believe “community” and “hierarchy” are mutually exclusive concepts.)

Another impact of agriculture was that as it improved, it freed up a lot of members of those societies. It allowed these people to focus on other crafts: house building, pottery, metal work, etc. Thus the beginning of “division of labour” and specialization.

A giant leap in the evolution of agriculture would have come when groups moved to higher elevations and tried to farm without the aid of flooding rivers to enrich the soil and smother existing plant growth. People would then have to figure out “tillage” (creating seedbeds) and how to maintain fertility.

By the end of the last partnership society, most societies are hierarchical, violent, patriarchal, have a ruling elite, and run on the energy of slaves. They are, in effect, dominator societies. These are the societies that historians dwell on. So let’s skip ahead over the thousand or so years of Conquest. The names of Kings and Queens, presidents and prime ministers, dukes and princes, popes and generals, who defeated whom, etc. is quite irrelevant to the history of community. We’ll pick up the story at around 1,000 A.D., after the Romans had cleared out of northern Europe.

Riane Eisler and David Loye — Center for Partnership Studies

The use of myth to present norms for communal life... how is this different from academic sociology? When will this particular tired myth die out? Better histories of Europe, that also take a critical look at the accumulation of economic power among the few, have probably been written.