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peace & justice lecture series rebalancing the world with carol lee flinders february 18th, 2016 the college of st. scholastica alworth center for the study of peace andjustice duluth, minnesota 7:30 p.m. - 9:15 p.m. * * * * *"cart captioning is provided in order to facilitate
communication accessibility. this text maynot be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * *cart provided by lisa richardson, rpr, crr,cbc, ccp paradigm reporting & captioning inc.612.339.0545 caption@paradigmreporting.com>> well, good evening, everybody. 2 thank you for coming. i feel very supported. i always feel supported but particularly tonightwhen the weather was so awful and you people cameout and
braved it for this program. i'm sure you won't be disappointed. thank you all very much for coming. my name is tom morgan and i am the directorof the alworth center for the study of peace andjustice here at the college of st. scholastica. this is the third in a series of five programswe're doing this academic year dealing with thesubject of violence.
why do we have so much of it? why does it seem like we've always had somuch of it, as long as we've had recorded history. these are the questions that we're exploringall year in these lectures. this lecture in particular is sponsored bythe alworth center for the study of peace and justiceat the college of st. scholastica. and funded in part by the warner lecture seriesof the
manitou fund, the dewit and carolyn foundationand by mary c. van evra, a former trustee of thecollege. additional support has been received by theroyal d. alworth jr., institute at the university of minnesota-duluth, the st. scholastica womenand gender studies program, reader weekly of duluthand numerous other private donors. once again, thank you all for your supportfor making these things happen.
they wouldn't happen without you, and a specialthanks to the alworth family for their continuoussupport. speaking of the alworth family, that photographbehind me, i think many of you will recognize, thatis martha butler alworth, who died a little more thanthree years ago, and has been a very important personin the lives of so many people in duluth, particularlyat the it's my privilege now to introduce my boss,president of the college of st. scholastica, larry goodwin,who
will say a few words. [ applause ] >> good evening and welcome to the college. whenever i think of martha alworth, i thinkof color, bright color. her snow white hair, her fire engine red convertible, her sunburst yellow kitchen. martha was a vivid presence.martha alworth lived a life of purpose. she was a community and social activist anda voice
for peace and justice. she loved duluth and gave of herself in manyways. she served as one of the first lay trusteesat the college of st. scholastica and was later named trustee emerita. martha loved duluth and gave of herself inmany ways. she was a longtime supporter and board memberof the duluth-superior area community foundation,the league of women voters, the junior league, the buildingfor
women, grandmothers for peace, and multipleduluth civic and preservation committees. she valued the cultural offerings of duluth,including the duluth-superior symphony orchestra, theduluth playhouse and the marshall performing arts. she received the depot foundation arts andculture lifetime achievement award in 2009. martha embodied �lifelong learning.� she was a charter member of university for
seniors at umd, and she was a frequent guest lecturer in this auditorium. even when she struggled with hearing lossand had to wear special headphones -- and i have to say,this would have been perfect for martha.it's exactly what she needed. 5 martha loved to learn. martha traveled extensively, pursuing herendless curiosity about the world and its people. duluth constantly impressed her with its international
residents and their perspectives, which makesall our lives richer. she understood what we want our students to understand, that all the peoples of the worldare interconnected and that we all have a stakein the health of the planet, and in the safety andsecurity of everyone living on it. she was an early proponent of the duluth sistercities program, and a supporter of the duluth international
peace center, a forerunner of the sister citymovement for duluth. her interest in international affairs ledher to establish the royal d. alworth, jr., institutefor international studies at umd to honor herhusband, following his death in 1987. she was passionate about electing people shethought represented her beliefs, both nationally andlocally, even if it meant backing the underdog.
sometimes her candidates won, and sometimesnot. martha was not just a fair weather supporter.she always maintained her commitment to the causes and 6 the candidates she believed in. martha loved lake superior. summer picnics with family and friends onpark point in the north shore were her way to celebratethis treasure in our backyard. tennis was a large part of martha's life,and
friendships with her tennis pals were as importantas the game itself. we miss her at st. scholastica and we appreciateher support and the ongoing support of the alworthfamily. thank you, karen and royal. i'm so pleased to have had the opportunityto know martha and to have the chance to acknowledgepublicly the contributions made by this remarkablewoman. >> thank you, larry.
does seem fitting now for me to make thisnext announcement. i think you're all clear, this is somethingnew we're trying for the very first time. on the screen to your right, we are displayingthe text of tonight's lecture through technologycalled realtime captioning. you may also access this information fromyour smartphone or other mobile device. 7
although we anticipate a high quality format,there will inevitably be errors that are inherentto the technology. nevertheless, research indicates that manyviewers benefit from captioning, including those withhearing loss. a special thank you is extended to the edwinh. eddy foundation whose generous support makes thisinclusive service possible tonight.
please take a moment to complete the captioning service survey provided tonight to enableus to improve this service. on the survey, you'll also find the url youmay use to view the captioning on your smartphone ormobile device. we ask that you, of course, kindly turn thesound to mute all devices. so, if you can't see it -- it's over therefor a
reason so it's not so distracting, but ifyou want to take advantage of it, there are plenty ofseats over there so you can get closer to the screen. so that's one piece of housekeeping. back to regular business now. after these lectures, as you all know, weget together the following week for what we calla 8 talk-back session to chat about what we heardand process it a little bit, and this next week,the
talk-back session will be moderated by beth bartlett, who is professor of women, genderand sexuality studies at umd. and you all should have had a flyer aboutthat, when and where that little meeting will be hereat st. scholastica, tuesday at 7:00 p.m., tower 3121. one other little piece of housekeeping, ijust have to tell you, coming attractions. as i said, this is the third of five programsin
this series about violence, two more coming. these flyers are out in the lobby that tellyou more about that. there's one other attraction i just learnedabout recently that i should mention to you. this is a program sponsored by scholastica'swomen and gender studies program, march 31st, whichis a thursday, kind of in the middle of this otherseries. very timely, the topic is rape culture, spiritual
violence and visions of healing, with a womanby the name of gina messina-dysert, who's cofounder of feminisim and religion that is reachingout to folks in at least 181 countries already.one last -- oh, and then one last thing. 9 of course, at the end of the lecture we'llhave books and stuff for you to look at. we also have a table there operated by veteransfor peace and you might want to look at theirtable. they have things to give you and sell you,as well.
after the talk, q and a, right up here tothe microphones. please, you community people, defer to the students, let them ask the questions firstand then, if there's time, and i'm sure therewill be, then community people are welcome to ask questions, but we're here for the students, aren't we, folks, so let them have a chance. our speaker this evening is a writer, independent
scholar, educator and former syndicated columnist. she has a doctorate in comparative literaturefrom the university of california, berkeley, with afocus on medieval women's mysticism. dr. flinders currently is a faculty memberat the sophia center for culture and spiritualityat holy names college in oakland and a fellow at santaclara university. she's also taught at the university of californiaat
berkeley, the graduate theological union andelsewhere. 10 her published writings cover a variety oftopics ranging from medieval christian mysticismto vegetarian cooking to scientific researchon meditation. she is a co-author of "laurel's kitchen" andits later editions, which in all have sold more thana million copies. from 1977 through 1989, she wrote a widelysyndicated
column on vegetarian cooking, "notes fromlaurel's kitchen." beginning in the late 1980s, dr. flinderspublished a series of books on spirituality. the first, "the making of a teacher," wasco-authored with her husband, timothy. four years later, dr. flinders published "enduring grace: living portraits of seven women mystics,"a well-received collection of spiritual portraitsof
catholic mystics. additional books by dr. flinders have focusedon various intersections of feminism, spiritualityand cultural and biological evolution. "at the root of this longing" chronicles herstruggle to reconcile the claims of a lifelong meditation practice with her emerging feminism. her nextbook, "rebalancing the world," is the basis forher talk 11 this evening.
so i won't say any more about that work. "enduring lives" is a sister volume to "enduring grace" in which dr. flinders examines thelives of four contemporary women spiritual activists. and her latest book is "our fistful of salt:gandhi and the global women's movement." it is expected to be published this year byorbis books. as i said, dr. flinders is married to timothy
flinders, who has conducted research on contemplative practice. their son ramesh is a screenwriter and filmmaker. in her spare time, and i think she has some, dr. flinders enjoys swimming, hiking and,of course, cooking. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome dr. carollee flinders. >> thank you so much.
i'm so very grateful to be here. you have a beautiful town. and i was particularly pleased to find myselfat a benedictine college campus because it makesme feel as if -- oh, i don't need that, do i? 12 can we... because i'm micced. okay. when i was a little girl, our family farm,and my
grandmother's... [ microphone feedback ] and my grandmother's family farm were in the williamette valley, just two miles from alittle town called mount angel where there is also a benedictine college, founded by benedictine sisters probably around the same time that this one was. used to ride over on my bicycle and my grandmother used to take me to plays and operettas onthe campus
because she was an alumna. she had gotten her normal school certificatefrom the benedictine nuns and she was always terribly fond of them. i didn't know about st. scholastica, though,and in all my studies, i neglected to find out whoshe was, so god bless wikipedia, right? there is a marvelous little story which maybeis old hat to all of you is the fact that she's benedict's
sister, had a little hermitage with some otherwomen not far away from his, and he used to comeover regularly and they would talk about all thingssacred. 13 and she was very ill, probably near her lastdays so he excused himself at the end of one ofthese days, he had to scurry home because, of course, the rule meant that he needed to be back inhis own monastic setting. she said, "please, don't go."
he said, "but i must." she said one quick prayer. so she prayed and immediately a horrific stormcame down, thunder and rain. and she looked at him and said, "are you sureyou won't stay?" [ laughter ] so i love that image of a woman who can, youknow, bring down the wrath of help when she choosesto.
so love the benedictine sisters. is violence inevitable? i'm here tonight -- i think my job in thisseries is to suggest the possibility and lay it outas persuasively as i can that it may not be possibleto address this question usefully, authentically,without looking hard at what maleness and femalenessmean in our world, how they came to mean what theydo, what they have meant in the past.in short, i'm the person who gets to introduce
what a 14 friend of mine calls the "g" word. i don't know how many times you've been in,oh, maybe church, you know, a classroom setting or church meeting or school board meeting or maybe,you know, preparation for an antiwar protest or somethinglike that and something gets said and everybodystiffens just a little, and then somebody who's goodat placating a room full of people says, "well,let's not
go into gender. you know, it's so divisive. it's so polarizing." so we don't. i don't want to bring down thunder and lightningso i'm going to keep pushing that microphoneaway as far as i can. but, you know, i'm going to take a leap fromghandi who always said that when there's somethingseriously
wrong, you have to talk about it. but there are ways you can talk about it,and one of the principles he always advised and followedwas to remember that when there are two of you andyou've got a big problem between you, to recognize that,no, the two of you can be in the room together, trustingand respecting one another and wanting badly toget -- to solve that problem over here that's makingyour life 15 difficult.
the problem's over there, the two of you arein the room together. and, really, i think that's what i was tryingto do in writing this book, "rebalancing the world,"was to present a way -- a perspective on all of this,a way of thinking about it that allows us to begenerous to one another, respectful of one another, andobjective, too, to kind of put it over there so we canlook at it clearly.
i really appreciate it, i have watched bothof the earlier lectures and so i've got them rattlingin my head, too. i really appreciated john horgan's warm tributeto the wonderful anthropologist, margaret meade,and his particular mention of her belief that waris not an evolutionary inevitability, it's a culturalinvention, which is to say we can uninvent it, if wecan muster the will and the wisdom.
i feel the same way about the meanings ofmanliness that we've inherited and of the feminine. you know, those meanings, those constructshave gotten so rigid and so ever present, we're stuckwith them in certain ways, and when you're stuck in a story,it always helps a lot if you can come up withan 16 alternative narrative. how much can it help? well, it sure did help elizabeth cady stantonand
matilda jocelyn gage and lucretia mott backin the middle of the 19th century. i see a couple of smiles like maybe you knowwhere i'm going. historian sally rosche wagner came up -- i'mnot sure whether she came up with the question firstor the question and the answer at the same time butshe raised a very important question, how didthe radical suffragists come to their vision, a visionnot of
band-aid reform but of a reconstituted world completely transformed. whatever made them think that human harmonybased on the perfect equality of all people with womenhave absolute sovereignist over their own liveswith an achievable goal. it's funny, it never occurred to me to askthat but as soon as she put the question it's like, whoo,that's right, where did they get such a radical idea.
well, remember, they met at seneca hall, thegreat 1848, that was the great declaration of sentimentwas published and so on.they lived in the middle of iroquios country and, in 17 those days, this was before the reservationpolicy was enacted. white people and iroquios lived side by sideand there was a lot of social interaction, and thesewomen were right in the middle of that.
elizabeth cady stanton, every time she cameto see her radical cousin, garrett smith, who was partof the underground railway, he had women maybe fromthe -- onondaga tribe in particular, they were inthe house and she got to know them. elizabeth was at one of their homes and thewoman was -- one of the tribal women was givingaway a magnificent horse to a friend and elizabethsays, "what's your husband going to think of that?"
and her friend looked at her like, "are youkidding me? why would my husband have any say in my givingaway my own property?" elizabeth cady stanton, who had a great manychildren, learned about natural childbirth from thesefriends of hers, and she and her daughter both practicedit. the report in the local newspaper would reportthe score of the latest lacrosse games betweenone tribe
and another, so sally has really gone thedistance to help us understand that this vision of anequitable, 18 harmonious relationship between the sexeswas really quite possible, and it had been going on for,well, hundreds of years. in fact, let's see, yeah. in the six nations of the iroquios confederacy,women have worked with men successfully to guardtheir sovereign political status against resistanceattempts
to turn them into united states citizens. so, yeah, it can help a lot to get an alternative version of things. now, i was appreciative of tom a few minutesago when he found me in the green room scribbling inthe margins. he said, you know, chris hedges was changinghis notes right up to the minute he came up to the microphone. i can relate to that.
the -- this particular -- when you've justwritten a book, you develop your little spiel and goaround and differently the same spiel over and over againand it's just easy peasy. i wrote this book 15 years ago. i came to re-read it over the last two weeksand it can be almost like somebody else wrote it. so much has happened in-between times, includingthe fact that it's contextualized this time insideof the 19
big question, "is violence inevitable." and by the time i thought about that and thenadded in the other two speakers, i found myself writingnotes on my notes until it's kind of a... [ audio indiscernible ] so i'll be grateful for your patience. one thing that's happened since i wrote thebook, quite recently, and it's placed everythingi was thinking about in a new context and givena real
urgency, and i'm talking about the publication,i think it was in 2012 of a book called "sexand world peace." valerie hudson and other writers, and -- howmany of you have heard of that at all? okay, i didn't think -- it's really prettyexciting stuff. how many times back in the day have you heard feminists say, "a world that is safe for womenis safe
for everyone." but we didn't have the data, and now we do. thanks to these people. there's four of them and they come from international relations, middle east specialties, socialscientists, you know, they cover a fair territory, threewomen and one man. 20 you want their credo is something like this. gender inequality in all its many manifestationsis a
form of violence, and this gender-based violencenot only destroys home but we argue also significantly affects politics and security at the nationaland international level. they pose the question, to us, what are thesources of conflict and instability within and betweenstates? well, and they say the standard lists thatappear among international relations people wouldinclude deficit of democracy, scarcity of resources,poverty,
and ideological conflict. what they are demonstrating, and this is ongoing research, very exciting stuff, is that a better predictor of state peacefulness, both internallyand externally, and level of democracy, levelof wealth or the presence of islamic religions, is thesecurity of the women themselves within those countries. so they go through and start to identify,what are the sources within the country that make it stableor
unstable. food security is one, right? if people are hungry, things start fallingapart. well, in subsaharan africa, women perform80% of agricultural labor. 21 worldwide, it's over 50%. but worldwide, women only own 2% of the land. remuneration for cash crops is given to themen. and studies have been done over and over again,95% of
a woman's earnings go to her family whileonly 40 to 60% of a man's earnings go to his family. in agricultural societies, women are responsibleto see that the women and children do not starve. two-thirds of all malnourished children inthe world are female children. and in many societies, women and girl childrenare expected to eat less. you heard from adrian rains what the consequencesof
poor nutrition can be for the developmentof the infant brain and so forth, okay? might inequitable treatment of women makefamine and malnutrition more likely? second, economic prosperity, another obviousindicator of the nation's stability and well-being. turns out, the larger the gender gap, thelower the gdp per capita of a nation and the lowerthe rate of national economic growth.
lower investment in female education is alsolinked to lower national economic growth.and economic development projects with a gender 22 component are known to be more successfulthan those without. third, health, think about disease and poorhealth as a factor in national security. the smaller the gender gap, the lower theinfant and child mortality rates, and the lower the levelof
child malnutrition. the smaller the gender gap, the lower theshare of household income spent on cigarettes and alcohol. the larger the gender gap, the higher theage rate and the higher infectious disease across the board. the larger the gender gap, the lower is thelife expectancy for both men and women. i think this is astonishing stuff to know,right? state conflict.
the higher the level of violence against womenin the state, the more likely a nation state is tobe non-compliant with international norms. the higher the level of violence against women,the worse a nation state's relationship is with neighboring countries. the larger the gender gap, the more likelyit is to be involved in interstate conflict and to useviolence first in the conflict.regarding governance, the larger the gender
gap, the 23 higher the levels of both perceived and actual government correction. the lower the gender gap, the greater thelevel of trust in government and the greater the degreeof transparency from government. when the representation of women in the councilsof humanity is higher, more attention is givento social welfare, to fighting corruption, to improvinglegal
protection for citizens. okay, demographics finally. when marriage is hierarchial between men andwomen and women have few rights in marriage, unsustainablyhigh levels of population growth result. and when society makes care-giving economically irrational for women, no child care for work,no help on taking care of the elderly, no parentalleave, then subreplacement with -- we're seeing that allover
europe right now. so, our authors ask the question, might onegreat key to the structural and physical violence wesee around us in this world be the inequitable treatmentof women? if we concentrated more on mitigating maledominance hierarchies, and less on the neoliberal projectof exporting democracy or free-market capitalism,would 24 we have a better chance of achieving sustainable
development and good governance, and lowerlevels of poverty, disease and conflict? well, kofi annan thinks so. he said in 2006, in his u.n. secretary general,the world is starting to grasp that there is nopolicy more effective in promoting development, healthand education than the empowerment of women andgirls. and i would venture that no policy is moreimportant in preventing conflict or achieving reconciliation
after a conflict has ended. this is terrific news. i mean, i know that's a very dark picturewe've looked at but to realize how consistent the datais, it's like seeing that -- there is this tremendousresource hidden in plain sight. there's this point of entry, this point ofleverage that we could work -- i've found myself aspleased by it in a sense as by the news coming out offrance, the
four parts per thousand of the carbon capture-- you know, if our use of the land world-wide canchange so that instead of carbon dioxide being in the atmosphere, the carbon is pulled down intothe soil and it can be -- we can reduce enormously-- in fact, we could halt altogether the co2 that's pouringinto 25 the atmosphere, counter it every year. this resource has a face, a beautiful face. i think she looks just like malala yousafzai,our
nobel prize winner. also looks like a beautiful somali girl whosename i think is nista, whose face i saw, she's beautiful child, 14 years old, has a baby on her hip,like so many child, women, mothers do around the world. but she has a gleam in her eye, too, becausethere is an ngo in her neighborhood that makes sureshe gets to school every day, and nitsa knows her daughterwill have a very different life.
she won't be married at 12 years old. so this lovely hope in this picture, so, clearly,we do need to talk about gender. but my desire is to offer perspective thatwill make it possible and even hopeful. i had been struggling myself with that question,is violence inevitable, after writing the book"at the root of this longing." along with reconciling my spiritual hungerand my
feminist theories, i had been looking hardat violence against women and trying to square it, tryingto make sense of it because i was myself so privilegedto live 26 with such marvelous men. it didn't make sense to me. i knew the biological determinism and allthat. and then things came into sharp focus in springof 1999. i was driving one of those -- remember thoseyellow
volvo station wagons that were the color oftraffic signs, a lot of us had them in the '90s becausethey were these big school bus things to haul yourkids around. i had a car full of teenage boys that i wasdriving up to lake county for a tennis tournament andi'm sure that u2 was on the radio and they were allhaving such a good time, and i was enjoying them so much,and the broadcast then was interrupted by a news flashfrom
littleton, colorado. that was the morning of the columbine shootingoutside of littleton, and we're hearing about thatagain right now because darren klebold's mother has writtena memoir in the hopes of helping other familiesnot go through what her family did. the next morning -- the guys went off andplayed tennis, and i sat there huddled by the radiotrying to make sense of what was going on, and the nextmorning
i remember someone from littleton was interviewedand 27 she spoke of this terrific, horrific eventsaying, "it just speaks to the stunning erosion of oursocial matrix." and that phrase really -- it seemed to meshe had captured something with that phrase. yeah, the stunning erosion, because just afew years earlier, at the heart of -- at the root ofthis longing was the fact, in my own life, of three
beautiful young women, two of whom i had known,one was student, one was a childhood friend anda third was a little girl in the town of petaluma,you know who i'm talking about, were all destroyedin acts that seemed like pure evil and did seem to signala stunning erosion of something. that was the first of our numbing successionof school shootings. the word "matrix" itself, i'm a word freak,what can i
say? it has a fascinating range of meanings, matrix, mother, material, so forth. it can mean the womb, i think it can alsorefer to the placenta. a medium on which things can grow and live. in archaeology, it's the sediment surroundingthe fossil you're trying to dig out. 28 it's intracellular material, that which holds
everything together. it also, in mathematics, has to do with linesand numbers going every which way, like on a loom,the verticals and all that. so what might a social matrix be? well, it has to do clearly with the shared-- our shared assumptions about what matters in life. a family can have a matrix of values, a community certainly.
this marvelous community certainly has itsown matrix. we are held in them and we are embedded inthem, as she said, and that's a term that professorhouston smith is very fond of, "embedded." houston is our berkeley treasure. he is still alive, i found out the other day. he lives -- i've been to his home, privilegedto be in his home and have lunch with him and his wife,kendra. he's got the face of a seraphim, a magnificentman.
historian of religions, his book used to becalled, "the religions of man," the classic text for comparative religion, and chapter after chapteryou think, this must be his favorite. well, sometime around early '90s, houstonreissued the book. 29 he put out a new edition, because, in thefirst place, he didn't want to call it "the religions ofman" anymore, he called it "the world's religions"now but,
more importantly, he added a chapter at theend of the book called "primal religions" and this iswhere he looked at religions of people that are sometimes called prehistoric or the foragers, hunter-gatherers, prehistoric is probably the term we coulduse. what inspired him to do that, he was teachingat syracuse university many, many years and hegot acquainted with the local indians and spenta lot of time there.
he got acquainted with their life ways andjust wanted people to know about them and how differenttheir religious life was from that of the historicalpeople. so he described the religiousness of thesefolks in three ways. first, embeddedness. he said it's a threefold embeddedness. one is embedded in one's kinship, lineage, particularly maybe beaver clan or whatever.
you know who your people are, you come intothis world, have a lineage. you are embedded in the natural world in theparticular piece of land that your people have 30 occupied for maybe a few thousand years, maybejust a little valley, a meadow, a watershed but they'vebeen there forever, and you know the names of allthe plants and you're on speaking terms with allthe animals, and maybe when you were born, youwere given
a totem animal, maybe raven is your brotheror beaver or whatever. just as an illustration, i don't know if you'vebeen to northern california, there is a big bodyof water not to far from where i live called lake sonoma,only been there since 1982. big civil engineering project, they put upa warm springs dam, and this is about 50 miles, squaremiles, this lovely recreational jewel, lake sonoma.
but to do that, they flooded land that pomoshave lived in for several thousand years. every year after that, and i think -- i don'tknow if the men are still alive but for certainly20 years after that, every year during the festivalseasons, they would bring folding chairs up to a hillsidethat overlooked the valley and they would justsit there all day, silently looking out across the valley, reconnecting, you know, because it's theirmother.
and the third form of embeddedness is, ashe says, within spirit. 31 he says specifically as a cosmic womb, enclosing everything else. there is this sense that gorgeous as the material world is, it's a window onto a deeper reality,and our job in life is to be looking hard enough andlistening hard enough to be drawn to that. a symbolic mentality goes with that.
the third, the most important to my -- ofthe important features of these people is, ashouston puts it, a muted character of distinctions thatin the historic religions explode into opposites. muted character of distinctions, like thedistinction between animal and human, light and dark,good and evil, man and woman. well, i was intrigued and realized i knewnothing about the native -- the pomos and the newacs(phonetic
spellnig) that lived near me so i holed upfor the next year or so reading everything i couldabout them and just generally reading all the great anthropologists that i could get my handson, wanting to get a better sense of what he was talkingabout. it was a marvelous time. the practitioners of these religions are orwere -- and most of these cultures are gone, if noton their way out, are people who lived in small bands,they 32
foraged for their food and they were itinerant,okay? and the values that they held, the matrixof values that they held, crisscrossing, supportinglife, reflected those conditions. in other words, they were adaptive to a particularway of being in the world. came to call one of them the values of belonging because seemed to me it had everything todo with what happens when you stand in front of -- youall have
your own -- you have this gorgeous lake rightin front of you but you all have a place like thatfor yourselves, i'm sure, where you stand thereand say, "i belong here. every bit of me belongs here." imagine the difference between that and gettingup one morning and looking at the same place andsay, "this belongs to me." everything flows.
the values of belonging have to do, for example,with an empathetic relationship to animals, youknow, when the inuits kill a seal, they'll pour freshwater into his mouth to send him off on his journey. a sense of custodial restraint, a sense of deliberateness in everything you do.time is cyclical, not linear. 33 there is a movie, i hope many of you willsee, if you haven't seen several years ago, about theinuits called "fast runner."
there's one moment when you see a granny andher granddaughter sitting, just intimately connectedwith one another, and the granny says to the littlegirl, "little mother, i'm so glad you've come back. i waited so long for you." it's her mother, she's quite certain, comeback as her granddaughter, just this marvelous recyclingof ourselves over and over. a sense of balance.
generosity. if you're walking around all day long, there'sno point accumulating things, you can't carry'em all, so what anthropologists have found when theyvisit, say the kalahari, for example, you might in gratitudegive somebody a jackknife or magnifying glass andyou think -- really going to hold on to it? but the fun that the people have is givingit on to the next person and the next person and thenext
person. this is a gifting kind of culture, not oneof inquisitiveness.egalitarianism and inclusiveness, indigenous people 34 respect and treasure the wisdom of old agebut they do not like authority structures. they do not like authorities. each of them is kind of their own expert oneverything going on.
profound interdependence among themselvesbecause they know, you know, you might bring down an antelopetoday but you might not do it again for anotheryear so you are dependent on one another's generosity. the big one, though, is what i guess i callmutuality the ability to see yourself in the peoplearound you. gender mutuality in particular. when the girls have their first period, chancesare very good from one culture to the next there'sgoing
to be some kind of ceremony. this is explicitly developed, for instance,among the navajo, but something to acknowledge, she'smade this tremendous threshold and it's important toeverybody in the band, in the community, and they willhonor her because they believe -- i know the indianswhere we are, the sense that the god, that spirit isborn, spider woman, healing woman is coming backthrough that little girl.
these -- the women in these cultures are veryself-reliant. 35 they don't actually have to have a man intheir lives. 70% and more of the food is supplied by womenand children gathering. so this kind of lets the men off the hook,too. they know that -- you know, they might notbe successful in the hunt but they're not goingto go hungry that night. so, yeah, women had public active lives witha say in
links. here's the -- it turns out, when you're walkingaround like in the kalahari, subsaharan desert orin australia, there are no weaning foods so babiesnurse for up to four years. it's their primary source of nutrition becauseyou can't give a little kid, you know, a big oldroot to gnaw and so forth, so they're nursing forsuch a long time that the mother doesn't have anotherbaby right
away. that baby stays on her hip or walking alongbeside her and gradually absorbs everything she knowsabout that piece of land where they are and crittersand so forth. babies are enormously secure because of that. so, okay, there's that.openness to spirit. 36 there is an affinity for alternative modesof knowing, you know, intuition, your eyes, your senseof smell,
of hearing and so forth. playfulness because life is short, and a geniusfor nonviolent conflict resolution. gregory bateson, margaret meade's husbandand pretty famous in his way, spent a lot of time inbali and wrote about it and became very charmed withthe way that conflict is kept to a minimum there. one thing he said is things are kept in continuous motion.
they also would appear to be wasteful of foodand resources because they're continually planningthese large ceremonial events and they have to havepeople bringing flowers and musicians and dancersand so there's always something going on. after a while you realize it's like when yousee a ballerina en point and they look like they're perfectly still, there's hundreds of muscle groups active to keep them poised that way.
he says that's how these communities are inbali, there's so much going on that things don'thave a chance to accelerate.there is a tradition, in fact, when you're having a 37 quarrel with somebody, you go downtown, thereis a particular official, you go downtown and registeryour quarrel with them, and you agree that whoevertries to talk to the other one first will either paya fine or go to the temple and make an offering.
it's just a way of kind of formally saying,let's not let this escalate. well, so, okay. something -- oh, yeah, i mentioned this, justas a -- i remember when i was in the hospital -- ihad some kind of surgery and i was in the hospitalin the middle of doing all this and i brought someof my work with me, so this young woman came in who was-- i talked to her and she was going to the j.c.and
working in the hospital, kind of cleaningand -- and she did a double take and said, "oh, you'rereading about the pomos." i said, "yeah, do you know anything aboutthem?" "well, yes, i married one." very blonde, blue-eyed, i said, "really." she said, "yes, and you know what they sayabout pomo men." "no."
she says, "well, they're great lovers."[ laughter ] 38 and she sort of sashayed out with her broomand mop, so good to know. good to know. one of the things i found out about the indiansin our own area, and they do prefer -- by and largeprefer to be called indian, not native americans, severalof the tribes, is a respect to have maternality isright at the heart of what they're doing.
among the alonis, which are a little furthersouth, there is a tradition there that when a womanis going into labor, her husband doesn't come runningin and doing lamaze breathing with her. he has a job to do, the women surrounds herand helps her. he runs outside and digs a hole in the ground,like think about the size of a good-sized bathtuband then he lines it with smooth rocks and he buildsa fire.
and when the fire is done, died down, he getsthe ashes out and he fills it with sweet-smellinggrasses, clovers and so on, and then he puts deer skinon top of that, and when she and the baby are ready,they come out and lie down in this lovely -- whatwould you call it -- this cradle that he's created forthem. these same people have generated a story -- actuallythe pomos who have a story of slug woman. 39 men are supposed to stick around for at leastfour
days after the baby is born and make surethe wife has everything she needs, the understanding isthat if he doesn't, slug woman is going to come afterhim in the night and she is this horrific thing withlots of bells and so on and faster than anybody couldpossibly be, and she'll shove him into a tree and burnthe tree down if he doesn't -- these are people whotake parental leave very seriously. and i don't want to leave the pomos without
mentioning, they -- the pomos, probably thesingle art form for which they're best known is theirmagnificent baskets. the hermitage museum in st. petersburg, leningrad, is full -- has a big collection of these becausewe had russian settlers, russian trappers upin northern california for a while and there's also alot of them at the smithsonian. these things, they're made -- the women goout -- the
designs for these and the skill in makingthem was handed down the mother line. you learn from your mother and your grannyand they're made from sedge root and willow and red bud. these three elements are slightly different,a gold and kind of reddish and a brown. 40 and the designs are traditional but you alsomight get them in a dream, a design -- sunflowers orthe little tip of a quail or -- well, my favorite, youcan look
down inside and it's sort of like lookinginto a spiral nebula, you get dizzy because of theelaborate kind of spinning world kind of things. incredibly high technical work, like 60 stitchesto an inch. if you wanted one emblem that captured whatwe mean by that matrix of the values of belonging, ithink it would be the pomo basket and their sacredness. something like the stability of the pomosand the
newac who have lived in our area for severalthousand of years with very little record of anythingyou could call military, you know, combat at all, wouldhave characterized the lives of most of the world's foragers until about 10,000 years ago. the seeds of change had been germinated slowlybut irreversibly as human beings edged out ofthe niche that they've been in. they came, captured fire, invented tools and
weapons, and they became artists, and theallure of settling down became more and more strong.it was a revolution, niles aldrich, paleontologist 41 says, taking control of our own food supply,we became the first species in the 3.5-billion-yearhistory of life to live outside the local confines ofthe local ecosystem. this is an astonishing step we took. it changed everything.
there is a lot of speculation on what triggeredit, you know, climate change, population pressure,tools and so forth, but, as i understand it, thecurrent consensus is that, no, it was just the desireto experience cultural complexity. it's how do you get them outside -- back onthe farm after they've seen mesopotamia. we've always had these capacities for inventiveness, creativity, restlessness, entrepreneurship,they're
part of the human -- who we are, but our lifeways never really allowed that to explode and nowthey did. we were no longer foraging, no longer itinerant. we settled in by our fields, and food surpluses allowed our little bands to expand into villagesand towns and cities and city states, and allthe good stuff and the hard stuff that comes with that. cities densely populated -- we know now therewere epidemics, food shortages, there was socialunrest
but, imagine, you could become a full-timejeweler, 42 you know, or potter or magician, whatever. god underwent a huge makeover at this point. god had been fluid and multiple and everywherein that old world. nameless, elusive but always around us, partof us, with us, part of the earth. and now the growing prestige of big men requiredthat god be correspondingly masculine and supreme,capo y
capo, and as the earth is tamed and wildnessis banished, belief in a -- god waned. god now is anthropomorphised as a mighty he,residing in heaven at a great distance, all powerfulin the way men felt they had to be now. this was coming into the human record, thatsense that you got to be good at being dominant. you got to control. you got to control the water, you got to control
the soil, you got to get those predatory animal out of your fields. this is all new territory. women, remember those self-reliant, self-possessed beings of yesteryear, we were probably fullyon board with this, the idea to come in off the road,have a roof over our head, different kind of foodand company, and all that stuff, we would havesaid, sure, 43 why not.
they couldn't have anticipated what was goingto happen. there were women -- now. there were certainly grains you could makeinto a gruel or mush. there were goat's milk, cows and so forth. so now the little patterns fell away. now a woman could have a baby a year. it's a raw deal for the babies and for themoms but
it's great for business because now thesebig men needed people to work the field and to besoldiers. so the whole sense, then, of what a woman'slife was about was very different. this is what gerta learner meant when shetalked about the commodification of women's reproductivityand sexuality. it could have been the most natural thingin the world now for man to build a corral for his livestockand a
house and a courtyard to keep his family in,for his days to look around and count them as prettymuch the same things, right? but we haven't adequately realized, and ithink maybe that's the biggest and most important thingwe got to figure out is that even as women were enclosedin what 44 felt like -- must have felt like a prison,men were too. it can look real flashy from the outside buti think
they were shut off from something called thesocial matrix, from the vibrant, radiant gloriesof that, those values of belonging, which everybodylived in common, where you were glimpsing the supernatural,you know, in the brooks and trees and stones andso forth. because along with agriculture, there's this-- there's this fascinating unholy alliance betweenthe inventiveness and the joyous creativity ofthe agricultural revolution, everything that comes
afterwards, but also with that sense, needto control, that sense that you're in charge now and yougot to make sure there is enough to feed everybody,and you're going to have to go and fight withthose guys two watersheds down because they're goingto come and take your land. life gets very serious now, it's no longera whole lot of fun. you tell yourself you're having fun doingstuff but
maybe isn't meeting your deepest needs. so directly, then, now instead of the valuesof belonging, we shift over, every one of thosevalues is displaced by its opposite. 45 instead of an empathic receptivity towardearth and animal and other kin, there is that felt imperativeto exert your will over them, to dictate, thisis a weed and that's a crop. this is a friend, that's a foe.
so many decisions. mutuality and reciprocity give way to competitiveness. and soon enough, that mean enters the worldthat sociologists and others called "otherring." where it's also called subspeciating, wheremy need to displace someone else is so great that i decidehe's not fully human, or she's not fully human. we do, we dehumanize someone in order to dowhat we like with them and, again, that desperateneed to
control. secrecy is okay now, keeping secrets becauseknowledge is power. we can store stuff now, we don't have to carryit we can have prestige goods and so forth, so acquisitiveness becomes okay. hierarchy, elaborate authority structures,yep. no time for playfulness now, real men don'tgoof around.aggressiveness becomes a lamentable but necessary
part 46 of life and so is the willingness to commitviolence in defense of all of our stuff. there's no more sense now of that envelopingwomb of spirit but, rather, a kind of abstractednessand disconnection from the natural world. enterprise cultures -- i should say, i didnot call these -- this new set of values the valuesof dominance or wickedness, i call them enterprisevalues
because i want to capture that sense thatwhen they first came along, it was like a baby's firststep. and there's going to be part of that -- we'reall part of that. we still carry around that marvelous senseof creativity but that term i think capturesthe acceleration, the open-endedness of it. so what became, then, of the consolation ofvalues that had filled -- as human beings.
there's no place for the values of belongingin commerce, government, military, or even inthe state religions that were emerging now but theycouldn't have vanished altogether because they're us. so you would think, why couldn't we have figuredout a way to reconcile them and integrate them sothat each of us acknowledged that there is a littlebit of the enterpriser in all of us and a lot of thebelonging in 47 all of us and so on.
it was a terrible dilemma and how did we handleit? we side-stepped, i think. we punted. we finessed. instead of accomplishing that integration,we made a kind of cultural decision that, roughly speaking,the values of belonging would be the values ofwomen and the values of men would be the values of enterprise. i have to tell you, i -- i regret the subtitleof the
paperback of this book, it's called "why womenbelong and men compete." i was stuck with an editor -- it was the onlytime in my life -- i've always had wonderful editors. this particular editor just swooped in fromnew york into harpers, san francisco, and shewanted a book on women's values versus men's valuesand she thought that's what my proposal said. i kept saying, "no, liz, no, it's really not."
so the subtitle comes from her. what i was trying to say, obviously, is somethinga lot subtler, having to do with the valuesof belonging and the values of enterprise. here's what i was hoping she could get.when the ethos of belonging came up against the ethos 48 of enterprise, contradictions occurred atalmost every salient point, rather like a tectonic plate,too massive and too real to simply crumble orvanish, the
old one slid beneath the new. have you seen those tectonic plate thingsin geology, and women slid with it. that was the solution. jerry built and held. woman would carry the constellation of belonging, they're in the home, if you're going to preserve babies, you have to have some of those values. men would build civilization on the basisof values of
enterprise. that shouldn't really have held because there'sas much of the desire to be connective and intuitiveand playful in you as there is a desire to beambitious and inventive in me, the human need, and yet,for a long, long while, those are the messages wereceived. i shouldn't be playful or ambitious. we can trace a direct lineage from the lawsof assyria, reflect all this, and govern thetreatment of
women and female slaves, and those are horrific documents, by the way. we can connect those to a chart that a friendof mine handed me that was displayed, oh, sometimelate in 49 the -- probably around 1990 of a wall of a kindergarten class. she went to her child's parents' night. this is a progressive u.s. public school inan eastern academic community.
and there are lists on the wall. here are the girls' awards and here are theboys' awards. girls to be awarded for being all-around sweetheart, sweetest personality, cutest personality,best sharer, best artist, biggest heart, best manners,best helper. the boys' awards, very best thinker, mosteager learner, most imaginative, most enthusiastic,most scientific, mr. personality, hardest worker,best
sense of humor. the components of a fully developed humanbeing have been teased apart into two lists that barelyoverlap. if you are a little girl with a sharp wit,you want to understand how things work, or if you're alittle boy who loves to be helpful, full of empathy,where do you see yourself on that chart? well, we're still, of course, asking thosequestions. men would lay waste for our daily bread, womenwould
be relational, restrained and reverent.the full cost there of what happened to men at the 50 same time has, i think, remained hidden. we are beginning to grasp it, and reportsthat are coming out -- a couple months ago, the reportson this suicide crisis in white males of a certainage, you know, kind of thing. the authors of "sex, world and peace" eliminateone dimension of this legacy when they describea
phenomena you see in different parts of theworld. the male-bonded groups that they believe hadbeen at the heart of society for a very long time. the so-called warrior cultures. example, if we sent -- they're concerned aboutthis in china right now because the one-child policyhas resulted in so many girl babies being abortedor killed that by 2020, there are going to be25 million men in china between the ages of 20 and 45,who -- for
whom there is no available female partner. these are called bare branches and historicreaders know there is a real pattern. they describe it as authoritarian group, inherently unstable, violent, and violence toward outgroups serves as a male bonding mechanism becauseit dampens within group tensions within males. higher-ranked males keep the subordinate malesunder control, loyal to the group, that sort ofthing. 51
and if we were just to -- you know, you cansit down now and sort of think through what you knowof world history and see that legacy playing out, empireafter empire, invader after invader, and so forth. fast forward, coming into the present... portland's living treasure, she grew up, remember,she was -- her father was theodore kroeber, thedean of anthropology there at berkeley, who was theman who took care of ishi, the last remaining manof his tribe
so ursula grew up playing with ishi. one of her novels is called "the telling,"and looks at two cultures which are probably tibet andchina, and this is what she says about the one that'slike china. from a great consensual social pattern withinwhich each individual sought physical and spiritual satisfaction, they made it a great hierarchyin which each individual served the indefinite growth,the
indefinite growth of the society's materialwealth and complexity, from an active homeostatic balance,they had turned it into an active forward-thrusting imbalance.so this is where -- it's kind of that's where 52 enterprise culture culminates, that activeforward thrusting imbalance. blithely indifferent to the havoc being wreakedon the earth itself.
remember father thomas barry said, "when wedestroy the natural world, we destroy the groundsof our religious imagination." gregory bateson again said, of the ethos ofapplied science in the late 20th century, that itarises out of a deep epistemological panic. i want to suggest that that epistemologicalpanic arises directly out of our having been wrenchedout of something that goes away and the epistemological,that
matrix of values. well, yeah. arriving at this reading of human historywas actually pretty helpful for me because for decades,i had thought about the fact, how do i put it, thatwe walk around often feeling like we're trying tobreathe with one lung and walk on one leg. i thought the missing half of what we arewas everything about women and the feminine andso forth.
now, i begin to say, no, i think missing halfof who we are is that -- is that matrix of sharedbelonging, values and all the connectivity to the naturalworld 53 and one another and spirit that's implicitin it. but the thing is, they hadn't gone anywhere. they're still right where they left them. they're just itching to get out, and i findnow that more and more, as i look around -- i thinkit was -- mr. rogers who was quoted not too long agoagain for
something he said, when things are gettingreally scary around you and there is a big crisisgoing on and there might be violence breaking out,you're really scared, anybody remember what he said? i bet you know, look for helpers. all around us, there have always been menand women and groups of people who have somehow or othermanaged to achieve that equilibrium, so they carryaround with them the most nurtureant element of that cultureof
belonging, along with the creative and irrepressible, optimistic, risk-taking part of the valuesof the great ones embody the balance of whatwe're looking for. when you're in the presence of francis assisior jane goodall or sister helen prejean, that senseof belonging here begins to slip back over you. you walk in the room and you feel it in theair. i wanted -- i think we're running probablyalong -- 54
there should be some time for questions buti wanted to share with you -- yeah... one of the symptoms, the culmination of enterprise culture came out to me very strongly the otherday. there is an article in the "new york reviewof books," a review article, i think it's called "weare hopelessly hooked," an examination of fourrecent books on our relationship to social media. and two of the books in question are by
m.i.t. psychologist sherry turkle, and sherecords -- just going to give you a few bits of informationfrom this because i think it helps us understandwhat kind of crisis we're in, what we're up againstbut what we can do about it. she says that, at this point, it looks asif people are spending five and a half hours a day withtheir digital media. one group of girls, women students at baylor
university agreed that they spend about tenhours a day on the cellphones. we check our phones 221 times a day. that's every four and a half minutes. what she is saying -- she is a psychologistherself and she's interviewed a whole lot of teachersand other therapists and parents -- is what shefears 55 she's seeing as a failure of young peopleto develop fully independent selves, that they are losingthe
ability to empathize. genuine solitude, when you're without your devices, allows you to experience yourselfso you can experience other people and their self-ness. teachers are reporting their young studentsare not able to establish eye contact with their teacher,with one another. they can't read body language. this is your basic primal religions territory,that's
how we relate to one another. i can look at you and see, you know, how you're feeling. social media spares us the awkwardness ofunmediated human relationships. and of course, you know, the things that comewith that, online harassment and so forth. there is a new science which i did not knowabout and there is a whole -- at my alma mater, stanford,
there's a whole institute devoted to thisnow, how many of you have heard of the science captology? an acronym here, computers as persuasive technology. you can get your degree in capotology now,you can figure out what the best ways are to capture56 somebody's attention with one of these devices. well, okay, so we're in pretty scary territorybut i do want to -- i do want to close this on aspositive note as possible and say we're also seeingpeople
pushing back against this and trying to figureout how to recapture their own capacity for attentionand for being able to relate to the people in theroom with them. i think rediscovery of meditation in variousforms and prayer, maybe the ultimate worm hole backto that place of sanctity. finally to that question that brings us alltogether, is violence inevitable?
i would suggest to the extent that we buyinto an unqualified -- values of enterprise, socially sanctioned violence is a cultural invention,to use margaret meade's phrase, but is intimatelyrelated to that pesky mean of dominance and control. we have to look at that, too. how many times have you seen in movies andtv and so forth the hero says -- because it's obligatory,"i've got this under control."
nobody has anything under control. if we can allow ourselves to realize thatabout ourselves and the people we love, imaginewhat will 57 come from that. i think that's all i want to say now. i think i've said way too much and i wouldlove to have your own questions and responses and observations, so... >> get my watch back.
go ahead, please. >> you really often distinguish between womenvalues and male values. i was wondering where you found transgenderrole in your studies, or was there something like transgender -- >> say it again? >> where do you see the value stand or wheredo you see the role of transgender personalitiesin your
studies? >> yeah, you know, well, where i come from,the indians in california have a term twin spirit, two-spirited people, and they treasure thosepeople who, you know, don't fall into the more obvious traditional -- they feel that these peoplehave a special route into the spirit. they're just very inclusive and respectfulof -- you know, across the board's difference so i thinkone of 58
the more positive things i'm seeing rightnow, and it's just happened maybe in the last coupleof years, is a deepening interest in understanding of,for example, the transgender -- i just watchedthe second season of "transparent" and i find it enthrallingwhat that has opened up, you know, to ordinaryamericans to start thinking about realities they haven'tbefore. >> so would you say that it's like what youwere talking about, that there are special valuesfor
women, for men, and then kind of like transgenderhave their own values? >> no, what i'm trying to say is exactly thereisn't a set of men's values and women's values, andwe've been sold a bill of goods, we've been asked tothink that there are but, no, these are human valuesthat all of us possess and we shouldn't have to feel we'recut up in the middle and have to honor one at theexpense of the other.
so that each person should be free to actas whoever they are, free of that kind of projection. >> okay, thank you. >> thank you. yes. [ audio indiscernible ]>> is it not on? 59 he's coming. thank you. >> been having a lot of discussions latelyon the
difference between your biological sex andthen your gender -- >> between what? >> the differences between your biologicalsex and your gender, and i was wondering what yourthoughts on that were. >> well, i only learned last week becausei'm not on a campus right now and heard how widespread,you know, the colleges are giving people the optionof calling
them he or she or they, for example. i think it was fascinating and very positivebecause it gives people the leeway to experiment andact out and try on what it feels like, for example,to go around, you know, being a man, being a womanand so i think it's all to the good. yeah. >> uh-huh. >> hello.
it's me again, thank you so much for coming.i really enjoyed your talk this afternoon. 60 oh, sorry, i can speak louder. my question is, how do we use the frameworksof values of enterprise and belonging to address thesubtler violences that we face as individual, liketoday for violence or emotional violence. the things that come to mind in terms of gender violence are all of the messages we're bombardedby --
daily by the media, for example, that we haveto look a certain way or present ourselves a certainway. which are harmful in the end. >> i think reclaiming our sense -- i thinkwe have to repersonalize the world. i think we have to put down the damn phones. we're just going to have to do that for certain amounts of time every week, just get themout of our lives and be together in the world becausethis
mediated, electronically mediated way of communicating isn't communication. we're curating versions of ourselves to presentto one another and they have maybe a very slender relationship to what our real feeling statemight be, so, in other words, we're creating so manymasks between one another. i think it has to start at the grass roots,you know, has to start right where we are in the personallevel. 61
we don't have a whole lot of control overwhat's happening in the social media but we can walkaway from it. >> i meant more like in a person-to-personbasis, for example, one of the -- another example thatcomes to mind is cat-calling, that's, i feel, likea violence or a kind of domination against the objectof the cat call, so how would you suggest using the frameworkof enterprise to combat behavior like that?
>> well, you don't go from there to there,there is a whole lot in between, i think. it's funny, i was just thinking about thatthis morning. there is a real place for coming togetherwith one another, you know, forming conversations where you are so that -- anybody have anything else that they want to suggest on that score because i'm not right in the middle of thecampus
and i think what you're talking about is ofvital importance. >> hi, thank you again for coming. my question is, has to do with, like, oureducation system and do you feel that there is a placeor a role 62 for gender-only classes, such as male or femaleor even gender-only schools in the educationsystem of modern society? >> that's a really interesting question andmy husband
has dealt with that a lot, thought about thata lot. he was one of the people in the early '90s-- he is -- he wrote a book called "elements ofpromise." he was in elementary school, taught giftedkids from 6th grade. he observed this rapid falling off of self-esteemin little girls as they approached puberty. first he thought it was him as a teacher,thinking, "i'm not very good with girls of that age,"and he got
hooked up with some groups and he startedfinding out that there is this whole thing that happensto little girls in this culture, kind of the oppositeof getting celebrated and so forth. so he was very tempted with the idea of separate classrooms. it's very -- girls can do awfully well whenthey're, you know, in -- and if you go through highschool and college, there's little patterns of womenbeing able
to get established in leadership patterns,so it's very intriguing but there is a lot to be saidagainst it, as well. 63 that men and women, boys and girls need tobe socialized together. i like -- the model i like to see, there wasa couple of catholic high schools, boys and girls sideby side on the same campus up in santa rosa, theywent to some classes together and some not, and i honestlythink
that's really pretty neat because it givesthem the experience that, you know, of -- that extremely hormonal time in your life, and nice for theboys, too, the distraction was good for them. i would like to see something that would recognizethe values of both of those. >> thank you very much. >> thank you so much to have your talk. i found it really informative.
i know how you mentioned in the beginningthat a lot of hunter-gatherer society started out withthis principle of the matrix. >> say that again? >> i think a lot of people -- it's what yousaid, when societies began to accumulate wealth and resources, that's when power began to shift and thingslike, you know, patriarchy and oppression started tohappen. how do you think in a capitalist world, increasinglycapitalist world, we can embrace those feminine
64 values? >> very good question. in an increasingly capital world, i don'tthink you can. i think a lot of the best feminist thinkersnow are linking, when you look at globally what'sgoing on -- there is a wonderful book, nancy frazier,called "the fortunes of feminism," and i think that mightbe very
useful for to you look at because she traceswhat's happened in this country, the shift in feminismfrom when we were in what she calls managed capitalismto the state we're in now, which is more of a-- you know, the neoliberal, completely unregulatedglobal capitalism, and globally, it's that neoimperialist model that's threatening women most world-wide, threatening the environments, the water supplies, getting rid of environmental laws, labor lawsand so
forth, so, i don't know, i see it as really antithetical to -- and that's why i thinkwe have to start figuring out ways of pushing back, andshe talks about some ideas for doing that. you have to start where you are, you startsmall but we've got to start pushing back against thatbecause you remember, it is threatening to women,it is threatening to the values of belonging, itis 65 threatening to life, it is threatening tomen, too.
and i think -- that's why i wanted to bringout the iphone because it is a product of this wholeglobal control masked as communication. >> i had this conversation with my econ teacherand i asked him, you know, isn't it terrible how corporations take advantage of people, mostoften women would work in their factories, and mostoften the response from economists is those peoplewouldn't have had jobs anyway so you're providing ameans of
livelihood. >> no, doesn't wash. sorry, i'm very opinionated about that. maybe he and i need to talk. that if you look country by country, that'swhat's happening because, you know, if a companyis going to come -- why would they out-source if theyweren't getting a good deal? they're getting a terrific deal because whenthey go
in, they talk to the elected representativesof the country, say, we'll come in, set up a factoryhere provided you loosen up your environmentallaws and your child labor laws and so forth, so -- andafter a while, the country itself is losing its ownautonomy, 66 this is what's happening is that local governmentsare crumbling under the weight of that globaleconomic capitalist reach, so, yeah -- your generationhas got some huge stuff to figure out.
thank you for doing it, in advance. >> earlier, i think you had mentioned somethingabout, you know, young boys and girls having different,you know, titles that they could have. but it seems like, you know, if a boy or ayoung man wanted to be more empathetic or wanted tobe more of a helper and if that kind of was like if hewas pushed toward a different path, what's, like, the long-lasting impacts on that man as a possible,you
know -- >> sorrow. >> what? >> okay. >> yeah, i think so. i've seen some of those guys, you know, whosenatural instincts would have them doing nurtureantwork and who end up doing what somebody else thinksthey should be doing, and that's where -- okay, but thenhere's
where feminism can help. 67 if women have -- are no longer getting 70cents on a dollar, are dollar for dollar with men, thatmeans if you look at your sweetheart and say, thisjob is eating you up alive, wouldn't you like toget retrained to do something closer to your heart,i'll support us for a while, and you can becauseyou're making a decent wage. >> and not necessarily looking at this particular
presidential election but eventually, do youthink -- like what -- do you think positive impactscould come from having a female president or more females obviously in the leadership roles of societyin this particular country? >> that's absolutely vital, and we need todo it at the local -- presidential elections can absorbso much of our energy, our life force, that we forgethow important the local politics are, the statepolitics
are. we don't have a pipeline for getting womenin office and there are reasons for that, just runningthrough some of them the other day. women don't have the money to stop workingso that they can run for office. they don't have the higher pay that wouldlet them do that. 68 and they're also -- within the establishmentof both
parties, there's a longstanding understandingof who is going to take office and so it's hard forthem to break into that, as well. but you're right, you heard what i was sayingat the beginning, the statistics from the book, "sexand world peace." if we have women in leadership positions,helping with all the decisions that are going on, includingthe supreme court, yeah, somebody just quotingthat --
judge ruth bader ginsberg was asked when shewould be satisfied with how many women should be onthe supreme court, she said, "about nine." why not? we've had nine guys for an awful lot of thetime. things aren't going to change a whole lotuntil that happens, and that might sound contradictorybut i'm not saying women are good, men are bad, i'mreally not trying to say that.
but women have been able to live closer tothose values, live out those values of belongingfor such a long time that there is a kind of instinctive, intuitive sort of -- they're not risk-takers,that's one thing that comes up in stability of governmentswhere women are in leadership. 69 women aren't as likely to take the kind ofrisks that plummet a country or a company off a cliff. >> yeah. >> hi.
so earlier you spoke about -- i enjoyed abouthow you spoke about how spirituality is kind of away to access both parts of being human, as you spokeabout, and not having to choose either -- yeah. how would you say in our -- in my era andamong my peers with the decreasing -- what seems tobe the decreasing interest in religion or spirituality,how would we as -- in my age group or youngerbe able to still access those sort of -- being able toaccess
both sides of what it means to be a human. >> yeah, yeah, how do you access the spiritualcore of yourself when you're alienated from the apparent religious openings around you. right, is that part of what you're saying? a big one. >> or i mean with religion or spiritualitynot being of -- like a focus anymore, how would onemy age or younger be able to access sort of somethingmore than
just these systems that are constructed socially?>> in my experience, being a young person once who was 70 like that, and i have a son, also, it's oneof those things that it just starts within you as yourown journey, and once you really single that outas something that's going to matter to you intensely, pretty soon it's all you can think about isfinding an authentic source, a support, a practice, oreven just individuals to hang out with who model thekind of
equilibrium and depth that you're lookingfor, and you'll find a way that is absolutely -- it'snot something that you can have a class about,you're going to suddenly get antenna and that's allyou can think about. it's such a gift to your friends when thathappens, i've seen that happen, so good luck for you. >> time for just a couple more. go ahead.
thank you for coming to st. scholastica. i also wanted to give my two cents, i wentto an all girls' private high school. >> oh, good, okay. >> and i think it was probably one of themost important experiences i'll ever have in termsof being able to come here and do well here, you know,further in life, hopefully. 71 and so i have a question, how do you suggestwe as
students sort of initiate this conversationof belonging among our peers, if that makes sense? >> don't you think it has to do with -- okay. this is partly his question, too. there is a certain -- once you get prettycommitted, you get a strong sense, you know a directionyou want things to start going. you'll find yourself getting -- and this isa value, very deliberate and very slow to react, andthat
you're listening more carefully, and thatthe quality of your listening helps other people stopin the middle of a sentence and hear themselves differently. i think that's kind of where it starts. it starts with a deep personal conviction,a sense of -- and that just starts changing the wayyou interact with the people around you and thatbecomes, in itself, also a point of revolution, that'swhere it starts, so --
>> time for one more. thank you, thank you for being here.i want to respond to one of the students' comments, 72 she mentioned briefly about trump and all-- literally, all the violence we see every day. a dear colleague and friend and myself havebeen studying energy medicine, energy healing over20 years and i recently heard that there is an energylevel called d-3, and i don't know all the innermakings of
that but this level on the earth is deterioratingand it's at its end time, so to speak, so we seethis amazing increase in violence, and we lookat our campaigns this year and how that is capturedon the energy level of the universe and so that levelwill probably be no longer present within thisnext year, probably sooner than that because of the acceleration of violence. so it's a real hope, even though you may not
understand this, it's present and it's real,and i wanted to share that with the audience. >> grounds for hope. we'll take it wherever we can get it. thank you so much. >> thank you very much for coming. >> good job.>> thank you all very much for coming. 73 we do have a little reception in the back,we have some books to sell.
dr. flinders has some books to sell and sodoes veterans for peace, and we have a little buffetthere, food to eat. drive safely on your way home. thanks again for coming. "communication access realtime translation(cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility. this text may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings."