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| Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009) |
This is the sixth installment of my ongoing series about his book. In it, I'll discuss his chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History." As you can tell from the title of the chapter, its subject is one that will stick in the craw of many Catholics, as our church is one of the more patriarchal institutions on the face of the earth.
First, a brief recap of my earlier posts. Berry's book is about the need for our society to move from the current industrial-technological-consumerist age into a new "ecological age." We need to do this because we are turning our planet slowly but surely into a toxic trash heap. We are destroying the earth's rainforests and other forested land, exhausting or destroying the topsoil we grow food on, poisoning the water we drink, and polluting the air we breathe. In doing all these things as the supposed means of satisfying human aspirations — most of which are bogus needs created entirely by the ceaseless stimulus of constant advertising — we are killing countless living species along with the complex ecosystems they live in.
In this collection of essays that can stand alone or be read as a group, Berry lays out what he considers the most significant facets in the history of Western Christian thought. The Western view of the world, starting in classical Greek and Roman times, is constituted mainly by the history of Christian belief and, in more recent centuries, by secularist-humanist derivatives of medieval church teaching. Thought patterns born long ago in the West, Berry contends, underlie our current worldwide age of industrial, scientific, technological striving. It is that striving that is now destroying the earth.
"Patriarchal" vs. "Matricentric"
Chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History," is an indictment of a particularly virulent thought pattern that began in Old Europe some 5,000 years ago. Today that thought pattern has been labeled "patriarchy."
The word "patriarchy," according to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, refers to "social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly: control by men of a disproportionately large share of power."
I'm admittedly guessing about some of this, but apparently Berry is placing the start of the patriarchal period in Europe at roughly the beginning of the Later Neolithic age ... if not slightly before. In this essay, he gives not one but two dates for the onset of patriarchal culture in Europe: 3500 B.C. and 4500 B.C. According to Wikipedia's article on the Neolithic Age, that age ended in Europe in about 3000 B.C. Specifically, the Later Neolithic period in Europe ran from 3500 to 3000 B.C.
The arrival of patriarchal culture in Europe coincided, Berry says, with the arrival of conquering tribes that imposed control over Europe's settled agrarian cultures. The conquerors' society was nomadic and patriarchal. On the other hand, the settled agricultural denizens of Old Europe — the folk whom the invading tribes conquered, that is — had a matriarchal social organization. We know this because archaeologists find that their primary deities were female. They were goddesses, not gods. Accordingly, we can confidently call the pre-patriarchy age in the numerous agrarian locales of Europe "matriarchal" or "matricentric."
Berry says patriarchy was long associated with cities/civilizations such as Rome, while matriarchy was found mainly in rural areas.
Matricentric Culture
The matricentric cultures of Old Neolithic Europe were egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful. According to Judy Chicago, a feminist archaeologist whom Berry cites, the "female-oriented agricultural societies gradually gave way to a male-dominated political state in which occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism developed" (p. 143).
Sound familiar? Our society today extols three of those four values — the exception being social stratification, as we are ostensibly more egalitarian and democratic. (Yet in terms of income stratification and wealth stratification, it seems we may have little to brag about.)
Patriarchy and Dominion
Not only were occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism four of the primary motifs associated with early patricentric cultures. At a more basic level, the male drive toward conquest and dominion was (and remains) deeply characteristic of patriarchy.
The ecofeminist rap against our patriarchal culture is (in part) that patricentric conquest and dominion of the earth has left us playing out a currently unsustainable pattern of behavior. In the name of exercising control over Mother Nature, we are turning the abundance of natural resources of our planet into an overabundance of trash, waste, and toxicity.
Matricentric Attitudes Yet Endure
Berry's position on such matters is that we need to move from our present "patricentric" view to a new, "omnicentric" one that will put neither gender above the other. Our new ecological age will, however, draw much inspiration from the matricentric attitudes of Old Europe. These matricentric attitudes, it turns out, have been preserved right through the last five patriarchal millennia by virtue of an ineradicable substratum of belief and practice. Berry writes:
Even in this period of patriarchal dominance the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions. Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals seem to be among the component elements of our submerged cultural traditions. They carry on an earlier wisdom associated with alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings [the teachings of a magical and religious movement stemming from the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus]. These hidden traditions, considered destructive and unacceptable within the religious-humanist traditions of [today's] Western society, need reconsideration for the contributions they make to our understanding of the universe, its deeper modes of functioning, and the proper role of the human. The carry some of the most creative aspects of our civilization. In their symbolic modes of expression, especially, they enable us to go beyond the rational processes derivative from the classical philosophers and [also from] our later theologies. Through these traditions we have [for instance] recovered our understanding of the archetypal world of the unconscious. (p. 145)
Archetypes of the Unconscious
The "archetypal world of the unconscious"? What is that?
Unconscious archetypes, according to the early-twentieth-century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (pronounced "YOONG"), generate universal symbols that are used in myths and heroic narratives across all cultures. We each natively carry all of these universal archetypes in our bodies and brains, though they remain unconscious until they are brought up to conscious awareness.
The process of bringing archetypal wisdom up to the level of conscious awareness can lead to "self-realization" — which in a male of the species involves actualizing the universal archetype of the feminine(!) that lurks buried within every man's psyche.
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| Ecofeminism Depicted |
The image at left is not all that cryptic. It unites the deep archetypal idea of the feminine with the deep archetypal idea of the natural world.
It accordingly makes a fine icon for Ecofeminism.
What is Ecofeminism?
Endorsed by Berry in his book, Ecofeminism is a movement that sees ...
* * *
Whoa!
After starting that last sentence, I got called away and never finished it. Then commenced a string of problems that cropped up and kept me from getting back to writing this post for several days.
When I resumed, I ran into another problem: I could not find a short, pithy quote from Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter that would complete the sentence for me. Berry manages to convey what Ecofeminism is obliquely, by hinting at what life in the settled agricultural communities of Old Europe may have been like, before the conquest by the patriarchal peoples who brought with them their male deities. Ecofeminism is accordingly a movement that would unite the goals of today's ordinary feminism with those of the ecology movement by hearkening back to the values cherished in the matricentric days of over 5,000 years ago.
The Later History of Patriarchy
Admittedly, Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter frightened me. In it, Berry shows how a male-centered, patriarchal outlook has typified our culture since the days of the earliest true cities in Egypt and Sumeria. Those quasi-empires were succeeded by the true civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome ... all of which had rulers that were either male deities themselves or the anointed agents of the chief male gods.
As such, their authority was written in the stars. The whole cosmic order that undergirded natural phenomena bespoke their unrivaled status. One thinks of the sign of the Messiah's birth given by the Star of Bethlehem, or that by which the Once and Future King, Arthur, was identified, when only he could pull the sword Excalibur from the stone imprisoning it.
That much I could swallow. I could also handle it when I read how, according to Berry, patriarchy instilled its values into our ecclesiastical establishment from its earliest days on, and in our nation-states when they came into existence in more recent centuries.
Patriarchy and the Modern Corporation
When Berry starts talking of how those same masculine tendencies towards rapacity and conquest characterize our modern corporations, which he says are the primary agents responsible for plundering our environment today, I start to squirm. It's not that I don't see his point. Rather, it's that I do see his point, and I don't like it very much.
I would have to be stupid or blind not to see that my whole lifestyle depends on our major corporations. I would not be typing this blog post into my computer, for instance, were it not for the providence of Apple, Inc. I look out my window at my car, parked in front of my house, and see a product of the British Mini Cooper company, a corporation that is owned by BMW in Germany. My breakfast cereal was made by General Mills, or Post, or Nabisco. The list goes on and on.
If corporations are rapacious (and they are) and if their rapacity is a reflection of the patriarchal outlook that began 5,000 years ago (which it is), then my whole worldview is wrong, wrong, wrong. The entire pattern of my life is pathologically skewed. That's scary.
A Bitter Pill To Swallow
Berry goes on to state:
What is needed is a profound alteration of the pattern, not some modification of the pattern. To achieve this the basic principle of every significant revolution needs to be asserted: rejection of partial solutions. The tension of the existing situation must even be deliberately intensified so that the root cause of the destructive situation may become evident, for only when the cause becomes painfully clear will decisive change take place. The pain to be endured from the change must be experienced as a lesser pain to that of continuing the present course.
These four patriarchal establishments [empire, church, nation-state, corporation] have made a world that carries with it a certain pathos. Assuredly there is grandeur in many of its achievements. Enormous energies have been expended in what has been thought to be beneficial to the larger human process. To realize suddenly that so much of this has been misdirected, alienating, and destructive beyond anything previously known in human history is a bitter moment indeed. ...
None of the other revolutionary movements in Western civilization has prepared us for what we must now confront. ... It is possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period (pp. 158 - 159)Oh, woe and dread. Then Berry goes on:
The revelatory experience and the classical humanism on which our civilization has been founded — these are under challenge. Presently they are being severely criticized as manifestations of a biased mentality and as the context, if not the cause, of the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place. (p. 159)
Need for a New Dream Vision
In his later chapter "The Dream of the Earth: Our Way into the Future," Berry identifies all the major thrusts of human cultural development with "dream visions" and "revelatory experiences" of the type associated in tribal societies with shamans. The biggest things we humans generate come out of intuitive, extra-rational visions, not out of reason or philosophy. No matter what our reason tells us after the fact, we are ever in the grip of an original myth.
That in itself is not bad, for our myths and revelatory visions derive from our "genetic coding." Our genes create the archetypes which express themselves as symbols in our sleeping or waking dreams. Those dreams power our changing, evolving "transgenetic cultural coding" (p. 200), each historical version of which provides "the functioning norm of a human community."
All we make, first we dream.
And our genes are the product of the earth itself, in its never-ending evolutionary capacities ... which in turn are expressions of the evolutionary capacities of the entire universe in which we arise.
Revelatory Experiences as Pathological
That would seem to me to suggest that the "revelatory experiences" that power our civilizations would be reliably beneficial, not pathological. However, according to Berry our civilization has been founded on one that has paradoxically turned into the context or cause of "the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place."
How that could happen is a mystery Berry does not truly address. I personally feel it has something to do with what the literary critic and biblical scholar Northrop Frye, in his books The Great Code and Words with Power, called "demonic parody." A demonic parody, according to Frye, is an expression of what Berry would call a true "revelatory experience," but one which twists the original mythic motif in such a way that it becomes ugly and harmful rather than helpful and beautiful.
Prophecy and Dread
Yet that is but an intellectualization I use to avert my eyes from the dread which Berry's dire prophecy stirs in me. I simply don't want to confront the order of magnitude Berry says our revolutionary confrontation of patriarchal environmental atrocities must take on.
Which is surely why, after I wrote the beginning of my earlier unfinished sentence about the definition of Ecofeminism, I abruptly developed a lower back malady which prevented me for several days from sitting at my computer and trying to finish that sentence in an unthreatening, antiseptic way that I now see couldn't be done in the first place.
The material human body, in Berry's view, is wiser than the reasoning mind. The body imposes its own true nature on our plans and intentions. My body was telling me, "Stop! You are heading into dangerous territory. You are being called on to believe things that deep down you already realize are true ... but that you don't want to admit are true. You need to respond to that crisis of belief in a constructive, creative way that mere intellectualizations are designed to bypass. Think (and dream) some more before you try to finish that sentence!"
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