Nurturing Our Humanity

How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future

By: Riane Eisler, Douglas P. Fry

Narrated by: Margaret Wakeley

Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity. It brings together findings—largely overlooked—from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule. Moving past right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end.

The book is published by Oxford University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

"Everyone should read this book... so together we can re-envision our future!" (Darcia Narvaez, University of Notre Dame)

"Essential and transformative reading for every policymaker, philanthropist, activist, and change-maker interested in a more just, balanced, and peaceful world." (Jennifer Buffett, co-president, NoVo Foundation)

"This path-breaking book goes beyond the conventional divides hurting today's civilizations." (Ernst von Weizsäcker, honorary president, Club of Rome)

©2019 Oxford University Press (P)2022 Redwood Audiobooks

foundational

There's a weird silence around the 2 hour 35 minutes left mark (chapter 10), that's why performance is only 4 stars.

Other than that, this work is phenomenal and eye-opening.

Such an important message

Everyone should read this book. The context, history, research, and examples given, prove that domination systems do not yield the results we want. Partnership is the path forward.

A well worded call for calm.

I highly respect these authors. Their arguments are sound, and I agree with much of what they say. They lay out their arguments very concisely and articulately. The narrator; however, almost put me to sleep. If I were you, I would buy this book in print to read yourself. Great points, though!

Timely and important book beautifully narrated

Nurturing Our Humanity is powerful and important book that offers us all a critical call to action. It makes an irrefutable case for strengthening and investing in partnership aspects of societies (where they exist) and for working to overcome dominance and authoritarianism worldwide. Margaret Wakeley's narration is pitch perfect. Nurturing Our Humanity contains much disturbing content that is painful to listen to and digest. Margaret's calm, assuring and steady authoritative voice helps make such passages highly accessible. Her delivery provides unshakable clarity. The reader is left empowered and motivated to help meet - in ways large and small - meet the enormous challenges humanity is facing today.

Change the World

Riane Eisler changed my life with The Chalice and the Blade. Yes, there was ensuing controversy as there always is when patriarchy is challenged. But, decades later it is clear that our future on this planet requires radically different human culture, rejecting war, brutality, violence, trauma, abuse and rape, including rape of the earth, in the name of cultural dominance. I wasn’t quite pleased with the narrator, whose tone was very reasonable and persuasive, when the ideas here deserve an authoritative tone. There’s no time to “sell” these ideas when the opposition is self-interested and powerful. I’d have preferred a tone that conveys we should hold these truths as self-evident.