Ever since 2007, when I toured India’s schools and colleges performing UNSUNI, a performance to sensitize youth towards the real India and to start a volunteer movement, I have been sensing a change in the air. And it is not only in India. Where ever I travel I find young people, a small but growing number, disenchanted with the way we are living life today, searching for a more just and kind solution to the ways of the world.
It is in this context that I came across a fascinating book by Marc Ghisi, advisor to various Presidents of the European Commission and Dean of the Cortugli Business Academy, an institution trying to educate industry towards the concept of profit as a consequence of the way one works for the common good. His book is titled The Knowledge Society.
Ghisi traces much of our current malaise, angst and mess to the continuous growth of patriarchy and its concomitant behaviours – conquest, command and control. While these attributes gave a lot in terms of science and technology, and in times of conquests, expansions and colonization, they do nothing for the survival of humanity or for our fast dying planet. For that we need to go back to a nurturing, sharing mindset – in fact back to a matriarchal, or what Ghisi calls a matrifocal mindset.
Did a matrifocal society ever exist? Doesn’t it seem as if patriarchy has ruled the human world forever and ever?
Referring to the research of anthropologists and writers Riane Isler and Marija Gimbutas, Ghisi tells us that patriarchy is a relatively recent condition in our history, a mere 5500 years old. Before that the matrifocal civilizations of India, China and Europe “were based on a different relationship between woman, man and the sacred. The principal creed of these civilizations centred around a Mother Goddess who exercised her authority by giving life and helping growth. Her action was felt even in death, which was conceived as a passage to another way of life. In these civilizations, the sacred was centred on the values of gift and fertility, and thus also on sexual pleasure, artistic creation, and aesthetics. Power was a positive concept centred on life. It meant to make, grow, live, bloom and, because of that focus, establish favourable norms”.
To the forever asked question “Why did matrifocal societies give way to patriarchal ones” Ghisi, based on his research suggests that when humans moved from hunting and gathering to agriculture, territories had to be marked out for people to know where they had sown and where they could reap. This started the concept of possession. Form owning land to owning animals to owning women were easy steps.
The system he says, and many like me agree, has become an anachronism, a dinosaur that needs to die. This dinosaur has lead to greed, corruption of the soul and the mind, avarice and the need to kill for what you want to possess. It is this that has lead us to society as it is today, to the values, or lack of, that we live with – the I, me and myself at any cost.
As we all know, but many refuse to accept, the dire straights of our planet, the response of nature to this system, can only lead to our own destruction. The need to change is immediate.
And it is happening. Perhaps not here at our door steps, but elsewhere the whisperings are becoming louder, for a more caring world, for a world where feelings, attitudes and thoughts take precedence once again. Where valour is not brute strength, and respect doesn’t flow towards soul-less, guiltless wealth generators. A world worth living for. May the gently gusts of change become a whirlwind soon.
