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Together with Ole Danbolt Mjøs, MD, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Past President of the University of Tromsø, Norway, Past Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of the Norwegian Parliament, Norway, 6th July 2010
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Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security
December 8, 2010, 4-5:30 pm, Russell 306, Book presentation in Gottesman Library, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York.
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security:
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• Editorial Reviews
• Contents
• Foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu
• Afterword by Linda M. Hartling
• Endorsements
• Reviews and Comments
Editorial Reviews
Bookdescription
A social scientist with global affiliations, among others with Columbia University in New York, University of Oslo in Norway, and La Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris, Lindner takes us across history and into nations worldwide to show how emotion spurs hierarchies of domination and therefore causes subjugation, human rights violations, abuse, conflict, and fighting. She spotlights results ranging from the binding and subsequent deforming of Chinese women's feet, to periods of slavery, bondage, feudalism, apartheid, and other events across time. Related actions from political domination internationally, to spousal or child abuse on the homefront are addressed. Lindner looks at how widely divergent societies - from the Japan of Samurais, to the Meso America of Aztecs, up to the modern Iraq at war - are driven by hierarchies of emotionally-fueled control with rigid domination.
Combining classic literature with emerging research, Lindner explains how similar dynamics are at work also in contemporary societies of the West, albeit more covert. What is still lacking, almost everywhere, is access to the full range of our emotions, together with the skills to regulate these emotions so that they become a liberating force in our lives, play a constructive role for productive, fair, and so-called "good conflict," and inform our institution building. Lindner concludes her book by laying out a road map for how to reduce domination and increase human dignity, both in our lives and in the world, by using the power of emotion to implement global systemic change."
Jacket Cover Narrative
"If humankind wishes to overcome its current crises," writes author Evelin Lindner, "it is in need of a paradigm shift so enormous that it comprises all aspects of life. This shift must be powered by an emotional, motivational driving force. Love - or, rather, a new paradigm of love, and a new way of putting love to work - can be this force."
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs aims at outlining the kind of change that needs to be made if we wish to create a less crisis-prone world. This audacious book describes a vision for an alternative future, showing how new approaches to love can dignify gender relations, sex, parenthood, and leadership, and how they can guide us to a world where all citizens can live dignified lives.
The book is organized in three parts. Part I, "Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in Times of Transition," examines the nature of humiliation and how love and humiliation are influenced by large-scale, historical transitions such as globalization. Part II, "Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in the World Today," and Part III, "Global Security through Love and Humility in the Future," look at love, sex, parenthood, and leadership and how they can be dignified. They explore how love can be used to inspire psychological, social, cultural, and political strategies and stimulate global, systemic change.
Evelin Lindner, PhD, is a transdisciplinary social scientist, covering the entire range from neuroscience to political science and philosophy. She holds two PhDs, one in medicine and the other in psychology. She is the founding president of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, a global network of academics and practitioners. Lindner lives and teaches globally, and is affiliated, among others, with Columbia University in New York, the University of Oslo, and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. Lindner is the author of Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict, which was honored as a Choice 2007 Outstanding Academic Title and characterized as path-breaking. Her second book, Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict, was published in 2009.
Summary
If humankind wishes to overcome its current crises, it is in need of a large-scale systemic paradigm shift so enormous that it comprises all aspects of life. My first two books, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict(2006), and Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict (2009), brought the message that we must not push human survival chances over the edge. My third book, Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs (2010), is more ambitious. Paradigm shifts must be powered by an emotional, motivational driving force. Love - or, rather, a new paradigm of love, and a new way of putting love to work - can be this force. It can overcome inflexible rigidity, outdated dichotomies, and false choices. It can defeat the self-humiliating ways in which we design our lives, our emotional, social, and cultural responses, the environments in which we live, our societal and economic frames and institutions, and how we impact nature. It can infuse flexibility, it can balance complexity, it can forge unity in diversity rather than uniformity or division, and it can create dignity rather than the abuse of humans as pawns in large-scale systemic humiliation. The book Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security is unique in its transdisciplinary breadth and depth. It is a "stellar" book. It calls upon us to connect micro, meso and macro levels more consciously than we are used to. Many publications address love, sex and parenthood, few highlight the significance of the macro level as a frame for meso and micro levels. The book describes a vision for an alternative future for the human family, showing how new approaches to love can dignify gender relations, sex, parenthood, and leadership, and how they can guide us to a world where all citizens can live dignified lives. The "love motive" (Gandhi's firm love of satyagraha, not inconsequential weak love) is recommended as replacement for the "profit motive" because it entails the emotional power necessary for a healing re-calibration of world affairs and the creation of a decent, dignified future for humankind and its habitat.
The book is written in a very accessible style and is of interest for a wider audience.
Keynote
An award-winning author and transdisciplinary social scientist offers a must-read guide to paradigm change for creating a socially and ecologically sustainable future.
Very short summary (50 words)
If humankind wishes to overcome its current crises, writes author Evelin Lindner, “it is in need of a paradigm shift so enormous that it comprises all aspects of life. This shift must be powered by an emotional, motivational driving force—love, or, rather, a new paradigm of love and a new way of putting love to work.”
Slightly longer summary (120 words, 2 paragraphs)
<i>Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs</i> aims at outlining the kind of change that needs to be made if we wish to create a less crisis-prone world. This audacious work describes a vision for an alternative future, showing how new approaches to love can dignify gender relations, sex, parenthood, and leadership, and how they can guide us to a world where all citizens can live dignified lives.
The book is organized in three parts. Part I, “Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in Times of Transition,” examines the nature of humiliation and how love and humiliation are influenced by large-scale, historical transitions such as globalization. Part II, “Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in the World Today,” looks at love, sex, parenthood, and leadership and how they can be dignified. Part III, “What We Can Do: Global Security through Love and Humility in the Future,” explores how love can be used to inspire psychological, social, cultural, and political strategies and to stimulate global, systemic change.
Three highlights
• Looks to create a new, global vision for the future of our world, a systemic, paradigm-shifting vision of loving Unity in Diversity
• Aims at creating leaders who can carry this vision forward into our political, cultural, social, and psychological ways of dealing with ourselves and the world
• Draws together a vast spectrum of perspectives and materials to show how destructive cultural, social, and psychological scripts from the past permeate all levels of human activity
• Uses a broad, historical lens that captures all of human history to help readers understand why humankind has so far failed to tap into the potential of love
Contents
Foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in Times of Transition
Chapter 1: Love or Abuse—How Culture Frames Emotions
Chapter 2: Humility or Humiliation—How Humiliation Became a Violation
Chapter 3: Men Above Women—How Gender Became Segregated and Ranked
Part II: Gender, Humiliation, and Lack of Security in the World Today
Chapter 4: Gender Roles—How They Can Humiliate
Chapter 5: Humiliation Addiction—How Dangerous It Is
Chapter 6: The Humiliation Antidote—How About the Audacity of Love
Part III: What We Can Do: Global Security through Love and Humility in the Future
Chapter 7: Love and Sex—How We Can Free Them
Chapter 8: Parenthood—How We Can Rescue It
Chapter 9: Globalization—How Co-Egalization Can Dignify Us All
Afterword by Linda M. Hartling, in Honor of Jean Baker Miller and Donald C. Klein
Notes
Index
Reference List
Foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Since 2000 I have been in contact with Evelin Lindner and have extended my support to her work. I am delighted to see it grow so formidably.
In this book she asks: What can we learn from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Mahatma Gandhi? And she asks why it is that love is so important.
She explains this in chapter 9. Why love? Because love has force. She refers to Strength to Love, a book by Martin Luther King Jr., in which he calls upon the “creatively maladjusted” to use the force of love, rather than hatred, to affect change. At his funeral, he wished that it should be mentioned that he tried to “love and serve humanity.” I wrote the introduction to the book from which this quote stems.
Lindner highlights the role of African ubuntu in her book. Ubuntu is an integral part of my theology and also my work with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ubuntu is a traditional African philosophy for living together and solving conflict in an atmosphere of shared humility. In my book No Future without Forgiveness, I explain ubuntu as follows:
Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human…You share what you have. It is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours: We belong in a bundle of life. We say, “A person is a person through other person.” It is not, “I think therefore I am.” It says rather: “I am human because I belong.” I participate, I share. A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are.
It is my conviction that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor. And it is also my conviction that humility is more effective than humiliation. Both points are strongly made by Evelin Lindner in this book.
Let me give a stark illustration: My dear friend Nelson Mandela could have followed the example of Rwanda’s Hutu leadership. He would certainly have had the power to unleash genocide on the white elite in South Africa. He did not. He chose inclusiveness rather than humiliating domination and he chose humility rather than arrogant revenge. I once said in an interview: “I think this is what we’ve got to say to white people of this country: You don’t know how lucky you are.”
The world must learn about respect, listening and forgiveness. In my book Out of the Shadows. What the TRC Achieved in Search of the Truth, I try to “teach” the world about respect, listening and forgiveness. And with my Educational Trust I was seeking to redress the educational imbalance experienced by Black, Coloured and Indian students in the Western Cape during the regime of apartheid with precisely the same goal.
Lindner’s book encourages us to call for a Global Educational Trust, a trust that would bring the wisdom of her work to the whole world, a trust that would tell the world that “God has a dream” and that “there is hope for our time”!
Archbishop Desmond Mpilo Tutu Cape Town October 29, 2009
Afterword by Linda M. Hartling in Honor of Jean Baker Miller and Donald C. Klein
If we are very lucky, we may have the privilege of working with one world-class leader in a lifetime. I have been more than lucky. I have worked with three: Jean Baker Miller, MD, Donald C. Klein, Ph.D., and Evelin Lindner, MD, Ph.D., Ph.D. These three scholars dedicated their lives to creating a better world. Sadly, Jean Baker Miller and Don Klein died in 2006 and 2007, respectively, but the spirit of their work lives on in this new publication by Evelin Lindner. In many ways, this book is a celebration of all three!
Jean Baker Miller was an internationally renowned psychiatrist, teacher, and activist who wrote the bestselling classic, Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976/1986), a groundbreaking text that continues to inspire readers today. Her book traveled far beyond the field of psychology, influencing courses in medicine, education, organizational management, political activism, and even international relations—being translated into more than twenty languages. As the associate director of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley College, I was the “relational bridge” between Jean and Evelin Lindner.
When you read Evelin’s words, you will hear Jean’s voice. Both Jean and Evelin recognized the healing power of authentic connection to prevent and repair profound relational violations such as humiliation. In her recent book, Conflict and Emotion (2009), Evelin advanced Jean’s notion of “waging good conflict,” emphasizing that we must learn to conduct conflict constructively, in ways that lead to positive change and growth. Furthermore, like Jean, Evelin calls for a complete restructuring of social and institutional relationships toward systems that uphold the dignity of all people.
While Jean inspired Evelin from afar, Don Klein jumped into the fire with her. At 80 years of age, Don participated in the founding of Evelin’s Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HumanDHS) network by attending its first international meeting in Paris (2003). Don was a legendary leader in the field of community psychology. In 1991, he edited a special edition of the Journal of Primary Prevention that examined the many ways humiliation disrupts and damages lives, which was largely overlooked in the literature. After guiding me through my doctoral research developing the first scale to assess humiliation, Don introduced me to Evelin who invited both of us to collaborate on the formation of HumanDHS.
In his later years, Don challenged psychology’s tradition of viewing human behavior through the lens of “a glass half empty.” He proposed a strength-based approach he called “appreciative psychology,” which emphasized understanding and curiosity—in his words, “awe and wonderment”—about human experience, even when one doesn’t like what one sees. Ultimately, he offered “appreciative being and practice” as an antidote to humiliation. Readers will find his appreciative presence woven into the words of this book.
Beyond the integral ways Jean and Don live on through this book, there is more. Jean, Don, and Evelin shared professional practices that are the heart and soul of their scholarship. First, Jean, Don, and Evelin “walked the talk” of their work by “listening others into voice.” They fully realized the truth of Virginia Woolf’s words when she said, “Masterpieces are not single solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by a body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
Today, Evelin has designed her life as a “global nomad”—an “intercultural voyager”—in order to accurately present the diversity of human experience by connecting directly with the people who experience it firsthand. This book is informed by the diverse voices, stories, and wisdom of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals and communities from around the world.
Second, Jean, Don, and Evelin were “visionary-pragmatists.” They did not offer a rosy view of the world, nor did they succumb to cynicism. Each of them brought to life a vision of possibility while realistically addressing the inevitable obstacles that impede efforts to create positive change.
Finally, Jean, Don, and Evelin adamantly resisted being idolized or placed on a pedestal. To borrow a popular phrase, they practiced the “audacity of humility.” Make no mistake, their humility was not a charming or charitable form of modesty. Their humility stemmed from knowing this truth: we must learn from each other and become the leaders we wish to see in the world.
We are at a pivotal time in the history of human relations! We need the full participation of all people to address the social, economic, and environmental crises we are facing today. This book reminds us we can’t afford “ to be blind to our blindness” about humiliation or gender, and we can’t afford to take arrogant action. If men and women are going to grow beyond the forced and false choices of the past, we must adopt humility as a relational necessity for healing and strengthening our connections with each other. If men and women are going to transform pernicious institutions, we must promote humility as an organizational necessity for bridging differences. Most of all, if men and women are going to create a sustainable future for the world’s children, we must cultivate humility as an urgent international necessity. This book calls us to forge a heroic, yet humble path forward, celebrating and enlarging men and women’s potential and capacity to work together for a better world.
Linda M. Hartling, Ph.D. Director, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Research Scientist, Jean Baker Miller Training Institute Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts
A Better World Creating
A summary of Linda Hartling´s Afterword
by Francisco Gomes de Matos, an educator-peace-linguist from Recife, Brazil
The goal of a better world creating
calls for ways of positive relations
systems for humiliation preventing
and repairing relational violations
The goal of a better world creating
calls for ways of positive change
the dignity of all people upholding
using language as appreciative exchange
The goal of a better world creating
calls for ways of audatious humility
from each other cooperatively learning
nurturing a secure future for humanity
Endorsements
Without a doubt, Evelin Lindner is the world’s leading authority on the destructive and deadly dynamics of humiliation. In this book, Lindner dares us to think bigger than ever before, challenging us to transform the degrading practices that damage and corrupt our most fundamental relationships, not only for our personal health, but also for the health and well-being of the world!
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Linda M. Hartling, Ph.D., Director, Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Research Scientist, Jean Baker Miller Training Institute Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College
Not only is Lindner presenting a research-based, refreshing and courageous voice of her own; she is conducting a huge orchestra of human research voices, stretching from economics to politics and family life. Centering on the future of the human child, she makes us understand why we need to listen – in a new way. Why we need to think big thoughts, combining insight from many areas. Why “the commons dilemma” is related to children’s rights. This book is destined to become a classic.
- Øystein Gullvåg Holter, Professor of Gender Equality and Masculinities Studies at the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, Norway
The future of humankind is at stake. In times of crisis, we need people of courage, people who step out of the beaten track of familiarity and look at the situation from a new perspective. Few people have the global experience and transdisciplinary background that Evelin Lindner brings to this task. This book is a wake-up call and a guideline for humanity to follow if it wishes to survive.
- Ole Danbolt Mjøs, MD, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Past President of the University of Tromsø, Norway, Past Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of the Norwegian Parliament, Norway
Ranging across the centuries and over diverse global cultures, this beautifully written, compassionate work shows us how the corrosion of direct human relationships underlies many of the world’s critical problems: war, terrorism, the abuse of women, and the abuse of entire religious or ethnic groups. While scholars and statesmen have worked hard at finding rational solutions to these problems, Lindner’s indispensable work demonstrates that no solutions will take hold unless they are based on a firm foundation of trusting and mutually respecting human relationships. This book bridges the gap between the psychology of conflict and macro-policy in unique and fruitful ways – an invaluable guide to finding ways forward in this time of global crisis.
- Jack A. Goldstone, Hazel Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University
Lindner asks the pivotal question for our time: how can we use love as a tool for transversing the transition into a new, more caring world, a world of partnership rather than domination. Drawing from her research and experiences in places ranging from Egypt and Rwanda to Norway and the United States, her answers are always thoughtful, sometimes provocative, and invariably evidencing Lindner's commitment to building a world where human rights and dignity are truly respected.
- Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations
A pioneering and multi-faceted book. It gives specific content to the general proposition that to build better societies and economies we need to utilize the findings of psychologists who study individuals, couples, and families.
- Howard Richards, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, USA, and Fellow and Development Education Chair at the University of South Africa
The contents of Evelin Lindner’s book are the closest we can come to a gospel for the twenty-first century, and the author is a modern version of an old-time prophet. Her message is solidly founded in a fabulously broad and rich experience, and in modern psychology and social science. The world is on the verge of a catastrophe, but if her and other similar voices are heard, we may have a fighting chance.
- Jan Smedslund, Professor of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs is a sterling example of the kind of inclusive, integrative discourse that may just save humankind and our planet, the important point being that we can only create this kind of discourse together. To give context to the ideas in this book (the main one being that the dynamics of the present intensely interconnected information age give a unique opportunity to alter the influence of the "security dilemma" identified in international relations research that has generated the "traditional" gender relations of the last 10,000 years where the female sphere is "inside" and the male sphere is "outside"), Dr. Lindner shares with us her own personal context as a child of the German diaspora that occurred on the Polish-German borderlands after World War II. This basic context, as a child deeply affected by world events, directly led to her subsequent explorations of both medicine and the social sciences and to her consistent practical activity, as a global citizen and as both a psychotherapist and a social psychologist, in addressing the world's ills, particularly those affecting women and children. The book is not only transdisciplinary, but it also weaves together the micro, meso and macro levels of both personal experience and formal analysis into a seamless fabric of understanding into which we are all invited to participate. Dr. Lindner is akin to the Native American Spider Woman, a female entity who spins the world into existence through her narratives, in this case a possible radically inclusive future world, a world where no one is "left out," a world of mutual dignity and respect.
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Jacqueline Wasilewski, Ph.D. Professor (Retired) of Intercultural Communication & Relations, International Christian University (ICU), Tokyo, Japan, Intercultural Consultant, Americans for Indian Opportunity, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Evelin Lindner's new book, Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs, soon to be released by Praeger, is unusual in the social science context in that it is a book of love. Love is possibly the most abused term in any language, brought into the service of all manner of feelings, activities and events, harnessed to the romantic, social and metaphysical and justified by the ever growing collective ego of our materialist cultures. We abuse and oppress in the name of love, we control and circumscribe to demonstrate our commitment to love and we explain our excesses by the demands of our conflicting allegiances, all of which are, we claim, the objects of what we identify as love.
In her epic voyage through how we understand the demands of love, Lindner offers a refreshing analysis of our careless frittering of this sublime quality and the extravagances of our misuse of what love might be. Her words re-endow love with the magnificence which has made it an eternal sentiment for the most elevated aspects of our awareness and the pinnacle of our artistic and philosophical goals. Her text explores the depths of human difficulty, but with the sensibility of transcendence rather than despair. It is this transcendence which vitalises her research, the search for a humanising element within the desparate cataclysms of world events, where humiliation trammels dignity and at personal and national levels, oppression is the systematic result.
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs offers a view of love, distant from the emphatic ego, the nationalistic spirit and the religious zeal, which uses a universal ideal for its own ends; it reasserts the nature of a free, universal and pervasive love, a love of humility and tolerance which enhances and humanises wherever it resides. The detail of this book reinforces the nature of culture, family and individual and reasserts the dignity of life. For Lindner, love is a universal humanising force and to use it in any way which sullies this identity, is to abuse the nature of love and the contexts in which it is identified.
- Bernard Hoffert, Professor of Art, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Associate Dean of External Affairs of the Faculty of Art and Design, Vice President of the Academic Board of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, Former World President of the International Association of Art
In this book Evelin Lindner continues her groundbreaking work, opening the field of conflict resolution to the centrality, of humiliation. Her work has always been political, in that she attends to the dynamics of marginalization and oppression, but here, she focuses on an issue near and dear to all of us---the politics of love itself as a gendered phenomena. Her vision of a relational world free of humiliation is a beacon for anyone interested in reducing the violence of daily life and promoting positive peace.
- Sara Cobb, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University
With the responsible and vibrant optic of a World Citizen, Evelin Lindner explores the interpenetration of gender roles and experiences of humiliation in different cultures and venues, even the most personal, opening up new avenues for building a better future for our human collective. The insights bestowed by its reading will be powerful for policymakers, and indispensible for all of us.
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Carlos E. Sluzki, MD, Professor of Global and Community Health, George Mason University, Fairfax VA; and Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University School of Medicine, Washington DC
Dr. Evelin Lindner is a leading voice in the newly emerging field of humiliation studies. Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs is an ambitious work which deals with emotions, previously overlooked, which are central to the human experience. This book will be recognized as a major contribution to the field.
- Dr. Aaron Lazare, Professor of Psychiatry, Chancellor and Dean Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Medical School and author of On Apology (Oxford University, 2004)
Evelin Lindner represents a rare combination between the responsive individual, the responsible global citizen and the thoughtful and creative scholar who is able to put it all together in a message that is both thought provoking and inspiring. This rare integration found expression in her previous scholarly works on the dynamics of humiliation, and in her commitment to translate these intellectual insights towards better interpersonal and intergroup relations in a conflict torn world. Her present work is a major stepping stone in the intellectual and social paths that she paves. It is a thoughtful, beautifully written and socially relevant analysis of the destructive forces of humiliation and the unavoidable human necessity to base social relationships on foundations of trust and mutual respect. This is the stuff that peace between nations, equality between social groups, emotionally fulfilling human relations and good parenting is made of. None thinks it more deeply and says it more eloquently than the way that Evelin Lindner does in her new book.
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Arie Nadler, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Argentina Chair for Research in Social Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Israel
This extraordinary book is a ‘must-read’ for men and women of all ages who are interested in their own future and the future of humanity. This is a seminal contribution which spells out a path for the profound paradigm shift that humankind has to bring about if it wishes to create a sustainable future. It offers, in a very nuanced and sensitive manner, what good parenting, in private, local, and global contexts, must mean in order to be effective. I have never met a person who is such a profoundly committed global citizen from her heart and soul as is Evelin Lindner: a true member of the human family of One World. The global standpoint from which she gazes at the world is unique and is essential for humanity's future. This book is a beautiful meditation and a true vehicle for healing.
- Grace Feuerverger, Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, University of Toronto, Canada, author of Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel and Teaching, Learning and Other Miracles
Anyone interested in the future of the human species should read Dr. Evelin Lindner's pathbreaking new book Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security. The desert of neo-conservative, neo-liberal ideology highlights the power and potency of the fully formed self maximising individual. Dr. Lindner's book is an oasis of common sense. It reminds us of the much more important concepts of positive relationships, love, empathy and compassion. She is not afraid to propose these qualities as guiding principles for effective sociation, community and paradoxically, individual well being. When these qualities are absent, individuals, groups and communities feel marginalised and humiliated. These negative experiences of humiliation and disrespect are violent in themselves and the source of violence. Dr. Lindner diagnoses the troubles at the heart of the human condition in the 21st century with great forensic skill. Not content with diagnosis, however, she provides pragmatic , hopeful and realistic alternatives. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to survive the 21st century with human dignity intact.
- Kevin P. Clements, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, Foundation Director, the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, Dunedin New Zealand, Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association
In this remarkable book, Evelin Lindner mobilizes her experience as a global citizen, her passion for making the world better for us all, and her comprehensive scholarship to paint a unique picture of love in the time of globalization. Globalization invites realization that love can be more -- and stronger -- than either traditional or modern cultures have realized, while the new, richer and stronger love that comes into view in these pages invites realizing that globalization can and must be more generous, nurturing and healing than any of us would have thought. A breakthrough analysis of our moment in history, a liberating vision for love, sexuality and parenting, and a pathway into a better tomorrow: This book is a must read for anyone who cares about the future of love and wants a future we all can love!
- Michael Britton, Ed.D. Counseling Psychology
Once again Dr. Evelin Lindner has contributed her groundbreaking critical analysis and compassion to the study of humiliation and human dignity and their role in understanding the human situation and promoting social justice. In Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs, she continues the work of her two previous books but also applies her experience and knowledge as a psychologist in understanding how previous gender paradigms have contributed to the dehumanization of others and to the ongoing deadly conflicts we face. I highly recommend this book not only to psychologists, political scientists, and feminist thinkers but to policy makers as well. The publisher has my permission to use my words for promotional purposes.
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Kenneth Suslak, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus and Licensed Psychologist
Evelin Lindner's vision was a major force that inspired my art installation, "My Inner Sole". The book presents original ways of looking at humiliation and reversing it's destructive consequences. It is beautifully written and is a must read text to anybody who is interested in the future of humanity.
- Zuzka Kurtz, NYC artist and creator of “My Inner Sole”
Evelin Lindner shows that thinking big and outside the box pays off. Offering a myriad of interrelated insights drawn from work, study, travel, clinical experience and broad interdisciplinary reading, she reframes gender, humiliation and security. It adds up to an activist agenda for deep change at the interpersonal, community, institutional, and global levels, which simultaneously broadens human rights thinking. Her book indeed confirms the fundamental insight of transnational human rights histories since 1945: that people matter and their hopes and bitter struggles have altered the course of international and domestic relations.
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Jean H. Quataert, Professor of History, Binghamton University, SUNY, USA, and author of Advocating Dignity: Human Rights Mobilizations in Global Politics (2009)
Evelin Lindner’s groundbreaking work introduces us to new ways of thinking about the abuse of power and its antidote: strong love modeled on the examples of world leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. All sentient beings are included in her compassionate view of the earth, her vision as attuned to the suffering of infants as to the beauty and healing power of the mature and robust capacity to love. In this book, Lindner invites readers not only to embrace her understanding of what is possible in terms of human dignity but also shows us how we might achieve it. Nothing less than the salvation of our world is at stake. A compelling read and a formidable accomplishment.
- Sondra Perl, Ph.D., Professor of English & Urban Education, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Director of the Holocaust Educators Network, and author of On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate (SUNY Press)
In her book, Evelin Lindner makes a quantum leap from humiliation to human dignity with love. She writes for everyone who has ever dispaired at the state of the world we live in. Her book is filled with the concrete optimism of practitioners who never discard anyone in their actions. In the current times of uncertainty, it is an ode to life, interconnectedness and relationships. The book leaves one with the feeling that it is never too late to live a fulfilling existence alongside family, friends and nature. It will no doubt resonate in our co-evolutionary thoughts for years to come.
- Victoria C. Fontan, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace, Costa Rica
"Humiliation" is Evelin Lindner's term for domination in international relations, subjugation in social science, and repression in clinical psychology. Her new book, Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security, should appeal to close students of the present world transition to life founded anew on dignity and all the human rights. She lays out systemic changes—"extraordinary" women in the lead—to a more dignified world. If ever there will be a political unification of the human race, it will have to be based on the "sacred" and "big" loving relations of citizens of the world, as described in this extraordinary book. —Joseph Preston Baratta, author of The Politics of World Federation.
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Joseph Preston Baratta, Ph.D., Associate Professor, History & Political Science Department, Worcester State College, Worcester, MA, USA, author of The Politics of World Federation
What a wonderful book! Timely and necessary. It addresses issues that are very important for all individuals as well as for contemporary societies, characterized and enriched by numerous diversities. Societies not only need to recognize and accept these diversities and their numerous impacts, both positive and negative, also traumatic ones, but need to learn how to internalize and manage them. Gender and gender related issues are only segments, but important ones for the cohesion and security of societies as well as for the happiness and security of individuals. These central goals and ideals can only be reached if all individuals are respected, if their needs and interests are taken seriously, if adequate conditions are ensured that allow them to realize their potentials and their desires, express their emotions, be able to coexist with the others and develop partnerships that they want - based on acceptance, friendship and love (in all its dimensions). Following the central messages of the book, everything should be done to prevent humiliation and heal traumatic experiences, resulting from it, which I see among the main obstacles in the achievement of the above goals and ideals.
- Mitja Žagar, Professor of Political Science, Ethnic Studies and Law at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the Faculty of Humanities, Koper, at the University of Primorska/Littoral, Slovenia
In an era of multiple man-made crises buffeting our world, Evelin Lindner presents an analysis that is timely and scholarly, inspirational and practical. No person, no nation, can ignore the hurt of humiliation.
- Floyd W. Rudmin, Professor of Social & Community Psychology, University of Tromsø, Norway
In this book, the author, Dr. Evelin Lindner, a well known medical doctor, psychologist, social scientist, and a dedicated person for peace and harmonic relations in society, said "Humankind must prepare for a different future, a future where coming generations are offered more humane socializations than those into which we were born".
Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security is a very important tool for such a preparation for a dignified future and to understand the complex and historical interrelationship of genders at all levels, and, obviously at the individual state of love between two adults.
I strongly recommend this book to be studied in universities and schools and, for parents, educators, sociologists and every woman and man.
- Ernesto Kahan, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine and Poet, Tel Aviv University, Israel, President of the Israeli Association of Writers in Spanish in Israel, Vice President of the World Academy of Arts and Culture, (Recognized by UNESCO), Former Vice President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985) and the actual president of the Israeli Branch, Honorary President of the International Society of Poets Writers and Artists A.C. (SIPEA), Vice President of the International Forum for Literature and Culture of Peace (IFLAC), National President of the Union of Hispanoamerican Writers (UHE), Vice Director of General Directorate of Global Harmony Association (GHA)
This spirited and scholarly account illuminates human dignity as a force for social transformation and sustainable peace. With inspired clarity, Evelin Lindner contends and elaborates how an analysis of gender humiliation can be transformed into humility. She rouses readers to find alternatives through dignified and sustainable relations of sex, love, parenting, global society and ecology.
- Janet Gerson, Co-Director Peace Education Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY; Education Director, International Institute on Peace Education, Community-based Institutes on Peace Education (IIPE/CIPE)
Never before have I heard Evelin`s voice so forceful, so authentic and so outstanding! This book is a page-turner, it gives me goose-bumps and shocking insights while I read during one night and two days non- stop. What a force, what an impressive work! I bow to honor her insights and I cling to the inspirations this book gives my own work as a fair-trade activist and ecological fore-runner.
- Ragnhild Nilsen, Partner of CoachTeam, Founder of GlobalFairTrade and Sekem Scandinavia, ArcticQueen
The book Gender, Humiliation,and Global Security is important for psychotherapists and psychologically savvy lay people, because it helps us consider that a psychological influence, unrecognized humiliation, truly is at the root of all human problems. Evelin Lindner does so partly by showing us that the connection between humiliation and problems is evident throughout the globe, not just in advanced nations. Moreover, she helps us glimpse the depth and power of intense humiliation's damaging effect on people. Her prescription is not psychotherapeutic; it is persuasion. But the goals she persuades us to achieve are valuable guidelines for the theory and practice of psychotherapy.
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John H. McFadden, Marriage and Family Therapist, Private Practice, San Francisco, California, USA
In this inspired, timely and universally vital presentation, Evelin Lindner proposes the big question of how to understand and evolve the interconnected and interdependent micro and macro perspectives of the gender and humiliation relationship while also providing a concise and workable solution to balancing, healing and restoring our planetary psyche for a sustainable and loving world.
- Harold W. Becker, Author and Founder/President, The Love Foundation, Inc.
Prof. Lindner's new book is an important book and it makes pleasant reading too. It came at the right moment for me as I was finalizing my own manuscript for "The Know NORWAY Book", written for Pakistanis and Afghans. Lindner's book became a great help for me.
- Atle Hetland, Social and Human Scientist, Oslo, Norway, and Islamabad, Pakistan
Evelin Lindner takes on a broad interdisciplinary approach toward social sustainability, showing how "big love" can transform the world from a fear and profit paradigm to one that fosters global dignity and community. My understanding of humility and humiliation has deepened enormously as a result of her rich synthesis and anecdotes.
- Lynn King, Founder and Managing Director, SageVision, Shanghai, China
This is a stimulating and wonderful masterpiece of research which will advance and enrich the knowledge in the social and political sciences. I was particularly impressed by the methodology of research involving a complete change of the researcher herself as a way of preaching by the example, in order to undertake this fantastic adventure in the quest of values for a better living for us and for our children. Through this research, Dr Evelin Lindner has challenged the foundations of current relations between indiduals and nations. She rather promotes the values of universal love and dignifying relationships between human beings. This is a unique topic of reseach which opens many avenues of thinking in order to address a large number of problems posed to our present and future times. We should therefore be grateful to the author for offering us this opportunity to reflect on our common challenges in order to prevent the worse to happen again.
- Emmanuel Ndahimana, Managing Director of a Guarantee Fund supporting Microfinance Institutions in Rwanda, he is also involved in Ecobank Rwanda and in the National Public Service Commission of Rwanda
This innovative and accessible work tackles an ambitious and interdisciplinary subject matter, emphasizing the need for a paradigm shift on a global scale to address the critical problems that humanity faces with an ethic of cooperation, trust and love. Lindner envisions a sustainable and humane future on this planet and to that end offers crucial insights as to how we may begin to walk that path - a path where the following words become indeed a reality to every woman, man and child "for love is the goal and love is the guide."
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Mohammed Mesbahi, Chair and Founder of Share The World’s Resources (STWR), London, UK
Lindner's book unleashes a wildfire on humiliation. No old paradigm, fabricated hierarchical structure, antiquated view on relationship, sex, marriage, parenting or love escapes the flames of her fierce pen. Let the ashes of these outdated frameworks fertilise the soil for the seedlings of firm love to grow into fully grown trees of life.
- Zuzana Luckay, Ph.D. Candidate and Lecturer at the P.J. Šafárik University (UPJS) in Košice, Slovakia, currently doing research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), Belgium
Evelin Lindner invites you to a journey you must not miss. Combining research and profound analysis with warmth and genuine care for fellow human beings, she engages both your heart and your mind. Her journey is about a number of important aspects, but more than anything it is about love in the prespective of our civilisation's survival. If the world joins her, there is hope.
- Olav Ofstad, Country Representative, The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Serbia and Montenegro. Author of Conflict Management in International Peace Operations: A Handbook for Officers and Soldiers
This book explains complicated concepts using examples easy to picture and comprehend, and gave me a new perspective into a subject unintentionally ignored. The love described herein is not a romantic “small” love; it is a powerful and dangerous “big” and “firm” love that through humiliation could lead to heaven or hell. How love links to humiliation and potentially leads to genocide or the solution to global problems is one of many questions raised and answered. This book brings a fresh perspective, is a great table topic for conversations and brings a comprehension useful for the social sciences as a whole.
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Espen Walderhaug, Ph.D. , Clinical Psychologist, Yale University School of Medicine
This book represents a whiff of hope for the new generations who are tired of the old theories that seem to hamper the reflections concerning humankind. Although it is based on love and hope for a better world, the ideas revealed by the author are not romantic or utopic, but well founded on wide theoretical knowledge.
- Gabriela Saab, Gabriale Saab is a graduating Law student from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Reviews and Comments
Choice
(Choice is a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL),
a division of the American Library Association)
In this far-ranging, sometimes brilliant book, Lindner (Columbia Univ. and Oslo Univ.) studies the social and political ramifications of human violations and world crises related to humiliation, defined as the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that harms or removes the dignity, pride, and honor of the other. A "transdisciplinary social scientist," the author charts how humiliation--and its antidote, love--are conditioned by large-scale, systemic social forces such as globalization. The force of this book resides in its construction of a compelling, compassionate alternative to the psychological effects of humiliation on gender and sexual relations, parenthood, and leadership. For Lindner, this alternative is not only love but also its psychological correlate, humility, both of which can become the basis of the social, political, and cultural change necessary to reform the harmful global tendency toward humiliation. Lindner's philosophy is avowedly non-dualist and rooted in ancient Eastern wisdom. A powerful follow up to her Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (CH, Mar'07, 44-4114), this book appears in the "Contemporary Psychology" series; it will be indispensable for psychologists, humanists, and political scientists and invaluable to policy makers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. -- M. Uebel, University of Texas
On Humiliation by Valentin Y. Mudimbe
(written, initially, for his graduate seminar on the "Existence of Others," on October 9, 2009)
Dear Dr. Evelin Lindner,
You asked for a pre-publication endorsement of Gender, Humiliation and Global Security? Instead, here is a heartfelt statement in recognition of the engaging lesson represented by your book.
“Eyes they have, but they do not see;
They have ears, but they do not hear.”
These verses from Psalm 115, and their perennial wisdom which accompany home the faithful after the Passover meal, feature vividly a symbolic, helpful entry to the lines of your exhortations and their skillful growth-oriented perspectives in a “globally interdependent knowledge society.”
Eloquent, compassionate, Gender, Humiliation and Global Security escorts the reader in most tangled paths aimed at an “I-Thou relationship of mutual respect and equal dignity,” through questions about the safety of the world of tomorrow. The paths are individual, they are collective. They are regional, and at the same time they transcend all differences and borders.
"This is a book by a Master.”
The predicate entails orders of semantic restrictions, and their rapport to portraits. The recognition, a paradox, could also serve as an entry to this uncommon book. In flame-touches, it uncovers disquieting correlations between cultural economies of gender relations and everyday humiliation politics. Designating patterns from a good worked out induction, as the book does, is an achievement in its own right. Clearly defining objectives, a contribution.
What’s the price in confronting an assertion about a “Master” that seems to relativize the property it grounds? Should one eliminate a semantic ambiguity by modifying words, specifying their contexts, in order to assume the insecurity induced by a predicate? Such a process would simply be displacing a linguistic constraint it needs to question, and not erasing it.
Here is another entry:
Gender, Humiliation and Global Security, is indeed a master book.
Authoritative, responsible, meticulously based on research, interviews, and clinical analysis, Dr. Lindner’s book is a comprehensive approach to a universal phenomenon, humiliation, assessed in its expected and unexpected effects, as well as their risks. Culturally determined, these effects refer back to a line of alienation, attested in all human experience. That is the point of departure of this project that pays attention to features in the human condition, the singularity of its regional distinctions, and the ambition for a “world without humiliation that would dignify us all,” as Professor Linda M. Hartling writes in the Foreword.
Preceded by her Foreword, the book has three chapters, three privileged angles. They decode humiliation in “times of transition,” in “the world today,” in “the future.” Angles, they are designs planning ventures in understanding. A historical dominated approach structures the first chapter, a more synchronic description rolls the last two. They circumscribe the being of the humiliation phenomenon. Revelation of a reality, it manifests itself to the critical consciousness of the reader. One recalls, on the one hand, Hobbes’ dread on “the natural condition of mankind, as concerning their felicity, and misery.” As it expresses itself in Leviathan, there is, on the one hand, an affirmation on equality of minds, but difference of bodies’ strength, and a remark about the human being prone to conflicts and wars. And, there is, on the other hand, Hobbes’ plea for a strong governing power to civilize communities. The vision of the philosopher had to accent the fact that “man” is an enemy to “another man.”
In the modernity of such a thought that judges the barbarism of the English civil war, Hobbes was reformulating the old paradigm of Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BC); πολις διδασκει aνδρα (polis didaskei andra), namely that it is the city that educates “men.” Like the Greek, Hobbes was concerned about the pervasive masculine violence in nature that the rule of law should domesticate. A wolf to another human, homo homini lupus [ital.], according to a popular saying. Is there a reason to believe also, according to some theorists, that the male throughout all species is prone to disorder?"
In the variety of fields assumed by Dr. Lindner’s inquiry, signs and sites of humiliation refer to the same “natural body,” the gendered body of the individual, also the cultural body of a community. “You give me your body, I shall inscribe on it the law of the tribe,” from which one could evaluate the fact that we inhabit our cultures in the manner we inhabit our bodies. Grounded judgments justify cultural models. “Waging good conflict,” to use Professor Hartling’s words for this book’s aim, means to deconstruct even apparently stable paradigms. Consider the Athenian grid of the “good woman” that a Judeo-Christian tradition has universalized. She is the daughter of a citizen, the spouse of a citizen, the mother of a citizen. This is a theoretical definition. It is equally an explanation, insofar as it answers the why and how of the adjective “good.” The notion of “intension,” from logic, contributes to symbolics of whatever must have a woman to be part of the class of good women. Including, the “intension” excludes also. To use Dr. Lindner’s word, a “female script” stands there. In languages in which exists a grammatical gender system, the feminine is a marked form vis-à-vis a regular masculine one, functioning in this manner as a perfect metaphor of the “female script.” It assesses rules of inclusion and exclusion, total or partial. Politics of separation, politics of humiliation, are often motivated within this “female script.” In our time, they have been allowing catastrophes like the holocaust in Germany, the Rwandan genocide, all impurity-impetuses in ethnic cleansings, from the Balkans to Africa, to Southeast Asia, for example.
One readily agrees with Dr. Lindner in using the “female script” as a sign that could account for correlations between transcultural economies of gender relations and humiliation politics. Simone de Beauvoir is right in The Second Sex, demonstrating how the female “exists” her body in a transitive manner, being a body-for-herself, yet enclosed within the body-for-others, thus existing as the absolute experience of contingency.
Among many twentieth-century testimonies, in her Meeting the Madwoman, the Jungian analyst Linda Schierse Leonard has convincing case-studies. Casually informed, institutionally marked, or inflicted through abuse, a spirit may perfectly well identify in shame or in pride with a “Caged Bird” or the “Bag Lady,” a “Recluse” or a “Saint” woman.
In her ambition to account for the ordinariness of humiliation, Dr. Lindner brings together reasons to relate a priori cultural expressions and a gendered body, thus can name a produced assignation. In a sustained effort, she extracts the irony and imponderability of assumptions governing humiliation all around the world.
Beyond ways of doctrines, war-fighting zones of rights and security conflicts, from domestic to public, regional to global, yesterday and today, the body, any gendered body, stands as a facticity. It is the point of view by which anyone exists as being-for-other-people. Through humiliation, this body is reduced to contingency, even when attempts are made at recognizing its virtual transcendence. Dr. Lindner’s view, her whole book, is there, unique by her touches, the elegance of a style in grasping the immediacy of a utopian political economy. If it is difficult to provide a straight summary of it, for sure one can qualify it in its own task, a concrete obligation for the well-being of individuals, as well as for the security of the human race. In clear, an approach to everything for, and in equal dignity, Dr. Lindner’s view represents life altering principles for a way to live on this planet within a fraternal global culture, in “egalization” and “co-egalization.”
The book’s major assurance gives cause to empirical socio-psychology, and to ethics. In rethinking a total vertical and horizontal collaboration, the book makes a strong case. Accentuating that, Professor Hartling emphasizes both the “profit-motive and the love-profit, and entail the emotional power necessary for a re-calibration of world affairs and the creation of a decent dignified future.” The view seems simple, it is not. In effect, it measures an argument against a world of future violence. Arguing that, along with a better ethical management of technological resources, today’s world on conflicts might become a better knowledge universe, a decent service world-village. Because of its fluidity, humiliation is likely a key to pass everywhere for what should be controlled throughout levels in all social formations. To begin with, there is the necessity of a new rhetoric of gender, ethnicity, religion, aimed at signifying a normative goal for mainly those held to contempt in a loveless hell. There is, equally, the necessity to invest this goal into a terminal goal of human dignity for everyone.
The challenge can be met, demonstrates Dr. Lindner. The evidence of a universal ideal stems from particulars. These are localized. As a matter of method, to treat humiliation and its relation to what it negates is to trace it back to its socio-cultural contexts. Societies, all cultural formations, have hierarchized expressions of humiliation. As they have, of sins and bad manners; in other words, explicit and tacit taxonomies. A medical doctor and psychologist, Dr. Lindner uses a classical approach. As the understanding of good health, basically deduces itself from a positive knowledge of a diseased body, a diagnosis of negative procedures in relation to systems of values is propaedeutic to any action, including thinking proactively a plan for a transcultural critique of regional systems.
In sum, an important lesson of the book is its philosophical statement about humiliation. Between the polarities represented by, on the one hand, the inward-oriented anxieties or apprehension of any individual, an institutional system, or a transnational corporation, and, on the other hand, the outward-oriented grids of fear, there is something like a space from which to understand humiliation, and work against its pervasiveness.
“Hell is other people,” from Jean-Paul Sartre’s arch-quoted No Exit ought to reflect its other side, which is, for instance reflected in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ citation from South American Indians, “hell is me.” In fact, the two French thinkers state the same evidence. To exist, to relate to other people, is simultaneously to see and be seen. This fundamental paradigm of phenomenology is of consequence. In effect, to apprehend oneself as subject, to posit oneself as an eye perceiving a something, a someone, equals prevailing in a dynamic with a full weight for reifying, alienating the perceived. At the same time, any perceiver knows that in return, the perceived can exercise the same capacity, look back, and stand as a subject having the same ability to alienate anyone else. And, writes a Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness, “this is the meaning of the famous line from Scriptures: ‘They knew that they were naked.’” From this strictly agnostic approach, that is “the original sin,” which is being named in a professional language. Adds Jean-Paul Sartre, “Thus original sin is my upsurge in a world where there are others; and whatever may be my further relations with others, these relations will be only variations on the original theme of my guilt.”
No commentary is needed in order to highlight the connection between this metaphoric use of a biblical figure and the articulation of the prophetic voice of Dr. Lindner’s on humiliation.
Primum non nocere (first of all do not harm), was the ethical instruction of Peter S. Drucker, deemed “the most important management-thinker of our time.” The lesson comes down from the guiding rule of Hippocrates, the founder of scientific medicine. Proactively prophetic, in an abiding sense of urgency, Dr. Lindner makes a similar plea for a healthier global culture of solidarity.
V.Y. Mudimbe
Duke University, Durham, NC
October 9, 2009
Review by Tuva Otterlei Blikom
In Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security, Lindner has the courage to broaden the academic horizon and look at the world in a general perspective. By doing this she takes the academic out of its comfort zone and uses its tools to put a diagnosis on The World 2009 - a quite depressing one, but it is not without hope. The personal tone of voice is made up from Lindner's own experiences through her life and studies, which makes the book engaging to the reader. This same thing make the political undertone of the book clear.
Throughout my own studies on gender, media and culture I have wondered several times what the ultimate goal of feminism and equality between the sexes is defined as. In Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security Lindner gives a daring and long awaited answer to this: she strives to use the power a broader love to show humility to other people, regardless of their sex, gender, class, ethnicity or other cultural differences.
Lindner's unorthodox perspective on how to solve world conflicts and challenges leaves the reader inspired. I honestly believe that our world would be a better place if everyone read this book.
Tuva Otterlei Blikom
MA in Media and Communications, Oslo, Norway
12th November 2009
Comments and Reflections by Francisco Gomes de Matos, a peace linguist from Recife, Brazil
• ON DIGNIFYING: A mini-paradigm dedicated to Evelin Lindner by Francisco Gomes de Matos, a peace linguist from Recife, Brazil
DIGNIFYING is a PEACE worth living
DIGNIFYING is an act of joy-giving
DIGNIFYING is a way of soul-filling
DIGNIFYING is a mission fulfilling
DIGNIFYING is a NO to all killing
DIGNIFYING is a LIFE ever-tilling
DIGNIFYING is GOODNESS ever-willing
• IF THE WORLD WE WISH TO HUMANIZE
DEEP, SOCIAL CHANGES ARE NEEDED
FOR PEOPLE EVERYWHERE TO HARMONIZE
DIGNITY SHOULD ALWAYS BE HEEDED
• Dear Evelin,
Reading your ENLIGHTened-ing book has led my mind to create these Rhymed reflections.
Core-concepts are capitalized:
(1) How can we make our LOVE be firm?
Our MUTUAL RESPECT let's always affirm
(2) How can we our GLOBAL SECURITY maintain?
All nations' INTERDEPENDENCE let's sustain
(3) How can we SOCIETY humanizingly refine?
Its GENDER CO-EGALIZATION let's define
(4) How can we RELATIONALLY improve?
Our DIGNITY day-to-date let's prove.
Readers of Evelin Lindner´s book are urged –challenged – to create their Rhymed reflections. This is suggested as a strategy for creatively summarizing an author's work.
• Dear Evelin, as a creative thinker-writer, you exercised your linguistic right to
coin CO-EGALIZATION.
What if this reader of your book suggested another coinage;
EGALIDIGNITY (a blending of EQUALITY and DIGNITY)?
• Dear EVELIN, Your CREATIVE ways of referring to-characterizing LOVE have inspired my mind to create one more RHYMED REFLECTION:
LOVE IS AN EVERLASTING FORCE FOR HUMANKIND.
WHY?
BECAUSE ALL KINDS OF RELATIONSHIPS IT CAN DIGNIFY
Francisco
Review by Pandora Hopkins
Review by Pandora Hopkins, Ph.D., published in UPeace's Peace and Conflict Review, 4 (2), Spring 2010, pp. 83-87
I have reason to believe that in so far as the industrial applications of physics are concerned the forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists. (Leó Szilárd 1933; quoted in Canaday 2000: 4)
These words, penned by the Hungarian nuclear physicist Leó Szilárd in 1933 accompanied The World Set Me Free, a book written by H. G. Wells 20 years earlier. The package was addressed to Sir Hugo Hirst, founder of the British General Electric Company. Only a few months before, Szilárd had picked up the novel that was to prove, not only pivotal to his own career, but tragically so to the world at large. In his novel, Wells described artificial radioactivity and dated its future discovery:the year 1933. Despite the initial skepticism of fellow scientists, Szilárd was inspired by Wells’s imagination to begin working in the area of nuclear physics and, eventually, to become a leading player in the U.S. atomic weapons program (Canaday 2000: 3f).
The foregoing exchange of thoughts between a fiction writer and a physical scientist—members of “two cultures” usually considered to be impenetrable to one another (Snow 1956: 413f)—is particularly dramatic. However, the episode should also be understood as part of a growing desire to question the legitimacy of other boundaries between genres—e.g. anthropology/sociology, folklore/literature, mathematics/music, ethnography/writing. Ever-widening experiences with other cultures and their diverse modes of thought have led to critical reflection on accepted Western research practices, especially, the Procrustean bed of dualism and the contextlessness of non-holistic strategies. The newer perceptions are both enriching and humbling—enriching because of their potential for increased wisdom, humbling because of the implied willingness to cede a measure of professional authority. Sometimes they involve recognizing limits on what the human mind can in fact accomplish—as in the uncertainty principle (Ungenauigkeit) of the physicist Werner Heisenberg; the “fuzzy logic” of physicists (sometimes called “fuzzy thinking”) derived from the “fuzzy set theory” of mathematicians; or the on-going controversy by social scientists about how much of an outsider an ethnographer is able to be. In short, there has been a growing realization that accuracy in scholarly research must include the willingness to incorporate what might be inconvenient—including, the unpredictable, the contradictory, and the partially true.
Dr. Evelin Lindner, the Founding President of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, has recently written an important book: Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security. It is a sequel to her two earlier volumes (Lindner 2006 & 2009) on the grave consequences of humiliation and the urgent need to work toward both personal and interstate equality and respect—or dignity, as she prefers to call it. This is the subject Lindner calls her life’s project, and she has coined the egalization”… to complement the term globalization in ways that can help build a decent global community” (151). *
Humiliation is a complicated emotion that comes in a number of forms; it can cause international cycles of violence; it can be addictive; and (one of the main themes of this book) it can even, in the sense of humility, be essential for survival.
In line with the trend toward nuanced scholarship noted above, Lindner openly disavows dualism and uses qualitative methods to promote dignity through a respect for cultural diversity. In today’s world, it might seem difficult to shock through boundary-blurring. However, Lindner may have raised more than a few eyebrows by stretching the parameters of scientific inquiry into a realm usually associated with plastic lace, virtual Valentines and FTD.com. It is a subject area she calls by a variety of names, such as “big love” or “firm love,” as well as “tough universal love” and “ambitious love” (167).
Why does Lindner use the L-word? “Love has force. This is why I write about love, even though the word and the concept are so mangled that its force has almost been obliterated.” Clearly, it is partly for its very shock value that she decided to use the word. Just as clearly, the cumbersome term with its modifiers (“big,” “firm,” etc.) reflects the inadequacy of the English language to express this concept. In line with her cross-cultural ideals, Lindner lists a number of non-English terms, including satya, pilia, agape, and metta. Desmond Tutu, in his Foreword to her book, writes that she is advocating the African concept of ubuntu which he describes as the “traditional African philosophy for living together and solving conflicts in an atmosphere of shared humility.
Lindner knows she is taking a courageous step onto uncharted—or should we say uncool?—terrain. Fortunately, she is well-armed with impeccable academic qualifications: a doctorate in medicine and another in psychology. As to her lifelong concern for human dignity, she points to being born into a displaced family from Silesia in Central Europe, part of a group of people who were deeply traumatized by being punished for a war they had not caused “… the need to develop Geschichtsbewusstsein (awareness of history) and to stand up for ‘never again’ became central for my life” (xx). Lindner has chosen to match her interdisciplinary research with a similar freedom of movement in her personal life. Constantly on a global lecture circuit, she possesses affiliations, among others, with the Columbia University Network of Conflict Resolution, the University of Oslo's Department of Psychology, and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.
This is not an easy book to understand because, while the focus is on domestic relationships, the points are being made both for their literal meaning and for their metaphoric value in relation to international dealings—a subtle but important relationship for which Lindner ingeniously chooses a spiral type organization.
This book is, therefore, not merely about gender and humiliation or love and dignity. It is also about cultural and institutional change, locally and globally (xvii).
In order to show these correspondences, Dr. Lindner uses vignettes. For example, to bring out the importance of understanding the cultural frame before trying to solve a societal problem, she describes a situation in which both husband and wife play the roles assigned to them within the honor-society framework; the wife believes her husband’s beatings to be evidence of his love; the husband believes he would be humiliated if deprived of his dominant (and therefore, disciplinary) function—which he associates with honor. To permanently stop the husband from beating his wife, it is necessary to do more than enforce a law against domestic violence. The first step must be to change both husband’s and wife’s conception of marriage structure—and gender—to an egalitarian one. Another vignette concerns a ski trip in the mountains of Norway. The British leaders of the expedition tragically cause fatalities, including the death of one of their sons, through their unwillingness to accept the humiliation of retreating from perilous weather conditions.In this case, acceptance of humiliation would have been constructive, in contrast to other types of humiliation situations that invite retaliation and often instigate cycles of vengeance.
It is easy to make the international inferences: Lindner is pointing out that something similar to the patriarchal code of honor is widely accepted internationally—(and can therefore be used for propaganda purposes). Invasions of weak nations by the strong are commonly explained as a disciplinary action and withdrawal or defeat considered humiliating. Keying in humiliation and Iraq on my computer this morning, I received almost 40. 000 hits this morning for humiliation and Afghanistan, I got 155, 000 responses. To some of us, it is reminiscent of Secretary of Defense John McNaughton’s explanation forty years ago: “The present objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation” (quoted in Schell 1976: 10). The second vignette (the skiing tragedy) refers to the main theme of the book: there are times (internationally, as well as domestically) that call for a beneficial, non-demeaning, type of humiliation; and that kind of willingness to give in, to humble oneself without feeling violated, is only possible outside the honor culture. Lindner sometimes refers to this as humility; I would suggest that exclusive usage of this term would be more suitable and less confusing.
Thus, Lindner finds that the honor society is not confined to the Middle East, but is a societal system “predicated upon the anticipation of war.” Lindner is disgusted and angry—about bailouts to crooked millionaires, about the environment, about a permanent war economy, about “…endangering the future of our children.” She refers the philosopher Otto Neurath who used a ship metaphor:
—the wealthy play with love and sex on their luxury top decks, trying to protect their riches from the poor who attempt to climb up to them from their miserable lower decks—and all overlook or deny the fact that the entire ship is at risk of sinking (xvii).
Dr. Lindner opens up—and invites—new avenues for collaboration: “I do not have all the solutions. Most probably, there is no one final remedy. Saving the ship will always be an ongoing” process (xvii).
This book is partially a blueprint, partially a call to action: However, it is as an authority on humiliation that the author is most powerful. She is able to contribute an important psychological component to a cutting edge issue: the linkage between a patriarchal family, an authoritarian state, and war (see Braudy 2003; Ducat 2004; Goldstein 2001; Hoffman 2001; Hopkins 2008; and Lakoff 1997).
Lindner shines a spotlight on the honor culture and “the need to defend it against humiliation” (50), a structure that, she theorizes, may have originally come about through fear of others (the “security dilemma”). Anyone concerned about the path toward perpetual war recently taken by the United States should be roused to action by her strong language as she points out that, within this context, human potential is “curtailed, mutilated, and deformed.” It requires the polarization of gender roles since “men prepare to die young and women to produce new soldiers whom they have to prepare to die young.” Evolutionary biologists—and the rest of us—should take note, for “honor is inherently irrational (if interest in survival is defined as rational)” (50).
Psychology has only recently shifted its focus away from a search for universals. Dr. Lindner, as a psychologist who sees wisdom in boundary blurring, believes that: “metaemotions depend on our cultural scripts, which, in turn, are embedded into large-scale geopolitical framings” (5). Lindner categorizes the humiliation found in honor societies (honor humiliation) into four types and criticizes human rights organizations for conflating them under a single rubric (70). Some might imagine that anyone who attempts to work for a more equitable world while, at the same time, maintaining respect for diverse cultural views, confronts a daunting task. Characteristically, Lindner openly airs the difficulties while pointing to the opportunities for enrichment offered by access to the knowledge and experiences of others..
As we learned from the H.G.Wells-Léo-Szilard anecdote at the bginning of this review, the fuzzing of boundaries opens minds to new ideas, but the results can be destructive: the invention of devastating weaponry. Nevertheless, Gender, Humiliation and Global Security delivers an optimistic message—a rarity in today’s world. As noted above, Lindner looks at that bête noire for progressives, globalization, and sees in it potential for creating a new and decent world community—the erasure of national sovereignty being a prerequisite for getting rid of the “security dilemma” and the honor culture it brings with it. While pulling no punches about the gravity of the contemporary situation, she makes positive suggestions for the systemic transformation of globalization she calls egalization.
Dr. Evelin Lindner even finds a hopeful sign in the economic meltdown: the pitiful performance of the powerful has aroused sleepers whose apathy used to be so thick, she writes, that people seemed to be victims to a “mind-set that races toward crisis by default.” The fallacy of reliance on corporate leadership is out there in plain sight, and she quotes Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan who said he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” to find that CEOs could not police themselves (xix). As Dr. Linda Hartling writes at the end of her Afterword to this book:
If men and women are going to transform pernicious institutions, we must promote humility as an organizational necessity for bridging differences. Most of all, if men and women are going to create a sustainable future for the world’s children, we must cultivate humility as an urgent international necessity. This book calls us to forge a heroic, yet humble path forward, celebrating and enlarging men and women’s potential and capacity to work together for a better world. (177)
Dr. Lindner has shown us that we must cross both physical and mental boundaries in order to learn how to live together on this planet. There is no language or culture that contains within it all the answers—even, as we have seen, words for all types of love. Like fuzzy logic, Lindner’s recommendations are both enriching and humbling. This is an important book and should be read by anyone concerned about the future of life beyond his or her lifetime.
References:
Braudy, Leo. 2003. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Random House.
Canaday, John. 2000. The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ducat, Stephen J. 2004. The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press.
Goldstein, Joshua. 2001. How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge; Cambridge U.P
Hoffman, John. 2001. Gender and Sovereignty: Feminism, the State and International Relations. Chippenham Wiltshire: Antony Rowe Ltd.
Hopkins, Pandora. 2008. “Manufacturing Shame: The Danger of Purity.” in The Peace and Conflict Review Vol.III No 1 (fall)
Kosko, Bart. 1993. Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic. New York: Hyperion.
Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant! White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green.
Lindner, Evelin. 2006. Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. London: Praeger.
Lindner, Evelin. 2009. Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict. London: Praeger.
Schell, Jonathan. 1976 . Time of Illusion. N.Y/: Knopf.
Snow, C.P. 1964. The Two Cultures:and A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rezension von Uta Ottmüller
1. Buchbesprechung von Dr. Uta Ottmüller: "Geschlechterverhältnis, Demütigung und globale Sicherheit," published in Friedensforum , Volume 1, 2011
2. Rezension von Dr. Uta Ottmüller: "Evelin Lindner: Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships from Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs, New York, Praeger 2010." In: Knoch, Heike; Kurth, Winfried; Reiß, Heinrich J. und Egloff, Götz (Hrsg.): Die Kinder der Kriegskinder und die späten Folgen des NS-Terrors. Jahrbuch für Psychohistorische Forschung. Bd. 13, Seiten 335-339. Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag, 2012.
In den Politik- und Geschichtswissenschaften gehört das Verhältnis der Geschlechter (Gender) – ebenso wie das Generationenverhältnis – immer noch eher zu den Spezialthemen. In ihrem Buch: Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security, zu dem der südafrikanische Erzbischoff a.D. Desmond Tutu ein lobendes Vorwort schrieb, weist Evelin Lindner diesem stets kulturell geformten Verhältnis zentrale Bedeutung für die Veränderungen zu, die die aktuelle Krisensituation (sei sie als Finanzkrise, zunehmende ökologische Gefährdung oder Krise der globalen Sicherheit begriffen) erfordert.
Die Autorin, die über die Psychologie der Genozide in Somalia, Ruanda / Burundi und in Nazi-Deutschland promovierte, als "globale Nomadin" lebt und als Psychotherapeutin, Konflikt- und Sozialforscherin u.a. in Norwegen, Ägypten, Japan, Ruanda, Somalia, Indonesien, China, den USA und Neuseeland tätig war, verknüpft die weltweiten Geschlechterbeziehungen eng mit dem sonst von Wissenschaftlern eher gemiedenen Phänomen der Demütigung (humiliation). Dieser Begriff wurde schon in ihrer Promotion zum Schlüsselbegriff und hat in ihrer weiteren Forschungs- und Bildungsarbeit so große Bedeutung gewonnen, dass sie unter der Webadresse www.humiliationstudies.org ein internationales Netzwerk von Forschern, Friedens- und Bildungsfachkräften gründete, das mittlerweile ca. 1000 Mitglieder zählt, jährlich zwei Tagungen veranstaltet und im Internet ca. 40000 mal pro Jahr aus über 180 Ländern angefragt wird. Dem Jahrbuch für Psychohistorische Forschung ist sie seit 2004 als Autorin verbunden.
In einem Interview der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung bezeichnet Evelin Lindner Demütigung als "die gefährlichste Triebkraft des Weltgeschehens und ... das größte Hindernis für den Frieden" und erläutert: "Hitler verstand es, die Gefühle einer Bevölkerung in einem großen Narrativ nationaler Demütigung zu bündeln. Dasselbe hat auch Milošević getan oder die Hutu-Elite, die den Völkermord in Ruanda organisierte. Dazu kam, dass ich als Psychotherapeutin erlebte, dass es fast nichts gibt, das Beziehungen so nachhaltig zerstört wie Demütigung."5
Als Ph.D. in Sozialpsychologie und Medizin hat Lindner ihre Forschungen um neurowissenschaftliche, historische, anthropologische und kulturspezifisch-religiöse Perspektiven erweitert und in mehreren Büchern veröffentlicht. Das Besondere ihrer Bücher liegt zum einen darin, dass sie diese Perspektiven immer wieder an gut verständlichen Handlungsbeispielen aus den westlichen Kulturen, wie auch aus den zahlreichen anderen Kulturen erläutert, in denen sie arbeitete, forschte und lebte – zum anderen entwickelt sie daraus eine Sichtweise gesellschaftlichen Wandels, die den 68er Slogan: "Das Private ist politisch" auf gut verständliche Weise umsetzt.
Während in Making Enemies (2006) die oft wechselseitigen projektiven Prozesse der Demütigung und die unverzichtbare Gegenseitigkeit der Menschenwürde im Vordergrund stehen und in Emotion and Conflict (2009) die neurophysiologische und interaktive Theorie der Emotionen breiten Raum einnimmt, liegt der Hauptfokus von Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security (2010) bei den historischen und kulturell unterschiedlichen Wandlungen der Geschlechterbeziehungen.
In den letzten 10 000 Jahren war demnach weltweit ein wesentlich auf Landbesitz gegründetes Herrschaftsmodell (dominator model) verbreitet, das ein System von nach Rang abgestufter Ehre (ranked honor) beinhaltete. Die Abstufungen werden im Wesentlichen durch die existenzielle Unsicherheit der Außen-grenzen erklärt: Die Gruppe (oder Nation) nach außen zu schützen, galt als ehrenwerter, als im Inneren für ihren Bestand zu sorgen. Die Außenbeziehungen wurden in der Regel durch ein "security dilemma" bestimmt, das Angst in Angriffsbereitschaft umwandelte. Aggressivität galt deshalb als wertvoll für die gesamte Gruppe. Nicht zuletzt aufgrund ihrer auch biologisch naheliegenden größeren Zuständigkeit für die Kinder wurden Frauen fast überall die Innenräume zugewiesen, während Männern die äußere Sphäre zugeteilt wurde, die zugleich auch den Zugang zu gesellschaftlichem Austausch und Macht bedeutete.
Im Kontext rangorientierter Herrschaftsformen wurde Demütigung (humiliation) als eine prosoziale Aktivität der "Oberen" im Umgang mit ihren Untergebenen betrachtet, die letztere "an ihren Platz erinnert" (S. 20). Am englisch-sprachigen Beispiel des Begriffs von humiliation zeigt Lindner, wie diese Aktivität erstmals im 18. Jahrhundert im Zusammenhang mit der Proklamation von Menschenrechten und Menschenwürde als verletzend kritisiert wurde, während humbleness und humility, beide auch mit Demut oder Bescheidenheit übersetzbar, weiterhin positiv bewertete Begriffe blieben. Lindner: "Human rights open space for wise humility in a world free of humiliation" (S. 21). Der Weg hin zu einer solchen Welt scheint allerdings mit Hindernissen gepflastert. Enttäuschte Erwartungen, die als Demütigung wahrgenommen werden, nehmen dabei eine Schlüsselstellung ein: "Human rights ideals are a love declaration to the oneness of the human family... Love professed and then betrayed is more humiliating than love never professed. Global terrorism-entrepreneurship can feed on these feelings of humiliation. A love story of global unity, when turning sour, risks to bitterly re-divide the world, no longer as a result of the security dilemma, but now along the fault lines of humiliated love" (S. 67f.). Die extreme Aggressivität, die auf diese Weise ausgelöst werden kann, erklärt Lindner mit Rückgriff auf die Neurowissenschaften, die die hirnphysiologische Nähe der Rezeptoren von "sozialem Schmerz" und "physischem Schmerz" aufzeigten.
Als "Gegengift" (antidot) empfiehlt sie gelegentlich Bescheidenheit (humility) – etwa wenn sie als Therapeutin in einem nichtwestlichen Land für das Leben eines von "Ehrenmord" bedrohten Mädchens bittet – , vor allem aber "starke Liebe" (tough love), die sie als bislang missachtete und kaum genutzte gesellschaftliche Ressource betrachtet.
Eine Weiterentwicklung dieser Ressource erwartet sie von der Weiterentwicklung der Familien- und sexuellen Partnerbeziehungen. Besonders gelungen ist ihr das Kapitel zur "Rettung der Elternschaft". Nachdem die Liebesheirat sich nicht nur in westlichen Ländern durchgesetzt hat, sondern auch weltweit verbreitet, stellt sich die Frage nach einem angemessenen Umgang mit der Zerbrechlichkeit der Liebe. Muss sie als Fehler und Betrug erlebt werden? Vor allem im Interesse der Kinder fordert Lindner, Scheidung "konstruktiver" zu machen. Zur Begründung zeigt sie u.a. die Folgen unreifer und frauenbenachteiligender Elternschaft weltweit (S. 125ff.). In vielen Gesellschaften, z.B. in Kenya sind Frauen derzeit meist nur so lange für Männer interessant, wie sie jung und kinderlos sind und sie mit ihnen ausgehen können. Mittellose lateinamerikanische Mütter schicken ihre Kinder auf die Straße, wenn ihr neuer Mann die Kinder des vorherigen nicht in seinem Haus duldet. Indische Frauen werden oft von ihren Männern verlassen, wenn sie sich weigern, ihre weiblichen Foeten abzutreiben. 1,2 Millionen Kinder werden jährlich verkauft.
Parallel zu den ritualisierten und oft oberflächlichen Partnerbeziehungen in arrangierten Ehen in Ägypten oder Japan findet man intensivierte Mutter-Sohnbeziehungen, die bei den Söhnen die Beziehungsfähigkeit stören und zu polygamem Pascha-Verhalten einerseits und kriegerischer Kamikaze-Bereitschaft andererseits führen können.
Als Alternative beschreibt Lindner neue Familienformen in Norwegen, das die Spitzenposition im human development index HDI einnimmt. Jenseits der "patchwork families" werden hier erweiterte Familien als Nach-Scheidungs-Arrangements erprobt, in denen beide geschiedenen Elternteile sich – meist mit ihren neuen Partnern – bemühen, nahe beieinander zu wohnen und den Kindern mit beiden oder noch mehr Haushalten einen erweiterten Lebenskontext zu bieten, der mit dem von kollektivistischen settings vergleichbar ist. Sie kommentiert: "The successes I have observed attest to the fact that divorce is not hurtful per se. In a cultural context where outdated expectations – and thus outdated causes for hatred and cycles of mutual humiliation – are removed from the equation, the transformations that are left to be tackled entail the potential to provide those involved with growth, maturation, and enrichment. In former times, extended families had many children; many modern families have many parents – no longer 'kinderreiche Eltern' but 'elternreiche Kinder'" (S. 130).
Neben diesem auf die Eltern zentrierten Beziehungswandel ändert sich auch das Verhältnis zum Kind, und zwar vom Modell des strengen Vaters (strict father model), der in "Ehrengesellschaften" Kinder mit oft grausamen Mitteln zu gehorsamen Untertanen erziehen sollte (und auch die Mutter dominierte oder misshan-delte), zum Modell der unterstützenden Eltern (nurturant parent model), die ihre Kinder zu neuen, emotional kompetenteren Formen gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe befähigen. Als Voraussetzung dafür wird die Frage nach der Vereinbarkeit von Elternschaft (als Mutterschaft und Vaterschaft) und Beruf im Kontext nachhaltigen Wirtschaftens und einer von der gesamten Gesellschaft zu verantwortenden work life balance diskutiert.
Eine globale Handlungsperspektive für die aktuelle Krisensituation sieht Lindner in ihrem Konzept der Co-Egalization. Sie sieht darin das Zusammenwirken von Entgrenzungs- und Angleichungstendenzen auf globaler Ebene und Angleichungstendenzen zwischen den Geschlechterrollen: "When we-against-them fragmentations become porous, the security dilemma wanes, and men no longer need to die for their families – what remains is the maintaining and, if necessary, the policing of the village, the global village, by men and women together" (S. 131). In diesem Zusammenhang wird auch das Auftauchen eines neuen Führungsstils nötig, den sie durchgängig propagiert: "Gandhi-" oder "Mandela-like leadership" – mit der Erfahrung von Demütigung und dem Verzicht auf Rache und mit der unermüdlichen Suche nach Ausgleich und Verständigung. In diesem Zusammenhang empfiehlt Lindner besonders die Leitungsfunktion (leadership) von Frauen.
Das Problem, dass die Globalisierung derzeit vorrangig von einem Kasino-Kapitalismus vorangetrieben wird, der neue Armut und neue Konflikte schafft, hat sie 2012 in einem neuen Buch: A Dignity Economy. Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet bearbeitet. Ihr neuestes Projekt ist eine Initiative für eine Weltuniversität für Menschenwürde: www. worlddignityuniversity.org.
Uta Ottmüller
Literaturangaben
Lindner, Evelin (2004): "Nichts zerstört so nachhaltig wie die Demütigung". Interview. Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag, Nr. 20, 16. 5. 2004, S. 77.
Online: www.humiliationstudies. org/documents/evelin/ZuericherZeitungOriginal.pdf.
Lindner, Evelin (2006): Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. (Praeger, New York 2006).
Lindner, Evelin (2009): Emotion and Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good Conflict. (Praeger, New York 2009).
Lindner, Evelin (2012): A Dignity Economy: Creating an Economy that Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet. (Dignity Press, 2012).
www.humiliationstudies.org
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMIWTfNrWi8
Review by David Bar-Gal
Review by David Bar-Gal, Ph.D., "To Move the World," published in Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Volume 17, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 201-203
To Move the World
by David Bargal,
a Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Correspondence should be addressed to David Bargal, Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus 91905, Israel. E-mail: msbargal[@]pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il.
Online publication date: 20 April 2011
To cite this Article Bargal, David (2011) 'To Move the World', Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 17: 2, 201—203.
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10781919.2011.561180.
URL: dx.doi.org/10.1080/10781919.2011.561180.
See also www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g936696276.
Full terms and conditions of use: www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf.
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
To Move the World
David Bargal
Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Reading Evelin Lindner’s book, one is reminded of Archimedes’s famous saying: ‘‘Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.’’ In this book especially and in the former ones as well, Evelin
Lindner seeks a place to stand in order to move the whole world from being
hostile and humiliating into a place of humility and dignity.
The author, Evelin Lindner, undertakes in this book a problematic task.
Although she focuses on the issues of love, gender, and humiliation, she
states in the introduction that the book is concerned ‘‘not merely about gender,
humiliation, love, and dignity. It is about cultural and institutional
change, locally and globally’’ (p. xvii). This is a remarkable idealistic and
a very demanding mission, which is already being carried out by her for several years and via different channels: writing books, arranging biannual conferences, delivering lectures, and establishing academic programs to
promote her ideas.
Evelin Lindner describes herself as a transdisciplinary scholar in social
sciences and the humanities. Being trained as a physician, as well as a psychologist,
she has been dedicated to the cause of promoting dignity on the expanse
of humiliation and violence. This is true as regards personal and interpersonal
relations, as well as regarding relations among communities and nations.
Evelin Lindner was brought up in a German family that had been displaced
from Silesia, Poland, in 1946, and grew up in West Germany. Some
of the roots of her intellectual interests regarding dignity and humiliation
she attributes to the hardships that her family endured prior to and following
its displacement. Later events in her personal life may have also contributed
to the feeling of ‘‘being put down and hurt’’ in Evelin Lindner’s own words. Hence, the origin of humiliation is ‘‘embedded in relationships.
People and institutions inflict humiliation on those who are at the receiving
end’’ (Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, n.d., p. 1).
The book is a sequel to Evelin Lindner’s previous books: Making
Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict (2006) and Emotion and
Conflict: How Human Rights Can Dignify Emotion and Help Us Wage Good
Conflict (2009). The book is comprised of three parts that are divided into
nine chapters. The first part is titled, ‘‘Gender, Humiliation and Lack of
Security in Times of Transitions,’’ and the second part is titled, ‘‘Gender, Humiliation and Lack of Security Today.’’ In both chapters, the author
analyses and explains the relation between gender, masculine preference,
and humiliation. Hierarchy and high rank also contribute to looking down
on low-ranked people, and especially women. The third part carries the
heading, ‘‘Global Security Through Love and Humility in the Future.’’
Following the analysis of the roots and manifestations of humiliation as
presented in the two previous parts, the author introduces and discusses
her vision of a new global humanistic order.
Evelin Lindner is concerned with the unending intergroup and between-states
conflicts and wars. According to her conception, a paradigm shift
should occur in interpersonal, intergroup, and globally. Nowadays, relationships on all levels are based on humiliation and the subjugation of women in
their relationships to men, as well as between countries and religions. To remedy
this continuously humiliating world condition, there should prevail a
spirit of humility and collaboration among groups in society, as well as internationally
between nations. She is aware of the rigidity of the social structures
in contemporary society where honor codes dominate many cultures. She
calls for abolishing the national sovereignty and the honor codes that it
entails. She suggests that a systematic transformation will take place where
globalization will be humanized by egalization (Lindner’s word for globalized
equal dignity); and quoting her closest collaborator, Linda Hartling, in their
common enterprise for promoting world egalization, ‘‘This book calls us to
forge a heroic, yet humble path forward celebrating and enlarging men and
women’s potential and capacity to work together for a better world’’ (p. 177).
The book mission’s is very important and worthy. The author’s knowledge
of theories and research in the realms of social and behavioral science
is impressive. The concepts used are based on the updated knowledge from
cognitive psychology, anthropology, and political science—a real transdisciplinary
and holistic approach to social issues.
Evelin Lindner, beyond doubt, joins a very important gallery of idealistic
people who have devotedly cared about the fate of the world and tried to
cure it relying on the spirit of love, dignity, and humility. Among them
we may mention Gandhi, Desmund Tutu, and Schweitzer.
However, opposite to these idealistic voices, there are others who have
perceived human nature and its capacity to strive for peace in very gloomy
terms. In the famous correspondence between Einstein and Freud—Why
war, the latter is very doubtful of the ‘‘likelihood of our being able to suppress
humanity’s aggressive tendencies’’; and he added, ‘‘What we may try is
to divert it into a channel other than that of warfare . . . . If the propensity
for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros . . . . All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must
serve us as war’s antidote’’ (Freud, 1932).
Evelin Lindner devotes her life to create sentiments of humility, dignity,
and respect among all human beings. According to this book, she seemed to
have found an Archimedean place to stand. The only question is whether the
lever she uses will indeed be sufficient to move the conflictual and highly divided world.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
David Bargal is a Gordon Brown professor (Emeritus) at Hebrew University,
Jerusalem. He has extensively published in professional journals and
authored and edited 10 books and journals. His book (with H. Bar), Living With Conflict (Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Israel, 1995), reported on
5 years of action research of conflict management workshops for Palestinian
and Jewish youth. For the last several years, a similar type of conflict management
has been carried out and evaluated in four high schools in Michigan
(reported in a special issue of Small Group Research, 2008).
REFERENCES
Freud, S. (1932). The Einstein–Freud correspondence (1931–1932). Retrieved from www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf.
Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies. (n.d.). What is humiliation? Retrieved from www.humiliationstudies.org/whoweare/humiliationdefinition.php.
Lindner, E. (2006). Making enemies: Humiliation and international conflict. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Lindner, E. (2009). Emotion and conflict: How human rights can dignify emotion and help us wage
good conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Review by Christy Barongan
• How love can save the world. Barongan, Christy. PsycCRITIQUES, Vol 56(16), 2011 (No Pagination) Copyright 
2011 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission. No further reproduction or distribution is permitted without written permission from the American Psychological Association. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0023116, or http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2011-05833-001.
"How Love Can Save the World" by Christy Barongan
A Review of Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security: Dignifying Relationships From Love, Sex, and Parenthood to World Affairs by Evelin Lindner Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. 305 pp. ISBN 978-0-313-35485-4. $44.95
Please see Evelin Lindner's comments to particular points in Christy Barongan's review.
• Christy Barongan: "Lindner defines humiliation as “the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that damages or strips away their pride, honor, or dignity” (p. 18). She distinguishes between honor humiliation, in which men kill to defend their honor, versus dignity humiliation, in which men humiliate those who are lower in rank."
• Evelin Lindner: "Please note that these two definitions are better formulated as follows: Honor humiliation and dignity humiliation are similar in so far as they both entail an element of pushing down, of holding down, of making helpless. However, they are also different. In the case of honor humiliation, holding down others is often regarded as legitimate, even prescribed, at least in relationships between superiors and inferiors, while it is deemed to be illegitimate in contexts where equality in dignity is enshrined as cultural value."
• Christy Barongan: "Lindner argues that humiliation is a product of cultural rather than biological evolution and has developed in only the last 500 years, or 5 percent of the 10,000 years of human history."
• Evelin Lindner: "Modern humans have a history of ca. 150,000 to 200,000 years. Throughout the first 95 percent of this period (or 99 percent), they migrated and populated the planet. Roughly 10,000 years ago, circumscription set in (an anthropological term meaning limitation, enclosure, confinement): the surface of planet Earth is limited, and it was to be expected that, at some point in time, it would no longer be possible to find the next valley untouched, open for unhindered migration; at some point, it was to likely that other humans already inhabitated the adjacent valley. Complex agriculture was the main adaptation that humankind developed in response to circumscription. In this situation, hierarchically ranked collectivist cultures evolved, together with honor humiliation. Dignity humiliation, in contrast, is new, or, one may also argue that it reaches back to human culture prior to 10,000 years ago. In other words, dignity humiliation is both newer and older than honor humiliation, it pre-dates and post-dates honor humiliation."
• Christy Barongan: "The hunter–gatherer roles for men and women led to a horizontal division in which women were responsible for the maintenance of the domestic sphere while men defended the outside sphere."
• Evelin Lindner: "The first 95 percent of human history was spent migrating, gathering, and hunting. Inside/outside differentiations, if they existed, were mild. At least this is what we can infer from archealogical evidence (see, for example, rock art traditions, where most humans are depicted as gender neutral, and which show how social groups were connected, rather than divided, over large distances; see, for example, the research of Ingrid Fuglestvedt). Inside/outside differentiations were thus most probably much milder throughout the first 95 percent of human history when circumscription was not yet definitorial, since, by its nature, it forces drastic cultural adaptations."
• Christy Barongan: "Lindner argues that because humiliation is shameful, it often leads to denial or aggression—either against the self, by feeling deserving of violence or punishment, or against others, who serve as a projection of one’s shame."
• Evelin Lindner: "Just to use one example, human rights activists attempt to shame companies into fulfilling their promises of respecting social and ecological sustainability. They hope that the CEOs of these companies will indeed feel ashamed and that this shame will motivate them to improve their practices. In other words, I would argue that shame, even though it may lead to avoidance or aggression, may also lead to much more benign outcomes. See the salutogenic definition of shame, rather than the pathogenic definition, by Tony Webb."
• Christy Barongan: "Such a transformation is possible through love."
• Evelin Lindner: "A marriage that is based on positive emotions which are intentionally strengthened and nurtured, has good chances to be sustainable. What would be unsustainable, however, would be expecting that positive emotions will prevail 'automatically,' so to speak 'by themselves.'"
• Christy Barongan: "Instead, Lindner argues that we need to foster big/thick/strong love.
• Evelin Lindner: "'Working for peace' would be the language I would use. The word 'fight' stems from the language of war and is intrinsically misleading if we want to talk about peace."
• Christy Barongan: "Lindner argues that strong women should avoid investing too much energy in romantic relationships that may ultimately be unfulfilling because men may be threatened by their strength. Instead, they should cultivate multiple, weaker romantic ties to men and foster stronger ties to more egalitarian men and women."
• Evelin Lindner: "I would call on women who wish to lead that they, of course, attempt to find a partner who supports them fully. However, in the current historical context, many strong women spend their lives being weakened by repeatedly unsuccessful attempts, and their capacity to contribute with their talents to society at large is thus prevented from being fully manifested. The attempt to find a fully supportive partner should thus be balanced with the wise realization that historical times are perhaps not yet accommodating strong women as they should, and that second best solutions may at times be better than continuous heart-break."
• Christy Barongan: "Another problem is that she provides few guidelines for how one commits to love."
• Evelin Lindner: "The new kind of love that I advocate is like the color that a color-blind person sees for the first time. Or, there is this lovely story of a person who has lost her keys at night, in the street, and searches under the street lantern, even though she has lost the keys elsewhere. Asked why, she explains that she searches where the light is. My work, in its entirely, is a guideline, one may say. It is an attempt to make my readers see color, or an attempt to bring light to regions that are dimmed and where we therefore are not used to search. I wish to invite my readers into a deep transformational experience of learning to see more, and therefore, since I have lived globally more than most people, I try to show the reader the world through my eyes. The only guideline that I can give is to stop thinking of having guidelines, and, instead, look at the world with new eyes and let a new kind of being emerge, which will manifest new 'guidelines,' however, these guidelines will only be describable post-hoc..."
