The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future [Hardcover]

Carol Gilligan (Author), David A. J. Richards (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521898986 | ISBN-13: 978-0521898980 | Publication Date: November 10, 2008 | Edition: 1

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. The book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology (based on loss in intimate life) and resistance to it (based on the love of equals) to the Roman Republic and Empire and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. Democratic resistance in religion, psychology, the arts, and politics rests on free voices challenging patriarchal restrictions on the love of equals. In addition to examining why we are at war, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gilligan and Richards leave few stones unturned in this exploration of patriarchy throughout time, beginning with ancient Rome, focusing on its diametric relationship with democracy: "we lack a critical public understanding of this tension, in part because... Roman patriarchy has been absorbed into our religion and political culture." The authors examine patriarchy in many literary sources, from Oedipus Rex and the Bible to Hemingway, Joyce and Freud. Among other themes, they find repeatedly that "exposing the psychology underlying patriarchy touches a nerve so sensitive that it becomes inflammatory," for reasons that include "the dynamics of shame and violence... how closely questions of honor are aligned with questions of gender," and "how intricately gender is woven into the body, into language, and into identity and culture." Authors and gender scholars Gilligan (Kyra, In a Different Voice) and Richards (The Case for Gay Rights, Disarming Manhood) make it clear that patriarchy is omnipresent in our society; discussion of matriarchal societies and literature would have made an enlightening counterpoint. This exhaustive study will be of particular interest to gender studies professionals and students.
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Review

"The Deepening Darkness leads to the light of understanding that there can be no true democracy in public life until we have democratic families and connections in private life. Gilligan and Richards have proven this link. Now it's up to us to live it."
Gloria Steinem

"This is a book with a grand thesis, and it should probably be thought of in the tradition of Hannah Arendt on evil, or Bruno Bettelheim. It argues that patriarchy remains the root of the evils of racism, sexism and much violence in contemporary society. More precisely, the book claims that patriarchy calls for and legitimates the traumatic disruption of intimate relationships, and the effect of such trauma in the human psyche is precisely to suppress personal voice and relationships and to identify with the patriarchal voice that imposed the disruption."
Simon Goldhill, Professor of Classics, Kings College, University of Cambridge

"This historically probing, gracefully literary, and deliciously detailed book brilliantly illuminates the mysterious psychological roots of political domination and defiance."
Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

"Far-ranging in its scope, compelling in its exposition and argument, informed by an inclusive, humane vision and imagination, this ambitious, richly perceptive synoptic study is firmly anchored in the insights and findings of recent scholarship. It brilliantly connects the ancient Roman world with our own. It illuminates as it forges other, riveting connections among a dazzling array of ostensibly disparate topics concerning contemporary Americans, and accords center stage to the role played by a series of canonized western literary masterpieces in making and sustaining these connections."
Judith P. Hallett, Professor, Department of Classics, University of Maryland

"Carol Gilligan and David Richards have written a bold book that draws as palpably on their respective backgrounds in psychology and law as it does on their shared passion for literature. Using an immensely rich set of materials, they explore how patriarchy operates at the atomic level of human consciousness, and how, in doing so, it can destroy even its ostensible beneficiaries. These scholars see the world differently from you, and the book they have written may trigger a welcome conversion."
Kenji Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law

"The Deepening Darkness is that rare thing - a cultural study that is not only a delight to read, but one with important practical implications. Gilligan and Richards expose the fundamental organizing role of patriarchy in western consciousness and show that we have been wedded to a false story about human nature, resistance to which is understood as pathology or sin. They provide fascinating descriptions of the error being transmitted through social institutions, and point out its malignant impact on men and women alike. For example, they trace clearly how even psychoanalysis, which began by liberating the individual, became oppressive due to Freud's inability to escape the patriarchical demands embedded in his own psychology."
Owen Renik, former Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (November 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521898986
• ISBN-13: 978-0521898980
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Deepening Darkness, August 28, 2010

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Dianne Hunter "dianne.hunter1" (Hartford, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (Hardcover)

Gilligan and Richards argue in scholarly detail and at length that Western Patriarchy derived from ancient Rome produces split subjects and mutes our deepest emotional needs. The title "the deepening darkness" comes from Virgil's AENEID, which is also the source of the epigraph to Freud's THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. Aeneas left his wife and later abandoned Dido to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His grief only finds expression when he sees Dido's shade in the underworld. Freud first listened to but then repudiated stories of violated daughters, moving on to his narrative of the patriarchal vicissitudes of oedipal sons. As Aeneas's descent into the underworld models Freud's into the unconscious, Rome's imperial Fascism and its cult of violent virility provide prototypes for the Bush-Cheney USA and its extensive network of surveillance, censorship, and war-making. Honor-based violence considered as the sign of masculinity, say Gilligan & Richards, undermines the future of democracy.

7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Epic Work, Small Blinders, Over-All a MAJOR Integrative Work, June 28, 2009

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (Hardcover)

I only recently learned of the literature on voices of women, and this is the first of several books I ordered to explore the subject. At tempted as I have been to take away one star for small blinders (notably the gross over-selling of anti-Semitism, and the complete oblivion to the fact that Dick Cheney used 9-11, even if he is a cross-dresser our response to 9-11 was NOT some deep psychic rage stemming from our humiliation--Cheney sent 1% of the country to war, and Bush asked the other 99% to go shopping.

Having said that up front, I stayed with five stars because this is an epic work, and I am deeply impressed by the rigorous documentation in notes, the spectacular bibliography, and the deliberate mention of names of minds being quoted in the body of the book, a certain mark of integrity that I always look for. Hence, while some of the points below in my notes come without the cited source, be assured that the authors have been meticulous.

QUOTE p. 19: "...patterns of injustice and moral slavery are supported by the repression of resisting voice and to show how such resisting voice is rooted in the human psyche and preserved in cultural forms that preserve and maintain it. ...What patriarchy precludes is love between equals, and thus it also precludes democracy." For the political science version of this, see The modern state.

Part I starts with Roman Patriarchy and if you are not a cultural studies ancient literature obsessive, you can skim most of this. I have a note: "marvelous handbook for teaching literature as culture & psyche." See The Manufacture Of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and On the Psychology of Military Incompetence for the modern equivalencies...and other books I have reviewed.

Part II covers resistance across time and culture and is a brilliant survey in detail--while leaving much for others to cover in follow-on works--of religion, psychology (notably a wonderful chapter on Freud first embracing women's voices and then rejected them), the artists, and politics. The Catholic Church comes in for its fair share of condemnation as a patriarchal organization as well as a criminal and hypocritical organization, but it is here that I note the immaculate conceptions the authors both portray of Jews and Israel--"can do no wrong" gets annoying after a while.

Part III, the shortest part, provides a once-over on western colonialism, the war on terror, and where we are going wrong now in seeking to turn back the progress made from the 1960's. All good stuff.

Here are my fly-leaf notes and a couple of quotes.

+ Gender and how gender equality and sexual tolerance are handled is both the foundation for democracy (dignity and equality for all) and the canary in the coal mine for failing democracy such as we have in the USA.

+ Resistance, once it acquires critical mass, is the pre-condition for being able to achieve transformation. This is a very important point and merits its own book. See my review of Responsible History for supplementary insights from another author.

+ Over-all this is a fascinating holistic view of cultural relations and why the matter. I particularly appreciate the focus on how important "feelings" are and how the repression of feelings, including sexuality, cuts off half the soul-brain for the questionable desire to assert control.

+ I could not stand the "femi-nazis" in my own era of learning (1970's) but now they have come of age. It is no longer about aggressive women trying to fight men on men's terms; what we have here is brilliant women making a well-documented case for how stupid men are to fall for the patriarchy propaganda, and THAT I can respect. This book, for those of us not familiar with the Voices literature, is a milestone.

+ I completely buy-in to the author's view that patriarchy supports racism, Puritanism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, the latter with a grain of salt. As "Responsible History" documents, way too many charges of anti-Semitism are defamation and no longer have standing in court.

+ The author's make a compelling case that a Republic in which the people are sovereign, equal, and entitled to equal voice, is completely anti-thetical to a top-down command and control patriarchy. Others have made this case and described Epoch B leadership, bottom up inclusive deliberative democracy. I cannot do justice to the originators, but see All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover)) and Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace for a taste.

+ They discuss how repression imposes disassociation that blocks ethical development as well as resistance.

+ They discuss the contradictions in laws that force women to disassociate their intelligence from their sexuality. I am moved by their citation of the work of others in which young girls learn they cannot have BOTH voice (honesty) AND relationships (steeped in patriarchy).

+ I am sympathetic to their discussion of fascism as over-compensation for male humiliation that becomes a psychological basis for violence, and I am even more in turn with the varied observations that fear feeds violence.

They conclude: "The corruption of manhood has been our theme." They discuss the tension between voice and violence, and reiterate that the demonization of pleasure requires a split in consciousness--put another way, the USA has lost its mind.

QUOTE p. 266: "As we have found the roots of intolerance--whether racist, sexist, or homophobic--in the traumatic rapture of intimate relationships that marks the initiation into patriarchy, so the splits between mind and body, thought and emotion, self and relationships signal a disassociation that keeps us from knowing what we otherwise would know. It impedes the voice of experience, grounded in the body and in emotion and fostered by relationships, that would speak to the voices of authority, thus posing a threat to democracy in the same ways that totalitarianism targets the functions of the human mind."

We're there. See Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

See also:
Radical Man
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House

6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why turn the erudite review of a very good book into a vicious anti-semitic tirade?, February 20, 2009

By 

Mark Twin "Mark Twin" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (Hardcover)

As the above reviewer says this is a splendidly written, and extensively documented work. Yet his review is full of venom, spiteful innuendos, and ends in a vicious and off-the-point anti-semitic tirade.

The authors start by analyzing written Roman records ranging from poetry to the law in order to explain various features of patriarchy. By doing so they convincingly show that Roman patriarchy still pervades the Western - and one would add the non-Western- world.
As the reviewer acidly says "The authors employ the by-now standard postmodernist techique of close reading of texts selected by them, through which they construct "voices" that convey to us the desires, disappointments, and resistances" of the times.
Saying this the reviewer reduces a rich and brilliant text to a well-prepared, ready-made recipe with no originality or depth.
Given the scarcity of Roman women's writing Gilligan and Richards are also accused of reconstructing practically from nowhere stereotypical views of women and men.
Strangely we continue to find such alleged stereotypes in the vast literature handed down through the centuries and in most societies contemporary or not.....
The reviewer condescendingly concedes that the authors convincingly show the pivotal role of Augustine in transforming Christianity into a sexually repressive culture fostering the "madonna" "whore" splitting of women and the equally oppressive split between the "macho" and the "feminized" man. He also concedes that one of the most valuable aspects of the book is "the brilliant explication of Judaism as a despised, effeminate religion" as seen by the Romans, and later by Augustine and his followers up to the present.

Having analyzed the origins and sources of the 'darkness' the authors proceed to analyze traces of it in fields ranging from psychology, to the arts, and politics.
Againg the reviewer acknowledges that "The treatment of Freud's writing in the segment addressing psychology is well done, the authors' argument being coherent and lucid." But immediately he launches an attack accusing the authors of being stuck in views expressed in Freud's early writings claiming that histerics suffered "from reminescences". Freud hiself soon rejected the idea that histerics had been sexually abused, and the authors too do not adhere to this idea.
Before concluding a long tirade against recontstructed memories even the reviewer feels symapthetic to the "judicious case being made by the authors". However -again an attack- as he adds, "I must reserve judgement on at least part of their critique. It is, nonetheless, well worth consideration."

The final, most vicious, and unwarranted attack is on the views expressed by the authors on contemporary foreign policies.
The reviewer takes just one (or perhaps two) phrases on Israel and says
"It is here that the authors go seriously astray, and where the faults of the postmodernist treatment of real human events shows its flawed underside." These erudite words precede a viscious attack on Israel and the Jews seen as the symbol of contemporary oppression and non-respect of human rights. All the nasty anti-semitic tirade that follows makes the book sound as a pro-Israel, anti-palestinian manifesto. This is clearly not in the intentions of the authors, which are very balanced in their views. But reveals a lurking and chilling hatred in the reviewer......Indeed.
PS I am not Jewish!