The Values of Belonging: Rediscovering Balance, Mutuality, Intuition, and Wholeness in a Competitive World

by Carol Lee Flinders

The Values of Belonging breaks new ground by examining human value systems from the perspective of how we live, not our gender. "There is a way of being in the world that recoils from aggressiveness, cunning, and greed," writes bestselling author Carol Lee Flinders. This way of being arose out of the relationships our hunter-gatherer ancestors had with the natural world, one another, and Spirit -- relationships that are most acutely understood in terms of trust, inclusion, and mutual reciprocity. This society's core values, which include intimate connection with the land, empathetic relationship with animals, self-restraint, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, playfulness, and nonviolent conflict resolution, are what Flinders calls the "values of Belonging." But with the Agricultural Revolution, as people took charge of what they could grow and where, the nature of human society changed. Once we could produce enough food to have surpluses, food could be bartered. The concept of ownership took on new meaning; more complex economies evolved, and with them came social and economic inequities. Qualities that had been reviled, such as competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and ambition, became under these new conditions the means to success. God underwent a transformation as well, becoming masculine, supreme, and finally located above and beyond us in the heavens. Flinders observes that these "values of Enterprise" have played a crucial role in the development of human society, having given us our passion for innovation and exploration of our world. But, whether negative or positive, the values of Enterprise, which became associated with men, overwhelmed the values of Belonging, which were identified with women. This division has impoverished us all. The values that shaped the hunter-gatherer's life reflected the need for connection, while those that fueled the Agricultural Revolution, and the subsequent rise of civilization as we know it, resulted in disconnection -- from nature, other people, and Spirit. The two value systems could not be more deeply at odds. Because the values of Enterprise have prevailed, the entire world stands in acute and perilous imbalance. And yet there are those who have managed to keep the values of Belonging alive, while successfully negotiating Enterprise culture. In this fresh look at gender relationships, Flinders moves away from the dichotomy of male as oppressor and female as victim. She sees models for a new balance in the lives of visionaries, artists, and mystics such as the Buddha, Baal Shem Tov, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Muir, and Martin Luther King Jr., each of whom mirrors the essence of Belonging values for the world. This thought-provoking book adds an exciting dimension to the debate about Western values and where we are headed.

Genres: Nonfiction, Spirituality

256 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Dr. Carol Lee Flinders is an author and former vegetarian food writer/syndicated columnist. She is best known as one of the three authors of the vegetarian cookbook
Laurel's Kitchen along with Laurel Robertson and Bronwen Godfrey. She also wrote the syndicated news column "Laurel's Kitchen" based on the cookbook. She wrote a weekly syndicated column called “Laurel’s Kitchen” for a number of years.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Flinders began writing about spirituality. She was a lecturer in spirituality at Holy Names College in Oakland, California.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful thoughts, repetitive

The major thesis of this book, that there is a meta tension between forces of masculine enterprise and more feminine belonging and mutuality is really important. Many moments in this book make you stop to reflect on the meta forces that continuously grind us forward and apart. And yet, I wished the author had been more concise and that the points had been illuminated and backed up more thoughtfully with references.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

“'Being then desirous to know who I was, I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy color between the south and the east, and was informed that this mass was human beings in as great misery as they could be, and live, and that I was mixed with them, and that henceforth I might not consider myself as a distinct or separate being.'”

[Jeffrey Lehrer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to think and reimagine your place in the world 🌎 read this book 📖

[loafingcactus · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book attempts to create a mythology of the history of the human condition that solves two of the author’s key concerns with the main currents of feminism. These concerns are that “add women and stir” makes a gender split primary to a values split, the failure of which is demonstrated by “the vice” where women are allowed into the domain of men if they are good women, but then must act as good men to stay there, while still being women. I am sympathetic to this argument, but not to this book.

The first half of the book is a mythology of pre-history, cherry-picked and romanticized (as such things commonly are) to meet the author’s ends. As an interesting side-note to the cherry-picking, the author is looking for examples of opposition to “relational” which are “ambitious.” One might wonder whether those are truly opposites (does not ambition bring people together to meet common ends?) and also one wonders what the other forces of opposition might be. The might be something like “isolationist” or “cruel” but the mythology does not allow for that flexibility.

This pre-history the author terms as “Belonging culture” in opposition to the “Enterprise culture” of the historical period. The author claims to want a balance between these things but in the course of the second half of the book this doesn’t seem to be honest. In a very transparent and in my mind disgustingly sexist statement the author writes that more female examples of Enterprise culture would be used but “There are only so many Margaret Thatchers.” The author’s examples of historic era “Belonging culture” are male saints of Belonging that included women in their movements without exploiting them while avoiding the male saints of Belonging that have problematic relations with women- thus she creates a historic mythology to go with the pre-historic one.

The book ends with the argument that “Enterprise cultures keep things in boxes” after describing that the primary thing holding back Belonging culture is the fragmentation of the ends its advocates pursue and also a statement that the books original end to re-shape feminism into a values debate has failed: “Even as we conclude that ‘it isn’t about gender but about values,’ we’re compelled to recognize that he values of Belonging can’t be rehabilitated unless women are too.” When faced with the real problems of today, the mythology is of no help. The author has brought you here for nothing.

If one is truly interested in the problem termed in this book as Belonging/Enterprise I recommend The Technological Society. The book is a flip of this book- an honest history and then a problematic redemption mythology.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it fascinating to read about the belonging values of hunter gatherer societies as opposed to enterprise values of agricultural and industrial societies. The author looks for ways to integrate these in a gender non-specific way that is meaningful to modern living.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though it's been almost a year since I checked this book out from the church library, I'd call this book a must-read, right up there with Daniel Quinn's books, for anyone interested in social change.