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Lifting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science
a book by Linda Jean Shepherd
(our site's book review)
Her book has a subtext that persistently propagates the concept that humans have a male and female side, and many modern people have lost or repressed their feminine side and are therefore out of balance. Fritjof Capra has said the same thing. Freud said humans have a male and female side also. Maslow would have said that the reconciliation and balancing of these two opposites would be a wise maturity step indicating integrity. In a less gender-focused context, her overall recommendation is for the adoption of the new, ecological-holistic paradigm and the dropping of the old, mechanistic-reductionistic paradigm. She sees people—especially scientists—as too ready to indulge in reductionism and linear logic, and too unwilling to take the time to back up, look at the whole picture, examine the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, take a walk by a stream and let it all “cook,” and just simply be with their problems.
Just take a walk by a stream and let it all cook
It’s no surprise that Shepherd advocates win-win, democratic rather than authoritarian human relationships. She notes that children exposed to authoritarian leadership become either more aggressive (in the win-lose, negative sense) or more apathetic. Examples of democratic parenting: Authoritative and Democratic Parenting Programs.
She describes the dramatic effect that small changes can have on large systems through underlying webs of relationship, such as Chaos Theory's butterfly effect. (A perfect future example is that MCs in American culture will represent this same phenomenon of small changes having dramatic effects on society. See Why Register for an MC?.)
Registering for MC search and match
Trying to flap the wings of a butterfly to get a hurricane