The speed with which the boy dodges a dagger and scales a pillar stuns Atilo. Having cut the traitor's throat, he turns back, having heard a noise, and finds a stranger crouched over the dying man, drinking blood from the wound. As day dawns, Atilo, the Duke's chief assassin, prepares to kill the man who let in the pirates. It is her bad fortune to be there when Moorish pirates break in to steal a chalice, but it is the Moors' good fortune - they kidnap her and demand ransom from the Duke. In a side chapel, Marco's thirteen-year old cousin prays for deliverance from her forced marriage. Duke Marco commands the seas, taxes his colonies, and, like every duke before him, fears assassins better than his own. The officers break the boy's chains to rescue him, but he escapes. Stunningly beautiful but half-starved, the boy has no name. In the hold they find oil and silver, and a naked boy chained to the bulkhead. In the depths of night, customs officers board a galley in a harbor and overpower its guards. A more equitable and sustainable way of life is biologically possible and culturally attainable: we can change our course. It shows how through today's ever more fearful, frenzied, and greed-driven technologies of destruction and exploitation, the domination system may lead us to an evolutionary dead end.

Nurturing Our Humanity explores how behaviors, values, and socio-economic institutions develop differently in these two environments, documents how this impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, examines cultures from this new perspective (including societies that for millennia oriented toward partnership), and proposes actions supporting the contemporary movement in this more life-sustaining and enhancing direction. On the other end is the more peaceful, egalitarian, gender-balanced, and sustainable partnership system. On one end is the domination system that ranks man over man, man over woman, race over race, and man over nature. Western, and other familiar categories that do not include our formative parent-child and gender relations, it looks at where societies fall on the partnership-domination scale. Its groundbreaking new approach reveals connections between disturbing trends like climate change denial and regressions to strongman rule.

It brings together findings-largely overlooked-from the natural and social sciences debunking the popular idea that we are hard-wired for selfishness, war, rape, and greed. Nurturing Our Humanity offers a new perspective on our personal and social options in today's world, showing how we can build societies that support our great human capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity.

Chalice and the blade isbn