Composing a Life

within the symmetrical model, because the asymmetries of gender relationships have been so profoundly exploitative and the discovery of comradeship so rewarding. But symmetrical models promote competition and conflict; as the Bible shows, brothers are not always friends. These models also involve pressing participants toward similarity, teaching them to play by the same rules and to abandon their different styles and different contributions. The loss is serious. Furthermore, symmetrical models work badly across cultures, when differences are real and profound. They are almost useless as a basis for forming ethical relationships outside the human species; they don’t help us deal responsibly with the rain forests or the oceans.
    The sermon by the Tibetan monk evokes compassion with a double twist: On the one hand, it invites acknowledgment of similarity, reminding the listener that all sentient beings are caught in the cycle of incarnations and have passed through the same forms. We are all alike. On the other hand, it evokes the asymmetry of the mother-infant relationship, of love and mutual need based on difference. We need the rain forests and the living oceans to sustain our lives. Compassion is a more complex idea than equality, but the very word is distorted in Western usage into something like the faintly scornful pity felt by the strong for the weak. “Interdependence” is the word increasingly used for relationships of interlocking needs that contain elements of difference and elements of commonality. We speak of interdependence between species, between nations, between north and south, between different bioregions. Oddly, as procreation becomes less central, we are finding ourselves in need of new ways to express the interdependence of males and females as partners or as friends.
    When you hear someone describing their day-to-day interactions, you can sort out the underlying metaphors, listening for the formal similarities between different forms of caring, or rivalry, or exploitation. You find teachers who are aware of learning from their students and teachers who are not; employers for whom workers are interchangeable and others who recognize that spontaneity and freedom produce higher productivity than adversarial negotiations about standardized tasks. Even in working with computers, there is a variation between those who use an imagery of collaboration and those who think in terms of a master-slave relationship. “I always like the aspect where there is a close human interface,” Alice commented, “those things a machine can do better because a human being and a machine work together.”
    The differences between men and women are our most important resource in learning new ways of thinking about difference. We cannot change the disparity between infant and adult, though we can surely learn to understand and respect children more. But we can work toward households and schools in which the differences between men and women are visibly a mutual source of strength rather than dominance. A home is one model of the kind of complex whole two people—or more—can work together to create. This dimension of homemaking is also applicable to the building of laboratories and the staffing of offices, to making places where adults as well as children can grow, where strengths are fostered and possibilities are increased.
    Women have a great deal to offer to this process today, but not because they necessarily bring the resources of nurturance and tolerance that create reform. Rather, having grown up expecting to be homemakers and caretakers, they still retain an understanding of interdependence. If they continue looking for complementary relationships, relationships of mutual give and take, when they have rejected inferior status, they can help to make these relationships more widely available. And when women argue against the various forms taken by the exploitation of women, against the premises on which traditional gender relationships and visions of the life cycle have been built, they are also arguing against the arrogant dominance and casual exploitation of the planet on which we live.
    If the difference between male and female can be affirmed without connotations of inferiority and superiority, we may be able to change the exploitative elements in other relationships across differences like race and class and, more profoundly, between the developed world and the developing world, between the human species