The Androgynous Mind
In "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess", Leonard Shlain argued that literacy shifted our cognition toward the left hemisphere, triggering a rise in misogyny. What if it gave rise to misandry too?
“There is something inherently anti-female in the written word. Men obsessed with the written word tend to be sexist. The vast majority of men who love women and have families are not the ones who withdrew from conventional life to preach doctrines that others, similarly disposed, commit to writing.”
— Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, page 202
A few months ago a reader recommended Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus The Goddess (1998) during a conversation about Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009).
I’ve discussed McGilchrist’s work at length in previous articles (here, here, and here), and compared his ideas to some similar observations found in Christopher Badcock’s work in The Imprinted Brain (2008) and The Diametric Mind (2019).1
Like McGilchrist and Badcock after him, Shlain—who sadly passed away in 2009— argued that the Western world has become cognitively lopsided. Like McGilchrist, Shlain characterized this as a lopsidedness in favour of the left hemisphere at the expense of the right hemisphere.
To quickly summarize McGilchrist’s hemispheres theory; while both hemispheres are active in everything we do, various tasks lateralize more to one hemisphere over the other, and each hemisphere attends to and interacts with the world in different ways.
Loosely speaking:
Left Hemisphere: Language centres of the brain (verbal communication, especially reading and writing), more active when we interact with non-living things, such as machines. Abstract, literal, narcissistic, reductionist, categorical, uses bottom-up processing, emphasizes logic, order, rationality, and bureaucracy, and understands things in black-and-white. Leans toward short-term thinking. The LH sees things, including our own bodies, as an assemblage of parts, apprehends, and explains. The LH is more closely interconnected within itself than the RH. The left hemisphere “pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”2
Right Hemisphere: Our relationships to our embodied selves, to nature, to food, to spirituality, and to other people and all living things. Music, spatial abilities, and nonverbal communication (body language, facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice etc). Holistic, relational, contextual, uses top-down processing, emphasizes change, empathy, and openness, and is the hemisphere of the brain responsible for meaning-making. Self-awareness, empathy, and identification with others is more RH-dependent. The RH sees the systemic whole, comprehends, and understands. The right hemisphere pays attention to the “Other” and sees itself in relation.
Here’s a short animated video summarizing McGilchrist’s ideas:
Shlain, on the other hand, makes the following distinctions between the left and right hemispheres:
Left Hemisphere: Analysis, linear thinking, logic, discrimination/categorization, and numeracy. Perception of time.3 Language / verbal skills. Concerned with doing and the act of willing. Focussed vision (sees the figure, colour, and detail via the cones in the eyes). Controls the right hand, which in neurotypical people is used for manipulating tools, throwing weapons, and grasping (the “agent of action”).
Right Hemisphere: Integrates and generates authentic feelings (e.g. love, humour, aesthetics), recognizes images, appreciates music, field-awareness, synthesizing so the mind can grasp sensory inputs holistically. Nonverbal and nonlogical (e.g. the RH will interpret a facial expression without putting it into words). Expresses being and understands metaphor. Better at appreciating dimensions and judging distances than the LH (a talent for many types of sport and dance would be largely RH-based). The realm of altered states of consciousness; dreaming takes place mostly in the RH. RH skills are often referred to as “intuition.” Holistic vision (sees the ground and the big picture via the rods in the eyes). Controls the left hand, which in neurotypical people is used for protection (e.g. carrying a baby, holding a shield in battle).
One of the reasons for the division between the hemispheres is to allow for simultaneous hunting / collecting / tool manipulation (LH) and threat-detection / surveillance as well as attending to other creatures for social purposes (RH). Loosely speaking, one could think of the RH as being the “prey” side of our brains, and the LH as being the “predator.”4
Shlain, however, made a pretty wild conjecture in The Alphabet Versus The Goddess. He argued that the left hemisphere is the “masculine” brain, whereas the right hemisphere is the “feminine” one, at least in humans.5
The thesis of Alphabet is that rises in alphabet literacy6 rates and reading throughout history resulted in left-hemisphere shifts, which in turn marginalized the right hemisphere’s way of attending to the world. This, in turn, meant that misogyny and patriarchy follow periods of increased literacy—and that alphabet literacy is largely responsible for the shift away from polytheism and goddess-worship to monotheism and worship of a single patriarchal male god. As—in Shlain’s conception—the RH is largely responsible for processing images and the LH language, each surge in literacy rates was also followed by the marginalization (and sometimes destruction) of images, in particular religious artworks.
Shlain provided numerous historic examples to back up his arguments, predominantly from Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.
While the invention of alphabet literacy is typically credited to the Phoenicians (or the Canaanites), Shlain—who was Jewish—claimed that the ancient Hebrews actually invented the first alphabet and that patriarchal monotheism first appeared with the ancient Hebrews and the Torah.7
“The Hebrews founded the first religion based on literacy, and for the first time in history a people repudiated both the Goddess and the making of images in their art.”8
He hypothesized that the Hebrews passed alphabet literacy on to the Phoenicians, who in turn passed the invention on to the Greeks. Ancient Greece, in turn, revised its mytho-history to disempower women after embracing alphabet literacy, including making a rapist (Zeus) their principle deity.
Later, Shlain detailed how surges in misogyny linked to Christianity and Islam can be linked to rising literacy rates following the publications of The New Testament and The Quran.
Literacy declined after the fall of Rome; during this period the worship of Jesus’s mother, Mary, became more prevalent. Feminine values and female power flourished in Europe until around 1300 A.D. However, from within the Church, “a small group of highly educated and determined men began to wrestle this dynamic medical culture away from its feminine orientation toward masculine values.”9
The witch hunts followed the invention of the printing press and the resurgence of literacy in the 1400s.
“I propose that the witch craze was the result of ballooning up of the left hemisphere’s hunter-killer attributes, which was inflated by the rapid expansion of printing press-generated alphabet literacy.”10
Women’s rights continued to decline with the Protestant Revolution. The left-brained Scientific Revolution was associated with a further decline in women’s rights, as was the Industrial Revolution; “men raped Mother Nature with nary a concern for the future.”11 Shlain also argued that communism was a left-hemisphere, literacy-based ideology which severely oppressed women and despoiled Mother Nature.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess is a fascinating book, and I recommend it to people for its historic overview alone.
However, Shlain’s thesis is wrong.
