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.
Is the Left Hemisphere Really “Masculine”?
In an interview with The Morning News, Iain McGilchrist was asked what he thought of Leonard Shlain and his hypothesis in The Alphabet Versus The Goddess (emphasis mine):
“Shlain was an intelligent, imaginative writer, but he does not display a deep knowledge of the way the brain works. The whole thesis of that book is vitiated by the fact that it is women, not men, who are most at home with language. All that rhetoric about men and “The Word” is politically coherent, perhaps, but makes little sense from the neuropsychological point of view.
The image-oriented point is wrong in any case, because both hemispheres are involved in imagery—as they are, in fact, in everything. What differentiates the hemispheres is not which aspect of reality they engage with, since each engages with everything, but the way in which they engage with each aspect of reality.
All the evidence I see suggests that in the modern world we are getting trapped in what I call the hall of mirrors: the left hemisphere’s construction of reality, in which everything refers to something else within the hall of mirrors, but never breaks out to reality. Life becomes more and more abstract and virtual: The values that would have led us out of this vision of the world, and are grounded in a view of the world as embodied, neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual, become neglected.”
Research on sex differences consistently show that women, on average, tend to have superior skills with language (as well as word memory and social cognition), whereas men tend to excel at spatial processing—a right hemisphere lateralized skill. In grade school, girls outperform boys when it comes to language; while it is more controversial to state that boys are better at mathematics than girls, twice as many boys get perfect scores on the math section of the SAT than girls and at the highest levels of mathematical competency, males outnumber females by as much as 13 to 1.12 US Air Force aptitude tests for mechanical comprehension find that the average male who takes the test outperforms 80% of women test-takers, and in the top levels of mechanical reasoning ability, males outnumber women around 8 to 1.13
Regarding images, McGilchrist claims that the right hemisphere has a preference for “realistic” images and is more sensitive to the environment. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, “is more at home dealing with distorted, non-realistic, fantastic—ultimately artificial—images.”14 This distinction makes more sense than Shlain’s suggestion that images in general are mostly processed in the right hemisphere.
As an aside, it’s pretty well established that males prefer to watch or look at pornographic images whereas women prefer to read erotica and romance. In other words, men are more, uh, swayed by image, women more by word. This implies that in a culture dominated by language, males gain a power advantage over females, whereas in a culture dominated by images, females gain a power advantage over males. This suggests that Shlain is correct when he points out a connection between suppressing images and suppressing female power.
So, no, the left hemisphere is not “masculine” and the right hemisphere is not “feminine”. However, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess still illustrates an interesting pattern of misogyny following shifts toward left-hemisphere and literal thinking.
This leads to me to my own interpretation of Shlain’s findings:
What if sex differences and sexuality disproportionately lateralize to the right hemisphere while the left hemisphere is more androgynous?
What if shifts toward left hemisphere thinking are associated with both misogyny and misandry, as well as a rejection of sex differences (anti-sexism), and, in extreme cases, of the other sex?
The Androgynous Mind?
On a recent podcast between
and , Bismarck made an interesting confession.“When it comes to something like anima possession—which is something that I’ve struggled with a long time—it’s like hyper-masculinity comes from a place of being possessed by your anima, like you’re just trying to rape your anima because you’re just so resentful towards women […]
[…] There is a sense in which I do think the male urge to dominate and sort of subjugate women does come from that, that revulsion with your own inner woman and your own sort of inner weakness […] like resenting your anima for holding you to a standard that actual women probably wouldn't even hold you to as much, you know? […]
[…] It’s, like, this stupid self-sabotaging impulse that men have because you hear this inner Stacey calling you a loser, like, a pathetic faggot all the time, right? And it’s sort of is turned into a desire to oppress women, right?”15
This was a mind-blowing observation for me, though not a surprising one. I’m grateful to Bismarck for his honesty and self-reflection here. However, I do think he gets an important detail wrong, and it’s the same mistake Shlain and many others (e.g. many feminists) seem to make.
The assumption is that “masculinity”, in particular in the extreme, is associated with violence towards women—that masculinity inherently opposes and wishes to control and marginalize femininity. But what Bismarck is describing here is how low masculinity or insecure masculinity leads to a rejection of the “anima” and thus to aggressive thoughts and/or actions towards women.16
I don’t know Walt personally, but he invited me to appear on his podcast after I wrote a response to an excellent essay he wrote about the troubling phenomenon of early puberty in girls. He struck me as autistic (a label he identifies with) with an extremely high verbal IQ and what I would generally characterize as more left-brained tendencies.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the examples Leonard Shlain gives of hyper-literate, “left-hemisphere” dominant men throughout history (all emphasis mine):
“Isaiah, Socrates, Zoroaster all gave a distinctive shape to peculiarly Western ideas. In the same brief period, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius emerged in the East … All six share certain striking similarities: each developed or refined an abstract system of thought that challenged the brains of all who attempted to understand them; all were literate. None of them had a relationship with a woman that he valued above solitude or the company of men.”17
Paul the Apostle, who wrote much of The New Testament after Jesus’s death, “seemed to have difficulties with women”, spent his life “traveling in the company of men”, and “interacted with women only when it was necessary to advance his agenda.”18
The first significant Orthodox Christian theoretician, Origen (185?-254? AD), wrote “some six thousand books”, and was a “social misfit” who “believed that the renunciation of all sexual urges promoted salvation” and “castrated himself in the belief” that he “would transcend bestial lusts to achieve the exalted state of androgyny.”19
Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant movement, and “one of the most prolific writers in German history”, only married at forty-two after an ex-nun propositioned him. Perhaps the exception to the rule, he fathered multiple children with her. However, he also said stuff like “Take women from their housewifery and they are good for nothing” and “If women get tired and die of childbearing, there is no harm in that.”20
In a telling description of the Ancient Hebrews—the first hyper-literate culture—Shlain writes:
“Under the new regime of alphabet literacy, men learned to sublimate; they projected their sexual desire onto Sophia, a feminine noun meaning “wisdom.” … While Wisdom is always feminine, none of [the writers Shlain quotes in this passage] seeks feminine wisdom. None aspires to intuition, prophecy, or woman-knowing; they all long for book learning! With the rising importance of alphabet literacy in Jewish culture, young men are instructed to turn their eyes away from desirable young women and instead, poor over written words. In one of the strangest aberrations to occur in the 3,000,000-year-old human condition, men substituted dry scrolls in place of a woman’s beauty.”21
And when describing the downfall of the Ancient Greeks:
“No one has yet provided a satisfactory explanation for the prevalence of homosexuality and bisexuality in Greek society … It appeared just when intellectual pursuits became transcendent in Greek society and when the Goddess was relegated to the culture’s periphery. I suggest that the masculinizing effects of alphabet literacy were responsible for all these phenomena.”22
So … bookishness among the Ancient Greeks “masculinized” the men into … homosexuality? This doesn’t make a lot of sense.
On the other hand, during the Middle Ages, when most of the European population was illiterate, Shlain describes not only a rise in imagery, goddess-worship (e.g. of the Virgin Mary), and what he calls “feminine” values, but also a rise in chivalry; of values such as protecting the weak (and women), morality, justice, and bravery.
Far from being “feminine”, I would characterize chivalry as highly masculine—and as even Shlain claims, the “protector” instinct is associated with the right hemisphere (it is the left hand, operated by the right hemisphere, in which most warriors have held their shields).
A significant number of famous and prolific writers throughout history have been (or at least suspected of being) homosexual, bisexual, asexual, and/or died without marrying and/or having children. Notable (male) examples include Immanuel Kant, Nikola Tesla, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Isaac Newton, Henry James, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rene Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, Jorge Luis Borges, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Jonathan Swift, Leonardo Da Vinci, Virgil, David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, and George Bernard Shaw. It is also suspected that Adolf Hitler was asexual or homosexual, despite his marriage to Eva Braun.
Speaking of George Bernard Shaw—who had a celibate marriage to a feminist activist he only agreed to marry because she nursed him during a period of poor health—here’s an iconic song from “My Fair Lady”, the musical adaptation of his play “Pygmalion”. Check out that library!
Readers may have noted that philosophers and polemicists were disproportionately represented on the above list of writers; regarding this point, Iain McGilchrist writes:
“Philosophers have, for the most part, had an antagonistic and unsympathetic relationship to the body—it goes with the territory. Kant described marriage as an agreement between two people as to the ‘reciprocal use of each others’ sexual organs; Kant also, it may be noted, remained single, and died probably a virgin.”
Naturally, Kant is one of many famous thinkers who is now suspected of having been on the autism spectrum. Interestingly, while autism spectrum disorder is associated with excess testosterone exposure in the womb and higher than average testosterone levels during childhood (in both sexes), it seems that by adulthood, many autistic men have below average testosterone levels.23
According to McGilchrist, autism spectrum disorder is characterized by right hemisphere deficits and/or dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance.
Autism is not one condition but an umbrella diagnosis for a cluster of symptoms originating from a variety of causes. One study has found four distinct subtypes of autism; two include higher-than-average verbal IQ (recall that language is lateralized to the left hemisphere), and it is these two cohorts which are most relevant here. One of the other subtypes had average language abilities, while the fourth had language impairments.
McGilchrist also makes this claim of other ailments which disrupt our relationships to others, to nature, to food, and to our own bodies, including schizophrenia, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, anxiety disorders, and various personality disorders including borderline personality disorder and narcissism. He describes Western civilization as being “schizophrenic” (and “autistic”) in nature.
Shlain also described Western civilization as the “schizophrenic only child of [the Israelites and Greeks].”24
Autism is a “gender incoherent disorder”; “somewhat paradoxically, many individuals with ASD display androgynous physical features regardless of gender.” Many autistic people have androgynous facial features.
While autistic men are far more likely to be heterosexual than autistic women, autistic men are still more likely to be homosexual or bisexual than neurotypical men (one study found that only 82% of autistic men and 57% of autistic women reported being heterosexual).
While autism is highly correlated with all LGBTQ+ identities, it is particularly so with asexuality; up to 8% of autistic men and 22% of autistic women are on the asexual spectrum.
Regardless of their sexuality, writers, who are typically earnest readers as children, are notorious for poor health.
In The Matter With Things (2021, page 290), Iain McGilchrist discusses a study on creative writing students from the University of Iowa which found an incredible 80% had one or more diagnosed anxiety and mood disorders compared to 30% of control subjects, and 30% were alcoholics (compared to 7% of controls).
In the Mars Review of Books, autistic writer Tao Lin points out:
“In NeuroTribes, Silberman writes that many in Silicon Valley, in the tech industry, seem autistic. I’ve noticed that many autobiographical authors and graphic novelists do too. There’s a connection between autobiographical self-expression and autism, or auto-ism, from the Greek word auto, meaning “self” or “self-referential.” Pain and discomfort point inward, toward themselves, insisting that something be done.”
In Conversations with Great Thinkers (2017), which is available in full online, LJ Hammond notes a connection between excessive reading and poor mental health. From Chapter 4:
“[David] Hume, for example, “suffered a nervous breakdown at eighteen, following a period of intense intellectual discovery and voracious reading.” The young Napoleon also had a ravenous appetite for knowledge; “on attaining the age of puberty, [Napoleon’s] passion for reading was carried to excess; and he eagerly devoured the contents of every book that fell in his way.””
Napoleon is another example of a famous figure who, despite marrying women and siring children, is speculated to have been queer.
In another section, Hammond discusses some of the qualities found in male “geniuses”. From Chapter 5:
“Though the genius may be a male, he has some feminine traits, and though the genius may be an adult, he has some childlike traits. Virgil, because of his feminine traits, was nicknamed Parthenias, or The Virgin. Milton was nicknamed The Lady of Christ’s (he attended Christ’s College). Chekhov was described as “modest and quiet like a girl. And he walks like a girl.” Artistic creation requires an especially high degree of femininity. Philosophical, scientific and political geniuses are less feminine than artistic geniuses, and accordingly they’re less inclined toward homosexuality than artistic geniuses are.”
Chekhov was a famous womanizer, so please don’t think I’m implying that all famous writers were unsuccessful with or avoided the opposite sex! I am well aware that there is no shortage of examples of womanizing male writers; I am, after all, a distant great-great-great-something niece of notable Scottish poet and man-slut Robert Burns. Generally speaking, the pattern of left-hemisphere dominance and alternative sexuality I’m illustrating here seems to apply more to philosophical writers than poetic ones. (As well, no one has suggested that Chekhov or Burns or any of the other womanizing men of the pen were autistic).
To state the obvious, spending a lot of time alone in your home/bedroom is conducive to producing a novel, memoir, book of poems, or philosophical treatise. Having lots of sex, romantic relationships, and children is a major productivity killer (which isn’t to say, as I noted above, that there aren’t writers who are prolific both on the page and between the sheets).
What About Hyper-Literate Women?
In a recent (private) conversation I had with another Substack writer,
, she pointed out that cultures/ethnic groups which seem to be more “left hemisphere dominant” also tend to consider smaller breasts and butts on women to be “higher status”, whereas other cultures/ethnic groups tend to see curvier women as being more desirable and of higher status.In other words, cultures which are more abstract, reductionist, bureaucratic, and literate, more oriented toward machines and mechanics, place a greater emphasis on logic, order, and rationality, and are less spiritual, relational, and physically affectionate (i.e. cultures which are more “autistic” or “mechanistic”) also tend to favour more physically androgynous women.
Famous female writers who may have been homosexual, bisexual, asexual, and/or who never married and/or had children include: Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Gertrude Stein, Anne Widdicombe, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor.
While I think Shlain was incorrect that the left hemisphere is “masculine” and the right hemisphere “feminine”, he appears to have been correct that hyper-literacy and left-hemisphere dominance is connected to male misogyny (and the rejection of image).
I am proposing that both masculinity and femininity are, loosely speaking, right hemisphere lateralized, and hyper-literate male misogyny (rejection of femininity) comes from the left hemisphere’s lack of masculinity.
Shlain was a feminist thinker. Near the end of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, he claims the feminist movement was enabled in part because of the rise of image-based mediums such as photography and film/television.25
This seems to overlook that it was feminist texts not images that largely drove the women’s rights movement (and continue to drive feminist thought today).26
“Reading was my first solitary vice (and led to all others). I read while I ate, I read in the loo, I read in the bath. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I was reading.”
― Germaine Greer
If I’m right that the left hemisphere is more androgynous and McGilchrist is right that spirituality is right-hemisphere lateralized, then Mary Wollstonecraft’s assertion that there is “no sex in souls” and Frances Wright’s atheism would be examples of left hemisphere thinking. Simone de Beauvoir’s stance that women should not have the choice to stay home and raise their children is also hardly an example of the “nurturing” right hemisphere.
While there was a branch of “maternal feminism” that absolutely did exemplify the right hemisphere’s “nurturing” and “family” values, it was quickly eclipsed by more radical feminism of the “girl-boss” variety.
Shlain argued that the tilt toward the left hemisphere initially was responsible for the decline of goddess-worship. He failed to take into account the skyrocketing rates of atheism over the past several decades.27 The goddess might have fallen first, but the god followed shortly afterward (interestingly, the rise in atheism followed the influx of women into universities, and coincided with the invention of the computer and then smartphone, which shifted communication and socialization largely from in-person and over-the-phone to text-based messaging).28 Hyper-literate women and feminists are less likely to be religious than other women.
As with many well-known female writers in general, many prominent feminist writers and academics were/are lesbians, and/or remained unmarried and childless.
Many people—including many ex-feminists or contrarian feminists (
, for example)—have also pointed out that feminist movements have been rife with misandry and the vilification of masculinity.“Only when manhood is dead—and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it—only then will we know what it is to be free.”
— Andrea Dworkin
To clarify, while I am arguing that excessive reading tilts the brain toward the left hemisphere’s worldview, decreases both masculinity and femininity and increases androgyny, and leads to misogyny and misandry (in both sexes), I am also not denying the role that early childhood trauma—in particular with parents of the opposite sex—plays into this. Many feminists and female misandrists have legitimate and serious trauma caused by men, and many male misogynists have legitimate and serious trauma caused by women (in particular their mothers).
There’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem here. Psychologist Alice Miller pointed out decades ago that early childhood abuse and emotional neglect seems to increase the likelihood of traits such as overachievement, “giftedness”, perfectionism, obsession with power, and intellectualization and obsession with language and bureaucracy in both sexes—in other words, with traits associated with left hemisphere dominant thinking.
I discuss this in greater detail in an earlier essay on the dark history of parenting books.
This is to say that lonely, maltreated, and poorly attached children are more likely to become obsessive readers and to strive for success and validation in cognitive, intellectual, and bureaucratic fields.
This is also true of creative fields—though success in the arts typically requires right hemisphere talents. I believe early childhood trauma causes dysfunction and abnormalities of the right hemisphere, which can manifest in some extreme right-hemisphere talents (e.g. musical ability) at the expense of other right-hemisphere lateralized talents. As well, collaborative creative work seems to have a significant ability to heal; I’ve observed that artists who do solo work (e.g. writers, painters) seem to struggle a little more with their mental health and with right-hemisphere thinking than collaborative artists (e.g. musicians, theatre professionals).
However, I’ve also observed that many (most) young people who wish to become artists lack the talent for success in their desired fields—and this frequently seems to be because they tilt toward left hemisphere thinking and struggle to tap into the right hemisphere.
“[With the left hemisphere] Any subtlety, any nuance, anything that comes from context—and context alters everything—everything that comes from the realm of the implicit is missed. And the realm of the implicit, by the way, includes everything that we really value. So it includes, for instance, the beauty of nature, poetry, music, narrative, myth, ritual, sex, love, the divine—all these things remain implicit. They can be made explicit but when they’re made explicit, they change their nature and they become less than they were. And they may become completely other than they were.”
—Iain McGilchrist29
Failed and/or would-be artists often go into fields such as academia, journalism, admin work, teaching, mental health work, and, unfortunately, politics.
Are We in the “Age of Asperger”?
Christopher Badcock argued in his books that we are living in the “Age of Asperger”, in other words that highly mechanistic “autistic” thinking has come to dominate the Western mind.
Iain McGilchrist makes a similar claim when he says that the left hemisphere has taken over the West. In an ominous piece for Unherd, McGilchrist goes as far as to claim that “left brain thinking will destroy civilization.”
Shlain also pointed out that the left hemisphere came to dominate the West over the past several hundred years, but then went on to end his book with a prediction that has since proved to be incredibly wrong; he claimed that the rise of image-based technologies such as television, the computer, and the Internet would result in a return to right-hemisphere and feminine values and thinking. Of course, as Badcock and McGilchrist have since pointed out, the opposite has happened—the left hemisphere is more dominant than ever, and while it can be argued that women have more power now than we did 30 years ago, it would be more accurate to say that androgyny has increased in power and as a value than femininity has.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess came out in 1998, a decade before Badcock and McGilchrist published their respective works. So to be fair to Shlain, he was working with considerably less information than the other two writers. However, he was also a feminist thinker, and I think this lens lent an unfortunate bias to his work.
Something Shlain failed to consider was that the rise of technology might actually increase the amount of time people spent reading (as in, communicating in written language) even as it decreased the popularity of print books. The sales of print books might be on the decline, but people are reading more than ever—on their phones, on their laptops, on their tablets. By 2010, one-third of teenagers sent more than 100 text messages per day, Talking on the phone and face-to-face interactions have been on a steady decline. Popular social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter (X), reddit, and even Instagram and TikTok heavily rely on text. And, of course, women and girls are more likely to use text-based and written online communication in excess more than men and boys.
As well, as groups such as
(Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans) and have documented, there appears to be a relationship between traits or diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder (characterized by left hemisphere dominance, right hemisphere dysfunction, according to McGilchrist), excess time spent online and communicating via text, and “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”. The rapid-onset is important here because this is distinct from early-onset gender dysphoria, which typically appears in extremely gender-nonconforming toddlers (boys who are extremely feminine and girls who are extremely masculine). In the rapid-onset cases, the young people in question are more androgynous and frequently opposite-sex attracted, asexual, or bisexual, and parents report that their children did not appear to be strongly gender nonconforming prior to the onset of dysphoria.As with autism, “gender dysphoria” and same-sex attraction are complex and have multiple causes. The observations in this essay do not apply to all people who fit under one or more of these umbrella terms.
For example, gay men who are highly feminine and lesbians who are highly masculine do not seem to tilt toward the left hemisphere in the same way more androgynous LGBTQ+ people do.
Indeed, one study found that out of “male-majority occupations”, the professions with the highest proportion of gay men were (1) actors; (2) news analysts, reporters, and correspondents; (3) artists and related workers; (4) agents/managers of artists, performers, and athletes; and (5) producers and directors. However, the “female-majority occupations” with the highest proportion of gay men were all people-based careers (e.g. flight attendants, hairdressers, nurse practitioners).
A similar pattern emerges with lesbians: lesbians in male-majority occupations tended to work in mechanical fields with their hands (e.g. mechanic, home appliance repair, security and alarm systems installation), whereas lesbians in female-majority occupations tended to have more cerebral and bureaucratic occupations (e.g. psychologist, sociologist, probation officer, training and development specialist and manager, and social and community service managers).
It can be inferred from this that more androgynous homosexuals and non-homosexual queer people are more likely to be in cerebral (i.e. “left hemisphere”) careers than highly feminine gay males and highly masculine lesbian females (who lean more toward “right hemisphere” careers that are typical of the opposite sex).
Another way of conceptualizing this is to borrow a metaphor from British journalist David Goodhart, author of Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect (2020); more androgynous LGBTQ+ people (and people in general) tend to favour professions and pursuits that tilt disproportionately toward the “head”, whereas more feminine and masculine people (regardless of sex and sexual orientation) tend more toward professions and pursuits that incorporate the “hand” and/or “heart.”
These are loose metaphors—I realize both hemispheres of the brain are active in everything we do, and that it is too simplistic to say that the left hemisphere is the “head” whereas the right hemisphere is the “hand” and “heart”.
My point is that a tilt towards hyper-literacy, academia, bureaucracy, and a cerebral, left-hemisphere orientation appears to coincide with a rise in androgyny, not with a rise in masculinity, as Leonard Shlain suggested. In particular—especially when autistic traits are involved—it seems to be associated with negative or undifferentiated androgyny, or low levels of both masculinity and femininity, and at least slightly less so with positive androgyny (high levels of both masculinity and femininity).
Unfortunately, the desires and priorities of the cerebral class—of the left hemisphere—dominate Western culture. This has not changed just because women as a sex now have significantly more power than in previous generations. Blogger Penelope Trunk has argued that autistic (and women high in autistic traits) are “primed for power and influence and neurotypical women are not.”
David Goodhart, for his part, dedicates a good chunk of his book to highlighting how the desires of cerebral career women trump those of other women. For example:
“Policy has reflected the priorities of highly educated professional women concerned with competition on the most equal possible terms with men in their careers. At the middle and bottom end of the labor market most women would prefer to do so part-time or even not at all when their children are very young, yet the state provides little support to make it easier to stay at home.”30
In addition, this tilt toward the left hemisphere appears to be associated with both misogyny and misandry in both men and women, not just with misogyny in men as per Shlain. At the same time, a rise in left hemisphere dominance would also increase anti-sexist values, or the idea that there are no meaningful differences between men and women (outside of socialization; we see this in the claim that “gender is social construct”).
Neoteny, Undifferentiated Androgyny, and the Left Hemisphere
As I mentioned above, undifferentiated androgyny (low masculinity and femininity) appears to be a little more correlated with left hemisphere dominance than positive androgyny is.
Autism spectrum disorder (and other psychiatric conditions of right hemispheric abnormalities such as schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and anxiety disorders) combined with undifferentiated androgyny also appear to be related to neoteny, or the retention of juvenile traits in adults. As one reddit-er put it, many people with high functioning autism (Aspergers Syndrome) seem to be in a state of “eternal adolescence.”
I want to keep this essay to a reasonable word length, and I’ll admit I haven’t had the time to dive into the research that’s available here, but I think this is relevant and I wanted to at least mention it.
In my conversations with
, she noted:“The left hemisphere has no temporal dimension, as McGilchrist pointed out, it perceives time as discrete chunks of moments frozen in time. I think that, coupled with their own sexual un-differentiated-ness, makes the left hemisphere oriented people revere neoteny to the point that it becomes almost a fetish.
You see this in how Christianity, over the centuries, you go from God the father to the crucified image to then worshipping the virgin-child. There’s the “boy-genius” archetype in all modern media, which believes that youth and neoteny will save everyone (many fictional examples here). You also see this in favouring highly neotenous-looking women, and perhaps men too, in their aesthetic choices (this goes along with having smaller boobs and butts).”
In his essay, “We Need to Talk About Frodo”,
writes:“In Victorian England, this veneration [the Cult of the Child / worship of childhood] reached a fevered pitch of sacrilization, resulting in the bowdlerization of English literary traditions, a re-jiggering of Christianity around the veneration of the Baby Jesus rather than the Savior Jesus, and—this should be unsurprising given the close link between spirituality and sexuality that shows itself in all cultures—the eroticization of childhood. The venerated child is always given the physical and emotional traits that appeal simultaneously to the care-taking drives and the sexual appetites (seen very well in Jackson’s wide-eyed Frodo and in Harry Potter’s precocious wisdom and boundless enthusiasm).
This conflation of desires on the part of the audience places the sacred child in a position of moral authority:
One listens to the voice of innocence because it sounds very like the voice of conscience.
One listens to the objects of one’s erotic desire because awe is often a key ingredient of erotic fascination (remember how, when you were a teenager, you’d hang upon your intended’s every word on topics you’d otherwise have found boring?).
This kind of fetishism (I use the word deliberately, as a “fetish” is literally an object of worship) wasn’t new even in Victorian England. It shows up all through Christian history, perhaps most egregiously in the tales of Children’s Crusade in the 13th century, where children were allegedly exhorted to join a quest to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims on the grounds that God would protect them due to their innocence (it’s unclear to me if this happened as one event, or is a conflation of many smaller such events and campaigns that bled together in historical memory).
Equating innocence with weakness and childish ignorance with virtue, by necessity, turns strength into evidence of sin. This is a parody of Children’s Church morality, less nuanced even than an old Disney film. And when this kind of thinking gets out of control, it deranges a culture. Let’s leave aside the growing push for the normalization of pedophilia (which is certainly aided by the strong cultural presence of the Cult of the Child), and look just at the less salacious danger that such thinking poses.
This moral vision elevates an impracticable and undesirable (by and for adults) aspect of childhood to a moral ideal. Any time one’s moral paradigm is impracticable, one is easily excused for not practicing it. Any time it’s undesirable, one casts about for paragons in whom it is desirable. We find such paragons in child-heroes such as Jackson’s Frodo, and Harry Potter, and Bella Swan, whose heroism comes not because they grow out of weakness and ignorance and stupidity, but because of their weakness, ignorance, and stupidity.
In the real world, we have a rotating cast of complimentary figures exemplified recently by the likes of Greta Thungberg and David Hogg.
Such heroes are pliable. They have no agency—they do not even choose their adventures. They are, instead, chosen. They are thus easily maneuvered into serving the interests of the powerful, and—while still too young to see it for the poison it is—develop an addiction to the admiration they receive as puppets. They become the sin-eaters and sooth-sayers of our public discourse, excusing the public’s apathy by self-righteously embodying its hope and its rage.
Such lack of agency is these characters’ central virtue. If they were real people, they would not be fit for purpose. In the 21st century, we prefer our heroes to be empty vessels onto whom we can project our own fantasies. If they had their own natures, their own rough edges, their own desires ... well, then they wouldn’t be much use to us.
And hey, if the child can’t handle the fact that we no longer find them fascinating or respectable when they become adults, and if cutting off the public approbation opens inside them a yawning pit of need that drives them to self-destructive (or others-destructive) behavior, who cares? They’re not children—they’re no more special than you or me. What’s a culture without a little child sacrifice here and there, after all?”
Again, I haven’t really dug into this and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on from a neurologically and developmental standpoint. There’s probably a whole other 8,000-word+ essay’s worth of material here. But here’s a quick summary of my best guess at the relationship:
Early childhood neglect (in particular in infancy and toddlerhood) disproportionately impacts the development of the right hemisphere of the brain, which is rapidly growing and dominant until about ages 3-4. Western cultures, in particular the WASP and Germanic populations (e.g. the Victorians), had unusual parenting practices which Alice Miller characterized as coming from “poisonous pedagogies” spread through popular parenting books, thus neglect of children was common. See my essay “The Dark History of Parenting Books.”
Children who are neglected in early childhood are more likely to develop autistic traits. In Harry Harlow’s famous monkey experiment, rhesus monkeys were raised in isolation. “Some would sit alone, clutching themselves. rocking “autistically.” Others would be markedly inappropriate in their hierarchal or sexual behaviors.”31
A disrupted early childhood leads to Peter Pan syndrome, or difficulty in growing up. Unmet childhood needs emerge in adulthood. This can also lead to a romanticization of childhood seen in “the Cult of the Child.” See my essay, “The Lost Girls and Boys.”
As previously mentioned, children abused or neglected in early childhood often grow up to be predisposed to intellectualization (and other left hemisphere traits, which makes sense as their trauma would disproportionately impact the development of the right hemisphere), and neglected children have been historically more likely to dissociate into books (and now also movies, television, video games, and social media). This can lead to the exacerbation of autistic traits and left hemisphere dominance.
Anyway, this is grossly oversimplified and I think a lot more is going on here. Again, I do not think autism is one condition or has only one cause, and I do not think any particular “cause” of autism applies to all cases.
As Iain McGilchrist states:
“Autism is, in my view, not a unitary condition. In keeping with this, I believe, on the one hand, that the variety of presentations of autism is so great that we should talk about autisms; and it is well recognised that schizophrenia, too, takes many different forms […]
The point is that though there may be a virtually infinite number of causes of a complex system’s malfunctioning, there are only so many ways in which that malfunction can manifest itself.”32
Which is to say, it’s all very complicated.
Final Thoughts
I’ve come down hard on the left hemisphere in this essay, so I feel it’s important to point out that the left hemisphere is important and many autistic (or sub-clinically autistic) people have made tremendous contributions to science, medicine, philosophy, law and social justice, literature etc.
As LJ Hammond notes:
“Genius is childlike. Genius approaches the world with naiveté, as if it were new and strange. Leonardo is an example of a childlike genius; “the great Leonardo,” wrote Freud, “remained infantile in some ways throughout his whole life … As a grown-up he still continued playing.” It was said of Mozart that, “in his art he early became a man, but in all other respects he invariably remained a child.””
The benefits of literacy are also manifold. I certainly don’t want to return to an illiterate society, or to one dominated by masculinity and femininity and the right hemisphere.
As Leonard Shlain wrote:
“The Old Testament was a powerful social instrument that realigned culture. Many groups benefited; others suffered. The winners were the common folk, the poor, widows, orphans, slaves, Levite priests, the literate, warriors, lawyers, judges, prophets, farmers, businessmen, sons, fathers, husbands, and bigamists. Also celebrating were alphabet literacy, law, logic, justice, ethics, morality, dualism, democracy, conscience, and individualism. The losers were wives, prophetesses, queens, artists, daughters, female slaves, rape victims, sexually adventuresome persons, and priestesses. Images, beauty, nature, wholeness, tolerance, and intuition also experienced a decisive setback. Judaism was, and always has been, based on the steadfast worship of God through the medium of the written word. 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.”33
The issue that is Western society has become imbalanced toward the left hemisphere and toward androgyny, at the expense of the right hemisphere and healthy masculinity and femininity.
The way forward is not to reject the left hemisphere, literacy, androgyny, or anti-sexism, but to reincorporate right hemispheric values and healthy masculinity and femininity into our culture.
Thank you to
for her feedback and help with this essay.For a more detailed summary of “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess” I recommend checking out this review on Medium. There are also some good summaries and criticisms of Shlain’s research and ideas on Goodreads.
Thank you for reading! I’m thrilled that this Substack now has over 500 highly-engaged subscribers from over 35 countries. Posts will likely be a little less frequent for a few months as I’m about to give birth to my second child.
As always, I encourage your feedback in the comments section!
Further Reading
The Dangers of Reading Too Much (Part 2)
The Drama of the Gifted Children
Quick background on these authors: Leonard Shlain was a surgeon, writer, and inventor and the former chairperson of laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and literary scholar. Christopher Badcock is a sociologist, affiliated with the London School of Economics.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, page 93.
Iain McGilchrist, on the other hand, suggests perception of time is more lateralized to the right hemisphere. “The sense of past or future is severely impaired in right-hemisphere damage … [temporal sequencing] may be right-hemisphere dependent … the understanding of narrative is a right-hemisphere skill; the left hemisphere cannot follow a narrative. But sequencing in the sense of the ordering of artificially decontextualized, unrelated, momentary events, or momentary interruptions of temporal flow—the kind of thing that is as well or better performed by the left hemisphere—is not in fact a measure of the sense of time at all. It is precisely what takes over when the sense of time break down.” See page 76 of The Master and His Emissary.
“In general terms, then, the left hemisphere yields narrow, focussed attention, mainly for the purpose of getting and feeding. The right hemisphere yields a broad, vigilant attention, the purpose of which appears to be awareness of signal from the surrounding, especially of other creatures, who are potential predators or potential mates, foes or friends; and it is involved in bonding in social animals.” — The Master and His Emissary, page 27
This, he claimed, is because the long childhood period in humans shifted hunting responsibilities almost entirely onto men, whereas caregiving became the realm of women.
As opposed to pictographic, ideographic, and logographic writing systems.
According to Shlain, the first four Commandments “encourage alphabet literacy by rejecting the right brain’s way of knowing” and “reinforce the ability of a people to think abstractly, linearly, and sequentially” by promoting monotheism, rejecting imagery and idolatry, encouraging the tracking of time (via the Sabbath), and ordering followers not to take God’s name in vain (which emphasizes the importance and power of words over icons). (The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, pages 82-85).
The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, page 86.
The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, page 295.
The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, page 364.
The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, page 381.
Christopher Badcock, The Imprinted Brain, page 140.
The Imprinted Brain, page 142.
The Master and His Emissary, page 56. “[In a world dominated by the left hemisphere], art would become conceptual, having lost the capacity for eliciting the metaphorical power of incarnate qualities. Visual art would lack a sense of depth, and distorted or bizarre perspectives would become the norm.” — The Master and His Emissary, page 433.
Walt Right Perspectives, Episode 67 “Kristy - Horror, Art, and Identity”, clip starts at 28 minutes 36 seconds.
Bismarck is describing an inner experience, not actual behaviour, and, to my knowledge, has no history of violence against women. In the clip, he’s reflecting on what he recognizes as an immature, self-sabotaging reaction and in the personal example he gives (he’s not a good driver and was embarrassed by this on a road trip with a girlfriend) he makes it clear that the woman in the story did not do anything wrong. It should be noted that poor driving is a not-uncommon trait of autistic people! I hate driving and am definitely below-average at it, so please know I’m not casting any shade here. As well, from what I’ve read of Bismarck’s work and life story, it seems that as he’s matured and gained confidence and become more social and successful with women (and, I’d argue, less autistic than he was as a child), he’s also become more masculine. The self-awareness he demonstrates in the podcast clip also indicates this.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, page 202.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, page 230.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, pages 242-243.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, pages 329-330.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, pages 117-118.
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, page 135.
Higher testosterone in adulthood is associated with more masculine facial features in men (Robert Sapolsky, Behave, page 444), but it is a myth, according to Sapolsky, that it is related to more aggression (see Chapter 4 of Behave). Instead, the relationships between testosterone levels and various behaviours are “hugely context dependent.” (page 104).
“There is a weak and inconsistent association between testosterone levels and aggression in [human] adults, and … administration of testosterone to volunteers typically does not increase their aggression.” — John Archer, endocrinologist (quoted in Behave, page 101).
The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, page 135.
“Numerous factors contributed to the rise of women’s assertiveness and independence and the resurgence of feminine values and holistic thinking. All photographs increase the status of the image-recognition skills of the right brains of both sexes. This factor in turn reinforces a cultural interest in art, myth, nature, nurture, and poetry.” The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, page 386.
He also credits the English language and its lack of gendered nouns on page 388. “The English language’s gender neutrality and its lack of pronoun distinction foster democracy and I suggest this is one of the primary reasons why the suffragette movement began where it did.”
To be fair, this could be in part because his book was published in 1998 and it was in the 1990s that atheism really took off
However, men are still more likely than women to identify themselves as atheists.
YouTube, Interview with Andrew Gold on the “Heretics” podcast; “Scientific Reasons WHY Woke Leftists Are Bad at Understanding Others – Dr. Iain McGilchrist”
David Goodhart, Head, Hand, Heart, page 163.
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, page 191.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, pages 307 and 325.
Sorry, but just before I finished this essay I managed to misplace my print copy of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess and pulled this quote from an online version which doesn’t have page numbers. I’ll fix this when I find my copy!
Readers who like this essay may also appreciate this excellent piece from Sai Pandit!
https://saipandit.substack.com/p/the-woman-question-question
Something I learned recently, which further supports my argument and refutes Shlain’s, is that the suffragettes carried out mass destruction of visual art … something Shlain argues is typical of an out-of-control left hemisphere. (See also: climate activists destroying art).