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?
I love your writing. Really fascinating and always makes me think. I was actually listening to an interview between Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher earlier (I think it was from last year) and Dreher talked about how the Orthodox religion attempts to balance both sides of the brain through its focus on imagery and ritual (I think he actually referenced McGilchrist here!).
Both Orthodoxy and Catholicism to a lesser extent put a heavy focus on religious imagery, including of Mary, which the Protestants would view as idolatrous (you mention this). As someone raised Catholic, I can also say that Catholicism values the feminine (so many female saints, and Mary of course) and views the body as intertwined with the soul, and therefore the body is not just a meat suit, so to speak, but something embodied and sacred (right brained, I think?). While Catholic priests being celibate strikes me as left brained, In the Orthodox Church, priests are not celibate and are expected to marry and have children, I believe (right brained, in your dichotomy?).
Anyways, all of this is to say that I wonder, following your argument, whether Christianity itself is really a left brained religion that encourages misogyny, or if it is instead just the left brained EXPRESSION of Christianity that does so. For example, I have always been under the impression that the early Church actually led to greater freedom for women through Jesus’s treatment of women and the weak, the focus on Mary, and the option for women to lead a religious life and forego marriage if they chose. In Catholicism, it is understood that woman are equal to men in dignity but not in roles, which I actually find to be a very fair way to treat the genders (even a feminist viewpoint, if you will!).
But, as you mentioned, Martin Luther had attitudes that we might think of today as “misogynist” and rejected the church as he knew it. When I think of Luther, I think of his desire to distribute the written word of the Bible (left brained) and to stop using Latin in mass. I think you could characterize a Latin mass, with chants in a language you can’t understand, as being an implicit, musical experience (right brained?). I believe Luther also rejected the idea of transubstantiation (that communion actually becomes the blood and body of Christ when consumed) and instead viewed it as an abstraction/metaphor. Transubstantiation strikes me as an implicit, right brained concept.
But I don’t know. These are just the thoughts that popped into my head as I was reading!
Yes!! Annoyingly, I lost my copy of The Alphabet Vs the Goddess a couple of days ago so I'll have to go from memory here, but Shlain argues that Jesus's cult was very much a right-hemisphere-y cult, and that Jesus was very egalitarian and good to women. The early Christian cults are also speculated to have been psychedelics cults (see The Immortality Key) and would have been orally-based and very right hemisphere based. After Jesus died, and more literary-minded men wrote his story down in The New Testament, Christianity slowly became overtaken by left hemisphere-dominant men -- it had a period of being very right hemisphere-y again during the Middle Ages as literacy declined, but then began to become more left hemisphere based again around 1300 or so and then the Protestant Revolution was basically a left hemisphere revolution. So, yes, Christianity is not an inherently left-brained religion, if anything, it's the opposite, but the way its commonly expressed now is very left-brained.
The same could be said of Judaism -- more right-brained interpretations exist, e.g. "Elohim" is actually a masculine plural of a feminine noun and implies that God is plural (and one at the same time) and both masculine and feminine.
Oof sorry not my strongest writing here I'm a bit tired right now :-p hopefully you get the gist!
No I totally get what you’re saying! Super interesting. I’ve heard the idea about Christianity being a psychedelic cult before (I think Joe Rogan likes to obsess over that, lol). It’s fascinating, not sure I buy it 100%, but it’s not implausible to me either. I know very little about Judaism so that’s interesting to learn as well.
Hahaha, there's some pretty good evidence for it! Multiple cults though, and I'm guessing some used psychedelics and others didn't. There are also fringe theories like Jesus was into Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and even that Jesus wasn't a real person but instead a metaphor for magic mushrooms (this last one seems wacky to me, but it exists!)
Firstly, I love your work and can’t translate enough how much it helps me make sense of the world in revelatory ways 🙏
I breathed a great sigh of relief when you said “However, Shlain’s thesis is wrong.” 😅
As his splitting of the brain like that was troubling me, I take things quite literally.
I think the different uses of language is an important reflection. When I use language/hear language I think it in pictures. I imagine it. And I speak most often in an attempt to ‘translate’ or share an image (how I see).
The Mary poppins reference makes a lot of sense.
The song ‘a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down’ likes to play in my head when I think about the necessity of the nurturing process.
I imagine first there is the split of sexual difference, there is the female. Then feminism in its various forms is the way in which that fundamental reality is negotiated/tolerated/repressed. Splitting as separation from the mother factors into this.
I think you’re right in connecting this ‘cult of childhood’ with early neglect. It often reads like a desire for the mother, and this desire for the mother desperately holds the female in a state of ‘empty vessel’ assured presence. Unable to tolerate the ambiguity of the yes and no, the come and go dialectic.
Have you heard of Bions ‘maternal reverie’?
I like to think we are here elaborating a sort of Mary Poppins alternative feminism.
We will reincorporate some right hemispheric sugar with the medicine.
Reflecting on it in relation to the recent conversations, I see Walt as a feminist allie despite and maybe because of his violent full disclosure. He does not repress it, and repression I think I see as low tolerance: unable to hold femininity. The company he keeps, surrounded by agentic women, palpably aware of female agency throughout his work. Yes Walt is a feminist of the spoon-full-of-sugar variety 😂 🥄
Walt wrote two of the best "feminist" essays I've seen on Substack! The one about girls going through puberty too early, and a great piece telling men to stop being mean to slutty women :-)
The problem that you present it that the modern managerial estate thrives off hedonism and nihilism. It sees any one who is not a simple producer-consumer as a threat to that system. Strong men, motherly women are threats to the totalitarian control of the faceless bureaucracy. You can't "fix" this society while remaining within its bounding sphere.
Rejection of the managerial bureaucracy must happen before any remedy can be made to hearth or home.
I loved Shlain's book but after putting it down had the same reaction as to DIANETICS: great world-building, but not so much with the science.
This review points out that asymmetry is a basic property of the body that we share with relatives all the way back to snails. Cilia (little waving hairs that circulate fluids) seem to be important.
There's also a good short discussion of cherry-picking of the type I attribute to Shlain.
"Handedness is inexpensive and easy to measure and thus is often included in studies as a ‘bonus factor’, even though it may have very little scientific merit for the study in question [81,82]. Any significant result leads to an additional publication, whereas nonsignificant results are often forgotten, gathering dust in the file drawers of researchers. This publication bias is known as the file drawer problem [83]."
I’ve never heard that phenomenon called the “file drawer problem” before, but I’m glad to have a name for it. I experienced that all the time when I was in academia.
Congratulations on the addition to your family. If you have time, would you describe in a little more detail the difference between high and low androgyny?
Also, next time don't include so much useful detail. I had ice cream in my lap only during the second half and still had more than I meant to 😂
Do you mean positive and negative androgyny? The difference essentially is that positive androgyny is roughly equal levels of healthy, mature masculinity and femininity whereas negative androgyny (or undifferentiated) is low masculinity and femininity, and more childlike. In a different essay, I also discussed "positive" androgyny as being high in healthy masculine and feminine traits to a roughly equal degree, whereas "negative" androgyny was being high in negative stereotypes / unhealthy masculine and feminine traits. Negative androgyny is associated with poor mental health, whereas positive androgyny is actually protective against mental health issues -- in both sexes. I have some links to articles in The Drama of the Gifted Children article.
People who are far more masculine than feminine (regardless of whether they are male or female) would be considered masculine etc.
I believe the left hemisphere dominance I'm discussing here is only associated with negative androgyny -- positive androgyny would still be very right-brained, just less sexed than is typical. People generally find positive androgyny attractive / sexy.
So if i’m thinking of examples, I have a friend who loves being a mom, does her hair and nails frequently, but is also very outspoken and assertive. Is that what you mean by positive androgyny? And a negatively androgenic person may be sort of young adolescent in their appearance (neither the hair/muscles or curves) and perhaps withdrawn/indifferent about their interactions with others?🤔
I appreciate you taking extra time to provide clarification!
Yes, that's kind of it! In this case, I'm referring a bit more to personality / cognitive style / skill-set than physical appearance, but the two tend to go hand in hand.
In this context, I'm also suggesting that someone who is positively androgynous will be very connected to their body, whereas someone who is more negatively androgynous will be more "in their head" and dissociated from their physical body.
Huh. Generalizing from one example is not a good idea, but I am extremely left-brain guy, I was very androgynous as a child, I was always near to asexual because just not liking body things, liking abstract mind things instead, such "nerds" are known to like women who look "angelic" rather than sexual and it has nothing to do with religion: https://preview.redd.it/x2bhzdllac711.jpg?auto=webp&s=6740d96b057b8a91d3ff6a75191e4422cf76a7ed and I had very low empathy. Then at some point hormones kicked in, and just simultenaously I got chest hair, empathy and lust. It was a very strange change.
Interesting! There's two major developmental windows for the right hemisphere -- ages 0-3/4 and around 10/11 - 25. When hormones kicked in did you start socializing more too and kind of get out of your head? It's definitely very possible to become more right-brained, cells that fire together wire together and all that.
I love your writing. Really fascinating and always makes me think. I was actually listening to an interview between Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher earlier (I think it was from last year) and Dreher talked about how the Orthodox religion attempts to balance both sides of the brain through its focus on imagery and ritual (I think he actually referenced McGilchrist here!).
Both Orthodoxy and Catholicism to a lesser extent put a heavy focus on religious imagery, including of Mary, which the Protestants would view as idolatrous (you mention this). As someone raised Catholic, I can also say that Catholicism values the feminine (so many female saints, and Mary of course) and views the body as intertwined with the soul, and therefore the body is not just a meat suit, so to speak, but something embodied and sacred (right brained, I think?). While Catholic priests being celibate strikes me as left brained, In the Orthodox Church, priests are not celibate and are expected to marry and have children, I believe (right brained, in your dichotomy?).
Anyways, all of this is to say that I wonder, following your argument, whether Christianity itself is really a left brained religion that encourages misogyny, or if it is instead just the left brained EXPRESSION of Christianity that does so. For example, I have always been under the impression that the early Church actually led to greater freedom for women through Jesus’s treatment of women and the weak, the focus on Mary, and the option for women to lead a religious life and forego marriage if they chose. In Catholicism, it is understood that woman are equal to men in dignity but not in roles, which I actually find to be a very fair way to treat the genders (even a feminist viewpoint, if you will!).
But, as you mentioned, Martin Luther had attitudes that we might think of today as “misogynist” and rejected the church as he knew it. When I think of Luther, I think of his desire to distribute the written word of the Bible (left brained) and to stop using Latin in mass. I think you could characterize a Latin mass, with chants in a language you can’t understand, as being an implicit, musical experience (right brained?). I believe Luther also rejected the idea of transubstantiation (that communion actually becomes the blood and body of Christ when consumed) and instead viewed it as an abstraction/metaphor. Transubstantiation strikes me as an implicit, right brained concept.
But I don’t know. These are just the thoughts that popped into my head as I was reading!
Yes!! Annoyingly, I lost my copy of The Alphabet Vs the Goddess a couple of days ago so I'll have to go from memory here, but Shlain argues that Jesus's cult was very much a right-hemisphere-y cult, and that Jesus was very egalitarian and good to women. The early Christian cults are also speculated to have been psychedelics cults (see The Immortality Key) and would have been orally-based and very right hemisphere based. After Jesus died, and more literary-minded men wrote his story down in The New Testament, Christianity slowly became overtaken by left hemisphere-dominant men -- it had a period of being very right hemisphere-y again during the Middle Ages as literacy declined, but then began to become more left hemisphere based again around 1300 or so and then the Protestant Revolution was basically a left hemisphere revolution. So, yes, Christianity is not an inherently left-brained religion, if anything, it's the opposite, but the way its commonly expressed now is very left-brained.
The same could be said of Judaism -- more right-brained interpretations exist, e.g. "Elohim" is actually a masculine plural of a feminine noun and implies that God is plural (and one at the same time) and both masculine and feminine.
Oof sorry not my strongest writing here I'm a bit tired right now :-p hopefully you get the gist!
No I totally get what you’re saying! Super interesting. I’ve heard the idea about Christianity being a psychedelic cult before (I think Joe Rogan likes to obsess over that, lol). It’s fascinating, not sure I buy it 100%, but it’s not implausible to me either. I know very little about Judaism so that’s interesting to learn as well.
Hahaha, there's some pretty good evidence for it! Multiple cults though, and I'm guessing some used psychedelics and others didn't. There are also fringe theories like Jesus was into Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and even that Jesus wasn't a real person but instead a metaphor for magic mushrooms (this last one seems wacky to me, but it exists!)
This was the podcast (from 2022):
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6VsUnwfzz9ZPchSjuCoRQb?si=0JoOrXlaQLK85MS6coKvmA
Firstly, I love your work and can’t translate enough how much it helps me make sense of the world in revelatory ways 🙏
I breathed a great sigh of relief when you said “However, Shlain’s thesis is wrong.” 😅
As his splitting of the brain like that was troubling me, I take things quite literally.
I think the different uses of language is an important reflection. When I use language/hear language I think it in pictures. I imagine it. And I speak most often in an attempt to ‘translate’ or share an image (how I see).
The Mary poppins reference makes a lot of sense.
The song ‘a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down’ likes to play in my head when I think about the necessity of the nurturing process.
I imagine first there is the split of sexual difference, there is the female. Then feminism in its various forms is the way in which that fundamental reality is negotiated/tolerated/repressed. Splitting as separation from the mother factors into this.
I think you’re right in connecting this ‘cult of childhood’ with early neglect. It often reads like a desire for the mother, and this desire for the mother desperately holds the female in a state of ‘empty vessel’ assured presence. Unable to tolerate the ambiguity of the yes and no, the come and go dialectic.
Have you heard of Bions ‘maternal reverie’?
I like to think we are here elaborating a sort of Mary Poppins alternative feminism.
We will reincorporate some right hemispheric sugar with the medicine.
Reflecting on it in relation to the recent conversations, I see Walt as a feminist allie despite and maybe because of his violent full disclosure. He does not repress it, and repression I think I see as low tolerance: unable to hold femininity. The company he keeps, surrounded by agentic women, palpably aware of female agency throughout his work. Yes Walt is a feminist of the spoon-full-of-sugar variety 😂 🥄
Walt wrote two of the best "feminist" essays I've seen on Substack! The one about girls going through puberty too early, and a great piece telling men to stop being mean to slutty women :-)
The problem that you present it that the modern managerial estate thrives off hedonism and nihilism. It sees any one who is not a simple producer-consumer as a threat to that system. Strong men, motherly women are threats to the totalitarian control of the faceless bureaucracy. You can't "fix" this society while remaining within its bounding sphere.
Rejection of the managerial bureaucracy must happen before any remedy can be made to hearth or home.
Oof, you're not wrong.
I loved Shlain's book but after putting it down had the same reaction as to DIANETICS: great world-building, but not so much with the science.
This review points out that asymmetry is a basic property of the body that we share with relatives all the way back to snails. Cilia (little waving hairs that circulate fluids) seem to be important.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969300/
There's also a good short discussion of cherry-picking of the type I attribute to Shlain.
"Handedness is inexpensive and easy to measure and thus is often included in studies as a ‘bonus factor’, even though it may have very little scientific merit for the study in question [81,82]. Any significant result leads to an additional publication, whereas nonsignificant results are often forgotten, gathering dust in the file drawers of researchers. This publication bias is known as the file drawer problem [83]."
I’ve never heard that phenomenon called the “file drawer problem” before, but I’m glad to have a name for it. I experienced that all the time when I was in academia.
Congratulations on the addition to your family. If you have time, would you describe in a little more detail the difference between high and low androgyny?
Also, next time don't include so much useful detail. I had ice cream in my lap only during the second half and still had more than I meant to 😂
Do you mean positive and negative androgyny? The difference essentially is that positive androgyny is roughly equal levels of healthy, mature masculinity and femininity whereas negative androgyny (or undifferentiated) is low masculinity and femininity, and more childlike. In a different essay, I also discussed "positive" androgyny as being high in healthy masculine and feminine traits to a roughly equal degree, whereas "negative" androgyny was being high in negative stereotypes / unhealthy masculine and feminine traits. Negative androgyny is associated with poor mental health, whereas positive androgyny is actually protective against mental health issues -- in both sexes. I have some links to articles in The Drama of the Gifted Children article.
People who are far more masculine than feminine (regardless of whether they are male or female) would be considered masculine etc.
I believe the left hemisphere dominance I'm discussing here is only associated with negative androgyny -- positive androgyny would still be very right-brained, just less sexed than is typical. People generally find positive androgyny attractive / sexy.
And thank you!!
Yes I did mean positive and negative :)
So if i’m thinking of examples, I have a friend who loves being a mom, does her hair and nails frequently, but is also very outspoken and assertive. Is that what you mean by positive androgyny? And a negatively androgenic person may be sort of young adolescent in their appearance (neither the hair/muscles or curves) and perhaps withdrawn/indifferent about their interactions with others?🤔
I appreciate you taking extra time to provide clarification!
Yes, that's kind of it! In this case, I'm referring a bit more to personality / cognitive style / skill-set than physical appearance, but the two tend to go hand in hand.
When I think of "positive" androgyny I think of the singer LP -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDjeBNv6ip0
In this context, I'm also suggesting that someone who is positively androgynous will be very connected to their body, whereas someone who is more negatively androgynous will be more "in their head" and dissociated from their physical body.
Huh. Generalizing from one example is not a good idea, but I am extremely left-brain guy, I was very androgynous as a child, I was always near to asexual because just not liking body things, liking abstract mind things instead, such "nerds" are known to like women who look "angelic" rather than sexual and it has nothing to do with religion: https://preview.redd.it/x2bhzdllac711.jpg?auto=webp&s=6740d96b057b8a91d3ff6a75191e4422cf76a7ed and I had very low empathy. Then at some point hormones kicked in, and just simultenaously I got chest hair, empathy and lust. It was a very strange change.
Interesting! There's two major developmental windows for the right hemisphere -- ages 0-3/4 and around 10/11 - 25. When hormones kicked in did you start socializing more too and kind of get out of your head? It's definitely very possible to become more right-brained, cells that fire together wire together and all that.
I think work forced me to talk to people. At some point even day long trainings. But it might happened a little later.