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).
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 :-)
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!
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!)
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]."
Crikey, that was a long essay, thank you for taking the time to spell this out in detail. Getting my left and right sides confused, but can just about understand McGilchrist’s distinction between the apprehending left and comprehending right. We are all left brain people as we grasp the immediacy of the screen in front of us. In a material world, the material necessity of ‘the thing’ that demands attention keeps the focus to the left. This probably suits the feminine temperament too. The right side is the religious side, which sees the bigger picture and places all the parts of our world into a contextual order - which is, or was, a good corrective to the male temperament. McGilchrist’s point though is that we need a balance between two sides to function effectively, and we have lost this, individually and societally.
McGilchrist has at least one stray line in The Master and His Emissary where he says that if either sex is more left-brained than the other (he rejects the notion), it's women more than men. However, given he's British (thus, WEIRD), I'm not sure whether that observation applies globally -- but I can see how it applies to WEIRD populations, to those within the Hajnal Line and their descendants (possibly other populations too, but my research is a little Eurocentric so I don't really know).
I hope you didn’t write this long piece while giving birth. That would be too impressive.
I like the left/right brain division as a way of understanding different perspectives, and the need to find a balance between the two. I wonder as well whether modern life - the internet, the material, the secular - keep us focused on the here and now, that which is immediately necessary. It’s not necessarily a male/female thing although I expect Peterson would persuade us that there is a female proclivity to focuse on the crying infant to exclude all else. You may though be able to speak from experience there.
This is a fascinating concept. I don't know if one side of the brain is more gendered or androgynous than the other, but you make compelling points and interesting dive through history. A parallel idea connects hormones, and testosterone levels in women and men.
On one of the tangents, I recently discovered an old debate called the Hebrew-Greek mind problem. Have you heard of it? I have a book by Thorleif Boman I've barely started.
This is a really good job of categorizing the problems with Shlain's book--the right hemisphere has all the visual stuff and men are more visual, etc. (I remember thinking a few of these 20 years ago when I flipped through it, but was never this detailed or well-referenced! Great job!) But if overusing the left hemisphere causes more 'negative androgyny' ('undifferentiated' in the Bem Sex Role typology), then that would explain the increased autism and rise in misandry and misogyny (in different people of course).
His ideas seem like they come out of the New Age movement of the late 20th century--there was a whole focus on 'goddess energy', being anti-rationality, etc. It overlapped with second-wave feminism, though of course they weren't identical.
(As a personal note, I read a whole bunch of this stuff as a teenager and it did a number on my self-esteem. But that's just kind of me being silly.)
Yeah, I think Shlain was heavily influenced by 1970s feminism, to the detriment of his work. It's unfortunate, because I think without that influence, he might have recognized what I'm arguing here. The evidence in his book supports my hypothesis more than his :-p
From what I'm told the whole left-right brain thing is now thought to be overstated, and unless you have a cut corpus callosum (which they will do occasionally in case of seizures) they aren't totally separate things and talk to each other a lot. There definitely is localization of parts of the mind in parts of the brain, or you couldn't tell what part gets damaged when people have a stroke. (Well, now you can with an MRI...)
That said, if living in your head and in Virtual World makes people uncomfortable with sexuality (male or female)...that would explain a lot! I'd say it's more that the sort of abstract thinking that we value takes you away from positive sexuality (male or female)...which makes sense intuitively, if you never see horses you're not going to be good at horseback riding.
Yes ... Iain McGilchrist goes into this in his books. I definitely over-simplify things here, because it's easier to talk about the implications that way ("left-brained" vs "right-brained"). But the reality is a lot more complex.
Mathematics is itself a language. The left hemisphere focuses on words — the letter of the law — whereas the right hemisphere focuses on meanings — the spirit of the law.
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.
I think it goes to the Bem Sex Role inventory--rather than just opposites, masculinity and femininity were orthogonal axes, so you could be masculine (high masculinity, low femininity), feminine (low masculinity, high femininity), androgynous (high masculinity, high femininity), or undifferentiated (low masculinity, low femininity).
Androgynous was obviously the best one as you had both 'female' (compassion, empathy) and 'male' strengths (courage, self-reliance), but you could be undifferentiated too--cowardly and oblivious, for example. Nerds like me are a pretty good example of an undifferentiated person, actually, combining the worst traits of both stereotypical genders. ;)
This is a fascinating concept. I don't know if one side of the brain is more gendered or androgynous than the other, but you make compelling points and interesting dive through history. A parallel idea connects hormones, and testosterone levels in women and men.
On one of the tangents, I recently discovered an old debate called the Hebrew-Greek mind problem. Have you heard of it? I have a book by Thorleif Boman I've barely started.
Great meditation on the topic. While technology is definitely exacerbating this problem of self-isolating individuals today, I think the rise of agriculture and urban living is the root cause of such unintended side effects and goes way back. You do know what ethnic group possesses one of the highest rates of homosexuality, right? It seems to be related to what you write about monkeys failing to act hierarchically, although I'd wager it's not fully explained by early parental neglect. In fact, many of the type of kids you mention seem to have been over-parented early on and throughout adolescence.
Occurred to me you might have been talking about Ashkenazis ... I've focussed a lot of my research on Germanic countries, so just speaking for those populations ... early neglect in the first three years still seems to be the issue. I have an essay on the dark history of parenting books / poisonous pedagogies which came out of Germanic countries and Ashkenazis were greatly affected by those ideas too (and some of the loudest voices criticizing them are Jewish, e.g. Gabor Mate, Alice Miller). It was common, for example, for well-off Jewish women to hire wet nurses back in the day. Many of the toxic ideas about child-rearing also made it to Israel via Germanic Jews and influenced how the Kibbutz communal child-rearing system was initially set up (which then traumatized kids raised in it, things have changed now). As well, homosexuality is linked to maternal stress during pregnancy and there's, to put it mildly, quite a lot of reasons why that would disproportionately apply to Jewish people. There's also possibly a genetic vulnerability (certain MTHFR mutations) that are really common in all Europeans but even higher in Ashkenazis! (FYI I am married to and have children with an Ashkenazi Jewish man).
Exactly, which is fitting given Shlain's ancestry and his theory of the Hebrews and the written word. I know Germany is known as a gay culture center, but from what I recall it is Ashkenazis with the highest percentage. It seems fitting that a population with among the longest histories of urban living and literacy would be the highest, and hunter-gatherers seem to have little to non-existent rates. It seems to be a certain behavioral set of traits along with environmental influences. As I am sure you're aware then, many Ashkenazi straight people show personality traits that tend toward androgyny( an old trope that is not entirely untrue). I am of Ashkenazi origin myself.
The thing is, spirituality or "connection to Spirit / God / Elohim" (however you wish to conceptualize it) is lateralized to the right hemisphere. At least one of the authors I've used heavily as a source (Christopher Badcock) argues in his books that Jewish people are a bit more "mentalistic" than Germanics / Nordics / WASPs (not quite the same concept as left vs right hemisphere, but some overlap). Comedy and music, which (many) Jews excel in, both lateralize to the right hemisphere.
I know with conditions such as autism, there are higher rates / traits in secular Jews over more religious ones ... but following a religion "by the book" over looking for metaphor, greater meaning, emphasizing flexibility, holistic connection to Spirit etc would also be very left-brained. This seems to apply more to Protestants than Jews (or Catholics).
I'd suggest that the left-brained( as you describe it) would also engage in looking for metaphor and greater meaning within the written texts that they so enjoy reading ( even if they do not believe in a religious way). I'd wager many left-brained people are actually more questioning and tend to atheism( as you note in your article). The way I see it, the left-brained simply derive more pleasure from "thinking", which more narrowly in this case means verbal logic, theoretical situations and complex mythologies and narratives. I've come across studies recently that suggest neuroticism is inversely correlated with high IQ, but in my experience a good deal of neurotic people( especially in the "cerebral" professions) are still quite capable despite their frequent mental health challenges.
Also, I don't think there should be major differences in autism or other inheritable or semi-inheritable conditions between Haredi and secular Jews, given that they've really only been separate for at most 300 years( the vast majority of Jews who were more secular between 1700 and 1850 have descendants who no longer identify as Jewish because of assimilation). The 1,000 to 3,000 years of common genetic-historical heritage are still more relevant than those 300 years of divergence.
Also, I should clarify that homosexuality doesn't (necessarily) equal "left-brained"! There are lots of causes of homosexuality, and what I've written here doesn't seem to apply (at least as much) to highly feminine gay men or highly masculine lesbians, or to people who are "positively" androgynous (high in masculinity and femininity, regardless of sexual orientation).
It's all super complicated! I swear the more I look into this stuff, the more I feel confused :-p. People who are more "left-brained" (so to speak) and who are higher in autistic traits are more likely to opt out of faith, and autistic traits and left-brained-ness is largely environmental/nurture as well as genetics. I'm not sure if there's a big difference, but it would make sense if there were.
I get into some of the stuff more in other essays -- if you're interested, "The Lost Girls and Boys", "The Drama of the Gifted Children", and the two "Dangers of Reading Too Much" essays have more details.
Enmeshed parenting is definitely an issue! But if we're talking about the Germans (a weakness in my work is that my research has been very Eurocentric so I can't really comment outside of that, though a few people have raised other examples with me) the evidence points to early neglect and then in many cases enmeshed or 'devouring mother" parenting later on :-/
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.
Interesting. I can't remember much interest in the opposite sex before puberty *at all*. After puberty, I did have a taste for androgynous women--but the feeling wasn't mutual. (In fact, looking back, I think a few more feminine women may have been interested in me, but I wasn't interested in them!) Indeed, getting chest hair and lust (but not empathy, interestingly enough), and being too afraid to act on it and feeling guilty about it due to feminism, I just didn't do anything at all until my late twenties.
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).
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 :-)
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!
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!)
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]."
Crikey, that was a long essay, thank you for taking the time to spell this out in detail. Getting my left and right sides confused, but can just about understand McGilchrist’s distinction between the apprehending left and comprehending right. We are all left brain people as we grasp the immediacy of the screen in front of us. In a material world, the material necessity of ‘the thing’ that demands attention keeps the focus to the left. This probably suits the feminine temperament too. The right side is the religious side, which sees the bigger picture and places all the parts of our world into a contextual order - which is, or was, a good corrective to the male temperament. McGilchrist’s point though is that we need a balance between two sides to function effectively, and we have lost this, individually and societally.
McGilchrist has at least one stray line in The Master and His Emissary where he says that if either sex is more left-brained than the other (he rejects the notion), it's women more than men. However, given he's British (thus, WEIRD), I'm not sure whether that observation applies globally -- but I can see how it applies to WEIRD populations, to those within the Hajnal Line and their descendants (possibly other populations too, but my research is a little Eurocentric so I don't really know).
I hope you didn’t write this long piece while giving birth. That would be too impressive.
I like the left/right brain division as a way of understanding different perspectives, and the need to find a balance between the two. I wonder as well whether modern life - the internet, the material, the secular - keep us focused on the here and now, that which is immediately necessary. It’s not necessarily a male/female thing although I expect Peterson would persuade us that there is a female proclivity to focuse on the crying infant to exclude all else. You may though be able to speak from experience there.
This is a fascinating concept. I don't know if one side of the brain is more gendered or androgynous than the other, but you make compelling points and interesting dive through history. A parallel idea connects hormones, and testosterone levels in women and men.
On one of the tangents, I recently discovered an old debate called the Hebrew-Greek mind problem. Have you heard of it? I have a book by Thorleif Boman I've barely started.
I'm not familiar with the Hebrew-Greek mind problem -- will have to look that up!
This is a really good job of categorizing the problems with Shlain's book--the right hemisphere has all the visual stuff and men are more visual, etc. (I remember thinking a few of these 20 years ago when I flipped through it, but was never this detailed or well-referenced! Great job!) But if overusing the left hemisphere causes more 'negative androgyny' ('undifferentiated' in the Bem Sex Role typology), then that would explain the increased autism and rise in misandry and misogyny (in different people of course).
His ideas seem like they come out of the New Age movement of the late 20th century--there was a whole focus on 'goddess energy', being anti-rationality, etc. It overlapped with second-wave feminism, though of course they weren't identical.
(As a personal note, I read a whole bunch of this stuff as a teenager and it did a number on my self-esteem. But that's just kind of me being silly.)
Yeah, I think Shlain was heavily influenced by 1970s feminism, to the detriment of his work. It's unfortunate, because I think without that influence, he might have recognized what I'm arguing here. The evidence in his book supports my hypothesis more than his :-p
From what I'm told the whole left-right brain thing is now thought to be overstated, and unless you have a cut corpus callosum (which they will do occasionally in case of seizures) they aren't totally separate things and talk to each other a lot. There definitely is localization of parts of the mind in parts of the brain, or you couldn't tell what part gets damaged when people have a stroke. (Well, now you can with an MRI...)
That said, if living in your head and in Virtual World makes people uncomfortable with sexuality (male or female)...that would explain a lot! I'd say it's more that the sort of abstract thinking that we value takes you away from positive sexuality (male or female)...which makes sense intuitively, if you never see horses you're not going to be good at horseback riding.
Yes ... Iain McGilchrist goes into this in his books. I definitely over-simplify things here, because it's easier to talk about the implications that way ("left-brained" vs "right-brained"). But the reality is a lot more complex.
Mathematics is itself a language. The left hemisphere focuses on words — the letter of the law — whereas the right hemisphere focuses on meanings — the spirit of the law.
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.
I think it goes to the Bem Sex Role inventory--rather than just opposites, masculinity and femininity were orthogonal axes, so you could be masculine (high masculinity, low femininity), feminine (low masculinity, high femininity), androgynous (high masculinity, high femininity), or undifferentiated (low masculinity, low femininity).
Androgynous was obviously the best one as you had both 'female' (compassion, empathy) and 'male' strengths (courage, self-reliance), but you could be undifferentiated too--cowardly and oblivious, for example. Nerds like me are a pretty good example of an undifferentiated person, actually, combining the worst traits of both stereotypical genders. ;)
This is a fascinating concept. I don't know if one side of the brain is more gendered or androgynous than the other, but you make compelling points and interesting dive through history. A parallel idea connects hormones, and testosterone levels in women and men.
On one of the tangents, I recently discovered an old debate called the Hebrew-Greek mind problem. Have you heard of it? I have a book by Thorleif Boman I've barely started.
Great meditation on the topic. While technology is definitely exacerbating this problem of self-isolating individuals today, I think the rise of agriculture and urban living is the root cause of such unintended side effects and goes way back. You do know what ethnic group possesses one of the highest rates of homosexuality, right? It seems to be related to what you write about monkeys failing to act hierarchically, although I'd wager it's not fully explained by early parental neglect. In fact, many of the type of kids you mention seem to have been over-parented early on and throughout adolescence.
Occurred to me you might have been talking about Ashkenazis ... I've focussed a lot of my research on Germanic countries, so just speaking for those populations ... early neglect in the first three years still seems to be the issue. I have an essay on the dark history of parenting books / poisonous pedagogies which came out of Germanic countries and Ashkenazis were greatly affected by those ideas too (and some of the loudest voices criticizing them are Jewish, e.g. Gabor Mate, Alice Miller). It was common, for example, for well-off Jewish women to hire wet nurses back in the day. Many of the toxic ideas about child-rearing also made it to Israel via Germanic Jews and influenced how the Kibbutz communal child-rearing system was initially set up (which then traumatized kids raised in it, things have changed now). As well, homosexuality is linked to maternal stress during pregnancy and there's, to put it mildly, quite a lot of reasons why that would disproportionately apply to Jewish people. There's also possibly a genetic vulnerability (certain MTHFR mutations) that are really common in all Europeans but even higher in Ashkenazis! (FYI I am married to and have children with an Ashkenazi Jewish man).
Exactly, which is fitting given Shlain's ancestry and his theory of the Hebrews and the written word. I know Germany is known as a gay culture center, but from what I recall it is Ashkenazis with the highest percentage. It seems fitting that a population with among the longest histories of urban living and literacy would be the highest, and hunter-gatherers seem to have little to non-existent rates. It seems to be a certain behavioral set of traits along with environmental influences. As I am sure you're aware then, many Ashkenazi straight people show personality traits that tend toward androgyny( an old trope that is not entirely untrue). I am of Ashkenazi origin myself.
The thing is, spirituality or "connection to Spirit / God / Elohim" (however you wish to conceptualize it) is lateralized to the right hemisphere. At least one of the authors I've used heavily as a source (Christopher Badcock) argues in his books that Jewish people are a bit more "mentalistic" than Germanics / Nordics / WASPs (not quite the same concept as left vs right hemisphere, but some overlap). Comedy and music, which (many) Jews excel in, both lateralize to the right hemisphere.
I know with conditions such as autism, there are higher rates / traits in secular Jews over more religious ones ... but following a religion "by the book" over looking for metaphor, greater meaning, emphasizing flexibility, holistic connection to Spirit etc would also be very left-brained. This seems to apply more to Protestants than Jews (or Catholics).
I'd suggest that the left-brained( as you describe it) would also engage in looking for metaphor and greater meaning within the written texts that they so enjoy reading ( even if they do not believe in a religious way). I'd wager many left-brained people are actually more questioning and tend to atheism( as you note in your article). The way I see it, the left-brained simply derive more pleasure from "thinking", which more narrowly in this case means verbal logic, theoretical situations and complex mythologies and narratives. I've come across studies recently that suggest neuroticism is inversely correlated with high IQ, but in my experience a good deal of neurotic people( especially in the "cerebral" professions) are still quite capable despite their frequent mental health challenges.
Also, I don't think there should be major differences in autism or other inheritable or semi-inheritable conditions between Haredi and secular Jews, given that they've really only been separate for at most 300 years( the vast majority of Jews who were more secular between 1700 and 1850 have descendants who no longer identify as Jewish because of assimilation). The 1,000 to 3,000 years of common genetic-historical heritage are still more relevant than those 300 years of divergence.
Also, I should clarify that homosexuality doesn't (necessarily) equal "left-brained"! There are lots of causes of homosexuality, and what I've written here doesn't seem to apply (at least as much) to highly feminine gay men or highly masculine lesbians, or to people who are "positively" androgynous (high in masculinity and femininity, regardless of sexual orientation).
It's all super complicated! I swear the more I look into this stuff, the more I feel confused :-p. People who are more "left-brained" (so to speak) and who are higher in autistic traits are more likely to opt out of faith, and autistic traits and left-brained-ness is largely environmental/nurture as well as genetics. I'm not sure if there's a big difference, but it would make sense if there were.
I get into some of the stuff more in other essays -- if you're interested, "The Lost Girls and Boys", "The Drama of the Gifted Children", and the two "Dangers of Reading Too Much" essays have more details.
I'm considering expanding on this topic so if there's anything you think I should look into I welcome a DM with tips :-)
Enmeshed parenting is definitely an issue! But if we're talking about the Germans (a weakness in my work is that my research has been very Eurocentric so I can't really comment outside of that, though a few people have raised other examples with me) the evidence points to early neglect and then in many cases enmeshed or 'devouring mother" parenting later on :-/
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.
Interesting. I can't remember much interest in the opposite sex before puberty *at all*. After puberty, I did have a taste for androgynous women--but the feeling wasn't mutual. (In fact, looking back, I think a few more feminine women may have been interested in me, but I wasn't interested in them!) Indeed, getting chest hair and lust (but not empathy, interestingly enough), and being too afraid to act on it and feeling guilty about it due to feminism, I just didn't do anything at all until my late twenties.