alexwright's Full Review: Leonard Shlain - The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: ...
Since the written word first took hold in Mesopotamia, Western culture has undergone a long seismic shift from feminine-centered goddess worship to the hardened patriarchy of the written word.
Shlain, a medical professor who specializes in left-brain/right-brain dynamics, posits an entirely new theory to explain the evolution of patriarchy in the West. Drawing on his understanding of neural science, Shlain postulates that the advent of written, alphabetic language literally changed the chemistry of the human brain, realigning human culture along the left-brain axis of critical thought and linear reasoning. As alphabetic literacy took hold, right-brain feminine constructs - visual, symbolic, and emotional - gave way to the left-brain imperatives of logical reasoning, dispassionate aggression, and - inevitably - to the systematic oppression and persecution of right-brain modes of thought, and, inevitably, of women.
First laying the physiological groundwork with an excellent layman's explanation of left-brain/right-brain dynamics, Shlain embarks on an ambitious foray through the history of western alphabetic culture, tracing an arc that maps the rise (and sporadic fall) of human literacy with a near-exact parallel history of the rise and fall (and rise) of women and feminine cultural values.
Beginning with the repudiation of early goddess worship (or "fertility cults," as dismissive - male - Victorian scholars derided them) in early pre-literate Sumeria, the alphabet-wielding priestly class of early Mesopotamia, and later Israel, began a systematic campaign to eliminate the competing goddess cults. Later, early Christianity would evolve from a relatively gender-egalitarian spiritual movement (especially as seen in the early Gnostic church), to a strong patriarchy ruled by a literate priestly class wielding an alphabetic text (especially after the Bible was finally canonized in the 400s). Interestingly, as literacy ebbed and flowed, so did the primacy of feminine values - as in the largely illiterate Dark Ages, age of Arthur's egalitarian round table and the chivalric code. When literacy reasserted itself in the Medieval era, then exploded after Gutenberg, so too did the subjugation of women and feminine ideals - as evidenced in the strident misogyny of the medieval Christian church, especially in its highly literate - and all-male - monasteries, then, horribly, in the post-Gutenberg cultural madness of witch burning, which followed almost precisely in the footsteps of the printing press as it spread across Europe, and later to America. Of course, Shlain does not miss the irony of women's eventual reaccession to cultural power through appropriating written language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring the remarkable progress of women in recent history, Shlain notes the parallel reemergence of the image and right-brain thinking in our culture, as evidenced in the advent of photography, movies, and television, for instance. Finally, Shlain sounds a profoundly hopeful note for the apparent growing reintegration of word and image in the nascent world of computers and screen design, affording a rich and potentially healing interrogation of word and image.
So compelling is the historical evidence that Shlain marshals, one wonders how such a seemingly direct historical parallel could have escaped scholarly observation for so long. Shlain's piercing hypothesis - grounded as it is in hard physiological observation, and exposited with meticulous cultural detail - seems as convincing as it is original and bold. It should also be noted - with no small irony - that Shlain writes very good alphabetic prose.
As an amateur historian/anthropologist writing for a general audience, Shlain may have trouble gaining credibility in some academic circles. His theories will - and should be - be subjected to far more informed and critical academic scrutiny than I, an admitted member of the general public, can possibly hope to apply here. But suffice it to say that Shlain's theory makes a fascinating and provocative read.
The author of Art & Physics now offers a fascinating account of the evolution of our male and female ways of knowing (Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author o...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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