Takeaways from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain
Anthropologist and historian Yuval Harari asks in Sapiens “If the patriarchal system is based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universal stability of this system?”
This book offers a comprehensive yet provocative answer — literacy is to blame! Surgeon-turned-historian Leonard Shlain’s argument is thus:
Hunters / gatherers attached gender roles to men / women respectively.
These gendered attributes map to left / right brain hemispheres respectively.
Alphabets, writing, and abstractions exclusively reinforce left brain thinking;
Which led newly literate cultures to all devalue their ancestors’ earth mothers
and destroy idols in favor of an abstract sky father who spoke via writing.
He traces literacy and misogyny’s twinned resurgences throughout history,
Until today’s nonlinear electromagnetism/radioactivity/quantum physics, and radio/television/internet imagery, usher in the Goddess’s right brain return.
Sounds like a stoned hippie professor explanation, no?
Yet this book is an engaging read with too many well formulated examples to dismiss entirely. There are definitely several examples that aren’t well backed up or given sufficient credence to alternative explanations, but on the whole, the theory stands on its own as a better patriarchy explanation than any other I’ve seen.
Such is the curse of the historian, that they cannot run scientific experiments to determine cause and effect. Instead they must stare into humankind’s past and attempt to trace causation through our jumbled records. This take on human’s history is just as enjoyable, provocative, and enlightening as any other, and I recommend it to any curious mind.
Here, I’ll summarize his ideas that I found the most believable, unbelievable, or just plain fun. Italics are Shlain’s.
Left Brain as Hunter/Killer, Right Brain as Gatherer/Nurturer
Eastern Right Brain, Western Left Brain
Abrahamic Religions Started During The Alphabet’s Introduction
God’s Commandments Declare Art More Dangerous Than Murder
Jesus’s Teachings Don’t Match the Ghostwritten Bible
English Allowed Suffragism via Genderless Nonhierarchical Pronouns
Literacy Resurgences Are Tied to Witch Hunts and Communism
Shlain’s Argument Fades in the Modern Era
Other Fun Facts That Appear to Be True from Cursory Web Research
Core Propositions
“For now, I propose that a holistic, simultaneous, synthetic, and concrete view of the world are the essential characteristics of a feminine outlook; linear, sequential, reductionist, and abstract thinking defines the masculine.”
These are the archetypal gender roles in Western society, no? Which came first — the gender roles, or the gender’s way of being? All stereotypes have a grain of truth in them.
“Conceiving of a deity who has no concrete image prepares the way for the kind of abstract thinking that inevitably leads to law codes, dualistic philosophy, and objective science, the signature triad of Western culture.”
“A male’s discovery that he could have heirs meant that he could wrest a small victory from death’s maw by siring a child to whom he could pass on his name, wisdom, and weapons. This made urgent his need to be certain a newborn was the result of his copulatory efforts.”
This is his explanation for why most of the first law codes in history all treat adulterous women the most harshly. It’s patriarchy ensuring that its men can trust their property passes on to their true sons.
“The sex-for-meat exchange developed by earlier hominids now became considerably more complicated. The new social contract exchanged male fealty for female chastity, and eventually formed the basis of marriage.”
Left Brain as Hunter/Killer, Right Brain as Gatherer/Nurturer
“The environment, human rights, education, health care, child care, and welfare are all concerns of the gatherer/nurturer.”
“The values that typify the right brain include empathy with the plight of one’s companions, generosity toward strangers, tolerance of dissent, love of nature, nurturance of children, laughter, playfulness, mysticism, forgiveness of enemies and nonviolence.
In contrast, people tend to exhibit left-brain attributes when absorbed in work, goals, focus, power, and money. Cruelty, argument, violence, a disregard for nature, and lack of concern for the lame and the halt round out the list.”
Interesting that these somewhat map to the American political spectrum, but called by the inverse, huh? It seems too perfect a mapping to be true, but from what I’ve read of the hemispheres, it’s all on point!
“Hunters rely on horizontal scanning, conversationalists employ vertical scrolling.”
Hunters scan the horizon for prey, while gatherers scan from face to hands to ground while chatting in a group.
Eastern Right Brain, Western Left Brain
“Laotzu’s concept of the Tao is the antithesis of (Abrahamic) predestination.”
“Traditionally, the West has been outer-directed and dualistic; the East, inward-seeking and monist. The West sees its history as a series of events; the East tends to perceive patterns that recur. Western medicine tends toward being mechanistic; Eastern medicine embraces a holistic approach. The West’s aspects predominately personify the left brain; the East’s predominately characterize the right.”
I see the parallels, but then why is the East still patriarchal?
“Alphabet cultures, due to their extremely dualistic form of writing, are more inclined to impose their systems of belief on others and, therefore, religious persecution is commonplace, whereas religious tolerance has been the way of the gestalt-based ideographic cultures.”
“The snake, a female symbol, was cursed, crushed, and conquered in the alphabet cultures, yet it became an exalted, beloved, and worshiped symbol in the ideographic culture. In the West dragons were dispatched by heroes. In the East, dragons portend good fortune each new year.”
He’s right — the snake personifies evil in the Bible, yet illiterate cultures the world over revere it as a symbol of fertility and luck. Likewise, Asia doesn’t fight religious wars, really — only imperial ones.
“The five most influential abstractions of society — imageless deities, written laws, speculative philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical science — are highly regarded and developed in alphabet cultures. Ideographic cultures…relied on custom instead of law, have discouraged discussion of speculative philosophy, concentrating instead on practical issues, and have failed to see the transforming possibilities of higher mathematics and scientific hypotheses.”
“The greatest monument to Chinese insularity and xenophobia is their Great Wall, whose purpose was to keep foreigners out. Immediately after the widespread infiltration of alphabet letters, China became an imperialist power intent on expanding its territory and conquering its neighbors.”
I don’t know enough to prove or disprove this one. As for abstractions, they are indeed less practical at first, but they also allow more power over reality in the long run than short sighted rural village beliefs. I suppose he’s not arguing against abstractions per se, just that they come with negative externalities.
It is interesting to note that Eastern culture relied (and still does!) on societal taboos than on legal punishments to enforce norms.
“Tribal mores discourage individuality; everyone is inextricably enmeshed in the community at large, and in general, violating a taboo brings misfortune on everyone. Breaking a law, however, singles out an individual.”
Abrahamic Religions Started During The Alphabet’s Introduction
“The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans had no word in their language for sin; the Israelites introduced both the word and the concept into the stream of Western civilization and by so doing, diverted it. The Babylonians and Egyptians believed that one’s entire destiny was in the hands of the gods.”
Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were predecessors, but they were gestalt languages — a single mark’s meaning varied depending on where it was placed and what it was placed near, unlike modern letters and words.
Wikipedia: “The major Abrahamic religions in chronological order of founding are Judaism (the base of the other two religions) in the 7th century BCE, Christianity in the 1st century CE, and Islam in the 7th century CE.”
Also Wikipedia: “Most specialists believe that the Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek during the early 8th century BC.”, and “The Arabic alphabet is first attested in its classical form in the 7th century.”
Were these timings coincidences? Not for Shlain. I forget his reason for why Christianity arose later — must have been something about Romans becoming more literate around then or something.
God’s Commandments Declare Art More Dangerous Than Murder
From BibleInfo.com, in order:
You shall have no other gods before Me.
You shall make no idols.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Keep the Sabbath day holy.
Honor your father and your mother.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet.
Commandments 1–4 can be interpreted as ‘I am the only god, I have no image, You must sanctify my name and my day’. Then respect your parents, and only then, in the second half, comes no murder, adultery, or stealing!
I never thought about how weird that is, that first the commandments define God as distinct from the other gods (who all had images and idols), and only then talk about important earthly rules. I suppose if you’re going to revere certain rules you have to spell out how to revere first.
Jesus’s Teachings Don’t Match the Ghostwritten Bible
“The religion that Paul shaped combined oral and written traditions. The oral was about love and nurturing, the written more often concerned suffering and death. Paul was responsible for this shift. In this sense it is not hyperbole to say that Paul invented the religion called Christianity.”
Shlain notes that Jesus never wrote anything down, and even proselytized in ways more in line with right brain feminine values than left brain masculine ones. It was Paul the Apostle who wrote much of the New Testament, and shaped the way it conveyed its teachings into a more abstract manner.
Likewise, male scribes often shun females and thus develop towards more abstract sexist directions which are reflected in their writing.
“None of the (prophets) had a relationship with a woman that he valued above solitude or the company of men.”
“The vast majority of men who love women and have families are not the ones who withdraw from conventional life to preach doctrines that others, similarly disposed, commit to writing.”
English Allows Suffragism via Genderless Nonhierarchical Pronouns
Shlain says English cultures are the only place that female suffragism could arise due to its genderless nouns and statusless pronouns. Indeed, modern feminism’s first wave came first to America and spread to England.
“English nouns are gender neutral. In the majority of European languages, most passive objects, such as urns, vessels, sheaths, and holsters (all waiting to be filled), along with doorways, gates, and thresholds (through and over which one passes), tend to be feminine; weapons that thrust, tools that pierce, smash, or crush, and implements that cut, saw, or divide, are almost always masculine.”
“If nouns that are stationary, receptive, ill defined, or sinister require a female article, would not this information affect how a little girl will perceive her place in relation to boys? If nouns denoting passivity are feminine, would this not tend to encourage feminine passivity?”
“If pouvoir (power) requires a le and maladie (sickness) a la, what are very young French children to make of these distinctions? In Italian, disability (invalidata) is feminine and honor (onore) is masculine; vacancy (vacante) is feminine in Spanish, while value (valor) is masculine; in German, mind (Geist) is masculine and foible (Eigenheit) is feminine. Although there are many counterexamples, in the main this division holds.”
The logic here is hard to break — it’s his timing rationale that seems thin.
He says that the discovery of electromagnetism and photography are what caused feminism due to their nonlinear image based natures. While the timing roughly lines up, he doesn’t go into detail on how exactly that manifests, and to me it’s one of the weakest points of his argument.
“Any language that forces the speaker to choose between two pronouns to address another, a decision that depends on the permission of the person addressed, promotes a vertical layering of culture, and this in turn reinforces dominant/submissive interpersonal relations.”
Literacy Resurgences Are Tied to Witch Hunts and Communism
Shlain spills much ink exploring the considerable depravities of the Renaissance popes and the nasty witch hunts of the Enlightenment, as resulting from the rising literacy of their eras.
“These six principal Renaissance popes reigned during one of the most glorious periods in human history. Yet they were at the helm during the steepest regression of papal moral authority. Previous Church leaders had not exhibited behaviors so antithetical to the spirit of its founder for so many years. There is not a comparable lapse among Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu, Confucian, Jewish, Taoist, or Islamic priesthoods.”
“Once again, an anti-evolutionary aberrant custom (witch hunts), diabolical in its effect on women’s sexuality, seems to have come into existence and is practiced only in those societies newly acquainted with alphabet literacy (via the printing press).”
Then he points out that Russia became literate as it became communist, and compares the USSR’s atrocities to those perpetrated in Europe during the religious wars of the newly literate 16th century. Bit of a stretch, but it fits his theory!
“In the year 1800, there were only two bookstores in all of Moscow, and there were more universities in England, France, and Germany than there were university students in all of Russia.”
Shlain’s Argument Fades in the Modern Era
The book is an entertaining romp through history via this alphabet/goddess lens, but far more words are given to certain examples that illustrate his point well than to those that do not, which are only mentioned in passed.
The most egregious examples of this occur in his discussion of the 20th century, which he skims over breathlessly sharing all the new image based technologies that are bringing us back into the bosom of the proverbial goddess without investigating exactly how.
His argument boils down to pointing out occurrences throughout history where literacy rose and the divine feminine fell, without sketching out how this happens (beyond the initial left/right brain neuroscience).
If nothing else, the sheer number of data points when this comparison can be justly made is a strong argument for his cause. The GoodReads reviews are all love or hate and point out several inconsistencies, none of which can topple his thesis entirely, methinks.
The book was published in 1998 and Leonard died in 2009 so we don’t get to hear him weigh in on the many incredible tech innovations of the past 20 years, though it is worth noting his daughter Tiffany is a digital pioneer who started the Webby Awards.
Safe to say I’m sure he would say the Goddess’s resurgence is continuing apace :)
Other Fun Facts That Appear to Be True from Cursory Web Research
- “As a general rule throughout Asia, the more patriarchal the society, the more the Buddha looks like a woman; the more egalitarian the society, the more the Buddha looks like a man.”
- “A culture that uses an alphabet as its primary communication tool hugs less and laughs less than those that do not.”
- “(Before nationalism) Soldiers belonged to a professional class whose principal aspirations were to get paid and to not get killed. Few mercenaries died in battle and, by common consent, most skirmishes broke off at five o’clock, in time for a beer and dinner.”
- Mazel tov literally means “May your planet be favorable.”
- “Baseball — a sport characterized by one event following another, from the batting order to the way in which a player rounds the bases —was the perfect sport to complement (linear radio) alphabet literacy. After television sets filled the corner bar, baseball began to lose ground to sports that are more involving for the eye, such as football, basketball, and hockey — all sports in which multiple interactions between players occur simultaneously.”
- “While it is true that women also engage in “channel surfing,” the practice is far more prevalent among men and, in general, they do it more mindlessly.”
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