I was in San Francisco for the 5th day in a row trying to pick up my Chinese Visa, which I was finally able to get after yelling at the patient consulate member who had a microphone that didn’t work. In my case I was able to talk to the same woman I saw the previous day, and after a few corrections she let me through, although I failed to secure a 2 entry visa which is problematic, since apparently they are not giving out visas in HK anymore.
While waiting the several hours to get my Visa, I located a Borders in SF and found an appealing book in the Psychology section, which is always where I end up. In this case I browsed through, Leonard Shlain’s “The Alphabet versus the Goddess.” The main argument of the book, was perhaps difficult to prove, but the author was a surgeon which strengthens his authority on brain development. The idea presented was that in the past, religion was dominated by female deities, but over the progression of time, and with the development of the written word society has turned to more male religious authority figures. The reason for this change is based on the notion that the evolution of writing systems was responsible for a strong degree of left brain thinking, which came to dominate the previous levels of right brain thinking. He links left brain with masculine, and right brain with feminine/ creativity, although also claims that both of these are inherent in different degrees in different people. From his perspective, in olden times, knowledge was generally transmitted through images which relied on the right brain, and as a result women and creativity were more normalized. He claims that in Egypt, for example, since they used pictographs, this helps to explain part of the high respect they had for female deities. He also mentions India and China. Indian religion was originally orally based, and they had a more combined view of the sexes. In the case of China, the received Buddhism from India, which eventually sprouted off Daoism. Daoist thought in China was right brained and lacking a writing system, but with the coming of Confucianism and eventually the invention of the printing press, they established a great many specific rules which relates to the left brain. In another case, he refers to the Christian Bible, and attempts to link left brain thinking with the development of the commandments.
One intriguing section of the book compares different writing systems and ways they are linked to brain disfunction. In the case of Chinese characters, for example, the author writes that when the right side of the brain is impaired, it becomes difficult to write in Chinese, and it also may handicap the left side of the body. The implication here is that written or visual Chinese is related to functions of the right side of the brain. At the same time there is definitely an analytical aspect to writing characters with 14 strokes.
Overall I appreciated the argument that he presents in the book, and especially the sections talking about ways in which brain function affected writing ability, but the evidence linking civilizations and writing systems seemed very dispersed, and the theory very general. It is true that writing systems developed and had a significant change on society and that there may have been more feminine deities in the past, but it is hard to determine whether these writing systems were exactly responsible for changes in thinking and a specific shift away from feminine deities and role models.
