Unbalanced Brains

Unbalanced brains?

This week I will be attempting to provide a possible theory to at least partially explain the otherwise bewildering success of our Dear Leader in creating a solid block of unwavering support despite behavior that is so contemptible to many of us.

Just saying that he is a clever demagogue is true enough, but hardly adequate to explain the slavish, unquestioning devotion he receives. I believe that we are living through a fundamental devolution of our consciousness, and I’m hoping to provide some light on this development. Reader, you must be the judge as to whether or not I succeed.

I have been referring regularly to Dr. Leonard Shlain’s comprehensive and exhaustive book, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, which elaborates his thesis that the development of the alphabet empowered the left side of the brain (of right-handers—see issue #12) and sometimes violently displaced the role of women in our society. He provides substantial historical examples to support this idea. I cannot possibly do his argument justice in this limited format, but I will try later in this essay.

I will start by going back more than a million years to explain our evolutionary development. For all but a relative handful of those years, we survived, first in nuclear families, then extended families, eventually in tribes, as hunter/gatherers– with men doing most of the hunting and women gathering edible and medicinal vegetation, nuts, fruits and the like. Women also provided nearly all of the child care. Hunting was something like the lottery: not always successful, so foods gathered by the women were essential for human survival.

Dr. Shlain asserts that during that time, the right hemispheres of our brain were not only dominant but the sole driver of our existence. As we became more proficient, our brains evolved, getting larger and somewhere along the way, splitting into two hemispheres. Many mammals also have split brains, but ours were unique in evolving specialized hemispheres.

The following is a quote from Google: “Commonly stated as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biogenetic law theorizes that the stages an animal embryo undergoes during development are a chronological replay of that species’ past evolutionary forms.”

Per Dr. Shlain, the right side of the brain develops much earlier in the womb, and the left side rather late, mimicking our evolutionary history, as confirmed by the previous paragraph. Thus, the left side is like a younger brother, as it were, in our evolutionary development, which may help us understand why, when it became belatedly dominant, as noted below, it behaved inappropriately, to say the least. And why it is reacting violently now that the right hemisphere is regaining some of its former power. I know these are generalizations (see Issue #7), but I do believe they help us understand what otherwise miight be so hard to accept.

The development of the left side of the brain really took off after we started speaking and especially when we began writing—cuneiform: a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia c. 3500-3000 BCE to record donations to the temple and transactions involving early agricultural products. There are conflicting theories about who developed the first alphabet. Shlain believed that the most influential was the Hebrew alphabet, used to create the earliest religious document, the Bible.

For the rest of this discussion we will assume, as Shlain does, that the left side of the brain may be considered as primarily Male, and the right side as Female. His most common appellations are Hunter/killer for the left side, and Gatherer/nurturer for the right, based on our evolutionary past, as noted earlier.

He wrote that he was inspired by a trip to the Mediterranean, where he noticed substantial evidence of the ubiquity of early goddess images, most of which had been eradicated by later male-dominant cultures. But, it didn’t stop there. They had to vilify women generally. Early Christians, influenced by the written word, were especially violent in their zeal to destroy all statues, temples and other pagan vestiges. The misogyny of the Catholic Church continues to this day, despite Pope Francis’ efforts to modify it. The church’s male dominance fueled the Inquisition and subsequent persecution of women accused of witchcraft, with the notable exception of the belated veneration (a millennium later!) of Mary, in order to provide an alternative to residual Goddess worship in Europe. Many, if not all female saints added over the ensuing years were inspired by these persistent remnants of Goddess cults.

Shlain provides ample evidence of similar violence against women whenever and wherever the alphabet/literacy were introduced and implemented around the world. Gutenberg’s invention of printing was a primary assistant to Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation. For the record, Luther and Calvin were both misogynists. Luther also a passionate anti-Semite. Quoting from one of Luther’s earlier writings: “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has…She is the Devil’s greatest whore…” Notice the feminine attribution.

I had mentioned earlier that I was raised in a Fundamentalist family. I can assure you that faith was much more important than reason. We were taught that the world was created in 4004 BC and that we are all descendents of two people, Adam and Eve, who lived in the Garden of Eden, now generally believed to have been somewhere in the delta created by the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq. (The Museum of the Bible in Kentucky even includes a replica of Noah’s Ark.) We were told that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was pure sacrilege.

Toward the end of his book, Dr.Shlain posits that innovations such as photography, the movies, television and now the computer have re-activated many right brains at the expense of gains made during the rule of the left.

The Gatherer/nurturer works primarily with images. Just think of all the painting on cave walls, of the proliferation of small statues, the best known of which is the Venus of Willendorf, an 11.1-centimeter-tall (4.4 in) Venus figurine estimated to have been made around 30,000 years ago.

So, it is not a coincidence that women have made enormous strides in the last century: the right to vote, more power in the workplace, more elected leaders of Western countries, and now the “Me Too” movement. Nor is it surprising that there has been a backlash by men. I recently watched Christiane Amanpour interview Laura Bates, whose new book Men Who Hate Women exposes the virulent extent of groups like the InCels (involuntary celibates), who extol men who kill and rape women and girls, largely because of their anger at being sexually refused. Bates has done the research, and there are thousands of groups such as this, most online.

Consciously or unconsciously, Trump is exploiting these trends: anti-science, anti-reason, anti-women. Much of his “base” consists of Fundamentalists, minimally educated white males, and existentially threatened remnants of the Republican Party, all of whom are very uncomfortable with most of what many of us consider progress: diversity, tolerance, even acceptance of those who are “other.”

One last thought, no matter who wins this election, the conditions noted above will continue for now. Biden is a good man, and the only possible alternative, but he is not charismatic or dynamic enough to effect real change. Yet four more years of Trump is unthinkable. We have to hope that enough changes will enable at least some relief.

There is an old Chinese curse: may you live through interesting times……