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Who changed the sex of God? This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind.… (more)
User reviews
I started it with great hope - avid reader though I am, I love books that carefully explore unusual ideas, like the downside of literacy. In the beginning, Shlain seemed so precise and careful that I expected this to be well-thought out. It fell apart fast - I almost quit reading halfway through. I did love his ending argument that visual media are restoring a balance, although that is mostly my impatience with people who regard every change as the end of the world.
My greatest problem is the inconsistency between societies that according to Shlain's thesis should be similar. The Romans and the Jews, for instance: both encouraged universal male literacy using an alphabet. If the alphabet caused the Jews to be monotheistic, shun images and denigrate women, how is it that it that the Romans, as Shlain describes them, were polytheistic, religiously tolerate (for the most part), avid consumers of visual arts, and gave women an unusually high-standing in society?
Similarly, the Egyptians and the Chinese both used graphs instead of letters, which Shlain regards as more benign. Yet he claims that Egyptian woman had a very high status and lots of rights whereas Chinese women were oppressed. Granted that things besides literacy affect society, but these are the very points that it is supposed to affect most strongly.
There are also other things that seem illogical. Shlain's thesis is that Archaic or Neolithic agricultural societies were nurturing and at least gender-equal if not matriarchal. Then how is it that Egyptian women, in a literate society, are described as having the highest status in the area? How is it that the Jews, with an alphabet and a high literacy rate (the only thing worse is a printing press), are supposed to have invented morality, compassion and social welfare? Wouldn't these things more logically belong to the illiterate Nurturing Neolithics? And how would we compare these societies? There is evidence from Neolothic burials that they did take care of people unable to fend for themselves.
I also question some of the facts. So in China, they tended to form stable empires and weren't warlike? The Chinese Empire just "formed" did it, no violence involved? Why are the generally illiterate nomads thought of as so warlike? Shlain says that Henry VIII took up with Anne Boleyn when she was 17 and beheaded her when she was 19. Since Anne's date of birth and the early history of her involvement are uncertain, I wouldn't argue with Shlain about her being 17, although now she is usually thought to have been in her mid-twenties. However, between the beginning of the annulment process and her death was closer to nine years, he obviously has his facts wrong. A minor point, but there are enough similar examples to make me wonder.
I also suspect that the right brain/female and left brain/male dichotomy has been overdone. Since women have no trouble learning to read, one has to wonder how it is the literacy was a male province.
Still there is a lot to think about in this book, and approached in the right spirit, it's always good to look at things from a new angle and reconsider conventional wisdom.
We had the opportunity to have him sign it after an astonishing lecture with slides about the "new theories" of human evolution that came out of Shlain.
Shlain is a brain surgeon by trade and he has many various intellectual avocations which he has incorporated into his hodge-podge of tripe that has found regard for in certain circles of academia. He is the Philosopher in residence at UC Davis.
One of his personal observations is that computers needed to be devised to assist the human species with a continuation of child birthing. He said at the lecture that babies heads have become so large due to the pressure of all the new scientific advancements and such that a person being born now has a greatly increased skull size. The womens pelvises are no longer large enough to pass these monstrously large skulls through in child birth, therefore we needed computers to take some of the knowledge out of our heads and keep the size of baby heads at a reasonable dimension.
But what I found most offensive is the stuff about about the use of the alphabet and its effect on the health of the human mind in general. He suggests that language is a toxic material that will be eliminated over time as the superior female mind begins to overwhelm the world through the creation of a new pictograph language being brought about by the computer age. This is being embraced by new age feminist pagans as a cool idea. It is incredibly anti-intellectual. It is fascistic in its core. It is a notion of eliminating all history and reason to be reinterpreted by these new esoteric beings, the new god women. He is just a cuddly fruitcake.
This book takes theoretical approach similar to educated analysis in physical anthropology with how the human mind
This is an excellent book.
The intention with which we set out to communicate surely must have more impact on how we choose to employ our tools, rather than our tools dictating our uses, and not only that, but regimenting our mindsets so definitively that our thought cannot venture outside of the limitations of the tools themselves. Thus, according to Shlain’s explanation, the technical details of language – how it depends on abstract representation, and is ordered in a linear fashion, etc. – will consequently limit our thought to abstractions and linearity, too. Such a model of human behavior is evocative of a machine which can act only upon the software with which it has been coded, or of a circuit board whose output depends on a linear chain of cause and effect… Perhaps this mechanistic concept is how our collective left brain has primed us to think of the world and ourselves. It seems to me, then, that Shlain has himself recurred to a left-brain mode of thought in the very act of trying to warn us of its pernicious effects. I prefer to think that cause and effect don’t work nearly as linearly as left-brain conceptualization would have us believe – instead, our preferential use of one or another expressive outlet, our perceptions of gender differences, our disdain or esteem of the bodily and the concrete, our tendency to think linearly and analytically or holistically and intuitively, etc., are interrelated in a network of associations, and all collaborate to reinforce one another. As to what makes these characteristics a cohesive whole, I’d venture a guess that they spring from a fundamental attitude towards the world that each of the brain hemispheres has. And if it’s odd to think of the brain hemispheres as having separate attitudes towards the world, as if they were two different people taking up residence inside our heads, it is certainly no odder than thinking that a computing machine is encased in our skulls, and that all it takes to ‘re-wire’ our way of thinking is to change the code a bit, say, to process images instead of words. The mind forms such a large part, if not all, of human behavior, that to think of it as less than human, as a mechanism, as so many current metaphors of the brain unfortunately would have us do, is to unnecessarily limit our understanding of ourselves.
On the other hand, his theory that use of writing caused maltreatment of women is a weak theory. He writes about his theory as if it were true.
From the evidence he gives, it seems to me